Since we were running late last week, I already covered Astonishing X-Men Infinity Comic #2. This doesn’t leave us short of books. It’s an absurdly heavy week.

UNCANNY X-MEN #7. (Annotations here.) This is part 2 of the “Raid on Graymalkin” crossover with X-Men, although much of it covers the same material from the perspective of the Uncanny cast. That’s not as redundant as it might seem, since the good parts of this story are largely the character material, particularly with Calico. The actual plot still leaves me unconvinced – the prison villains feel both one-dimensional and too close to Orchis, and the fight between the two X-Men teams feels forced. Generally, the prison stuff feels like a distraction from what this book really wants to be doing – and the fact that this is the issue that gets partial fill-in art kind of reinforces that. It’s still not a bad issue on the whole, but the book does other things better than this.

X-FACTOR #5. (Annotations here.) This isn’t working. It ought to work – there’s nothing wrong with the idea of the US government sponsoring its own mutant team who sign up in good faith and find themselves answerable to shallow self-publicists and military incompetents. And Mark Russell seems like he should be a good person to write that book. But what we’ve wound up with is a book that’s too wacky to take seriously without actually being funny, and that’s the worst of all worlds. There are moments where it comes together – the Polaris subplot is maybe the one thread in the book that really works, perhaps because it’s been insulated from everything else. But five issues in, this is floundering.

PHOENIX #6. (Annotations here.) This isn’t really working either, but its problems feel rather more fixable. Jean as Phoenix is so powerful that you can’t put her on a regular team book for long, and going cosmic makes sense. The general idea that she’s torn between embracing the Phoenix and holding on to her humanity works, and offers a potentially satisfying way of getting her back to more workable power levels in the medium term. The religious themes kind of work. Adani’s role as a potential protégé torn between Phoenix and Perrikus is fine. I even quite like the art, which has some nice energy to it. But then we’ve got Perrikus as a one dimensional villain, and the baffling use of Thanos, set up with the Galactic Council handing the galaxy over to him for no adequate reason at all. It looks like the idea is meant to be that a degree of mind control is involved, but then that didn’t feel like the story being told last issue, which was more about everyone’s terror of Phoenix’s power levels. That stuff feels clunky and arbitrary, and it just doesn’t convince – it simply plays as a moron plot, where the Galactic Council have to do something monumentally idiotic in order to make the plot happen, and the book hasn’t pulled that off.

STORM #3. (Annotations here.) Well, look, the art’s great – that giant bird thing in the closing pages is fabulous. But this is a weird book. If you boil it down to a couple of sentences it all seems solid, but at full length it feels very strange. We’ve spent two issues building up Storm’s radiation poisoning, only for it to be cured off panel between issues. Sure, it’s a plot device for a magical deal means Storm can’t use her powers for a week, but… we’re not doing that on panel? Really? Then we’ve got Storm spending her week with the X-Men so that she can spend a quarter of the book in silent sparring with Wolverine, with a baffling intro sequence in which I guess the idea is that the X-Men pretend that Nimrod is attacking in order to surprise Rogue, but… what? Seriously? More to the point, if the angle is that Storm can’t pursue a romance with Wolverine because she wants to stick to the personal agenda she had in issue #1, why aren’t we doing stories about that agenda, instead of jumping straight to reactive stories where she never gets around to it? It all kind of sort of makes sense if you handwave it a bit, but it’s clumsy, and it just doesn’t feel ready for prime time.

LAURA KINNEY: WOLVERINE #1. (Annotations here.) I thought this was fairly bland on a first reading, but it grew on me as I was re-reading it for the annotations. At most points in X-Men history you’d be pushing your luck doing a story where the hero learns that some mutants are bad guys and some humans are nice, but coming off the Krakoa period there’s a bit more scope for Laura to start off being dogmatic about that sort of thing. Presumably we’re going to see more of Polly and her Oasis project in Dubai – we never do get told who’s funding it, and even though that only gets a passing mention, it seemed to be there for a reason. Polly seems like she could have a niche as someone who’s spent her life on the fringes of the mutant community or avoiding it entirely, and is now trying to make more of a contribution to it. I like Giada Belviso’s design for her too, although I’m not sure the issue really manages to sell its Dubai setting. Still, it’s a decent enough story. Is it a first issue, though? It feels like the sort of evergreen thing you could put in an annual rather than something that sets out the stall for a new title – and the fact that we’re moving on to a random guest star next issue (yes, okay, they’re both former living weapons) leaves me wonder what the direction is here, if there is one.

DAZZLER #4. By Jason Loo, Rafael Loureiro, Alan Robinson, Java Tartaglia & Ariana Maher. Final issue of the miniseries, though some further Dazzler project is promised for April 2025. And yeah, we’re back to the refrain for the week: this book didn’t work. In theory, Dazzler doing her inspiring mutant-positive tour and fending off the haters seems like a fine angle. In practice, it turns out to mean randomly selected villains attacking the show – Pretty Boy? As a solo villain? And then the bad guy behind it all turns out to be a rogue Madrox dupe from one of Loo’s X-Men Unlimited Infinity Comic arcs. If that was foreshadowed at all in earlier issues, I missed it. As for the Dazzler song lyrics in this series, there’s a reason why nobody’s done this before. If the work is meant to be good, it’s generally best to leave it to the audience’s imagination, rather than actually put it on the page and then get the characters to give it (i.e., yourself) a five star review. That’s the case even if the work actually is good – but if these songs are as good as the characters claim, the tunes must be doing some seriously heavy lifting.