Previously On X-Men: As ‘DNX’ Looms, Beast Battles Beast in ‘X-Men’ #35

We turn once more to the not-too-distant past, in which the X-Men aren’t vampires and “DNX” still looms!

Generation X-23 #7

 

 

By Jody Houser, Marco Renna, Erick Arciniega & Ariana Maher

Wolverine (Logan) joins the fun as Laura and Gabby bring the Generated back to the Facility to investigate their origins.

• Laura is even less a clone than Gabby told Surprise! she was; while she was thought to be a female clone of Wolverine for many years, she learned in one of the Hunt for Wolverine miniseries circa 2018 that she is his biological daughter, the result of her mother Sarah Kinney mixing her own DNA with Wolverine’s.
• Scout lost her healing factor in issue #4-5.
• It’s wild to think everything that happened in the series thus far all took place within one week.
• The Pit was, effectively, Krakoa’s prison, and in practice much worse for its denizens that Laura lets on here. She also seems retroactively more uncomfortable with it than she ever did during the Krakoa Era.
• Nanny and Orphan Maker debuted in the original run of X-Factor (issues #30 and 31, respectively), and Chris Claremont later picked them up and used them in his “de-aged Storm” plotline (with Nanny being responsible for reverting Storm to a child).
• They were sent to the Pit in Hellions #18, after Orphan Maker killed humans (thus violating one of Krakoa’s three laws). Nanny opted to join him in the Pit. They escaped in Sabretooth and the Exiles, along with the other prisoners (which makes Logan and Laura being surprised by their appearance somewhat odd, given they encountered a bunch of other escapees during “Sabretooth War.”
• Orphan Maker’s powers remain nebulous, but the general idea is he has some kind of highly destructive/explosive power he can’t control, and must wear his armor to contain. It’s also not clear if he is physically a child or not (though he generally acts like a child).

Look, a sure-fire way to make me like a comic is to put Nanny and Orphan Maker in it, so here we are. — 6/10

Wolverine #25

 

 

By Saladin Ahmed, Artist: Martín Cóccolo, Jesus Aburtov, Cory Petit

Wolverine battles Doctor Mor and Alpha Flight to regain his healing factor.

• The new Vindicator continues to be an annoying dick (which is the point), but I do like the way Ahmed is using Alpha Flight as a sort of occasional supporting cast/low-level antagonist in the series.
• The moment Mor disables the nanites impeding Wolverine’s healing factor, it immediately kicks back in. This is presumably cuz Ahmed needs Wolverine to not die from his injuries at the hands of MorPost, but it also means that, apparently, Mor just happened to activate the nanites at almost exactly the same time as the Adamantine broke Wolverine’s claws in issue #19. At any rate, Wolverine now has one set of adamantium claws and one set of bone claws which … sure, whatever, let’s try that out for a bit.
• The New Morlocks Vindicator is all fired up about are from the previous two arcs in the series (ie the random mutants trying to carve out a new life in the Canadian wilderness.

This continues to be the most perfectly cromulent of series, neither notably bad nor exceptionally good, as its latest story concludes pretty much as expected. The way the fight with MorPost resolves is that idea in microcosm: Ahmed making explicit the parallels between Wolverine and Mor (two people fighting a program that turned them into monsters) to bring out the good in Mor makes sense and fits the larger themes of the series. At the same time, it’s something that’s been done to death before, given no real twist or revamp to freshen it up, thereby making it far from an exciting conclusion.  — 5/10

X-Men #35 – Book of the Week

 

 

By Jed MacKay, Tony S Daniel, Mark Morales, Arthur Hesli, Clayton Cowles

Beast seeks the help of Illyana as 3K makes their next move against the X-Men.

