LAURA KINNEY: WOLVERINE #4
“Brother in Arms, part 1”
Writer: Erica Schultz
Artist: Giada Belviso
Colour artist: Rachelle Rosenberg
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso

This one won’t take us long.

WOLVERINE

Bucky claims to be enlisting her help because he needs an “old-school tracker” to locate Henrick Schneider. She doesn’t believe this is the whole story but doesn’t seem to press him on it. She seems to be happy enough to go along for the sake of the road trip and the chance to go after a Nazi mad scientist. Bucky specifically sells to her the fact that Schneider tortured mutants.

Naturally enough, she sees Bucky as “not so different from me”, as they’re both would-be heroes trying to escape a past when they were used as weapons. This was also the theme with Elektra, the guest star in the previous arc.

She’s surprised to find that the unnamed mutant they rescue in Red Oak wanted to keep it secret that he was a mutant, and has to remind herself that not all mutants are “ready to be out” (to be fair, there weren’t many closeted mutants on Krakoa, nor is she meeting many in NYX).

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UNCANNY X-MEN vol 6 #12
“Some Kinda Way”
Writer: Gail Simone
Artist: Gavin Guidry
Colour artist: Matthew Wilson
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort

THE X-MEN

Gambit. This is a self-contained spotlight issue for him.

The flashbacks to his childhood take place, according to him, at a time when he “wasn’t quite wild yet, not quite feral”. He’s been adopted by Jean-Luc LeBeau at this point, but hasn’t yet been fully accepted into the Thieves Guild. If we’re going by the account of his early life in Gambit #1 (1999), this almost certainly means that he’s ten. According to that story, Remy was always seen as significant in New Orleans Guilds circles because of his strange eyes, and Jean-Luc had been keeping an eye on him throughout his life, but wasn’t able to take him in earlier due to guild politics. In the years running up to this, he’s been a member of a street gang called Fagan’s Mob, learned to fight and pick pockets, and already befriended Bella Donna Boudreaux. Everything here is basically consistent with that.

Remy’s powers are apparently starting to manifest at this point. He’s promised to stay out of trouble but winds up getting into a fight with some other Assassins Guild family members, which the Vig gets him out of, leaving him in debt. (See below.) These events also lead to him meeting Marcus St Juniors for the first time, while in hiding from the Assassins Guild. It turns out that the whole thing was engineered by the Vig, and this story is basically Gambit standing up to him when he tries to get back into Gambit’s life.

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X-MANHUNT OMEGA
“X-Manhunt Finale: Dreams End”
Writers: Murewa Ayodele & Gail Simone
Artists: Gleb Melnikov, Federica Mancin & Edni Balám
Colour artist: Brian Reber
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Tom Brevoort

This double-sized one-shot is the final part of the “X-Manhunt” crossover. For annotation purposes, I’m going to treat it as an X-Men special.

X-MEN

Cyclops. When trying to reconcile with Rogue in a flashback set after “Raid on Graymalkin”, he makes an optimistic case for the post-Krakoan diaspora as offering a range of different mutant dreams; he seems to be rationalising Krakoa as a dream that went wrong because it was one-size-fits-all.

Nonetheless, he insists that Professor X has to be kept in prison. His official argument is that Xavier is worth sacrificing to preserve deals with the US government (which, to be fair, was Professor X’s stated reason for handing himself in to the authorities in the first place), but he seems to believe that Professor X deserves to be there for the atrocities he committed in House of X, and he resents the trauma that Professor X has inflicted on him over the years. He doesn’t know that the crew of the Agnew were simulacra, something which seems to surprise Professor X (who, on one reading of the original scene, was trying to heavily hint to Scott that all was not as it seemed).  Professor X suggests that Cyclops is caught between hating him and not wanting him to leave.

