The X-Axis – w/c 11 November 2024
X-MEN: FROM THE ASHES INFINITY COMIC #23. By Tim Seeley, Eric Koda, Arthur Hesli & Clayton Cowles. So this is the Thanksgiving issue, as Beak and his family show up at the X-Men’s headquarters in Merle, to the utter bewilderment of the team, who weren’t actually expecting them. It turns out that this is actually heading somewhere, since there’s a story continuing into the next issue that explains why Beak wanted to visit. But this issue is simply the improvised Thanksgiving dinner, a nice little scene in which the X-Men – even Quentin – tell Beak’s kids how great he is. And given her back story, it’s a nice touch to have Psylocke going out of her way to spend time with the kids. A perfectly nice little holiday issue.
UNCANNY X-MEN #5. (Annotations here.) This is billed as the concluding part of “Red Wave”. But you might be better off putting that out of your mind, since it suggests you should be expecting a bit more resolution than the story actually gives you. It’s the end of the current fight with Sarah Gaunt and her followers, to be sure, and it’s not simply the break point for the first trade paperback, which runs up to issue #6. It gives some clarification on Sarah’s delusions. But it doesn’t really resolve the questions of what she actually is, whether she’s a mutant or something else. And the Outliers don’t really play into the ending at all All of which is fine if you think of it as just issue #5 in an ongoing series, and that’s probably the better way of approaching it.
Taking it on that level, it’s a pretty good end to the fight, with Harvey X’s death in issue #1 being cast in a new light. Mind you, the resolution does depend on Harvey’s powers somehow allowing Rogue to beat Sarah, and I don’t follow at all how that’s meant to work. If the idea was that Sarah was vulnerable to psychics then that would make some sense, but Rogue just hits her, so it’s all a bit confusing, and that takes it down a bit. Still, the art is absolutely beautiful, and I’m on board with where the book is going.
NYX #5. (Annotations here.) Ah. Well. Oh dear.
You have to feel sorry for everyone who worked on this issue, because it must be one of the worst timed comics in history. To choose this of all weeks to ship a story in which an evil political scheme is thwarted by Kamala’s honest camaigning and appeal to America’s better nature is simply painful, and everyone invovled must have known it was dead on arrival before it hit the shelves.
But the story has fundamental problems, and the timing really just throws them into sharper relief. Empath’s plan doesn’t make sense – he wants to oppress the mutant community so that he can radicalise them and… do what, exactly? How does the umpteenth superhero fight in Times Square possibly shift the needle in New York politics, when the series of terrorist attacks by an explicit mutant didn’t? Why does nobody notice that all of those attacks have killed members of the city council? When did the bye-elections take place to get Empath’s stooges onto the council? Why do our heroes leave it until the last 24 hours to start campaigning against Empath’s ghettoisation law? What on earth do a handful of characters plausibly do in that time to have any possible effect on the outcome?
Some books can get away with this sort of all-purpose handwaving about the power of activism, but NYX is a book that was devoting space to David Alleyne’s pseudo-academic musings about the nature of mutant culture in the diaspora. You can’t just whiplash from that to “Golly jeepers, the malt shop is being closed down and we only have 24 hours to save it! Let’s do the intersectional solidarity right here!” And that’s pretty much what this issue would have been, even in more propitious times.
PSYLOCKE #1. (Annotations here.) So, another attempt to make an ongoing solo X-book work. And I can see the thinking. If Marvel want a Whole Bunch of X-Books then there are only so many teams you can do before they all become very similar. Maybe it’s easier for a solo title to be distinct. Of course, the X-books are full of characters who were never designed to be solo leads. In many cases, it’s very hard work to find reasons why they would encounter a problem and do anything other than call in the X-Men. But then there are a handful of characters who do seem like they should be off having solo adventures which they’re not telling peole about. It worked with Wolverine. It worked for a time with Gambit (and I’m slightly surprised they’re not trying with him, to be honest). Psylocke arguably fits the pattern.
