Back with the core titles, Uncanny X-Men does something very unfashionable.  Yes, believe it or not, it's a stock-taking issue largely devoted to dealing with the implications of storylines in other books, and sorting out the hideously complicated timeline.

These days, it's a bit of a shock to see any writer explicitly acknowledging anyone else's stories at all.  Really, it's the sort of thing we should see a little more of.  God knows we don't want to go back to the days when stories existed in a state of perpetual crossover.  But if you've got three comics, all called "X-Men", all featuring characters who live in the same building, then there ought to be a bit more overspill than we actually see.

The current philosophy at Marvel seems to be to put more emphasis on the shared universe again, and so for the first time in ages, we're getting issues like this.  The cast of Uncanny X-Men react to the fact that Colossus came back from the dead in Astonishing X-Men #6. 

"Enemy of the State" is going on in the background, and since it's a major storyline for one of the book's star characters, you can hardly complain about Claremont taking a handful of panels to tie it in.  Even X-Men: Phoenix - Endsong gets worked in, as Claremont not unreasonably seems to feel that Rachel might like to react to the temporary resurrection of her mother.  Hard to argue with, really.

Of course, Marvel are a bit out of practice at this sort of thing, and it shows.  The reason Wolverine disappeared from the previous storyline halfway through was to try and leave time for him to appear in "Enemy of the State", but it doesn't tie in at all, so his disappearance has had to be quietly dropped.  The storyline in Astonishing X-Men #6 apparently now took place during the last arc, which is... frankly, almost impossible to make work, unless you're prepared to splice huge whopping great time gaps into the middle of Astonishing #1 where they're plainly not meant to go.  And all the characters seem to recall a different and far more specific ending to X-Men: Phoenix - Endsong than the deliberately vague effort which actually saw print.  Is Claremont working from an earlier draft where Jean was unambiguously killed off forever?  At the very least, it's confusing.

All of this only takes up the first two thirds of the issue, which leaves Claremont with a few pages to do some more housecleaning.  So the set-up for next issue's story - a battle with Mojo - consists largely of Claremont quietly disentangling the final Chuck Austen story by retrieving Juggernaut and Nocturne from another dimension.  The dialogue also seems to suggest that Sabretooth is alive and well, which pretty much just tramples on Austen's feeble attempt to kill him off - but is anyone really complaining?

An issue for the hardcore fans who want to see how everything fits together, yet who are also prepared to turn a blind eye to some of the glitches.  Personally, I applaud the effort.  Glad to see somebody's trying.

Rating: B+

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