The X-Axis – 4 February 2026
UNCANNY X-MEN #23. (Annotations here.) The first part of “Where Monsters Dwell”, and it’s an odd thing. We’ve got an apparently-possessed Legion of Monsters showing up to claim New Orleans for monster-kind, which… hmm. I’ve never liked the Legion of Monsters. It’s not so much that magic doesn’t fit in the X-Men – the Dark Artery is already an established element of this book – I just find them a bit wacky. Not my thing. Maybe it plays off the subplot of Gambit’s corruption coming to a head? We’ll see. Alongside that, though, we’ve got a parallel bedtime story about the Rawhide Kid, of all characters. And he’s a different genre entirely. So are we doing something meta about pre-FF #1 Marvel? At this stage, I’m just kind of puzzled about where this is going, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing at the end of chapter 1. And it’s David Marquez on art, so it looks fantastic. A weird enough mishmash of disparate elements to make me curious, at least.
WOLVERINE #15. (Annotations here.) Wolverine and Silver Sable train the Morlocks and fight a bit, and then Department H show up with Alpha Flight in tow for the fight. As you might have picked up, I have a problem with this. Partly, it feels as if Agent Mehta has lurched far too quickly into being a stock hostile government agent, despite the way she was introduced – and she’s a vastly less interesting character as a result. But the whole current set-up of Alpha Flight is a problem.
The last Alpha Flight series, during Fall of X, had Alpha Flight feigning loyalty to the pro-Orchis Canadian government in order to protect mutants from inside, and eventually winding up in jail at the end. And now, long after Orchis were defeated, they’re… still in jail? Why, for god’s sake? It’s a particular problem when the implication is to say, in 2026, that fascism has been more persistent in Canada than in the USA, which: no. Absolutely no.
I suppose you could make a case that Graymalkin is doing something similar in the USA. But Graymalkin is mainly a story about private prisons, and quite what legal basis they have for hauling mutants off the streets has never been remotely coherent – they seem to exist in a parallel USA where “Fall of X” is still in progress, while mutants are living openly in Chicago, have a community centre with a big sign outside in New York, and are being offered a tourist district in New Orleans. It can’t be both!
But… yeah, I’m just not willing to tolerate Americans, any Americans, doing this story about Canada right now, I’m really not. If you can’t or won’t do this story about the USA, don’t do it about Canada.
STORM: EARTH’S MIGHTIEST MUTANT #1. (Annotations here.) It’s never a good sign when the writer seems to have found out that the book was a five-issue miniseries by reading the solicitations; you wonder how the pacing is going to shake out. That said, I think I liked this more than the previous run. The scenes get a little bit more room to breathe, minor characters like Death Siren actually stick in the mind, and we seem to be rid for the moment of the cosmic stuff that made Storm seem to lack agency in her own book. Instead we have a fairly straightforward story where Storm has imprisoned Susanoo to stop him killing himself, and his followers go on a rampage to get him released, so that Storm feels guilty about teh devastation that she’s unleashed in her attempt to stick to her principles. The biggest problem with this issue is the confusing way that it jumps about in time, and even that’s more of a visual issue: if the flashbacks were more clearly coded as such in the art or colouring, then it would be vastly easier to follow and it wouldn’t have taken me two reads to figure out the plot (and a third to figure it out correctly). Once you do, though, it’s not a bad story at all, and there are some genuinely likeable ideas in here.
MAGIK & COLOSSUS #1. By Ashley Allen, Germán Peralta, Arthur Hesli & Ariana Maher. A miniseries from the creative team of Magik, and you could probably have run this as an arc in a Magik solo book. But it does merit the joint billing, and if anything it’s more of a Colossus story. Allen’s main aim here seems to be to confront head on the fact that Colossus has been written into a corner of depression and to see if she can get him out of it. After he goes missing for several weeks, Magik tracks him down in Russia where he’s been trying to make his way back home to help with the harvest, only to keep running into monsters that he thinks are following him from town to town. As it turns out, they’re actually part of some magical plague on all Russia’s farming villages (which sure feels like it would have been noticed by someone before now, but maybe that’ll be explained). That plot feels like it exists mainly to provide some opposition with a bit of local colour in the form of Slavic myth; the main point here is about Piotr’s seeming death wish and Magik’s attempts to steer him back into his traditional heroic role, only for him to end up having to kill the demon-of-the-week with an “oh well, this again” sense of resignation. As Magik points out, she and Colossus have had much less interaction over the years than you might expect, and this issue makes their relationship work rather well – now that she’s come to terms with her Darkchild persona, Magik has really done a much better job of coming to terms with trauma than Piotr has, and that seems to be the angle.
