X-Force #48 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-FORCE vol 6 #48
“Game Recognizes Game”
Writer: Benjamin Percy
Artist: Robert Gill
Colour artist: GURU-eFX
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER / PAGE 1: Beast in a forest, leaping towards someone who’s looking at him through the scope of a sniper rifle. Quite a loose interpretation of the actual story.
The first half of this issue is pretty much self explanatory, by the way.
PAGES 2-4. The Beast breaks into the Greenhouse.
X-Force set up their new Greenhouse base last issue, and Beast showed up at the end of the issue with his gun. From the look of it, whatever it is that he fires at Omega Red is meant to incapacitate.
That’s Aurora and Northstar on page 4, who also arrived here last issue.
PAGE 5. Recap and credits. We’re expressly told that this comes before the current Wolverine storyline, and also before Fall of the House of X and Rise of the Powers of X – all of which was clear from the last issue of Wolverine anyway, but there’s no harm in making it clear in this book too.
Daredevil Villains #12: The Masked Marauder
DAREDEVIL #16-17 (May & June 1966)
“Enter… Spider-Man” / “None Are So Blind”
Writer, editor: Stan Lee
Penciller: John Romita
Inker: Frank Giacoia
Letterers: Artie Simek (#16) & Sam Rosen (#17)
Colourist: not credited
Sixteen issues into the series, Daredevil has had a steady stream of bad guys. But only the Ox has appeared more than once. That changes here, as this two-parter introduces Daredevil’s first recurring enemy. He’s the main villain through to issue #27 – and after that, he never appears in the series again. Meet the Masked Marauder, a villain exactly as generic as he sounds.
When we first meet the Masked Marauder, he’s already an established supervillain. He wears a purple jumpsuit and a green cape, the standard colours of Silver Age villainy in the Marvel Universe. He has a gang of thugs who do all the hard work for him. They wear purple too. He is, as advertised, Masked. If we’re being honest about it, though, he doesn’t do much Marauding. He’s a high-tech master planner, who creates elaborate devices and conceals them in trucks. But the Masked Planner didn’t have the same ring to it.
In this story, the Masked Marauder’s unspectacular nature isn’t such a problem. The real focus is Spider-Man. He and Daredevil don’t get on, they fight, they team up – you know the drill. It’s Spider-Man that the kids want to see, and it’s Spider-Man that they get.
The X-Axis – w/c 15 January 2024
X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #122. By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Nick Roche & Yen Nitro. Well, this is certainly a slimmed-down phase for the core X-titles, which is no bad thing in itself. This is the second part of the Thunderbird arc and… well, it’s mostly just random fighting, honestly. The Proudstar brothers assume that Crule is working with Orchis so they attack him. Crule is apparently there for his own reasons, which is something to do with stealing the refugee mutants himself, but there’s nothing to flesh that out. And if you want people to take Crule seriously, that does need some legwork, because nobody cared about this bozo even back in the early 90s. Nick Roche draws some nice punching, but it really is one-dimensional as a story.
X-MEN #30. (Annotations here.) Oh boy.
So issue #29 ends with a cliffhanger where the other X-Men get back from Latveria, find the base trashed and covered in blood, and Synch and Talon missing. The next issue caption says we’ll find out in this issue where they are. And… this issue has nothing to do with that at all, unless I’m missing something fundamental. After an opening scene with Scott (which is pretty good, and the best thing in the issue) it shifts to a completely unrelated story about how to distribute the cure to the killswitch that Orchis placed in Krakoan medicines… which I don’t think has been mentioned at all until now, but somehow involves Spider-Man and Norman Osborn. Aside from a couple of pages of subplot with Firestar, what we then get is Synch and Talon visiting the High Evolutionary – and the exercise of getting to him is compressed to a single page – to recover a device last mentioned in issue #3. The entire confrontation lasts four pages, and at the end it turns out that Talon died and Synch is keeping her alive in his mind.
X-Men #30 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-MEN vol 6 #30
“Who Says Romance is Dead?”
Writer: Gerry Duggan
Artist: Phil Noto
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Jordan D White
COVER / PAGE 1. Synch and Talon fight the High Evolutionary and his creations.