Then again. Kwannon wasn’t created to be a viable solo lead either; she was created to be a plot device for a body swap angle involving Betsy Braddock. She used to have a motivation about finding her lost child, but that was all tied up during the Krakoan era. What’s left is all rather familiar. “Can I transcend being the living weapon I was made into” is Wolverine. “Can I transcend being the living weapon I was made into from childhood” is X-23. “Can I transcend the living weapon I was made into by the Hand” is Elektra. All good characters, of course, but it’s familiar territory, occupied by some big beasts already. Does Psylocke bring anything new to the trope? There’s the supportive partner angle with Greycrow, I guess. There’s that.
Alyssa Wong and Vincenzo Carratù’s first issue is a solid enough rendition of what we already knew about Psylocke, but doesn’t seem to bring any hook that adds to the formula. Maybe they’re just restating the premise before moving forward, but as a first issue, it doesn’t convince me. It’s okay, but it feels very unnecessary.
VENOM WAR: WOLVERINE #3. By Tim Seeley, Tony Fleecs, Kev Walker, Java Tartaglia & Cory Petit. The end of the miniseries – if you’re wondering, the trade paperback bundles it with two other three-issue minis, with Deadpool and Carnage. Now I could live without what seems to be a permanent second Wolverine title, Insert Event Here: Wolverine. But if you’re going to do it, at least this has been a strong example of how to do it. We’re in the margins of Venom War, up in Maine. It’s really a story about a dysfunctional family that Wolverine happens to have encountered once before. The symbiotes are just here as a plug-and-play device that turns that family drama into something Wolverine can fight. In other words, the crossover is being used as an off-stage shorthand to save the book the trouble of setting up its own macguffin. It’s still a bit nailed on, but it works well enough, and the key thing is that it uses the event in service of its own story rather than vice versa.
I wonder if Brevoort will adress the poorly-timed issue in his column. I presume someone will ask the question in the comments, if they haven’t already.
A new series called Weapon X-Men is debuting in February. It features Cable, Wolverine, Deadpool, Thunderbird and Chamber as part of a take-no-prisoners squad and is written by Joe Casey. In other words. this is the real X-Force, as opposed to Thorne’s title which he never intended to be called X-Force.
I know Deadpool and Wolverine is a blockbuster movie but how many books with Deadpool and Wolverine teaming up do we need? We’ve got Deadpool and Wolverine and now this book.
This book shows the problem of bringing Thunderbird book. This is a defecto X-Force book. Ordinarily, Warpath would be a.member. But instead, we’ve got Thunderbird as a member. Thunderbird basically makes Jimmy redundant. It’s the major reason Thunderbird was never brought back before Krakoa and it’s the reason why Baron Heinrich Zemo was never brought back. (Yes, I know about the Baroness thing but they quickly said she was lying.)
You would think that Bishop would be a member of a book like this. I wonder what’s going to happen to him after Timeless. You would think that since Fitzroy is appearing in MacKay’s X-Men, he’d be appearing there too but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
By the way. Casey said this series has been in the works over a year- so Breevort always knew Cable going to be part of a regular book.
In other news, Angel will be returning as leader of X-Factor in issue 7- but the team will now be working for Doom as a result of One World Under Doom.
In other One World Under Doom news. a Thunderbolts limited series called Thunderbolts:Doomstrike by Kelly and Lanzing will be out in February. The idea is that Bucky Barnes, US Agent, Black Widow and Sharon Carter form the Thunderbolts to oppose Doom and they get Songbird to join them. Unfortunately Doom has Zemo on his side, so he’s able to recruit his own Thunderbolts including Moonstone, Fixer and Atlas.
We discussed a couple of months ago how Songbird has barely shown up since Secret Empire in 2017, so it’s nice that she’s going to actually get to do something. But OTOH, I don’t think Kelly and Lanzing’s work on NYX is filling anyone with confidence.
It would seem Beak’s daughter coughing all the time is the real reason Beak made his impromptu trip. That one uh … panel? of Juggernaut trying to inconspicuously nudge Cyclops justified the whole story for me, I don’t even care if the ending turns out to be as terrible as the Lifeguard one. Hilarious physical humour from Eric Koda.
