The X-Axis – w/c 15 September 2025
UNCANNY X-MEN #21. (Annotations here.) No X-Men Unlimited issue this week – they often take weeks off between arcs but for some reason they’ve started doing it mid-story of late. Which is a silly idea but what the hell, it’s only the Infinity Comic. So we’ll move straight on to Uncanny X-Men as it wraps up for “Age of Revelation”.
Now, I remember the original “Age of Apocalypse”, which also did the stunt of “cancelling” the line and replacing it with stand-in books for the duration of the event. And the first time around, they made a point of actually leading in to the event. The official prologue was confined to the core X-Men titles, but the other books at least ended on a cliffhanger before going into their break. We’re not getting that here – in some cases that’s because the book had been cancelled, or perhaps they just weren’t sure what it was doing on the other side of the crossover, but even Uncanny X-Men isn’t actually doing anything to set up its participation in the story. Which is very weird in terms of momentum. It hasn’t felt in the slightest like we’re leading in to a big event – it feels like the line is closing down for the winter.
Still, on the level of individual issues, it’s probably for the best that they aren’t forcing a tie-in. This is the second part of Ransom’s spotlight story, in which he goes back to Argentina to rescue his estranged ex-brother from a cult, and winds up visiting a comicon with Wolverine. It’s an odd issue. It looks nice enough, and Vecchio has some fun with the convention cosplayers (even if the place does look a bit spartan). The emotional beats with Ransom and his family land decently. There’s maybe a bit more nuance to his father than we’ve seen before, and some more hints about a family history to be explored in future, but Ransom’s complaint of feeling rejected by his father is basically made out. What’s not made clear is why his father ever took him in in the first place, which is a story for another day. And all this just about gets away with there being a gaping hole at the centre of the plot where the villain’s motivation ought to be. It’s never at all clear what Proctor actually wanted, or what the purpose of his cult is, or what they were trying to achieve (or even what his cultists think they’re trying to achieve). Which… has the advantage of leaving the way clear to tell us that Benicio just wanted to belong to something and allowing him to redeem himself, without the awkwardness of making him an explicit racist. I guess. But without ever really knowing what any of this was about, parts of the story float uncomfortably.
PHOENIX #15. (Annotations here.) So, look, I sort of get what Stephanie Phillips is trying to do here: she wants to do the story where creating Sara Grey creates a massive problem, and the cosmic powers that be want to deal with that problem by eradicating her. But Jean shows them that there’s a better way. And everyone learns that Jean is bringing something new and worthwhile to the cosmic gods by adding the perspective of the little person, which in turn justifies Sara’s new role as… well, a cosmic Jiminy Cricket.
But the execution fails comprehensively. The plot hinges explicitly on the fact that if Sara is allowed to continue existing then this will bring universal disaster. And this is evidenced by showing the White Hot Room breaking apart, and a trip to a future timeline where, for some unfathomable reason, it’s all zombies. Nobody at any point suggests that there’s a possible solution that doesn’t involve killing Sara, even Jean. She’s simply written as refusing on principle to sacrifice one “life” for the greater good, without having any explanation of how else she’s going to avoid the mass extinction thing. So when she just out of nowhere declares that it’s a solvable problem and everyone goes “oh, okay, fair enough then”, that’s a massive cheat and the story collapses.
Plus, if this is the story, it should have been one of the cosmic entities or their messengers setting out the problem, not Cable. By using him, the story inadvertently positions the cosmic entities’ attitude as one shared by reasonable mortals, and completely undercuts the idea that it’s something about cosmic perspective. Then we’ve got a bunch of former Phoenix hosts, from the prominent to the extremely obscure, showing up as guest stars only to do literally nothing.
Artist Roi Mercado has their moments – I think they’re actually a good artist for more down to earth material, and they do a pretty solid job when asked to draw the cosmic beings in their human forms from G.O.D.S.. Oblivion comes across particularly well here. It’s the grand cosmic bits that fall a bit flat, but that’s more a case of Mercado being miscast on this particular book; I’d be happy to see more from them on a book better suited to their strengths.
Overall, though… yeah, a bit of a catastrophe.
