The X-Axis – 21 January 2026
X-MEN #24. (Annotations here.) This is billed as a second epilogue issue to “Age of Revelation”, though I’m not sure that’s the best way of framing it. As I’ve said before, “Age of Revelation” really works best if you think of it as a middle phase in Jed MacKay’s overarching X-Men storyline. And these two issues aren’t really epilogues, so much as characters in the present day changing direction in light of what they’ve learned from that future timeline. This is the villain issue, focussing on 3K – half of it is the remaining members of 3K’s inner circle squabbling for power in the Beast’s absence, and the other half is him returning and announcing that he knows how to create the X-virus. It’s a pretty good issue, at its best with the individual character work – although the 3K X-Men get shortchanged a bit, and I’m still not quite sure I buy the Beast having quite so much influence over this otherwise murderous assortment. Tony Daniel does a rather good take on the snow-white Beast design from “Age of Revelation”, which the Krakoan Beast has evidently decided to adopt without explaining why – we seem to be heading towards a romantic triangle with Jen Starkey and two Hanks, which is cute – and I really like the final page of the 3K base hanging serenely over a mountain landscape, with the tiniest little dot showing Schwarzchild’s body being dumped over the side.
INGLORIOUS X-FORCE #1. (Annotations here.) Last year’s X-Force didn’t really work out, being cancelled after ten issues and rushed to a conclusion. It also didn’t have much to do with the X-Force name at all. This time, Tim Seeley and Michael Sta. Maria take the more conventional route with Cable landing back in the present day and prompting recruiting Archangel, Hellverine and Boom Boom as a new version of X-Force. Despite Archangel and Hellverine being in the book, Seeley isn’t a grimdark writer, and seems much keener on the early 90s version of X-Force, which was more of a sugar rush than anything else. And I quite like the way that Cable seems to be trading on X-Force’s history and reputation as a way of encouraging the rest of the cast to stay with him (for ulterior motives); if nothing else, it provides a legitimate reason to brand this as an X-Force title.
Bringing Ms Marvel into an X-Force book sounds dubious, but in fact that seems to be the point. She doesn’t belong in an X-Force title, but rather than hang around looking uncomfortable about the whole thing, she simply refuses to play ball, insists on her neighbourhood hero role, and demands that the book change for her instead of vice versa. I like that, and I can see it working. On the other hand, the basic premise that everyone thinks they’re defending her now against an assassination attempt in, what, 15 years time, is hard to make sense of. I know Cable’s got other motives, but what do the rest of the team think they’re achieving here? And I’m not really sold on Hellverine’s inclusion either – I can see the angle that justifies everyone else being here, but Akihiro feels like he’s been chucked in because he was available.
The art is solid, with a pleasingly old school yet run-down Cable, and Tabitha nicely positioned as a true believer to lighten the mood. I quite liked it, all told. But at the same time it does feel like the X-books playing it safe compared to last year; that’s probably the biggest point where it still needs to convince me.
SPIDER-MAN & WOLVERINE #9. By Marc Guggenheim, Gerardo Sandoval, Victor Nava, Brian Reber & Travis Lanham. Yes, once again it’s an issue of the Kaare Andrews art showcase book without Kaare Andrews – aside from the cover, which isn’t his best work anyway. At least this arc has a more functional story than the first one, which makes it easier for it to carry an issue without him. The book is cancelled with the next issue, and while it’s certainly improved, it remains eminently skippable.
X-MEN OF APOCALYPSE #2. By Jeph Loeb, Simone Di Meo & Comicraft. So what we’re doing here is the Age of Apocalypse X-Men jumping through the past of the mainstream timeline in the vague hope that something will turn up that might explain what’s wrong with time. In practice, that’s an excuse for an extended fight scene in the margins of 1963’s X-Men #1, which then gets erased from history anyway. The one vague sign that Jeph Loeb might be awake is the idea that the young Jean can be used as a way to contact Phoenix – since later retcons mean that she was always Phoenix – although in practice this just results in everyone being sent to have more fights next issue to get some macguffins. On art, Simone Di Meo is actually putting in some effort; it doesn’t always flow, but some of the individual images look great. Loeb, on the other hand, might as well have written “PAGES 2-12: THEY FIGHT”.
ROGUE #1. By Erica Schultz, Luigi Zagaria, Espen Grundetjern & Ariana Maher. This is a 4-issue miniseries. I wasn’t keen on Schultz’s work on Laura Kinney: Wolverine, but this is quite decent. After rescuing a bystander who she might have crossed paths with before, Rogue starts having flashbacks about a Brotherhood of Evil Mutants mission that she doesn’t remember, with Sabretooth being involved somewhere. So she heads out to investigate, and starts by dropping in on Destiny and Mystique. (By the way, Mystique is still emaciated after her solo miniseries last year, so apparently we should just ignore her cameo in Hellfire Vigil as a continuity error.) Schultz has the character’s voice well; it wouldn’t feel out of place as a Rogue spotlight story in Uncanny X-Men. Zagaria draws a really good giant monster – he’s quite a conventional artist but he’s good with scale – and his Deathdream is rather good too, though his Rogue can be a little wide-eyed for my taste. All round, though, this is quite promising.