And hang on, are they having Chamber on a wetworks team? The miserable, snarky goth guy? That’s even worse than when they had Wolfsbane on the team.
I think Chamber is the only mutant character Joe Casey likes. When he was writing Uncanny X-Men, he said he didn’t care about the X-Men. It’s surprising to see him writing another X-comic in 2025, well, outside of for money. Hopefully, he’ll try a bit harder than 24 years ago. Sigh…it’s been 24 years since then.
Anyway, yeah, if I remember correctly, he thought Chamber was an interesting character, even as he couldn’t figure out what to do with the other characters he was writing.
I haven’t seen a lot from Casey within the past decade, but the few comics by him I have sampled doesn’t give me hope. I found Casey to often be an above-average writer in the late-‘90s/early-‘00s, but he couldn’t be bothered with Uncanny X-Men.
Recently reread casey’s Cable. It’s not as good as you all remember. Ladronn still stands out though
My thoughts regarding the Weapon X-Men lineup (My wife on the title: are they just throwing words together???)
The ’90s called and want their headliners back. I mean seriously, Wolverine, Deadpool, and Cable? It’s the ’90s. It’s all three Deadpool movies combined. It’s more ‘kewl’ than should be assembled in the 2020s. Adding Thunderbird and Chamber (my wife: they really ARE just throwing words together!) is just… extra.
If it weren’t for Casey and ChrisCross both being well-established, competent creators, I’d worry for this series on general principle. But this will either go big or flop big (Casey can be really good, or really … experimental.) I suppose this will skew more towards action and stabbing, which will be enough to carry it for a while.
(I guess we now know how quickly Deadpool comes back to life, eh? I mean, I didn’t expect it to take a while, but this is almost as quick a return as Kamala’s…)
It really is a damn shame to see characters back in “classic” uniforms, especially Thunderbird, whose new look was a nice change of pace and felt a little more authentically respectful compared to feathers and fringe…
“It’s okay, but it feels very unnecessary.”
Paul, you just described 98% of Marvel’s entire line. And about the same ratio of DC’s.
One way in which post-Krakoa Psylocke is unlike X-23, Elektra and Wolverine is that she is a mother dealing with the sense of loss. That seems to have been acknowledged in this #1, and can be a good direction for development of the character going ahead.
There is also a hint that her relationship with Greycrow may come to have nuances that she does not know how to describe yet. Figures, given how little opportunity to find her own direction as a person she had so far.
I was going to agree with AMRG above that there are hardly any necessary comics, but I find myself wondering what a necessary comic would be. Odd as it may be, necessary comics may have a harder time seeing publication than unnecessary comics do.
I’m not entirely clear on why “timing” is such an issue with NYX – you’d think recent events would leave us *more* in need of stories that remind us of and reaffirm basic human qualities like compassion and empathy. It may be escapism, but why is that a bad thing?
Maybe because the recent events made many people lose hope and then stories like this feel like another slap in the face?
I haven’t seen any mentions online, but I think this volume of Weapon X-Men was originally going to be another X-Treme X-Men. The title font on the the Alex Ross cover matches the X-treme font that has been used since the first volume as opposed to any previously used Weapon X font.
@JCG: YMMV – personally, I’d prefer a bit less verisimilitude in the MU right now. The last thing anyone needs or wants is another Secret Empire/Nazi Cap situation
@Nate S
The Weapon X-Men logo is based on the logo from Casey’s Uncanny X-Men run, not X-Treme X-Men.
“I wonder if Brevoort will adress the poorly-timed issue in his column. I presume someone will ask the question in the comments, if they haven’t already.”
I doubt it. What would he say? “Geez… sorry everyone, we REALLY didn’t think most Americans were stupid, gullible, or conscienceless enough to elect Dumb Norman Osborn again. Our bad for overestimating you all.”?
No. He might WANT to, but no way would management allow that, nor would the legal team. They don’t want to be in those crosshairs.
