So, What comics did you buy this week?

[jjreason]

That sounds like an omnibus edition - that's an awesome deal - at $30 you stole it. Nice work.

[Ran]

That sounds like an omnibus edition - that's an awesome deal - at $30 you stole it. Nice work.

For an additional $10, he sold me an Upper Deck Gary Carter game used jersey card. Lucky day.

[Tom Foolery]

Neat. Looks like they did three Omnibii of the original run. You got the middle one. Nice find.

[Tom Foolery]

Back with more ‘S’ books. It’s been slow going, sometimes only getting one issue, or half an issue read before hitting the sack every night.

Suicide Squad 2,3. Robbie Thompson’s latest run only lasted 15 issues. I picked up the first couple issues, and the rest were found in dollar boxes. A very incomplete run. The first arc had Peacemaker and a bunch of cannon fodder villains break into Arkham to retrieve Talon, the Court of Owls thug at
Waller’s behest.

7-10. The task force is out in space and Ambush Bug is on the team for some reason, se we’re getting a bunch of fourth wall breaking, meta commentary from Bug about DC comics and movies, etc. I would mention Deadpool, but Ambush Bug came first, so Wade is actually cribbing his schtick.
15. finished off the series with a different writer where a team led by Rick Flag kidnaps Lex Luthor with the intent of having him fund their independent Suicide Squad.

Supergirl:Woman of Tomorrow 1, 5. I bought the first issue and found the 5th in a cheap bin. I didn’t know Tom King wrote it or I would’ve stuck around for the whole series. Supposedly, it’s the basis for James Gunn’s Supergirl movie. An alien girl is tracking down the bad guy who killed her father, and she crosses paths with a drunk Supergirl who tags along to help her find the dude. The story is told from the girl’s perspective. Enjoyed both issues, will have to track the rest of them down.

Action Comics 1029-1032. Phillip Kennedy Johnson took over for Bendis on writing and began his whole Warworld arc. I only have the first couple issues, before I dropped it. Then came back for…

Action 1050. Extra big anniversary issue. Lex uses Manchester Black’s hypnosis powers(and kills Black in the process) to erase the entire world’s memory of Clark Kent being Superman. So DC figured out how to put that back in the bottle.

Action 2021 Annual. A story set in the far future where Clark has several children. One turned evil and crashes the wedding of one of the others.

Superman 31. The second to last issue of the Bendis relaunch, of which Johnson also took over writing. Unremarkable.

Superman:Son of Kal-El 5. The issue where Jon and his boyfriend kiss.

Superman:Red and Blue 2, 4, 6. For some reason I was buying these randomly. Anthology short stories where they’re only using red and blue coloring(like the Batman:Black and White books). Some were good, some were okay. Highlights were one where they’re trying to get Streaky the SuperCat into a carrier to go to the Vet. And one where Clark revealing his identity inspires a young gay man to come out to his family.

Death of Superman 30th Anniversary oneshot. The original writers and artists from the four ongoings back in the 90s came back to tell four more stories. The idea is cooler than the execution.

Superman and The Authority 1-4. Grant Morrison telling an alt universe tale where an older Superman recruits a new superteam. Meh.

Next up, a very small amount of post-Dawn of DC Superman books, and a couple other ‘S’ series before I jump into the ‘T’s.

[Tom Foolery]

I started getting both Superman titles for the Dawn of DC relaunch and almost immediately didn’t keep up with either of them.

Action Comics 1051-1053. Clark and Lois have adopted two twin children from Warworld, so now there’s like seventeen Super-People with Clark, Jon, Connor, Kara, Steel and his daughter, Power Girl, the twins, etc. It’s ridiculous. John Irons is opening up his new Steelworks tower in Metropolis and John Corben aka Metallo attacks thinking he’s working for Luthor, but Lex is in prison so team Super-everybody has to figure out who’s really pulling the strings.

