The X-Axis – w/c 23 June 2025
ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #26. By Alex Pakandel, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo and Clayton Cowles. The island of Mursay, which has proclaimed itself a mutant home despite a suspiciously small number of actual mutants, is indeed trying to lure people into a trap. But not, it seems, because they’re an anti-mutant front – instead, they’re a pro-mutant cult who look to be worshipping a symbiote or something, and won’t let anyone leave. So it looks like it’s The Wicker Man. Fair enough, it’s a solid concept, and more interesting than the straightforward honey trap plot. Two chapters in, it’s not obvious whether there’s anything much else going on. But it’s perfectly fine, so we’ll see where it goes.
UNCANNY X-MEN #16. (Annotations here.) This is the final part of the “Dark Artery” arc, which looks like it was intended more to set up the Artery and the Penumbra for future stories – everyone now knows that Henrietta is at the bottom of the garden, after all – than to resolve very much about them. What it does resolve is the question of what drew the four Outliers to Haven, which is Shuvahrak trying to force one of them to relieve her of the burden of looking after the Penumbra – evidently as much of a prison for her as it is for the people she imprisoned there by way of punishment. It seems like we’re meant to take the place as a vicious cycle that needs to be broken at some point, though nobody in the cast actually seems terribly bothered about that issue, whether in terms of freeing the prisoners or relieving Shuvahrak of her burden.
Instead, the immediate story (and the priority for the cast) is more about the Outliers resisting Shuvahrak’s pull. What makes that read a little oddly, at least at first, is the fact that her primary focus is on Deathdream, a very distant character who never seems at all bothered by the prospect of taking up the role. Of course, Deathdream never seems that bothered by anything, but it still leads to the unusual dynamic of all the other characters fighting to protect someone who doesn’t immediately seem terribly worried. I think Gail Simone mostly makes that work, since the upshot is to leave Deathdream with a clearer appreciation of his new family, and in his understated way to recognise that signing up to rule the Penumbra would not have been a good idea.
David Marquez’s art is beautiful, even with the general gloom of the setting. We get some fill-in art from Luciano Vecchio on the subplots, which is very obviously different in style – but at least his scenes have been kept distinct, and having slightly dreamier art on the Penumbra sequences kind of works. Henrietta’s flashback scene feels a bit underdeveloped this issue, mind you. And there are a lot of loose ends about the Penumbra itself, but we’ll see how far the book is going to follow up on those.
SPIDER-MAN & WOLVERINE #2. By Marc Guggenheim, Kaare Andrews, Brian Reber & Travis Lanham. Well, it’s an art showcase, and on that level it’s a pretty good one. The panels from the plane crash video scattered around the pages at weird angles are a nice effect, together with the still page immediately after the impact. In plot terms, though, it’s an issue long fight scene with a plot that boils down to: Spider-Man thinks Wolverine killed his parents, and Wolverine’s scrambled memories mean he isn’t sure it’s not true, so Spider-Man is very angry and they fight. That’s nowhere close to an issue’s worth of plot, so it depends entirely on how you feel about Kaare Andrews.
WOLVERINE & KITTY PRYDE #3. By Chris Claremont, Damien Couceiro, Carlos Lopez & Ariana Maher. Another issue long fight scene, although this one is a bit more tempered with character beats, a subplot about a mystery portal, and a plot about an out of control AI. But the Ziggy Trask thread doesn’t feel like it has much to do with the story from the first two issues, so it all feels a bit random. Still, Claremont does enough to signal that he’s going to link it together somehow, and I really do enjoy Couceiro’s art on this book – not so much the opening splash page, which is a little rough, but he does a fun teen Kitty. And as a Claremont throwback book, which is after all the point, it does the job.
GIANT-SIZE AGE OF APOCALYPSE #1. By Jackson Lanzing, Collin Kelly, CF Villa, Rafael Loureiro, Edgar Delgado and Clayton Cowles. The tour through X-Men events brings us to “Age of Apocalypse”, which at least has some resonance for Legion, since he created the timeline in the first place. I still feel like Kamala has been shoehorned into this concept – even if the justification is to give her a tour of mutant history, latching her to the X-books hasn’t been to the benefit of the character in the slightest. But since this issue focusses on her and a depowered Legion trying to find a way out of the timeline before the bombs drop at the end of the big crossover, until Legion tries to screw it all up at the end, it’s actually one of the more sedate and character-driven issues, and the strongest of the Giant-Size one-shots to date. The backup story is by Jeph Loeb and Simone Di Meo. It’s an prologue to the X-Men of Apocalypse miniseries for September and I can’t say it contains anything to pique my interest in that project.
I’ve actually enjoyed the Giant-Size AoA issue, which is not something I could say about the previous two. The theme solidifes – Legion is mutant power and nothing else, Kamala has to accept her own mutant power, yadda yadda yadda.
