The X-Axis – w/c 24 February 2025
ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #12. By Tim Seeley, Edoardo Audino, KJ Díaz, Clayton Cowles, Darren Shan. So the thing about Black Tom going mad turns out to be a teaser for another storyline, which was perhaps inevitable given how much he’d been kept to the margins of the story after the set-up. What that leaves us with is a Juggernaut rehabilitation story with some very nice art but which feels like it’s way, way too late – the Juggernaut first joined the X-Men over twenty years ago, for heaven’s sake! Even his last run as a villain ended before Krakoa. This would be a good story if it wasn’t so detached from where the Juggernaut actually is right now, but… well, that’s a problem, isn’t it?
X-MEN #12. (Annotations here.) Mmm. I know Jed MacKay is Canadian, and I know this is kind of the status quo that was inherited from the previous editorial office, and I even think the new Vindicator is an interesting character, but… Canada is the North American country where the people who opposed Orchis are still in jail? Canada? Seriously? Because I don’t think you can do that story in 2025. At a bare minimum, it’s extremely tone deaf. At worst… look, I realise there are lead in times involved here and so forth, but my gut reaction to the whole angle was still a strong one. This sort of dissonance is likely to be an increasing problem for the X-books and Marvel in general in the coming months and years as the lead-in time issue fades away and the reality of writing X-Men stories for Disney under the second Trump administration sinks in – and I have a sinking feeling about how I’m going to feel about that. Maybe the creators will have a better idea of how to thread that needle. None of which is really a direct reflection on this issue, of course. But look, it’s the main thing I was left thinking about.
HELLVERINE #3. (Annotations here.) Well, the book has certainly answered my initial question of what makes this different from Ghost Rider, since apparently we’re doing a horror-theme tour of important sites in Akihiro’s life in order that he can – um, it’s not really spelled out, but the obvious ending would be something like him coming to terms with his history so that Mephisto can’t use it as a source of power. The Ghost Rider elements are really on the margins of this issue, too, which is mostly Akihiro visiting the town of Jasmine Falls and finding the population being plagued by a ghost story. Given that we’re doing a tour of his history, it’s surprisingly light on continuity, as well (which is good, since nothing in the established continuity linked to Jasmine Falls would particularly lend itself to a Ghost Rider story). It still feels to me like a gimmick that’s been crowbarred into an actual story, which undercuts the mood it’s going for, but it works reasonably well on its own terms.
SENTINELS #5. By Alex Paknadel, Justin Mason, Federico Blee & Travis Lanham. I’m not sure the Juston Seyfert reveal here works – he’s a fairly obscure character, and the ending of this mini feels like it needs the reader to be a bit more familiar with him. Still, the overall arc of poor old Lockstep trying to be a reasonable professional in a dodgy environment and getting crushed for his troubles is an effective tragedy, and sliding Drumfire from the B-plot into the hero role at the last minute stops it from being too dark. The art feels a little bit rough in the opening pages – Scurvy is really a bit over the top as a leering villain – but the closing fight and the belated appearance of a real Sentinel are nicely handled. An odd mini, but quite good.
ROGUE: THE SAVAGE LAND #2. By Tim Seeley, Zulema Scotto Lavina, Rachelle Rosenberg & Ariana Maher. Um… fine, I guess? It’s certainly not the T&A book that the covers suggest, and there’s some very nice art with the shark hologram and the diving pterosaurs. But it’s tribal feuding in the Savage Land, which I’ve never found particularly appealing, and it doesn’t really have a hook to change my mind. Still, more in the territory of “not my thing” than anything else.
SABRETOOTH: THE DEAD DON’T TALK #3. By Frank Tieri, Michael Sta. Maria, Dono Dánchez-Almara & Joe Sabino. This is turning out to be surprisingly fun. Despite being billed as a Sabretooth story, it’s really more “Marvel New York in 1909”, complete with a proto Crimson Dynamo, proto Kingpin and so forth. And the art looks great in terms of selling that idea, with pre-superhero versions of the ideas. My main reservation is that the story seems to be riding two horses – notionally, the plot is Sabretooth coming round to the idea that he should be in charge because he’s the most powerful. And that story feels like it wants normal gangsters, so the MU trappings cut against it, even if technically they’re all normal humans. But it’s working just as a simple fun set-up, so fair enough.
Maybe in the Marvel Universe, Poilievre or one of the Ford brothers is PM up there.
I like that Drumfire actually pointed out to Xavier what a bad idea resurrecting Trask without any safeguards was.