PAGES 2-4. Scott dreams about Jean.
This somewhat mirrors the dream scene that opens Fall of the House of X #1, in which Scott dreams about being hanged in the American west, and is apparently saved by Jean. Jean, of course, is still off in the White Hot Room, where we left her in Immortal X-Men. But the clear implication is that she’s regained contact with him in some way.
The fire imagery suggests Jean’s renewed connection with the Phoenix Force.
The X-Axis – w/c 8 January 2024
X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #121. By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Nick Roche, Yen Nitro & Travis Lanham. Another quiet week, as Marvel are sensibly giving Fall and Rise a clear run with their first issues. But X-Men Unlimited moves ever onwards, and so this is the start of a new arc joining the Proudstar brothers on their reservation. Apparently, they’ve been taking in mutants all this time and nothing has come of it until now. Hmm. Okay, this is one of the books that’s running with the idea that Orchis are reasonably easy to avoid. I can’t help thinking this hasn’t been played very consistently between books, though.
Anyhow, this first issue is really just setting up the cast on the reservation and having a fight with some random Orchis guys who finally show up, until the actual plot gets going in the final panel. I’m glad of that last panel, because on a first read through it’s very much the stock Fall of X story, and there’s only so many times you can read it. What we’re actually getting, it seems, is something to do with the resurrection of the Externals after Selene got her hands on the External Gate over in Immortal X-Men. The story doesn’t really do anything by way of a hook for that beyond having one fairly obscure External show up in the last panel, though, so we’ll just have to see what happens when it gets going properly next issue.
RISE OF THE POWERS OF X #1. (Annotations here – revised now that the data pages in the digital edition have been fixed.) While Fall of the House of X is clearly meant to be the straightforward action book, Rise of the Powers of X is a more eccentric outing, continuing the Dominion storyline from Immortal X-Men. I have no idea how much of this would have been in Jonathan Hickman’s final act, but he spent enough time setting up the Dominion stuff in Powers of X that you figure it was surely meant to go somewhere; it makes sense as a way to keep raising the scale beyond Krakoa and Orchis, and there’s something kind of interesting in the way the machinations of one man wind up overshadowing everything else.
Wolverine #41 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
WOLVERINE vol 7 #41
“Sabretooth War, part 1”
Writers: Victor LaValle & Benjamin Percy
Pencillers: Geoff Shaw & Cory Smith
Inkers: Geoff Shaw & Oren Junior
Colour artist: Alex Sinclair
Letterer: Cory Petit
Design: Stacie Zucker with Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER / PAGE 1. An amalgam of Wolverine’s face on the left, and Sabretooth’s on the right. It’s the most violent Wolverine story ever told, apparently. Not sure that’s really the selling point of Victor LaValle’s Sabretooth stories, but okay.
PAGES 2-5. Sabretooth kills a group of “X-Men”.
Okay, so. We last saw Sabretooth in the Sabretooth & The Exiles miniseries, in which he defeated Graydon Creed and seized control of Orchis Station Five. Graydon had been travelling the multiverse killing Sabretooths and mounting their heads; he also had the bodies outfitted with collars which let him control them as weapons. That’s where all the headless Sabretooths in the crowd came from.
Rise of the Powers of X #1 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
NOTE: This post has been revised now that the digital edition has been corrected to include the data pages at the right places.
RISE OF THE POWERS OF X #1
“Data Pages”
Writer: Kieron Gillen
Artist: R. B. Silva
Colour artist: David Curiel
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Associate editor: Lauren Amaro
Editor: Jordan D White
Editor-in-chief: C B Cebulski
THE RISE OF THE POWERS OF X is the companion series to The Fall of the House of X, mirroring the House of X / Power of X twin minis that launched the Krakoan era. And yes, according to the credits pages, the titles have a THE in them.
With the original books, the titles were supposed to be pronounced as “House of X” and “Powers of Ten”. Presumably the same goes for this, but you never know.
COVER / PAGE 1. The near-future X-Men team, of whom more later. They’re surrounded by foliage but in front of a mechanical portal showing what looks to be the sun.
