Continuing my catch-up efforts – X-Men Blue is already up to issue #32 – we have this bizarre little two-parter from Cullen Bunn and Nathan Stockman.  You may recall that we just did an arc with a fill-in team so that the regular cast could go off and appear in the Venomized miniseries.

X-Men Blue doesn’t really bother to explain what happened in those issues, beyond the fact that Jean Grey is alive and well, something that is unlikely to come as a tremendous shock.  But Jimmy Hudson, who wasn’t in the set-up issues at all, is apparently now the last remaining Poison on Earth.  Yay?

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Old Man Logan is obviously on its way to some sort of wrap-up.  With the original Wolverine on his way back, the Wastelands version is simply redundant.  The question is how to draw a satisfying line under this version of the character, given that his whole schtick is that his story came to an end only for him to return to the game.

Kill him?  Can’t really do that while bringing back the real Logan at the same time.  Have him wander off into the sunset?  Tough to buy.  Send him back to the Wastelands?  It’s the obvious thing to do, but it doesn’t seem very satisfying.  Ed Brisson’s answer seems to be to play up Logan’s mortality, so that his return to the Wastelands (to die) can seem like a dignified farewell.

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Bait and switch marriage issues seem to be the thing this year for superhero comics.  Not that I’m complaining too much; the Batman issue works as a story even if it makes the hype look insincere, while X-Men Gold seemed to be on the verge of marrying off Kitty and Peter for no particular reason beyond the fact that it seemed like an X-Men-y sort of thing to do.

How many of today’s X-Men readers actually are invested in the idea of Kitty and Peter’s relationship, I wonder?  It’s something that gets referenced from time to time, but the actual meat of it stems from Claremont stories back in the early 1980s – it was in the past even by the time I started reading.  The marriage we actually get in issue #30 seems like one that far more readers are likely to care about, so if anything, it’s a switch that many fans will see as a trade up.

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Here we have a classic example of that Marvel curio, the three part story which is blatantly just the first half of a six part story, but gets a separate title for no discernible reason beyond the possibility that it might justify the drastic change of art style in what would otherwise have been part four.

So while issue #20 – which is already out, because I’m hopelessly behind – has the cartooning of Ricardo López Ortiz, these three issues have Yildiray Cinar, who is more of a conservative house-style artist, and plays it all pretty straight.  The ideal tone for Weapon X‘s stories would probably be somewhere in between, since they’re gleefully over the top but played fairly deadpan.  But Cinar is solid, and helpfully for this story, he can do some good night time snow.

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The second half of Charles Soule’s run – which, I know, I know, finished a month ago – is one of those arcs that gets a separate title for TPB-bracketing purposes, but really is just the continuation of a single story.  We left off with the X-Men having apparently defeated the Shadow King, and Xavier having returned to Earth in the body of Fantomex… or something like that… and calling himself X.

It’s an odd approach, and quite an intriguing one.  Soule knows perfectly well that bringing a beloved character back from the dead looks like a reset button, and that simply restoring Xavier to his pre-death status quo isn’t all that interesting.  Putting him back as the leader of the X-Men feels like a backward step for everyone; and he’s already done the coming-to-terms-with-his-past bit under Mike Carey.

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