MAGIK #10. (Annotations here.) Another final issue. The absence of this series from “Age of Revelation” raised eyebrows, since on the available data it seemed to be selling respectably. It turns out that the same creative team are starting a new book in January – presumably not just a Magik title, or they’d have said so – which is something. This has been one of the stronger X-books of late. That’s not just in terms of having a strong sense of identity, but also in terms of finding a way to make Magik a viable character again after many years of using her as a mobile snark delivery system, simply by leaning into the idea that she hides behind her persona, and then putting her in situations where she can’t. Or indeed by putting her in situations where she can, but her first person narration is more honest than her dialogue. Germán Peralta has even managed to make her costume work, and very few people have.
So it’s a book that’s done good work in reviving my interest in Illyana, and it’s had some good concepts as well. This final issue is maybe not its strongest outing; it feels like plotlines about the Exemplars turning on Embodiment are being rushed to a finale that was meant to come in another arc’s time. And the way that Illyana defeats Embodiment kind of depends on inventing some previously undeclared rules about the villain’s precognitive powers right before they’re conveniently needed, when this book is usually better than that at laying its groundwork. But it’s still good enough, and delivers as a resolution to that last ten issues. Magik has been better, but this is perfectly fine.
DEADPOOL/WOLVERINE #9. By Benjamin Percy, Robert Gill & Guru-eFX. I ran out of things to say about this comic months ago. If you were into Benjamin Percy and Robert Gill’s X-Force issues then, well, tonally, this is very much like that. But the decision to drag out this one storyline for 10 issues, when it feels like even five would have been pushing it, is baffling to me.
I wouldn’t say that contradicts Hickman leaving X-Men due to editorial interference, at all. He signed a contract to write Krakoa: X-Men for three years. Marvel extended the duration of Krakoa, and that wasn’t in Hickman’s contract. Based on other things he’s said and written about leaving the X-Men, it seems to go beyond simply his paycheck.
Based on Hickman’s comment above (“just write ongoing monthly books”), it seems that Marvel was considering making Krakoa the new status quo until they saw that sales were quickly dropping and they decided to scrap the entire project.
The fact that he went on to do GODS and the Ultimate line simply shows that Marvel was willing to pay him big bucks to do other projects for them, rather than let Hickman wander back to creator-owned books after he quit on X-Men.
Hickman left in 2021. Krakoa ended in 2024. If Marvel had “decided to scrap the entire project” due to low sales, they certainly wouldn’t have taken that long to do so.
Found this from 2021. X-Men group editor Jordan G White clarifying the reason for Hickman’s departure.
https://bleedingcool.com/comics/jonathan-hickman-departure-from-x-men-explained/
What’s so interesting is that everyone who talks about why Hickman left leaves so much ambiguity. Here’s part of what Jordan said in the interview quoted here:
“But after seeing how things started to unfold, Jonathan said, “I think we might want to not do this.””
It’s not really clear what things unfolded, or what the “this” that they didn’t want to do was. My theory is that part of may have been fan responses and/or the way the pandemic unfolded, which made the rest of the story un-tellable.
The other weird thing is how Hickman’s departure was announced. It was announced both suddenly AND anticlimactically in the press. A big part of the emphasis in the press was that they were NO LONGER DOING whatever Hickman had originally planned, and that his departure was tied to them no longer doing that.
It seems like an unforced error, in terms of PR. Why not just call Inferno “the next explosive step in the Krakoa story” and say that Hickman is going to pass on show-running to another writer but they have his full support?
Why go into “ummm we changed our original plans”? Like, even if the press asked them questions about that, surely they could just say “we’re doing what we always intended, which is moving the story of the X-Men forward”
It’s the way the PR rolled out which makes me think that Hickman was not fully onboard with the changes to the story, because all parties took pains to emaphsise that the story WAS changed from what was originally intended. That’s bound to happen in any kind of long-running serial fiction, right? So why mention it? There are all kinds of ways they could have sold Hickman’s departure from the books, but they chose to go with a “conscious uncoupling, but we’re still friends” narrative.
I would guess that Hickman wanted to be sure that fans didn’t associate him with what happened in the X-Men books after he left.
@Aro – Um, why would Jonathan Hickman not want to be associated with what came next when what came next came about precisely *because* of his decision to move on?