The coincidence of Kamala killing (?) the one Infinite made from her AoA variant is mind boggling, but sure, why not.
I liked how at the beginning of the issue she’s sitting on a broken streetlight, mirroring her apparently iconic cover (iconic enough to be used for the MCU promo art iirc).
I disliked the casual killing of characters, up to popping Rogue like an overripe fruit. The Dark Phoenix issue also killed basically all of the X-Men, but it wasn’t as jarring.
Also, I haven’t reread AoA in many years, so I’m not really sure, but… Does this issue actually follow the plot of the original event at all?
“So it looks like it’s The Wicker Man.”
It’ll be a damn shame if there’s no “Scott Summerisle” joke.
ZIGGY Trask????
Are we… revisiting X-MEN FOREVER?
The backup story in Giant-Size Age of Apocalypse was odd. First, we’re told than in the Age of Apocalypse. Logan and Sabretooth were both members of an elite squad led by Holocaust. Is that something that’s ever been mentioned before? Because I don’t remember anything like it.
But the other problem is that there really isn’t a good hook to convince readers to pick up the X-Men of Apocalypse miniseries. All we’re told is that Blink and Sabretooth have to go on a mission and if they. screw up, one of the X-Men might die. That’s not very specific. Superheroes go on missions all the time and if they screw up people might die. I realize that some people didn’t get what the backup in Giant Size Dark Phoenix Saga was hinting at but in that case they were TRYING
to hint at something specific (that Jean’s and Scott’s rapport is more than just a rapport). This backup is too generic to attract interest.
This week Storm appeared in Superior Avengers as one of several Avengers trying to capture Graviton when the Superior Avengers interfered. I felt like They Wasted A Perfectly Good Plot by not having Storm confront Graviton:
“Storm, we need your help against Graviton”
“That man is insane. What kind of person thinks they’re a god just because they can control a force of nature?”
“…”
One particularly grating things from Kitty & Wolverine was the repeated use of X-Folk. Yes, I get it, X-Men sounds terribly gender-specific in this day and age, but since no one ELSE uses it seriously, and this is a continuity implant set in the halcyon days of Very Long Ago, it comes off even more out of place.
But then again, dragging X-Men Forever elements into mainstream continuity like we should know who Ziggy Trask is, is another case of why series like this feel hammered into place and need a little better editorial oversight. But then again, I think there’s an agreement to just let Claremont (and some of the other classic authors) do what they want and just handwave away any discrepancies because it won’t actually affect what’s going on now.
I thought Spider-Man & Wolverine was ridiculous and the art made it even more so. Flimsy excuse for an issue-long fight scene with a brutal cliffhanger ending. There’s no way they’re gonna let “Wolverine killed Spider-Man’s parents” stick as an actual canon point.
Once we accept that all of these Giant-Size issues take place in alternate/side continuities and don’t actually affect the 616 or the original stories, all is perfectly adequate. The worst we have to worry about, I suppose, is them persisting as new timelines down the road. And it’s not like we haven’t seen a dozen different takes on the Krakoa mission, Dark Phoenix, AoA already through What Ifs and the like. They should have made that clear earlier, but I suppose Marvel wanted the outrage attention of “OMG! KAMALA KHAN IS RETCONNED INTO EVERYTHING!!11!” to drive sales of an otherwise servicable if irrelevant series of overpriced one-shots.
Yeah, I might also be cranky because they stripped out everything interesting and unique about Legion to make him just an all-powerful plot device. Gone are the personality conflicts and weird powers tied to them…
The Jeph Loeb series is going to sell well, regardless of a backup strip in a series that isn’t getting that many readers, simply for the fact that it’s Loeb writing an Age of Apocalypse series. As sickening as the words make me to write, Loeb seems to still be able to draw readers. I want to hope it’s like a car accident, but I know that it’s somehow not.
Similar (although at a much lesser level, kind of sadly) to how a Chris Claremont comic in 2025 appeals to readers who want to see Chris Claremont write Chris Claremont comics. Very few other Marvel fans are going to pick up these retro Claremont comics.
At the end of all this, Ms. Marvel should say, “Mutant history is too complicated. I don’t want to identify as a mutant any longer.”
I was hoping the AOA Giant Size may answer why we never saw Storm in X-Men Omega. Lost opportunity right there.
@The Other Michael: I’m not quite sure I follow. The more recent comics have characters – I think Rogue, specifically? – talk about the name as a problem.
And it sounds like a very awkward double bind: we criticize Claremont both for his authorial impulses and attempts at restoring his own X-Men mythology, *and* for any kind of neologism?
It’s not like we expected the time displaced O5 to speak in Stan Lee script, or we imagine Dazzler as actually sounding like a 70s disco diva…
I was also pretty surprised about the calmer, slower pace of the AOA Giant-Size. It actually deflated the cartoonish extremity if it all, made it feel more grounded and better paced. But it is still an overall very shoddy premise, and I don’t see how it could resolve it not bringing David back into the timestream.
