The X-Axis – w/c 6 May 2025
ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #20. By Tim Seeley, Adoardo Audino, KJ Diaz & Clayton Cowles. This feels like it backs off a bit from the cliffhanger of the previous issue (which I liked a lot). But the basic setting of a bunch of influencers who don’t really care about anything other than engagement – including the ones who are supposedly the good guys – seems like a good angle. Building up Wildside as the leader of a new MLF is, um, a choice, but I guess that of the established MLF guys he’s the one with the most charisma. Audino makes good use of the format, bringing a lot of personality to his bit part characters. It’s pretty decent, all told.
FREE COMIC BOOK DAY 2025: FANTASTIC FOUR / GIANT-SIZE X-MEN #1. This came out last weekend, but it was added to Marvel Unlimited on Wednesday. There are three 8-page stories here, and the main attraction is the FF strip by Ryan North, Humberto Ramos and Edgar Delgado. It gets across the strengths of North’s FF run – a simple strong idea, and genuinely self-contained – which also makes it ideal for FCBD. The X-Men story, by Jackson Lanzing, Collin Kelly, Iban Coello and Brian Reber, is basically just an advert for the upcoming Giant-Size X-Men one-shots and does nothing to increase my interest in what currently looks like a rather tiresome gimmick. It’s certainly hard to see why it would hold any interest to the new readers that FCBD is ostensibly targetting. Finally, there’s a Chip Zdarsky story about a fan and his non-fan wife ending up the Marvel Universe as “Wolverpool and Deadverine” which… feels too close to what Gwenpool did already, I guess?
X-MEN #16. (Annotations here.) Three parts in, and still not finished? This is the longest story X-Men has had in its current run. The focus here is the debut of the 3K X-Men, and as the centrepiece of an issue, I’m not sure it entirely works. In theory, I quite like the idea of a random group simply declaring that they’re as legitimate the X-Men as anyone else – but the obvious answer is the absence of any existing X-Men to endorse them. So it may work better if and when we establish that Cypher or some other such character is involved in 3K. The new group have decent designs and seem to work better as a team than the regular cast. But what doesn’t come across is a great deal of personality. Schwartzchild and Timebomb show something, but the rest feel quite ill-defined – I don’t have any real sense of why these adult-created mutants want to be the X-Men.
STORM #8. (Annotations here.) Look, I get that there’s an audience for a Storm solo title that wants to build her up as an iconic figure on a par with Superman and Wonder Woman. It’s not particularly the version of Storm that interests me, but it’s the version that interests a lot of her fanbase, so I can absolutely understand why that’s the book we’re getting. Hell, it’s the sort of Storm book I’d commission if I was making those decisions. That’s not the issue I have with this series. And the art is consistently good too. No, my issue is with the writing, the neverending parade of utterly baffling storytelling and pacing choices, and the general unintelligibility of the plot. It’s the one current X-book where I approach each issue with a heavy heart, knowing that a massive chore lies ahead. Of course, you might well say that nobody’s making me read it, and you’d be right, but… it’s amateur hour stuff, it really is. I get what this book is trying to do in the very broad sense of the direction it has in mind for the character. Literally everything else about it mystifies me.
PSYLOCKE #7. (Annotations here.) This is more like it. The whole question of whether Psylocke is being possessed by one entity or two is a little confusing, but I think it’s meant to be obscure at this point, so it gets a pass. The Mitsuki flashbacks have built up Kwannon’s childhood friend (i.e., fellow victim) very effectively so that I actually care about seeing something done with that relationship now, and Carratù’s art really helps sell the pairing in this issue’s graveyard flashback. I raise an eyebrow at the apparent stalker tendencies of the supporting cast in monitoring Psylocke, but I’m going to assume for the moment that that’s the intended reaction. The hybrid ghost thing is suitably grotesque, too. The issue does seem a bit of a waste of Deathdream, who notionally has a major role here but in practice spends it all either possessed or unconscious, but the book has me interested in where it’s going.
