As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.

X-MEN vol 5 #10
“Fire”
by Jonathan Hickman & Leinil Francis Yu

COVER / PAGE 1. Vulcan, Petra, Sway, Cyclops, Marvel Girl and Wolverine in the new Cotati garden on the moon. This is an Empyre tie-in, so it also gets the Empyre trade dress on top of the regular X-Men design.

PAGES 2-5. Flashback to how Vulcan survived.

This is another plot thread where the Covid-19 hiatus has played havoc with pacing. We saw Vulcan having this dream before in X-Men #8, which should have been fairly fresh in the memory. Vulcan is remembering falling into the Fault at the end of the 2009 crossover War of Kings. As I pointed out before, Vulcan wasn’t wearing his superhero costume when that happened. I assumed before that it was a symbolic page, but evidently that’s not it.

As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.

CABLE vol 4 #2
“The Five In One”
by Gerry Duggan & Phil Noto

BEFORE WE WERE SO RUDELY INTERRUPTED… Cable #1 came out back in March, so over four months have passed between issues, through no real fault of anyone’s. This obviously isn’t ideal for story momentum, though. So… in issue #1, Cable beat Wolverine in a match in the Quarry, so Wolverine owes him a marker (whatever that means). Cable went on a date with Armor and Pixie (at the same time). Cable found a big sword stuck in the foot of a monster from the Arak Coral; the sword belongs to an ancient Spaceknight from planet Galador, and three other Spaceknights are coming for it. And somewhere else, the original Cable is in a demonic wasteland. Alright, let’s go.

COVER / PAGE 1. Cable shows off his new sword, while the Stepford Cuckoos fawn over him. (Except for the one in front, who seems unimpressed. There’s no way of telling which one she is, but see page 11.)

As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.

This is the final issue of the miniseries. I’ll review the whole thing soon, but in the meantime let’s cover the last chapter. Like most final chapters, it doesn’t really call for much annotation…

COVER / PAGE 1. Dr Doom reaches out for Franklin; Kitty reaches through Doom to get to him first. All of the issues of X-Men / Fantastic Four have had similar group shots on the cover, but this is the first one to feature Doom and to have a black background instead of a white one.

PAGES 2-3. Everyone starts fighting Doom’s “Latviathan” Sentinels.

“they ignored my orders and murdered a Latverian mutant”. The X-Men did indeed ignore his orders, but they killed a mutant who had been sealed inside what appeared to be a Doombot. Pretty obviously, Doom was engineering this in order to have a pretext to set his Sentinels on them.

As always, this post contains spoilers, and the page numbers go by the digital edition.

EMPYRE is the big crossover event of spring summer 2020. It’s principally an Avengers / Fantastic Four story, so the X-Men are on the margins. This is a four issue tie-in series. X-Men #10 and #11 are also Empyre tie-ins, and X-Men #10 was originally supposed to have come out first, but, well, times change.

For the purposes of this series (at least so far), all you really need to know about Empyre is that a race of alien plants called the Cotati are invading Earth. The Cotati come from the Kree’s back story in 1970s Avengers stories, and traditionally they were cosmic peace types, so something is obviously up – but that’s probably not this book’s concern.

The fact that the Cotati are plant people might potentially play into the X-Men’s current reliance on Krakoan plant-based technology, but you surely didn’t need me to point that out.

As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.

COVER / PAGE 1: Kwannon / Psylocke and Wild Child fighting while Mister Sinister looks smug about it. This doesn’t actually happen until the last panel, so yay spoilers.

PAGE 2: Epigraph. A vaguely compassionate quotation from Nightcrawler (original, as far as I know). Another quotation from Nightcrawler also opened issue #1, which is interesting, since he’s not otherwise a presence in this issue.

PAGE 3: Recap page. Note that Kwannon is definitely now being billed as the new Psylocke. Oddly, Havok is described as “theoretically reformed”, which doesn’t really seem to fit with the back story.

As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.

COVER / PAGE 1. Wolverine charges headlong towards people shooting at him. Generic image, basically.

PAGES 2-3. Wolverine drinks Magneto under the table and steals his helmet.

The Green Lagoon was previously established in X-Force as Krakoa’s main nightspot, as was the Blob‘s role as barman.

Magneto’s helmet has long been established as containing circuitry that shields him from telepathic attack (though this issue never actually spells that out in terms, and it’s not obvious what the point is of taking one helmet when his plan involves a whole team). It’s really not very in character for Magneto to get this drunk, and it’s not as if other books are showing him as particularly complacent on Krakoa – though he’s certainly right that he has plenty in common with Wolverine. Wolverine hasn’t really been a villain since debuting in 1975, aside from brief periods of mind control, but it’s fair to say that he was effectively a villain for stints of his back story when he was under the control of Romulus.

As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.

COVER / PAGE 1. The New Mutants inside Tashi Repina’s candy-coloured happy dreamworld – which does happen in this story, but only for a couple of pages. Magik isn’t present for the actual scene, either.

PAGE 2. Armor’s parents tempt her to drop her shield.

Picking up from the cliffhanger in issue #10. As we’ll see later, they’re just an illusion. What’s interesting is that unlike most of the nightmares in Tashi’s psychic orb, this seems to be calculated to interfere with the New Mutants’ attempts to help. We’re told later on that once Tashi is asleep (and her powers are active) her body seems to try to keep her that way. But this feels as if something a little more directed is going on. Note also that there’s a vague parallel with the fate of Tashi’s own parents.