X-Force 2, X-Men Legacy 300

X-Force 2
Spurrier (w) and R. Kim (a and c)

Cable is adamant about uniting mutants in terms of seeing everyone as one people as opposed to their separate factions. In that hope, he contacts every individual faction he can (including Wolverine and Storm at the Jean Grey School, Mystique wherever Mystique's at leading her villains, Magneto wherever Magneto's at, Cyclops at the Xavier School, Polaris at X-Factor, and Havok with the Avengers) to tell them about the recent attacks to mutants and about the new mutant they've found, who he and his team have dubbed Meme. Everyone he talks to is very reluctant to actually care about his information about the war they're fighting and the idea that the mutant race needs to really take care of its own, even after he reveals that Meme is just one in a line of people who seemingly have been experimented on and whose powers have been tested and synthesized. Of course, it seems like both Hope and Marrow are members of that group with Marrow being particularly a strange case as she was depowered on M-Day. The key for Cable and his X-Force now is to track down the person responsible for the events at Alexandria. Cable goes to Fiqh, a higher-up in Saudi intelligence and strikes a deal; Cable and his team will kill someone in his way and he'll give them information. The team succeeds, giving Fiqh a direct line to the head of his agency. He happily gives up the information he promised, leaving Cable and his team with a look at Yevgeny-Malevitch Volga, a billionaire with the means to destroy Alexandria.

Another really compelling issue. I think this one is a little heavier than the last, covering multiple locations and giving a harder-to-follow running narration from Cable instead of Marrow this time. Still, it's a more worthwhile read for how deep it gets. Like in issue one, there are mysteries peeking in from the corners here and ones that you already know will be driving points later down the road but are secondary to the missions now. It's a lot of very cool stuff and Spurrier has very clearly defined the sort of story this one is going to be and the sort of parameters driving the team. I think that Cable being so determined to make the mutants see themselves as one race is really interesting and a really smart move that hasn't really been done before. It's been touched on in the past, particularly after M-Day and with the X-Men's move to Utopia but it's never been on this sort of scale, where Cable so desperately wants everyone involved. The characters are showing a lot of personality and the story certainly has legs. I think this one is going to be another one that builds its world first and then really takes off, like Spurrier did in X-MEN LEGACY, though I'd be surprised if it took quite as long here. Great stuff.

X-Men Legacy 300
Spurrier, M. Carey, and Gage (w) and Huat, Kurth, Sandoval, Yeung, A. Martinez, and Tarragona (a) and Villarrubia, Rosenberg, and Arreola (c)

A young woman with serious injuries to her face has appeared at the Jean Grey School and subsequently been trapped by one of the defense measures surrounding the school: a fence that sucks you in and keeps you trapped more and more the more you want to get into the school. She's trapped pretty badly and none of the X-Men appear to be on hand to help her except one, a mutant man named ForgetMeNot. ForgetMeNot explains that he is an X-Man but is one who is almost entirely unknown because his power is one that makes anyone not focused on him forget about him entirely (not unlike the Silence from Doctor Who but, you know, he's a good guy). The girl explains that she came to the school in the hopes that the X-Men, who she always loved, would accept her although she's not a mutant because, after a sexual attack from a man in her town, her entire home life has pushed her away. However, there's apparently no way to get out of this gate. ForgetMeNot decides to tell her a story to take her mind off how much she wants to get in, something that will hopefully release her. So he tells her a couple of stories, including one about his efforts saving enemy soldiers, or at least giving dying ones some brief moments of peace, when the X-Men were at Fortress X, one about Professor X being the kind of guy who set his watch to remind him about ForgetMeNot every hour so someone knew he was always there, and one about trying to get Weapon Omega and Mimic to take his powers after Professor X died so that he could be noticed at last. The lesson of the stories end up being, essentially, that you are what you are and you are what the past has made you but the key is to do something with it that matters, to live the life you have and make the best of it. Eventually the wall traps ForgetMeNot, who Beast apparently forgot when he programmed the defenses, and frees the girl, allowing her to escape with the lesson learned but forgetting about ForgetMeNot.

