The X-Axis – w/c 10 February 2025
ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #10. By Tim Seeley, Edoardo Audino, K J Díaz & Clayton Cowles. Well, there’s some nice art on this. And it’s got beyond the improbable “Captain America doesn’t seem to have noticed that Juggernaut is an X-Man now” stuff to a more plausible angle of Cap not having worked much with this guy and being a bit sceptical about him. It’s also pretty well designed to give them a problem that their powers aren’t particularly well designed to solve. But it’s still a fairly basic “fight then team up” story which isn’t really getting to grips with the more interesting bits about Black Tom. And… you know, I’ll be honest, this is not the time to give me stories about Captain America, old-school beacon of decency. That character is going to be the walking dead until someone comes up with a story that adjusts to 2025 (and persuades Disney to publish it, and good luck with that).
X-MEN #11. (Annotations here.) Corsair returns from outer space, and everyone assumes that he’s there to get the X-Men’s help in fending off space mercenaries. But it’s a (slightly contrived) misunderstanding as they’re actually after Cyclops. Um… fine, I guess? The team banter in the background works for me, and while the book seems to be trying for broadly the same interpretation of Corsair that crashed and burned in Phoenix, it’s done here with a bit more balance that makes it easier to square with his history. It helps, of course, that in this story the idea that he’s only out for himself is just misdirection. But it’s still ultimately “space baddies attack for some reason”, and I’m not sure there’s an issue’s worth of material in this chapter.
PSYLOCKE #4. (Annotations here.) Okay, so apparently they did mean “Taxonomist”, since the word “taxidermy” shows up in this issue. Although I’m not entirely sure they know what it is, since the claim is that the Taxonomist’s drones are a mixture of machinery and “taxidermied animal parts”, which would ultimately just mean that there was a bit of dead fur in there for show. Maybe that is the idea? The “Taxonomist” thing seems to be about him being interested in the division between normal members of a species and mutants, though quite why that makes him interested in Psylocke is tricky to understand. The issue mostly consists of Psylocke making her way through a museum of dead mutant animals and hallucinating, and I’m not sure it quite pulls off the hallucinogenic tone that it’s going for. But I’m glad to see the book addressing head on the question of why someone who’s supposed to have reclaimed her identity after all these years has immediately chosen to become Psylocke II and join the X-Men. We all know the publishing reason – Psylocke was perceived as a popular character and the race-swap angle had come to be seen as increasingly embarrassing – but it doesn’t really make sense as a direction for Kwannon unless you think there are weird hang-ups at play where she’s trying to make a role for herself in taking over the persona that Betsy had abandoned. That shouldn’t become a central focus of the character – it ties her to an exceedingly complicated back story, for a start – but it’s weird enough to call for some exploration.
MAGIK #2. (Annotations here.) This isn’t doing much for me, but that’s more because I don’t care about magic and demons than because there’s anything objectively wrong with the book. If you’re into that sort of thing, then sure, this is a perfectly good book in the vein of Ghost Rider (cursed hero has demonic persona who may be helpful or may not). I’m slightly relieved as well to see that we’re not going to do the obvious thing of have Illyana do a tour of five seal locations, and instead we’re cutting to the chase. The magic electric guitar stuff feels tonally odd to me, though, and the set-up for the show feels really sketchy – a random character inviting Illyana along before basically fading into the background, and nobody noticing her teleport into the room in full view of everyone, feels weird. But it’s got a mood that it pulls off, with some strong design work on the characters, and I can see why someone more inclined to this sort of thing would be keen on it.
DEADPOOL / WOLVERINE #2. (Annotations here.) This feels like it can’t make up its mind whether it wants to be a wacky romp or something darker. Mostly the answer seems to be “wacky romp”, but if that’s the direction, maybe don’t nuke South Dakota, and lean into Stryfe’s absurdity rather than dialling him back? I’m especially unconvinced by the latter choice, since his costume flamboyance was arguably Stryfe’s most distinctive trait beyond his convoluted back story. It’s got some nice monsters, I guess? Maybe a bigger issue is that the series isn’t making much of a case for its own existence. I’ve read plenty of Deadpool / Wolverine team-up stories over the last year and I don’t think it’s a particularly interesting relationship, at least on an ongoing basis. But if the premise of your book is that it is an interesting relationship then… why have Deadpool brainwashed and out of circulation for most of the issue?
