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.
Charts – 5 January 2024
Last week, there were 37 Christmas singles on the chart. This week, every single one of them is gone. There are almost no new releases to take their place.
Brace for chaos.
1. Noah Kahan – “Stick Season”
We start with something fairly predictable. Originally released in autumn 2022, this entered the top 40 in October, partly on the back of an Olivia Rodrigo cover. It’s one of the three non-Christmas songs that clung in like limpets during the festive deluge – it even stayed in the top 10 throughout – and so it’s been the obvious number 1 in waiting. It finally becomes his first number 1 in its 13th week on the chart, having previously spent two weeks at number 2. His other single “Northern Attitude” re-enters at number 28, after a previous two-week run in November where it peaked at 16.
And now for something less obvious.
8. Sophie Ellis-Bextor – “Murder on the Dancefloor”
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”.
Daredevil Villains #10: The Plunderer
DAREDEVIL #12-13 (January & February 1966)
“Sightless, in a Savage Land” / “The Secret of Ka-Zar’s Origin!”
Writer, editor: Stan Lee
Layout penciller: Jack Kirby
Finishing penciller, inker: John Romita
Letterer: Sam Rosen
Colourist: not credited
DAREDEVIL #14 (March 1966)
“If This Be Justice…!”
Writer, editor: Stan Lee
Penciller: John Romita
Inker: “Frankie Ray” (Frank Giacoia)
Letterer: Artie Simek
Colourist: not credited
However questionably, Stan Lee apparently felt that Wally Wood’s run on Daredevil had gone awry. Wood’s replacement was John Romita Sr, doing his first work for Marvel. This time, Lee took no chances, with Jack Kirby doing the layouts for Romita’s first two issues before Romita (who says that he only wanted the inking work at first) took over as penciller. He didn’t stick around on Daredevil for long, but that’s because he was swiftly promoted to Amazing Spider-Man.
As for the story direction, Lee seems to have been toying with drastic action. The previous arc ends with a tacked-on epilogue in which Matt and Foggy suddenly realise that they’ve been so preoccupied with the plot that they haven’t been doing any legal work and they’ve run out of money. They need to downsize. So Matt announces that he’s leaving, and the whole thing plays like it’s setting up a new status quo.
It isn’t. Instead, Daredevil spends three issues exploring the back story of Ka-Zar, before Matt simply returns to the office, with no mention of why he left in the first place. It’s been three months, the kids will have forgotten.
Charts – 29 December 2023
This is the chart that covers Christmas Day itself. It also covers the three days after Christmas, when you might think the Christmas music would be tailing off a bit. But if it did, then the effect was swamped by everyone hammering the Christmas playlists in the first half of the week. And so we’re looking at another all-Christmas post.
Four weeks this year, seven in total. I’m pretty sure the Christmas records will be gone next week – last year, “Last Christmas” dived from number 1 straight out of the top 100. The top three are all non-movers, with Sam Ryder at 2 and Mariah Carey at 5. Most of the chart consists of the existing Christmas records squeezing up another place or two, but that does free up some space at the bottom for five new tracks – all of them Christmas.
35. Michael Jackson & The Jackson Five – “Santa Claus is Coming to Town”
Just think, there could be future generations for whom Michael Jackson’s reputation rests entirely on “Thriller” and “Santa Claus is Coming to Town”. Ask Wizzard if you don’t believe me. This track was recorded for the “Jackson 5 Christmas Album” in 1970, and wasn’t released as a single at the time. It first charted in 2018 when it got to number 30, but hasn’t managed to establish itself as a chart regular. It got to 40 last year.
The X-Axis – w/c 25 December 2023
X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #119. By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Phillip Sevy, Ceci de la Cruz & Travis Lanham. Is this the first time that an X-book has been published on Christmas Day? Truly, it warms the heart to think of the diligent assistant editor, trudging through the snow to the offices of Marvel Comics to press the big red PUBLISH button on the thirty-second floor. That’s dedication. Especially for the middle chapter of an Arakko storyline. This is turning into the sort of Arakko story that doesn’t work for me – the sort where we’re somehow making the logical leap from “expressing your pain is a good thing” to “battering one another with sticks is a good thing”. To be fair, I suppose this sort of ritual combat event is a fairly standard fantasy trope, and the genre has never much appealed to me anyway. But when you start trying to rationalise it in this kind of therapy-speak way, and have a bunch of characters from Earth nodding along and going “yes, this all sounds entirely reasonable”, you end up lampshading how much it doesn’t make sense.
IMMORTAL X-MEN #18. (Annotations here.) This is the final issue – or, if you prefer, the book morphs into Rise of the Powers of X for its final arc. Either way, we really are entering the home stretch of the Krakoan era now. This is the pay off for Mother Righteous’ attempts to become a Dominion, and it rather cleverly hits the accelerator by revealing that Orbis Stellaris and Dr Stasis already tried and failed to become Dominions off panel. Actually, maybe it really is rushing to the end for scheduling reasons, but if so, it’s a very neat way of making it into a positive.