Here’s some comments from Breevort on his blog:
Iioo: What’s the point of tying a story about a mutant disease (wow, it’s already 6 years since last one concluded) to Resurrection Protocols? It’s not going to excite Krakoa fans, they’re too busy pointing out holes in it, like the fact that Magneto’s latest resurrection had nothing to do with The Five. It’s not going to please people looking for new X-Men stories not tied to a 5-year hundreds-of-issues story they did not follow. Who is this for?
TOM: It’s a story, Iioo, so it’s for anybody who enjoys reading a story. I do feel like you’re (pre)judging a lot about a story that’s only just begun and about which very little is known. And Magneto was resurrected by the Five in the aftermath of INFERNO, so while they weren’t involved with his latest resurrection, he had definitely been resurrected through the typical Krakoan methodology prior to that.
MB: Tom, can yall please, please, please, please, PLEASE cool it with the Savage Land Rogue variant covers? We get it, she’s sexy and she’s half-naked. Do we really need to objectify her this much? Do we really need ten billion Savage Land Rogue variants for every comic book she appears in? Can we have her in literally any other outfit?
TOM: See the above answer about what sells versus what a particular editor likes, MB. To be honest, I haven’t commissioned a single cover image that has Rogue in that outfit. But plenty of our Retailers are asking for it when they order Retailer-exclusive covers, and as the client, that’s their right. And even internally, we’re aware that those covers tend to sell really well, and will sometimes have our sales team request them when they think they’ll do the project some good. As I want to get the books into as many hands as are possible, I don’t really have a problem with this.
“Sorry to misread the ability of a smug Liberal to galvanize the masses with buzzwords and cheap platitudes. After all, it was going so well before that point. We’re going to do better. Don’t worry, our next event, One World Under Doom, featuring our Donald Trump stand-in saving the world from international Communism is going to be much more timely and relevant. Enjoy.”
Look at that. I should be writing copy for Brevoort. He even used my explanation that Magneto had been resurrected by the Five in “Inferno”. See?
@Nate S- Casey has said he’s the one that came up with the Weapon X-Men name.
@The Other Michael- Casey said in an interview that he chose the cast because they’re the best selling characters Marvel has created. (I assume he means X-characters.) But while that’s true of Wolverine and Deadpool, Cable really hasn’t been a solo sales success since his series was cancelled in 2010. His next series in 2017 sold so horribly that Cable got killed off and replaced with his teenage self. His next series in 2020 was cancelled after only 12 issues. The two Cable miniseries during Fall of X- Children of the Vault and the 2024 Cable series- both sold horribly, with Children of the Vault being outsold by both of his moms’ miniseries. So Casey definitely has a ’90s mindset.
UXM 396 by Joe Casey was what got me into reading comics when I was a little kid and received it at camp. That first page with Iceman and the bagel is a formative moment jn making him my favorite X-Man despite never having heard of him before that. And that arc was all about Chamber, so I’m pretty excited to see Jono and Joe reunited. I didn’t even know about it till reading this page right now. Sweet
I don’t know. I can see why Brevoort might not want to undermine his own creative team or denigrate the corporate product he helped create. But he’s had no problem calling the upcoming administration an “apocalypse” and inviting people who take issue with that to unsubscribe from his newsletter. I’m pretty sure he’s already at least inching closer to those crosshairs.
I love Jaymes’s comment because it’s a great reminder of how everyone’s pathway into comics is different and how what hooked us might be the very stuff that the older fans decried, etc.
Mind, I’ve always thought I was unusually lucky in terms of how I was introduced to the X-Men: I got a pack of comics that included a reprint of the Silver Age X-MEN no. 1 and also the new-at-the-time Claremont/Lee X-MEN no. 1. It was an effective introduction: “Here’s how the X-Men started. Here’s where they’re at now. Clearly a lot has happened (and wouldn’t you like to learn about it?). Away we go.”
“I love Jaymes’s comment because it’s a great reminder of how everyone’s pathway into comics is different and how what hooked us might be the very stuff that the older fans decried, etc.”
Yeah. Nobody considers Maximum Carnage a high point in story telling but it was my first comic event and basically defined Captain America for me.