CABLE: LOVE AND CHROME #2. By David Pepose, Mike Henderson, Arif Prianto & Joe Sabino. This really does seem to be just a series where Cable meets a woman with her own techno-organic infection and falls in love with her, in a distant alternate future of no wider continuity significance. I mean, there’s an insurgent war for them to fight in, but that’s hardly the point. I’m not sure what sort of market there is for this, but fair play for trying. What it really does have going for it is Henderson’s art (and Prianto’s colouring), which is bold and dynamic stuff and deserves a wider audience – hopefully it gets them an outing on a higher profile book in the future.
The last time they decided to “do something” about Captain America, we ended up with the horrible misfire that was “Secret Empire”. They can’t keep turning Cap into Hitler every time a Right populist is elected into higher office in the US.
Personally, I think they should just ignore the “world outside your window”, which was basically thrown out with the foundation of Krakoa, then choosing to not feature Covid (explaining it away poorly in a random FF issue); as reflecting topical politics is always at odds with Marvel’s sliding timescale. A US presidential election every four months? Nixon as president in 2012 (or something)? Sure.
It doesn’t work.
If Marvel must insist on changing Captain America to reflect the current-day US, then I say hire someone like Mike Baron and let him run wild on the character. I wouldn’t read it (I haven’t read a Steve Rogers comic since 2021 anyway, I was rarely the biggest fan), but I guess it would get some type of fanboys back to reading a Marvel book.
Brevort in his newsletter this week straight up identified Love and Chrome as a”relationship book masquerading as standard super hero title” so I guess that is the point
“The last time they decided to “do something” about Captain America, we ended up with the horrible misfire that was “Secret Empire”.”
I’d argue the last time was Te-Nehisi Coates, which I think mostly didn’t work because he was a still kind of beginning comics writer and at the same time had to deal with an implied gravitas of being an “important writer” who needed to write important stories.
I do think a Cap series that reckons with an intensely divided political climate where, say, the National Anthem is getting booed regularly at sporting events and at the same time half of the political establishment is pushing a hard patriotism angle isn’t unreasonable for a character who is basically draped in the flag. In fact, I think it’s slightly unavoidable for Cap, even when not dealing head-on with that stuff to be seen as a commentary on the state of things.
I think if you got someone like Jason Aaron, who is doing pretty good work on Absolute Superman, which has a political perspective without being heavy handed, on it, they might be able to do something interesting.
It needn’t be “Cap as Nazi”, it could just as easily be in the vein of the Nomad stuff in the 70s. Or even just “Captain America faces a deeply divided public that in some cases sees America as negative, and in some cases wants to turn back the clock to a time of unexamined patriotism”. You can definitely play with Cap being torn between his vision of America and not being made into a pawn in political games etc
The Phoenix series will continue with issue 11 and not be cancelled as some had speculated. It will feature a new artist and someone from Jean’s past will return.
I’m surprised that they’re just getting a new artist, since the art isn’t the main complaint people have about the book. Does Stephanie Phillips have compromising pictures of someone at Marvel?
In other news, Bleeding Cool’s top 10 list for this week came out and Magik came in at number 3- the best title of the week after Absolute Batman and One World Under Doom. These numbers are preliminary but still. I’m shock Magic’s series is doing so well. It beat X-Men and Amazing Spider-Man. I would have never guessed a Magik series would be so popular.
Psylocke, by the way, didn’t make the list, which isn’t a good sign.
They’ve gone to the “man without a country”, “Steve Rogers gives up being a symbol” well too many times. I don’t want to see them return to that any more than “Captain America is a Nazi”.
Yes, the Coates run did try it’s very hardest to be very topical (that was also the last time I was reading a Steve Rogers comic), and it was done terribly. It was also continuing in the usage of Steve Rogers as a “beacon of decency in a polarized, divided world” role, which is what Paul seemed to object to in the presentation of Captain America in this Infinity Comic (the “beacon of decency” aspect of the characterization). It seemed to be very confused about what the different symbolism Coates was trying to use actually represented.
I thought the biggest problem from the very start was that it portrayed many people as mistrusting the Captain America identity due to its being associated with (ugh) “Stevil”, including the president encouraging this type of thinking. I thought the obvious direction was to portray many Americans as thinking this “liberal” Captain America was a fake who had taken away “their true Captain America”. If this was a decision on the part of Marvel editorial to try to not upset fans or a decision on Coates’ part to downplay claims of rhetoric, I’m not sure. I found the decision led to his run being a non-starter, even ignoring the myriad other problems that kept cropping up through the run.
