Oh, great (he said with defeated sarcasm).  Jamie Braddock is here. He’s a character I hate so much I have refused to tag him. I generally hate all the Captain Britain/UK Comics/Alternate reality crap. The fact that Chris Claremont’s return (again) to the title he took from unknown to brilliant decades ago ends here is appropriate. This run has largely been terrible rehash, and this is more of the same.

Sigh.Anyway, a few stories ago, Psylocke was blipped out of reality. Of course she’s not dead.  We all knew she wasn’t.  It was just her turn to be killed-and-brought-back, one of many things that happens far too often in X-books.

Turns out, Jamie saved her. He does some stuff here (like killing everyone and then bringing them back to life) that Uatu seems to think matter.

But they’re not really all that important.  They’re more confusing than important.  There’s some kind of anti-Phoenix force and ugh ugh ugh this is Claremont at his most impenetrable.  Jamie Braddock dies in the end, I think.

While that whole awful drama is happening, Storm fights against a new slave trade in Africa that traffics in mutants.  At the end of this story, she asks the X-Men for help.

And that closes out Chris Claremont’s run. Go and read the Deadly Genesis miniseries now, before you read issue #475, because that mini is the start of Ed Brubaker’s run on this title.

Publishing the mini concurrent with this final arc kinda indicates that Marvel knew this was bad. It was like they were saying, “We know UXM sucks right now, but don’t worry–look at this cool stuff we’re doing!”