Superman 1, 3. Supe gets relaunched for the third series post Nu-52. Lex is in prison and has bequeathed Lexcorp and all its resources to help Superman fight crime. Clark is hesitant at first, but by the end of the third issue he’s given Lex a Jimmy Olsen style signal watch. Because he’s an eternal optimist.

Adeventures of Superman:Jon Kent 1. First issue of a six issue mini. Ultraman is travelling the multiverse killing alt reality Supermen. Val-Zodd and Red Tornado from Earth-2 arrive on main Earth and recruit Jon to help stop the villain who kept him imprisoned for years and robbed his childhood from him.

Superman:Lost 1-10. Priest wrote this maxi-series. When the League finds a derelict alien ship in international waters off the coast of China(not important) Superman has to stop its singularity warpcore from destroying Earth, and is sucked Billions of light years away from home. Lois finds him at home moments later and he tells her he’s been gone twenty years. The rest of the series is where he went and how he got back via some time travel mumbo jumbo. The series was actually pretty good. And the final issue came out last week, so the timing on my back reading was nice.

S.W.O.R.D. 5-11. The X-Men’s space station team and the beginnings of their interstellar diplomacy as the solar system’s “capital” planet. And Abigail Brand is scheming behind the scenes to double-cross both Krakoa and Orchis, culminating with her blowing Henry Gyrich out of an airlock. The short ongoing led directly into X-Men Red.

Task Force Z 1. Red Hood is leading a team of supervillain zombies for some secret organization. Bane, Man-Bat, Arkham Knight, etc are on the team. Only got the first issue. It was a dumb concept and the motivations for Jason are suspect and convoluted.

Next up, either I do another catch up on W thru X stuff I’m previously caught up on. Or I’m doing Teen Titans, Thanos, Thor, Thunderbolts, etc.

[jjreason]

Daredevil Epic Collection 5 - Going out West. Most of the 60s titles I'm going to stop with after I get to 1970, but I'm going to keep going with DD until the end of Miller's run so I can get my head around selling my floppies.

[jjreason]

And the box I was supposed to get with DD 5 showed up: Sub-Mariner 2, Sgt. Fury 2 and Dr. Strange 2 all aboard.

My 60's Marvel reprint "needs" list has shrunken to be quite small. They owe me the following in Epic collection format:

Tales to Astonish (Sub-Mariner) 88-101, Iron Man/Sub Mariner 1 (the original "one shot"), then Subby 1-3,
Captain Marvel 1-21 (I have these in digital format, just not a paperback I can lazily read),
Silver Surfer 1-18 (these have been re & re-reprinted, not sure why it's taking the Epic so long to show up),
Sgt. Fury 37-81,
Marvel Super-Heroes select content from issues 12-23 (partially a reprint title),
Captain Savage 1-19 (still not expecting them to reprint these).

[Tom Foolery]

Dove into the ‘T’ stuff. I started with Teen Justice, which was a gender swapped Teen Titans multiverse miniseries, and only got thru an issue and a half before I decided it was boring a.f. I’ll get back around to it eventually, but I skipped ahead in the pile and finished Cates’ Thor run.

Thor 14. The ‘Prey’ finale. The Donald Blake persona has Asgard on the ropes until the banished Thor shows up piloting the Destroyer armor and beats Blake down. Odin wants to destroy his mistake, but Thor, being King now, offers Blake to Loki for punishment. Loki straps him to a table where a giant snake is perpetually dripping venom into his eyes and bequeathes him the title of the new God of Lies.

15-18. Thor leaves his disobedient hammer in Avengers HQ, where it is promptly stolen. He tasks Frog Thor with assembling a team of Pet Avengers to track down the missing hammer.

19-23. “God of Hammers”. While looking for his missing hammer, somebody starts massacring everyone in the Nine Realms. The killer is using Mjolnir. Plot twist, the killer IS Mjolnir, or rather the ancient lightning entity that Odin trapped in the hammer eons ago. When Mjolnir was tossed into the sun by Jane Foster to destroy Mangog, the reforged hammer had been corrupted by Mangog’s spirit. Odin sacrifices himself so that Thor will inherit the Odin-force and use the power to reforge the corrupted lightning back into Mjolnir.

