Writer: Gail Simone
Artists: David Marquez / Luciano Vecchio
Marvel Comics, 2026 (collected edition)
With the greatest of respect, Gail Simone has been writing comics for a long time now. We suspect she cannot resist the cheap beer of superhero comics to something more refined with a richer aroma. One of the very first titles we reviewed on this site was Ms Simone’s The Clean Room. It one of the most terrifying horror comics we have ever read (see https://worldcomicbookreview.com/2016/01/27/gail-simone-frightens-us/ ). Yet here she is, penning the adventures of a specific selection of characters from the X-Men franchise (inevitably including everyone’s favourite slicer-and-dicer, Wolverine) who in turn coach a group of young mutants called the Outliers, all set in New Orleans.
Ms Simone certainly knows her X-lore, and here she is drawing upon wobblier years of Uncanny X-Men scribe Chris Claremont’s run. After the bleak magnificence of the Dark Phoenix Saga and the Days of Future Past, and with John Byrne’s departure from the title, Mr Claremont conceptually meandered with plots in Uncanny X-Men around from, say, 1981 to 1984. We had Dracula in issue #159 (a drab and cliched story, enlivened only by Bill Sienkiewicz’s wonderful art), giant squid, the Brood (an unimaginative stand-in for Sir Ridley Scott’s Aliens), and other unstructured arcs. Mr Claremont found his stride again by around Uncanny X-Men #177, with the return of Mystique, the introduction of Selene and Rachael Summers in Uncanny X-Men #180, the heart-breaking insight into Rogue’ schizophrenia in Uncanny X-Men #182, and then a little beyond that, the trial of Magneto in issue #200. But for about two or so years before that, Mr Claremont did not really seem to know what at all to do.
Ms Simone seems to take us back to those days. (Wolverine is even back in his classic brown-and-tan 1980s costume!) The first story is about a menacing mutant named Mutina, whose stealth and ruthlessness takes even Wolverine by surprise. Because Ms Simone has a quirky sense of humour and likes playing to a young -at-heart audience, Mutina wears a cat-eared hoodie.
The second story features a bunch of classic horror villains, plus monster-hunter Elsa Bloodstone, being mind-controlled into fighting the X-Men in a turf war. Aside from Wolverine shedding pints of blood, there is not much in the way of violence in the story at all.
But even the evisceration of Wolverine calls upon Mr Claremont’s depiction of Mystique “killing” a robot version of Wolverine in a training session in issue 180, by slitting his throat: Mutina tries to clip slits Wolverine’s thigh arteries, which could cause him to rapidly bleed out. In the second story, a werewolf also does a good job of severing Wolverine’s carotid.
And – surprise! – a giant dragon swallows a swamp monster, and later vomits him up. No harm done, and no one is ever seriously in danger of death. Mutina may talk a big game (was the gift to Nightcrawler on his birthday ever really going to be a box of severed thumbs?). But, fundamentally, this collected work is a story for a teenaged audience. We are far removed from The Clean Room here.
One last curiosity remains. The second, classic monster-led story within the collection is punctuated by a Weird Western cowboy adventure. This plays out as as an ad-libbed, kids’ adventure bedtime story told to the Outliers, incorporating each of them as horse-riding members of “the X-Posse”. (And given we have X-Factor, X-Force, Excalibur, Exiles, Generation X, X-Patriots, X-Saviours, X-Statix, Academy X, and X-Babies, why not?) We cannot think of another example of Ms Simone extending her ouvere into hokey cowboy horror.