• Magneto was previously seen visiting Merle’s Sukkat Shalom in X-Men: From the Ashes Infinity Comic #13-14
• Illyana being “stolen away to Hell” is a reference to Uncanny X-Men #160, when she was pulled as a seven year old into Limbo.
• Apparently, the Juggernaut story in last issue isn’t a one-off, as Cyclops and Xorn are discussing the Juggernaut-proof force field around the Trask statue.
• MacKay seems to be suggesting that the Animalia codename is a bootstrap paradox — Jen knows it from having heard she uses it in the future either here from the Chairman or at some point off-panel from Cyclops (though per the Marvel Universe time travel rules, it’s not really a bootstrap paradox, it’s just Jen adopting a name held by a (futuristic) alternate reality counterpart, and that Jen presumably coined it herself.
• The Chairman more or less rescinding the offer he made to Beast in issue #18 to join 3K reads like the sort of thing you’d see when a new writer takes off a book and wants to nip a dangling subplot in the bud, but obviously, both events are written by MacKay, so it’s presumably meant to be an indication of the Chairman’s evolving motivations/goals in the wake of “Age of Revelation.”
• Tony Daniel, an artist I tend to think of as an artist whose strengths/predilections tend to “big loud action scenes” acquits himself quite well on this more character-focused issue.

Essentially a “calm before the storm”  quiet issue before the next big (but, thankfully, not as big as “Age of Revelation”) event, I’m hoping this is an indication that for all its inevitable big moments and plot turns, MacKay will keep some measure of characterization central to “DNX.”  — 8/10

X-Men ’97: Season 2 #3

 

 

By Steve Foxe, Salva Espin, Matt Milla & Joe Sabino.

X-Force combs through Apocalypse’s history.

• The auctioneer’s comment about the statute the opal was pulled from putting up a fight is because it came from Ozymandias, who is a being made of stone.
• In both the comics and the animated series, Pestilence was previously the Morlock Plague.
• Ozymandias’ comic book origin is roughly similar to what is shown here (though there’s less distance between his transformation and Rama-Tut).
• Similarly, Exodus’ origin is broadly the same (in that it involved Apocalypse. But also Sersi and Black Knight of the Avengers).
• The Gameboy Color landed in late 1998, so for the ’97-set Sunspot, Gameboy games would indeed still be uncolored.

Honestly, not a bad issue, particularly in terms of it being a prequel supplement to the TCV show (which this issue makes clear it is): it’s foreshadowing the tension within X-Force between Jubilee/Sunspot and the rest, offering a little more context to the random Apocalypse/Candra romance that is revealed late in the season, and indirectly explaining why War was the Horseman X-Force was zeroed in on in the second episode (cuz they’d already taken out Pestilence and, presumably, Famine). Checking in on the X-Men stuck in ancient Egypt via Psylocke’s psychometry is also a clever way to check in on that plotline while still keeping the focus on X-Force. —  7/10

 

X-Men United #6

 

 

By Eve L. Ewing & Evan Narcisse, Tiago Palma, Eduardo Pansica, Oren Junior, Brian Reber & Joe Sabino

The adults battle Shuvahrak while the kids face the Shadow King.

• This story is titled “Shadow Play Part 2”. The previous issue was “Shadow Play,” yet it was the second chapter of a story that started in the issue before that. So “Shadow Play Part 2” is actually the third part of “Shadow Play.” Some real Rambo: First Blood Part II energy.
• Penumbra is the weird afterlife hangout for mutants introduced in Gail Simone’s Uncanny X-Men. Shuvahrak is its guardian.
• This whole story presumably takes place before the Outliers got their New Mutants uniforms in Uncanny X-Men #32 (since none of them are wearing it).
• Amongst the more specific crimes Shuvahrak accuses the X-Men of is filicide for Wolverine (he killed his son Akihiro at one point, as well as the Mongrels, five illegitimate children Akihiro manipulated him into killing), “temporal manipulation” for Beast (presumably a reference to Beast pulling the original X-Men forward in time, though technically, the current Beast never did that because he’s a backed up clone of regular Beast from before all that), and “treason and massacre” for Gambit (a reference to his involvement in the Morlock Massacre, which came out back in Uncanny X-Men #350).
• Shuvahrak doesn’t really sound the same as in Uncanny X-Men, though its not clear if that’s a clue to something or just a case of Ewing not nailing the voice.
• Scout dealt with the Shadow King in the Krakoa Era New Mutants.
• Wither died back in X-Force (vol. 3) #25 in 2010; he returned on Krakoa, but didn’t do much.

While the immediate plot of the issue is a fairly straightforward “fight dark mirrors” situation, its role within the larger arc is muddled. The series still doesn’t seem to fully understand its basic premise, even with the arrival of a second writer. —  3/10