24 was also the giant 750th issue. There’s a funeral for Odin and a bunch of back up stories by returning creators. The new twist is that Odin’s persona is now in Mjolnir and Thor can hear him.

25-26 was a crossover with the Hulk book called ‘Banner of War’ I didn’t read the oneshot that started it(its in the Hulk box) or either Hulk issue, but the culmination is that Thornis doused with gamma radiation and becomes a Thor-Hulk, so Hulk has to pick up Mjolnir and becomes a Hulk-Thor to fight him. Which sounds totally bad-ass, but at the same time is sadly unmemorable.

27-28 was a two parter with Venom where the Donald Blake entity escapes and gets a symbiote. Jesus fucking Christ, EVERYONE is getting a fucking symbiote these days. Like its the new lazy way to give someone superpowers at Marvel. What the shit.

29-35. Cates left the book and Torun Grønbekk came in to finish off the series. Back at the start of the series, the Black Winter gave Thor a dark vision of the future where Thanos had killed everyone with a black infinity stone. Thor and Runa break into an ancient vault sealed by Thor’s grandfather Bor millenia ago, and find a trapped timestorm where the past and future are colliding. The adult future version of Thor’s new baby sister Laussa brings a future warning, while present day Thanos gets trapped in the past and has thousands of years to scheme in preparation. Also, Dr Doom is trying to kidnap Hela as a child….fuck, I’m losing interest in this story. It’s confusing. The book ended, and Al Ewing started a new series a couple months later which is currently on issue 5 or 6.

Annual 1. An alternate dimensional being named Varg uses the time stone to change Thor’s past where he gives a glimpse of all the problems Loki will cause in the future right around the time he caused the Avengers to form. Past Thor kills Loki and sends him on a dark path. Then Varg uses this dark evil Thor to attack the 616 universe to corrupt it and feed off it or something, but our Thor stops the evil Thor and then tells Varg if he ever tries invading again he’ll get his ass kicked. Meh. Forgettable.

Cates run started strong with the Black Winter arc, and then it kinda nosedived down the stretch. Took me longer to read than I wanted.
Gonna finish up the rest of the ‘T’ stuff I have here. Then I’m gonna go back and do all the ‘catch up’ U thru X reading which is piling up again. Then come back and read some Transformers. That will have me (going backwards) to some big runs of Spider-Man and Star Wars.

[Tom Foolery]

Finished the Teen Justice mini(well, almost. I only have the first five issues of a six issue series, but it was boring and I didn’t care about how it ended).
On Earth-11, all the heroes are gender swapped, so Robin’s a girl, Raven’s a boy, Troia is now Troy, etc. They’re all bitchy towards each other and something about Sister Blood stealing the souls of all her cult members and also the evil all girl Green Lanterns trying to do something, but really I was speed reading because I could give a shit.

Thanos:Death Notes. A oneshot that tied in with Thor’s ongoing featuring a few short stories about Thanos. Pretty good stories.

Thanos 1-3. Current mini where Thanos returns from the black hole where he died(I’m assuming this is from some other recent ongoing like GotG, but who can keep up with Thanos dying and coming back all the time?) and looking for the missing Death. After a young woman dies, her mother confronts Death about the unfairness, so Death asks the Illuminati to help her become mortal in the deceased girl’s body so that she may experience a mortal life and death. Thanos rips Fresno off Earth and fights the Illuminati, thinking they trapped his GF in the mortal body, not knowing it was her idea. She “dies” and returns to being the Death avatar and is kinda pissed at Thanos. One more issue to go, but so far Chris Cantwell is delivering a fun story.