One thing, though: isn’t it past time to retire the “Ust-Ordynsky Collective Farm”? Russia got rid of collective farms over thirty years ago now. There’s no way either of these characters grew up on one.
LOGAN: BLACK WHITE & BLOOD #2. The first issue of this series exceeded my expectations. This one doesn’t – nothing in it is especially bad, but nor would any of it seem out of place as a filler back-up in an annual. “First Kiss” by Benjamin Percy and Robert Gill is a very straightforward story about Logan getting into a fight in the woods in the 1920s and making it away with a cask of bourbon. That’s it. “The Children of the Altered Mind” by Frank Tieri and Raffaele Ienco is basically just a pre-superhero Logan and Carol Danvers running into a Skrull. “One Last Crossing” by Mirka Andolfo is the best of the bunch – a semi-ghost-story about a trafficking ship, that at least uses the spot colouring effectively, including by highlighting things that shouldn’t logically be red. As a package, it doesn’t make a great case for the format.
About 50 years ago Canada was made the villain of Wolverine’s story. Wolverine took off, so evil Canada became a minor X-book staple. It was always weird but in a “meh it’s just a comic book” way you could shrug off.
I agree, given the state of things, it’s starting to get uncomfortable now.
“which sure feels like it would have been noticed by someone before now, but maybe that’ll be explained”
My headcanon is that people did notice but assumed it was part of one of the other two “Villain Takes Over Monsters” plots that Marvel is doing right now.
One seeming continuity error this issue. Lady Midday says to Colossus while he’s in armored form “Even you cannot breathe in a vacuum” and drains the breath from Colossus’s body causing him to revert to human form. Sometimes Colossus has been described as not needing to breathe in armored from. However. the Official Handbook Deluxe reads “In the past he has exhibited a minimal or nonexistent need to breathe while in his armored form. However, it is believed that he could not survive for long in a vacuum”. (The confusion comes from X-Men 99. where Peter seems to be suffocating in his armored form while in outer space.)
It’s nice to get confirmation that Mikhail is still dead and wasn’t resurrected by the Five.
“That plot feels like it exists mainly to provide some opposition with a bit of local color in the form of Slavic myth;”
I don’t think so- I think the Immortal is Grigori Rasputin. But we’ll see.
Colossus’s problem is that every attempt to deal with his problems has been cut short. Percy planned to deal with Peter’s trauma after the Mikhail plot ended but he let the Mikhail plot drag on so long that Brevoort replaced White and Percy was off X-Force three issues after the Mikhail plot ended. Then Geoffrey Thorne got the brilliant idea to disguise Colossus as Tank for the first nine issues of the next volume of X-Force instead of admitting Colossus was Tank up front and having him deal with his trauma. So of course, X-Force was cancelled with issue 10 and we got a rushed reveal with no explanation why Colossus was hiding his identity.
“If you can’t or won’t do this story about the USA, don’t do it about Canada.”
And as a Canadian, I appreciate your support! I’ll be sure to mention this at our next facism meeting.
“Isn’t it past time to retire the “Ust-Ordynsky Collective Farm”? Russia got rid of collective farms over thirty years ago now.”
Yeah, that doesn’t work anymore. As a replacement, I suggest “Chip-Zdarksy Farm”.
I think there was a story in recent years that said that when the collective system collapsed, the people of Ust-Ordynsky just got together and kept running theirs. I’m not really interested in finding out how collective farms worked or what happened when the system collapsed, so that does well enough for me.