PSYLOCKE: NINJA #1. By Tim Seeley, Nico Leon, Dono Sánchez-Almara & Ariana Maher. Another miniseries, but this time it’s a continuity implant. It’s basically a Psylocke vs Elektra book shoehorned into a narrow gap in continuity between Uncanny X-Men #256 and #257, when she’s been brainwashed by the Hand but hasn’t yet started calling herself Lady Mandarin. And Elektra is meant to be recovering after the events of, I take it, Elektra: Assassin. An awful lot of this first issue is devoted to explaining this convoluted thicket of late 1980s continuity, which on one level is fair enough – it’s ancient history, and because it’s making a bona fide attempt to expand on the original material, it requires you to know (1) how Psylocke ended up here, (2) what Matsu’o Tsurayaba’s interest in her is, and (3) how the Hand link to both Matsu’o and Elektra. Spiral and the Mandarin aren’t relevant to the story so they just don’t get mentioned.
None of this is exactly done badly, aside from an utterly pointless fight between Matsu’o and some ninjas near the start. It looks good, in fact (the dreadful cover is by a different artist and can be ignored). But is there really a story to be told here that’s worth all this effort, particularly given how Very Dubious Indeed the Psylocke body-swap angle seems from a 2020s viewpoint? Well, maybe – Seeley obviously wants the emotional hook to be the Matsu’o/Kwannon romance which was a later retcon, and sits awkwardly with the way Matsu’o actually behaves in the original story. Maybe there’s something you can do with that? I’m not altogether convinced, but I’ll give it another issue to make the case.
Re: Psylocke 1:
So Betsy is fighting in the freezing cold but refuses to wear anything but her very revealing costume? Now why doesn’t that surprise me? 🙂
The solicits for Marvel’s April releases are out and Exiles is nowhere on the list. At first I thought this book was delayed because Rocket Raccoon is one of announced characters and Rocket is currently guest-starring in Amazing Spider-Man. But the March and April solicits for Amazing Spider-Man have Peter fighting a serial killer on Earth- that doesn’t sound like a plot suited to Rocket. ,so he’ll probably be gone by then.
It does seem like Marvel is cutting back on the cosmic titles it launched after Imperial. Marvel tried to use Imperial to relaunch its cosmic line. But the sales on Imperial and the books that were launched out of it weren’t very good.
Nova in particular already fell out of the top 100 with the 2nd issue. Of course, none of Rich’s series last very long. Even the Abnett and Lanning series only lasted 36 issues.
In fact, in general Marvel doesn’t have much luck with cosmic series. The only cosmic books which lasted over 65 issues were the Silver Surfer’s 1980s and 1990s series and ROM. Every later attempt at a Silver Surfer series has failed miserably. And ROM was based on a failed toy that Marvel no longer has the rights to.
So it looks like Marvel is cancelling the books that were launched out of Imperial. DC beat Marvel last quarter, so there’s probably some reorganization going on at Marvel in an attempt to improve sales. The Imperial Guardians series was announced as an ongoing and it’s now been turned into a miniseries. And it’s been announced that Carol Danvers will play a major role in Armageddon, whereas before, it seemed like she would be a part of the Imperial Guardians series.
So it looks like Exiles has been cancelled. But if that’s the case. what happens to Xavier?
Even ROM can’t be considered a true cosmic title since it was about the alien travelling around Earth-616 with his gun, meeting denizens of Marvel Earth, and shooting other aliens in disguise. Rom didn’t go into space for an extended period until issue #66, and the book got cancelled within less than ten issues afterwards.
Unless it’s the Silver Surfer, it seems that spending much time away from Earth is a death knell for a Marvel series. Even for the Surfer, as you said, that only worked with the late-‘80s series.
Michael: To be fair, Conan basically trademarked wandering around in snowy climates in a loincloth, with MAYBE a furry cloak on if the artist happened to remember it.
@Michael
Well, Imperial didn’t do a great job of setting up the launches in the main series – Nova’s part was technically set up and he had a fair amount of page time, but by way of sending him off on an ineffectual fetch quest where he achieved nothing in the grand scheme of the plot.
Planet She-Hulk was even worse – she basically disappears after #1 except to give a reminder in a video message at the end of #4 that she’s still stuck on New Sakaar. And it’s not at all clear why Hulk & co *don’t* pick her up, since Hulk clearly made it back.
Just reading the series, you’d think the Inhumans would have been the launch out of it, especially with the tease near the end about the Vell siblings going up against them.
