We can take this one quickly, because although X-Men Gold #21-22 are billed as a two-part story, they’re really not.  That’s not to say that bracketing them together is completely random – there’s certainly a story unit here, for want of a better word – but X-Men Gold is written more as a throwback to the open-ended storylines of the 80s and 90s, before things came in defined arcs.  So “Brotherhood” is really two issues of set-up – or, if you prefer, it’s not so much a story as a first act.

From the X-Men’s point of view, the story is very simple.  Mesmero’s Brotherhood show up again, attacking a Heritage Initiative fundraising event.  The X-Men dutifully go to save the day.  But Mesmero is an illusionist, so he tricks them into fighting the police and runs away.  Kitty decides they should probably play along with the authorities, since they did beat up some cops and all, so the team are carted off to jail, which is where we can presumably expect to find them in issue #23’s “Cruel & Unusual, Part 1”.

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Wordplay isn’t what it used to be.  Still, with this arc, Weapon X finally leaves the Weapon X Project behind and turns its attention to something else: Nuke.

Weapon X doesn’t exist to be a subtle comic, and Nuke is not a subtle character.  He’s a pill-popping patriotic maniac with the US flag tattooed on his face who runs around killing everything in a patriotic frenzy.  His tenuous connection with the X-books comes from the Grant Morrison era, which decided that his version of the Super-Soldier Programme was actually the Weapon VII Program, forerunner of Weapon X.

But when he debuted in Daredevil #232, he was presented as a debased Reaganite version of Captain America, an easily manipulated hyper-patriot, struggling to grasp simple facts like “this isn’t Vietnam”, who would be a total buffoon if he wasn’t also a dangerous lunatic.  He represents a toxic version of patriotism open to taking orders from anyone with the right flag, and he’s a ludicrous parody of Rambo.

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Oh god.  Where do we start with this?

The Cable ongoing series got off to a shaky start with James Robinson’s Conquest arc.  Now, it proceeds to jettison the creative team in favour of writer Ed Brisson and penciller Jon Malin, change the numbering to #150, and cast around in Cable’s back catalogue for something that might make a Marvel Legacy arc.  Since the Legacy remit can be amply satisfied by “dig up something we haven’t mentioned in a while”, and Cable has had an assortment of dead ends over his thirty years in print, there’s no shortage of ammunition.

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In theory, the idea of the Legacy arcs is supposed to be to do something calling back to past continuity.  In practice, some books do that so often anyway, that it’s not obvious how to make Legacy any different from normal.  Clearly, that’s a challenge for Ed Brisson on Old Man Logan, writing a series which is about as legacy-driven by default as you could possibly imagine.  Some writers, in this situation, have just responded by shrugging their shoulders and doing a regular story.  Brisson, to his credit, decides to dig up a major element of Wolverine’s mythos that’s been left undisturbed for a very long time.

For some reason these five issues are bannered as two different stories – Mike Deodato draws the first, Ibraim Roberson the second – but by any reasonable standard, this is actually a single five-parter, and sensibly paced at that.

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Sina Grace’s Iceman stories have tended to be strong on character and theme, a bit wonkier on the plot.  This is a case in point.

Since Bobby decided in the previous issue to move to LA, this is his going away party, and he’s invited Judah along to meet his friends.  Naturally, that leads to the familiar fish out of water routines, where one normal person finds himself baffled by the weirdness of the X-Men’s world – always worth doing now and again, to keep up the contrast.

But Daken shows up, with Zach from a few issues ago in tow.  Zach is the obnoxious mutant kid whom Bobby rescued from small town panic, only for him to run off and join the much cooler Daken.  With vaguely defined powers to amp up or turn down other people’s superpowers and, well, stuff generally, he’s now calling himself Amp.  So Daken apparently has a plan to lure away the X-Men (by staging a Purifier attack as a distraction) and Generation X (by getting Amp to lock them in the Danger Room), after which he confronts Iceman and…

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With All-New Wolverine‘s Legacy arc, Tom Taylor has certainly taken the remit to heart.  “Orphans of X” is, quite literally, a story about the legacy of Wolverine, and the characters left in his wake.  Taylor and artist Juann Cabal also find themselves in the happy position of being able to this story without the actual, original Wolverine being around.  So although his shadow inevitably hangs over the whole thing, the focus remains firmly on his legacy, rather than on the man himself.  Yes, Old Man Logan is in here, but he’s kept to the margins and (wisely, in this context) not treated as an ersatz Wolverine.

It’s a very simple idea, even though a bunch of guest stars and some side quests get it to six issues without it feeling like much of a stretch.  There’s a group called the Orphans of X, and they’re basically the relatives of people who’ve been killed off by Wolverine and his ilk over the years.  Largely, they seem to be the family left behind by the cannon fodder.  And they basically want to kill off all the Wolverine-type characters, to put a stop to the whole thing.

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