LAURA KINNEY: WOLVERINE #6. (Annotations here.) The previous issues of this series felt a bit generic to me, but this is more like it. Sure, there’s nothing original about the story where the lead character is told that the regular series is a hallucination. But it’s done well here by having Laura unaware that these hallucinations are even meant to be part of her back story. It’s nice to see Gabby brought back even for this sort of role, and there are some genuinely subtle choices being made to make the book a bit weirder – the story never leaves the house and there’s something just a little too prominent in the way the art keeps showing us the sunlight streaming in through every window. It’s the first issue of the series that’s really felt like it has a take on Laura, and her awkward feelings about what passes for family, and a big step up for the book.
It’s especially weird because the 3K X-Men started out as Fourth School fanatics – essentially the U-Men but wanting to integrate AI components as well. None of that lines up with what Schwartzchild is saying (assuming he’s being honest about his motivations).
The FCBD issue didn’t work for me.
First, there was Cyclops’s portrayal. I get that Kelly and Lanzing were trying to write him as being hard on the X-Men for their own good. But it still doesn’t feel like Scott circa Giant-Size X-Men 1. First. he refers to Thunderbird as a “hermit” and Storm as a “refugee” which is just racist. And he calls Colossus a “farmer” as an insult- Scott has never been the kind of snob who looks down on people who live in rural areas.
Second, Storm’s portrayal also seems off as well. She wasn’t this arrogant circa Giant-Size X-Men 1. Her creating a storm that knocks out Banshee and Sunfire while trying to get at Cyclops seemed out of character for her at this point. Yes, she nearly drowned the X-Men and Maddie stopping Mastermind in Uncanny X-Men 175 but the entire point of that scene was that Storm’s personality had changed drastically since the Brood Saga ended. Her not caring about anyone else while attacking her target seems out of character circa Giant-Size X-Men 1.
Then we have Cyclops using his optic blasts to fly through the air. I hate it when writers do that. It just raises the question of why Scott’s optic blasts don’t always propel him backwards. And yes, I know, there’s precedent in X-Men 53 but (a) it was portrayed as a dangerous, last-resort move in that story and (b) there’s also precedent for Rogue absorbing Cyclops’s powers through Nightcrawler’s tail and Scott starting a forest fire with his optic blasts but everyone agrees these sequences are stupid and ignores them.
Then we have Scott saying that the X-Men don’t showboat- this isn’t the Avengers. Scott didn’t have anything against the X-Men circa Giant-Size X-Men 1- the last time he worked with them, they saved the X-Men from Magneto. The bad blood between the X-Men and Avengers came later.
But at least Scott put the “hermit” Thunderbird and the “refugee” Storm in their place, right?
Finally, on the last page. Xavier is in his hover chair. But he got that from Lilandra and he hasn’t met her yet at this point.
The problem is that Kelly and Lanzing aren’t very familiar with the X-Men prior to Morrison. As Moo suggested last week, it might have been better to get Chris Claremont to write this issue but unfortunately, he’s not very familiar with Kamala.
Re: Astonishing X-Men- the point seems to be that Banshee is too violent, since Mondo criticizes him for that this issue. Good- I was worried that we were supposed to think of his actions as admirable.
Bleeding Cool’s Bestseller list is out. X-Men 16 came in at 6, Storm 8 came in at 8 and Psylocke 7 came in at 9. As usual, Laura Kinney: Wolverine didn’t make the list.
The sales figures for April are out. Some highlights:
Magik came in at 24. Its sales are coming down to Earth a bit but the only non-Ultimate X-titles that beat it are Uncanny X-Men, X-Men and Wolverine.\
Exceptional X-Men came in at 46.
Rouge came in at 47. That’s impressive because not only did it beat the cancelled titles but it also beat Laura Kinney:Wolverine, Deadpool/ Wolverine, Phoenix and Hellverine. Not bad for a continuity implant limited series.
X-Force 10 came in at 61- not bad for a cancelled title.
Laura Kinney: Wolverine came in at 53, Deadpool/ Wolverine came in at 64, Phoenix 10 came in at 73 and Hellverine came in at 137. Laura’s book came in at 69 last time so it did a little better and Deadpool/ Wolverine came in at 55 last time so it did a little worse.
I’m guessing Hellverine will be cancelled at issue 10. Honestly, Laura’s book and Deadpool/ Wolverine should probably be cancelled as well There’s just too Wolverine books.
Why is Phoenix still around? It’s doing worse than any other non-cancelled title except Hellverine. If nothing else, you’d expect Breevort to replace Stephanie Phillips with another writer. Does Stephanie Philips have compromising pictures of someone at Marvel?
