As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.

There are a ridiculous number of new titles out this week – eight ongoing titles in total, plus one miniseries – so I won’t be doing annotations for all of them.

UNCANNY X-MEN vol 6 #10
“Off the Leash, part 2”
Writer: Gail Simone
Artist: Andrei Bressan
Colour artist: Matthew Wilson
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort

THE X-MEN:

Nightcrawler. He regards Haven as a “home” rather than a “school”, “base” or “country”. If we leave aside for a moment the confusing explanations we’ve had about the nature of Rogue and Cyclops’ disagreement, the actual distinction between X-Men and Uncanny X-Men is that X-Men features a mission-focussed strike team operating out of a utilitarian base, while Uncanny X-Men features a quasi-family cast with none of those trappings. Rogue presumably considers that this is the real core of the X-Men. Kurt’s standpoint seems to be that this isn’t really the X-Men, and he rather likes it that way. He isn’t sure he wants to go back to something more formal and seems rather wistful about MacKenzie Deneer and her family.

Chelsea thinks Kurt is worried about the Outliers even before there’s any word of a problem at the mall, although he insists otherwise. He certainly seems to be putting on a cheerful face for her, and perhaps for himself.

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ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #1-2. By Alex Paknadel, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. Well, I’m late enough with this one that I might as well cover today’s issue #2. We’ve got a new title and a fresh number #1, but this is the same book as From the Ashes with the same creative team. But you can’t keep calling it From the Ashes forever, I guess.

This arc has two seemingly unrelated threads, though it’s fairly obvious how they’re likely to come together. On the one hand, we have Husk returning home to the Guthrie family for Thanksgiving. But the wheels are coming off the family group: Paige is the only mutant in the family to show up, since Sam’s apparently not been in touch since his resurrection, while the other mutant siblings decided to stay in the White Hot Room. There’s a plot about how they’re in danger of losing the farm, but it’s basically a story about the non-mutant relatives being treated as afterthoughts, with one of the background kids drifting into radicalism.

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Annotations will be at the weekend this week, for anyone checking in.

Just a quick note to say that posts are likely to be running behind schedule for the next couple of weeks, so don’t expect annotations on day of release right now.

As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.

X-MEN vol 7 #3
“Scott Summers vs. The United States of America”
Writer: Jed MacKay
Penciller: Ryan Stegman
Inkers: JP Mayer & Livesay
Colourist: Marte Gracia
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort

THE X-MEN:

Cyclops tries unsuccessfully to persuade Rogue not to attack Graymalkin; we’ll see Rogue’s side of that conversation in Uncanny X-Men vol 6 #2, which won’t be out for two weeks. Cyclops is clearly aware of the fact that Graymalkin has been turned into a prison over in Uncanny X-Men and thinks that Rogue’s group are hopelessly outpowered by whoever’s in charge of it. Scott evidently had plans of his own to deal with this, and he’s going to have to accelerate them now.

At some point between the end of Krakoa and issue #1, Scott sued the US government over his treatment by Orchis. For some reason, he accepted the Factory as a settlement. So yes, the X-Men are there legally. Scott acknowledges that there was an “implication” that the US government expected the X-Men to stay in Alaska, but seems clear that he never agreed to anything. His ultimate position is that the US government would much rather his group were acting as the X-Men than acting as the Brotherhood, and those are the only two choices he’s offering them. He argues that he’s doing the government a favour by keeping his roster under control, and flags how dodgy they are: most of them are former villains, and Magik’s half demon.

(more…)

This shouldn’t take long.

X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #140. By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Nick Roche, Yen Nitro & Travis Lanham. Well, if nothing else, we’ve reached the final boss phase. And a giant Selene made of blood is at least a strong image. But it’s pretty much just random fighting at this stage. Hey, speaking of which…

FALL OF THE HOUSE OF X #5. (Annotations here.) So there you go. We’re not quite at the end of the Krakoan era. There’s still Rise of the Powers of X #5 and one final issue of X-Men to go (oh, and a couple of stray issues of Wolverine and Ms Marvel). But this is the end of Orchis, 2019-2024.

In many ways people are right to say that this is the strongest issue of Fall of the House of X. The art feels more polished and epic than in earlier issues; the pieces that needed to be yanked into place were already there. Now, the book can go out with the X-Men defeating Orchis by restoring Omega Sentinel’s real personality, and defeating Nimrod. We can just get on with the fight scene. And Nimrod does look good here.

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No annotations this week and next, because I’m on holiday. I’ll do a weekly review round up at some point over the next couple of days, though, and the next Incomplete Wolverine will be up on Sunday, covering 2014. There should also be a new House to Astonish episode coming up shortly.

Normal service will be resumed in two weeks time.

Just for anyone wondering, the rest of this week’s posts are probably going to wind up slipping a week or so. I’ll catch up in due course.

On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me… twelve lightnings striking!

It’s time for the latest episode of our reread podcast covering Marvel’s most wanted, the Thunderbolts, and we’re looking at issues 31-33 of the original run of the book. This is the end of series cocreator Kurt Busiek’s run as writer, so we’ve got a little tear in our eye as we revisit Arnim Zola From Work, the Marvel Universe’s most deadly drug and Citizen V’s emoji mask.

The podcast is here, or available via the embedded player below. Let us know what you think, in the comments below, on Twitter, via email or on our Facebook fan page. And don’t forget to go one post down to cast your votes for the 2022 Homies!

It’s obvious to anyone that Twitter is at the very least becoming unstable and unreliable, and quite possibly on its way to uselessness and/or implosion. I can see that a fair amount of traffic comes to this site directly from Twitter, so it’s clearly time to make contingency plans. I’d like to imagine that most of you who come here via Twitter would probably just check in regularly anyway, but let’s assume that’s not the case or that there’s a convenience issue for you.

That’s why this post exists: to invite comments from you, YES YOU, on the alternatives.

You can find the same links on Hive, where I’m @ifdestroyed, and on my Mastodon account https://mas.to/@ifdestroyed.

But… I don’t honestly think either of those platforms is going to replace Twitter (or that they could cope with the infrastructure and moderation demands if they did), and I don’t know how much use any of you are likely to make of them. And if you’re going to check in on them once a week to see what I’ve posted there… well, you might as well just come here in the first place.

I have also have accounts as @ifdestroyed on Post.News and Cohost which are currently dormant. If there’s a lot of you out there who’d actually find it helpful for me to post links on those platforms then let me know.

The other option is Substack. Using that just to send out alerts of a new post seems a bit clunky, but I could do a weekly round-up, maybe with a bit of extra material thrown in. Or I could go the whole hog and have every post on Substack as well as on here.

Thoughts?