The X-Axis – 26 September 2025
ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #37. By Tim Seeley, Edoardo Audino, KJ Diaz & Clayton Cowles. You know, sometimes a plot makes so little sense that it’s hard to see past that to anything else. The basic idea here is that Changeling and Morph are a split personality who don’t realise that they’re the same person – okay, fair enough. Changeling wants to start a nuclear war so that mutants can rebuild civilisation in the ruins – bit mad, but okay, it’s what he was trying to do back in the Silver Age as a member of Factor Three. Changeling wants to use his shape-changing powers to impersonate someone with high enough security clearance to get into a military base and fire the missiles – I’m going to doubt that there’s any one military type who can do that, but sure, I’ll go with it. But… the guy in question is a SHIELD agent? Who retired twenty years ago? And he can just waltz in with a bit of facial scanning? What? No, this is silly. Nice art on the shapechanging, and I get that there’s some kind of point being made about Banshee’s attitude to rehabilitation, but… no.
X-MEN #22. (Annotations here.) Okay, now this is good. I was saying last week that most of the line wasn’t doing a great job of building up to “Age of Revelation”, and to be honest I still see it as basically an X-Men storyline that seems to be interrupting the other titles. But as an X-Men storyline, I’m quite looking forward to it. This is pretty much an entire issue of conversation, picking up on a series of character subplots, and it even sells me a bit more on Juggernaut killing Ocelot last issue – I’m still not convinced that that’s in character, but there’s follow-up which feels more convincing. C F Villa’s art keeps a very talky issue interesting and I’d really like to see more from them. The pay-off of all this is Doug Ramsey showing up to join the X-Men, which we already know from the Age of Revelation one-shot is a slippery slope towards disaster. I’m not quite sure whether he’s meant to come off smug as the art makes him look here – he didn’t come across this way in issue #19, his spotlight story. But then again he’s talking to a different audience here, and trying to sell his alpha male status to an audience who aren’t used to thinking of him that way so… I guess it makes sense. Anyway, this was fun, and it was one of those stories where there turned out to be a lot more to say about it in the annotations post than I thought there would be. And it does raise my interest in “Age of Revelation”.
STORM #12. (Annotations here.) This is the end of “Thunder War”, imaginatively titled “Thunder War Ends”. I gather this has been compressed slightly from the original plan, and it shows – the final act of Eternity reconciling with Storm, betraying her again and getting expelled from her body is horribly rushed. And a bunch of meta elements are added at the last minute with no real opportunity to go anywhere. Still, Storm has always had very questionable storytelling choices. Looking back on the series as a whole, it’s now possible to piece together a basically coherent narrative for the Eternity plotline, which is what I did for the annotations post. But you really have to work to get there. More fundamentally, though, is this really a Storm story? On the letters page, Ayodele describes Eternity as the antagonist, but surely he’s the protagaonist. You can summarise his plot and barely mention Storm except as a passing host body. The inciting event of this story is Oblivion threatening to kill Eternity, which leads to Eternity embarking on a misjudged scheme to stop that happening. The scheme backfires, things get even worse, and Eternity learns an important lesson about how he needs to work with his host in order to get the job done. That’s an Eternity story! Storm’s role in the plot is to be a host body because Eternity either can’t or won’t fight in person, and that’s an essentially passive role. She gets no choice in anything that happens and the turning point in the final issue is nothing to do with her – it’s Eternity having a chat with his dad. There’s an audience that seems to love this book because it’s giving Storm a ton of power, but it sure isn’t giving her much agency.
SPIDER-MAN & WOLVERINE #5. By Marc Guggenheim, Kaare Andrews, Brian Reber and Travis Lanham. The end of the first trade paperback, and good lord, this doesn’t have much to recommend it beyond the art. And as I’ve said before, when you’ve got Kaare Andrews, maybe that’s enough – maybe the only function of the plot is to avoid having to test the theory that Kaare Andrews really could draw his shopping list and make it look good. But there is a plot here, and it really doesn’t work. So there’s a new villain called Dreadshadow – which is already a bad start unless you’re doing a 90s comedy revival – and he wants revenge on Spider-Man and Wolverine for the death of his daughter. His daughter was killed by long-dead villain the Enforcer (he was one of Scourge’s victims back in the 1980s), and Dreadshadow blames Spider-Man and Wolverine because, um, they once arrested the Enforcer. But they didn’t kill him, you see. So Dreadshadow’s aim in this story is to make some sort of point about how they aren’t real heroes because they don’t kill people by… um… making them angry? That doesn’t even get off the ground as a concept for a Wolverine story, and while it might work if Dreadshadow was a parody of a revenge villain, we get a sequence of Spider-Man solemnly reflecting that the guy had a point. What? Come off it.
