X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #133. By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Nick Roche, Fer Sifuentes-Sujo, Travis Lanham. Look, there’s only so much I can say each week about an endless, rambling storyline with no apparent point beyond being a farewell tour. I can sort of see how that might work in theory, but what we’re actually getting feels very unfocussed. It feels almost as if it’s intended to come across as a victory lap. And while there’s still good stuff out there, the Krakoan era as a whole isn’t going out in a way that can pull off a victory lap.

X-MEN #33. (Annotations here.) Speaking of which. Not that this is an especially bad issue in its own right. It’s obviously making an effort to tie up loose ends, provide a bit of resolution, and generally clear away some of the dead wood so that Fall and Rise can take a clear run at the AI opposition. It does all that quite efficiently. Shinobi Shaw even shows up for a couple of pages, and he’s a character I actually am interesting in checking in on during Fall of X. It doesn’t have the mad-scramble feel of some other contributions to this crossover (though it seems to have been written in complete ignorance of Callisto’s role in Dark X-Men). At the same time, it doesn’t feel epic either, and the character moments rarely land. It’s mainly just the plot moving from A to B in quite a simplistic way. This isn’t how you want Krakoa to go out.

AVENGERS #12. By Jed MacKay, Francesco Mortarino, Federico Blee & Cory Petit. This is the first half of a Fall of the House of X tie-in. It’s also written by Jed MacKay, who’s one of the incoming writers for Whatever The Hell Is Coming Next. Don’t expect any particular pointers about that, though. MacKay’s Avengers is in the model of the sort of Justice League story where the big names go up against grand sweeping ideas. It does that well, but it’s not the way he approaches other books and I’d be surprised if it was the way he approached X-Men. This issue plugs Orchis into the villain of the week role (which has the downside that Orchis is a much weaker concept than most of the ones in this book have been, at least when it’s used as a straight anti-mutant organisation). Part of the story is intended to rationalise why the Avengers have been ignoring Orchis until now – they’ve been waiting for Iron Man’s cue that it’s time to move, basically, and now they get to go around smashing up a lot of Orchis stuff so that the X-Men don’t have to worry about it. The other part of the story, which is the actual hook, involves the 3-D Man resurfacing as an ally of Orchis, who’s been off panel until now because he’s supposed to be tasked with keeping the Avengers occupied, and they haven’t actually done anything until now. It’s not the best issue of this Avengers run, but in terms of the bad guys getting smashed up in a brightly optimistic way, Mortarino’s art is a better fit than what we’re getting in X-Men.

(Again, before anyone asks, no, I’m not doing X-Men ’97, for essentially the same reasons that I’m not doing Ultimate X-Men: it’s not part of the core X-Men line, and it doesn’t interest me enough for me to spend money on it.)

X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #132. By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Nick Roche, Yen Nitro & Travis Lanham. In this issue, Wiz Kid and Trinary fight off hackers in one of those cyberspace stories that I thought had gone out of fashion twenty years ago. We’re twelve issues into this arc and if there’s meant to be a point to any of it beyond killing time with a farewell tour of Krakoan D-listers, I honestly have not got the slightest clue what it is. I’m afraid my patience has run out.

RISE OF THE POWERS OF X #3. (Annotations here.) The Rise half of this event continues to feel much more coherent than Fall, without the same sense of last-minute changes of plan being accommodated. Perhaps any changes hit the other side more extensively – maybe this plotline was always going to pay off around now, or it’s been easier to skip to the end by jumping over the failed ascensions of Orbis Stellaris and Dr Stasis. And RB Silva’s art makes this book feel convincingly epic, as well. But for all the epic time travel and cosmic weirdness, this issue is built around Professor X finally getting to confront Moira about the collapse of Krakoa. Which means it’s really a story about how he feels about the compromises he was driven into, and also that Moira gets to be written as something more than a one-dimensional lunatic, an approach which pretty much killed the character after Hickman left. Going back to an earlier version of Moira helps to re-establish her as someone to invest in, and she’s really needed that.

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