Dennis Hopeless seemed to wrap up his run on All-New X-Men by drawing a line under the vexed question of how the time-travelling teenage X-Men fit into continuity.  After all, by that point – by the end of Brian Bendis’ run, in fact – they’d changed drastically enough that it was unclear how they could ever simply be returned to the Silver Age in the place where they’d left.  Hopeless’s solution was that the kids travel back to their own time, and see another set of X-Men running around the same as ever.  The timeline healed by simply relegating them to the status of divergent X-Men and having the real X-Men carry on as normal.

There are obvious advantages to this solution.  It’s simple.  It clears away a horrible quagmire, and it lets the team move forward based on a “can’t go home, second chance” theme.  But it also has one major downside: it’s a cop out.  It’s not a resolution to the story of how they get home, it’s just defining the problem out of existence.  It’s the sort of thing you do if you don’t have a proper resolution to the story, but you figure that you can’t string it out indefinitely, so best bite the bullet and get rid of it.

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Well, this is not very good.

And it’s a shame to be saying that, because “The Negative Zone War” is also the X-Men: Gold storyline which relies least on nostalgia.  That’s not to say that it’s strikingly original – the X-Men visit another world and get caught up in the local civil war, which is not new.  But it’s a world they have no connection with, and it’s a new villain.

In fact, that seems to be a large part of the story.  Kologoth – the alien bad guy who had an origin issue a few months back – is finally rescued when his rebel army open a portal to Earth.  The rescue mission causes a bit of chaos, the X-Men get involved, and Kitty and Kurt wind up stuck on the ship when it goes home.  And so the X-Men go after them.  But while Kologoth is mildly pleased to have the chance to imprison a couple of X-Men in turn, he’s not that bothered.

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It’s thirty years since Excalibur #1, and with three of the cast currently appearing in X-Men: Gold, it does make sense for the book to do a tribute.  And where better than in an annual, that traditional home of byways and digressions?

The result is… odd.  There’s a nice Alan Davis cover, re-doing the cover of Excalibur #1 with the characters in their current costumes.  The interior art is by Alitha Martinez, and while it isn’t especially reminiscent of Davis, she does a sound job on the character comedy, she sells Meggan’s key scene very well, and she does nicely enough with a brief dimension-hopping homage sequence.

Marc Guggenheim and Leah Williams’ story, on the other hand, is something of a half-formed affair, full of quite promising ideas that never actually tie together.

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Grand Design is one of the stranger X-related ideas in quite some time.  Planned for six outsize issues, it’s Ed Piskor re-telling the first three hundred or so issues of (Uncanny) X-Men.  These first two issues cover the Silver Age.

Now, three hundred issues in around three hundred pages is going to be seriously compressed.  But Piskor’s best known work, Hip Hop Family Tree, is essentially documentarian, and there’s a similar vibe to this.  Yes, there’s a framing sequence to set up Uatu as the narrator, but that largely serves to explain why the focus remains on the big picture rather than the small details.  More to the point, though, roughly three hundred issues basically means the end of the Claremont run, and if there’s one thing that Claremont was very good at, it was creating a sense of a grand saga.

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Astonishing X-Men picked up a few votes in our end of year poll in the pleasant surprise category.  And it is indeed better than you might have expected, even if this says as much about expectations as it does about the comic itself.  After all, if you follow up a slightly subdued relaunch by suddenly saying “hey, here’s another X-Men book”, and push it on the basis that it doesn’t have a regular artist… well.

After a gentle prologue in which the Shadow King attacks various low-level hermit psychics to regain his foothold on Earth, issue #1 kicks off the story proper with him having a stab at seizing Psylocke.  This lets him use whichever X-Men he wants, since the result is a lot of psychic thrashing around in London, and whichever X-Men are nearest turning up to help.

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