X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #97. By Alex Segura, Alberto Alburquerque & Pete Pantazis. It feels a bit odd to have the second part of a Polaris story out in the same week as the Hellfire Gala one-shot, which up-ends the status quo of the line entirely, but there we are.

Last issue’s cliffhanger with Mirage doesn’t turn out great. Alburquerque draws her looking ready to fight, in the same rather tortured pose, three panels in a row… and then they just go and talk. It’s not good. At any rate, after that we get back to the murder mystery, and establish that whoever it is who’s killing people with magnetic powers is still around. The main villain, though, seems to be… well, the obvious one if you’re searching for an archenemy for Polaris. In theory, it makes sense to do something with Malice and Polaris after Malice was returned to Krakoa in Excalibur, since Polaris could use the closure; in practice, this feels a bit like we’re pretending that the Excalibur story didn’t happen. We’ll see how it goes.

WOLVERINE #35. (Annotations here.) Well, that seems to be the pay-off for the Beast storyline in X-Force – and I still think it’s a puzzling move to do it here rather than in that book. X-Force themselves wind up feeling like an afterthought in their own storyline, but at least Wolverine gets the satisfaction of taking down Beast’s operation. What carries this is the understated absurdity of the multiple Beasts and the way Juan José Ryp’s art sells the schtick. The moralising is less successful – did anyone really need to have it pointed out that Beast thinks he’s fighting monsters but he’s become a monster himself, after years of stories about that? But it’s weirdly enjoyable when it leans into the madness.

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By normal standards, a very quiet week.

X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #96. By Alex Segura, Alberto Alburquerque & Pete Pantazis. This is the start of a Polaris story. And it’s a pretty reasonable angle which I don’t think has been done before – after reminding us rather heavily at the start that Polaris has spent a distressing amount of her career under mind control of one sort of another, she gets dragged by an old college friend into investigating a cold case where the murderer seems to be her in the days when she was possessed by Malice. I get that we don’t want Polaris to be a character overshadowed by this sort of thing, but it’s a reasonable enough hook. There are also some pretty blatant hints that all is not as it seems, since something is very obviously up with the old college friend – subtlety is not this story’s strong point – but it’s pretty dense and it hits the ground running.

X-MEN RED #13. (Annotations here.) The parallels here with the collapse of the Quiet Council are presumably intentional, as we build to Hellfire Gala 2023. This is Genesis confronting the Great Ring, and everything more or less falling apart instantly. I’m still not all that interested in Genesis in her own right, but the contrast between her and the regular cast works better here, as she tries to drag Arakko back to the way it was before Al Ewing started rehabbing it. There’s a certain sleight of hand going on here – Genesis is asserting the sort of one-dimensional Arakko that X-Men Red was at pains to emphasise was never a fair reflection of their rounded culture, but evidently it’s a pretty good reflection of Genesis herself. At any rate, she’s a great foil for the regulars here. It’s a very talky issue – essentially an extended meeting in one location – but Jacopo Camagni makes it work. New Great Ring member Lycaon is fun but it seems an odd place to bring in what’s effectively a comedy character.

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X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #95. By Jason Loo & Antonio Fabela. This is the end of the FF team-up arc and it’s what you’d expect. You can see the idea – the rogue dupes are a way of externalising Madrox’s inner doubts about accepting responsibility, becoming a family man, and so on. And that’s a pretty good idea. But it winds up being tagged on to a rather routine action story, and the FF’s role as guest stars never quite clicks. Yes, they’re the superhero family so they offer something Madrox can feel insecure about… but along with Blastaar they wind up cluttering the plot more than helping it.

IMMORTAL X-MEN #13. (Annotations here.) There are only twelve members of the Quiet Council, so with issue #13 we move on to Cypher, the low key observer. Once again, Lucas Werneck does great work with his reactions, and generally in bringing visual life to an issue that’s almost entirely conversation. The big surprise here is that the collapse of the Council continues to run faster than you’d expect. I’d assumed things would be building to a head during the “Fall of X” event, but instead the Quiet Council is imploding already, At first glance there’s something a little awkward about Professor X dutifully playing along with his non-voting role in the previous issue, only to turn around here and decide to help tear everything down, but I suppose the key distinction is that he still isn’t trying to put himself into a position of power. And there’s a very good scene here that finally confronts head on the question of what Krakoa ever had to do with Xavier’s dream of coexistence. Excellent as ever.

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