X-MEN: FROM THE ASHES INFINITY COMIC #25. By Tim Seeley, Eric Koda, KJ Díaz & Clayton Cowles. Apparently this is the final issue, though that really just means that they’re changing the name of the book. You can’t keep naming it after the relaunch forever, after all. It’s the end of the Thanksgiving arc with Beak and his family, and it doesn’t do anything that will come as a huge surprise. At the end of the last issue, Beak was downcast and depressed to learn that the Beast hadn’t been working on a cure for his daughter after all. In this issue, a chance encounter restores his sense of hope. It’s very sentimental – it’s playing the dying child card, after all – but you can get away with that in a holiday story. And it does get away with it, through some gentle pacing and some nicely observed detail both in writing and art. It’s a lot better than a summary makes it sound.

UNCANNY X-MEN #6. (Annotations here.) This is a transition issue between the “Red Wave” arc and the “Raid on Graymalkin” crossover – although you could equally bill it as the first part of “Raid on Graymalkin”, since it sees two of the main cast get captured and carted off to jail. But it’s got a fill-in artist, Javier Garrón, which might explain why it’s being classed as something separate. Good art, though – closer to Nick Bradshaw than regular artist David Marquez, but a clean line and a storng sense of body language suit the book.

The main focus of the issue is on the four Outliers being sent off to the local school together. Since they’re clearly part of the core cast, even if they’re not technically X-Men yet, it’s a good idea to give them a downtime issue before going into the crossover. And I’m all in favour for doing more to get the X-books into the real world more often, though I can’t help wondering whether this book and Exceptional are covering very similar territory in having so many teen trainees around. Calico is clearly getting the bulk of the attention here, but maybe that’s necessary, since she’s the one who’s going to be taken off the board, so getting us invested in her is the most pressing task. Deathdream and Ransom get fleshed out a little more too, though Jitter is still a bit sketchy.

I’m still not sold on the Graymalkin prison as villains – it’s too early to go back to Orchis, and we haven’t really established what makes these guys different. And it feels too early to be going to a fight with them, when the X-Men have barely interacted with them to this point (except in the sense that they’re allied with Sarah Gaunt, but the X-Men don’t seem to know that). Still, we’ll see where all that is going when the crossover is underway.

MYSTIQUE #2. By Declan Shalvey, Matt Hollingsworth & Clayton Cowles. This is going to be one of those books where I won’t know what to make of it until it ends. It’s building up a complicated mystery story which I’m not sure I’m following, and a lot is going to turn on whether it sticks the landing. In the meantime, it’s doing some quite effective things in terms of distancing us from Mystique and showing her through other people’s eyes, to play up the uncertainty about which characters might be her at any given time. Granted, there’s a bit of gratuitous shapechanging for the sake of visual flair too. But I can see that it’s making good use of Mystique as a source of confusion. What it isn’t really doing is drawing me into the story, because… well, because it’s confusing and I don’t really feel like I know what’s going on or what’s at stake. It’s a puzzle box book, and we’ll have to see it if it can pull off the solution.

DAZZLER #3. By Jason Loo, Rafael Loureiro, Java Tartaglia & Ariana Maher. Dazzler’s tour dates are getting cancelled because of the chaos that keeps affecting her shows, and Lila Cheney takes her to Japan for an issue to have fun. That leads to a basically random fight with Arcade, who just happens to be in the area and has a stab at claiming the open contract on Dazzler. It’s really just a random fight issue, but it does that well enough. Loureiro does some fun go-kart chase scenes, which isn’t an easy thing to pull off. As with previous issues, the book’s main problem is that it’s terribly heavy-handed when it does deal directly with its core theme of Dazzler standing up to prejudice, and while that’s more marginal in this book, the lyrics of Dazzler’s songs probably would have been better left to the reader’s imagination.