After several years away, X-Men Annual is back on the schedule.  There's something a little odd about the fact that Marvel are now publishing the third X-Men Annual #1, but I suppose if they don't want to use the years, then they might as well do it this way.

By the time Marvel stopped publishing annuals, a few years ago, they'd pretty much degenerated into filler.  Clearly they're determined not to fall back into that trap.  Uncanny X-Men Annual #1 doubled as Storm's send-off, and actually served a purpose.  X-Men Annual #1 is similarly important to the plot.

In a story which presumably follows the current "Primary Infection" arc, Rogue finally gets around to doing something with the brainwashed Aurora and Northstar, whom she captured a few months back.  The X-Men take them to SHIELD with a new plan to deprogram them.  But Exodus and his new Acolytes - an unlikely cluster of characters from the 198 Files who weren't being used anywhere else - show up with their own plan to derail matters.

There are basically two stories going on here.  One sees Carey finally lowering the curtain on years of abuse for Aurora and Northstar, and restoring their personalities to normal.  It's an unashamed resort to the reset button, but that's fine by me.  The characters had nowhere to go as brainwashed killers.  Now they're back in circulation as viable characters, and that in itself means the story has achieved something useful.

The other, completely unrelated story involves Exodus' grand plan.  This could probably have used a bit more prominence, since it's thrown in at the end, almost as a justification for the preceding fight scenes, and it should have been more than that.  Exodus has come up with a scheme to save the mutant race.  He's going to hijack the SHIELD Helicarrier, use its advanced technology to build a device that detects latent mutants, and then use it as an Ark to hold all the newborn mutants as they appear, so he can keep them all safe until the population is back up to safe numbers.

Thankfully, Carey has apparently been thinking these things through more thoroughly than some of his colleagues and his X-Men have already figured out the answer behind the scenes.  There are no new mutant births; the surviving 198 are the last generation of mutants.

I pause here to observe that this is a plot point of such staggering importance that it's utterly ridiculous that Marvel took over a year to get around to making it clear.  It's pretty much fundamental to understanding the mutants' current status quo and the X-Men's mission.  And unfortunately, the logic offered here doesn't quite work.  Rogue explains that humans can't have mutant kids any more because the gene was removed - which at least fits with what we were told during Decimation.  But what about the surviving mutants?  They must still have the gene, so why can't they breed?

The very fact that it's possible to do this story so late in the day shows how poorly Decimation was thought out.  But at least it's finally being tackled, and Carey seems to be setting up plans to address it as a central part of his series.

Overall, this is an issue which works much better in the context of the bigger picture.  On that level, it's doing something valuable, by addressing some points that really needed attention, and finally sorting out Northstar and Aurora.  But these two strands don't come together into a coherent whole, and both of them get a bit lost under a huge fight scene.  On top of that, Exodus' sidekicks aren't introduced very well (especially Random); the story opens with a scene that only makes sense if you remember that Exodus disappeared through a black hole the last time we saw him; and the first half is littered with out-of-context flashbacks to Alpha Flight continuity that I suspect few readers remember.

It's not an accessible issue, in other words.  But it'll go down well with old-school X-Men readers like me, since not only is it full of established C-list characters being written well, but it's actually advancing the plot and showing some real concern for the coherency of the mythos - something that we see all too little of these days.

Rating: B+

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