Had Hickman stayed on, what would have came next would have been exactly what he had originally planned to come next, and Jordan White was very clear on that point. Nobody changed the plans on Hickman. It was Hickman’s own suggestion that they not move forward with what he originally had in mind. Not his own suggestion. Not another editor’s suggestion. Not another writer’s suggestion. It was all Hickman. Again, White is very clear about that, and if that weren’t the case, I can think of no reason Hickman why wouldn’t have called White out on this interview to set the record straight.
There’s no drama here. There’s no conflict here, and maybe that’s the problem. When it comes to what goes on behind the scenes, the fans can sometimes become even bigger storytellers than the actual writers. After all, it makes for a much more interesting accounting of things if someone actually did get pissed off along the way.
@Aro: It’s especially odd that they publicly announced that, considering that in the run-up to both Sins of Sinister and Fall of X, Kieron Gillen and Jordan White were insisting that Hickman had been consulted on plot points, and that FoX specifically was ‘more or less’ lined up with Hickman’s original plans for the end of the Krakoa part of his story (which… seems *deeply* unlikely, for multiple reasons).
@Moo: I think the skepticism stems less from a desire for melodrama and more from the fact that Inferno is a muddled, plot hole-riddled mess – typically a sign of a rush job.
@Diana – yeah, that’s the kind of PR talk that I think would have been expected to get when Hickman departed the books. “It’s been the plan all along, everything’s been building to this etc”. Sure it’s just spin, but that’s 90% of marketing comics, and it’s NOT HARD. The press that covers superhero comics is generally so soft that any PR is generally taken at face value. So to me, Hickman going “yeah we had a grand vision for a story in mind, but now we’re not doing that anymore” is almost like breaking kayfabe.
@Moo – I mean I DO find the meta level as interesting as the actual stories sometimes: They started out with grand plans to tell a story, but as they story was being told it became impossible to tell.
I don’t know to what degree there was any real ‘drama’ (Hickman immediately pivoying to Substack does not suggest he was fully happy at Marvel, but it’s also what a lot of comics people were doing at that time, so maybe it’s a coincidence). I guess what I’m saying is that I think Hickman is a savvy enough of a storyteller to know that if he says “I had a big plan, but we’re not doing it any more. For reasons”, he’s leaving a big WHAT IF J HICKMAN NEVER LEFT THE X-MEN on the table for fans to stew over, probably for decades. So far it’s working I guess…
My guess about Hickman’s untellable story is that it had something to do with the Krakoan drugs for humans, specifically something going spectacularly wrong with them. I’m pretty sure Marvel didn’t want to (seem to) line up with anti-vaxxers in the middle of a pandemic. That would also explain why the drugs mostly got sidelined in the larger story.
LIM protein has been implicated in the onset of most cancers in humans. Oddly enough, the designation given to the Krakoan drugs was Drugs-L, I, M. Moira made a comment, “Mutants are a cancer in need of a cure.” Interesting. Interesting. All the evidence seems to point to the Krakoan drugs being her cure for the X-gene.
Why the pandemic making them reconsider their plans for the Krakoan drugs would have made Hickman decide he couldn’t tell his story anymore though, I have no idea. I’m sure he could have found a way to work around it, if that was really the issue.
There are also conflicting reports ranging from, “Hey! Everyone is having too much fun playing, so we decided to let them keep having fun.” (as if Marvel is run like a high school newspaper) to “after seeing how things began to unfold, Jonathan said he might want to do this.” all of which is usually a sign of a corporation trying to cover up what actually happened.
I’ve never said there was any drama, I’ve said Hickman made the correct decision all along (although, what that decision was is a lot more questionable after reading different versions of what happened), and what I meant was that Hickman is a consummate professional. He has always realized that Marvel is paying him more than 99% of the writers they hire, and he can get his work pulled out from under him at any time by corporate decisions.
I am guessing the amount of PR was to try to prevent fans from dropping the X-books in anger over Hickman’s plans being changed, “Hey, we’re still buddies. Hickman wanted to leave now because his plans changed, and he said he didn’t want to do what he was doing. So, keep reading because this is still the same direction as it always was under Hickman.” Hickman seems to be careful in his responses to not upset anyone, again being the consummate professional. Hickman could give interviews, “They ruined it. They ruined Krakoa. I hate what they are doing.”, which would certainly have lead to fans rebuking Krakoa (it’s going to happen anyway after a change, but will happen much more if fans think the writer they followed to X-Men got the shaft). Then, Marvel may decide to no longer work with Hickman, and since Hickman charges more to write than the typical comic writer, that’s not a good decision for someone like Hickman to make.
