X-Men Unlimited Infinity Comic #59: “The Fall of the House of X”
X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #59
“The Fall of the House of X”
Writer: Alex Paknadel
Artist: Nick Roche
Colourist: Lee Loughridge
Letterer: Joe Sabino
Editor: Lauren Amaro
This issue came out on Hallowe’en, and it has a rather charming approach to that theme: it’s basically an old fashioned horror anthology story, framed by campfire scenes where Cypher acts as the storyteller.
It’s not just a random anthology story, though; it’s Tales from the Hidden Past of Krakoa. According to Cypher, after the island was separated from Arakko, it spend most of its time dormant. Unless it was disturbed. This story is about 19th century mutant Silas Ellerby, heading to the Americas with his wife to make their fortune when their boat sinks. Silas winds up on Krakoa, and since he’s a mutant, the island perks up a bit and takes notice.
Unfortunately for Krakoa, Silas’s powers just happen to be control over the Earth (at least the bit around him), which includes Krakoa. So instead of Krakoa being able to eat him, he sets about tearing Krakoa apart in order to build rafts (which don’t work) and a mansion in tribute to his late wife (which does, but that doesn’t resolve the lack of food problem). And without him realising what’s happening, Krakoa tries to find ways to calm him down, get rid of him, or at least placate him. Which, of course, ultimately involves Krakoa hunting for the shipwreck.
It’s a nice little idea – a pleasantly traditional story concept from the House of Mystery style, and a more inventive way of approaching the Hallowe’en remit than just chucking some zombies at the page. Nick Roche, best known for his Transformers work, is a very good storyteller and his design for the makeshift mansion gets the right mix of impressive and wonky.
The last panel misfires – I know the original genre often involved the narrator spelling out the moral for everyone’s benefit, but it feels too much here. Something a bit more ambiguous would have been more effective, I think. On the whole, though, a nice little holiday issue.
X-Men Unlimited Infinity Comic #56-58: “X-Friends”
X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #56-58
“X-Friends”
Writer & artist: Jason Loo
Colourist: Antonio Fabela
Letterer: Joe Sabino
Editor: Lauren Amaro
This is a sequel to the three-part “Downtime” arc featuring Madrox and Strong Guy, also by Jason Loo, which ran in issues #21, #27 and #34 (because X-Men Unlimited Infinity Comic is a weird book).
As in the previous arc, Strong Guy wants to hang out with his old pal Madrox, while Madrox is more preoccupied with his responsibilities as a father, leaving Guido stuck with the duplicates. They’re off in the Shi’ar galaxy for the equivalent of a weekend in Vegas, and manage to lose their ship as well as a bunch of dupes.
It turns out, of course, that the dupes took the ship, and for some reason a night on the town has convinced them to… go off and become pirates? I’m not sure that’s how it’s meant to work. Somehow or other there’s meant to be an angle in here where Madrox decides that he needs to solve his problems for himself rather than palming them off on dupes, but since that’s not really what he did wrong in the first place, it doesn’t quite land. And it’s not really a Guido story at all.
So they track down the renegade dupes, Madrox absorbs most of them, and one of them just gets handed over to the authorities to take the fall for everything. It’s pretty lightweight stuff, even for Unlimited, with the highlight being the character work in Loo’s art. As for the story, it just doesn’t click.
X-Men Unlimited Infinity Comic #50-55: “Secret X-Men 2022”
X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #50-55
“Secret X-Men 2022”
Writer: Steve Foxe
Artist: Alan Robinson
Colourist: Carlos Lopez
Letterer: Joe Sabino
Editor: Jordan D White
Continuing our run through the recent X-Men Unlimited arcs, here’s something a bit more typical of the book – which is to say, a bit more marginal. Remember last year’s Secret X-Men one-shot, featuring all the losing candidates from the fan vote that decided the last place on the team? Well, it’s that, but with the 2022 line-up.
I didn’t think this really worked last year, since the characters weren’t selected to be the natural cast of a story in the first place, and it winds up being a bit of an exercise in pulling some elements out of a hat and seeing if you can get a story out of them. And this year… yeah, not dissimilar, if we’re being honest. This is a Hellfire Gala tie-in story, though I’m not reviewing it quite as late as that makes it sound. It ran from the last week of August to the first week of September; the actual Hellfire Gala one-shot shipped in mid July. I suppose that probably means they waited to see who had won the vote before they started work on this, which would be fair enough.
