Where Uncanny X-Men struggled for a sense of resolution in its final issue, Extraordinary X-Men has no such problems.

Of course, it has several advantages over Uncanny.  Of the three X-Men titles from the outgoing era, this was the lead title, the one about the actual X-Men in the actual school.  All-New was a time-travelling second team of X-Men and Uncanny was X-Force hoping to sell a few more copies.  But Extraordinary was the X-Men taking refuge in Limbo while they hunted for a cure for the Terrigen Mists.  Ill-advised as that direction may have been, it was embedded in this series.  And so the end of IvX genuinely closes the door on this chapter of the X-Men.

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Another year, another relaunch.  Coming off three issues of Inhumans vs X-Men tie-ins, the X-Men titles now find themselves with one issue to call it a day before returning as something else in April.

This is, shall we say, less than wholly satisfactory.  For Uncanny X-Men, the crossover issues had no shared through-line.  They were separate one-shot stories which advanced other storylines from the book but brought them nowhere especially close to resolution.  And indeed, this issue makes no real attempt to resolve them.  It’s a further one-shot in which Psylocke tries to make good on her pledge from a few issues back to hunt down Magneto if he turned on the X-Men.

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You’ve got to admire Marvel’s perverse determination to confuse people.  The solicitation says IvX.  The Comixology listing says IvX.  The cover says Inhumans vs X-Men.

Let’s go with IvX.  It’s shorter to type.

IvX is an example of a beleaguered genre – the necessary resolution to a high profile storyline that bombed.  Regular readers know the back story.  Marvel wanted to plug the Inhumans into the role that mutants had occupied in the Marvel Universe, because that fitted more neatly with the rights that were available for the Marvel Cinematic Universe (the X-Men being licensed elsewhere).  As a piece of corporate synergy, this made reasonable sense; as a story direction, not so much, for either group.

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So that’s that, then.  The Terrigen cloud is done with, and the attempt with shoehorning the Inhumans into the mutants’ role seems to have run its course.  There are still Inhumans titles to come in 2017, but they won’t be squatting in the X-Men’s spot.  This is all for the best.  It was driven by considerations of corporate synergy more than anything else, and placed the Inhumans and the X-Men alike in roles that did no favours to either, not least because it sent the X-Men back to the “no more mutants” set-up which had only just been resolved.

Now, as for how we get to this eminently desirable outcome, well, that’s the IVX crossover, and in particular the IVX miniseries.  And we’ll get to that.  Oh, we’ll get to that.

But first, I’ll finish up the tie-in issues from the core titles.  Just like All-New and Uncanny, Extraordinary X-Men finds itself working in the margins of a story being told elsewhere, and offers three essentially unrelated spotlight issues.  Yes, sure, they’re related by using the IVX crossover as backdrop, but that’s window dressing – it’s other stories that are really being advanced here.  It’s a choppy way of doing things and a messy compromise, but while none of these stories could be called a home run, they do have things going for them.

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