Here’s one for the “what the hell was that all about” file.  It’s a story that seems to be groping haphazardly in the direction of big themes… and what is it actually trying to say about them?  I’m very much unclear.  Let’s go through it and see if I can figure it out.

This is a story about the village in Kenya where Storm was living just before she was recruited into the X-Men.  You know, the place that was worshipping her as a goddess.  This isn’t something that comes up terribly often these days, because let’s be honest, it’s a depiction of Kenya that was dodgy in 1975 and has aged really quite badly into 2018.  I’ve always viewed this part of Storm’s backstory as distinctly patronising – there are traditional religions still being followed in parts of Kenya, but they don’t seem to bear much resemblance to this – and it’s something that’s often ignored, downplayed, not taken literally, or simply blurred into her own “bright lady” stuff.

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Well, this is an odd book, and no mistake.  Be warned, by the way, that it’s one of those books where I can’t really talk about why it works without giving away big chunks of the plot.  If you were planning to read it anyway, I’d go and do that first.

Matthew Rosenberg and Adam Gorham’s New Mutants: Dead Souls is ostensibly a New Mutants miniseries.  Issue #1 establishes the premise: Karma, who inherited a mega-corporation during Marjorie Liu’s run on Astonishing X-Men, has recruited a bunch of superheroes to investigate paranormal phenomena.  The book kicks off as some sort of mystery-of-the-month horror title, with this random team visiting aftermath of an Alabama hurricane and dealing with an outbreak of zombies.  This turns out to be the result of somebody stealing from the body of a victim who had magical powers, and whose spirit is accordingly no longer at rest.  It’s quirkily and atmospherically done, but it’s basically a standard horror story.

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Ed Piskor’s re-telling of Uncanny X-Men returns for a further two issues, covering the material from the 1975 relaunch through to Storm losing her powers in 1984 or so.  This is a curious project: a basically straight retelling of the X-Men’s history, and with an indy sensibility about it.  As the Grand Design sub-title would imply, Piskor’s focus is on the big picture, and the over-reaching story.

This task should get somewhat easier now that Piskor has reached the Claremont run, which really was a single continuous narrative from 1975 through to Claremont’s departure in 1991.  What remains to be seen, and will stay that way until the final issue, is how Piskor will get around the problem that Claremont’s run doesn’t actually end on a note of resolution that ties up the saga.  But since Grand Design is more than willing to tinker with history, to revise and streamline, in order to get things to fit more neatly into a big picture, presumably he won’t feel too bound by that.

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Well, this is complicated.  Hunt for Wolverine is the sequel to Death of Wolverine, but it’s preceded by the four Hunt for Wolverine miniseries, which had a lead-in issue of their own, and now get a further wrap-up one-shot to draw them together and set up the main event.  So it’s the coda to the prequels to a sequel to a finale.  Lovely.

It’s a quirk of ultra-commercial superhero comics that the need for intertitle continuity and sprawling crossovers can lead to odd structures like parallel, intertwining narratives.  It’s not exactly a structure that other media are queueing up to use, but at the same time the serial format of comics does lend itself to this kind of thing.  So if you actually have a reason for doing four parallel narratives, it can be interesting.

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So Hunt for Wolverine saves the most important story for last.  Not the most important to the return of Wolverine, mind you.  From the look of it, this series plays into the return of Wolverine mainly by establishing that Soteira are baddies with an interest in Wolverine, which we’ve already established thrice over.  There’s also a plot about a satellite that does something as yet undivulged, but the big-deal-ness of that is as yet unestablished.

This week, instead, people will be talking about the fact that Psylocke is now back to her original body, which means she isn’t Asian any more.  That came out of nowhere – and that’s before you get to the surprise of having it happen in a Hunt for Wolverine mini.

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Three down, one to go.  And if you’re going to do four parallel lead-in stories, each drawing on a different aspect of Wolverine, then somewhere along the line you’re going to need a story about beclawed people doing violent things.  Of course, even if you can’t use Wolverine himself, the Marvel Universe has no shortage of other characters who are, shall we say, Wolverine-adjacent.

Mariko Tamaki and Butch Guice are the creative team tackling this remit in Claws of a Killer.  Lady Deathstrike has found out about Wolverine’s return through her contacts with the Reavers, and enlists Sabretooth and Daken to look into it.  The idea seems to be that all three were meant to have devoted their lives to getting revenge on Wolverine, and his death screwed that up.  So they need to get their chance now, before anyone else does.

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