So who have we got here? Well, we’ve got Penance, who is unexpectedly at a loose end after X-Corp suffered early cancellation. We’ve got Siryn, who also counts as a reasonably big name. We’ve got a whole bunch of teen characters who aren’t doing much – Gentle, Armor, Surge and Bling!. I guess Bling! was in the Sabretooth miniseries, but this must be the most prominent appearance Armor has made outside Marvel Snap in several years. We’ve got Avalanche, the member of Freedom Force who never comes up, even though Mystique, Destiny and Pyro are big names. And we’ve got Micromax, who was very, very briefly a member of Excalibur at the tail end of Alan Davis’s run, treated here as a bit of a joke character.
X-Men Unlimited Infinity Comic #44-49: X-Men Green III
X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #44-49
Writer: Steve Orlando
Artist: Emilio Laiso
Colourist: Rachelle Rosenberg
Letterer: Joe Sabino
Editor: Jordan D White
For those of you who aren’t subscribed to Marvel Unlimited – or who just aren’t interested in reading all six or so Infinity Comics that come out each week – X-Men Unlimited remains the closest the line comes to a core title. There are Unlimited titles for the Avengers and Spider-Man books too, but they’re peripheral – the Spider-Man one is quite keen on doing Spider-Verse stories, for example. X-Men Unlimited is like that about half of the time, but also has running stories that it returns to, the main one being “X-Men Green”.
The tone of these stories has noticeably shifted from the first arc with Gerry Duggan. By accident or design, that arc winds up trying to have its cake and eat it, by being half-heartedly disapproving of Nature Girl’s eco-terrorism, but with a definite overtone of “yeah but corporations amirite”. We’re meant to basically agree with Krakoa letting them escape, after all. Over the following arcs – this is the third – the tone has shifted emphatically to “dangerous lunatics”. Of the group, only Nature Girl is really even motivated by environmentalism, and even she has lost touch with reality, allowing her to be manipulated by Hordeculture (who, for the most part, are played as straight villains in this story). Sauron has weird obsessions about avenging the dinosaurs, and Curse just likes having an excuse to destroy stuff.
Knights of X
KNIGHTS OF X #1-5
Writer: Tini Howard
Artist: Bob Quinn
Colourist: Erick Arciniega
Letterer: Ariana Maher
Editor: Sarah Brunstad
So before you ask, yes, this did finish a while back, but the collected edition isn’t out till December, and that makes this Still Timely. Somewhat. My plan right now is to clear the backlog of minis and completed Infinite Comics that I haven’t written about yet, and then go back and catch up on ongoing titles that I’m writing about as they come out anyway – but since Knights of X wound up being a five issue series, let’s cover it here.
Marvel’s approach to this series is… let’s say confusing, shall we? It’s the sequel to Excalibur, a book that had its fans, but I had a few problems with. Part of that was that magic stories have never really been my thing where the X-books are concerned, and that’s just a matter of taste. But part of it was that the book always rang painfully false to me when it went anywhere near Britain, and since a major part of the plot was “who gets to be Captain Britain”, that was a big problem.
So Knights of X, refocussing the book simply on Otherworld, seemed to me like a good move. It was focussing on the book’s strengths and letting it get on with some world building. It was clearly intended to be an ongoing title, and it winds up being cancelled after five issues. Okay. These things happen. But… it’s then being relaunched again in 2023, with the same writer, as Betsy Braddock: Captain Britain. That’s just weird. That’s mixed signals if ever I saw them.
Charts – 18 November 2022
No. Not that. Not now…
But first… Taylor Swift gets her fourth week at number one. This has grown on me, to be honest. It is a return to Taylor Swift banging on about fame, but it’s a better version of that song than many of her previous singles in the same vein.
We’re going a long way down for the first new entry…
18. Bugzy Malone & TeeDee – “Out of Nowhere”
Bugzy Malone had another track get to number 39 in September, but this matches his all-time peak of 18 with “M.E.N. III”. It’s a weird track – more mainstream dance than typical UK rap, but a bit too wonky to quite count as that either.
Immortal X-Men #8 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
IMMORTAL X-MEN #8
“Part 8: The Curious Case of Dr Essex and Mr Sinister”
Writer: Kieron Gillen
Artist: Michele Bandini
Colourist: Davie Curiel
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Design: Tom Muller, Jay Bowen & Kieron Gillen
Editor: Jordan D White
COVER / PAGE 1: An ageing photo of Irene and Raven in Victorian times.