“But Graymalkin is mainly a story about private prisons, and quite what legal basis they have for hauling mutants off the streets has never been remotely coherent – they seem to exist in a parallel USA where “Fall of X” is still in progress, while mutants are living openly in Chicago, have a community centre with a big sign outside in New York, and are being offered a tourist district in New Orleans. It can’t be both!”
At a push, this is an ICE story: In some parts of the United States, immigrants are supported and defended, with historical immigrant communities being a tourist attraction, and in some places — wherever ICE is making its push this time — they get snatched off the street, put in detention, and disappeared to some other country, some other prison, or some other country’s torture prison. The X-books’ version is exaggerated, because comic books, and it’s incoherent, because Marvel isn’t great at coordinating such things.
“…Marvel isn’t great at coordinating such things.”
Yes, but this doesn’t excuse the — at best tone deafness — and cowardice.
For what it’s worth, Simone has claimed we’ll be getting back to Graymalkin as soon as the current arc in Uncanny is over.
I think that part of the problem is the backstory Simone came up with for Warden Ellis. She’s basically a podcaster who slept with a guest who claimed to read minds and turned out to be more genuine than the usual article. The problem is that she’s got no skills of her own to fall back on- she’s just a vamp. The Enchantress became a major villain because she has actual magical powers (including seduction powers) that make her a real threat. There’s no reason why Cyclops and Rogue can’t just break into Graymalkin and free all the prisoners while Scurvy is incapacitated or distracted. So Simone has to come up with contrived reasons. Um… satellites, yeah, that’s it.
Wolverine:
Eh. I like this arc more than the first two, I think, but I was more interested in the AoR tie-in than in anything happening in the ongoing.
This book needs a supporting cast, so it could be nice if somebody from this arc stuck around for longer.
I have my suspicions about Deepfake, what with the whole ‘Logan mentoring young girls’ thing.
Storm:
Watching Storm ride into battle on a dragon made me ask, and not for the first time, why is this a Storm book? It’s not a bad book, not really. It’s weird, a bit unhinged, definitely easier to follow than the ongoing and Storm is not driven by a space ghost for 90% of it, so it’s already miles ahead of the previous arcs.
But why is this a Storm book? What does Storm have to do with… any of it? Gods, dragons, other dimensions? Rage the Living Whatever is not and should not be a part of Storm’s rogues gallery.
Magik & Colossus:
Brevoort really screwed the pooch on Magik, didn’t he? Derailed a well-received series with a crossover that didn’t give Magik a book other than the digital exclusive told in flashback. And now – a mini. I dearly hope it’s at least the first of a string of minis if not a gear shift before another ongoing, because – it’s good! Just like the ongoing was. And if Allen can pull Colossus from the downward spiral he’s been in since… um… The Muir Island Saga brought him back into action… then she’ll be a miracle worker. It’s been tried before, but somehow more misery has always been piled on him again and again.
I really liked the neck-breaking sequence, weird as that might sound – the close-up on Lady Midday’s face mirrors the composition with Riptide’s face just before Colossus killed him in Mutant Massacre. (‘Harpoon! Make peace with your gods, little man. You’re next’ is the coldest line Claremont ever wrote.) And being reminded of Piotr’s emotions in that scene and the sad resignation in this one makes it even better.
One quibble, as a Slav – Lady Midday is not a good name. This is a Południca (which is a type of creature, not a singular being, but that’s not important), which would literally translate into… Middayer, maybe? Kind of like Midnighter. The Witcher games went with ‘noonwraiths’ in the English language version, which isn’t half bad. But Lady Midday does not work for me.
Okay, just one more quibble as a Polish Slav – if it bothers you that Marvel Canada is more fascist than Marvel USA, it bothers me when Russian characters visit Russia and no one ever mentions that Russia has been perpetrating the largest European land war since World War II for four years now.
Storm, the mutant of African background, is being written by a Nigerian, and there’s nothing about the atrocities there. So it’s all fairly consistent, anyway.
Maybe just me, but I don’t necessarily need everything in the real world being mirrored in my funny books, or other forms on popular culture too. There should be some entertainment designed for escapism. Room for both and everything in between.
