Previously on X-Men: ‘X-Men’ #25 Nazi-Punches Its Way To The Top

We get both flagship books and a heaping helping of Wolverine in an overall strong week for X-books!

Generation X-23 #1

By Jody Houser & Jacopo Camagni

Laura and Gabby investigate a new Facility experimenting on mutants to make them weapons.

• Gabby gets to be the ball in a Fastball Special, crying out “Scout’s cool attack name!” as she does, which made me chuckle.
• Kiden is Kiden Nixon, a young mutant with time acceleration powers. She debuted in NYX #1 and last appeared in the most recently volume of NYX, where there seemed to be a romance sparking between her and Laura.
• Amongst the various flashes of time triggered by the mutant Laura and Gabby rescue (designated X-80 based on the number of the side of her head) is a flash of Shadowcat and Colossus from “Age of Apocalypse,” suggesting her power works across realities as well.
• The montage of images showing Laura’s history when she’s hit by the time-distortion wave shows her in various looks from distinct eras, starting on the left with her appearance in the the X-23 miniseries, then an outfit from the Marko Djurdjevic variant cover to X-23: Target X #1 to represent her initial “NYX” era, then the Fang costume from her X-Men debut in Uncanny X-Men #450, then her “Utopia Kill Squad” X-Force costume, followed by her current look (with two more we can’t see presumably meant to be future versions of the character).
• I also chuckled when Gabby said under her breath that maybe the X-23 robots think Laura is creepy. Gabby is the best.
• All of the characters who appear on the final page are new, and while they’ve been named in pre-release material, let’s wait til the series itself introduces them to run down the list.

Less “new series” than “next arc of the Laura Kinney solo book” (albeit with an entirely new creative team), there’s not a ton to this – everything that makes it distinct from the earlier Laura book doesn’t come until the very end. But it’s solidly-done, and intriguing enough to make me want more, which is a pretty good return on a first issue these days.

Check out Tony Thornley’s full review here.

Uncanny X-Men #24

By Gail Simone & David Marquez

The X-Men battle the Legion of Monsters as Marcus St. Juniors continues his Western tale.

• The cover of this issue may be an homage to Tomb of Dracula #48 or Astonishing X-Men #6.
• The setting of the Western story has changed from “Willow Flats” to “Willow Falls.” It *really* seems like there should be someone whose job is to read through scripts before they’re published and check for errors and whatnot.
• Sweet Water Park is not a real amusement park in New Orleans, though it being abandoned in the wake of Hurrican Katrina presumably makes it a stand-in for Six Flags New Orleans, which faced the same fate.
• While all of the X-Men are acting a bit weird (Rogue points it out), Nightcrawler being especially fearful of the Monster of Frankenstein could be rooted in his German upbringing and the Monster’s connection to that general region of Europe.
• Speaking of Frankenstein’s Monster, he’s oddly monosyllabic and anti-mutant here (saying only, “Mutant, Bad”); the former is more in keeping with his cinematic counterpart (the comics version has always been more like the more erudite book version), the latter is entirely new.
• I’m not sure if “acting weird” covers for Jubilee saying something like, “it’s covered in the patina of death and I’d rather have a fraught life” which doesn’t sound like how Jubilee talks *at all*.
• The leader of the Legion of Monsters is only referred to as “Mistress.” She resembles the current, younger, look of Agatha Harkness (and has a familiar named Salem), but also talks about being undead. And Simone has said on social media that it’s not Agatha (but won’t say who it is). Maybe she’s Shiklah, another purple-y sorceress type with ties to Deadpool (one of Simone’s favorite characters)? [Ed. Note: Also Shiklah has been a queen of all monsters in the past.]
• Wolverine becoming a werewolf calls to mind the 90s classic “Cap Wolf,” in which Captain America became a werewolf and Wolverine guest-starred, as well as that terrible Jeph Loeb story which suggested Wolverine, Sabretooth and other similarly-animalistic mutants were all descendants of wolf people.

I maintain that if the identity of “Mistress” is mean to be a secret, she shouldn’t be revealed like we’re supposed to know who it is, especially if the story doesn’t make it clear who it is. Other than that, this is a fun issue that makes good use of the “split two opposing teams into a series of one-on-one battles” trope.

Wolverine #16

By Saladin Ahmed & Mike Henderson

Wolverine and the Morlocks battle Alpha Flight and Department H.

• Wolverine seems to think Department H’s heart attack device could kill him; that seems unlikely, but Wolverine’s healing factor is always inconsistent.
• I’m not sure why they would need Wolverine’s biodata, but Mehta did indeed shake Wolverine’s hand in issue #9 (and spent a few panels trying to make it happen). You also can see Puck attaching the device in the previous issue (there’s a small “beep” sound effect).
• It’s nice that while Puck, Marrinna and Snowbird are willing to dustup with Wolverine, they haven’t gone full fascist and draw the line when Vindicator is prepared to torture Ape and Erg.
• Snowbird erroneously turns into a brown bear; her forms are always white.
• Apparently we are meant to be questioning what Ape and Erg are doing in Canada, as attention is drawn to the question, then cut off.
• The sequence when Wolverine is hit with the heart attack device a second time has a nice intensity to it. In general, I’m enjoying Henderson’s work on this book; he gives it a grittiness compared to Coccolo’s often smooth lines.

• The MMA fighters Adamantine kills are loose parodies of Street Fighter characters (there’s a Ryu, Ken, Guile, E. Honda, etc.).

