X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #119. By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Phillip Sevy, Ceci de la Cruz & Travis Lanham. Is this the first time that an X-book has been published on Christmas Day? Truly, it warms the heart to think of the diligent assistant editor, trudging through the snow to the offices of Marvel Comics to press the big red PUBLISH button on the thirty-second floor. That’s dedication. Especially for the middle chapter of an Arakko storyline. This is turning into the sort of Arakko story that doesn’t work for me – the sort where we’re somehow making the logical leap from “expressing your pain is a good thing” to “battering one another with sticks is a good thing”. To be fair, I suppose this sort of ritual combat event is a fairly standard fantasy trope, and the genre has never much appealed to me anyway. But when you start trying to rationalise it in this kind of therapy-speak way, and have a bunch of characters from Earth nodding along and going “yes, this all sounds entirely reasonable”, you end up lampshading how much it doesn’t make sense.

IMMORTAL X-MEN #18. (Annotations here.) This is the final issue – or, if you prefer, the book morphs into Rise of the Powers of X for its final arc. Either way, we really are entering the home stretch of the Krakoan era now. This is the pay off for Mother Righteous’ attempts to become a Dominion, and it rather cleverly hits the accelerator by revealing that Orbis Stellaris and Dr Stasis already tried and failed to become Dominions off panel. Actually, maybe it really is rushing to the end for scheduling reasons, but if so, it’s a very neat way of making it into a positive.

This is the only issue of Immortal to be narrated by someone who was never a member of the Quiet Council, but then that was always a device that had to be slightly forced in a couple of issues when the plot really wanted to be with someone else. It works well as a resolution for Mother Righteous’ plans, which are trying to operate at the level of metafiction, and ultimately fail because her supposed happy ending doesn’t fit with how the story wants to work. We find out what she was trying to do, and the threat level is kicked up to the next level for Rise of the Powers. Juan José Ryp’s art plays all this dead straight rather than going for surrealist pyrotechnics, but that gives us something to hold on to. I can’t help thinking that none of this Dominion storyline bears a great deal of resemblance to what Jonathan Hickman was describing when he introduced the concept in the first place, other than keeping the bit about them existing beyond space and time. But taking it on its own terms, it’s coming together nicely.

X-FORCE #47. (Annotations here.) X-Force set up base at the North Pole and psychically invite all the surviving mutants to come and join them there. When you stop to think about it, this doesn’t make a tremendous amount of sense. How many refugees can actually make that journey, and how hard can it be for Orchis to get the location from somebody or other? But whatever – in the context of X-Force it feels like a nice little turning point issue as the team finally get back on track and start thinking about taking the initiative. Daniel Picciotto seems like a good art choice for this arc, not too far from what we’ve had before, but a little more of the classic superhero look. I’m not sure I buy the idea that Phoebe has just been lying around asleep on a beach for several months without Orchis at least bothering to cart away the corpses for experimentation, but on the whole I liked this issue.

PREDATOR VS WOLVERINE #4. By Benjamin Percy, Ken Lashley, Kei Zama, Gavin Guidry, Juan Fernandez, Alex Guimarães, Matthew Wilson & Cory Petit. Well, that’s basically where I figured this was going: Wolverine and the Predator have fought each other time after time down the years, which means we get to do a bunch of nostalgia flashbacks inserting Predator into various eras of Wolverine’s continuity. And this is the point where he finally beats the thing, by playing up the main point of difference between them: the alien relies on its technology, and Wolverine doesn’t. It’s simple but it does the job. That said, I question the decision to go with an odd mash-up version of different eras of Westchester – we’ve got an early 80s kind of X-Men, complete with Rogue in her earliest costume and the New Mutants in black and gold, coupled with what seems to be a full student body of the sort that didn’t show up until 2001. It’s not that I care much whether this book is canon (evidently it isn’t), but revisiting old Wolverine eras is literally the premise of the story, so where’s the upside in getting the broad strokes wrong?