Also, White’s comment, “Act one could be ten years.”-As if the editor or writers have any say in that matter. The only way it could end up being “ten years” is based on sales. White must realize that it would be a foolish idea to not plan to get the rug pulled at any moment if Marvel is upset at the sales. If you have an end point in mind, risking having to finish everything in six months because the sales started to tank isn’t sustainable planning. This is a company that will cancel a title after ten issues.
@Chris V – I think White was just using hyperbole to make the point that nobody involved knew how long the first act would run. I didn’t take him saying “ten years” to literally mean ten years. I took it as him saying “Who knows?”
@Chris V: Except that, per Inferno, Moira’s plan *couldn’t* have been to cure mutants all along, because Omega Sentinel comes from a future where Krakoa and mutantkind won.
Inferno suggests that Karima somehow changed events and caused Moira to reconsider the cure, but we never see any of that on the page.
If I had to guess – I do not, but I am making the attempt anyway – Hickman has simply decided that he likes to play with high concepts that affect entire lines more than he desires to see them played out to their logical and complete conclusions. It probably helps that Marvel does not want him to write the _final_ X-Men stories either.
Meanwhile, given the need to choose, Marvel values keeping their lines and intellectual properties viable above solving each arc or era to some definite conclusion that hinders the writing of more stories and the making of more movies and streaming series.
Marvel also has what I am increasingly perceiving as a permanent need to attract and acclimate new writers, for reasons both of self-interest and pragmatism.
Once we consider as well that there also factors that influence the viability of books that are well beyond any real control from creators, Marvel Editorial or any suits from Marvel or above, it is difficult to fault either party for those pragmatic stances.
So I guess I agree with Moo above. There is no real drama; Marvel, Hickman and others are simply taking the pulse of the market and the realities of the creative process in a company such as Marvel into consideration – as they should. Marvel and its creators are partners in commercial agreements, and the boundaries of their duties are fairly well defined and probably don’t carry much emotional weight to either party.
Mostly because there is no need to. Hickman can easily find other venues for publication if he feels the need for more creative freedom. And Marvel neither promises nor expects much closer a relationship with its creators either.
Fans may feel passionate about specific arrangements and time periods, but the creators and suits are not wrong in perceiving their business as, ultimately, just a business.
“I think the skepticism stems less from a desire for melodrama and more from the fact that Inferno is a muddled, plot hole-riddled mess – typically a sign of a rush job.”
Or a “too many cooks in the kitchen” job. Or a backstage confusion job due to miscommunication or poor communication. It happens. It has happened. Marvel and DC have both produced incomprehensible garbage in past that didn’t involve key personnel departing unhappily.
Ordinarily I love me a good conspiracy, but I just don’t see any cover up here.
Diana-That’s true, and it shows again that “Inferno” was rushed and failed to convey basic facts necessary to make sense of the revelations. It would have been a simple matter for Hickman to write “Moira died” on the 10A timeline, or include “Destiny never died and was allowed on Krakoa from the inception” to give readers some hint of why Moira’s turning on mutants in Life 10B made sense.
Since Percy was going to turn Moira into a murderous psychopath within a few months, really, it doesn’t matter.
@Diana- “Hickman left in 2021. Krakoa ended in 2024. If Marvel had “decided to scrap the entire project” due to low sales, they certainly wouldn’t have taken that long to do so.”
Hickman left In 2021 and White’s firing was announced in 2023. Whether White’s firing was due to low sales depends on how quickly the sales collapsed. If sales on X-Men were 300,000 per month in 2021, 275,000 in 2022 and 100,000 in 2023, for example. and the other titles had a similar trajectory. then White’s firing could very well have been due to low sales.
The problem is that Marvel no longer publishes the Statements of Ownerships so we no longer have accurate yearly averages.