It's a solid frame story and the sort of story that makes you go "ahhh, clever" as you start to get the gist of the idea. ForgetMeNot is the sort of perfect character for a retrospective and sweet tale like this one, one that requires an observer from X-Men history but one who is decidedly separate from it. It's like dropping the Watcher in something like this, but a Watcher who is human and therefore more complex. The character and the issue are also impressively tailored to fit the themes of this long and storied series. While ForgetMeNot only interacts briefly with Professor X and never with, say, Rogue or Legion, he spends a long time dealing with Weapon Omega and Mimic, who have powers rather similar to Rogue's and who had spent a lot of time with Rogue in their most recent appearance, and the entire key to the issue is about being forgotten as a character who had never before existed, like a sort of opposite Legion. There's a lot to like about the oversized issue and it's certainly worth a read as long as you're not looking for something that will contribute to a larger story or a larger world and rather looking for a standalone and very introspective issue like so many of these style books tend to be.

Wolverine 1, Wolverine and the X-Men 26, Ultimate Wolverine 1

Wolverine 1
Cornell (w) and Davis and Farmer (a) and Hollingsworth (c)

If we're comparing Wolverine-based books, I think so far I'd rate this above Savage Wolverine. With only one issue of this and two of Savage Wolverine to base this comparison off of, I'm rating this one higher for a couple of reasons. First of all, it was an incredibly quick-moving read. I was pretty surprised when Wolverine started to say things that felt like wrap-up lines for the issue and more surprised when the comic actually did wrap up. Second off, and probably more important, there was far less gratuitous near-nudity in this issue (which, actually, is saying a lot, considering Wolverine spent a good half of the comic completely naked). One of my biggest issues with the Savage Wolverine book is that it spends all its time trying to appeal to the stereotypical comic book reader, the one who is sexually repressed and dreams of Shanna the She-Devil (who is, by the way, named Shanna the She-Devil) bursting out of her ludicrously limited apparel. I tend to try to distance myself as much as possible from that stereotype and I think comics are more than that. So here, we're pretty far from that stereotype, with Wolverine, a short and hairy man, entirely naked for most of this issue. Well done, I guess.

Anyway, we're opening with a storyline involving a gun with crazy tech in it being handled by a man who has held hostage and killed scores of people, including Wolverine (who has not been properly killed). The man, who has no prior mental illness history, has only two hostages left when he turns the gun on his own young son. Wolverine, healed enough to finally get back into the action, kills the man and tries to console the youth who later, as the police are cleaning up the scene and trying to piece things together, activates the gun and runs off with it before driving a police car into Wolverine who is having a bad day. Logan feels he owes this kid for killing his father and everything else this kid has been through today and has decided to hunt the child down, where ever he runs. No doubt we will see some Wolverine childhood memories interspersed with the story of this strange boy with an even stranger gun. There's not a ton left to say for me, anyway. There are a lot of Wolverine books. This is one of them. Coming up are two more.

Wolverine and the X-Men 26
Aaron (w) and Perez (a) and L. Martin (c)

Interesting turn for this comic. Dog, Wolverine's long-lost half-brother, has gained access to time diamonds, diamonds that, as the name might imply, allow him to jump in time. After a lifetime of resentment for James, who grew up wealthy and sickly before his mutation emerged as he killed their father for attacking his mother (his family history is all very complicated), Dog has finally tracked James down in the present with all kinds of futuristic weapons meant to contain Wolverine. On top of it all, Dog tells Wolverine that he's seen all the ways that his school plays out and every one of them ends in disaster because Wolverine didn't train the kids well enough. Dog plans on "fixing" that by putting the kids up against all sorts of horrors that he's time-jumped in, on top of the dinosaurs with which they've already been pitted against.

