UNCANNY X-MEN #25. (Annotations here.) This is the final part of “Where Monsters Dwell” and… um. Look, I like this book, and I like the creators, and I like the Outliers, but this arc is a misfire. To be fair, part of my problem with it is that the premise is pretty much that the Legion of Monsters are cool, and therefore a story where the X-Men fight the Legion of Monsters will be cool. And I disagree – I think the Legion of Monsters are boring and there’s really nothing here to change my mind. After all, they spend practically the whole arc hypnotised, so they’re not even really functional characters in it. But there are other problems too. The western strand seems to be implying that there’s more to Marcus than he lets on, but it doesn’t pay off coherently – the Rawhide Kid stuff falls away entirely and it winds up as just a pep talk to encourage the Outliers to be heroes. And issue #25 feels like it’s far, far too deep into the series for them to be learning that – doesn’t Ransom already want to be an X-Man? Some of the Gambit addiction subplot lands, and most of the issue is drawn by David Marquez, so it’s obviously going to look good, but mostly this feels like a forced attempt to shoehorn in some characters that the creators find a lot more interesting than I do.

INGLORIOUS X-FORCE #3. (Annotations here.) You certainly can’t accuse this book of dragging out its main storyline. The basic plot is that Cable has gathered this team together supposedly in order to protect Ms Marvel, but mainly in order to find out which of the team goes on to kill her in an alternate future. He only has three suspects, and by the end of issue #3 we’ve already eliminated two of them. We’ve already down Hellverine, and now this is Boom-Boom’s story. It’s partly a homage to Nextwave, but with part of the angle being that Boom-Boom doesn’t remember it fondly at all. After all, once you start incorporating Nextwave into the regular Marvel Universe, you run into the problem that it’s no longer a wacky comedy book in a wacky comedy world, but some sort of deranged collapse of rationality. Al Ewing did something similar with Spectrum’s reaction in Captain America and the Mighty Avengers, playing it as a sort of cosmic horror in which normal characters found themselves made into jokes, but doing it with Boom-Boom adds the fact that she’s the one you might expect to take it in her stride. To be honest, any attempt to get Nextwave elements to function in the regular Marvel Universe has problems – once you start grounding them in any sort of reality they kind of stop being funny, and this story feels like it’s trying to have its cake and eat it on that front. But Michael Sta. Maria’s art kind of pulls it off, and smooths over those competing elements. It kind of works, though I’m not sure how.

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X-MEN #27. (Annotations here.) Part 2 of “Danger Room” is an issue devoted to introducing the members of Maxine Danger’s think tank – the X-Men themselves don’t get that much to do, since a lot of the issue is flashbacks setting up their back story and recruitment. They’re unusual villains to get so much time, since none of them actually has any particular interest in the X-Men or even in mutants in general – they’re just psychos who have been enlisted by Maxine Danger, who herself doesn’t actually have an obvious interest in the X-Men beyond charging for her services. I’m in two minds about this arc, right now – they all get a nice enough introduction, and Diaz’s art gives them a neat contrast with Maxine’s lunatic office manager. Colton and Jackson are rather similar characters, too, though I do like the other two being (likely) delusional killers who are convinced that they’re Skrulls trapped in human form. But as an X-Men story it does feel at the moment like we’re just chucking random stuff at the team for them to fight. Still, Jed MacKay gets the benefit of doubt that this is heading somewhere more than that, since it wouldn’t be his style.

CYCLOPS #2. By Alex Paknadel, Rogê Antônio, Fer Sifuentes-Sujo & Joe Caramagna. Well, this is fun. Sure, having Cyclops lose his visor and have to work around his uncontrollable powers is a well established routine, but it’s one we haven’t done in a good long while, and Paknadel and Antônio do it rather well. The plot may hinge on a massive coincidence of Cyclops stumbling upon the new Reavers’ scheme, but now that we’re here, we’ve got an escaped mutant who was never that keen on Krakoa and isn’t immediately in awe of Scott, which gives him someone to win over. Mostly, though, we’ve got the new Reavers squabbling among themselves as Donald Pierce tries to keep them all in line, and they’re turning out to be quite entertaining. We’re not dealing with professional soldiers any more, just wide-eyed cultists who’ve signed up for dubious cyborg conversion. They’ve got the equipment but they have no real idea what they’re doing, and Pierce seems to be making do with a bunch of underlings who have been powered up to the point where they can at least shove some non-combatants about. Paknadel gives him a sort of weary disdain that somehow feels a bit more developed to me than he has in a while. It’s a good take on the character.

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