I’ve said it before… Murewa Ayodele really wanted to tell a very specific story, and for whatever ungodly reason, Brevoort decided to hire him to write it as an X-Book, thus hammering Storm and other Marvel assets into a weird cosmic saga which would have worked much better as a stand-alone independent story.
There’s no strong reason in my mind why this had to be a Storm story, or set in the Marvel Universe, or using Marvel assets. After all, Marvel doesn’t have a lock on mythological beings or storm gods.
Just like Gillon took the story which would become the Power Fantasy and allowed it to spread on its own merits, so should this have been a creator-owned title to fully capitalize on its um… free-wheeling enthusiasm.
Instead, this becomes more weird baggage layered onto Storm which future writers will have to ignore or address.
Storm: The Gas Leak Year(s)
It wouldn’t be hard to bring Storm back to useable levels. Iceman already made a speech about how he could end global warming, but the risks in unbalancing the system and making everything worse are just too great. So he sticks to making ice baseball bats. Just have Reed Richards or someone tell Storm that a cataclysmic collapse of global weather patterns has begun because of her, have her damn near kill herself fixing it, and she comes out of it humble, and much more wary about using her full powers on Earth. She was actually written this way, once.
Best do this while nobody remembers Thor, but it still works in the nebulous way that superhumans are different to actual gods somehow.
As far as the fascist Canadian government angle goes, I think some grace should be given as these books are written and created far in advance, the Marvel U Canadian government has shown fascist tendencies in the past (all government’s in Marvel have tbh, even when it didn’t make any sense), this is the continuation of an existing story that started years ago, future plots likely hinge on the outcome of this story which makes it difficult to change at this point, and there is no way the writers (if the editors didn’t come up with the plot) could have known how this would mimic real-world fascism in the U.S. It reminds me of the rise of Hydra-Cap during a resurgence of Nazism in the real world. People hated marvel for that as if it were planned, so much so that they changed the end of their giant crossover and fired the editor.
Now if we’re arguing Canada shouldn’t have been written as fascist ever, that makes more sense to me. They could have just made Dept. H go rogue a long time ago or made into another Weapon X branch. Not to mention, the plot of jailing Alpha Flight for the crime of saving mutants is stupid in isolation as without Orchis, mutants don’t appear to be illegal in Canada anymore.
Bleeding Cool’s Weekly Bestseller List is out. Magik & Colossus 1 came in 8th. Uncanny X-Men 23 came in 10th. Storm and Wolverine didn’t make the list at all.
Ayodele said that Storm might get more issues if her series sold well. It doesn’t look like that is happening. Of the 4 X-ladies’ limited series (Psylocke, Rogue, Magik & Colossus and Storm), Storm seems to be the one people have the least enthusiasm for.
Wolverine hasn’t made the Bestseller List in months. People don’t seem to like Ahmed’s writing.
This was a very busy week. Still, it doesn’t seem like a good sign that Uncanny came in 10th. Now I’m wondering if Age of Revelation has done long term damage to some of the X-Titles’ sales.
The May X-Solicits are out:
Illyana and Colossus will be fighting Baba Yaga. I get why Allen felt this would be a good idea- they fought a Limbo demon disguised as Baba Yaga in Uncanny X-Men 231, so it makes sense for them to encounter the real thing. But Baba Yaga is currently appearing in the Wiccan series- we’ll have to see if they contradict each other.
Storm’s daughter from the Hellfire Vigil will be showing up in Storm 4. And presumably be forgotten after Storm 5.
The New Mutants will be showing up in Uncanny X-Men 28. Also, in the same issue, we learn the identity of Inmate X. Brevoort seems to be pushing the writers to resolve all the outstanding mysteries. But does anyone really care about Inmate X at this point?
In X-Men United, Magneto and the Beast seem to be arguing. I’m wondering if this Beast is the Factory Beast or the Chairman.
If you’re a Russian in the Marvel universe, you will encounter corrupt agents, Baba Yaga, and Rasputin on a regular basis. It’s like being in France and having the Eiffel Tower in the background no matter where you are and what direction you’re facing.
