Previously On X-Men: The X-Men Battle Lazy Creators And It Looks Great In ‘X-Men Annual’ #1

Avengers end! Moonstar begins! X-Men gets an annual but its X-Men aren’t in it! All that and more in this week’s Previously on X-Men!

Avengers #36

By Jed MacKay & Farid Karami

Captain Marvel assesses her role in the Avengers following Kang’s defeat.

• This is the end of both this volume and Jed MacKay’s run.
• Don’t worry, I feel my age, too, Kang.
• Black Panther stopped being king of Wakanda in Black Panther (vol. 8) #15. After a period of democratic rule, he later assumed the kingship of a constitutional monarchy over both Wakanda and its intergalactic presence in Imperial #4.
• Wanda became Sorcerer Supreme in Sorcerer Supreme #1, in the wake of “One World Under Doom.”
• Carol saying Wanda and Vision are thick as thieves is funny considering I can’t recall any significant dialogue between the two in this series.
• I generally like Karami’s art in this issue and on the series, but I’m curious why he keeps seeming to put Carol in porn poses throughout it.

• The Impossible City leaving with the Twilight Court is a pretty obvious case of MacKay putting his toys back in the box and clearing the deck for whomever the next creative team will be.
• I get the idea that everyone is voting remotely via their ID cards, but the speed with which we went from, “Carol resigns and calls for a new roster to be formed, the call goes out, everyone votes and the votes are tabulated” is *really* fast.
• As of this writing, it appears the next capital A-Avengers book we’ll get (as opposed to stuff like the ongoing New Avengers book) won’t be until June, after the upcoming rebranded Free Comic Book Day one-shot in May, and even then, it’ll be an event tie-in miniseries which will theoretically set up the next iteration of the team, which is … pretty wild.

Less a climax to his run than an epilogue, this is the kind of thing I wish we’d gotten more of from MacKay’s run, quieter, interpersonal moments between the various characters. Also, I’m torn – on the one hand, it always sucks when a creator leaves a book with plotlines left dangling, or with a status quo in place that will just get ignored/replaced by the incoming creative team. On the other hand, having Mackay end his run by writing out the Impossible City and blowing up the roster just feeds into the feeling of modern runs just being entirely self-contained, with little overlap as one one volume ends and new creatives launch another.

All in all, MacKay’s run is aggressively fine. I love Kang shenanigans more than most, and both the Twilight Court and the Impossible City are fun ideas. That said, it’s pretty clear he had bigger plans for the book that got cut short, and maybe if he’d had more time to stretch some of that out, we’d have gotten more of the character work at which MacKay generally excels but which is strangely absent from much of this series.

Moonstar #1

By Ashley Allen & Edoardo Audino

Dani teams up with the Exemplars in search of an Asgardian death sword.

• This is essentially a spinoff of the cancelled Magik solo series, the last arc of which dealt with Illyana and Dani tangling with the Society of the Eternal Dawn. Given that Dani was the entry point to that storyline in the first place, it makes a lot of sense to pickup those threads here vs. the Magik & Colossus miniseries.
• Audino was most recently the regular artist of the X-Men Unlimited online book.
• Hogni, Hildr and the Dainsleif sword are all part of established Norse mythology.
• Dani’s parents were indeed trapped inside the Demon Bear; this is their first proper appearance in decades.
• As the footnotes allude to, nobody remembers anything about Asgard as a result of the climax of Al Ewing‘s Immortal Thor, in which Asgard is cutoff from Earth, leading everyone to forget about it and the Norse gods (including Thor). We learn here that extends even so far as to the concept of Valkyries and the fact that Dani is one (I wonder what the Wagner piece played in Apocalypse Now is called in this version of the Marvel Universe?).
• Kyron is a new character.

I’m still not sure what math led to the decision to cancel Magik and then spinoff two separate miniseries from it, but just like the first issue of the other spinoff mini, Moonstar #1 is a strong start, with Allen picking up where she left off with Dani and Audino doing a nice job on art — not too far removed from German Peralta’s style in Magik, but still putting his own spin on things.

Wolverine #17

By Saladin Ahmed & Martín Cóccolo

Wolverine continues to train the new Morlocks, sleeps with Silver Sable, and fights a bug man.