@Moo- this speculation isn’t limited to Hickman’s X-Men. People still argue over whether editorial rewrote the ending of Spencer’s Spider-Man. That’s due to factors like Strange and Mephisto arguing over Peter’s soul at the start of a story and then the ending has them arguing over Harry’s soul. Of course, in that case, Spencer hasn’t said anything in the years since his run ended, which fuels speculation.
Chris V said:
“ Hickman seems to be careful in his responses to not upset anyone, again being the consummate professional. Hickman could give interviews, “They ruined it. They ruined Krakoa. I hate what they are doing.”, which would certainly have lead to fans rebuking Krakoa”
Yes, absolutely. Everyone made sure to signal that they were being professional, and that there was no bad blood. Marvel still had projects with Hickman, and that Hickman wished the X-office the best. From a business standpoint, it seems to have worked out, and I think the clear guidelines around the new Ultimate line suggest that everyone learned something about structuring a line of comics.
I don’t think there’s a huge conspiracy to cover up. All parties tied Hickman’s departure to a change in plans for the Krakoa story – “he’s leaving and we’re doing some but not all of what was set up.” That message doesn’t really benefit Marvel, or the other x-writers. It DOES benefit Hickman, who got to exit the books with his reputation intact despite the fact that Inferno was a mess and that the flagship X-Men book got a fairly mixed response.
The PR would have been coordinated, and discussed ahead of time. Both sides got to be inculpable -it’s not Marvel editorial’s fault that the story changed, since Hickman agreed that it should change; it’s not Hickman fault if the story goes badly since, it wasn’t his original plan. Oh well! By comic book standards, this is impeccable PR.
But things like “I’m paid too much to just write monthly comics” don’t really square with Hickman’s show-runner “Head of X” role, while also contradicting the way the x-writers were portrayed as a team of equals circa X of Swords (it was obviously spin at the time, but I wondered how the other writers felt about Hickman shattering that illusion quite as callously). I think if the books had been successful, it might have been worth it to keep someone on in a similar role, but obviously somewhere in there the calculus changed.
I don’t think Marvel has attempted a similar writer/editor/show-runner model since Krakoa, which is telling. Maybe keeping a continually high-performing line of comic books is not worth the costs required, and it makes better business sense to keep relaunching titles and keeping them afloat with crossovers and variant titles. Maybe the comic market rewards novelty over consistency.
“Why the pandemic making them reconsider their plans for the Krakoan drugs would have made Hickman decide he couldn’t tell his story anymore though, I have no idea”
Based on some subtle comments that White and Hickman have made in interviews over the years, I have a strong intuition that real world vaccine skepticism exacerbated as a result of the pandemic was the cause of Hickman pivoting. Marvel / Disney was not going to do a story centered around tainted mutant drugs. Some part of that thread got picked up in Sins of Sinister and FoX, but it seems to me there was more of a plan for that, as Chris V points out above.
@Joseph S: I kind of doubt that, if only because they ultimately *did* do a story centered around tainted mutant drugs, starting as early as the second Hellfire Gala. Granted that most of that ended up being carried out by Duggan rather than Hickman, but still – that was the actual plot.
Right, but weren’t the drugs tainted by the super-evil Orchis? I admit again that this is completely made up, but I got the vibe that the drugs were originally going to be negative in some way because Krakoa or the mutants purposely made them to be that way. Not a good look for our “heroes.”
@Thom H.: I don’t think the circumstances would matter in this scenario where Hickman allegedly changed his plans to avoid even the *possibility* of being interpreted as antivax during the pandemic. It would still ultimately be a story about people being “tricked” into taking medicine that killed them.
To be fair, they did introduce that Embodiment’s premonitions are triggered by movement in issue #9. That’s not MUCH better than bringing it in at the last minute, but it’s something.
I’m not going to read tea leaves from Bleeding Cool’s cup.
But having the whole line in a holding pattern for a many weeks after Inferno with only the X Deaths/Lives of Wolverine as a stopgap sure seems like an ‘oh shit what do we do now’ moment.
As in, if Hickman’s exit was amicable and pre-planned, they wouldn’t need to pivot so hard.
“I’m not going to read tea leaves from Bleeding Cool’s cup.”
If you’re referring to the article that I linked, it wasn’t Bleeding Cool’s tea leaves. It was an excerpt from another site (AIPT), which they linked to at the bottom.