The X-Axis – w/c 30 June 2025
ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #27. By Alex Paknadel, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. This is a Hellfire Vigil tie-in, awkwardly interrupting an unrelated storyline featuring two of the same characters. It basically exists to explain Banshee grudgingly agreeing to attend the Vigil at the last minute, having started off with no desire whatsoever to commemorate the place where his beloved Moira turned out to be going through the motions, and then killed him. Cassidy Keep’s last remaining leprechaun reminding him of the story of Tir Na Nog, and the upshot is for Sean to accept that Krakoa was a time of lost innocence for the generation below him. I’m not sure you can really pull that line with characters like Husk and Skin who have been around since the 1990s, but the basic idea works well enough.
X-MEN: THE HELLFIRE VIGIL #1. (Annotations here.) This is an attempt to keep the Hellfire Gala one shots going, but not a terribly successful one. The Gala one-shots were used as turning points for the whole line. Vigil isn’t that, and really can’t be, because the whole approach of the post-Krakoa line is not to have a single unifying approach. And that’s a sensible approach, partly because there was never going to be a unifying high concept that could compete with Krakoa, but also because one of the downsides of Krakoa was the tendency to flatten out the line to a single setting. Nonetheless, it’s an approach that doesn’t lend itself to this sort of book, which leaves Hellfire Vigil feeling as if it’s going through the motions of an annual special. In practice, it’s an anthology – a collection of five-page scenes by the creators of various books, plus a few extra pages from the X-Men team, showing what each book’s characters are up to as mutantkind gathers to remember Krakoa.
Well, as those in New York gather to remember Krakoa, anyway. In Chicago, they’re watching a free Dazzler concert in a park. I didn’t much care for the Dazzler miniseries and I never thought that the song lyrics gimmick worked – certainly not when everyone is telling us all the time how brilliant they are – and all of that is present and correct here. But more to the point, a Dazzler concert is not a vigil. It’s just not.
Two of the books involved, NYX and X-Force, have already been cancelled; Dazzler was always a mini. Wolverine doesn’t contribute at all, for some reason. Lead-in times are probably a factor here, but it doesn’t help the sense of being, well, not very important. X-Force uses its pages to try and put a little flesh on the final issue reveal that Tank was Colossus, which has nothing really to do with the Vigil, but hey, they’re the only pages on offer. Phoenix just does a throwaway five-page story. Storm elects to trail an unrelated subplot. Uncanny has Ransom and Temper meeting up, which is a nice scene but could equally have been done at the intra-X-Men baseball game. Exceptional gets to have its teen characters attend a mutant-centric event, which is something, but doesn’t have space to do much with the idea.
While Jed MacKay gets to write the largest number of pages, they don’t manage to impose much structure on the issue. Cyclops refusing to go is a nice character beat, though, and the X-Men segments do at least advance the 3K plot by having the villains hijack the event to sell themselves to the wider mutant public as the true X-Men, pursuing the goal of Krakoan restoration. It’s the one segment that actually feels like it needs the Vigil – or at least some major mutant cultural event – to play off. Overall, though, this is a scattershot anthology which doesn’t add up to very much, and the title invokes expectations it can’t live up to.
X-MEN #19. (Annotations here.) Oh, yeah, I missed this out when I first posted this. Oops.
Well, with Hellfire Vigil shipping in the same week and the X-Men appearing there, this is a story in which the X-Men don’t appear at all. Instead, it finally picks up on X-Men: Heir of Apocalypse, which set up Cypher as Apocalypse’s heir on Earth, Revelation. That wasn’t a direction which seemed very promising, but Jed MacKay retools it here and makes it much more effective. The basic idea – which Netho Diaz gets across very well – is to row back on the robes and the stuff about disciples, and make sure that Doug is clearly recognisable, with Bei and Warlock as his family. There’s a bit more steel to Doug than before, but you could have said that at times during Krakoa. What’s kept from the original story is the idea that Apocalypse chose Doug precisely because he wanted someone with an entirely different approach, and so we have Doug trying to figure out what “Survival of the Fittest” actually means to him – from the look of it, in lieu of actually doing anything at all about it. It’s a much more interesting approach to the basic idea, with the nagging doubt about whether Doug really is the sort of character who should be trying to change the world, and the sense that Bei is holding back her private doubts from him. I’m less sure about giving O*N*E an extremist splinter faction – if you want me to believe that Orchis was acceptable to Biden, you’re going to have to work awfully hard to convince me that summary execution is over any sort of line for Trump.