I’m generally surprised the threat of Department H wrapped up so quick? Not that I mind. And I appreciate Ahmed making the seemingly-differing characterization of Mehta across arcs work. This book remains consistently mid – but Romulus and the Adamantine lurks to drag it down.

Wolverine: Weapons of Armageddon #1

By Chip Zdarsky & Luca Maresca

Wolverine teams up with a figure from his past to help a young mutant avoid Wolverine’s fate.

• Marvel’s next big event will be the Zdarsky-led Avengers Armageddon (which will also involve the Origin Boxes from the Ultimate Universe), and this is the first in a series of miniseries setting up that story.
• This issue retcons a new character, Teri O’Barnes, into Wolverine’s origin, establishing her, a mutant with tracking powers, as the person who found Wolverine for the Weapon X project, leading directly to his abduction outside a Canadian bar.
• Tyler Torrens, the young mutant Wolverine is trying to help, is a new character.
• I always love a footnote to a yet-to-be-released issue, (in this case: Ultimate Impact: Reborn #1).
• Nuke was introduced at the end of Daredevil’s “Born Again” story, another “trying to recreate Captain America” super-solider with tunnel vision that uses red, white and blue pills to modulate his mood.
• The Professor and Doctor Cornelius, who have a dialogue exchange in Wolverine’s flashback to the Weapon X project, are established figures from that story, introduced in Barry Windsor-Smith’s “Weapon X” serial in Marvel Comics Presents.
• The “other” Captain America at the end of the issue is Dave Colton, the post-9/11 Captain America recently introduced in Zdarsky’s Captain America (basically, the idea is that, thanks to the sliding timeline, there is now a gap between 9/11 and when Steve Rogers emerges from the ice of roughly ten years, so Zdarsky revealed the existence of a new Cap from that time inspired by the original, not unlike how back in the day Marvel had “substitute” Caps from the 1950s doing a similar thing).

The Teri O’Barnes retcon is a relatively significant one, and I don’t really love it; for one, the Weapon X era of Wolverine’s history has already been toyed with relentlessly, and for another, I can do without yet another, “this person is important in some way to Wolverine but you’ve never seen or heard of them before now” character in his backstory. All that aside, this is a perfectly fine Wolverine story with some stuff from Zdarsky’s Cap book on the fringes; presumably, it’ll focus more on event setup and less on bog-standard Wolverine story beats going forward.

X-Men #25 – Book of the Week

By Jed MacKay, Tony Daniel & Agustin Alessio

In pursuit of Doug Ramsey, the X-Men battle Fenris and meet the new director of ONE.

• This issue has a legacy number of #325, which is maybe why it gets a second 5 page backup story?
• I’m not quite sure what Beast means about RLDS being caused by retrocausality. but glad MacKay isn’t dropping that plot point.
• The “main” Morlocks have been living in Rio Verde since Marauders (vol. 1) #7, but there’s also the “New Morlocks” hanging out in Canada in Wolverine’s book right now, and we saw a group of Morlocks in New York in NYX, so apparently they’re taking the same “diaspora” approach as the X-Men.
• Also, I’m not sure why Doug would go to (any) group of Morlocks, or at least, why the X-Men are so certain he would.
• This is the first appearance of Fenris in continuity since “Fall of X” (when Kwannon cut off their hands in Uncanny Avengers, something not mentioned here), though they were the main antagonists in the “Age of Revelation” Cloak or Dagger series.
• Andrea is wielding a sword, a seeming reference to his time as Swordsman on the Thunderbolts (when he channeled his energy projections through a sword that had the flesh of his sisters wrapped around the handle).
• Speaking of which, at one point the Fenris twins do their “grab hands to activate their powers” thing, except…they’re wearing gloves, so it shouldn’t do anything.
• The new director of ONE is revealed to be Crimson Commando, who first appeared back in Uncanny X-Men #215 (alongside his fellow World War II superhero vets Stonewall and Super Sabre). He eventually joined Freedom Force, got injured, became a cyborg, lost his powers, and was killed by Wolverine when he tried to get Hope Summers to restore his mutant powers (which are basically “being like Captain America” in terms of being the fastest and strongest he can be without being truly superhuman (and long-lived).
• A footnote here cites his death as occurring in Uncanny X-Men #529, but it was actually #539.
• Crimson Commando being anti-Nazi makes sense given he fought Nazis in World War II, but that aside, MacKay is pitching him as a fairly MAGA-ish government official, one whose identity as an American is superseding his identity as a mutant, which is more or less consistent with his character (he wasn’t quite as jingoistic as he is here in earlier appearances, but this isn’t the first time he worked for the government against mutants, either).
• Beast received 3K’s contact card in issue #18. The whole “3K = MMM = Make More Mutants = Krakoa Beast” bit is cute and it works, because even if you think it’s all a leap, it only matters that it wasn’t a leap for the Beasts.

A solid issue, which provides some action, some mystery, some plot momentum, all in one. The pacing of both the ONE director reveal and Beast figuring out the Chairman ID is pleasingly-brisk. And bringing in Crimson Commando is a great example of a continuity deep cut that still makes sense as an evolution of the character – between the returns of Wyre, Astra and this, it’s easily the best of the bunch. If MacKay can keep these “Shadows of Tomorrow” cylinders firing, it will maybe make the “Age of Revelation” slog worthwhile.

Check out Tony’s full review here.