Previously On X-Men: A Tale of Two Fight Scenes In This Week’s X-Books

Spider-Man & Wolverine #2 and Wolverine and Kitty Pryde #3 offer different ways to do “issue long fight scene” stories, while Uncanny X-Men #18 wraps up the “Dark Artery” storyline and Ms. Marvel visits a fan-favorite alternate reality in this week’s X-Books!

Giant-Size Age of Apocalypse #1 by Jackson Lanzing, Collin Kelly, C. F. Villa & Rafael Loureiro

Ms. Marvel and the David Haller-less Legion arrive in the reality Legion once created, the Age of Apocalypse.

• The cover is a loose homage to X-Men: Alpha #1
• The opening page, with Ms. Marvel sitting on a lamp post looking at a statue of Apocalypse, is similarly an homage to the cover of Ms. Marvel #5.
• The main story in this issue is roughly set after the events of the “#4” issues of the various “Age of Apocalypse” miniseries and before the events of X-Men: Omega #1, which doesn’t really work, because the implication in the original story is the ends of the series led pretty directly into the climax of the story, without a ton of breathing room.
• This leads to an awkward moment where we see Colossus and Shadowcat just hanging out a picnic table, chilling with the other X-Men pre-battle, having just left all their students behind to die at the climax of Generation Next, smiling and toasting the dead like their deaths aren’t on his head (whereas in X-Men: Omega, it seems very clear Colossus is more or less deeply broken by those events and so obsessed with his sister’s safety that he mows down his wife).

• Ms. Marvel briefly encounters her Age of Apocalypse doppelganger.
• In the climatic fight with Apocalypse, Colossus gets ripped in half, in a visual nod to Magneto doing the same to Apocalypse in the original version of the story.
• Next up on Ms. Marvel’s Magic Mystery Tour: a return to the “House of M.”
• The backup story, by Jeph Loeb and Simone Di Meo, is basically just an ad for their upcoming “Age of Apocalypse” event, coming this fall.

Easily the worst yet of these one-shots. The art here is fine, but doesn’t elevate the mediocre plot the way the earlier Adam Kubert and Rod Reis art did, and shoehorning in a breath-catching sequence before the climax of the original story just so Rogue can give Ms. Marvel a lesson in the use of her corporate synergy powers is even less engaging and interesting than the previous “Ms. Marvel mucks around in X-Men history” moments.

Spider-Man & Wolverine by Marc Guggenheim and Kaare Andrews

Spider-Man fights Wolverine, enraged over the apparent involvement of Wolverine in the deaths of Spider-Man’s parents.

• This is an issue-long fight scene, and by that, I mean, it’s really just one long fight scene that takes all of three minutes to read.
• That said, it’s a gorgeously-drawn fight scene, with Kaar Andrews pulling out all the stops. There’s a great sequence where stills from the plane crash sequence that killed Spider-Man’s parents are scattered at weird angles across the pages, creating the effect of the images echoing in the mind of the enraged Spider-Man, and the choreography is strong throughout, as in a panel where Spider-Man launches a machine gun-burst of webbing at Wolverine but is positioned so he’s basically shooting at the fourth wall, or another panel where Spider-Man slides underneath Wolverine as Wolverine launches himself at Spider-Man.

• Throughout the issue, Wolverine is unable to categorically-deny involvement in the deaths of Spider-Man’s parents, due to the fact that he knows he’s done bad stuff in the past and his memories are untrustworthy. Wolverine theoretically had all his memories restored during “House of M”, but there’s been enough retcons and junk since then (*cough* Romulus) that its not unreasonable to say he’s back in a more traditional place of “not trusting his own memories”.

If you like Kaare Andrews stuff, then this is 100% your jam. If not, there’s not a whole lot else going on here.

Book of the Week: Uncanny X-Men #16 by Gail Simone, David Marquez, & Luciano Vecchio

The Dark Artery storyline comes to a close!

