Once again, we get a ridiculous overload of X-books this week, to be followed by just the one mainstream X-title next week. This doesn’t seem sensible to me, but what do I know? I’m just the reader.<\/p>\n
X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #110.<\/strong> By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Lynne Yoshii, Fer Sifuentes-Sujo & Travis Lanham. Basically just a fight scene, though it does serve the purpose of letting one of the X-Men do some serious damage to an Orchis operation. Now that the notion of a tour of Otherworld has been dropped and we’re simply onto a third-tier X-Man trying to save Redroot to help avenge his friends, it strikes me that there’s another problem here: Redroot is so wildly underdeveloped on the page that she barely qualifies as a character at all. So when the story tries to do the beat of Redroot feeling hope for the first time in ages… you know, let’s give her a personality first. Any personality. Because right now she’s a background Flower Fairy.<\/p>\n ALPHA FLIGHT #3.<\/strong> By Ed Brisson, Scott Godlewski, Matt Milla & Travis Lanham. It’s very much a week of middle chapters, this – which means the weight of books isn’t the only reason why some of these will be short. A lot of this is a fight scene with the Box Sentinels, which turn out to be nowhere near as good as their American counterparts. Slightly to my surprise, a scene is devoted to explaining away why we’ve had two Feedbacks wandering around, and while it reads very much like a continuity patch rather than a planned part of the story, I do appreciate the effort to smooth it over (particularly as Daken was in both stories). And Nemesis turns out to be… well, a character you’d always have expected to be in an Alpha Flight story, but I guess it does make sense for her to pick a random alternate identity to throw people off the scent. Still, it doesn’t land as quite the huge twist that the cliffhanger wants it to be – if anything, the bigger surprise is that Guardian\u00a0didn’t<\/em> already know who she was.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n UNCANNY AVENGERS #3.<\/strong> By Gerry Duggan, Emilio Laiso, Morry Hollowell & Travis Lanham. Captain America holds a press conference to tell everyone to hug a mutant. In theory, this is fine – it’s precisely what Captain America ought to be doing, using his position to change the narrative and not just running around with a random Avengers team who might or might not even be publicly acknowledged. In practice, it’s a Care Bears scene in which Cap points out the bleeding obvious, and a bunch of characters in the crowd stare at him with joyful, inspired faces. I wonder if it’s the art overselling the scene, but then since nobody is actually scripted to\u00a0do<\/em> anything in response to Cap’s speech, I’m not sure how else Laiso was supposed to convey that it was landing. And besides, when a big part of the X-books’ direction is that Orchis are dominating the narrative, I don’t think “all people needed was to hear the truth from Cap” works. To be fair, Steve\u00a0does<\/em> have a next step in his counter-narrative, which is to wheel out the one human witness who can testify to what really happened at the Hellfire Gala. Unfortunately for him, that’s the Kingpin – which is a much more interesting angle in terms of changing the narrative. (Mind you, it does beg the question of why Orchis hasn’t had him killed by now… but I guess he can hire protection.)<\/p>\n DARK X-MEN #3.<\/strong> Annotations here.<\/a> The Dark X-Men try to recruit Flourish, and don’t get anywhere with that at all. And Angel apparently gets killed, which nobody seems all that bothered about (though I’m pretty sure he’ll be back). I’m enjoying this book, though. It’s making good use of Feint as the rookie who’s managed to convince herself that all this is still within normal parameters of weirdness for the X-Men, and it’s a good call to keep her and Gambit around – and to a lesser degree Havok – to make sure that this\u00a0is<\/em> still some sort of recognisable X-Men team, even if the other half of the cast just seem to be amusing themselves, and Madelyne is somewhere in between. It does feel a bit episodic, given that this is only a miniseries – we’re obviously building to the two Goblin Queens fighting, but that feels a bit disconnected from Madelyne’s arc at this stage. But fun.<\/p>\n REALM OF X #3.<\/strong> Annotations here.<\/a> Bruno Oliveira is not the solicited artist for this story, and his angular cartooning bears no resemblance to regular artist Di\u00f3genes Neves. It’s been a while since I’ve seen Marvel slot quite such a dissimilar fill-in artist into the middle of an arc. Oliveira mainly works for Marvel’s Infinity Comics – he drew the Runaways arc from Marvel’s Voices Infinity Comic<\/em> which was quite similar but rather more polished. He also skipped the final issue of that arc, presumably because he’d been hauled across to draw this issue at the last minute. I’m very much in the minority here, but I actually like a lot of the art in this issue – yes, okay, there’s some terrible facial expressions and an inexplicable insistence on drawing people cross-eyed, even for a rush job issue, but there are also some strong layouts and a bit of dynamism which, frankly, this series could well use. Three issues in, the story itself is very much a case of: I see why this ought to be interesting in theory, but I’m not enthralled.<\/p>\n