In other news, the team book that Laura will be appearing in will be titled New Avengers, not Thunderbolts.
Breevort answers some questions on his blog:
JUSTIN WILDER:Now that three of the line’s books, specifically team books, are coming to a close, do you have any takeaways or reflections that you’d be willing to share? I know you don’t edit any of the three directly, but I’m curious from your role and process in the Conductor of X capacity.
TOM: I think people are maybe making too big a deal out of the fact that certain series are running their course, Justin. This is nothing new—if you look at the two rounds of X-Books last launched during the Krakoa era, you’ll find that pretty much all of those were only around for a limited time as well. Right from the start, i was very up front about the fact that not everything that we tried was going to be successful long term, and that possibly nothing we did was going to work. You can’t predict what the audience is going to connect with, you can simply place good bets and back material that you believe in. So everything that every pundit is saying is absolutely correct, but I still wouldn’t have done anything much differently in retrospect. If all that an NYX or an X-FACTOR can do at the moment is ten issues, then I’m fine with those being the ten—even though I would certainly have liked a #11 and a #12 and so on.
YLIASTER: Regarding the new AoA series, the Marvel.com article says that it takes place after the original AoA crossover. Does that mean it’s going to ignore all the stuff from the 2010s (Uncanny X-Force, David Lapham’s AoA, X-Termination)? Because it ends with the universe being damned to be devoured by a horde of reality-consuming monsters while Death Seed Jean Grey holds them off for a while to seal off the reality.
Also, any Nate Grey crumbs?
TOM: We’re not going to ignore that any of that stuff existed, Yliaster, but neither are we going to spend a whole lot of time accounting for any of it either. It’s tough enough to do a story that harkens back to a big event that saw print three decades ago in terms of making the story accessible to a readership of today. But once you try to square every circle of every follow-up story that had been tried in the time between, you’re talking to only the narrowest portion of the audience. So we’re going to work to keep everything as clean as possible here. And the project is being written by Jeph Loeb, so the likelihood that you’ll see Nate Grey in it somewhere is probably better than average.
I fully expect LK:W, D/W and Hellverine to end with #10.
Phoenix would probably have done so too, but I guess it is on life support due to the upcoming cosmic event in which it will presumably be involved.
By the end of the year, I think the line will be down to the three team books (Adjectiveless, Uncanny and Exceptional) plus four solos (Wolverine, Storm, Psylocke and Magik). That looks like a more sustainable line-up than what we have seen since the end of Krakoa.
Honestly, launching too many books and letting the market whittle them down isn’t the worst way to run a line. If you’re going to do it that way, though, it seems like the writers should always be prepared to end at the 10-issue mark instead of scrambling to finish. That’s an editorial blunder, for sure.
@Thom H.: On the contrary – and this is something Paul pointed out a good two decades ago on Ye Olde X-Axise – it trains readers to treat new series as disposable/meaningless in the grand scheme of things, which makes it that much harder to launch books with riskier, more innovative points of view like an X-Statix or an Exiles.
Jeph Loeb? Jesus. Hide your kids, hide your wife. Hide your Wasps from your Blobs.
And yet one of the biggest successes of this X-era is Storm-as-Eternity-as-Superman in a solo series that apparently runs on vibes. That was definitely a risk for the line, and it seems to have paid off while tried-and-true tactics like “more Wolverine(s)” aren’t working.
I’m not saying it’s a perfect strategy, but I don’t agree that it necessarily kills reader interest. Especially when you guarantee each series at least 10 issues. That was a smart move. Other decisions in this rebrand might not have been great, but I respect that one.
I wasn’t going to say anything because I haven’t read the comic and don’t know the context, but Cyclops throwing around insults to drive the team has precedent. I think it was after they fought Proteus, and Wolverine was having a bit of a meltdown. So Cyclops goaded him and the other X-Men until he lashed out, snapping him out of his PTSD. I think that’s the first time Wolverine showed respect to Cyclops.
Now that story has problems and probably shouldn’t have been revisited, but it is precedent.
“ Jeph Loeb? Jesus. Hide your kids, hide your wife. Hide your Wasps from your Blobs.”
Marvel saw DC was doing Hush again and said hold my beer.