To touch off of Jaymee’s comment, my introduction wad while touring Quebec. I picked up 117, and it was wtitten in French. I couldn’t read (still cannot) French, but wad thrilled with Kurt’s German phrase and that the team would next arrive in Japan. Perfect tourist item, wish I still had it. Loved Cochrum’s art, but didn’t have a fondness for Claremont until later.
*was not wad
I lucked out on my first X-Men comic. I liked the characters from Spider-Man & His Amazing Friends and the arcade game. I saw X-Men comics at the LCBS, but didn’t recognize any of the characters except for Wolverine and Storm. One day, the shop had a couple boxes of Classic X-Men and New Mutants comics, and I grabbed Classic X-Men 36, which reprinted the 2nd part of the Dark Phoenix Saga. I was hooked, bought the rest of the story one issue per week, and started picking up Uncanny X-Men with issue 273. I would have started with 270, but it was the beginning on the X-Tinction Agenda, and there was no way I could afford a 9 part story at age 12.
My first was UXM 280, which was not exactly a great jumping-on point. The next month was better.
I came into the franchise right around the introduction of the New Mutants but also around the original Brood saga — I think I was sort of off-and-on in the 160s and started reading regularly by the 170s. This firmly being the Claremont era, there was no good time to come in fresh–multiple ongoing storylines and continuing plots and a vast cast of characters and the interconnectedness with the New Mutants… but clearly, young me must have liked what he read, because I never stopped.
Tom Breevort gave an interview today an AIPT:
https://aiptcomics.com/2024/11/18/x-men-monday-275-tom-brevoort/
He discussed how the R-LDS plot would go:
“Well, just by its nature, it almost has to have a wider effect than just adjectiveless X-Men. It has to be a thing that’s in play across the line for potentially any person who went through Krakoan resurrection. I had our Marvel Handbook team do a deep dive to get me a full, comprehensive list of who was resurrected, because I asked Jordan D. White for it and he said they didn’t keep track of it. So we had to put some experts on the case. And I’m sure we’ll screw it up somewhere because we always screw it up somewhere.
But theoretically, this is a circumstance that could pop up anywhere. And as the characters say in X-Men #7, they don’t really know what it is. They’re not even entirely sure that this postulation about it is accurate. This is what Beast is working to try and figure out. And he’s a little bit hampered by the fact that he’s been reset to a much younger period in his life, where he knew less science and less of the developments that have come in all the time since then. But he’s working to figure out what’s caused it.
Will it spread? Can it spread? Will other people get it? How do we stop it? Is there treatment for it? Is there a cure for it? There’s a lot more story there to be unveiled. That’s really just the tip of the iceberg for stuff. But it will definitely be a thing you’ll see as we progress. I’m not rushing to get there. But as we go, it’ll be a thing that’s of interest to X-Force, X-Factor — you know, everybody. And the fairly rare characters who were never resurrected — you’re safe until that’s not the case anymore. And it turns out that you’re just as susceptible to whatever this is. We know very little so far.”
Since Breevort mentioned X-Force. I think it’s same to assume Rachel has R-LDS. I wonder how it’s going to make in impact in X-Factor.
Some other tidbits from the interview:
Sam and Bobby will be appearing soon- the first tidbit will be one of them in Uncanny X-Men.
Legion and Deathdream will be playing significant roles in the near future.
From X-Factor 5, there are images of Darkstar inside the government base and seeing McCloud.
In other news, Paul wrote “It worked for a time with Gambit (and I’m slightly surprised they’re not trying with him, to be honest). ” Someone on twitter wondered the same thing. Breevort’s response was “I hold my cards close, mon ami.” So it looks like some sort of Gambit series is in the works.
God, the mutant disease is a real thing, then? Are there seriously no plot arcs other than the mutant homeland/mutants endangered cycle? So now they’re just feeding off each other directly?
Personally I wouldn’t mind seeing the idea that mutants are just a subspecies of Deviant explored a bit more, or just a rugged status quo for a decade, but it looks like a few years of Legacy M Nano Sublime pox is what we’re getting.
