10 Best First Comic Book Issues From This Week (Dec 5, 2018)

If you haven't read the X-Event, X-Men: Extermination, then you're missing out on a solid story and there's going to be a spoiler in this issue.

This one-shot acts as an epilogue of sorts to X-Men: Extermination, focusing on the fallout from the death of Nathan Summers, Cable! Zac Thompson and Lonnie Nadler, paired with Neil Edwards on art, shine in the first half of this book. Hope Summers, the adopted daughter of Cable, is grieving over his death, and it takes Jean Grey, his mother, to speak to her and help her grieve. The second half is a Cable story by Chris Claremont but the reason this is a must read is all about that first half.

There is a stigma towards comics that continuity is a problem with storytelling but here is the perfect example of why having an established canon can heighten a book's emotive qualities. Hope Summers being upset because of her history with Cable is a fairly set-in-stone thing as it's been talked about since she came to the present, but Jean Grey is a special case.

There've been several retcons and soft reboots to the universe even since her last death, so when she explains that she understands Hope's grief as she raised Cable, it proves that bringing up the Adventures of Cyclops and Jean and Askani's Son as still currently canon are brilliant long-term storytelling tools.