Ed Brisson’s time on the X-books seems to be drawing to a close as we near the Hickman relaunch.  But there’s still time for one more story about Glob Herman, who seems to have become his favourite character.  Glob’s been around since 2001, largely as a background character with a memorable visual – but he’s the one currently selected to play the role of the long-suffering sad-sack trainee.  It’s a role that his design and long tenure leave him well suited to.

NextGen isn’t a solo title – the rest of the core cast are Anole, Rockslide and Armor.  But he’s the lynchpin.  Incidentally, this is one of several Age of X-Man minis where the title isn’t the name of the team.  There is no team here, just a handful of students at the Summers Institute for Higher Learning who realise what’s up.  Because, yes, this is inevitably another Age of X-Man mini where the basic arc is “some characters remember”.

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Considering that Nightcrawler is also starring in the Age of X-Man: Marvelous X-Men miniseries, it seems odd at first that there’s no apparent interaction between the two books.  As it turns out, there is a reason, of sorts: the plot of Nightcrawler’s solo book pretty much rules out the possibility of him coming back to the X-Men to talk about.  I’ll get into why later on, but anyone who’s been even vaguely following Age of X-Man will have spotted that there’s quite a lot of mind-wiping going on.  So fair enough, that turns out to make sense at the end of the day.

Amazing Nightcrawler is still a curious book, though.  There’s a certain same-iness to the Age of X-Man minis, in as much as they tend to fall into two main plots: fighting the forces of social conformity within Nate’s strange little world, or characters starting to recover their normal sense of identity.  Nightcrawler basically does that too, but its starting point is that Kurt is having a rather lovely time in this world, where he is indeed getting to live out his dream of movie stardom before an adoring audience.

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So this exists.

Quite why it exists makes a little more sense now we know that the X-Men line is being pared down to just two titles for the Jonathan Hickman relaunch.  And that means Marvel needed to get Wolverine back into circulation in order to save Hickman having to deal with that – but they couldn’t follow it up in the way you’d expect, with a relaunched Wolverine solo title.

So here, instead, is five issues of filler tying into a crossover that finished six months ago.  Strangely, it’s written by Gerry Duggan, the writer of Infinity Wars and a bigger name than you’d normally expect to find on such a superfluous project.  And it’s not that he phones it in – there’s a story here, to be sure.  It’s just not a Wolverine story.  It’s an Infinity Wars Appendix with Wolverine standing around in the background.

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With the final two issues of Ed Piskor’s re-telling of the X-Men’s history – or rather, of the Chris Claremont run and the preceding material that serves as necessary background for it – we reach the crunch point.  How is he going to impose an end on a story that never had one?  And is there a point to any of this, beyond a parlour-game exercise in distilling years of stories into a single story?

Let’s start with the first question.  The answer, on some level, is a cheat – but one constructed entirely from building blocks to be found in the Claremont run.  And that’s in keeping with the way the whole series has worked.  Piskor is being faithful to the broad strokes of the original stories, but he’s also more than happy to shuffle around the elements, and cut bits out entirely, in order to better serve that big picture.  One of those changes, in the previous volume, makes rather more sense now that we see how things pan out.

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As “Age of X-Man” draws to a close, we now know that the X-books have pretty much been marking time while waiting for Jonathan Hickman.  But “Age of X-Man” has been an unusually ambitious and intriguing way of doing that.  While the remnants of the regular cast plough on over in Uncanny X-Men, most of the characters are shunted over to an alternate universe for an inversion of “Age of Apocalypse”: Nate Grey has created his own world, and it’s meant to be a paradise.  Unfortunately, Nate is unable to tell hang-ups and insights apart, and so his idea of what would really push a nice world over the line into utopia is to get rid of families and love in favour of a mix of single living and communal groups.  On his account, this is a wonderful philosophical insight – we are all ultimately alone in our heads, and we’ll be happier if we embrace that fact – but… well.

This is a genuinely interesting and unexpected angle for a story which, up to that point, looked like a straight re-tread.  But with six minis out there, it also raises the question of whether there really are six different slants to be had on this concept.  Prisoner X, X-Tremists and X-Tracts have the clearest stories to tell, being either about the state apparatus or those who refuse to accept Nate’s ideas.  NextGen, Amazing Nightcrawler and Marvelous X-Men – about initially unsuspecting characters just kind of getting on with life in a world they regard as rather pleasing – have more of a challenge.

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