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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You might think that Phoenix Resurrection – or Phoenix Resurrection: The Return of Jean Grey, if you must – would form a good companion piece to the Jean Grey review one post down.  After all, Jean Grey was an entire series devoted to setting up this book.

In fact, the most jarring thing about Resurrection is how irrelevant it makes Jean Grey seem.  That book devoted months to establishing the ghost of the original Jean as a hard-ass mentor for the younger Jean, determined to prepare her younger self for the coming of the Phoenix.  What we get here is Jean as the everywoman innocent, living in a fictional small town created for her by Phoenix, as it tries to prepare her for host duties.  If it wasn’t for a couple of passing references, you’d think writer Matthew Rosenberg was completely unaware that Jean Grey was even out there.

This is, shall we say, annoying.  But let’s take the series on its own terms.

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Well, now we know where this was heading: it gets replaced by X-Men Red, a fourth X-Men title (and bear in mind two of the other ones are fortnightly), starring a revived original Jean Grey.  At least in terms of the plot mechanics, the point of all this was to set up Phoenix Resurrection and get her back into circulation.  We’ll get to Resurrection shortly, but let’s deal with Jean Grey first.

Sometimes the most frustrating books are the ones that have plenty of good stuff but don’t stick the landing.  And there is plenty of good stuff here.  Dennis Hopeless and his main artist Victor Ibáñez are strong when it comes to the character details that make characters feel rounded and believable, even when they’re doing something utterly divorced from human experience.  There’s a reassuring sense of (most of) this taking place in a recognisable real world.  Issue #8, which revisits the Morrison-era New X-Men school, looks fabulous.  Even when the characters decamp to the middle of nowhere in issue #9, at least it feels alive.  There’s some grounding for the giant cosmic bird to play against, and where the basic imagery of fire can look like a big thing.

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