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MAGIK vol 3 #3
“Pacts”
Writer: Ashley Allen
Artist: Germán Peralta
Colour artist: Arthur Hesli
Letterer: Ariana Maher
Editor: Darren Shan

MAGIK

While in Liminal’s domain, she can’t teleport and can only use simple magic. This seems to still be enough for her to put up a fight against him, but he gets back in control quickly enough that he may just be stringing her along. Liminal claims her magic is impaired in his domain because it’s so closely linked with him (and that he’d be in the same position in Limbo, which is equally closely tied to her) – but he also suggests that her bigger issue is a refusal to access Darkchild’s power.

She hates being trapped in Liminal’s domain, evidently because it reminds her of her origin story – something that Liminal goes out of his way to play up with “constructs” of characters from the first Magik miniseries. Belasco seems to particularly disturb her.

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PSYLOCKE vol 2 #5
“Hostile Hospitality”
Writer: Alyssa Wong
Artists: Vincenzo Carratù with Moisés Hidalgo
Colour artist: Fer Sifuentes-Sujo
Letterer: Ariana Maher
Editor: Darren Shan

PSYLOCKE

She takes particular exception to being treated as an object to be preserved, which brings to mind her upbringing with the Hand. She thinks that the Hand regarded her not merely as a weapon but as “something to be discarded when it’s outlived its use” – the accompanying flashback in fact shows childhood friend Mitsuki being murdered in order to motivate Kwannon, but evidently she sees no real difference between the two. At least in the flashback, she feels guilty for failing to protect her best friend.

She declares that she’s spent too long hiding from her past and trying to “bury” what happened to her in order to build a new future. There’s at least a suggestion that this is why she’s chosen to take on Betsy’s Psylocke name and role instead of focussing on her own identity. The other moral that she draws from the story is that the Taxonomist’s traumatic past is not an excuse for his current behaviour, with obvious parallels to herself.

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EXCEPTIONAL X-MEN #7
Writer: Eve L Ewing
Artist: Carmen Carnero
Colour artist: Nolan Woodard
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Tom Brevoort

This isssue is bannered as an “X-Manhunt” tie in, with the tag “Collateral Damage” instead of a part number. On his Substack, Tom Brevoort described it as a “red skies” crossover and he wasn’t kidding – the “crossover” consists of a two page scene in which the cast learn that “X-Manhunt” is happening, exchange some thoughts on it, and then get back to the plot. That’s literally it.

THE CORE CAST

Emma Frost. The issue opens with a five page monologue by Emma accompanied by a montage of images from her life. The general thrust is that she’s been through a cycle of building safe havens for mutants, trying to escape the human world, and seeing them collapse – hence, she’s experimenting with “something else”. Presumably, by that she means training the mutants within the human world instead of withdrawing from it. (The Massachusetts Academy had mostly human students, but it was still an elite boarding school and so outside the normal world in other ways.) This is more something that Kate insisted upon, but she seems to be coming round to it.

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X-FORCE vol 7 #9
“X-Manhunt, part 6: The Shapley Value”
Writer: Geoffrey Thorne
Artist: Marcus To
Colour artist: Erick Arciniega
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Editor: Mark Basso

X-FORCE

This is the penultimate chapter of the “X-Manhunt” crossover. It’s also the penultimate issue of the series, so X-Force can’t break off in mid-storyline to participate; hence, the crossover A-plot actually consists of Sage (not technically on the team right now) helping out Professor X, while X-Force spend the whole issue continuing the fight that started last issue. Forge, Askani, Captain Britain and Tank get to contribute to this vital exercise.

SUPPORTING CAST

Sage. Her real name is Terisia Karišik, as used at the end of the previous issue, which would imply that she’s Bosnian. (She’s been presented as Balkan in the past, but this is more specific.) She claims that she deleted her telepathy in “my last system update”, along with her alcoholism and “some other traits”. This presumably explains her mental recovery between the flashback and main story in issue #1. Professor X doesn’t seem particularly surprised by this notion, and it may be intended to explain the inconsistent portrayal of her psychic powers over the years.