The X-Men also appeared in Spider-Man this week and Storm appeared in One World Under Doom.
So it DOES look like Cyttorak summoned the Juggernaut because he’s just as afraid of the Blight as everyone else.
Everyone except Peter. that is. Am I the only person that thinks that they made Peter too unsympathetic this issue? First, he does nothing while the X-Men are fighting HIS battle. Then, after Strange tells him that the Blight doesn’t just kill people but it makes them kill their loved ones, Peter STILL doesn’t help. I get that he’s been traumatized but he just seems monstrous.
The consensus on the internet is that this is leading up to Aunt May, Shay and Randy dying and Peter giving up his extra lives to save them. But that could have worked if Peter just waited a minute or two to go help the X-Men. This was overkill.
In One World Under Doom, do we really think Zemo is dead? It’s blindingly obvious that Doom intended Reed to find the footage of him killing Zemo, so it’s possible it’s fake. (And even if North intended it to be real, a later writer will probably say it was fake because that’s the simplest way to bring Zemo back.)
Tom Breevort had an interesting revelation on his blog about some long-ago X-Men characters. Remember the Mannites? Those robotic-kids that appeared in the lead up to the Twelve? One of them, Nina, befriended Xavier? it turns out that they have their genesis in an idea Bob Harras had when he was writing Avengers. His idea was that when the government operatives dismantled the Vision, they basically stole his robotic sperm. And they used it to grow their own machine-based life forms. He didn’t get a chance to use his idea when he was Avengers writer so he used it as X-Men editor. Originally, the Livewires series was going to be about them, until Breevort realized their story had reached a conclusion in Astonishing X-Men. (I didn’t think it was that much of a conclusion.)
I always wondered what was going on with the Mannites- they seemed to suddenly appear and then disappear just as quickly. Now it makes a lot more sense.
By the way, Paul, how are you going to handle next week’s Annotations? There’s going to be EIGHT ongoing X-books next week- that’s too many for you to do annotations on in one week. And many of them will have significant plot developments- NYX will answer the question of whether Julian is a murderer and whether he was under Empath’s influence, X-Factor features the return of Angel, X-Force will answer the question of whether Colossus is Tank, etc.
I don’t think Captain America ever represented the average American. He was always the ideal. That ideal hasn’t changed much since the 1940s, no matter what the zeitgeist is doing at any given point.
I’ll probably just do the major ones. It’s a week when I’d probably have been running late anyway due to other commitments, so there’s absolutely no way I’m going to attempt to do the lot.
I never understood the reaction to Secret Empire. The villain turn was clearly never going to stick and was part of a specific story they were telling. There’s been plenty of other, similar stories which have followed the same basic gist and didn’t get anything close to the same visceral response.
Speaking of terrible comics – I’ve been revisiting the X-men Revolution issues from 2000 with Claremont’s return, The Neo and the other books of the era. I hadn’t read them at all probably since their release and far out they’re not good.
The highlights are probably Wolverine and Cable, while the two X-Men books bafflingly spend the first six months on the Neo storyline which is full of Claremont’s worse writing tics and bizarre choices which, with 25 years hindsight, you have to wonder why the editors didn’t step in and suggest something else. I didn’t understand it at the time and it’s even worse today.
The Morrison/Casey 2001 relaunch (plus cutting the line back drastically) was such a breath of fresh air at the time.
Didn’t Zemo die in Punisher? Did they explain why he’s back?
@Ronnie Gardocki- he explained that he faked his death in Falcon and the Winter Soldier 2, back in 2020.
Somebody could probably get a dissertation out of Captain America portrayals in response to Republican administrations.
Nixon: Captain America quits and is temporarily replaced by a right wing nut.
Reagan: Captain America quits and is temporarily replaced by a right wing nut, who gets to stick around as a second-rate hero without particularly softening his stances.
W. Bush: Captain America is presented as a right wing nut in a hyped-up alternate continuity and is largely treated as admirable and heroic, exaggerated just enough that the portion of the audience that thinks about the implications of this can tell themselves it’s supposed to be ironic satire.
Trump: Captain America is literally a Nazi in disguise.
With regards to Captain America and how he represents an ideal of America that’s currently not in vogue… this would be an excellent time to raise John Walker/USAgent’s profile and go back to exploring his conservative, small-town roots. Because if any Cap were to reflect the half of America which voted for Trump, it would be John. Not because he’s an asshole (okay, sometimes he is) but because his values more align with the rural, red state, conservative voters.