Just astonishing to me that Phoenix is under selling Storm. Phoenix’s worst sins are meandering and being sort of boring, Storm reads like Ayodele did the day one writing of jotting down every idea that came to them and then embarked on some sort of experimental exercise of treating the resulting list of disconnected setpieces and premises as if it was a detailed plot summary that only needed to be dialogued and sent on to the artists
Cyclops blasting the ground and “flying” is stupid. I don’t care how it’s justified, it looks bad and reads worse. The one scene from that FCBD X-Men story that I liked was Nightcrawler stopping the fight by questioning the purpose of fighting. I was onboard the Giant-Sized specials until I read the preview.
Solo X-books are a tough sell. I remember the early-‘00s, when Marvel launched new ongoing titles for Rogue, Nightcrawler, and Jubilee. They folded after, what, a year? I wonder how the number of copies sold compares to the number of copies current solo mutant comics sell. We might be living in the age where numbers that got books cancelled 20 years ago are good enough to keep the books going.
What IS the cancellation threshold these days anyway?
@Ronnie: Impossible to say, there’s no official sales data available anymore like there was in the old days. The charts that tend to make the rounds are just samples drawn from a few dozen stores across the US, not reliable info.
“which… feels too close to what Gwenpool did already, I guess?”
Genuine question: Are any Gwenpool stories outside of the main Chris Hastings series any good? I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the Hastings series, but that was for the writing, not so much the character or the premise.
“Marvel saw DC was doing Hush again and said hold my beer.”
In fairness . . . IN FAIRNESS . . . the first Long Halloween “Last Halloween” one-shot Loeb did with Tim Sale before Sale passed was actually pretty good, on par with the other Batman stuff the pair did together.
The rest of Last Halloween isn’t really doing anything for me. It’s nowhere as horrible as Loeb’s ’00s work, but it fails to capture any of the magic he made with Sale.
@Josie I liked the Kelly Thompson West Coast Avengers book that included Gwenpool, but it was more of a follow up to her earlier (even better) Hawkeye (Kate Bishop) series, and Gwen isn’t very significant there.
Although, of course, it is the birthplace of Jeff the Land Shark, the Eisner-nominated internet sensation.
There’s also a Love Unlimited (Marvel Unlimited digital exclusive) arc where Gwen tries to start a love triangle on Krakoa to keep her book presence up which was pretty fun. It starts in LU#43.
Other then that there hasn’t been many Gwenpool stories. There’s a Gwenpool Strikes Back miniseries from a few years ago which I think was one of Leah Williams’s lesser works, but still perfectly fine.
Long story short, I can’t come up with anything you’d really need to hunt down after Hastings’s run.
@Si: I immediately thought of that scene, too, and I thought the FCBD preview cheapened it. Instead of the post-Proteus scene being an extraordinary circumstance that took some ingenuity and genuine insight on Scott’s part to execute, it turns out he’d just been a drill sergeant since day one. Boring.
Is it just me or does anybody realize why new X-series only last until issue 10? Its because X=10 ! LOL
Hasn’t Cyclops always been a drill sergeant?
Another example would be his training of Hope during the Decimation stories. That was quite brutal at times.
@Jdsm24- I’m not sure if that’s a joke but the “default” minimum order for a Marvel series nowadays seems to be 10.
@JCG- He’s rarely a racist drill sergeant. Calling Storm a “refugee” is one step from calling her a “savage”.
But Scott was always stern but he arguably never as hard as he was in the FCBD issue prior to Morrison.
For example, in X-Men 127, he realized that getting Wolverine to fight him was the only way to snap him out of his trauma, so he deliberately provoked him.
Or in X-Men 200, he orders Rachel to use her hound powers to track the Ferris twins even though it’s triggering for Rachel. Because triggering Rachel is the lesser of the two evils compared to the Nazi twins blowing up a synagogue or something.
But calling Proudstar a “hermit” just seems out of character.
I’m still trying to figure out how Cyclops can use his optic blasts for propulsion without giving himself one hell of a case of whiplash.
Cyclops flying will never not look silly, but him using his optic blasts to do power skids in the cartoon was cool as hell. No it doesn’t make sense, but when you think about it, Cyclops ignoring Newton’s laws of motion all the rest of the time makes even less sense.
Many other superheroes also ignore Newton’s laws.
