No Infinite Comic this week, so we’re left with…<\/p>\n
UNCANNY X-MEN #11.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> We have the first three parts of “X-Manhunt” this week, which is the sort of thing that happens these days if you want to do a line wide crossover and don’t want it to last months on end. I was slightly surprised to see Tom Brevoort’s comment in today’s newsletter that “as you’d expect, reactions so far have been mixed”, considering that it’s a product he’s still in the course of promoting. He went on to say that everyone seemed to have liked at least one of the three chapters, mind you, and that may well be a fair summary of where we are after the first week.<\/p>\n The storyline is basically that Professor X breaks out of jail in order to save Xandra, the daughter he barely knows, and then goes on a little tour of the X-books in order to pick up the resources he needs in order to actually get to the Shi’ar Empire. The resulting three books are rather better as standalone issues than they are as a coherent whole, because… well, they’re an incoherent whole. The big set piece of part 1 is to establish that Xavier is hallucinating in a big way, that he doesn’t recognise Rogue’s team, and that he sees them as the original X-Men – who he brushes aside without much difficulty. But in the other two parts this entire plot thread is totally missing. It’s at best confusing and makes it hard for the overall storyline to generate much momentum.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In isolation, though, Uncanny<\/em> #11 is perfectly good. It does the set-up for the Xandra plotline; it has an old style training sequence with the Outliers, with some beautiful art from Garr\u00f3n. There’s a nice idea of Rogue being a discomfited with everyone else treating these familiar tropes as cosy when she wants it to be taken more seriously, although I’m not sure that fits too well with the feud that the book has been trying to build between her and Cyclops. The subplot with the hallucinating guard seeing his family as Sentinels is satisfyingly off-kilter and the closing sequence of Professor X taking the X-Men apart singlehandedly gets some mileage from his hallucinations. It’s just that it doesn’t play into the rest of the crossover at all…<\/p>\n NYX #9.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Pity writers Jackson Lanzing and Collin Kelly, who find themselves writing a penultimate issue that doubles as a tie-in not just to “X-Manhunt” but also to One World Under Doom<\/em>. That sounds like an absolute train wreck. Amazingly, though, they pull it off.<\/p>\n How? Well, the real story is that Mojo wants to get hold of the last Krakoan seed – the one that Dr Doom got hold of in X-Men<\/em> #35 – so that he can use it for his big plan in next month’s final issue. That’s your\u00a0One World<\/em> tie-in right there: it’s a story that doesn’t need the crossover at all, but since you have to get the seed from Doom to Mojo, you might as well stick up a few flags and call it a One World<\/em> tie-in. As for “X-Manhunt”, Professor X really just wants to get hold of a surviving Cerebro unit, but he needs a distraction – so he tries to enlist the NYX cast to go after the seed, on the pretext that he’s concerned about it too. And so the issue is mostly a distraction from the point of view of “X-Manhunt”, but that distraction is the ongoing story of\u00a0NYX<\/em>, so all is well. It’s a neat little bit of problem solving.<\/p>\n Francesco Mortarnio does a nicely sinister take on Mojo, and has some neat montage sequences to boot – there are a couple of pages which are a little busy, but Ra\u00fal Angulo’s colours take the edge off that with some strong lighting work. The blunt refusal of most of the cast to have anything to do with Xavier, leaving Ms Marvel and Anole as the only regulars willing to participate in the plot, helps declutter the issue and makes for some nice misdirection. Genuinely a good issue, which is remarkable in the circumstances.<\/p>\n