The X-Axis – w/c 2 September 2024
X-MEN: FROM THE ASHES INFINITY COMIC #13. By Alex Paknadel, Diógenes Neves, Arthur Hesli & Clayton Cowles. So, yeah, I just went on Marvel Unlimited to re-read this and they’ve added the entire run of CrossGen’s Mystic. Didn’t see that coming. Apparently they’ve just put out an omnibus, but I think it’s the first time they’ve added any CrossGen material.
Anyway, this is part 1 of a Magneto story set in Merle. That’s an interesting call in itself, because X-Men has mostly had Magneto hang around on the fringes in his floating chair trying to look ominous. But From the Ashes winds up being the first book to expand on that. The fact that he can’t walk was so strongly implied that it doesn’t really count as a reveal (and isn’t treated as one), but apparently he’s also outright depowered. The story leaves it to X-Men to cover how all that happened, so there really isn’t any new information that X-Men won’t cover in due course. But it’s still a bit of a surprise to see it show up here first.
Exceptional X-Men #1 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
EXCEPTIONAL X-MEN #1
Writer: Eve L Ewing
Artist: Carmen Carnero
Colour artist: Nolan Woodard
Letterer: Joe Sabino
Editor: Tom Brevoort
THE X-MEN:
Kate Pryde has retired as a superhero and is working in a bar called Lulu’s Tavern in Bridgeport, a district of Chicago. According to Wikipedia, Bridgeport used to have a reputation for racial intolerance but is now one of Chicago’s most diverse areas. We saw Lulu’s Tavern before in X-Men #35.
Kate is depressed, anxious or both. There are a couple of points in the issue where she seems to break the fourth wall, though you could rationalise that she’s talking to herself out loud if you want. She’s taking the fall of Krakoa badly. While she describes Krakoa as her home “sort of”, presumably referencing her semi-detached status as the one mutant who couldn’t use the gates, she evidently feels it as a loss. She worries that the more hubristic aspects of the Krakoan age are going to come back to bite the mutants now, and she’s appalled by her dark-and-violent phase as Shadowkat in Gerry Duggan’s X-Men. Being around other mutants strikes her as living in “the shattered remains of the life I knew”, and since she can pass for human, she’s going to drop out of all that, live a normal life, and try not to think about it.
The X-Axis – 26 August 2024
X-MEN: FROM THE ASHES INFINITY COMIC #12. By Alex Paknadel, Phillip Sevy, Arthur Hesli & Clayton Cowles. Some From the Ashes arcs have been rather obviously designed to yank a character into a new status quo so that a main line title doesn’t have to waste time on it. The Omega Red arc isn’t one of those, and turns out to be just a nice little story about a violent murderer returning to the miserable town where he grew up. There’s some low-level villainy for him to deal with but it’s more of a character and tone piece than anything else. I’m all for trying to round out Omega Red, who’s a very one-dimensional character with rather convoluted powers – honestly, I’ve never really understood what links the tentacles, the death spores and everything else about him. A perfectly fine little story designed to flesh him out a bit, without actually toning him down too much.
SAVAGE WOLVERINE INFINITY COMIC #5. By Tom Bloom, Guillermo Sana, Java Tartaglia & Joe Sabino. It’s a middle chapter of an Infinity Comic and so there’s not much to add to what I’ve said before: it’s a small town body horror story, pleasingly low key and well executed. Certainly at the high end of the range for Infinity Comics and worth a look if you have a subscription. (And if you don’t… well, Unlimited is very good value for the archives and for almost the whole Marvel line on a three month delay, but the Infinity Comics exclusives are at best in the “nice to have” category, rather than being a reason to sign up in themselves.)
NYX #2 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
NYX vol 2 #2
Writers: Jackson Lanzing & Collin Kelly
Artist: Francesco Mortarino
Colour artist: Raúl Angulo
Letterer: Joe Sabino
Editor: Annalise Bissa
THE CORE CAST:
Wolverine (Laura) gets the spotlight in this issue. She’s investigating the disappearance of thirty mostly homeless mutants over a few days (though the one we see at the start of the issue seems quite well dressed). As it turns out, they’re all being enlisted voluntarily by Local, of whom more below.