HELLVERINE #8. By Benjamin Percy, Raffale Ienco, Bryan Valenza & Travis Lanham. A good chunk of this issue is the origin of the Hell Hulk, and there’s a glimmer of an interesting idea in here: Severith is basically the Hell equivalent of a government scientist doing deranged experiments, and he’s created the demonic equivalent of the uncontrollable Hulk. I kind of like the idea of a Hell where people have actual functions beyond just Being A Demon, and then having them repeat the mistakes of humans. Other than that, though, it’s all quite by the numbers. The script seems to be going for a freewheeling lunacy that the art isn’t really up to selling, and that might be the core problem here.
WOLVERINES AND DEADPOOLS #1. By Cody Ziglar, Rogê Antônio, Guru-eFX & Travis Lanham. Marvel have gone back to wildly over-exposing Wolverine, and seem unaccountably convinced that he and Deadpool are a duo you’d want to see on a regular basis, rather than just for the duration of a film. So this is not an enticing title in the slightest. In fact, though, it’s simply a continuation of Cody Ziglar’s Deadpool run, which already has Wade’s daughter Ellie as a second Deadpool, and now gets to have Logan and Laura as guest stars for three issues. In that light, it’s a lot less obnoxious. In fact, it’s completely fine – Wade calls in the Wolverines to help investigate mutant abductions in a small town, but mainly just wants to have his first father-daughter team-up with his very favourite superhero. Since the mission is completely genuine, the Wolverines are stuck with him – and Ellie, the legacy Deadpool, gets to meet another legacy character for the first time. So within the logic of Deadpool, there are actually good reasons why you’d want to do this story, which is a pleasant surprise. The art’s generally quite attractive, and on the whole it’s a lot more readable than you’d expect from that title.
Oh, for the golden era of demonology when Hell still had class.
For example, the demon Adramelech wasn’t just some random demon. Not simply the Chancellor of Hell, he was in charge of Satan’s wardrobe. There are unlimited story possibilities with that function, and Adramelech wasn’t alone in the pages of Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire Infernal.
On a non-X-related note, am I the only one that thought that this week’s Thor was a bit contrived? A villain is using an evil counterpart of the Rainbow Bridge to invade earth, so Skurge destroys the Bridge. And that has the effect of destroying the real Rainbow Bridge. Fair enough. But once the Rainbow Bridge is destroyed. everyone on Earth forgets about the Asgardians and regards them as myth. For example, everyone remembers Beta Ray Bill as having done Thor’s heroic deeds and founded the Avengers.
The problem is that the Rainbow Bridge has been destroyed multiple times already. Why is this the first time this has happened?
I was really hoping to get your take on the ludicrous astral forms in the newest Claremont book. It was almost obscene.
I guess there’s a difference between destroyed and DESTROYED.
Yeah, as someone who doesn’t read Deadpool and therefore didn’t know about the Ellie situation, my first thought when I saw the title — especially given the plot of the movie — was “Deadpool Kills Deadpool meets that Exiles issue with the All-Wolverine Exiles”.
Actually, Deadpool’s first father-daughter team-up (of sorts) and Ellie’s first encounter with a legacy character was three months ago, in a crossover with Miles Morales: Spider-Man, also by Czigler.
@Michael, they did something similar in Fraction’s Mighty Thor run. After Thor died during Fear Itself, Karnilla enacted a spell where Thor was replaced by Tanarus (a disguised Ulik the Troll) in the memories of everyone. Amora’s earlier plan in Immortal Thor had Thor’s story change in Midgard with Thor himself changing as long as he was on Earth. I’m assuming that it’s all part of Loki’s bigger plan and the Rainbow Bridge being shattered was to make sure that Loki’s rewriting of Thor’s story took.