The Thing 1-6. A mini set in ‘the past’(it’s kinda nebulous when exactly, but somewhere during the Kirby/Lee era). Alicia breaks up with Ben after he gets jealous that she’s hanging out with a guy friend. So he goes on a cosmic dating app and finds a new girlfriend Amaryllis. Ben, Amaryllis, and a young kid named Bobby keep getting into trouble when a villain shows up to fight for Amaryllis, then the Elder of the Universe, the Champion shows up, and then the Silver Surfer shows up to collect the Champion after Ben beats him up. Then later they get transported to the Blue Area of the Moon where they find an army of ten billion robots that aren’t alive that Dr Doom is going to use to invade the realm of the dead to get his dead mother back. Then you find out Amaryllis is Death and she wanted Ben to be her new consort, and Bobby is like the Watcher Jr or something. And Alicia gets kidnapped by Death’s agents, and Ben and Doom have to team up and use Doom’s robot army to go rescue Alicia and Doom’s mom. It was a weird series. I was kinda bored until the Death plot twist, but then I was kinda annoyed I just read two ‘Death secretly posing as mortal’ stories back to back. Meh.

Thor:Lightning and Lament oneshot. One of those random extra books they publish right around the time a movie comes out. Usually written by Ralph Macchio. Set during the time Thor was still using Donald Blake as a secret identity. Thor helps an Asgardian army fight a bunch of trolls, then turns into Blake to do surgery when Sif gets wounded.

Thor Annual 1. Annual came out after the other Thor series ended, but before the current one started. A being named Mythos attacks Earth without warning and Thor goes to stop him. Turns out Mythos is actually M.Y.T.H.O.S. who is MODOK who used the shattered pieces of Bifrost to give himself a makeover and then restructures all of reality where Earths heroes never existed. Thor kicks his ass and returns things to normal.

Almost done with the ‘Th’ pile. 20 or so issues across five more series.

[Tom Foolery]

The Immortal Thor 1-7. Al Ewing took over the ongoing saga of Thor, immediately ‘fixing’ Mjolnir with the Odin/Thor power, and having Loki repair the Bifrost(although he/she/they used some questionable magic so that might rear up later). Thor returns to Earth and everything is going great until he encounters an ancient being called the Utgard-Thor who is even more powerful and giant. Thor uses Mjolnir to banish him to the other side of the universe, but he knows that’s only temporary. The act depletes his energy and he’s forced to go into the Odin-sleep while Loki watches over him. When he wakes, he recruits Storm, Beta Rey Bill, Jane, and Loki, and they ‘share’ the power of Mjolnir by tossing it back and forth between them before their sixty seconds run out and they revert back. Collectively the face off with the returned Utgard-Thor, until Thor tricks him into grabbing the hammer, which makes him ‘worthy’ and thus good, and he dissipates.
Meanwhile, Dario Agger, the minotaur with the melted face and also CEO of Roxxon has recruited the recently returned to life Executioner and Enchantress and has bought Marvel Comics so they can magically “edit” older issues of Thor comics and rewrite history. It’s weird, but Ewing usually writes fun stuff so we will see where it goes. Ongoing.

Thunderbolts 1-5. In the aftermath of the Devil’s Reign event, Luke Cage is the new mayor of NYC. Mayor Fisk had outlawed heroes except for his personal villainous team of Thunderbolts. As Mayor, Cage is trying to positively rebrand the team, so he recruits Hawkeye, America Chavez, the new Power Man, Monica Rambeau, Persuasion(formerly Purple Girl, an obscure Alpha Flight character), and a couple new characters to be the only legally sanctioned super team in NYC. The series is just an excuse to throw a bunch of random little used heroes on a team, and fight random little used villains.

