Alex Summers, also known as Havok, is arguably my favorite character from Marvel’s X-Men comic books. Unfortunately, his publication history is defined by long stretches of time off panel dating back to his earliest appearances. The most recent of these absences finally concludes today in the pages of X-Men: Legacy #254, the first chapter of a story called “Five Miles South of the Universe.” In commemoration of his return, we’ve even created a sub-site dedicated to Havok here at MLD as a resource for fellow fans.

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Mike Carey’s wild ride through the Age of X is coming to a close at the end of the month, and Chapter Five (also known as X-Men: Legacy #247) was firing on all cylinders. We get a lot of answers, but it’s still unclear exactly how the mutants are going to set things right. At the end of this issue, Carey talks about his deliberate pacing of the series, and as far as I’m concerned he got it just right. Every issue has left me anxious to know more and this one is no exception. There’s a lot to like here, and these final issues have brought everything together to set the stage for a thrilling finale. So let’s get to it.

Spoilers for the issue and series will follow.

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When Marvel’s May solicitations appeared earlier this month a group of books were very conspicuous by their absence. Four X-Men titles (Uncanny X-Men, X-Men: Legacy, New Mutants, and Uncanny X-Force) had no listings and it was clear that something was up. Last week Marvel released a set of teaser images for these titles and they’re giving more details all this week on Marvel.com. Every day at 3PM Marvel will host a series of “liveblogs” focusing on what they’re calling MMXI: Year of the X-Men featuring X-editor Nick Lowe and the creators behind each of these titles kicking off yesterday with New Mutants.

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I can’t understand Marvel’s publishing schedule at all sometimes. The Age of X Alpha one-shot that started this crossover shipped on January 26th and nearly a full month passed before we saw Chapters 1 and 2 last week with both shipping on February 23rd. After all the hype surrounding this event with weekly Historical Logs included in books shipping in December and writer Mike Carey providing additional backstory online leading up to the release of Alpha, it’s followed by a month of nothing and a week of double shipping. It felt like a huge loss of momentum, but the books may have been good enough to overcome the wait.

Spoilers to follow.

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There was a lot for this X-Men fan to be thankful for this week as all four major X-titles shipped on Wednesday. While in many ways this is great, I can’t help but recognize how much the publishing scheme for these books has changed after they had been coming out weekly for almost all of 2010. With this in mind, I thought it might be a good time revisit the state of the books post-Second Coming.

This will probably contain what some would consider spoilers, so keep that in mind if there are things you’d rather not know about these books.

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