@ChrisV, there’s actually Japanese manga/anime that uses Adramalech (ex. Black Clover) as well as other such relatively esoteric figures , the modern Japanese (or at least the manga/anime otaku crowd) are apparently really much more fond of Christian/Jewish mythology than contemporary Christians and Jews (exhibit A , the evergreen Neon Genesis Evangelion franchise) LOL
@JCG , considering it’s Al Ewing who wrote it , I suppose the obvious reason is 8TH COSMOS !!!, which is also the canonical explanation for the retcon of Prime-Earth/Marvel-616 cosmology in G.O.D.S.
@Michael, it’s explain in the issue. Loki is responsible. When Loki rebuilt the bridge a few years ago, he put a spell on it that would make Earth forget about them, if the bridge ever broke again. No one knew about the spell, which is why everyone on Asgard was caught by surprise.
The bigger issue is why people think Beta Ray Bill did everything that Thor did. If there is no Asgard than there’s no Beta Ray Bill. His powers are tied to Asgard. Furthermore, Bill wasn’t around yet back in Avengers #1, so it would have been impossible for him to be Thor’s fill in.
I was surprised that i liked WOLVERINES AND DEADPOOLS too though I dont read the current Deadpool run and gave up on Wolverine, so maybe not being overexposed to both helped. Seems like many aren’t reading it for that reason, but the villain is an old Claremontian x-villain we haven’t seen in while with a strong focus on mutants (and all the leads are mutants except Deadpool).
@NS- We last saw the Shadow King in Resurrection of Magneto 3, in March of last year. 16 months isn’t that long.
He’s another character like Sinister where it’s better that he’s used sparingly as a villain. Each appearance lessens the character.
Sinister was built up during the second half of the Krakoan Age and every good idea for him was used to the point he needed to disappear for a few years. Now, he’s the main villain in the trainee mutant title. Even with Emma in that book, there’s a reason why villains like Magneto or Apocalypse weren’t being used in Generation X. During Onslaught, they were fighting the Toad. OK, they did fight Omega Red, who was overpowered for a trainee team, but Omega Red had already fallen from being an A-list X-villain.
The same with Shadow King. He was supposed to be built up as Claremont’s ultimate threat to the X-Men. Regardless of how that ended, it’s not going to help the character to be in a third-tier X-title featuring characters who should not be any challenge to the Shadow King. Although at this point, Wolverine and Deadpool could probably defeat Galactus.
After Claremont left Marvel, it was seven years before the Shadow King returned again. While that story was poor, it at least showed that the Shadow King should be treated as a major threat, not a random villain in a random title.
That’s another problem with FtA, the creators are having a hard time finding suitable villains for all the titles. So, Sinister is back already in Exceptional. An alternate universe Apocalypse/Stryfe is in one of the Deadpool/Wolverine books, while the Shadow King is being used in this one.
No entry for the X-Men issue with Doug?
It completely slipped my mind, to be honest. I’ve added it now.
@Chris V- But comics always have villains as lesser threats once they’ve been beaten once, Apocalypse wasn’t beaten until Cyclops blew him apart in X-Factor and before that he was more powerful than Loki. I think Onslaught has returned twice since that whole thing in the 90s and was dispatched in the next issue both times. The Distinguished Competition keep harping on about how Doomsday killed Superman or Bane broke the Bat, but don’t mention that there have been dozens of stories since where they don’t do either of those things again.
But other than giving Claremont the excuse to write in his scripts ‘Moira now dresses sluttily’ the Shadow King was never actually a good villain and I wish he’d stayed gone after Claremont left X-Men the first time.
The obvious solution is to create new villains. Extraordinary could feature a group of anti-social teenage mutants, Wolverine could go up against a guy who isn’t part of his backstory, etc. Ellis, the 3K X-Men, and Gaunt have been underwhelming, unfortunately, but I think they current creative teams need to keep trying given how the older villains are mostly played out.
The most promising new villains, IMO, are the 3K “X-Men,” although they’re woefully underdeveloped.
But the real X-Men need a team of villains to fight. And not just anti-mutant humans/machines/whatever — other mutants, like the Inner Circle or Freedom Force, because they’re better positioned to be actual counterparts to the heroes.
If the 3K X-Men were holed up in a gorgeous base and were not at all traumatized and had a clear (but bad) objective, then they’d really highlight how lost and damaged Scott and co. are at the moment.