This issue was largely origin-based, giving us looks into James' past (I tend to call Wolverine "Logan" more than "James" but Dog is a Logan too, so I'm trying to make things less complicated in, probably, a way that is more complicated. Why Wolverine has a million names, I'm not totally sure) while focusing largely on Dog's. We see Dog as a beaten and deprived child who was friends with James before he knew their familial relationship. Though James was wealthy and spoiled, he was sickly and frail so Dog wasn't really jealous of the boy's wealth. Dog envisioned himself having a long life full of adventure and James, tragically, dying young. Instead, James' mutation kicked in and he was far less sickly and frail and went on to have a number of world-spanning adventures while Dog sunk deeper into alcohol and depression. Now, harboring a lifetime of resentment, dog challenges Wolverine as a fighter and as a teacher. With all of that backstory out of the way, next issue we'll actually see what that challenge amounts to for the kids of the Jean Grey School.

Ultimate Wolverine 1
Bunn (w) and Messina and Erskine (a) and Tartaglia (c)

With the Wolverine of the Ultimate Universe dead a couple of years now, the torch has been passed, rather recently, to his secret son Jimmy Hudson, currently starring in Ultimate X-Men. This book aims to show a little more about the Ultimate Wolverines of past and present as Jimmy tries to learn something about his biological father and the crazy hijinks that he was involved in. Right now, the key seems to be in some secret project called "Mothervine." Logan was on the trail of this Mothervine issue when it led him to a little girl with solid light manipulation who, with a trigger activated, tore a senator in half. Logan saved the girl, recognizing her as somewhat brainwashed, and followed the trigger man, only to find that someone else from Logan's past (currently undisclosed, but frankly probably Jimmy's mother) has killed the man first, keeping Logan's team from asking him any questions. The plot is brought to the present as Jimmy watches the recorded message that Logan had left with Kitty to give to his son after his own death. Black Box overhears the message and, as a technopath, figures out that there's a hidden message encoded in the not-so hidden message. It reads "Mother is calling her children home." Jimmy and Black Box set off to find out what that could possibly mean while, elsewhere, Quicksilver kills someone else attached to project Mothervine.

Presumably we'll get into more about Mothervine and the mysterious woman (again, my money's on Jimmy's actual mother) and Quicksilver's involvement in the whole thing as this four-issue limited series  progresses. I just had to look up how many issues the limited series was and, in truth, when I saw the number, it fits. I think this will be a tight, solid book. Limited series are kind of neat because they can spotlight characters that wouldn't necessarily survive a long book and tell a story worth telling without having to push too hard to keep an interesting running storyline going for a long time. I think this Mothervine conspiracy will stay interesting for about four issues. Certain other comics with code words that won't be immediately revealed could learn a lesson from this format, a four issue limited series that forces you to tell your story a little more quickly than, say, in eight issues focusing on one key word that won't be revealed through at least the majority of the issues, long after people stop caring. Anyway, that's my review of Ultimate Wolverine 1 and not in any way a review of any Daredevil: End of Days books.

X-Men Legacy 7, Ultimate X-Men 24

X-Men Legacy 7
Spurrier (w) and Huat and Yeung (a) and Villarrubia (c)

After a run-in with a version of his father lurking in his brain, David Haller is back to where he started, maybe even further back than that. His powers aren't necessarily driven by confidence, like Captain Britain or Kid Briton, but they require lots of focus and focus has taken a bit of a dive since his father's appearance and subsequent guilt-tripping. At the start of the issue, David can only really use his telepathy powers, which is problematic as he intends to start a fight with the Church of the Happy Host, a mutant-hating religious organization which was responsible for turning Luca (from the last arc; Blindfold's horrible brother) into the full-blown mutant-hater he became. David can also see astral projections so, going into the church, he knows that Blindfold is following him. Inside, it turns out the church was a little more prepared than he thought, wearing helmets to block out telepathic suggestions and equipped with pills that destroy the X-gene. Blindfold rushes in to save David, unbeknownst to the priests, and he is led away from the sanctuary to wait while they prepared their prayer cleanse. David and Blindfold chat and David lays out his plan for pre-emptive strikes against organizations that would do mutants harm, as opposed to the reactive strikes the X-Men have always made. It's kind of like a one man X-Force team, made up of one man who is unbelievably powerful in the right mood. After a quick blessing from Blindfold, David's confidence is somewhat restored and his focus allows him to access several more powers, including the power to instill images into the priests that make them seem guilty of mutant hate crimes (to SWORD, at least, who has been tracking David all issue after his recent teleportation of an entire Dire Wraith squadron to the Jean Grey School). SWORD shows up and arrests the church and, unable to tie anything to David, Abigail Brand tells David that she's watching him.