EMMA FROST: THE WHITE QUEEN #4. By Amy Chu, Andrea Di Vito, Antonio Fabela & Ariana Maher. One more issue to go in this mini, and right now it’s landing squarely in “fine, I guess”. I like the idea of doing a tour of the wider Hellfire Club network and playing it up as a global organisation, but there are problems with doing Club politics in a continuity implant series – I’ve said before that it ducks the awkwardness of Emma as villain, but it also means that the main plot tension is about whether Emma gets ousted as White Queen, which is something we all know can’t happen. That’s not necessarily fatal – sometimes it’s enough that the characters believe it’s a risk – but in this case it feels like there’s a lot of false jeopardy. A book that feels a little bit less than the sum of its parts.
Re: Spider-Man & Wolverine 5- Dreadshadow claimed that Spider-Man and Wolverine sent the Enforcer to the Raft but the Raft wasn’t introduced until decades after the Enforcer was dead.
The main significance of this issue is that it reveals that Teresa Parker is NOT Peter’s sister. Nick Spencer had the Chameleon claim that she wasn’t and left it ambiguous whether he was lying.But I guess some people at Marvel didn’t like leaving it ambiguous.
Re; Emma Frost: the White Queen 4- This caused a bit of a stir online when a Sentinel referred to Emma as an “Omega-level threat”.
Jon Lovitz could fill in for the X-Axis…“It stinks. It stinks. This one is ok.”
One thing to note is that the letters page claims that Scarlet Witch is going to confront Storm in her new series. My guess is that Marvel is going to use Wanda’s new role as the Sorcerer Supreme to help launch Storm’s and Illyana’s new series- Wanda confronts Storm in the first issue of her series and she confronts Illyana and Maddie in the first issue of Magik.
On one hand, I didn’t think it really added much to Spider-Man’s story to add in a long-lost super-spy sister, especially since so much of his defining backstory was a paucity of relatives beyond May and Ben. (Seriously, his family tree is a shrubbery.) Making his parents super-spies who encountered other denizens of the MU like Logan was pushing it already, but hey, I guess we were stuck with it. Better by far, if he had to have a long-lost sister would be if she was utterly mundane.
But what good does it do to remove Teresa as his sister now? She’s off-stage more often than not as it is; are we to assume we’ll never see her again if she’s not his blood sister? Or will she turn up anyway as “adopted family” because Peter, when he’s not being an asshole, is quite clinging with friends and family.
Dreadshadow is utterly ridiculous. And this series is nonsense. Also, I thought for sure it was a five issue mini, but it’s… still continuing?
Spider-Man should* have a sister who is mundane, extremely arachnophobic and also inherited the family heart condition. Spider-Man would have to keep rescuing her without letting her know he is around. Or I suppose he could just dye his costume green and call himself Grasshopper-Man instead.
*joke, he absolutely should not have any relatives except his aunt-in-law
Every once in a while, you need to add a non-starter idea to the Spider-Man canon which will only realize its full potential in an alternate universe movie or video game or Ultimate reboot.
After all, fans can’t complain if it was already canon.
Stan Lee should’ve fired himself for writing the “Peter’s parents were spies” story.
“ Jon Lovitz could fill in for the X-Axis.”
As Jay Sherman…
I give this my highest rating, 7 out of 10.
If there’s one thing you can say for Madame Web, at least it made Peter’s parents not be superspies.
Miles’s dad having worked for Nick Fury was also pretty silly, but there were worse issues with a Black man named Jefferson Davis.
Emma comes across as a morron when she gets roofied because she doesn’t want to read the mind of her “friend”. This minis has been non stop her being betrayed by people she thought were her friends!
