X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #97. By Alex Segura, Alberto Alburquerque & Pete Pantazis. It feels a bit odd to have the second part of a Polaris story out in the same week as the Hellfire Gala one-shot, which up-ends the status quo of the line entirely, but there we are.

Last issue’s cliffhanger with Mirage doesn’t turn out great. Alburquerque draws her looking ready to fight, in the same rather tortured pose, three panels in a row… and then they just go and talk. It’s not good. At any rate, after that we get back to the murder mystery, and establish that whoever it is who’s killing people with magnetic powers is still around. The main villain, though, seems to be… well, the obvious one if you’re searching for an archenemy for Polaris. In theory, it makes sense to do something with Malice and Polaris after Malice was returned to Krakoa in Excalibur, since Polaris could use the closure; in practice, this feels a bit like we’re pretending that the Excalibur story didn’t happen. We’ll see how it goes.

WOLVERINE #35. (Annotations here.) Well, that seems to be the pay-off for the Beast storyline in X-Force – and I still think it’s a puzzling move to do it here rather than in that book. X-Force themselves wind up feeling like an afterthought in their own storyline, but at least Wolverine gets the satisfaction of taking down Beast’s operation. What carries this is the understated absurdity of the multiple Beasts and the way Juan José Ryp’s art sells the schtick. The moralising is less successful – did anyone really need to have it pointed out that Beast thinks he’s fighting monsters but he’s become a monster himself, after years of stories about that? But it’s weirdly enjoyable when it leans into the madness.

X-MEN: HELLFIRE GALA 2023. (Annotations here.) The third annual Hellfire Gala one-shot kicks off the Fall of X phase by… well, tearing everything down, basically. Orchis attack the Hellfire Gala, wipe out the new X-Men team one panel after they’re announced, and then force Professor X to march all the mutants through the gates to Who Knows Where. The status quo for the next little while is basically the handful of remaining mutants on the ropes.

And my initial reaction was… well, I’ve read this direction twice before, with the 198 period and the Matthew Rosenberg run, and I didn’t much like either of them.

But on re-reading, it’s growing on me. The problem with the 198 is that it dithered aimlessly, at least until Utopia came along. And the problem with Rosenberg’s run is that it’s painfully grimdark. I’m not sure that is where we’re going with the X-books in 2023. Most of the new titles are 5-issue miniseries, which suggests that this is kicking off something much more defined than the 198 ever was. And the villains are still camping it up tremendously. How morose can a Steve Orlando Astonishing Iceman series get? In fact, Iceman and Jean Grey both have solo minis starting in August, which tells you how seriously you should take a lot of the on-panel deaths here. So I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt on that score for now.

Despite the cliffhanger trying to sell us on the idea that the gates were redirected and all the mutants are dead, it seems fairly obvious that this is the reason why Destiny wanted to get her hands on Manifold in Rogue & Gambit, a plotline dutifully flagged up in last month’s X-Men for anyone who might not have noticed it – it’s not mentioned in this issue, but how could it be, without putting up a big flashing neon sign saying BACK DOOR THIS WAY?

This is the X-Men being comprehensively outmanoeuvred by the bad guys, which is something we haven’t really seen during the Krakoan era – in fact, the repeating vibe has been slightly smug mutants telling all the villains how irrelevant they are. I’m not entirely sure whether the book is deliberately going for the angle that the mutants got complacent – there’s some seeds for that laid in earlier books, to be sure, with Wolverine in particular complaining about it. The idea that the Krakoans entirely failed to notice their pharmaceutical being tampered for a year is the sort of thing where you either have to give a lot of goodwill to the story or wonder just how recklessly incompetent these people are. There are more than a few plot points like that, when you stop to think about them. How long does it take for Xavier to march everyone to the nearest gate and send them through? It’s got to be hours, doesn’t it? How does he not notice that he’s losing contact with them until after he’s finished the entire exercise?

All this does feel like it comes exclusively from X-Men, and seems to render a lot of Immortal X-Men kind of redundant. Who cares about control of the Quiet Council now? But those issues were obviously written in the knowledge of where this was doing, and Immortal X-Men isn’t finished, so maybe that’ll all fit together in the long run.

I’m never that keen on jam art issues, though there are undoubtedly some strong individual pages here – Dr Stasis’ dance routine is wonderfully silly, and the brainwashed marching sequences are very effective. I’m not sure at all about the X-Men team reveal and Nimrod attack, though, which just feels a bit messy to me.

So as an issue, then… it certainly has an impact. We’re going for big scale here, and I think Duggan’s done enough over the last few issues in X-Men to set up the idea that Orchis’s various plans have all been working out quite nicely as they got their ducks in a row before trying to fight the X-Men directly. It’s complete chaos and it’s meant to be, and as an exercise in blowing everything up faster and further than you expected – even knowing that something called “Fall of X” was coming next – I think it works.

DEADPOOL #9. By Alyssa Wong, Luigi Zagaria & Matt Milla. The Atelier storyline builds to a conclusion, as we’re finally past the “assassin of the week” phase and into Deadpool and Valentine confronting the Horned Emperor. This isn’t one of the stronger issues, though – Valentine’s origin story in the Atelier is a bit generic, and the story doesn’t quite figure out how to make the gimmick of Valentine having no arms for most of the issue work. What exactly does Valentine do to get them out of the cell, and why does having no arms not pose a problem for that? How the heck are they supposed to get those swords off the wall and pass them to Deadpool? (The art seems a bit confused by that one too, and makes a sterling effort on it, but still.) Still, Lady Deathstrike is nicely conflicted, and I do buy the Deadpool/Valentine thing, which is the key to it all.

X-CELLENT #5. By Peter Milligan, Michael Allred & Laura Allred. Um. Well, that’s a mess. Zeitgeist achieves his goal, ascends to godhood, and gets summarily defeated anyway by something essentially arbitrary. This doesn’t really pay off any of the book’s themes, and comes across as a rushed wrap-up of the plot, which is weird in a de facto tenth issue. I don’t honestly get what Milligan was trying to do here, and it doesn’t work.