Laura narrates the issue and spends a lot of it reminiscing about Kiden Nixon, one of the main characters from the original NYX series. We hear so much about Kiden in this issue that it seems likely she’ll be showing up in the end. So far as I can see, Kiden hasn’t appeared since an X-23 one-shot in 2010 – at that point she was living on the streets, but that was 15 years ago, so who knows where she is now.
Laura is living in a dilapidated building in East Harlem, which is presumably why Kiden is on her mind. Back in the original NYX, Laura is a teenage prostitute; she kills a client who draws a knife on her, and meets Kiden shortly after. Her pimp then comes after her, and she kills him. Honestly, she doesn’t do a great deal more than that – the first run is only seven issues long, focusses on Kiden, and spends most of its time just introducing the cast. They move into Bobby Soul’s apartment at the end of the series, and most of Laura’s actual friendship with Kiden presumably takes place off panel after NYX #7 and before Laura shows up in Uncanny X-Men (which, due to insane delays on NYX, had actually happened before NYX finished). So basically, this friendship was always implied more than actually depicted.
X-Force #2 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-FORCE vol 7 #2
“Igubu Lika-Anansi”
Writer: Geoffrey Thorne
Artist: Marcus To
Colour artist: Erick Arciniega
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Editor: Mark Basso
As I said at the beginning of the “From the Ashes” era, I’m not necessarily planning to do annotations for all ongoing titles – we’ll see how the second-tier books are looking after the first few issues.
X-FORCE:
Forge helpfully illustrates the limitations of his powers by confidently building a device that will allow X-Force’s plane to get past Wakanda’s defence systems. Presumably it works, but it has no effect on the magic spell that he actually needs to worry about. In other words, Forge has built a perfect solution to the wrong problem. He spells out later in the issue that he needs to understand what the problem is in order to solve it. (Presumably he could always define “understand the problem” as a second-order problem, but then he’d have to build an entire machine before he could even start solving the main problem, which might take a while.)
Daredevil Villains #36: Damon Dran, the Indestructible Man
DAREDEVIL #92-94 (October-December 1972)
“On the Eve of the Talon!” / “A Power Corrupt!” / “He Can Crush the World!”
Writer: Gerry Conway
Penciller: Gene Colan
Inker: Tom Palmer
Letterer: John Costanza
Colourist: not credited
Editor: Roy Thomas
I’ve called these issues Daredevil #92-94, but you might have noticed that the cover logo quite clearly says Daredevil and the Black Widow. That starts with issue #92 and continues through to issue #106. During that time, editorial footnotes call the book “DD/BW”.
But according to Marvel, these title of this comic is was still Daredevil during this period. And they have a point. It’s not just a question of checking the copyright warning. The cover design of the time had the title in text just above the cover box, and that still just said Daredevil. The Stan Lee Presents captions on the splash pages still just said Daredevil. And for the most part, despite her equal billing on the cover, the book continued to treat Daredevil as the star and the Black Widow as a supporting character, albeit a prominent one.
The exception is the Project Four storyline, which culminates in these issues. But it’s a major exception. Gerry Conway introduced the subplot back in issue #87, as soon as the book relocated to San Francisco, and it’s been building ever since. In previous issues, we’ve learned that on her very first mission as a Soviet spy, the Black Widow and freelancer Danny French were sent to steal something from the mysterious Project Four. Project Four turned out to be a bunch of scientists working on a mysterious and allegedly powerful artefact. It’s a weird energy globe thing, and it’s the macguffin for the whole arc. Danny French has had it all this time, but he’s never figured out how to use it.
The X-Axis – w/c 19 August 2024
X-MEN: FROM THE ASHES INFINITY COMIC #11. By Alex Paknadel, Phillip Sevy, Arthur Hesli & Clayton Cowles. Part 2 of the Omega Red arc, which seems to be mostly concerned with giving the guy a home town and some sort of vaguely normal background. Given the way he’s being used these days, that seems like a worthwhile exercise. There’s a bit of rustic Russian cliche going on here, and maybe it takes itself a little seriously, but on the whole I’m enjoying the way that this story is letting Omega Red do something more grounded and low key than we’re used to seeing with him.
SAVAGE WOLVERINE INFINITY COMIC #4. By Tom Bloom, Guillermo Sanna, Java Tartaglia & Joe Sabino. Another depressed small town arc, and this one is turning out quite well too. Logan finds himself in a town where somebody’s been using anti-mutant paranoia to “innoculate” the locals with a supposed cure, with predictably disastrous results. The weird body horror designs are well done and the take on Logan is nicely understated. Okay, there’s an action sequence with an overturning car that doesn’t work at all – I honestly can’t figure out what’s supposed to make it flip. But that aside, this arc is much better than I expected from a Wolverine Infinity Comic.