Let’s see -him- struggle with the dichotomy between what the voters thought they were getting, and what they really got. Let’s see -him- have his “Nixon moment” (i.e. the head of the Secret Empire being a “top-ranking” government official, the same revelation which made Steve become Nomad…) Let’s see John balance his beliefs with his morals, and struggle to do good as our “leaders” actively destroy the country, as he questions his role and identity and status as an icon.
Pity I don’t actually trust any writer to handle this in an appropriately intelligent and sensitive manner.
@Michael: Thanks! It’s hard to keep track of deaths/resurrections sometimes.
Andrew, I was also puzzled by the SE reaction. Because it was never the real Steve, it read to me as a spotlight on the way in which even the purest symbols can be co-opted and perverted to serve nefarious ends. The real Steve was trapped (somewhere, it’s been 8 years) all along and the first thing he did upon getting back was to smash the twisted imitation.
So many people, including one pretty cool comic fan who brought it up on our first (and only, but not for that reason ) date, got all aghast at that without even reading the comic. So bizarre
Though I do believe most if not all the people around here do read the things they talk about (no shade if you don’t, everyone interacts with media in their own way, I just kind of have a rough impression of this community I’m relatively new to)
I agree that the Wolverine and Deadpool relationship isn’t that interesting. I get the Weapon X connection but they really weren’t a thing until Ryan Reynolds just kept referencing Wolverine as someone Deadpool should team up with in the movies. They each have more interesting partners.
I will be interesting to see how Alpha flight change if used in the next year or so. The current X-Men issues withstanding as that story if they are not skulls would be plotted before the current issues. They spend most of their time attacking the us on behalf of their government or fighting the evil Ottawa deep state, either storyline fits in well with some narratives.
Marvel just spent 3 years of Ironman and the X-Men fighting Elon musk, so I think Steve will be back to nazi punching soon. Or maybe a Nomad era where he goes round the world helping where his govt refuses.
Honestly the way things are going, we’ll be lucky if Marvel doesn’t sweep all of its diverse characters under the rug to comply with the anti-DEI movement. Kamala, Sam Wilson, Miles, all the rest… if Ike Perlmutter still had sway with the company it would probably already have happened.
I mean, if we got a series that was literally just Steve Rogers punching the hell out of Neo-Nazis for 22 pages straight, that would make me happy.
Jaymes.
It’s funny you say that, I got the strong feeling that a lot of the people who were objecting to it weren’t actually reading the book and were just reacting to the Hail Hydra splash page of the reveal.
I didn’t think Spencer’s run on the book was great but the hyperbole surrounding it was absolutely bizarre.
Myself, I think the one mistake to make with Captain America is to make him remain or resume as Captain America.
If anything, that is clearer than ever now.
Steve Roger’s Hero’s Journey requires that he let go of the naivete of his original costumed identity.
It is alright. And it is, clearly, necessary.
Secret Empire deserved to get exactly as much hate as it did but just for being a truly dreadful comic, not for whatever it was that people were all wound up about.
Speaking as one of the people who freaked out over “Hail Hydra”: For me, it was that, in a time when the real America was looking incredibly grim, Steve Rogers was a comfort. To have even my fictional “comfort food” ripped away felt like adding insult to injury. It was the exact opposite of the escapism I wanted.
Looking back, I am no longer angry at Marvel for doing that. Rather, I am angry at myself for such a reductive response. The art we want, and the art we *need* are often opposed.
@Jaymes: SE said that that was the real cap, and the one who replaced him is an imitation.
@ Andrew
If you’ve followed Conservative politics for the last few decades, it wouldn’t seem that bizarre. Inventing things to be outraged about is their bread-and-butter.
Grab anything you can find whichon its surface level can be distort or misrepresented into something you can go apoplectic about, and you’re halfway to a successful run for Congress.
You may think I’m joking, but some MAGA wannabe probably picked up a handful of votes somewhere in Florida or middle America ranting about woke Marvel Comics, and why does Spider-Man have to be black and Captain America a Nazi? Reading the actual comics is not a prerequisite.
@Alexx Kay: All the blame isn’t on you or other fans. Marvel repeated over and over that this was the real Steve and the story would not just end with it being reversed. If fans saw Steve as comfort food in a time when America was going nuts, the promise that Steve would never return had to make it 100X worse.