Moreover, trying to launch FIVE series out of it… it’s not quite AOR level, but it’s still trying to spam the market.
As for Exiles, I’m not convinced it’s abandoned, but I’m also not convinced it’s going to be marketed as coming out of Imperial at this point. They might just shove Shadows of Tomorrow branding on it or whatever.
B-b-but… Elektra: Assassin takes place BEFORE Elektra first appears in Daredevil. It’s back when she was, you know, an assassin.
I wouldn’t say the 2014/2016 Silver Surfer series “failed miserably”: a series that runs 29 issues (in two sections, because Secret Wars), wins an Eisner, concludes gracefully in a way that at least looks like its entire dramatic arc has been in place since the beginning, and has the same writer/artist/colorist team for every single issue seems like a real success to me.
Wait. Am I missing something, or are you saying that they tried to kill the gravity manipulator by throwing him off a cliff?
Douglas-There’s a difference between an amazing read that is critically acclaimed versus sales. The Slott/Allred Silver Surfer is one of my favourite comics of the 2010s. I’d recommend it to anyone who loves comics. It only lasted for 29 issues and failed to increase interest in the character of the Silver Surfer though.
The Abnett/Lanning Guardians was also an amazing read and paved the way for a successful MCU film franchise. That comic also only lasted 25 issues.
I’d much rather see Marvel takes chances on comics like the Slott/Allred Silver Surfer series, but the fact remains that something like the Lobdell/Nicieza X-Men are some of the best-selling comic books of all time. Those are what the Marvel corporation sees as successful comic books, whether we like it or not.
@Taibak
Well, they beat him to a pulp first. Maybe they thought he was unconscious.
But, yeah, clearly he’s going to show up in Alaska to tell them who the Chairman is and make Blue Beast angsty/ier.
I quite liked the Planet She-Hulk book. I was expecting her to suddenly become a grimdark gladiator, but the whole point of the story was that she didn’t change who she was while the entire rest of the setting was crazy combat alien rubbish.
I’d still have preferred her solo book continue and space feudalism not be a thing, but we can’t have it all.
>She doesn’t belong in an X-Force title, but rather than hang around looking uncomfortable about the whole thing, she simply refuses to play ball, insists on her neighbourhood hero role, and demands that the book change for her instead of vice versa.
I hope this gets played like Elixir in Messiah Complex-Second Coming X-Force, where he complained about the awful things they kept doing, but he still did them (giving Vanisher a tumor). Kamala could use a little depth and doing a little terrorism and manslaughter instead of giving speeches about intersectionality might make her more interesting.
Is Elektra: Assassin even in the main continuity? As much as I love that book it is pretty whacky! It would fit better into Marshal Law than Marvel. 🙂
It is, but only aspects of it. It was originally meant to be non-continuity by Miller and Sienkiewicz, however it was brought into continuity by Chichester using Garrett during his DD run. Obviously, Wind never became president in the Marvel Universe, and the idea that there was almost going up be a nuclear war never happened. I believe that the discrepancies in the story have been explained away as being told based on Garrett’s viewpoint, with Garrett’s mind having been tampered with by SHIELD.
Spider-Man/Wolverine aims to stage a very interesting encounter between Logan and Mariko, but unfortunately they completely forgot that the two already met in Wolverine (2020) 6, when Wolverine was searching for the Muramasa sword to participate in X of Sword.
@John- The difference was that Elixir already had a shady past before X-Force- he was a former Reaver. Kamala doesn’t have anything like that in her background, so her doing questionable things would be out of character.
Yeah, I don’t think what Kamala’s character needs is some murder. Marvel’s got enough characters for that already.
I didn’t enjoy the Laura Kinney series at all, it was absolutely pointless. I did, however, really enjoy the first issue of Rogue, so here’s hoping Schultz can keep it up.
Yeah, but the Reavers who was a part of were a bunch of randos who attended Pierce’s motivational speeches. He barely did anything with them before going over to the Newest Mutants.
I thought Rogue was going to be another continuity implant, the actual mini is much more interesting. I didn’t expect the Declan Shalvey status quo for Mystique to be maintained.
Could she do murder *while* giving speeches about intersectionality? That might be interesting.
This is the first time in a while that the X-Axis sounds optimistic about the line. AoR was bloated and largely pointless, but maybe as a pivot for the X-books, it’s working.
Bleeding Cool’s Weekly Bestseller List is out. The X-Books did good this week. Psylocke: Ninja 1 came in 2nd, Rogue 1 came in 5th, X-Men 24 came in 6th and Inglorious X-Force came in 10th. This is the first time we’ve had 4 X-Books in the top 10 in months.
Well, there are three #1s and a flagship title. That pneumatic Psylocke cover must have done the trick to place second for a continuity implant.