They have enough single, super-powerful villains: Cassandra, Shadow King, Stryfe, Sinister. Although, as Chris V. points out, each of those has gotten weaker (and more boring) over time.
@Michael: I would counter that the Shadow King we saw in the Resurrection of Magneto wasn’t clearly defined as the Shadow King. That appearance was in a dream in the land of the dead by a being that alleged it was something else first (when it really had no reason to) then the Shadow King, then it claimed it was all of the dark and esoteric x-villains combined including the Adversary. Maybe they’ll turn out to be the same. Who knows? Though with the lack of villains, combining a bunch into one seems like not a good idea.
@Thom H.: I thought that’s where Brevoort implied or said the line was headed. Some x-men turning bad as a result of Krakoas fall but it never happened. The only x-people who actually turned was Nature Girl/Armageddon Girl and maybe Doug. A new Brotherhood would be interesting if composed of former x-men, the thing that old Brotherhood book from way back seemed afraid to do.
@Thom H- I think Breevort was referring to Darkstar, Hellion and the Cuckoos.
The Shadow King…is a bit of an odd duck. He starts out as Amahl Farouk to show us what an evil Professor Xavier would look like (Emma Frost would come 12 issues later). He continues this way in taking on the New Mutants and is trounced by Karma. Then he returns possessing a dead FBI agent’s body to hunt down Storm, ostensibly in a set up for the Mutant Wars storyline that gets canceled/pared back. He starts calling himself the Shadow King, fights off panel with Magneto, and maybe takes over the Hellfire Club for a minute?
At this point in time, we leave Amahl Farouk and the Shadow King starts claiming to be an immortal entity existing from the time of the birth of humanity and wanting to infect the world, nay the universe! with hatred and dark emotions. I, personally, would like to believe that Farouk got so high on the Lorna Dane negative emotions nexus that he starting making these outrageous claims. He possesses Legion and is killed on the Astral Plane.
When we next see him, writers took his claims seriously and ran with them. He’s only the Shadow King at this point, and Amahl Farouk is gone or maybe mentioned as one of many identities that the Shadow King used. However, he isn’t so powerful because he gets locked in Betsy’s brain, and she can’t use her telepathy because he’ll break out.
Side note: has anything ever been done with Betsy’s telepathy being different? She’s able to keep the Shadow King locked up in her mind and also can penetrate the Juggernaut’s helmet with her psychic attacks. There are occasional traces of things being different with her, but these are usually soon forgotten or covered up.
Back to the Shadow King, Krakoa comes around and Amahl Farouk is resurrected. It’s revealed that he’s separate from the Shadow King and trying to come to terms with not being possessed/alone in his mind.
I much prefer Amahl Farouk, rather than the embodiment of the dark side of humanity that the Shadow King became. I wonder what was intended for him in the Mutant Wars, maybe a wheeler-dealer type, cutting deals with all sides with a look to indulge himself.
Ha ha! I swear I’m not responding to my own posts. I’m not sure who’s masquerading as me. Or maybe there really are two “Thom H.”s?
In any case, a bunch of X-Men going evil would be fun if Marvel would commit to it, but they never will. There’s too much anticipation for the good guys to snap out of it. Or they just change back when a writer forgets they’re supposed to be bad.
And can you imagine the “questions” Brevoort would get every week from the pissed off Eye Boy fans? “It’s scientifically proven that Trevor is the best X-Man in history, and you’ve ruined him forever!”
Better to create some new characters. Or power up some former henchmen. There are plenty of those around: Horsemen, MLF, Brotherhood, Hellfire Club goons, throw some Imperial Guard underlings in there…
Sam-You missed the X-Men: True Friends mini-series by Claremont. It was a continuity implant story featuring a time-travelling Kitty and Rachel prior to World War II. It was supposed to be published in 1989 but got shelved until Claremont returned to Marvel to finish it. It codifies the origin of the Shadow King.
On Tom Breevort’s Substack this week, he mentioned Scott and Jean will be interacting in Giant-Size X-Men 2.