Thunderbolts 1-4. The next iteration was more in line with the upcoming MCU roster. Bucky/Winter Soldier forming a team in the wake of a Captain America event, consisting of himself, both Black and White Widow, Contessa Allegra(or her LMD, since the original is dead), Shang-Chi, and Red Guardian. Their goal is to hunt down and destroy the Red Skull and all his global assets once and for all. They make good on killing the Alexander Lukin version in the first issue, and destroying his gold hoard in the second issue. The problem, the next version of Red Skull is in a bunker deep under Latveria, so they have to attack Dr Doom! Only three of the four issues are out, but it comes out in like two weeks, so I’m counting it read.
The two Tbolts minis were so dissimilar, it seems like Marvel is just throwing Tbolts on the cover of whatever superteam they threw together this week, and thus diluting the ‘brand’ of the series.

Thundercats 1. The new series from Dynamite. Never was big into Thundercats, but it had a cool Dave Nakayama cover, so I got it. In the back of the issue, they have FIVE PAGES of variant covers. There’s like twenty covers per page. This bitch had over 100 variant covers. Calm down, Dynamite.

Tiger Division 1-5. A South Korean super team with Luna Snow and a bunch of new characters that were introduced in a Taskmaster miniseries a couple years ago. Meh.

Now, to jump into and catch up again on the books I was previously caught up on. Can’t wait three months between catch up reads. Have to whittle it down to like once a month or less, or I’m just gonna be in the same boat as before I started. I’m at 15 boxes of new stuff, and I predict it will be 20-21 by the time I finish.

[Tom Foolery]

The catching up…

Thanos 4. After Thanos ‘kills’ Death’s mortal shell and wakes her up, she’s kinda pissed at him. They throw down, and the Illuminati realize if Death kills Thanos and absorbs his power, the life-death balance will lead to catastrophic disaster on a cosmic universal scale. So they’re trying to stop Death and protect Thanos, but they all get their butts kicked. Thanos ends up defeating Death and imprisoning her essence in a Black Infinity Stone. The series ends with an ominous message that Thanos will return in 2024.

Venom 28. Dylan and Black Widow, with help from the Toxin and Sleeper symbiotes, rescue Bren Waters from the Noname corporation and expose their nefarious plans to the public.

Venom 29-30. We see the Tyro iteration of Eddie Brock transformation into the Meridius iteration. And the original Eddie returns using Kang’s time travel device to disrupt the cycle…only to have Carnage burst out of Meridius’ body.

Venom 31. Part of a crossover with Carnage(which I won’t read for lets be honest, more than a year from now) where Carnage is now some multiversal godlike being and comes looking for ‘Daddy’ Eddie Brock, but finds the current Venom Dylan instead.

Void Rivals 7. Dummy McAssface and Assy McDumface flee into the Wasteland that separates the two halves of their world, and the one guys send some cyborg guy in after them to kill them. No Transformers cameo in this issue.

Weapon X-Men 1. So there was an X-Men oneshot, which I haven’t read yet, where a version of Onslaught that is a combination of Jean Grey and Magneto is infecting and destroying realities, so a Phoenix from yet a different universe recruits a team of variant Wolverines from yet a bunch of OTHER realities to stop and/or kill Onslaught. Including Zombie Wolverine, Old Man Logan, Age of Apocalypse Wolverine, overweight Logan from Earth-X, and a sassy gunslinger from the 1880’s named Jane Howlett. Marvel is the ‘House of Ideas’ but it seems like 95% of those ideas are now derivative.

What If…Venom 1. First of five new What If? books focusing on Venom. In the first issue, She-Hulk is walking by the church and interrupts Eddie Brock’s suicide. The symbiote bonds with her instead and starts using her to fight crime at night while she’s sleeping.

White Widow 2-4. Yelena’s neighbors are being evicted by the mega corporation that just moved into town. She discovers that the corporation is trying to use the citizens of the town as practice victims for assassins in training to improve killing techniques and then downloading the algorithms into assassin droids. Yelena kills the CEO. It sounds pretty grim, but it was written like a a sassy YA book for teen girls.

