Broken Frontier

In the first story in this issue, Mike Carey revives a character not seen in awhile, the vampiric mutant Emplate. Don’t remember who he is? That’s OK, neither does anyone else. He’s the brother of Monet, and was a major player in some issues of Generation X, a book which hasn’t been published in years.

Beyond that, he’s one of the seemingly endless horde of evil mutants with one-word names who drifted in and out of a multitude of X books in the 90s. And he’s pretty forgettable here too: his attack on the X-Men’s new island HQ is basically just a foretaste of things to come.

More interesting in Carey’s tale are the character moments scattered throughout, as our mixed-up mutants try to work out what they’re supposed to be now: soldiers, teachers and students or just refugees. But this is stuff we’ve seen before. The X-Men redefine themselves about once a year on average, it seems, and this latest move to being effectively an island nation is unlikely to have any more of a long-lasting impact than their move to San Francisco.

The second story in this issue ties up a loose end from the recent "Dark Reign" storyline, the Omega Machine, but also resurrects another plot strand that seemed to have been forgotten in recent months, Apocalypse’s tampering with Gambit’s genetic code. As with Emplate’s return, it’s a throwaway story, an overlong fight scene which will no doubt lead into things to come. But I’m pretty sure annuals used to be reserved for being more than just extended prologues…