Phoenix #2 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
PHOENIX #2
Writer: Stephanie Phillips
Artist: Alessandro Miracolo
Colour artist: David Curiel
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Annalise Bissa
PHOENIX:
She’s still running around answering every interstellar distress call she can find, and she’s still terrifying to all the aliens she’s trying to rescue. We’re told that she doesn’t require food, oxygen and so forth, but that she’s still “exhausted” – presumably emotionally, though I suppose it could mean that because she has a human mind, she still needs sleep. She doesn’t much like or trust Corsair, but see below regarding this book’s take on Corsair.
SUPPORTING CHARACTERS:
Corsair is rescued by Phoenix from a damaged spaceship which is about to explode. According to Corsair’s account – which it’s strongly suggested that we should be very sceptical about – the Starjammers have abandoned him “for no good reason”. This has prompted him to try and become a hero. He started investigating a series of disappearances from Gameworld (the casino planet that featured prominently in Gerry Duggan’s X-Men run), and discovered that the captives were being smuggled away by the Black Order to a small moon in a nearby star system. He says that the Black Order shot at his ship, which is why it was damaged when Phoenix found him.
Daredevil Villains #35: Mister Fear III
DAREDEVIL #90-91 (August-September 1972)
“The Sinister Secret of Project Four!” / “Fear is the Key!”
Writer: Gerry Conway
Penciller: Gene Colan
Inker: Tom Palmer
Letterers: Sam Rosen (#90), Artie Simek (#91)
Colourist: not credited
Editor: Stan Lee (#90), Roy Thomas (#91)
We’ve skipped five issues with returning villains, so let’s get up to speed.
Issue #85 is a Gladiator story and it doesn’t matter in the slightest. Issue #86 brings back the Ox, but it’s an important issue for other reasons: Matt Murdock and Karen Page briefly reunite, it all goes wrong, and they decide that they were never meant to be together after all. Matt then decides to move to San Francisco and pursue his relationship with the Black Widow which is where the book will stay for a while to come. The existing supporting cast are completely jettisoned. Karen joins the cast of Ghost Rider for a while, but doesn’t return to this book until issue #227. Foggy Nelson won’t appear again until the book returns to New York in issue #108.
In their place are the Black Widow, her sidekick Ivan Petrovich (who comes with Natasha as a package deal), and a bunch of new Californian characters mostly forgotten by posterity, such as irascible police commissioner Ironguts O’Hara.
Clearly either Conway or his editors decided that the book wasn’t working and that drastic steps were needed. After all, Daredevil had been on the verge of merging with Iron Man. So far, Conway has struggled to find a hook on Daredevil himself; moving to San Francisco doesn’t change that, but it does make Daredevil into Marvel’s token west coast book, and it means that the Black Widow can be mined for story ideas.
The X-Axis – w/c 12 August 2024
X-MEN: FROM THE ASHES INFINITY COMIC #10. By Alex Paknadel, Phillip Sevy, Arthur Hesli & Clayton Cowles. This is the start of another three-parter, and this time it’s an Omega Red arc. Thanks to Krakoa, Omega Red has been somewhat rehabbed to the point where you can now write a relatively sympathetic story about the guy. Arkady has been mellowed by his time on Krakoa to the point where he decides to go back and see his home town again. He gets a rather mixed reaction, and the story deals with that reasonably well. It looks like we’re getting some kind of story about odd things happening to local kids over the years, which feels like it could be looking to retcon some of his back story, but we’ll see where that goes. I’m not particularly up for toning down his history, I have to say. Anyway, all this is ultimately a lead-in to Sentinels #1, which is the real context for anything we’re doing.
X-MEN #2. (Annotations here.) The X-Men head to San Francisco to help a new mutant whose powers have emerged in the middle of an apparent alien invasion, which remarkably enough turns out not to be a coincidence. Actually, that makes more sense than you’d think – even in Marvel Universe logic, “his powers created the alien invasion” is a lot less likely than “it’s a stressful event that triggered his powers manifesting”, so I don’t think the X-Men come across as too silly for not jumping straight to the right conclusion.
