X-MEN: FROM THE ASHES INFINITY COMIC #23. By Tim Seeley, Eric Koda, Arthur Hesli & Clayton Cowles. So this is the Thanksgiving issue, as Beak and his family show up at the X-Men’s headquarters in Merle, to the utter bewilderment of the team, who weren’t actually expecting them. It turns out that this is actually heading somewhere, since there’s a story continuing into the next issue that explains why Beak wanted to visit. But this issue is simply the improvised Thanksgiving dinner, a nice little scene in which the X-Men – even Quentin – tell Beak’s kids how great he is. And given her back story, it’s a nice touch to have Psylocke going out of her way to spend time with the kids. A perfectly nice little holiday issue.

UNCANNY X-MEN #5. (Annotations here.) This is billed as the concluding part of “Red Wave”. But you might be better off putting that out of your mind, since it suggests you should be expecting a bit more resolution than the story actually gives you. It’s the end of the current fight with Sarah Gaunt and her followers, to be sure, and it’s not simply the break point for the first trade paperback, which runs up to issue #6. It gives some clarification on Sarah’s delusions. But it doesn’t really resolve the questions of what she actually is, whether she’s a mutant or something else. And the Outliers don’t really play into the ending at all All of which is fine if you think of it as just issue #5 in an ongoing series, and that’s probably the better way of approaching it.

Taking it on that level, it’s a pretty good end to the fight, with Harvey X’s death in issue #1 being cast in a new light. Mind you, the resolution does depend on Harvey’s powers somehow allowing Rogue to beat Sarah, and I don’t follow at all how that’s meant to work. If the idea was that Sarah was vulnerable to psychics then that would make some sense, but Rogue just hits her, so it’s all a bit confusing, and that takes it down a bit. Still, the art is absolutely beautiful, and I’m on board with where the book is going.

NYX #5. (Annotations here.) Ah. Well. Oh dear.

You have to feel sorry for everyone who worked on this issue, because it must be one of the worst timed comics in history. To choose this of all weeks to ship a story in which an evil political scheme is thwarted by Kamala’s honest camaigning and appeal to America’s better nature is simply painful, and everyone invovled must have known it was dead on arrival before it hit the shelves.

But the story has fundamental problems, and the timing really just throws them into sharper relief. Empath’s plan doesn’t make sense – he wants to oppress the mutant community so that he can radicalise them and… do what, exactly? How does the umpteenth superhero fight in Times Square possibly shift the needle in New York politics, when the series of terrorist attacks by an explicit mutant didn’t? Why does nobody notice that all of those attacks have killed members of the city council? When did the bye-elections take place to get Empath’s stooges onto the council? Why do our heroes leave it until the last 24 hours to start campaigning against Empath’s ghettoisation law? What on earth do a handful of characters plausibly do in that time to have any possible effect on the outcome?

Some books can get away with this sort of all-purpose handwaving about the power of activism, but NYX is a book that was devoting space to David Alleyne’s pseudo-academic musings about the nature of mutant culture in the diaspora. You can’t just whiplash from that to “Golly jeepers, the malt shop is being closed down and we only have 24 hours to save it! Let’s do the intersectional solidarity right here!” And that’s pretty much what this issue would have been, even in more propitious times.

PSYLOCKE #1. (Annotations here.) So, another attempt to make an ongoing solo X-book work. And I can see the thinking. If Marvel want a Whole Bunch of X-Books then there are only so many teams you can do before they all become very similar. Maybe it’s easier for a solo title to be distinct. Of course, the X-books are full of characters who were never designed to be solo leads. In many cases, it’s very hard work to find reasons why they would encounter a problem and do anything other than call in the X-Men. But then there are a handful of characters who do seem like they should be off having solo adventures which they’re not telling peole about. It worked with Wolverine. It worked for a time with Gambit (and I’m slightly surprised they’re not trying with him, to be honest). Psylocke arguably fits the pattern.

Then again. Kwannon wasn’t created to be a viable solo lead either; she was created to be a plot device for a body swap angle involving Betsy Braddock. She used to have a motivation about finding her lost child, but that was all tied up during the Krakoan era. What’s left is all rather familiar. “Can I transcend being the living weapon I was made into” is Wolverine. “Can I transcend being the living weapon I was made into from childhood” is X-23. “Can I transcend the living weapon I was made into by the Hand” is Elektra. All good characters, of course, but it’s familiar territory, occupied by some big beasts already. Does Psylocke bring anything new to the trope? There’s the supportive partner angle with Greycrow, I guess. There’s that.

Alyssa Wong and Vincenzo Carratù’s first issue is a solid enough rendition of what we already knew about Psylocke, but doesn’t seem to bring any hook that adds to the formula. Maybe they’re just restating the premise before moving forward, but as a first issue, it doesn’t convince me. It’s okay, but it feels very unnecessary.

VENOM WAR: WOLVERINE #3. By Tim Seeley, Tony Fleecs, Kev Walker, Java Tartaglia & Cory Petit. The end of the miniseries – if you’re wondering, the trade paperback bundles it with two other three-issue minis, with Deadpool and Carnage.  Now I could live without what seems to be a permanent second Wolverine title, Insert Event Here: Wolverine. But if you’re going to do it, at least this has been a strong example of how to do it. We’re in the margins of Venom War, up in Maine. It’s really a story about a dysfunctional family that Wolverine happens to have encountered once before. The symbiotes are just here as a plug-and-play device that turns that family drama into something Wolverine can fight. In other words, the crossover is being used as an off-stage shorthand to save the book the trouble of setting up its own macguffin. It’s still a bit nailed on, but it works well enough, and the key thing is that it uses the event in service of its own story rather than vice versa.