Uncanny X-Men #495-499 (2008)

These issues are part of the “Divided We Stand” X-line wide event.  DWS comes on the heels of multiple line wide events that required the reader to jump across all the X-titles in order to read the story sequentially.  The nice thing here is that each of the Divided stories can be read in a single series, without having to jump anywhere.  

In the last big story, Bishop accidentally assassinated Professor X and Cable ran off with the as-yet unidentified infant Hope Summers–the first child born after the M-Day event.  Cyclops broke up the X-Men after the Professor died, and now he’s chilling at the mansion when Iron Man shows up and tells him to get this team to register as superheroes.

Scott says no, and then tells Emma Frost that he intends to reboot the X-verse.

What we get in these issues starts as three separate stories.  Wolverine, Colossus and Nightcrawler road trip across Europe.  The road trippers end up in Russia fighting Omega Red and turn him over to SHIELD.

It’s a brief fight, but solid.

Hepzibah and Angel find out that San Francisco seems to have time-warped back to 1969.

Cyclops and Emma spend some time in the Savage Land, where we learn that Cyclops can actually look his new lover in the eyes because she can turn into diamond form and withstand his eyeblasts.

But they leave after they are contacted by Angel and go to help out with the San Francisco story, which turns out to be the doings of Lady Mastermind.  She mind-controls some X-Men so we get some hero-on-hero fighting.  That’s always fun.

Once they free the city from her spell, the Mayor asks them to make SF their new home–and we learn that San Francisco has refused to follow the rules of The Initiative.

Lady Mastermind escapes at the end and is recruited into a mysterious “sisterhood” by a shadowy figure who will turn out to be Madelyne Pryor. 

It’s nice to just have two straightforward stories running parallel.  There’s enough “seeding” of future stories here (the team moving to California, the mysterious sisterhood) but I don’t feel like I need a roadmap to follow it all.