PAGE 2. Data page – a quote supposedly from Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). “Fate is the word cowards use to describe the things they’re too weak to change.”
It comes from X-Men Legacy #214, in which Mr Sinister attempted to take over Professor X’s body, in a scheme which is referred to later in the issue. Sinister claims that, because of his tinkering with Xavier’s DNA, Xavier is fated to become his new body; Xavier defeats him, delivering the line and attributing it to Nietzsche. In fact, I can’t find any reference to this quote on Google that isn’t either referring to the X-Men Legacy issue, or including it in a list of inspirational quotes that seems to postdate the Legacy issue. (The inspirational version has it as “things we’re too weak to change.”)
Here, of course, the quote takes on a context of referring to Destiny, whose very name is an ironic contradiction of the fact that she devotes her life to trying to use her foreknowledge of the future to alter it.
PAGE 3-5. 1943. Mystique breaks into Alamagordo.
Alamagordo. Alamagordo is a city in New Mexico, but the local air force base was also the site of the world’s first nuclear test, in 1945. X-Men #12 (1965) establishes that Professor X’s father worked there, the original idea being to imply that Professor X had become one of the first mutants as a result of his father’s exposure to radiation.
Charts – 11 November 2022
It’s another week when a major album release dominates the singles chart. But first…
That’s three weeks, which is her longest run at number 1. Her only previous number 1 single is 2017’s “Look What You Made Me Do”, which lasted two weeks. (Yes, really. Forty-three top 40 hits, and that’s the only other one that made number one.)
3. Drake & 21 Savage – “Rich Flex”
5. Drake & 21 Savage – “Major Distribution”
7. Drake & 21 Savage – “Circo Loco”
That’s the maximum three tracks from their album “Her Loss”, which enters the album chart at 1. It’s Drake’s second album of the year, after “Honestly Nevermind”, which reached number 2 in June. That got three singles into the top 10 as well, but the highest got to number 7, and that one had… er, 21 Savage on it. Drake now has a total of 37 top 10 hits, thanks in part to album tracks, and this is his fifth number 1 album.
Sabretooth & The Exiles #1 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
SABRETOOTH & THE EXILES #1
“X-Isle”
Writer: Victor LaValle
Artist: Leonard Kirk
Colourist: Rain Beredo
Letterer: Cory Petit
Design: Tom Muller with Jay Bowen
Editor: Mark Basso
SABRETOOTH & THE EXILES is a 5-issue miniseries and a direct continuation of the recent Sabretooth miniseries by the same creative team. The recap page covers the set-up, but for any newcomers, the following points are worth flagging. First, Sabretooth was sent to the Pit for breaking the “murder no man” law before it was actually made, and without any sort of trial, and in circumstances where he arguably believed he had a promise of amnesty. Much of the first miniseries is a discussion of the nature and function of prisons and authority. When he escaped, his fellow “exiles” (meaning here prisoners in the Pit) were sent after him by Mystique and Destiny, but the rest of the Quiet Council don’t yet know that the prisoners have all escaped.
This series has no connection with any of the previous incarnations of Exiles.
PAGE 2. Data page. A prologue by Mole, originally a very minor background character from 1980s X-Factor, who got to play a more important role in the plot of the first mini. He’s restating another of the core themes of the first series, that the background characters are marginalised and ignored by the stars, even the heroes.
Legion of X #7 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
LEGION OF X #7
“The Hand That Mocked Them, And The Heart That Fed”
Writer: Si Spurrier
Penciller: Netho Diaz
Inker: Sean Parsons
Colourist: Federico Blee
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Design: Tom Muller with Jay Bowen
Editor: Sarah Brunstad
COVER / PAGE 1: Beast, Lost, Jean Grey, Vox Ignis, Pixie and Blindfold reacting in horror, while a thorned and horned Nightcrawler looks to be in pain.
PAGES 2-4. Nightcrawler briefs the Legion.
The two characters heading through the gate into the Altar are Maggott and Blob. Maggott’s getting an unusual amount of page time these days, albeit mostly as a background character.
The recognisable Legion members are Lost, Dr Nemesis, Chamber, Pixie and Fabian Cortez (standing separately from the others, but behind Kurt – without knowing his background, he’d look like a completely normal second in command). There are a couple more that don’t seem familiar, though I feel sure I ought to recognise the unnamed woman with the black hair and the cape. I’m completely blanking on her, though.