@Michael. It would be shocking if Age of Revelation didn’t do long-term damage. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a major event fail to have a single book make the weekly top 10 for 2 straight months. That combined with its poor overall quality and putting the entire line on hold and cancelling the books people actually liked, there’s got to be a contingent of readers that just noped out and aren’t coming back. You can’t have three months of something as bad as Age of Revelation was and not have some long-term damage.
@Gary: X-Men fandom survived *two years* of Chuck Austen back in the day, nobody’s jumping ship over a three-month crossover.
@Diana – That was a pretty different situation, though. If you didn’t like Austen, you could safely ignore him and read either Morrison or Claremont instead. Austen, Morrison and Claremont weren’t forced to participate in line-wide event crossovers. They were given the freedom to just write their respective books and be more or less left alone. The only thing that I can recall being imposed on them during that whole period was having to participate in ‘Nuff Said month. That’s it. There was no Fall of This, Age of That nonsense until House of M came along.
The whole line has been ridiculously interlinked since then. You say you don’t like Krakoa? Too bad. All the books are going to be staying here for awhile. You say you like Krakoa? Too bad. All the books are leaving.
@Si – or, if you’re Irish, it’s leprechauns and alcoholism.
So.. Logan sees leprechauns in Cassidy Keep even though he is not Irish but because he and Sean are the olny alcoholics around… I missed that but it still checks out.
Re: inconsistencies in how different places in the States handle mutants, well… TBH that’s very American. We have places where it’s considered “safe” to be openly queer, with parades and murals and cultural centers and supportive laws and whatever, and places that are openly hostile and unsafe at every level. The federal government’s support (or lately, overt aggression) fluctuates based on who is in power, but something happening in Washington DC doesn’t mean something entirely different isn’t happening in Seattle, Washington. This kind of chaotic and contradictory cluster is part of what has always defined the United States and I’m actually kind of wondering if that’s less apparent from the outside.
Re: the purpose of Storm in her own book, I actually do think it’s very intentional. For years, fans have felt frustrated by Marvel’s difficulty in fully utilizing what we all know is a great character. Always hamstrung by something or other holding her back. Ewing’s SWORD/XMR started to chip away at this and examine these contradictions in terms of her character flaws. In this book, we get to see what happens when those contradictions are examined from another angle – as a result of the limitations placed on her by her powers, and simultaneously those placed on her by her role in the Marvel Universe. The whole Eternal Storm saga obviously scratches a certain itch among a fandom that wants to idolize her as Marvel’s ultimate female hero. But that pedestal is a golden cage, especially for a Black woman, and Storm knows all too well that Eternity’s “blessing” actually comes at the expense of her own human autonomy. (And in the metaphor of the Marvel Universe, it would also be at the expense of all that exists. For what is life without will? This book’s answer: nothing.) And so instead she chooses, and fights for over and over, her own humanity and her fundamental right to self determination. It’s a choice that she is uniquely positioned to make as Marvel’s (still) most prominent Black female superhero, and the scale of the story seems intended to drive home these larger themes.
Does it stick the landing? Not really IMO, but that’s a failure of the writing where it massively over complicated things rather than clarified them. But the themes are there, and you can see why the writer chose the setting/scale he did given the point he was trying to make, and why he chose Storm to do it given her placement in the pantheon of Marvel heroes.
Put another way, this is a very Black story for Storm. It’s about her efforts to assert her full humanity, presence, and power, while simultaneously resisting every outside effort to dehumanize her, whether through overt control or oversimplified glorification. If we ignore her Blackness, we absolutely will not be able to understand why she’s in the middle of this story. But when we remember all of who she is, it’s hard to miss.
I walk away from Storm with a sort of similar feeling I had about Steve Orlando’s Marauders. There really was something pretty brilliant in there for marginalized people about reclaiming our histories, being our own heroes, spiritual and chosen ancestry, and alllll the complex perspectives about how to do that and whether we get to do that at all. But that book was so overstuffed it was just unpleasant to read and the themes were too buried to make it an effective story. Storm has at least been more fun at a glance but the overcomplicated plot and the failure to bring subtext into text resulted in most of us missing the point.
All of which to say – I’m not defending it as well-written, but it is a Storm story I think, and very specifically so.