Wolverine 40. During the Fall of X, Logan teams up with Spider-Man to sneak aboard an Orchis space station, but they were waiting for them.
Wolverine 41-44. The 10-part “The Sabretooth War” begins leading up to issue 50. Sabretooth has recruited an army of interdimensional Sabretooths to wreak havoc on Logan’s birthday. They kill Quentin Quire, Daken, and a bunch of mutant refugees hiding out in X-Force’s hidden north pole, and kidnap Laura. Wow, this story line is fucking dark.

Wolverine:Madripoor Knights 1. Remember that cool issue of X-Men with Logan, Cap, and Black Widow and the iconic cover? Well, here’s a five issue sequel miniseries written by Claremont because Marvel will leave no horse unbeaten.

Predator vs Wolverine 3-4. After trying to kill his trophy in both Japan during his training with Muramasa, and also while he’s incapacitated at the Weapon X facility, the Predator tracks Logan to present day Canadian Rockies. They mortally wound each other and the Predator triggers his self destruct atomic bomb. It blows up, and Logan walks out a couple days later. Which I feel is cheating on Logan’s part.

Next up, Wonder Woman, and a bunch of X-books.

[Tom Foolery]

Catching Up 2:The Uppening.

Wonder Woman 4-6. While the President declares WW a Clear and Present Danger to the US, Diana grants a little boy dying of cancer a request to soend the day on Paradise Island. Then the bad guys recruit all of Diana’s enemies onto a team. Menawhile, Diana challenges all her allies to duels so that they STAY OUT of the upcoming conflict. She defeats Yara, Cassie, and Donna Troy, but they all show up anyway. Then a bad ass fight happens on the National Lawn and WW gets the Washington Monument dropped on her, but she still single-handedly prevails against ALL the supervillains they threw at her. Tom King is kicking ass on this series.

Trinity 1. Not sure if this is a oneshot or a sporadic ongoing, but it collects all the short backup stories from the WW issues I just read about Jon Kent and Damian Wayne babysitting Diana’s daughter Trinity in the future. Cute, but I read them twice.

World’s Finest 22-24. The conclusion of the Return to Kingdom Come arc. Batman and Superman convince their Earth-22 counterparts they are legit. Gog transforms David into Magog with the intent of leading all the heroes to Apokalips on a futile suicide fight so that they may die in glorious battle. The four World’s Finest cinvince David he can still be good, and he convinces the rest of the heroes to stop Gog. After they defeat him, Darkseid shows up looking for Gog’s part of the anti-life equation and Magog kills Gog, making Darkseid’s attack irrelevant. This upsets all the heroes because Magog is heading down the same path that leads to Kingdom Come. Then the Spectre shows up and shows our Bat and Supe the future of Earth-22 before sending them back to their universe. My copy of 24 had a ripped up page in the interior from the printing press, so I gotta find a replacement copy.

World’s Finest Annual 2024. A bunch of random short stories featuring Metamorpho, Bumblebee, and the Challengers of the Unknown.

World’s Finest:Teen Titans 6. The Titans collectively resolve their petty infighting and defeat the Terror Titans on a live streaming-cast. Robin tells Batman that he revealed his identity to the Titans, expecting to be fired, but Bruce only grounds him for a month.

Next up, the X-stuff. Which is funny because I waited until the Krakoa Age was almost over to read everything, and now I’ll be reading the end as it happens.

[Tom Foolery]

The X-Mess! The current X-titles are all coming to an end(or have already ended) as Marvel tries to stuff the Krakoan Age back into a broken bottle…

X-Force 47-49. The team is reeling from the Hellfire Gala massacre. They regroup at the north pole and build a new base thanks to Black Tom and some Krakoa vegetation. But there’s one loose end, the currently evil Hank McCoy. To combat him, they use the last clone of his body and upload the only copy of his mind they can find, a Beast circa the 1970’s run of the Avengers. That Beast freaks out at the ‘future’ he’s been thrust into, and immediately runs off to Hollywood to find his best friend, Simon Williams. Meanwhile, the current Beast has stolen a nuke from a US Naval base and used it to power a Black Hole Cannon large enough to destroy the neighboring planet Arrako, aka Mars. X-Force isn’t sure if it now has two evil Beasts to contend with(and all this is happening before the Sabretooth War arc over in Wolverine) so everything will reach the apex in next month’s final issue 50.

