X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #125. By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Nick Roche & Yen Nitro. Gosh, this is a quiet month, isn’t it? Another week with just two X-books and an Infinity Comic. It picks up in the last week of the month, but honestly, I’d be perfectly happy to see the line dialled back to something like this.

Anyway… the middle chapters of X-Men Unlimited arcs are often tricky to review, since the individual issues are fairly short. This issue is very much more of the same – whatever the notional plot about Selene kidnapping mutants might be, the actual point of this arc seems to boil down to checking in on a bunch of characters who didn’t merit a miniseries, so we can see what they’re up to. This issue, Captain Britain. There are a couple of obvious problems here. For one thing, the arc is completely unfocussed and scattershot, so there’s no real momentum towards anything. For another, every character is doing much the same thing: fighting random Orchis guys, or at least Orchis-adjacent thugs. And after several months of “Fall of X”, we’ve kind of beaten that one into the ground. There just aren’t enough variations on the theme to sustain it.

X-MEN #31. (Annotations here.) In which the thing about Orchis doctoring Krakoan medicines kind of gets handwaved away, while the X-Men fight Nimrod, and Synch heroically sacrifices his relationship with Talon. Or rather, Talon heroically sacrifices herself and persuades Synch to let her go. Or… well, look, the passing mention of cradles sure looks like it’s laying the groundwork for Synch to find a new home for her mind, but then the narrator does tell us that “he set her mind adrift” and “the longest romance in X-Men history finally ended”.

Anyway, that plot thread in itself is quite nice, and it’s reasonably well set up over the history of Duggan’s run – I just don’t understand why the bit with the Evolutionary last issue was so hopelessly compressed, and if the book is trying to claim that the cliffhanger of issue #29 takes place between issues #30-31 then that absolutely does not work at all. As for the fight scene… Phil Noto is a great character artist, and I love the chunkiness of his Nimrod, but action set pieces aren’t his thing and a lot of this winds up looking quite mundane. The Synch/Talon and Fisk/Typhoid scenes play much more to his strengths, fortunately.

WOLVERINE: MADRIPOOR KNIGHTS #1. By Chris Claremont, Edgar Salazar & Carlos Lopez. Another continuity implant miniseries – this time, an entire mini taking place immediately after Uncanny X-Men #268. That’s the issue with Wolverine and Black Widow, and the flashbacks to World War II with Captain America. In other words, we’re in the period just before X-Tinction Agenda, when the X-Men are still meant to be dead. Claremont pretty much ignores that bit here, and to be fair, Wolverine seemed to have abandoned the pretence in Uncanny #268 anyway, so what the heck.

Captain America only appears in flashback in the original story, but wouldn’t you know, he shows up here in person so that everyone can have a fight with the Hand. In fact, we get ten straight pages of fighting with the Hand, before the Bacchae show up. Claremont really does love these characters, and since they actually are an undeveloped from his later stories, I guess it makes sense to come back to them in one of these implant minis. I still don’t really see what he likes about them so much, but their main role here seems to be to divert Psylocke and Jubilee into a subplot while Captain America, Wolverine and Black Widow team up to find an alien artefact. The fight scene seems overlong, but overall it’s a perfectly fine nostalgia story.