X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #105. By Steve Foxe, Stephanie Williams, Noemi Vettori, Pete Pantazis & Travis Lanham. This is another ludicrously overloaded week from the X-office. Which means it’s probably not the best week to be listening to the opinions of completists like me, or at least it’s best to attach a caveat to them, since anyone reading all of these books would have to be absolutely rabid in order to get to the end of the pile without, at some point, thinking “Oh god, is there still more?” To be fair, Uncanny Spider-Man #1 is running two weeks late. But the planned schedule always had eight comics, which is ridiculous.

X-Men Unlimited Infinity Comic has the good fortune to come out first. It completes the series of spotlight stories for the members of the X-Men team who got annihilated at the Hellfire Gala. This is Juggernaut’s story, and it’s basically people recapping his history and talking about his journey of atonement. But it seems to be trying to present election to the X-Men as the climax of that journey, which runs up against the problem that he joined the X-Men during the Chuck Austen run, something like fifteen years ago now. I suppose you can argue that being voted onto the team carries more weight, though. And if you’re willing to wave that point through, then it’s a nice enough recap of Juggernaut’s career, but it’s not much more than that.

ALPHA FLIGHT #2. By Ed Brisson, Scott Godlewski, Matt Milla & Travis Lanham. So, yeah, I’m not going to do annotations for Alpha Flight and Uncanny Avengers, because life’s too short. Besides, Alpha Flight is a proper Alpha Flight book, built around a recognisable Alpha Flight team playing along with an anti-mutant Canadian government in order to help refugees from within. Like all the “Fall of X” books that focus on the actual persecution of the mutants – rather than the exile thread, or stories which are enabled by the mutants being largely absent – it suffers from the fact that the Orchis angle is too heavy handed. Within its parameters, Brisson handles it well, and the art is nice in a classic superhero way, but at this stage… yeah, I don’t accept the premise of the story, and it’s pretty clear by this point that you’re not going to win me round to it.

UNCANNY AVENGERS #2. By Gerry Duggan, Javier Garrón, Morry Hollowell & Travis Lanham. See above, except I don’t even think this one is particularly well done within the ambit of the story. The closer “Fall of X” gets to the Orchis storyline, the more boring I find it, and unfortunately Gerry Duggan’s books are the motherlode for that thread.  Nothing against Duggan – his Marauders was the best thing in the first year of the Krakoan era – but this is stuff is absolutely dying on the vine for me.

DARK X-MEN #2. (Annotations here.) On the other hand, this is much better. Orchis are the villains, but Dark X-Men is more interested in a different angle – it’s a storyline enabled by the fact that all the regular mutants are off the board, leaving Madelyne Pryor to lay claim to the X-Men name and do it a wonky, distorted way. The cover is terrible, but the interior art is much better, and the book strikes a nice balance between its elements. A straightforward story of Madelyne leading a bunch of villains who are indulging her delusion that she’s running the X-Men would have worked. But the approach here – where she’s got a deluded Havok by her side, and a few actually sane characters to round out the team and make it kind-of-sort-of the X-Men for real – is a much more interesting balance. Even Azazel is quite entertaining, perhaps because the main problem with Azazel is the damage he does to Nightcrawler’s back story, and none of that is relevant here. Azazel as a dark Nightcrawler hanging out with Madelyne’s group for survival reasons, and acting amused by the whole thing, is perfectly fine. This book has been one of the pleasant surprises of “Fall of X.”

WOLVERINE #37. (Annotations here.) Wolverine hunts down his three missing clones, with the help of guest star the Hulk. This is another story written in the margins of “Fall of X” – it pays lip service to that arc, and works it into Wolverine’s motivations, but none of that really matters. The story is really an excuse to take Logan to visit three formative locations from his past, with each of the clones representing a distorted version of his persona there. I wasn’t expecting the book to bash through all three of them in a single issue – albeit an extra length one – but it’s a good call from a pacing standpoint.