X-Men 29. The X-Men are in Latveria trying to recruit some of the few remaining living mutants on the planet. But Doom, and the Latverian mutants have a different opinion, so there’s a big fight. They end with a standstill, but Doom seems to imply Orchis is a shitshow, and will assist the X-Men should the need arise.
X-Men 30. Synch and Talon head to Counter-Earth to retrieve a bio-alternator orb from High Evolutionary so they can counteract the bio-booby traps Orchis put in all the Krakoan meds that every human on Earth has ingested. Synch is successful in retrieving the device, but Talon is completely incinerated in the battle with HE and Synch “saved” her by uploading her entire psyche into his brain.
X-Men 31. The X-Men and their ally Spider-Man disperse the bio-globe to counteract the Orchis bioweapon, but Nimrod finds out. The team has to stall him just ling enough for the counteract to work. Unfortunately, they’re getting their butts kicked. An incapicitated Synch is forced to say goodbye to Talon forever, so he can join the fight and stop Nimrod.
X-Men 32. Magik is looking for a way to remove and/or reverse the effects of the Orchis nano-bots she was injected with during the Hellfire Gala. With the help of Emma Frost and ShadowKat, she tracks down the Orchis scientist that created the nano-bots, but then Polaris shows up and painfully just rips all the bots out of Magik and restores her abilities, including teleportation. These last few issues are happening concurrently with the ‘main’ two finale miniseries Fall of House of X, and Rise of Powers of X.

X-Men Red 18. The final issue of the series. Storm and her allies defeat Genesis and her invaders when Storm destroys the Annihilation Mask. It was a satisfying end to a great series by Al Ewing. The final pages reveal Genesis and what’s left of her horde took over the Phobos moon’s Orchis base, so there’s still a conclusion coming.

Immortal X-Men 18. The final issue of the series. Mother Righteous, the final of the four Sinister Clones, has taken Jean Grey to the very center of the White Hot Room(the otherspace concept that serves as the “afterlife” and the psyche of the Phoenix Entity where all the dead mutants are being held). She thinks killing Jean in a blank concept space will trigger the Dominion and let her ascend as the true heir to Nathaniel Essex(apparently the Sins of Sinister event was Sinister’s attempt to trigger this Dominion thing and it’s a pretty key concept to what’s happening as the Krakoan age ends, but I haven’t read that yet). Meanwhile, Destiny knows the truth, and she is getting Exodus and Hope to help her stop Righteous before it happens.(This is all happening in the White Hot Room, so technically everyone is “dead”(I guess??) and it’s just their post-life intact psyches that are preventing this from happening??) Meanwhile, Xavier, with the imbedded Sinister psyche, had snuck onto Muir Island to look at the data retrieved from the Moira-Engine(which is the machine Sinister was using to have Moira clones live out potential futures and then sending the data back when they died, so he could fulfill the ‘correct’ timeline for his Dominion ascension….I’ll be honest, this shit is barely making sense to me anymore…Marvel is trying to unfuck the Krakoan Age and it is becoming a spectacularly convoluted mess…holy shit) and discovers that all three other Essex clones; Sinister, Stasis, and Orbis tried and failed their Dominion ascension, leaving only Righteous. ANYWAY, Righteous thinks she’s done, BUT the PLOT TWIST is that all four clones were just feeding their data into a FIFTH. The original Nathaniel Essex realized at some point the machines were going to take over and there was no way to stop the inevitable, so he created ENIGMA, the apex A.I. which uses the data from the four failed attempts and reaches Dominion status. The Dominion thing becomes very important soon. But my, brain hurts.

Dark X-Men 5. Maddie Pryor fights and defeats her alt-universe Goblin Queen persona who has just invaded the Limbo Embassy.