• The opening pages setup the idea that New Orleans is going to become the first “Mutant Friendship City” (which of course has parallels to the Henrietta flashback story/the presence of the Dark Artery as a safe place to inter mutant remains in the general vicinity of N’awlins). It remains to be seen what comes of that, but its worth pointing out that the Utopia Era in the late 00s also involved San Francisco similarly embracing mutants, another way this book is either directly or indirectly connecting to that era.
• The angry ghosts refer to the X-Men and Outliers as “Breathers” which is a cute bit of terminology.
• Not surprisingly, it turns out Wolverine and Henrietta knew each other back in the day, with Henrietta referring to him as “James”.
• Really great colors in this one from Matthew Wilson.

• In a somewhat perfunctory wrap-up to the flashback story, the mutates of Haven house let Jacob Miller leave, and he comes back the next day with a bunch of agents only for the Dark Artery to be sealed and gone, making him look like an idiot. I suspect this won’t be the last we hear of Miller; I could very well see a descendant or something like that turn up in the present day.
• It also turns out that Henrietta has no desire to leave the Dark Artery, she’s content there with the spirits of her husband (the driver who was shot in her flashback story) and the rest of her family (including her mother, whose remains she was bringing to Haven House in the first place). When she had talked about leaving earlier in the story, that was Shuvahrak speaking through her, as it does via other characters in this story.
• Calico’s horse Ember is apparently a zombie horse, and it scares Shuvahrak enough that the Man-Thing can light Shuvahrak on fire.
• The reactivated Sentinel dog from the end of last issue turns out to have been rebooted in “good boy” mode, and is now living at Haven House.
• The reason the doorway to the Dark Artery is a giant X even though it existed long before Professor X and the X-Men is because the letter “X” meant “safe” in the mutates old secret language of codes, symbols and hand gestures, which is a pretty elegant and unintrusive way of imbuing the X-Men’s iconography with additional meaning and expanding the lore of pre-X-Men mutant society.
• It also seems pretty clear from this story that Shuvahrak was the force compelling the Outliers to come to Haven House in the first place, back when the series started.
• The solicits for this issue said that the Endling would be revealed; that’s certainly never directly revealed, and if anything, Shuvahrak tosses more fuel on the mystery by pointing out the ways the Endling could reasonably be any one of the Outliers.

Simone lands the plane with a solid wrap-up to her story-arc to date. This probably would have been even better coming earlier in the series, both in terms of the mutant sanctuary city stuff offering a less grim outlook for mutants post-Krakoa and in terms of the Outliers settling in sooner, but I guess that’s what happens when you have to wedge in two crossovers in your first year on the book.

Wolverine and Kitty Pryde #3 by Chris Claremont & Damian Couceiro

The fight with Ziggy Trask and her Sentinels takes an odd turn.

• As mentioned in the write-up of the last issue, Ziggy Trask is a character from Claremont’s X-Men Forever alt universe, while her mini Sentinels debuted in a 2013 X-Men Gold one-shot.
• I’m not sure the various ninja weapons Wolverine, Kitty, and their allies use in this issue (swords, knives, arrows) should be that effective against metal Sentinels, but this is hardly the first story to take that liberty.
• The mysterious snow-drenched vista of feudal Japan returns, with the doorway to Mariko’s bedroom basically serving as a portal between it and the regular world. The way this book is balancing the fantasy elements of that mystery with the more sci-fi nature of the Sentinels remains one of the more interesting things about it.
• In the end, Ziggy gets possessed by some kind of AI which also ensnares Kitty, leading to the emergence of a figure who looks an awful lot like Warlock/one of the Phalanx.

Coming the same week as Spider-Man and Wolverine #2, this makes for an interesting contrast case in how to do “one long fight scene” issues. This is also basically an issue that is just one big fight scene, and while the art, while solid, is perhaps not as flashy and dynamic as in Spider-Man and Wolverine #2, this is nevertheless a much meatier read, thanks to the use of narrative captions, the presence of more characters (which both widens the field of conflict and allows for more dialogue) and the way the fight ultimately progresses a few different storylines/mysteries.