Last stop in the ‘Battle of the Atom’ tour took place in ‘All-New X-Men’ #17 where we learned that the future X-Men whom we’ve been introduced to are not quite what they seem. Much like the rift between Wolverine and Cyclops, it would appear that there are two groups of X-Men in the future and the first group we’ve been introduced to hasn’t been quite honest with our present day heroes.

I felt that Brian Wood really tore it up while writing this issue and David Lopez illustrated the action perfectly. Speaking of action, we had quite a bit of it this issue and the majority of it wasn’t Jean vs Jean in a battle of the minds! It all happens when the first set of future mutants return to the Jean Grey School and find out that Magik took Iceman and Beast into the future in the last issue.

At this point Xavier kind of loses it as that means that the good future set of X-Men are now going to be coming to the past to stop them. Their timeline for whatever plan they have in store just got pushed up, but apparently those two aren’t the real focus. The real focus seems to be getting Cyclops and Jean back into the past, or perhaps even just Jean. Instantly Xavier starts lashing out at the man who gave them the news and suddenly Rachael tells Wolverine that he was right – these mutants weren’t to be trusted.

An epic battle ensues as Xavier and Icebeast go tearing through everyone, aside from Rachael who is holding her own. At the same time Molly ends up to not be the Runaway that we know but is in fact the apparent son of Mystique and Wolverine, if you can believe what he’s saying. So he morphs into a mixture between the two and stabs Logan in the gut. Sticking to continuity, he doesn’t have his healing factor at the moment though they do make it clear he doesn’t die here as his son is still alive. Around the same time Logan goes down, Rachael is also taken out of the game.

Right as this happens future Jean Grey takes out all of the X-Men in the room around her, almost knocking future Beast out in the attack. Fortunately for them, he recovers and immediately takes over the entire school.

After the battle we get an awesome reveal. The All-New X-Men and the good future X-Men have shown up. While Cyclops advises they wait to check things out the man in the Iron Man armor rushes in. With Jubilee coming out from a pile of rubble we quickly get to him taking off his mask and us finding out that he is actually the baby that Jubilee has been carrying around since this series began. That’s right Shogo is all grown up! What’s questionable though is that right after these two meet one another in the current time period, Psylocke pops up and is moving towards him quite threateningly. What exactly did she just find out or who is controlling her? We’re going to have to wait to find out.

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“X-MEN’ #6
Writer: Brian Wood
Artist: David Lopez Lopez