Previously On X-Men: ‘Uncanny X-Men’ #22 Is A Bamf-ing Good Time

In this week’s Previously on X-Men, Uncanny X-Men returns from “Age of Revelation,” Wolverine gets another black and white and red anthology, and Avengers hits 800 issues!

Avengers #34

By Jed MacKay, Farid Karami, Brian Michael Bendis, and Mark Bagley.

The Avengers use the power of story to turn the tide against Kang.

• Though the 34th issue of this volume, this marks the 800th issue of Avengers published (I haven’t checked this one out, but usually these kinds of legacy landmarks involve at least a little dodgy math).
• Much of this issue is comprised of recaps of the big events from MacKay’s run on the title, from the fight with the Ashen Combine to “Fall of X” to the “Blood Hunt” and “One World Under Doom” tie-ins.
• In several of those recaps, Storm is drawn in place of Thor, even though she didn’t join the team until after “Fall of X,” something a footnote points out, citing Immortal Thor #25. In that issue, Thor died and was reborn as a mortal, and the connection between Earth and Asgard was severed such that no one remembers Thor’s time on Earth. (Ed: Note: To the point that Beta Ray Bill actually took the Odinson’s place as a founding Avenger in continuity. Wild stuff.)
• I don’t recall the idea that the Grail had sentience and could choose who to ally with being previously established.
• Rather than reprint every one of the 800 Avengers issues in tiny print, this issue instead showcases each of the eight “100” issues, which makes for a fun window into when Marvel didn’t care about that (the 1960s, the 2000s and ’10s) and when they did (the 1970s-90s and now).
• The second story features Bendis’ return to the Marvel/the Avengers after a long absence.
• Near as I can tell/remember, the references to Madame Hydra tying Captain America to an anti-matter satellite and Iron Man proposing to her aren’t references to published stories.
• Mandroids were first deployed against the Avengers by the US government (at the orders of a Skrull posing as a politician) during the “Kree-Skrull War”, while the Super-Adaptoid was first created by AIM using unstable molecules and the Cosmic Cube.
• Iron Man scanning everyone to make sure they’re not a Skrull is a reference to Bendis’ late 00s “Secret Invasion” crossover event.
• Kitty Pryde, a favorite character of Bendis’, pops up amongst all the Avengers despite not ever having been on the team.
• It’s supremely difficult to chronologically place the backup story; even putting aside the Thor of it all, characters pop up wearing different looks than their current ones.

Grail mechanics aside, the recaps turning out to be more than just a reader refresher/page-filling exercise is a fun twist/way to celebrate this volume of the series (it’s also a good showcase for Karami, who gets to do a bunch of big panels and splashes). It’s not exactly a celebration of 800 issues (the backup story is more in the vein of “celebrating Avengers history”), but as the collection of centennial issues remind us, rarely do these big anniversary issues do that sort of thing (this is a better Avengers celebration than, say, when an ad hoc team fought demons as part of the “Inferno” crossover in #300).

Logan: Black, White & Blood #1

By Tom Waltz, Alex Lins, Saladin Ahmed, Adam Kubert, Larry Hama, & Dave Wachter

Wolverine gets another crack at the black/white/anthology, this time in stories set before he became Wolverine (hence the title).

• Each of the three stories are set in specific times. That sort of thing is always a little dicey when it comes to sliding timeline (one of these stories is set in a decade in which Wolverine was starring in X-Men comics, for example), but that’s the nature of the beast.
• The first is set during the Korean War, and involves Wolverine fighting some Russian cyborgs (almost like proto-Reavers) with ties to the Winter Soldier project.
• It’s funny to think of this Wolverine hunting down a serial killer in a ’70s New York porn theater when the comics of the time had him celebrating Christmas at Rockefeller Center and the like.
• In the third story, one of the poachers refers to his ammunition as a “jacketed 30-06”, which is a classic bit of Larry Hama scripting (working in a very technical bit of information about arms or vehicles).

The best of this batch is the ’70s New York one, in part because because it uses the red element to highlight the seediness of the setting and not just splash blood on the page. Also, it involves Wolverine going to a porn theater involving people dressed as clowns, and that’s the kind of bonkers nonsense I want from these one-off anthology stories. I’d love to see Ahmed tap more into that sensibility (which, I would contend is also what led to something like Kid Wendigo) in the main Wolverine book.

Uncanny X-Men #22 – Book of the Week

By Gail Simone & David Marquez

It’s Nightcrawler’s birthday, and Mutina returns, seeking a place on the X-Men.

• This is branded as “Shadows of Tomorrow”, but just as Unbreakable X-Men didn’t have anything to do with “Age of Revelation”, this doesn’t have anything to do with the fallout from the event, instead just picking up where the series left off pre-event.
• The cover has Mutina busting through the cover image of the first issue of this volume.
• The idea that opens the issue is that MacKenzie Deneer is turned on by the sensation of being teleported by Nightcrawler. This doesn’t really fit with previous stories — Nightcrawler has more than once used repeated teleportations over short distances as an offensive weapon to disable opponents due to how uncomfortable the sensation is meant to be — but Simone is clearly just trying to deploy a gag, and who’s to say what turns on Mackenzie?
• Mutina tries to scare Wolverine with info about the Outlier’s pasts, but most of it we (and the X-Men) already know, from issue #3.
• The “something bad happened involving Deathdream’s little brother” bit is new, though.
• The animals who backup Wolverine (until the cats turn heel…) are Ember (Calico’s horse), Waffles the Sentinel dog, and Gambit’s cats Figaro, Oliver and Lucifer.
• After hinting at it in Unbreakable X-Men #2, this issue seems to confirm that Chelsea St. Juniors (Dome in the “Age of Revelation” future) is the Endling. Though that info comes from Mutina, so maybe we should take it with a grain of salt.
• It also begs the question of how exactly Mutina knows all the stuff she knows — like that the Endling is even a thing, let alone who it is.

Mutina is still kind of a mess — her powers remain nebulous, her motivations confusing (why admit you just want to join the X-Men for PR reasons, then follow it up by threatening Makenzie?), and it’s not clear yet if that’s intentional or sloppy writing — but this is a good (and long overdue) showcase for Nightcrawler, and it looks great. Marquez hasn’t missed a beat.