What I Bought 10/14/2026

I've continued playing DREDGE since beating it, out of the completionist urge to catch all the fish and their aberrations. One thing I noticed, beyond how difficult it can be to get the aberrations of some of the crabs, it's less harrowing for your character's sanity to sail at night with the lights off. The moving curtains of purple-red lights don't appear, don't chase you. You'll see some wavy, black-and-white shapes, but they don't really seem to bother your guy.

Obviously it's dangerous to do in areas with a lot of rocks, but I was mostly cutting across open ocean from one potential Moonfish location to another. There wasn't much risk of collisions.

Generation X-23 #9, by Jody Houser (writer), Marco Renna (artist), Erick Arciniega (color artist), Ariana Maher (letterer) - Here we see Laura, desperately trying to fend off the dread Cancellation Crab.

Set 3 months after the previous issue, Laura and Gabby have been training the 3 remaining Generated and letting them do neighborhood patrols to beat up the apparently roving gangs of anti-mutant, I'm not sure how to describe them. They're adult-aged white guys, all wearing matching white polo shirts. Anti-mutant Latter-Day Saint Groups? The guys starting petitions to ban books from the high school curriculum?

I also notice the captions describe them as living in "Logan's Safe House." I thought Laura and Gabby moved into a place of their own partway through All-New Wolverine, after Laura was able to save all those people from the alien plague? They made sure to bring their weird pelican statuette with them; they had it in the subsequent X-23 series. I guess Laura might have given up the apartment when everybody moved to Krakoa. Terrible idea, I bet that place was rent-controlled.  

The fight's a quick way to show the progress in the characters. Port actually talks now, Renna draws Time Bomb's little explosives with less energy flaring off them than Laiso did, which could be a sign she's got better control. Surprise! can turn her arm into a sword strong enough to break a knife. Everybody's getting better. But there are issues, and not just that I can't figure out how, if Laura kicked her feet out to either side in the panel below, she kicked the guy in the foreground. I guess she's not actually kicking with the foot on the right side of the panel, only the other leg, which swept in an arc, hitting Foreground Guy and the the guy on the left side of the panel.

The information they found in that nursery suggests Time Bomb, Port, and Surprise! were all humans experimented on to gain mutant abilities. Which makes them like Deadpool, basically, though no one mentions that. Just as well, considering how poorly the X-Men usually treat Deadpool. Laura says there are files on each of them, but she won't look at them unless they want to. After 3 months, Time Bomb does, then wants to visit the family she had. Port wants to go along, Surprise! is less enthusiastic, fearing she's going to lose the family that's formed around her.

And when Laura gets them a minivan, X-80 (the time traveler) is already inside, albeit with no awareness she helped them a few issues ago, since she hasn't done it yet. So a half-dozen people and Jonathan the wolverine pile into the minivan to drive to Maryland, and they get attacked by X-Infinite and his crew. Which includes the bird-girl's upper half grafted onto that robo-scorpion, what I think is one of the Cuckoos, and, I have no idea who the lady with white hair and a red "X" painted on her face is.

I assume Houser won't kill off all the new characters she created in the final issue, but I wonder if X-Infinite's going to eat it. If Apocalypse is taking a different approach these days (or is he? I can't keep track), and Mr. Sinister is hopefully on ice for a long time, the X-Books could use an antagonist who claims they're trying to improve mutants through science, dressing up some curiosity about taking things apart as more altruistic. Worst case, you turn him into a patsy for someone a little more clever or experienced.