Claremont seemed to change his plans for Farouk/Shadow King in the fly in 1990. The pivotal issue is actually a random Excalibur comic in the midst of the Cross-Time Caper. That’s the first time Farouk is called the “Shadow King” and it’s specifically because he’s the shadow king behind the familiar kings and queens of the Hellfire Club in an alternate universe. In that story, he still seems to basically Farouk, he just has a code name for the first time.
I believe the 1990 Excalibur special that eventually became “True Friends” would have been published after that Excalibur story, and there we’d start to get a sense that Farouk might be able to transcend space and time and be more than just an evil telepath (with some occult connections).
From summer 1990 to Muir Island Saga about a year later, Shadow King suddenly becomes his main name and his astral image ceases to look like Farouk’s.
Claremont hinted as early as 1989 at a Farouk–Donald Pierce connection. When the Reavers retake their Outback base, Gateway shows up in a dream vision of Forge’s as a prisoner of Farouk. Later, in a dropped subplot, the Reavers are attacking Emma Frost’s company. Coupled with Magneto’s brief allusion in 275 to his fight with the Hellfire Club’s Shadow King, it seems like Claremont was leading to SK taking over the 616 Hellfire Club.
And then there are a couple of 1991 What If? issues that credit Claremont with plot input. They have a From the Ashes-era (UXM 175 vintage, that is) Mastermind being revealed as a pawn of the Shadow King. It is interesting that in reality Karma gets possessed in a New Mutants issue in the midst of the Mastermind storyline in UXM. Did Claremont intend Farouk to be behind both plot lines? Note Mastermind’s vendetta against Mystique, Destiny, and Rogue in From the Ashes, which may allude to Claremont’s unpublished Ms Marvel Hellfire Club adventure, but in retcon retrospect makes sense as SK messing with
Mystique, Destiny, and Rogue. All of which is to say, SK wound up being an ongoing story revision, but Claremont might have wanted to do something big with him from a fairly early (1983) stage.
Bleeding Cool’s Bestseller List is out. X-Men: Hellfire Vigil came in at number 6, X-Men 19 came in at number 7 and Hellverine didn’t make the list as usual. I’m surprised Hellfire Vigil did as well as it did considering how everyone was trashing it online.
Daken will be appearing in the Spirits of Violence miniseries this October which will feature several Ghost Riders. My guess is that Hellverine will be cancelled in September.
The sales figures for June are out. Emma Frost: the White Queen 1 came in at 36- pretty good for a continuity implant mini.Uncanny X-Men 16 came in at 38. Magik 6 came in at 44. Hellfire Vigil came in at 57- but that’s understandable since it only had a few days of sales. Wolverine came in at 60. Spider-Man & Wolverine came in at 62. Storm 9 came in at 79. Exceptional X-Men 10 came in at 85. Deadpool/ .Wolverine 6 came in at 90. Psylocke 8 came in at 98. Laura Kinney: Wolverine 7 came in at 99. Hellverine 7 came in at 103. Phoenix 12 came in at 113. And BTW, Wolverines and Deadpools 1 came in at 136.
It has to be said that June was a very difficult month. It was a five-week month. And there were a lot of number 1s.
That being said these figures are inexcusably bad. Uncanny didn’t even make it into the top 35. Wolverine didn’t even make it into the top 50. I’m not sure if the problem is Ahmed’s writing or overexposure. All of the Wolverine or Wolverine and Deadpool titles sold horribly- Breevort definitely made a mistake in greenlighting so many Wolverine titles. None of the solo titles except Magik and Wolverine made the top 75. And Exceptional X-Men an alleged flagship came in at 85.
At this point the higher-ups have to be wondering about Breevort.
Michael> Daken will be appearing in the Spirits of Violence miniseries this October which will feature several Ghost Riders. My guess is that Hellverine will be cancelled in September.
I mean, it is, but Spirits of Violence has nothing to do with that. The first two issues were originally solicited for March & April (to immediately follow the Spirits of Vengeance series it continues the story of) before being cancelled without explanation; only to now be reannounced months later as if for the first time.
I got the impression and it won’t work thanks to current retcons…. that Farouk adopted the “Shadow King” identity after hus body died and he was just powerful enough to gain immortality and greater telepathic ability in the Astral Plane… and that if Professor X died he gain a similar status… and the X-writers felt different