Marvel go through cycles with the annuals.  Sometimes they’re bonus extra-long issues of the regular title.  Sometimes they’re little mini crossovers off to the side somewhere.  Sometimes they’re quirky little one-shots that wouldn’t fit anywhere else.  And sometimes they’re basically a dumping ground for what would, in a former era, have been fill-in issues.

Extraordinary X-Men Annual #1 is pretty firmly in the last of those categories, or at least the lead story is.

The Terrigen Mists are about to pass over a British prison where, for some reason, obscure villains Ruckus and Ramrod are being held.  The British government won’t move them to safety despite Storm asking nicely, so the X-Men decide to stage a prison break.

So, okay, fine, that’s our set-up.  It’s pretty clearly intended as a caper story – there’s no great depth here.  Why Ruckus and Ramrod?  Because nobody else was using them.  Why won’t the British government just take them to safety?  Because there wouldn’t be a plot otherwise, and Authorities Bad.  And again, fine, as long as the mechanics of the prison break are clever enough.

That’s certainly where the story puts most of its effort, but it’s a flat affair.  Let’s break it down.  The prison has nullifiers that stop powers working inside the prison.  Okay.  Seems a bit excessive for a prison that apparently only has two mutants in it – are the rest of the prisoners superhumans too?  The Health and Safety Executive really needs to crack down on lab accidents.  But okay.  That’s the deal.  Powers don’t work in the prison.  Gotcha.  So the plan is that Forge can briefly shut down the nullifiers for a five second window, and Nightcrawler can teleport himself and Wolverine in, and Jean (from outside the prison) can stop anyone from seeing them.

So far so good.  We’ve got a suitably contrived goal for the X-Men to achieve (get everyone together in time to teleport out), and a gimmick where they can take advantage of being invisible to everyone else.  Forge messes about with the cameras, so that’s at least raised and set to one side.

What happens when we get in?  Well, there’s already a riot going on, apparently because the prisoners have found out about the Terrigen Mists.  Kurt gets knocked out immediately by a stray punch.  Ruckus is located with no particular incident.  They get past the riot again to find Ramrod.  They’ve missed the window, but they get Jean to open a hole in the wall and they escape that way.  And… that’s pretty much it.  It all feels a bit underdeveloped.  Perhaps the idea just isn’t that great after all.  Once you’ve decided that nobody (other than the rescue-ees) can actually see the X-Men, there’s not really much challenge beyond stepping carefully around the fighty people.

I’m not familiar with Ollie Masters; I know he’s written some stuff for Vertigo, and I wouldn’t really expect anyone to be producing their best work on a random X-Men fill-in assignment.  He’s English, which is presumably why he went for an English prison – plus, I suppose it explains why Ruckus and Ramrod aren’t in a massive super-prison with vast numbers of mutant inmates.  (Come to think of it, though, that would have been a better story, wouldn’t it?  Do we let them die or do we blow up the prison and let them all out?  Two guys is pretty low stakes.)   Unfortunately, Carlo Barberi – a perfectly sound superhero artist, for the most part – hasn’t been pointed in the direction of any references for British prisons, and so he’s drawn an American one, complete with the orange jumpsuits.  He also draws some weirdly flimsy prison walls.

It’s all a bit bleh.  Still, it’s competently paced, and he’s got the voices of the characters.  There’s something in the idea that feels like it could have been decent with a couple of inventive twists, but it just doesn’t get there.

There’s a back-up strip, in which Forge meets Moon Girl from Moon Girl & Devil Dinosaur.  It’s written by her regular writer Brandon Montclare, and as you might expect, it’s more a showcase for her than it is a Forge story.  I have no problem with that; nothing wrong with giving newer characters exposure in a more established title.  Forge has stumbled upon Moon Girl’s research on Terrigen and wants to help; with her usual mixture of genius, naivety and demented stubborness, she wants to fly to the Blue Area of the Moon to do research, and she’s determined to do it in a shonky home-made rocket which she knows deep down is probably going to blow up in her face.  The pay-off is to have her use it to rescue Forge when the Terrigen Cloud shows up ahead of schedule.

It’s pretty effective at introducing Moon Girl, and Rosi Kämpe’s art hits the right tone in terms of making Moon Girl’s stuff look rickety yet impressive.  Forge is an odd choice for this role; I guess he’s been chosen as the team’s current house scientist, but given that he’s spent years being written as a misfit with assorted personality disorders, it’s slightly jarring to see him cast in the role of the sympathetic voice of reason.  It’s no bad thing to bring out that side of Forge again, but you feel there was scope to play more off his own semi-detached status among the other superheroes.  And there’s a decidedly lame final panel about how Forge and Lunella are new friends now, which is the sort of thing that passes for an ending in a lot of Thomas the Tank Engine stories.  It feels clumsy and unearned.

The back-up is the better of the two stories, but neither is particularly worth looking out.  They’re not phoned in, and they have a couple of reasonable ideas, but the results are still middling.