X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #123. By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Phillip Sevy & Yen Nitro. Another relatively quiet week, then. And this is a pace of X-output that I’d be very happy with. Anyway, over at X-Men Unlimited, the plot moves beyond simple punching into… well, um, stuff. We’re told that Orchis aren’t just kidnapping mutants on the reservation. They’re doing it everywhere. Well… yes, isn’t that the whole premise of Fall of X? Aren’t Orchis meant to be arresting every mutant in sight? I guess it’s the involvement of the Externals that’s supposed to be a hook, but the story never actually explains why we should care about them. They don’t seem to be doing anything materially different from what Orchis was doing anyway. It’s not like anyone’s been holding their breath all these years for a Crule and Gideon story. The reservation setting previously gave this some sort of focus, but now we’ve got Shatterstar, and El Aguila (a Spanish mutant superhero from Power Man and Iron Fist), and … Betsy is still active as Captain Britain, despite Orchis? What? And she’s doing media interviews? At this point, I’m just lost – I don’t understand at all what this story is trying to do.

X-FORCE #48. (Annotations here.) The Beast storyline kicks up a gear, and not in the way I expected. When they mentioned that Beast had erased all his back-ups after the period when he was a shiny happy bouncing character, it seemed pretty obvious that the end game was to resurrect him with the older personality. Then the next writer could do a story where Hank comes to terms with what he did, but no longer remembers and can’t even understand wanting to do. But instead, the bouncing Beast is brought back as a clone, and that’s a much more interesting way of doing it. I still suspect we’re going to wind up killing them both off and resurrecting them in one body, or something of that sort, but the idea of leaving Hank Classic as a copy actually feels like a better way of getting a viable Beast back into circulation – it’s less of a reset button because this Beast genuinely didn’t do anything from the last few years. I kind of hope they just stick with that. After all, they replaced Kraven the Hunter with a clone, didn’t they?

RESURRECTION OF MAGNETO #1. (Annotations here.) Storm travels into the afterlife to bring back Magneto, in a story which has as much in common with Al Ewing’s Defenders stories as it does with X-Men Red. To be honest, re-reading Defenders Beyond back to back with this in order to remind myself of the details may not have been to RoM‘s advantage, since Luciano Vecchio’s work here is perfectly fine, but it can’t help suffering in direct comparison to Javier Rodriguez’s page-after-page fireworks. If I’m being honest, though, I found Defenders a bit too abstract for my tastes, and the tarot / kabbalah stuff doesn’t do a great deal for me. Maybe it’s because I only ever seem to encounter the tarot in the context of comics, but I find it trope-y in a way that I’m sure isn’t intended by any of the creators who use it. Thus far, this is a book I find easier to admire than to actually engage with.