In the first issue since his first major arc ended, X-Men Legacy is taking another turn for good. This book has been such a surprise to me; not because I was expecting bad things, per se, I just wasn't expecting something so good. David Haller is a very interesting character, Blindfold is becoming interesting after years of me not caring at all about her, and the plot that David is setting himself seems full of places to go and exciting things to do. There have been plenty of books in Marvel NOW! that have truly surprised me with their quality (some, like Avengers Arena and Cable and X-Force and Uncanny Avengers, came out of nowhere to floor me while others came from solid backgrounds, like Thor and Captain America and New Avengers, but switched enough that being absolutely delighted by them came as something of a shock) and X-Men Legacy is, in a way, even more of a surprise than those books. Every other book in Marvel NOW!, I had some sort of a feeling about before its start. This one I had no thoughts on and it came in strong and hasn't let up. Great book so far.

Ultimate X-Men 24
Wood (w) and Asrar and Vlasco (a) and Bellaire (c)

This newest arc comes with a cliffhanger beginning and a smaller cliffhanger ending. I guess we're sitting on some weird precipice with two cliffs. We start two weeks in the future, with military surrounding the head group of mutants in Utopia, Kitty, Storm, Jimmy, Blackheath, and Rogue. Then we cut back two weeks to find that Utopia is finally starting to build. Magma has raised the tiny nation physically up, giving natural borders, while Blackheath and Storm have created plant life. The mutants now have protection, water, food, resources, and land. Mutants start filing in, excited by the new prospects. Mach Two's group is still lurking around, unnoticed by the others, biding their time. Meanwhile, the US government is plotting their own little plan, one that would name mutants government property (after the revelation some time ago in the Ultimate universe that mutants were created by the government) and therefore all of their patents and land and everything else would belong to America. The book ends with Jimmy meeting with two members of Mach Two's group to discuss some sort of offer.

One of the great things about this book in the last couple years is that it's really characterized mutantdom. Not just the mutants themselves (which is important and which this book has done), but what it means to be mutant in this world. There's something inherent in the 616 that says that mutants are different and that they're prejudiced against, for sure, but I'm not sure it has the same weight it does over in the Ultimate universe, which is impressive considering the age of each universe. I think Remender's Uncanny Avengers book is doing well to show off how hated mutants are, but X-Men books tend to get muddled down with their own villains, or with mutant villains. Not that those stories are bad or that they don't belong because a good deal of them are great, but you tend to get pulled away and kind of forget that the X-Men are hated by many around the world simply for being what they are. That never seems to happen in the Ultimate universe. Someone, in every issue, is plotting against mutants as a race. There are plenty of entities in the 616 that do that as well, sure, and you do see it come up pretty regularly. Maybe it's just the sheer number of X-books in the 616; though they're all fairly different, typically, and pretty good, usually, you wouldn't read the five different X books where they're all fighting Sentinels all the time. The Ultimate universe has one X-book, so showing that mutants are feared and hated and isolated maybe works better. It's certainly working right now. Even when mutants are doing pretty well and led by a peaceful leader, we can see the hatred and fear from the outside. It's a great illustration of how this world functions.

Uncanny Avengers 4

Uncanny Avengers 4
Remender (w) and Cassaday (a) and Martin w/ Molinar (c)

