X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #134. By Steve Foxe & Steve Orlando, Phillip Sevy, Yen Nitro & Travis Lanham. Well, at least this issue has a fun bit which uses the vertical scrolling quite effectively for a leap across the room during an action sequence. Other than that, I don’t know what I can say that I haven’t said before. We’re apparently building to a fight between Sunspot and Gideon, and… um, that doesn’t feel to me like much of a hook in 2024. God, we must have another month of this to go. (Sighs deeply.)

RESURRECTION OF MAGNETO #4. (Annotations here.) At first glance, it seems like an odd choice to do three rather abstract issues venturing into the afterlife and then end on a final issue of Magneto joining the fight against Orchis – even if the crossover context might make that unavoidable. But it fits better than you’d expect, since this issue isn’t really concerned with the crossover at all; it’s about what Magneto has learned from the last few issues and how he chooses to put that into practice when fighting the Orchis footsoldiers. It’s an issue of Magneto trying to be responsible, though he gets boxed into a corner where he winds up killing the Orchis guys anyway. I’m not convinced that the colour coding thing works – red doesn’t really work as symbolising a middle path for Magneto when it’s the colour most associated with his Silver Age persona as a one-dimensional villain, while the black and white versions of his costume come from much later stories that are much more nuanced – but the basic positioning of Magneto coming out the story works, and the way that the art makes Magneto look traditionally heroic plays nicely against all that.

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X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #133. By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Nick Roche, Fer Sifuentes-Sujo, Travis Lanham. Look, there’s only so much I can say each week about an endless, rambling storyline with no apparent point beyond being a farewell tour. I can sort of see how that might work in theory, but what we’re actually getting feels very unfocussed. It feels almost as if it’s intended to come across as a victory lap. And while there’s still good stuff out there, the Krakoan era as a whole isn’t going out in a way that can pull off a victory lap.

X-MEN #33. (Annotations here.) Speaking of which. Not that this is an especially bad issue in its own right. It’s obviously making an effort to tie up loose ends, provide a bit of resolution, and generally clear away some of the dead wood so that Fall and Rise can take a clear run at the AI opposition. It does all that quite efficiently. Shinobi Shaw even shows up for a couple of pages, and he’s a character I actually am interesting in checking in on during Fall of X. It doesn’t have the mad-scramble feel of some other contributions to this crossover (though it seems to have been written in complete ignorance of Callisto’s role in Dark X-Men). At the same time, it doesn’t feel epic either, and the character moments rarely land. It’s mainly just the plot moving from A to B in quite a simplistic way. This isn’t how you want Krakoa to go out.

AVENGERS #12. By Jed MacKay, Francesco Mortarino, Federico Blee & Cory Petit. This is the first half of a Fall of the House of X tie-in. It’s also written by Jed MacKay, who’s one of the incoming writers for Whatever The Hell Is Coming Next. Don’t expect any particular pointers about that, though. MacKay’s Avengers is in the model of the sort of Justice League story where the big names go up against grand sweeping ideas. It does that well, but it’s not the way he approaches other books and I’d be surprised if it was the way he approached X-Men. This issue plugs Orchis into the villain of the week role (which has the downside that Orchis is a much weaker concept than most of the ones in this book have been, at least when it’s used as a straight anti-mutant organisation). Part of the story is intended to rationalise why the Avengers have been ignoring Orchis until now – they’ve been waiting for Iron Man’s cue that it’s time to move, basically, and now they get to go around smashing up a lot of Orchis stuff so that the X-Men don’t have to worry about it. The other part of the story, which is the actual hook, involves the 3-D Man resurfacing as an ally of Orchis, who’s been off panel until now because he’s supposed to be tasked with keeping the Avengers occupied, and they haven’t actually done anything until now. It’s not the best issue of this Avengers run, but in terms of the bad guys getting smashed up in a brightly optimistic way, Mortarino’s art is a better fit than what we’re getting in X-Men.