Theresa could STILL be the biological daughter of Richard and Mary Parker , since after all , why would they even bring her with them while on an actual mission to begin with in the first place , duh !
Madame Web made me laugh so hard in the movie theater that I have an affection for it. And, yes, I was laughing at it, not with it.
Using Mystique as someone on the side of pro-mutant revolutionaries is an interesting choice given that she either will or has already sold out to the government with Freedom Force. I always thought that the Inner Circle knew that Shaw was building Sentinels for the government so that a) he could make a lot of money and b) know how they worked so the Hellfire Club could evade detection or defeat them.
Steven Lang’s Sentinels were funded by the Hellfire Club’s Council of the Chosen, the pre-Shaw and Frost version of the Inner Circle. Ned Buckman, the White King, tried to kill the mutant members in the Classic X-men backup strips with the Lang Sentinels and was killed along with the rest of the Council by Shaw and Frost. I bring this up because Emma has always known about Shaw’s involvement with the government’s Sentinels, and writers sometimes make her seem like she doesn’t know (not only this White Queen series, but also Louise Simonson when Emma and Selene turn against Shaw to support Magneto in a post-Inferno issue of New Mutants).
@Sam- I think the problem with the Sentinels has to do with the confusion of when this series takes place. In X-Men 135, Shaw proposes a Sentinel project to a Senator. The note on the recap page claims that this issue takes place after issue 138. if you assume that issue 138 takes place maybe a week after 135, then Emma could very well have been ignorant of the fact that Shaw had proposed Sentinels to a Senator. The problem is that Storm sees Emma in the first issue of this series. And in X-Men 151, Storm is shocked that Emma survived the events of issue 131. So this series has to take place after issue 151. Unfortunately ,in X-Men 151, Shaw and Emma send Sentinels against the X-Men, so Emma had to know about the Sentinels any that time.
(Although if you want a real explanation, Emma never says she didn’t know about the Sentinels- Mystique just assumes she didn’t.)
Bleeding Cool’s Weekly Bestseller List is out. X-Men 22 came in fourth. Storm 12 and Spider-Man & Wolverine 5 didn’t make the list.
Anybody read Battleworld #1? DoFP Storm is one of the main cast and they fight a Sentinel.
I wasn’t going to buy this but I saw Pym was a main character and I loved how Gage used him back in Avengers Academy.
I will definitely keep reading this mini. It is a lot of fun, great characterization and surprising fan stuff. Plus Marcus To is better served here than he was on X-Force.
Battleworld is a silly remit wirh no obvious fanbase. Ir is essentially a marketing gimick. Silly in this case is decidedly not comedic. I would compare it to Godzilla versus X-men… which was also more competent than expected or has any reason to be. If you have nostalgia for the first Secret Wars, but don’t actually want to reread the oroginal than Battlrworlds is… slightly better than fine. The art is better than competent, but not a showcase. It was nice seeing old school Luke Cage. As Jay Sherman would say. “Who is this for?” (I guess me.) And “Dad, I can understand you gluing the silverware to the ceiling, but why the dog?”
Wow. Sorry for the typos.
@Scott: I read Battleworld 1. It was fun, and I’ll probably get the rest of the series. Avengers Academy was an underrated series- it had a fanbase, but seems more or less forgotten now. I think Gage is the only writer interested in using or developing Hank Pym and Korvac, might as well let him. I’m glad To continues to get work, his art always looks good.
Battleworld wasn’t my favorite comic from the last week (Twilight Zone 1 felt like an episode of the classic series with eye-catching art, Skinbreaker 1 was a feast for the eyes, Absolute Wonder Woman continued to rule), but it was a good read.
@Mike Loughlin- Well. MacKay brought Pam back in Moon Knight.
@Michael: as long as he didn’t bring Jim back with her. Stop mugging for the camera, Jim! That bit got old after two seasons and you just! wouldn’t! stop!
AIPT has an interview with Stephanie Phillips about the Binary series. Judging from the cover for issue 2, apparently Maddie will be the villain. Although Stephanie Philips made it clear that even though Carol thinks Jean is dead, Jean isn’t dead, so maybe it’s some fusion of Jean and Maddie that’s the villain?