Trask made several predictions regarding the future:
“They will be Legion.” – So it is Legion Kamala is fighting in the Giant-Size issues.
“war of thunders”- the Storm storyline.
“The Dark X-Men will rise”- 3K will be creating their own X-Men in X-Men 16.
“The children of the atom will aaall hunt their father”- X- Manhunt
“A Wolverine will see the stars”.
“All who open the executioner’s briefcase will be stung”.
Does anyone have any idea what the last two are? The “execiutioner’s briefcase” might refer to the Stryfe storyline in Deadpool/ Wolverine. But a Wolverine seeing the stars?
Speaking of Marvel’s Canadian writers, this week’s Fantastic Four definitely does not feel like it was written ahead of time!
(And it is probably a mistake for writers anywhere to assume that it can’t happen in your own country.)
The continuity between Sentinels and Uncanny X-Men is horrible. In Sentnels 5, Scurvy removes Trask’s medallion and he is left insane, ranting about future events. One of those events is X-Manhunt, so Sentinels 5 has to take place before X-Manhunt.
But in Uncanny X-Men 9-10, Trask is In charge of Ellis’s dog Sentinel program. Furthermore, the preview for Uncanny X-Men 11, the first chapter of X-Manhunt is out, and Scurvy is still recovering from the events of Raid on Graymalkin. So Sentinels 5 would have to take place before Raid on Graymalkin.
Uncanny X-Men 10 has a note claiming that it takes place before Sentinels 4 but that’s impossible since Scurvy appears in Sentinels 4-5.
I guess the only solution that make sense is that Director Ellis couldn’t decipher Trask’s rantings, so she slapped the medallion back on him and they came to a truce where he agreed to work on the dog Sentinels. You just have to ignore the note in Uncanny X-Men 10 to make it work.
The X-Men also appear in Amazing Spider-Man 68.Deaths this week, a nice story that focuses on how much the Juggernaut has changed.
West Coast Avengers 4 also came out this week and it was better than many of us were expecting. A lot of us were afraid that Firestar’s new love interest Blue Bolt would drag her down further But instead he advised her to get help. In general, Duggan’s handling of Firestar’s PTSD is better than I expected. What’s interesting is how Duggan treats Angelica’s relationship with Emma. He doesn’t shy away from acknowledging how bad Emma’s treatment of Angelica was. But on the other hand, he has Angelica use Emma’s line “for the children” in explaining why she went undercover in Orchis, suggesting that Emma and Angelica are more alike than Angelica would care to admit. In other words, Emma abused Angelica but some of what is good in Angelica also comes from Emma.
As someone not really hardly any current books, I saw Blue Bolt and “oh, is this a secret child of Black Bolt and Medusa introduced as yet another continuity implant?”
I now see that bad idea would not as bad as apparently the real answer actually turned out to be.
Angelica and Jean have not interacted on panel since the Fall of Krakoa, have they?
It is a shame if they have not. One of the best parts of the whole storyline was the impossible situation that the attack on the Hellfire Gala put Angelica in, and Jean was as instrumental in creating that situation as anyone else. It is a superb opportunity for character development when the two of them come face to face again.
Clearly, it’s a “grass is greener on the other side” thing. Just as USAmericans write wish fulfillment fantasies of having principled, ethical heroes like Steve Rodgers, Canadians write wish fulfillment fantasies of having powerful, sinister black ops agencies of their own.
@ Michael
The preview of Uncanny X-Men #11 shows that Corina Ellis is surprised to hear that Scurvy is still in the sick bay. We can assume he was out of it and relapsed after Sentinels (he never seems particularly healthy). It’s the explanation that requires the least changes to the continuity as it seems established (given that both Sentinels and Uncanny X-Men #9-10 take place before X-Manhunt)
Will disagreeing with the TDS here get me banned?
Fun fact: In 2007, Frank Tieri wrote a DC miniseries called Gotham Underground. One issue featured a flashback to a gang war in 1900s Gotham, with a series of group shots introducing the main gangs, and setting up “the coming of the masks”.
“Will disagreeing with the TDS here get me banned?”
Disagreeing with me will not you get you banned. But “Trump Derangement Syndrome?” After that obscenity in the Oval Office yesterday? For a government doing Nazi salutes? THAT’S the sort of thing that would get someone banned.
That said, you have a very long history as a sensible commenter, so you’ve earned the benefit of the doubt. I’ll leave it at that for now.
I have to admit I don’t *quite* understand Paul’s stance here re: the supposed dissonance between what MacKay is depicting and the current geopolitical climate.
