I have given quite some thought to this story, trying to work it out.

I mean, I follow it.  I follow it just fine.  It’s simple.  There’s a thingummy called the Time Sword which is desperately powerful, and it’s been split into five parts which are scattered through time.  A baddy called Conquest is trying to collect the pieces, so that he can re-create the Time Macguffin and use it to control reality.  Cable is chasing after him.  So we get a bunch of time jumps where Cable visits various eras, and each time Conquest has been there before him, and there are a bunch of local goons with futuristic technology for Cable to fight.  After a while Cable meets up with an Incan priest (who has a load of Eternal technology, unrelated to Conquest) and finds out where the other two pieces are.

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Brian Bendis has a tendency to leave undeveloped ideas in his wake, and in an era where incoming writers tend to treat their first issue as a fresh start, those undeveloped ideas tend to stay that way.  But deciding that a character who’s been around since the 60s is actually gay is the sort of thing that has to be followed up.

And it has been, for the most part, in All-New X-Men and latterly in X-Men Blue.  But that’s the teenage version who travelled through time; we also have the original, who’s had rather less attention.  Sensibly enough, that’s the version used by Sina Grace and Alessandro Vitti.  Grace is an interesting choice; as a creator, he’s mainly known for autobiographical indie books, but he was also an editor for Robert Kirkman titles like Invincible.

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With Secret Empire out of the way, X-Men Blue returns to its storylines in progress.  We’re not quite pretending here that Secret Empire didn’t happen; the plot point of Scott and Jean’s mental link remains, and gets followed up.  But quite how it came about, we’re not talking about.  The really awkward stuff, it seems, we’re just going to ignore.  It’s the “No Man’s Land” solution, as I suspected.

So instead, this is mainly a Beast story, as Cullen Bunn continues to follow up the storyline established by Dennis Hopeless on All-New X-Men about Hank’s dabbling in the occult.

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May as well knock this one off quickly, and get up to date with X-Men Gold.  There’s an issue to spare before a crossover with X-Men Blue (which gets a couple of pages of set-up in the epilogue, but we’ll worry about that another time).  So this is the origin story of Kologoth.

Kologoth is the mystery new guy who showed up in the mind-controlled Brotherhood of Evil Mutants in the first couple of issues, and later turned out to be an alien.  One of the things which Marc Guggenheim has done reasonably well in this series is laying the groundwork for his subplots and checking in on them periodically; the book has taken its time building up the character before putting him in the foreground.

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My initial optimism for this relaunch is starting to fade.  It’s not the direction.  That still feels like a sensible back-to-basics retrenching with enough changes to avoid outright retread.  It’s the stories that are being told within that framework, which feel lacklustre.  The “En’Kane” two-parter is a case in point.

It goes like this.  Colossus gets a phone call – apparently you can just phone up the X-Men and ask to speak to them, and I guess if they’re running a school there ought to be a public phone number, so okay – from somebody claiming to be his previously unmentioned uncle Anatoly.  Peter has never heard of him, but Anatoly basically says that’s because he was the black sheep of the family.  This is all established in some fairly terrible dialogue – the whole thing is in italics, which seems to be intended to indicate “speaking in Russian”, but Anatoly is still saying things like “In Russia, I am criminal.”  He’s holding a copy of Pravda, depicted as some sort of magazine; it’s actually a broadsheet newspaper.  So we’re off to a good start.

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