Let’s remember that, notevenwithstanding the fact it’s from a non-random subset of comic shops (and not including DCBS or Midtown), the BCBL only covers the first two or three days of sales, not even the first weekend. [It claims Wednesday to Saturday, but it was posted at 3pm UK on Saturday. I’m not even sure all of the listed shops are even *open* for Saturday at that time.]
With that caveat out of the way… not looking good for IXF to make it past #10, in 10th on a fairly quiet week and tonked by two X-miniseries.
In other news, we’ve seen some more previews for X-Men United 1. It shows Emma inviting mutants to Graymatter Lane, including Vulcan, Beast, Random and Magneto. (Magneto is still in a wheelchair, BTW.)
I can see why Scott has concerns. How does Emma know if Vulcan or Random is working for the Chairman? How does Emma know if Beast is the Factory Beast or the Chairman? (They look different in the physical world but what about the astral plane?)
@John: Maybe, just maybe, Marvel’s highest-profile Muslim character doesn’t need to be involved in a terrorism storyline. Just a thought.
Did it feel really weird how Constrictor was in Rogue’s flashbacks and she just didn’t mention him at all? And I don’t recall him ever been involved with the Brotherhood, he’s not even a mutant. Was he there as part of Project PEGASUS? I guess it’s possible this was set during the brief time he joined SHIELD, but I’d have thought that was long after Rogue had left the Brotherhood and joined the X-Men.
@Jeremy H- The Constrictor was Sabretooth’s partner between Power Man & Iron Fist 66 and 84, which roughly coincides with Rogue’s time with the Brotherhood. So presumably the Brotherhood went to Sabretooth for some reason and the Constrictor got involved because he was Sabretooth’s partner.
@Michael: Which basically means the Constrictor is the Marty Janetty of the Marvel Universe.
@Chris V: I get all that, but I don’t know that I’d say 65+ issues is what we really get to think of as the benchmark for “successful” anymore. The Guardians after the movie came out were incredibly successful, and none of those runs lasted more than 30. Does that mean it wasn’t a success?
I think as far as Marvel is concerned, about 25 issues these days is probably a better metric for a medium-successful run (including for books that get split up into different seasons/relaunches), and 50 issues is a rare phenomenal success.
Not saying we need to nitpick that these Imperial books have been successful, they haven’t, although most have been pretty good if not at the level of inspiration found in DnA’s books. I’d be happy if Nova: Centurion made it to a third arc, tbh. I’m really enjoying it and think McKay has the voice of the character down pretty well.
@Stuart- I agree that most books today have lower standards when it comes to long-lasting runs. (When I said over 65, I was thinking of Quasar and Captain Marvel, which had 60 and 62 issues respectively but one was direct-sales only since issue 17 and the other was cancelled three times but kept the same numbering and the last run was bimonthly.)
But it has to be said that Abnett and Lanning’s relaunches of the cosmic books after Annihilation weren’t very successful in terms of sales. For example, in June 2009, Nova 26 came in 76th and Guardians of the Galaxy 15 came in 82nd according to Comichron.
It’s true that the 2013 Bendis Guardians of the Galaxy series sold well. (The movie probably helped.) But that was temporary. The 2015 Bendis series didn’t do as well-by July 2016, Guardians of the Galaxy 10 came in 68th.
Duggar’s 2017 series had the film helping it too. But that didn’t work. By December 2017, Guardians of the Galaxy 148 came in 84th.
My larger point is that Marvel’s cosmic books have USUALLY had sales problems and the 1980s-1990s Silver Surfer series was the exception that proved the rule.
In short, Marvel always
Oh totally, I’m with you on all that. I am a Marvel Cosmic fanboy and have had more than my share of sadness that other than that SSv3, nothing has stuck around for long.
Guardians comes closest I think. If we don’t count relaunches as interruptions, and allow for gaps of up to a year or two (as other books like Thor and FF have had), Guardians did have a pretty long run issue run from DnA through Lanzing/Kelly. Not blazing to the top of the charts as you illustrate, but not nothing.
I guess not to get too semantic, but what do we think success means? A top 10 book? One that stays there? For how long? In the context of Annihilation, it meant bringing life to the cosmic corner of the universe where there hadn’t been any interest from fans or creators alike in years. They didn’t sell well but they sold better than they had any right to, frankly. I’d say that’s a success, and that’s what both James Gunn and Brian Michael Bendis clearly saw too. Now you have something that has inspired stories for 20 years, even if it’s a bit niche.
(I’d say something similar about Black Panther from Priest’s run until the end of his last book by Eve Ewing. That’s a 20 year stretch of only briefly interrupted storytelling. Success! Captain Marvel from Deconnick through Wong. Success!)
It’s not the same as the X-Men’s success, true. But then what else in the history of comics is?
(Oh and sorry for misattributing your comments to Chris!)