Over the last few years, Marvel have dialled back enormously on miniseries.  The solicitations used to be packed with more or less random minis that, given the creators, characters and level of publicity involved, never realistically had much chance to do more than pad out the collections of devoted completists.  This has largely stopped, which makes it a little jarring to come across a miniseries quite as cheerfully throwaway as Deadpool vs X-Force.

A four-issue miniseries by Duane Swieczynski and Pepe Larraz, this takes place shortly before Deadpool’s debut in New Mutants #98 (and thus before the heroes strictly became X-Force, but what the heck – the book happily acknowledges the point and hand waves it away).

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This came out two weeks ago, and was rather overshadowed for our purposes by some of the other stuff that was out.  But let’s deal with it quickly before time moves too far on.

With the centenary of World War I extending for the next four years, perhaps we should expect a number of stories to take a crack at it.  Now nestled safely beyond the sensitivities of living memory, World War I has a well settled place in popular culture: it’s the war that symbolises the slaughterous futility of war.

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In December 2013, when Marvel were soliciting issue #1 of the current Wolverine run, by Paul Cornell and Ryan Stegman, they offered retailers a novel incentive to order high.  Any unsold copies of issue #1, they said, could be exchanged for an exclusive “Mortal Variant” of issue #12 in September 2014.  And, it was made clear, you would want copies of issue #12, because it was a “double-sized landmark issue” which Marvel expected to receive “national attention for its game-changing story”.

In April 2014, Marvel announced the four issue Death of Wolverine miniseries by Charles Soule and Steve McNiven, to ship weekly in September.  Entertainment Weekly, who were given the official announcement story, described Death of Wolverine as the “culminat[ion]” of “Three Months To Die”.

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Yes, “#1”.  I know.

This is going in the second “Three Months to Die” trade paperback.  But that’s largely a case of “got to stick it somewhere” (despite the cover banner billing it as part of the story).  So we might as well give it a post of its own.

Although it has nothing much to do with the “Three Months” storyline, this story does take as its starting point the loss of Wolverine’s healing factor and his sudden feelings of mortality.  Its actual point is to give him a chance to say goodbye to Jubilee.  She hasn’t been a regular in his stories for years, but she was his main sidekick back in the 90s, and Paul Cornell hasn’t used her, so it makes sense for the Annual to give her a visit.

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Most of the stories we’ve looked at lately have been reasonably self-contained, even if lengthy.  All-New X-Factor operates rather differently.  Peter David works more in the soap opera style of team book that dominated the 80s and 90s, where the focus isn’t on having a single overall plot, so much as on getting a whole bunch of plates spinning, and then checking in on them from time to time.

And thus far, David has been largely devoting his time to getting the plates spinning.  Where volume 1 gathered the team, volume 2 spends most of its six issues on introducing Georgia Dakei and her family, as well as setting up a few plot points to be returned to in future, before finally unveiling the corporate X-Factor to the public in a press conference in issue #12.

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