I also found Ms Marvel’s power reveal pretty anticlimactic – it just seems a bit redundant with her existing power set?
Maybe cool if they’re trying to repurpose her as a solo character moving forward, but for a team, it doesn’t quite click – and neither does the character so far. I can’t help but find this all very editorially mandate and sort of intrusive.
The Spider-Man & Wolverine plot is just warmed over MCU, complete with Peter replacing Tony
Salloh> I also found Ms Marvel’s power reveal pretty anticlimactic – it just seems a bit redundant with her existing power set?
It’s her MCU powers. Synergy!
“Does this issue actually follow the plot of the original event at all?”.
Yes. The X-Men did go into an all-out assault on Apocalypse’s base in a do-or-die attempt to restore reality, and this is that day and the night before.
Bleeding Cool’s Bestseller List is out. Uncanny X-Men 16 came in at 5, Giant-Size Age of Apocalypse came in at 7 and Spider-Man and Wolverine 2 came in at 10.
A couple of interesting tidbits from Breevort’s blog. Spider-Man and Wolverine was proposed by the X-Office, not the Spider-Office.
And Bob Budiansky suggested having Kaine join the New Warrios in 1996. I never realized the first suggestion of Kaine joining the New Warriors came during the original run.
Hot take:
No version of Spider-Man felt appropriate for the New Warriors during their original run. Not Peter, nor Ben, nor Kaine. And trying to brand New Warriors as a Spider-Man adjacent title during the time when Marvel’s titles were grouped as thematic families didn’t help either.
Yeah, maybe Ben, as Scarlet Spider, was less experienced than Peter at this time, but he still felt out of place amongst the Warriors, even after all of the stuff some of them had seen and done. No wonder he kind of stopped showing up pretty quickly.
Now, this only applies to the original run–Kaine worked well enough during the short-lived 2014 run (and has it really been THAT long since we’ve had a New Warriors series, since the 2020 one got so unceremoniously killed before release?)
@The Other Michael- Yeah, one of the many reasons why Marvel’s decision in 1994 to do away with an Editor-in-Chief and instead install five group editors didn’t make sense is that some titles don’t fit neatly into a group. You can have a Spider-Man group, an X-titles group and an Avengers group. But Marvel had many titles that didn’t fit neatly into any of those categories- Daredevil, Ghost Rider, Hulk, Dr. Strange, Fantastic Four, Silver Surfer and New Warriors. So Marvel’s decision was to combine Daredevil, Ghost Rider, Hulk and Dr. Strange in an “Edge” group, combine Fantastic Four and Silver Surfer with the Avengers titles in a “Heroes” group and lump the New Warriors in with the Spider-Man titles. (And along the way, a lot of low selling titles got cancelled.)
In Al’s perfect world. All the Slingers join the New Warriors.
“Yeah, one of the many reasons why Marvel’s decision in 1994 to do away with an Editor-in-Chief…”
They didn’t do away with the EIC position. Bob Harras remained the Editor-in-Chief at Marvel until he was let go in 2000 at which point the Jemas/Quesada regime began with Quesada becoming Marvel’s new Editor-in-Chief.
@Moo- in 1994, when Tom DeFalco was fired, Marvel did away with the Editor-in-Chief position. Instead, they split Marvel into five groups with each group editor the equivalent of a mini-Editor-In-Chief- Bob Budiansky, Bob Harras, Bobbie Chase, Mark Greunwald and Carl Potts. This system was universally agreed to be a disaster- and the Editor-In-Chief position was reinstated at the end of 1995, with Harras as Editor-in-Chief.
Sad news- Jim Shooter has passed away.
@Michael – Oh, okay. I think I vaguely recall that. The “Marvelution” period, I think?
Re: Jim Shooter
Hard for me to shed a tear for Shooter. Yes, I know it’s bad form to speak ill of the dead, and I probably shouldn’t do it.
But that never stopped Shooter from doing it, so fuck it.
He gave an interview somewhere in the early 2000’s where he said some unkind things about Bill Mantlo and Carol Kalish– two people who, by that point, were no longer able to defend themselves as the former sustained severe brain damage in 1992, and the latter had been dead aince 1991. Reading that interview really soured me on Shooter. He didn’t rip anyone else in that interview, as I recall. Just the two people who, like I said, were no longer able to defend themselves.
1990’s Jim Shooter was 1990’s Vince McMahon WITH a 1990’s male ponytail LOL
And I’LL never forgive him for ending the Defiant universe in the middle of their major Schism crossover , what a waste tsk tsk tsk
There was also Shooter throwing penciller Bob Hall under the bus for the infamous Hank Pym slap.