X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #121. By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Nick Roche, Yen Nitro & Travis Lanham. Another quiet week, as Marvel are sensibly giving Fall and Rise a clear run with their first issues. But X-Men Unlimited moves ever onwards, and so this is the start of a new arc joining the Proudstar brothers on their reservation. Apparently, they’ve been taking in mutants all this time and nothing has come of it until now. Hmm. Okay, this is one of the books that’s running with the idea that Orchis are reasonably easy to avoid. I can’t help thinking this hasn’t been played very consistently between books, though.

Anyhow, this first issue is really just setting up the cast on the reservation and having a fight with some random Orchis guys who finally show up, until the actual plot gets going in the final panel. I’m glad of that last panel, because on a first read through it’s very much the stock Fall of X story, and there’s only so many times you can read it. What we’re actually getting, it seems, is something to do with the resurrection of the Externals after Selene got her hands on the External Gate over in Immortal X-Men. The story doesn’t really do anything by way of a hook for that beyond having one fairly obscure External show up in the last panel, though, so we’ll just have to see what happens when it gets going properly next issue.

RISE OF THE POWERS OF X #1. (Annotations here – revised now that the data pages in the digital edition have been fixed.) While Fall of the House of X is clearly meant to be the straightforward action book, Rise of the Powers of X is a more eccentric outing, continuing the Dominion storyline from Immortal X-Men. I have no idea how much of this would have been in Jonathan Hickman’s final act, but he spent enough time setting up the Dominion stuff in Powers of X that you figure it was surely meant to go somewhere; it makes sense as a way to keep raising the scale beyond Krakoa and Orchis, and there’s something kind of interesting in the way the machinations of one man wind up overshadowing everything else.

Granted, it’s not 100% clear what’s so bad about Essex becoming a Dominion, but I’ll buy that it sounds pretty undesirable, and that the other Dominions out there may not be particularly concerned about keeping him in line. It’s an inherently convoluted concept – the whole point of the Dominion being outside space and time is that it becomes unbound from the normal rules of cause and effect, but Kieron Gillen has managed to keep that idea weird and unknowable without the story structure simply collapsing. Nimrod is back doing his childlike enthusiasm from the original Powers of X – and someone in Orchis needs to. And RB Silva’s art is simply lovely, as well as providing a link back to the original Powers.

I do wonder how this is going to wind up working with Fall, though. Quite aside from my more specific reservations about Fall‘s first issue, these are very different books in different styles. I can understand them as offering alternatives to one another, but on the strength of their first issues, it’s rather harder to imagine them as complementary titles that are going to dovetail into a greater whole. I’ll be interested to see how that side of things pans out.

WOLVERINE #41. (Annotations here.) “The Most Violent Wolverine Story Ever Told!”, it says here. I… don’t think that’s what I’m looking for in a third Victor LaValle Sabretooth story? That seems like the exact opposite of a selling point? Then again, folding LaValle’s Sabretooth story into a 10-issue storyline that leads through to Wolverine #50 seems a really odd call in the first place. I liked the Sabretooth minis a lot; I’m more hit and miss with Benjamin Percy but there are definite hits in there. But it doesn’t sound like a combination of writers that should work.

As it turns out, this issue is quite consistent in tone – it’s closer to Percy than LaValle, but then it’s an issue of Wolverine, isn’t it? If anything, the bigger issue is what feels like a last minute scramble to remind us that Wolverine vs Sabretooth is a thing. There’s something in the idea that Wolverine hasn’t had to worry about his arch-enemy for the whole Krakoan era, but then again he’s also spent the whole period lurking around being sceptical about the whole project and being abused by the Beast, so it’s not like you can really play the angle that he let his guard down in paradise. And in itself Wolverine vs Sabretooth is just What Those Characters Do – just bringing them together to have another fight isn’t really enough. It’s not really clear at this point what “Sabretooth War” is adding to that, beyond the fact that the weird alt-Sabretooths from Sabretooth and the Exiles are still hanging around. I don’t know quite what to make of this, really – it’s not the tone clash I was braced for, but it feels a bit “oh well, time for this again” so far.