Dead X-Men 1-2. This is running concurrently with the Rise of Powers of X mini. Rachel Summers is tasked with forming a team to dimension hop and find a Moira who is still alive, but before she is compromised by the Technarchy AI, so they can figure out Orchis’ plans and work backwards thru the timestream. She chooses the fan-picked X-Men team that was revealed, then immediately killed during the Hellfire Gala. So Prodigy, Frenzy, Jubilee, Dazzler, and Cannonball find an alt universe psychopath Moira and scan her. But this triggers Moira’s latent something or other, and she starts regressing thru her previous “lives” with a time-ripping device she devised. The race is now on to see which team can get back to the original Moira’s timeline before her mutant powers kicked in the very first time…ohmigod my head—I’m getting a migraine.

Resurrection of Magneto 1-2. Ororo has a bad dream, and realizes Magneto might not be satisfied with his eternal rest after they both agreed to delete their resurrection protocols and he died his final death on Arrako. So she goes to Adam Brashear and he sends her into the afterlife to find Magneto and convince him to come back because of all the shit going down in the real world. There’s a lot of mopey navel gazing in the afterlife because Max/Eric/Magnus/Magneto has killed lots of people. Ororo convinces him to leave, but the Shadow King is waiting for them.

Fall of the House of X 1-3. Cyclops is on trial in a world kangaroo court for the crimes committed during the Hellfire Gala. The X-Men start fighting back against Orchis, including Polaris unleashing the Celestial Head full of brood led by Broo into the Orchis orbital station. Dr Stasis flees, but is caught by Emma and ShadowKat. After lifting everything they need from his mind, they satisfyingly end him, and then Firestar comes in and atomizes whats left. Dr. Gregor realizes that Nimrod and the AI might have doublecrossed both mutants and Orchis, and helps Cyclops escape. They go confront Nimrod and he casually kills Dr. Gregor and reveals the machines’ final solution to sterilize Earth of all living things…

Rise of the Powers of X 1-2. Xavier and a small team of what’s left of mutants ten years hence are operating from a no-place that exists outside of time and space so they can avoid detection from the Enigma Dominion that exists simultaneously throughout ALL time and space and is trying to prevent them from retroactively making it so he/it never existed. To that end, Xavier decides the only way to do that is if they go back and assassinate Moira at the beginning of her very first life, thus erasing the Krakoan Age from having ever existed….

Original X-Men oneshot. This is the book that kicked off that Weapon X-Men mini I just read last week. A Jean Grey Phoenix from a different dimension goes and recruits the O5 that had been pulled into the future and then returned to the past with their memories wiped, so that she can send them into yet another dimension where Jean Grey turned into Onslaught and try to convince their older selves to stop her. That world ends up getting blown up, and the O5 get returned to their original world and mindwiped yet again. So, basically a pointless story.

So that’s everything caught up on the X-books. I liked the Krakoan Age. I thought it was an interesting concept and the X-books had been stagnant for lord knows how many years. I think undoing it is a huge regression because Marvel wants things to be like they were when the 90s cartoon came out and this new X-Men ‘97 Disney+ series will attract “new” readers(which never happens) and they don’t want things to be different and interesting anymore. And the convoluted time-travel shit they are doing to get all the sand back in the sandbox is frustrating. There’s only a few issues across a few series left, which I will probably read on my next “catch up” read in a couple months.

Up next, the end of IDW’s Transformers run, and a couple other books here and there. Then HUGE Star Wars and Spider-Man boxes to plow thru.

[Tom Foolery]

The level of atrocity on the newest issue of Daredevil that came out today is sooooo fucking bad, I want to rage punch …everything.

John Romita’s art has reached abysmal levels of not trying. And he’s being enabled by the editors on the book for letting this preschool rejection artwork get published.

GAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!

[jjreason]

That's very sad. I have a couple of random DD issues from the Marco Chochetto (spelling sorry) era & he was killing it.