Completing our look at the Krakoa-era X-books that have actually finished stories so far, we have the first two Giant-Size X-Men one-shots.

Giant-Size is an odd format. The name refers back to the issue that launched the new X-Men back in 1975, and which was meant to be the first of a quarterly series that never happened. (Issue #2 was a reprint, and then they just cancelled the thing.) Here, though, it’s a series of one-shot Hickman stories. Except… well, X-Men is already mostly a series of one-shot Hickman stories.

Well, they can’t all be winners.

If there’s one thing about the first wave of Krakoa X-books that everyone seems to have agreed on, it’s that Fallen Angels wasn’t very good. And there’s a part of me that regrets having to say that, because it certainly wasn’t phoned in. You can see, in theory, what it was going for. You can see how it looked like a reasonable idea at the pitch stage. But the end result is a mess, for a whole range of reasons.

One factor here is that Fallen Angels seems to have been cut short. It’s principally a Kwannon book, but the first arc is plainly structured as a “gathering of the team”. Even on that level it’s strangely put together, with half the cast only appearing towards the end, and contributing very little. But it ends up with Kwannon running a team of vaguely outsidery mutants as part of a side deal with Mr Sinister. And then it stops.

Every line-up of X-books needs the grim one. It’s a role that plays a little differently, though, in the context of the Krakoan era. Normally X-Force is the book that takes a generally awful world to its somewhat-logical conclusion. But the whole premise of the Krakoan era is that the mutants are on top of the world, living in a secure tropical island utopia.

Here, X-Force becomes the book that focusses most directly on the idea that things are not necessarily very nice beneath the surface of the Krakoan utopia. It remains the most nineties and the most grim of the current line (or at least, it was until Wolverine came along), but that grimness serves a somewhat different function here.

With hindsight, New Mutants may be the strangest of the first wave of Krakoan books. Not because of the concept, which is nothing more elaborate than reuniting the cast of the original New Mutants series, and throwing in stories about trainee characters from other eras too. Basically, it’s the series for any characters who are trainees now, or played that role in the past. Simple.

No, it’s the structural choices that are strange. The first seven issues feature two quite separate arcs, with different characters and different creative teams, taking issues in turn.

Excalibur is a real mixed bag.

It looks great – let’s get that out of the way first. Marcus To is dealing with a large cast, a dense plot, and a wide range of locations, and he’s handling all that very well. He’s very good at establishing a setting, which is important for a book that’s trying to play up the tensions between Krakoa, England and Otherworld. There are clarity issues in this series, but they’re in the exposition, not the visuals.

The magical theme is potentially interesting too. Magic has been a part of the X-books for decades – most obviously, it was a core part of New Mutants thanks to Illyana – but it also exists on the fringes of the X-Men’s world, peripheral to all but a few characters. And characters like Apocalypse, Rogue, Gambit, Psylocke and Jubilee are hardly associated with magic.

Ah, my favourite.

If X-Men is carried by the promise of future gratification when the big picture starts to pay off, Marauders is the X-book that delivers the most entertainment here and now. In some ways it’s the most traditional X-book of the current line – Chris Claremont always liked writing the sort of story that characters could describe with a straight face as a “caper”.

On paper, the premise of Marauders didn’t sound all that enticing. A vaguely pirate-themed book about, er, pharmaceutical smuggling. It didn’t exactly leap off the page. But it turns out to be the most consistently fun of the current titles. Probably because there isn’t all that much smuggling in it. Or rather, we’re not expected to get all that interested in the mechanics of flower distribution.