I said in the annotations that there was only one bit of it that didn’t really make sense to me, which is Solem putting his Patch clone on display at the very same time as he’s explaining why he’s keeping the clone in the shadows. I still don’t think that bit works. In fact, there’s quite a lot that doesn’t make sense in a purely logical way – if the clones are all supposed to be dumb as rocks, how the hell did they manage to find their way back to these locations in the first place, starting from the other side of the world? Especially without getting picked off by Sentinels? But that’s the sort of thing I’m willing to wave through, because there’s a kind of fable logic going on here. Hulk is a bit of an arbitrary inclusion, but he works as a foil for Logan, and he kind of fits with the theme of revisiting Logan’s roots. Pretty good.

UNCANNY SPIDER-MAN #1. (Annotations here.) Another “Fall of X” book that does work, because it’s really a story about Nightcrawler being separated from everyone else and trying to find a new direction after Legion of X. Or rather, ostensibly trying to find a new direction, but actually just hanging around a park and beating up the odd mugger. It’s hard to imagine that Nightcrawler really thinks he’s fooling anyone with this Spider-Man costume, but the design looks great, and his efforts to be a light-hearted Spider-hero cut nicely against the bleakness of the “Fall of X” elements. I assume the voice of the sword is going to turn out to be Legion, given the accent and, well, the fact that this is obviously a continuation of Legion of X. Picking up Mystique’s storyline seems a good fit. But mainly, it’s a nice little character book, which benefits from being more focussed than Legion of X. In that series, a ton of ideas seemed to be battling for space – Uncanny Spider-Man is much less crowded, and all the better for it.

X-MEN ANNUAL #1. By Paul Allor, Alessandro Miracolo, Annalisa Leoni & Clayton Cowles. We had an X-Men Annual #1 last year, you know. During the same run of X-Men. If you don’t want to stick numbers on them, can we at least go with years so that we might be able to tell them apart in future? Have you people ever tried finding one of these old annuals on Marvel Unlimited? Putting #1 on literally everything irks me, not so much because it doesn’t make sense, as because it reeks of autopilot. Do you seriously think anyone is more likely to buy the 2023 X-Men Annual because it has a #1 on it? Especially when it’s part 7 of a crossover?

Yes, this is part of “Contest of Chaos”, a crossover which I haven’t been reading, and seems to be not much more than “they fight.” In this issue, set before “Fall of X”, Captain Marvel and Cyclops: they fight. It’s alright, as these things go? The art’s pretty. Some of the action is quite inventive. I’ve seen this sort of thing done far worse, but it’s still just a random fight scene at the end of the day. Maybe it’s less pointless if you’ve read the rest of the crossover, but it doesn’t do anything to sell me on doing so. A week with eight other X-books out was not the best time to put out this sort of filler.

DEADPOOL: BADDER BLOOD #4. By Rob Liefeld, Chad Bowers, Cory Hamscher, Chance Wolf & Jay David Ramos. And to think, issue #1 exceeded expectations. This doesn’t – it really has just descended into endless random fight scenes, to which Marvel can fairly say “What did you expect?” and I can reflect on my choices in life.

PREDATOR VERSUS WOLVERINE #1. By Benjamin Percy, Ken Lashley, Greg Land, Jay Leisten, Andrea Di Vito, Juan Fernandez, Frank D’Armata. Madly expensive, but to be fair, it’s 43 pages long. Oddly, this seems to be written as if it’s canon – the basic format is “Logan fights the Predator at assorted points in his career”. There are different artists for each era, with this first issue focussing on the post- Origin period – which, as per X Lives of Wolverine, now has an opening where Logan is lucid. That segment is drawn by Greg Land, but this is quite a smart use of him, since despite the usual manically grinning minor characters, the script forces him to draw things like snowbound landscapes and animals that steer him into doing some of his better work. Well, until the Predator shows up. He looks like a 14-year-old at a costume party. The basic concept is maybe too similar to X Lives of Wolverine. But if it’s playing the hits, it does it well, and Wolverine works in a predator-prey role reversal story. Traditionally that’s Sabretooth’s role, but he’s otherwise occupied and we haven’t done that particular story in many years, so this is better than you might expect.