Oh, so I thought I’d caught up, but it turns out this is a two parter.  I hadn’t noticed because it doesn’t really end, but issue #33 is “Surviving the Experience, part one”, so there you go.

Not that this is a repeat of the recent Weapon X storyline which was given two names for no reason.  “Kings and Queens” is separate from what follows.  But it’s more of a piece of connective tissue between actual storylines, and an example of the way Blue and Gold both sometimes lapse into a more traditional subplot-juggling style of team book.

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Marvel haven’t exactly done themselves any favours in the way they’ve gone about the death and return of Wolverine.  Old Man Logan is so similar to the original that there’s been little scope for absence to make the heart grow fonder.  The Marvel Legacy one-shot where he returned was nearly a year a go, and it took months to have any follow-up.  And now we have… a series of four miniseries, leading into another miniseries in which he actually returns?  I suppose it’s helping to belatedly build anticipation, but sixteen issues of prologue is patience-testing stuff.

So we have four miniseries, each with different creators, and each featuring a different cast of characters who more or less knew Wolverine.  Adamantium Agenda is basically a New Avengers miniseries; Claws of a Killer is pretty much a Weapon X mini; Mystery in Madripoor has the X-Men themselves; and… um.

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Officially a two-part story, this is actually just the conclusion of “Sabretooth’s In Charge”, the ostensible three parter that I reviewed last month.  In that story, the ailing Logan appointed Sabretooth as field leader, who wound up striking an awkward alliance with Omega Red in his feud with SICKLE, all to the general horror of Warpath and the more muted scepticism of Domino and Lady Deathstrike.  That leaves Omega Red’s feud with SICKLE to be resolved, which is pretty much what happens in these two issues.

So, Weapon X and Omega Red attack the SICKLE “Mothercarrier”, a robustly ugly version of the SHIELD Helicarrier reimagined as a brick, which, according to Omega Red, stays in the air because it’s “too stubborn to fall down”.  Domino starts getting worried about all this when she realises that Omega Red isn’t actually expecting to win, but just fancies a glorious death in battle against his estranged brother (the head of SICKLE).  Warpath has pretty much wandered off on his own by this point, but shows up anyway, mainly to help Domino.

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Cable‘s final storyline before cancellation is a wildly unfocussed oddity.

Our creative team for this one are writers Zac Thompson and Lonnie Nadler, who previously wrote The Dregs for Black Mask, and artist German Peralta, who’s worked on Thanos.  And this is a high concept one: a previously unmentioned monster, Metus, which has been pursuing Cable throughout his life.  Metus is bitter about some awful thing that Cable did in the past.  He doesn’t want to kill Cable, but he does want Cable to be alone.

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Given the volume of X-books that Marvel puts out, it’s not always clear why they do annuals as well.  The X-Men Blue annual this year was really just an extra issue of the regular title.  X-Men Gold takes the more sensible route, with the sort of off-to-the-side story that wouldn’t stretch to a mini, but might once have appeared in X-Men Unlimited.

I think this is the first comics work by Seanan McGuire, a prolific fantasy novelist with some award winning material to her credit.  It’s a solo story for a teenage Kitty Pryde, as she takes a few weeks off from the X-Men to go to summer camp.

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It’s been a few years since the last run of Exiles, a book which is essentially What If…?‘s parade of alternate Marvel Universes crossed with Quantum Leap‘s uncontrolled dimension-hopping.  Time for another go around, this time with Saladin Ahmed and Javier Rodríguez.

And… does Exiles actually count as an X-book?  The original Exiles series was clearly an X-book, populated mostly by variants of X-Men characters.  Here, we’ve got Blink, a version of Wolverine, and that’s pretty much your lot, X-wise.  There’s still a prominent X in the logo, but I’m minded to treat this as a spin-off that’s gone its own way, like Deadpool.  (We miss you, Deadpool.  Send money.)  But hey, we’re here now.

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You want comprehensive, I’ll give you comprehensive.  This is actually the middle chapter in a three-part miniseries about the Dora Milaje.  I haven’t read the first chapter, and I don’t plan to do so, at least until it shows up on Marvel Unlimited in five months time.  So reviewing it in isolation might seem pointless and futile…

…except that it is being promoted as a “one-shot”, it does have issue #1 on the cover, and if you’re going to (mis)promote a comic that way, you can’t really complain when people take you up on the offer.  To be fair, it does also say “The second part of a new Dora Milaje adventure”, and the “Wakanda Forever” logo is more prominent than the “X-Men”.  But still, the whole point of this sort of needlessly confusing numbering is to get people to treat it as a one-shot instead of a middle chapter, so let’s do that.

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As titles go, “Prestige Dark” is… not good.  It conjures up images of inexpensive aftershave, or perhaps pretentious late-night soft porn on obscure channels on the third screen of the Entertainment section.  The main hits on Google are for laminate flooring and rum.  None of these connotations seem likely to be intentional.

For a while now, Marc Guggenheim has been building a subplot about Mesmero tinkering with Rachel’s mind.  This is where it comes to a head, but not in an especially satisfying way.

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