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HELLVERINE vol 2 #4
“The Drowning Man”
Writer: Benjamin Percy
Artist: Raffaele Ienco
Colour artist: Bryan Valenza
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Mark Basso

HELLVERINE

Even as Hellverine, he doesn’t want to fight either the Mother or her children. But he has another option: from reading the Book of Lamentation, he’s learned some “hell magic” which “conjures horror” and “makes others see me as their worst nightmare”. It even works against the Mother’s enchanted children, who were perfectly willing to attack a burning skeletal Wolverine. That might suggest that it’s also cutting through their enchantment, although it clearly doesn’t free them entirely, since the art still shows them all with yellow eyes.

When Hellverine uses this power, a burning symbol appears on his chest. From the dialogue, I think the idea is that he has to carve the symbol into his chest using his claws in order to activate the spell, but the art struggles to get that idea across. Seems a very specific sort of spell, but I suppose maybe any old knife would do.

I hadn’t noticed this before, but Hellverine’s hands – which are only partially gloved – still have flesh on them even in demonic form. It’s weird.

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PHOENIX #9
Writer: Stephanie Phillips
Artist: Alessandro Miracolo
Colour artist: David Curiel
Letterer: Ariana Maher
Editor: Annalise Bissa

PHOENIX

This version of Phoenix has embraced her cosmic role and describes herself as “the guardian of cosmic balance”. All this somewhat ties back to issue #5, where Eternity gave her a speech about not letting her human side hold her back, and becoming a true cosmic entity. At that point, Jean’s main concern was that she wanted to hold on to her humanity, but in this story her narration is dismissing that sort of concern as compromise and weakness.

While her immediate aims are completely sensible – she wants to stop Adani from using her fraction of the Phoenix power to damage reality – she also casually brushes aside Rocket and Nova’s offer of help. Her plan to defeat the Shadow Realm is to create a “vast” fracture in reality, which doesn’t sound good, and indeed seems to have the sky shattering on random planets. And her narration is talking about how her fear of her own powers has been selfish and help her back from doing everything that she’s capable of. That said, she does get a lot more human when she’s talking to Adani, whom she still seems to regard as a kindred spirit.

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As always, this post contains spoilers and page numbers…

Well, I was going to go with the page numbers in Kindle, but for some reason Kindle is absolutely insistent now that comics start on page 2, which is the cover. So hell, let’s go with the story pages.

X-FACTOR vol 5 #8
“X-Manhunt, part 5: The Summers of Days Past”
Writer: Mark Russell
Artist: Bob Quinn
Colour Artist: Jesus Aburtov
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Editor: Darren Shan

In legacy numbering, this is issue #300 – not that the various books called X-Factor have a great deal in common. For the anniversary, we get a larger legacy number on the front cover, and a cover gallery at the end of the issue. Exciting!

X-FACTOR

Angel. He seems to have no problem at all with opposing the X-Men on behalf of the US government and returning Professor X to Graymalkin, despite the X-Men protesting that it’s a “mutant-hating death-trap”. (As mentioned at the end of the last chapter, the X-Men agreed with Storm that Professor X should at least go to a less inhumane prison.) It’s odd behaviour, but to be honest, none of the remaining team seem to have any particular problem with carrying out this mission. Even so, the team’s performance is predictably dismal – the only members to manage any meaningful offence at all are Angel himself and, of all people, ForgetMeNot.

While he was in hospital after issue #1, Angel had “elective procedures” carried out to restore his Archangel powers. This whole thread is a bit odd: he lost that power off panel somewhere between Heir of Apocalypse and X-Factor #1 in what appears to have been a continuity error, and certainly wasn’t explained. The new Archangel also has metal cloaws on his hands and feet (which look like they might be glove-like contraptions) and carries a sword. He also has a weird new move where he folds his metal wings around himself into a sort of buzzsaw.

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