Pretty much every strong guy hitting something with great effect without themselves being pushed back for example.
JCG: To be fair, I’d imagine someone bulky like the Hulk or the Thing to not pushed back easily. And I suppose you could say that someone like Rogue or Superman are subconsciously using their ability to fly to propel themselves forward.
Molly Hayes, on the other hand….
Not even Thing and Hulk are bulky enough.
They both have a weight of about a ton (kg).
Far too little to keep them in place when they pull out their heavy hits.
Works for Blob since his power is to anchor himself to the ground. (Though the ground itself should come lose as well)
Almost all superpowers break the laws of physics, and I’m fine with that. I can suspend my disbelief knowing that they can’t work in real life. I mean, Angel shouldn’t be able to fly with a human body, but I’ll accept it just like I’ll accept super strength and weather control.
There are some powers and uses of powers that take me out of the story, however, and Cyclops using optic blasts to fly is one of them. Others include Husk’s power (ripping off her own skin, but not her clothes, and being able to change her body into pretty much any substance? Huh?), shrinking but being able to punch people out, super screaming in a focused direction, and Namor’s ankle wings giving him the ability to fly.
As I recall Husk did lose her clothes when ripping her skin off back in Generation X.
I agree that Cyclops using his powers to fly is problematic (or just using them to stop his fall from an air plane in some old story) but not because it breaks the laws of physics.
It’s more that the writers try to have it both ways.
Most of time his powers cause no push-back on Cyclops himself. Except sometimes when the plot needs them to do so.
@Michael, Marvel Comics has finally embraced again the X-books as their main franchise like during the 1990’s LOL
@Taibak, the last OG Ultimate X-Men pre-Jeph Loeb storyline under Brian Vaughn revealed that Scott Summers’ final mutant evolution was to literally become a Not-Kryptonian! Re: Solar radiation absorption , which is why he’s actually physically superhuman too (No-Prize explanation for why he was shown to be Wolverine’s exact physical equal in the Schism special drawn by Alan Davis where they were literally beating each other up and down in and out all over Utopia like Popeye and Bluto just right before the Super-Sentinel came) LOL
And that’s my No-Prize HeadCanon for how 616-SS has been shown to have actual Heat Vision on select occasions (and SS in all of the XMen cartoons has actual HV as his full-time X-gene mutant powers) : according to the Official HandBook to the Marvel Universe , SS canonically has TWO “MAJOR” X-gene mutations : his first is to absorb energy , especially cosmic radiation , especially solar power , just like his bro Alex / Havok , and his secondary mutation is to channel kinetic ** energy from the so-called “punch dimension” *** via tiny portals in his eyes****
* believe it or not , his canonical “MINOR” X-gene mutation/tertiary mutation is Intuitive Mathematical Genius (apparently in Geometry) which is why he’s able to master the usage of his own optic beams even if he cannot actually switch them off
** this is apparently Chris Claremont’s why Gambit’s own mutation is to be a living generator/channeler of biokinetic energy 24-7 since CC revealed in XMen: The End (originally intended to be a direct Alternate Future of Marvel Universe-616) that 616-Gambit is supposedly actually a chimeric clone of OG pre-Apocalypse Nathaniel Essex spliced with Scott Summer’s X-gene
*** obviously it’s from Cyttorak’s Crimson Cosmos , which is an example of the TVTrope of Fridge Brilliance (I.e fortuitous serendipity in fictional storytelling due to sheer luck/cosmic coincidence which the writers & editors never planned at all). Indeed , this could also explain why SS just CAN’T stop his optic beams most of the time even if he already recovered from the brain damage that originally prevented him from controlling his powers : SS is literally channeling the unstoppable energies of the Crimson Cosmos in pure energy form 24-7 . And during the rare times he somehow manages to close the portals in his eyes (maybe due to sheer force of will or whatever) His optic beams still remain , but they’re now composed of hot plasma , instead of concussive force , since SS is after all also a cosmic-energy absorber/plasma-energy channeler like AS
**** fanon urban legend rumors say that this WTF OTT ass-pull was originally just a mere BS-trolling answer by then-X-editorial only in a random X-book letters page somewhere sometime in the 1980’s to 1990’s that actually became canonized later in a OHBTMU edition in the 2000’s