Even if MacKay’s version of Canada is one that retained Orchis’ fascist practices, it’s not as if he’s treating the US government (as embodied by Lundqvist, ONE and arguably whatever Perimeter is) with any measure of sympathy either. Certainly we’re not meant to see Marvel’s US as being in a better or morally superior position.
Under a more competent and cohesive editorial plan, there probably could have been some sensible political commentary in Orchis remnants *becoming* ONE and Perimeter (shades of the famous two-panel sequence of Kreelers becoming law enforcement in Strontium Dog: Portrait of a Mutant)… but is Paul arguing that there *should* be such commentary and its absence is problematic, or that the attempt at commentary itself is misguided?
(Speaking only for myself, I don’t need to see a fictional correlating portrayal of the Oompa Loompa-in-Chief, he’s enough of a cartoon in real life.)
yrzhe said:
“Clearly, it’s a “grass is greener on the other side” thing. Just as USAmericans write wish fulfillment fantasies of having principled, ethical heroes like Steve Rodgers, Canadians write wish fulfillment fantasies of having powerful, sinister black ops agencies of their own.”
That makes too much sense. Marvel, get that no-prize in the mail.
“Disagreeing with me will not you get you banned. But “Trump Derangement Syndrome?” After that obscenity in the Oval Office yesterday? For a government doing Nazi salutes? THAT’S the sort of thing that would get someone banned.”
More to the point, what possible appeal could X-Men comics hold for a Trump supporter? They’re all about oppressed minorities emphasizing their own humanity and fighting for the right to exist in a world that hates and fears them. Trump is racist, openly xenophobic, nakedly transphobic, legendarily misogynistic, and his policies are already inspiring state legislatures to start challenging gay rights. (Disappointing as ever, Idaho.) One of his very first executive orders declared transgender people simply don’t exist in the eyes of the government. He IS the world that hates and fears.
Seriously, complaining about TDS here is like me wandering into a Federalist Society meeting and wondering why everyone’s glaring at my “Read Banned Books” shirt.
@Drew: If there’s one thing the Morph “controversy” of X-Men ’97 proves, it’s that MAGA morons read nothing, comprehend nothing, and feel utterly free to claim any work of fiction aligns with their existing beliefs. In the words of Julie Lewald herself: “Did we teach you people nothing? Were you not watching?”
If what I’ve read on the internet is right, Jed MacKay is originally from my home province, so I’m surprised he hasn’t introduced a family of Roxxon competitors who own everything and control the local media.
(This is a test to see if any other Maritimers comment here haha)
Given that this a response to an earlier commenter (who’s generally been perfectly pleasant) and that my issue with him was tone rather than disagreement as such, I’d rather avoid words like morons.
The “X Years Ago” stuff is really getting out of hand. Is Lawrence Trask supposed to be only like 20 years old?
@ASV- I think X is supposed to stand for “unknown” in this context.
@Paul: Just to clarify, I wasn’t referring to anyone here, but to the type of audience Drew brought up who can consume X-Men in pretty much any medium while never identifying or internalizing *any* of its values or themes. They absolutely do exist – the very first episode of the ’90s animated series had a woman as President of the United States, but apparently X-Men didn’t get woke until ’97 started airing. Go figure.
Wasn’t Clan Akkaba secretly in charge of the British government or something during the Krakoa era? I question Marvel comics accurately portraying any country other than Symkaria, Latveria, and Wakanda.
Actually, is Clan Akkaba still in charge of the United Kingdom? Or did that get resolved in one of Tini Howard’s books?
@Sam- It was Coven Akkaba, not Clan Akkaba. And they had formed an alliance with Orchis, so presumably they were defeated when Orchis was defeated. (I say presumably because we didn’t see them after the last Gala- they were probably a casualty of having to end the Krakoan Era early.)
Tom Breevort had a couple of things to say on his blog today:
SEASTAR: I wanted to ask about your big Giant Size X-Men announcement. Details probably will be more forthcoming later, but do you see it as an opportunity to change X-Men history or recontextualize it?
TOM: A bunch of people showed up this week worried that we were going to somehow be overturning huge swaths of X-Men history in this series. To which I can only tell you, Seastar: does that genuinely sound like something I’d do? It’s perfectly fine to be a little bit uneasy about the announcement, but I wouldn’t worry about the sky falling until you start to feel it hit. That project is about celebrating the past, not burying it.