I'm pretty sure I started my last review saying something along the lines of "Wow." There's no reason not to do that here too. This book was incredible. There's a major story going on and there are major threats around, but it didn't stop Remender from loading this with character and with small moments. It's a really gorgeous issue (both in writing and in art/colors) and, unless you have a real aversion to captions or a bit of bloodshed, you should read it. I said yesterday that part of why I was looking forward to this book was the haunting last images from last issue. That's no less true and that feeling was certainly well met. The book starts off right where the last one left off; there's crazy carnage all around New York as homo sapiens have attacked new mutants in the streets of the city under the mind-control powers of Charles Xavier as wielded by the Red Skull. Wolverine has fallen and Scarlet Witch and Havok are trying to shut a practically possessed Thor down to get to Skull. Captain America, meanwhile, is fighting his own battle against Skull's powers, trying to keep Skull's hate out of his mind. It's exciting and fascinating on every front. Scarlet Witch needs a tremendous amount of power to outlast Thor, which she eventually musters with the help of Havok to keep Thor in check while she charges. She ends up tapping directly into her chaos energies and unleashing a massive attack on the Asgardian that launches him out of the fight for enough time to allow Havok to get to Skull. It also takes her out of the fight for the remainder, as she needs rest to recover. Skull, meanwhile, is busy trying to convert Captain America to his side, playing on Cap's own insecurities about the country. With his psychic powers, Skull can see the frustrations Steve has in the America that is compared to the America that could be. It's a really revealing few pages (and only gives me more faith in Remender on the Captain America series itself) that explain perfectly what I've complained about on here before, most recently in my post on comic-based video games. Cap isn't a shill for America, blindly echoing patriotic sentiments. He has real opinions on the country and how great it could be but he knows it's not there and there's a chance it won't ever be there. His responsibility is to always fight to try to get it to that point. Skull, though, latches on to his problems and fears about America and tries to promise him real change in the way he'd run things. Cap, with the help of Rogue and Havok, keeps Skull from fully planting any idea in his head and beats Skull down with the shield. Skull manages to escape with one of his S-Men, but the spell is broken. Thor comes down from orbit restored and Wolverine's healing factor (previously blocked by a different S-Man, kicks back in, allowing him to slowly recover.

I usually try not to spend too much time on recap because a.) I don't want to give away the whole issue and b.) I try not to write five pages per review. This comic forces my hand because I think it's so near perfect. There's lots of dialogue and many captions from an omniscient narrator, as has been true so far in this series, but that never slows the book down, like it can in other comics. Also, every part of this book develops a character or shows off this team. Just in naturally recapping, I found myself painting a picture of how this team works together instinctively. It's really impressive, given that so many teams these days feel like they're cut and pasted together and everyone has their distinct roles. Here, every team member does whatever they can to try to ultimately stop Skull, which is how it should be. The fight FEELS real for a fight involving superheroes and villains. Skull's attempt to brainwash Cap not only shows off Cap's feelings about America (perfectly captured, I think, though obviously with a more Red Skull hatred bent than really shows up in Cap's thoughts), it lays out what Skull wants to do. Yes, it's likely inaccurate because he's simply trying to get Cap on his side, but it's an argument that you can picture Steve having trouble turning down (when he's under some amount of mind-control, obviously). It also wonderfully references some X-Men history, with Skull describing a future with mutants on the run that directly harkens back to Days of Future Past with the famous "slain/apprehended" wanted mutants wall. Remender ties in MORE X-Men history later, as he hints towards a future with Red Skull acting as Onslaught, whose identity is tied with that of Professor Xavier.

This book is making a real pull for Avengers and mutants to work together. These kinds of things tend to just focus on the Avengers or bring in the Avengers and mutants working together but don't deal with the fact that they ARE Avengers and mutants working together. Remender's doing a fantastic job to make everything connect and feel like AvX had real consequences and that mutants are a real piece of this world that make humans uncomfortable. It's masterfully done and we're only four issues in. This might legitimately challenge my love of New Avengers for best new Marvel book. There are also enough light moments and introspective moments and really, truly sweet moments to make this book fit a wide spectrum of emotion. If you're not reading this book, you're making a mistake. It's as simple as that. It's a pretty dark book at times because it's covering extremely dark subject matter, but if you can get past that, it's a wonderful read.



JUST A NOTE: I apologize for this being just one review. I tend to tie a couple reviews into one post, which was my intent upon starting this post. However, given how long this review was, I felt justified in leaving it as its own review. More importantly, though, I was so blown away by this issue that I actually had to take a break before I reviewed my next book (which I'm incredibly excited about) because I was worried another book wouldn't live up to the expectations this one set. READ THIS BOOK.