Also, having read SE, it’s clear that they changed the ending due to the backlash. The story was heavily setting up Sam to take over as Cap after publicly defeating Stevil. In the last 2-3 issues or so, it swerves and Buckey’s faith in Steve convinces Kobit to just conjure a new Steve. Not to mention, how everyone just fails in line with Hydra (though there was some magical influence), everyone now seems to treat it as perfectly normal that they did so back then.
It was just a bad story that was poorly conceived since it had a cosmic cube at the heart of it, a magical macguffin that could do anything except reverse the story. Then Ultron shows up in the middle for no reason and his little overall impact. They could’ve ended it a 100 ways (Ultron takes Kobit, Kobit undoes everything and accidentally erases Steve or Bucky or Hydra from existence (which leads to more problem for a future story), Ultron switches from Pym to Cap, etc). Anything would’ve been better than either the planned or eventual ending.
Secret Empire is pretty terrible but I admit I liked the sojourn into Ultronville. It’s slim pickings for Hank Pym fans for the last, uh, decade, so to see him tear into Tony Stark was riveting.
“I discovered Pym particles! I took artificial intelligence to the next level! I founded the Avengers Academy! What have you ever done? You were a lout and a cretin who made his fortune selling weapons to murderers. Your arrogance started two wars–your incompetence put Norman Osborn in power!”
Don’t get me wrong. I liked it as well as it was at least well-written, but it was shoehorned into SE. Ultron is a big enough threat to carry his own crossover. If they were going to include him in SE, it should’ve been in a more relevant role instead of what was effectively a sidequest.
It’d be like Onslaught dropping into Raid on Graymalkin to tell the x-men he has the keys to Xavier’s cell and to ridicule them for fighting for no reason, then leaving.
“Does Stephanie Phillips have compromising pictures of someone at Marvel?”
I think it more likely someone at Marvel has compromat on Stephanie Philips. I have loved some of her other work. This feels almost vindictively bad.
VoldeBreevort: Nice work on Spider-Gwen Ms. Philips… if you want to keep it, you’ll have to work on a certain character assassination project of mine that no one else is willing to do.
Note that I recognise that I am being unfair, but…
There was an interesting idea somewhere behind Secret Empire: What about the ideas and iconography of the U.S. that can be used to justify fascism? What happens when someone in a position of high trust is subverted?
But the plot mechanics ended up being an arbitrary, externally imposed transformation that was inevitably going to lead to a similarly deus ex machina reversal down the line. Steve Rogers hasn’t been disillusioned and warped by actual circumstance. Instead, a Nazi supervillain has tricked a naive deity into changing his personality.
Any intended allegory was further muddled by having Evil Steve Rogers behaving like a standard-issue supervillain once he went public with his plans, to the point that virtually everyone sane in the story would be against him. He openly leads HYDRA and taking over the U.S., blows up Las Vegas, setting up planetary force fields, and suchlike.
Spencer also went for big crazy stuff happening, like HYDRA Cap using Thor’s hammer. And the plot got more and more absurd as the event went on, to the point that it’s a major turn when a character called Barf literally coughs up up a fragment of a sentient Cosmic Cube.
It’s a story that couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be chilling or wacky. It manages to tick off Steve Rogers fans while asking them to care a bunch about Captain America as an identity. And the plotting requires everyone else to be either stupid or useless.
Snark aside, this seems to be an example of someone creating a title and then handing it to whoever is around, instead of someone pitching an arc about a character they love.
“Steve Roger’s Hero’s Journey requires that he let go of the naivete of his original costumed identity.”
The problem is they’ve done that story. Twice.
A couple more pieces of news:
A while back, Breevort mentioned that he had a “grand unifying theory” of Scott and Jean’s relationship that would explain Scott’s behavior in the early issues of X-Factor and Scott’s affair with Emma. Breevort has said that we’ll learn it, or at least the essence of it, in June. But it’s in a “project that we haven’t entirely announced yet”.
According to Bleeding Cool, Marvel will be launching an Emma Frost: the White Queen series in June. It’s not clear if it’s a limited series or an ongoing.
It’s not clear if these two pieces of news are connected- if the “grand unifying theory” will appear in the Emma Frost series.
I always pronounced “mannites” as “manatees” because I thought it was funny, am I the only one?
Omar Karindu, you should submit a review to Shelfdust or something, you always have the most in-depth comments here.