PAGE 2. Recap and credits. The recap basically covers the plot of Immortal X-Men, and then explains that we’re ten years in the future, following the fall of Krakoa. The story title refers to the Krakoan era’s signature device of including text pages in the middle of the story rather than as back matter. It used to be a Jonathan Hickman signature device but it’s ours now.
Daredevil Villains #11: The Ox
DAREDEVIL #15 (April 1966)
“–And Men Shall Call Him… Ox!”
Writer, editor: Stan Lee
Penciller: John Romita
Inker: “Frankie Ray” (Frank Giacoia)
Letterer: Art Simek
We’ve seen the Ox before. He was one of Mr Fear’s henchmen back in issue #6. But this time it’s different. It’s his spotlight story, and now there are two… um, two Oxen?
With Ka-Zar’s origin story out of the way, Stan Lee reverts to the established Daredevil formula. Matt’s back in New York, he’s back in the office, and he’s back in the romantic triangle with Karen and Foggy. Poor Foggy is still feeling the after-effects of being hospitalised by the Fellowship of Fear back in issue #6. Not that he’s mentioned it in issues #7-14, of course, but apparently it’s still giving him dizzy spells. And so Matt is given the opportunity to reflect on how the Ox was, in fact, the most dangerous member of the Fellowship of Fear.
The Ox’s gimmick is very simple: he’s big, strong and not very smart. This issue strongly implies that he’s not just mentally below average, but has some sort of disability. He debuted as one of the Enforcers in Amazing Spider-Man #10 (1964), and has superhuman strength for no apparent reason. Presumably he’s a mutant. Since we last saw him, he’s been in jail, sharing a cell with mad scientist Karl Stragg. We quickly establish the dynamic: Stragg has a plan to use Ox’s strength to escape by slowly working on the bars, and Ox is half-heartedly playing along. But Ox isn’t entirely sure he even wants to break out, and Stragg is already getting frustrated with him. Crucially, the Ox is sensitive about his low intelligence, but Stragg is promising to raise his intelligence to normal levels if he helps them break out. That’s the Ox’s motivation.
The X-Axis – w/c 1 January 2024
Just two books this week and, yeah, well.
X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #120. By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Phillip Sevy, Ceci de la Cruz & Travis Lanham. The third and final part of the “Blood Dawn” arc and, yes, it’s the story I feared it was going to be. Expressing your emotions is a good thing, these people are seriously injuring one another in order to express their emotions, therefore that’s a good thing. And… no it isn’t? Obviously? This is the sort of thing that Arakko had to be rehabbed from in order to work at all. Let’s just file this one under “Well, that’s a premise I fundamentally reject” and forget about it, shall we?
FALL OF THE HOUSE OF X #1. (Annotations here.) Mmm. Yeah, it’s not the best start to the year, is it?
Look… House of X and Powers of X game-changing, rule-rewriting stories and if you’re going to invoke them you’ve got to do better than being just okay. And this is just okay at best. It’s not catastrophically awful or anything, but it’s not working.
Fall of the House of X #1 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
FALL OF THE HOUSE OF X #1
“The Trial of Cyclops”
Writer: Gerry Duggan
Artist: Lucas Werneck
Colourist: Bryan Valenza
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Jordan D White
FALL OF THE HOUSE OF X. This is one of two linked miniseries to complete the Krakoan era, the other being Rise of the Powers of X. The format echoes the twin minis House of X and Powers of X that launched the Krakoan era.
The title also alludes to the Edgar Allan Poe story “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), though there’s no terribly obvious significance to that fact.
COVER / PAGE 1. Wolverine, Colossus, Nightcrawler and Shadowkat in action. We can see a couple of Orchis footsoldiers reflected in Colossus’s first.
PAGES 2-4. Cyclops dreams about being hung after an Old West show trial.
Timely was the name of Marvel’s Golden Age predecessor. It’s not immediately obvious what that has to do with anything either. Marvel does have an established Old West town called Timely – it was the setting of the 2015 miniseries 1872, which was part of the “Secret Wars” event, and was basically “the Marvel Universe, but a Western”.
