Wolverine goes to Canada and meets up with X-23 while another team goes to France and finds that Betsy Braddock, aka Psylocke, is back from the dead.
The two stories converge quickly. The France team heads up to Canada to answer Wolverine’s distress call and find a bunch of dinosaurlike mutants who capture them and take them to the Savage Land. Psylocke and X-23 evade capture track the team to plan a rescue mission alongside the Savage Land Mutates.
Ka-Zar guest stars. Haven’t seen him in a while.
The Saurian mutates have telepathy and plan to take over the world after plunging it into an arctic thaw by hijacking and augmenting Storm’s powers.
They fail and, in the end, there is an uneasy truce between the various Savage Land parties.
Along the way, Psylocke has some astral plane conflict with her siblings Jamie and Brian. Clearly, there’s something going on there but I’m not sure what and I’m not sure I care—I wasn’t a fan of Excalibur when Alan and Chris were at their prime, and I’m not now.
Still, the Savage Land story was in the tradition of some of the early X-tales featuring Ka-Zar, so that was kind of fun.
Issue #460 is one of those “recovery from a long story” issues that Chris Claremont does so well. The cover, above, features the two new women on the team: Psylocke, newly back from the dead, and X-23, the second Weapon X mutant that Claremont didn’t create but did do quite a bit to popularize.
It ties directly to Enemy of the State by telling us that Wolverine has gone rogue. We also get to see Kitty and Colossus back together, which makes Rachel throw a mommy fit.
Claremont is nothing if not melodramatic. Oh, and Beast smacks Psylocke on the ass.
That’s a bit much. But apparently it’s part of the process to verify that this returner from the dead is the real thing. In an extended final bit, Psylocke tells us through narration that she no longer has telepathy and then Spiral, a female Nightcrawler (Nocturne) and Juggernaut teleport into the Danger Room, followed by Mojo.
Yeah, okay, they’re trying to get me to read Exiles. But it won’t work on me. This is a 616 blog.