DAVID LOWE: Wouldn’t it be better to have maybe only ten solid monthly mutant titles from proven and successful creators (plus some promising up-and-comers, of course) that sell like gangbusters because they’re all top quality must-read titles instead of twice as many lower quality quota fillers? The law of diminishing returns is a real thing, as is the fact that you can’t please all the people all the time, so perhaps we shouldn’t be trying to serve every niche and preference with a throw it at the wall approach.
TOM: Here’s the thing, David: when I was just a reader, there were only four X-Men titles being published every month. And the consensus then was very much what you say here: it was too much, the quality suffered, why couldn’t you just go back to having only one book and make that one really good? The reason that there are so many titles in any line, not just X-Men, is that there’s an audience hungry for them. You can see it by just how many fans write to ask about their favorite mutant who isn’t presently being featured anywhere (or not being covered to the extent they’d want them to be.) And it’s not like I have a big block of quality and we slice it up for the number of books. If we had ten titles as you suggest, I would guess that the complaint would still be exactly the same (as would the sales.)
In other news, Bleeding Cool’s weekly top 10 is out. Rogue came in at number 9- not bad for a continuity implant limited series.
Hellverine, on the other hand, didn’t make the list at all. The market just can’t support a Logan series and a Laura series and an Akihiro series at once, despite what Breevort thinks.
I know he’s a divisive figure in comics, but I love the Q&A section of Tom Brevoort’s newsletter. It’s so illuminating about what fans think is going on behind the scenes, especially when he gets questions that boil down to: why don’t you just publish more quality books instead of all these mediocre titles? Or: why don’t you just hand over the books to top-tier creators (from the ’80s)?
Brevoort is definitely not selling the fun hype of Stan’s Soapbox, where the fire hose of quality seemed like something that was difficult to control. He’s so practical about his answers that it’s like he and the fans are talking about two different things.
@Thom H- Breevort IS wrong about the number of X-titles- at a certain point, the market DOES become oversaturated and the sales suffer. 10 X-books is a perfectly reasonable number.
Now, the fans may have been wrong in arguing that X-Men, X-Factor,New Mutants and Classic X-Men were too many titles but at that point, the fans were mad that X-Factor seemed to screw the X-Menr plots up. Of course, the problem with X-Factor was that X-Factor was initially set up under a different editorial office than the other X-Books, making coordination between the two books more difficult.
Oh, I agree that there are too many X-books, and I think there have been for a long time. I also see your point about sales.
But my point was about quality, and how some fans seem to think it’s a magic ingredient that editorial is either purposefully or ignorantly withholding from their books.
Either that, or they think there’s a simple answer to adding more quality like “just hire these writers” or “just publish this number of books.”
The questions in Brevoort’s newsletter regularly reveal an ignorance of how comics are produced and what powers an editor does and doesn’t have.
Regardless of how anyone feels about his tenure as X-editor, this *is* his idea of what quality X-books look like. He’s not purposely sabotaging the line or trying to ruin any particular character. He’s using the resources available to him to follow directives from his employer. And trying to (or hoping to?) create good stories in the process.
I maintain the Juggernaut should be unambiguously a good guy whenever he appears in an x title, and a mildly sympathetic bad guy whenever he’s in something else, and I don’t care how incoherent it gets
Tristan: Split the difference and have him lead a Thunderbolts team?
If you gave me a Thunderbolts team with Juggernaut, Sandman, Absorbing Man, Titania, Loki, Mach-10 and Songbird, written by someone who knew and liked the characters, I wouldn’t complain.
Or keep the first four and throw in, I dunno, Boomerang and Shocker. And She-Hulk as the Avengers liaison/official heroic representative. I know it would be heavy on strong people, but it might be a good dynamic.
@Paul: I’d better take that as a yes, since words like “moron’ are already being thrown around.
Replace Loki with Thunderball and you might have something there.
@neutrino
It’s admittedly a highly charged subject matter (I’ll refrain from throwing further incendiary terms around), but Paul made it pretty clear that you’re a welcome and valued poster.
As for the word in question, the person who posted it clarified it was not directed at you, AND Paul told them to knock it off.
So no need to strike a victim pose. We’ll all be best, and avoid words like “low IQ”, “deranged”, “animals”, “sick” and so on. Obviously anyone failing to do so is missing the basic elements of civility.
…uh, on second thought, that’s not exactly going to add anything to the discussion. Not anything productive anyway. Shoulda thought twice and posted once (or none).
Mods, please fell free to delete, I’d do it myself if I could edit.
“what possible appeal could X-Men comics hold for a Trump supporter?”
People in costumes punching each other. No, really.
“since words like “moron’ are already being thrown around.”
Oh no, not the consequences of my own public words and actions!