As a note on the political timing of some comics, 2025 will see Marvel running with a crossover called ONE WORLD UNDER DOOM, with prologue issues kicking in around January. That…may be tonally appropriate.
Though if America’s Dear Leader catches wind of it and decides a senior editor or publisher has to “vanish,” well, expect some drastic rewrites.
That may not even be a joke. Florida’s Dear Leader (Jr.) has gone after Marvel’s parent company, Disney, in big ways at a local level (i.e. revoking tax breaks). So if Fox News airs a story on it, we may wind up in a place where we have to say, “No, I never knew C.B. Cebulski existed. There was never a man with that name. Please ignore these old comics. All reprints will be credited as Hail Trump.”
“ was not wad”
Everybody walk the Dinosaur.
I can’t say I’m as hung up as other folks are regarding the timing of the NYX issue. I think it would have been a crass, lazy, and empty ending regardless, and I don’t the comic dods itself any favors by waving at more complex concepts and debates while defaulting to the complete banality of “if folks just listen to one another”.
And honestly, I’m getting tired of comics being this stupid. It’s always this game: the constant extraction of the violences of real life politics and social relations to bolster the pedigree of the medium, while maintaining the broadest amd simplest worldview possible.
I don’t think it’s okay for X-Men comics to draw on the Holocaust, the AIDs crisis, nationalism, racism, amd xenophobia and then completely refuse ri follow through on amy of the complexities that stem from these issues. Be it in terms of character development or actual storytelling.
Some comics get it right. Grant Morrison’s run waw aloof enough to make some connections and hit some emotional notes, Claremont’s soap opera inclinations made everything about how the characters responded, bonded, and moved through the world.
But this feels tired as well.
I don’t expect to see radical politics take center stage in X-Men comics. But I don’t feel comfortable with their being utilized for their novelty value, either.
Amd I don’t think this sort of mass oblivion to the actual messyness of these issues is intrinsic to the medium, any more than it is to any other genre of storytelling.
If we’re dealing in metaphors and abstracts, I get it. But tugging at realism in some aspects while compleyely conceding to pop optimism in most others just doesn’t read right to me.
And for all the miserabilist nostalgia about how good or successful comics used to be, I can’t for the life of me understand the line comics like this try to straddle. And why the industry doesn’t take some of the risks that might actually make it remain relevant.
Jesus, that’s barely legible at all – sorry for the typos…
I have long maintained that super-hero comics are I’ll-equipped to deal with real world issues. There are rare exceptions, but allegory and metaphor are usually better choices. Unfortunately, there’s no simple solution to institutional racism/homophobia/etc., so we get platitudes instead.
Comic book writers do better when they focus on how an issue affects characters, or how such conflicts can be represented by violent exchange. Punching out Captain Nazi only goes so far, but it’s better than giving him a PowerPoint presentation on how racism is wrong. The fact that the X-Men can’t solve anti-mutant prejudice and have to keep reacting to how it affects their lives works, but Prof. X turning everyone tolerant is dumb and too easy.
Sometimes, it’s just nice to have a story where The Flash/SpiderMan/wonder Woman tries to stop CaptIn Cold/The Rhino/Gigantafrom robbing a bank.
“Recently reread casey’s Cable. It’s not as good as you all remember. Ladronn still stands out though”
That’s funny, because I recently reread it, and it was quite a bit better than I remember, or at the very least, a whole lot better than I’d feared it might read today. It suffers very few problems that books of its era did.
“Yeah. Nobody considers Maximum Carnage a high point in story telling but it was my first comic event and basically defined Captain America for me.”
For me, it was Maximum Gar- er, Carnage and Lethal Foes of Spider-man, as my first Spider-comics. And also a Howard Mackie-written 3-parter with Electro. Hard to think of more disposable ’90s junk, but goddammit those were MY ’90s junk.
@Josie: the first Spider-Man comic I bought was Deadly Foes of Spider-Man, which was hyped as “the first Spider-Man limited series!” by my LCBS. I thought the Sinister Syndicate must be a really big deal! Not to mention the sensational character finds of 1991, Darkhawk and Sleepwalker…