• Cóccolo is back on art, and I have no idea how artist schedules are determined, but it feels like a missed opportunity to have him on this issue — which feels like a time killer — vs. one of the two previous issue which at least had “fight with Alpha Flight” to their name.
• Ape is referencing the “Mutant Massacre” crossover when he talks about why he left the original Morlock Tunnels in New York.
• Tushar is a new character. His power appears to be that he’s basically Fix-It Felix from Wreck-It Ralph.
• Coldbug is also a new character. It’s not clear if he’s a giant sentient bug who steals people’s bodies, or if he always looks like he does before his bug form is revealed and just eats other people, or what the point of him even being in this story is.
• The Adamantine getting fed up that Romulus keeps sending it up against chumps is kinda funny, assuming it’s something Romulus is doing for a reason. At any rate, we’re clearly primed for that subplot to move into the A-plot next issue.

It’s nice to get a better sense of the Morlock community here beyond just Ape, Erg, Chowdown and Deepfake, and I appreciate Wolverine’s very measured perspective on him and Silver Sable being sex buddies at the moment. But the whole Coldbug thing just feels like a time-killer, a character with no backstory or thematic connection to anything chucked into the story to pad it out and give it a bit of (non-training related) action.

X-Men (vol. 7) #26

By Jed MacKay & Netho Diaz

The X-Men attempt to rescue the kidnapped Sheriff Robbins, only to fall into a trap.

• Netho Diaz is back on art, continuing his “second chair” role as the series regular fill-in artist.
• Greycrow robbing banks came up in the Psylocke solo series, and was established in issue #5 of this book.
• Presumably the “Amy” he is calling for help is Amelia Voght, who was teleporting him around in issue #5.
• Cyclops stating he was a kid in Alaska and grew up at Xavier’s ignores his time in the Nebraska orphanage secretly run by Mister Sinister, where he lived after his parents were kidnapped by the Shi’ar and before he was taken in by Professor X.
• Glob selling vegetables is adorable.
• I don’t believe we’ve seen Deputy Smith before.
• The first Iron Knight was seen via flashback in issue #7. The second one is presumably the Magneto-driven Sentinel/kaiju fight in issues #14-17.
• The Beyond Corporation debuted in Nextwave (which was originally an out-of-continuity series); Maxine Danger is the head of their New York branch. She was last seen in Amazing Spider-Man: Blood Hunt.
• I guess the X-Men are done trying to find Doug/visit the Morlocks, as they were on their way to do last issue?

The Glob stuff is great and I appreciate seeing MacKay doing something with Greycrow in the wake of the cancellation of Psylocke. Not sure it’s a good sign that the A-plot is the least interesting part of the issue, but we’ll see where this goes.

X-Men Annual #1 – Book of the Week

By Ryan Stegman, Steve Skroce & Sanford Greene

The Louisiana X-Men and Phoenix battle the Creationist, a mutant with the ability to manifest anything he can imagine.

• Despite the title, this issue stars the cast of Uncanny X-Men (well, the X-Men part of that cast). That book will also receive an annual this month, though it will feature characters from that book’s “Dark Artery” storyline. I guess the Alaska X-Men don’t get to be in an annual this year (though given how central they were to “Age of Revelation”, maybe the X-office thinks its only fair).
• Phoenix is here, appearing in the present/main reality for the first time since the cancellation of her outer space series. She is still operating out of outer space, and is here mostly because the Louisiana X-Men don’t have a telepath on their roster.
• The Creationist is a new character.
• The two artists he’s co-opted are Ryan Stegman and Sanford Greene themselves (they, appropriately, draw the “sketches” while Skroce handles the “real world” stuff; Stegman is the credited writer of the issue).
• Gambit calling the superhero the Creationist manifests a child’s fever dream of what a superhero would look like is an interesting comment from him, given the long-rumored urban legend that Chris Claremont intended Gambit to be a manifestation of Mister Sinister (who in Claremont’s original idea was the manifestation of a perpetual ten-year-old mutant), someone styled as a ten year old’s idea of what a cool superhero would look and act like (Claremont’s actual plans for Gambit were similar to but slightly different than that). I wonder if Stegman is aware of that idea and consciously gave that line of dialogue to Gambit.
• Also, the other superhero whom the Creationist’s design resembles, which Jubilee can’t quite name, is Superman (which she of course can’t say in a Marvel Comic).

I don’t know that I’ll ever need to see the Creationist again, but as a vehicle for a fun artist jam issue/commentary on the importance of imagination in art and the oft-hollowness of AI-generated/corporate mandated art and/or being stuck with a bad artistic collaborator (with a pair of the book’s artists literally strapped down and told to create things dictated to them by someone who can’t do the imagining himself), he gets the job done. It’s good to see Steve Skroce back drawing some X-Men, too.