I would like to see a Captain America pitch where he continuously takes on new missions from Donald Trump in silhouette, then finally balks at the absurdity of his assignments and Trump angrily leans into the light and is revealed as Mojo. Trump was just Mojo the whole time. It was the Captain Apprentice, and he tells Steve Roger’s “You’re fyireed!”
Oh. Oh no. All the pieces are in place for Mojo to become involved in local politics over in NYX.
Luke Cage has been the mayor for, what, three in-universe months by now? It’s high time for another election.
@Michael – I am going to set something on fire if it turns out that Magik #2 sold so well thanks to the J Scott Campbell cover.
The ‘70s and ‘80s saw Steve Rogers give up the Captain America identity for a little while. Right now, I think it would make sense for Sam Wilson to drop the costume and shield on the desk in the Oval Office. Marvel won’t do that, of course, given their most recent movie.
Actually, I could see the reverse happen: the president calls Sam “Captain DEI” and demands he give up the identity. Sam refuses, and the series goes from there. I don’t think Marvel would do that either, but it could be an interesting take.
@Mike Loughlin: Yeah, I tend to agree.
Some version of “Captain America openly defies the government” is both the best direction creatively and the most terrifying direction commercially and politically that Marvel could go in.
@Michael
A grand unified theory for why Scott left his wife and child without a word when Jean turns out to have been in stasis rather than dead, and then eventually cheats on Jean with not just any supervillain but one who was involved in corrupting Phoenix?
I wouldn’t get my hopes up for that story.
It’d never happen for a thousand obvious reasons, but it would’ve been nice to see Marvel kill Steve Rogers off in January 2025, Daddy Warbucks-style, and make it clear he won’t be coming back for at least four years. Let Nuke or Norman Osborn or somebody be Cap for four years, see how that works out. (Okay, probably not Nuke, since he actually served in Vietnam…)
@Drew: They should go all in and just have the government make Crossbones the new Cap.
Some more news:
A Spider-Man & Wolverine series by Marc Guggenheim and Kaare Andrews will be launching in May.
A new Giant-Size X-Men 1 will be coming in May by Collin Kelly and Jackson Lanzing. It will continue the story of Kamala’s adventures in the past among the All-New All-Different X-Men that will start in the FCBD issue.
3K will have their own version of the X-Men that will first be seen in X-Men 16.
@Omar:
A for Vendetta.
Captain America breaks ties with the US, debuts a new costume with the anarchy symbol on his forehead, is asked what nation he now represents:
“Nation? NATION?!? You think this A on my head stands for an organized system of government?!?”
Just to clarify about Giant-Size X-Men 1, it’s part of an event. Kamala gets pulled into the past by a villain “with deep ties to mutant history”. There’s going to be five Giant-Size books from May to July- Giant-Size X-Men 1, Giant-Size Dark Phoenix Saga 1, Giant-Size Age of Apocalypse 1, Giant-Size House of X-Men 1 and Giant-Size X-Men 2. It’s possible Giant-Size Dark Phoenix Saga 1 will feature the revelation of Breevort’s “grand unifying theory”.since it comes out in June.
The dumbest thing Marvel could possibly do is a story that just reacts to the news.
Where do you go from there once you’re boxed in by current events? Nowhere, because it would be unrealistic.
In this thrilling issue, Captain Anarchy must battle a new team of villains, the Dark Gods and Masters of Evil!
And what will he do when fellow costumed anarchists Sister Syndicalism, the Privatizeer, and Doc Kropotkin each present him with their own manifestos for change before accusing the other two of being government agents provocateurs?
Oh, and Spider-Man & Wolverine is an ongoing.
Solicit news: X-Force is cancelled at #10 (expect a rushed wrap-up – the writer posted on CBR that he was working on the assumption he would get at least another five issues before the ending, which would have seemed optimistic even if cancellation wasn’t confirmed), X-Factor’s #10 solicit looks very “final issue”, and NYX is apparently replaced outright by the time-travelling Ms. Marvel Giant-Size X-Men thing by the same writers.
I wouldn’t count on any of the current books other than (adjectiveless) X-Men, Uncanny or Wolverine seeing an #11. [Well, Phoenix is apparently continuing past #10, but only Brevoort knows why.]
“Te-Nehisi Coates, which I think mostly didn’t work because he was a still kind of beginning comics writer”
The dude had been writing comics for three years at that point. Bad comics.