The X-Axis – 25 February 2026
INGLORIOUS X-FORCE #2. (Annotations here.) Okay, so this is going pretty well so far. Cable’s got an ulterior motive for putting the team together, but it’s mainly just to figure out which team member needs to be saved from themselves. Boom-Boom not being able to get her head round the fact that the villains are younger than her these days is a cute angle. And Ms Marvel seems to be here to provide a contrast with everyone else – the point is for her to drag the team in her direction, not the other way round. Tim Seeley’s reference point is the original X-Force, after all, and they weren’t especially grimdark at all – that only became the norm in the Kyle/Yost era where nobody seemed able to find a lightswitch. The original X-Force was pretty much technicolour. This is a bit more restrained, but it’s still far from bleak. Hellverine is as grim as it gets, and this issue seems to exist mainly to establish early that he’s not going to be the killer – though I’m not entirely sold on bringing in the Blasphemy Cult as doomsday cult villains, which does drag us a bit in the downbeat direction. Still, having them call up old folklore monsters to fight for them is kind of fun, and Michael Sta. Maria gives them the right balance of backwoods extremists and actual magicians. Pretty solid.
SPIDER-MAN & WOLVERINE #10. By Marc Guggenheim, Gerardo Sandoval, Victor Nava, Brian Reber & Travis Lanham. Final issue. I honestly don’t know what to make of the farewell message from Marc Guggenheim, which says that “in these ten issues, we have something very rare for comics these days: a consistent creative team”. Uh, Kaare Andrews drew six issues and Gerardo Sandoval drew four, and they don’t even look much alike. In fact, Sandoval wound up drawing the last two issues. I guess you can make the case that at least they consistently had the same fill-in artist, but come on now.
The first arc of this book was an absolute mess. The back end is better, this being a basically fine alternate reality story where the local villain is a Wolverine/Spider-Man mash-up character. In the final issue, it follows our heroes back to the main Marvel Universe for a final battle, and in a last minute bid for continuity significance, Mariko Yashida shows up. Guggenheim’s approach to her is reasonable enough: she’s been through a lot of quite miserable and traumatic stuff and would prefer to be left alone to not be reminded about it. It’s more an effort to tie her up as a loose end than set her up for future use, although to be fair, this is a final issue. I don’t think the Scarlet Samurai outfit looks that great in Sandoval’s art – the weird shapes make her hard to follow. But it’s all perfectly fine.
ROGUE #2. By Erica Schultz, Luigi Zagaria, Espen Grundetjern & Ariana Maher. Well, the first issue exceeded my expectations, but this one is more of a problem. As we established last time, the basic plot is that Rogue starts having flashbacks about a Brotherhood of Evil Mutants mission that had something to do with Sabretooth, after running into a bystander who seems to have something to do with it. So Rogue sets out to investigate. So far so good. This issue opens with Mystique starting to explain what happened and then just stopping for no remotely apparent reason. I think it’s meant to come across as “Mystique must have her reasons”, but honestly it just feels like Mystique has to say something in order to advance the plot, and then has to stop because if she didn’t then the plot would be over. Then we get Rogue’s powers going out of control and mimicking random X-Men for no terribly clear reason, but okay, whatever. And then she crashes out of the sky into a bunch of villains by… sheer random chance? I mean, it seems to be sheer random chance. Maybe all this is going to come together in a more satisfying way, but right now it all seems like stuff happening for the sake of it, rather than a functioning mystery.
PSYLOCKE: NINJA #2. By Tim Seeley, Nico Leon, Dono Sánchez-Almara & Ariana Maher. This has got some pacing issues, perhaps in part because of the need to dance between the continuity raindrops. Issues #1-2 are somewhere between Uncanny X-Men #256-257, with Psylocke body-swapped by the Hand but not entirely brainwashed yet, and being sent on a mission to kill Elektra before she can get revived by the Chaste after, I guess, Elektra: Assassin. Leon’s art is fine enough for the period it’s going for, for better or worse, and there are some layouts I really do like during the fight scene. On the other hand… well, it’s Psylocke fighting the Chaste for about half an issue, and making an accidental contribution to Elektra’s resurrection. Then we have to reset to fit in the Lady Mandarin stuff, and apparently next time we’re on to the Wolverine-Jubilee-Psylocke Madripoor team – presumably with more of Elektra running around. It’s not exactly bad, and I’m vaguely interested in the idea of fleshing out Matsu’o’s retconned-in emotional connection with Psylocke (or at least, the previous occupant of her body), but I’m struggling right now to see what the point is.
“…they weren’t especially grimdark at all – that only became the norm in the Kyle/Yost era where nobody seemed able to find a lightswitch.”
God, Kyle and Yost were terrible on those books (X-Force, New X-Men). Not only couldn’t they think of anything more exciting to do than kill characters, they couldn’t even think of different ways to kill them. Wallflower (shot), Icarus (shot), Quill (shot), Boom-Boom (shot, but she got better). Okay, there were some exploding buses too, but after that, everyone seemed to get shot. I know the Purifiers and the Leper Queen didn’t have powers, but you’d think some of their victims could’ve been strangled or drowned or thrown off a building just for variety’s sake.
I thought Rogue #2 was fairly clear on that point (mainly because Schultz took that bit from X-Men Evolution): she accidentally absorbed Mystique’s power, which is allowing Rogue to literally *become* people she’s absorbed in the past
Re: Rogue 2:
I’m not liking the retcon of Constrictor’s death. Schultz has Remy claim that Constrictor faked his own death. The Constrictor died slowly of a disease. We saw Diamondback talking to the doctors. He died and Diamondback was left with the medical bills. At one point she had to become a stripper to pay them off.
So how did he fake his own death? Were the doctors in on it? Or did he somehow manage to trick the doctors? Did he undergo treatments with side effects even though he wasn’t sick? Why would he leave Diamondback with such immense debt that forced her to turn to stripping to pay the bills? He LOVES her. The whole thing reads like Schultz only found out that Constrictor was supposed to be dead after the artist had drawn Constrictor in the flashbacks. (In fairness, there is some wiggle room since Remy is just relating a story he heard third hand. But the real world answer is that Schultz screwed up.)
Re:Spider- Man & Wolverine 10- Guggenheim is forgetting that Wolverine already met Mariko back in X of Swords.
Re: Psylocke: Ninja 2:
“Issues #1-2 are somewhere between Uncanny X-Men #256-257, with Psylocke body-swapped by the Hand but not entirely brainwashed yet”
That confused me. In issue 2, Matsuo says “The Hand has interests in Hong Kong that would be served with a liaison. Psylcoke will have a new mission and a new name.” That seems to suggest that issues 1-2 take place BEFORE Matsuo approached the Mandarin in X-Men 256. But that raises the question of why Matsuo needed the Mandarin and Spiral if the body swap had already occurred. (In fairness, it’s possible he needed the Mandarin and Spiral to stabilize the process and try to ensure Betsy stayed loyal to the Hand.)
“Guggenheim is forgetting that Wolverine already met Mariko back in X of Swords.”
He may not have read it. Editors should catch that stuff.
Also this week, in Sorcerer Supreme 3, Wanda fought Maddie. This read like a squandered opportunity. Orlando didn’t seem to realize everything Wanda and Maddie had in common- they were driven insane after their marriages fell apart and their kids disappeared, they both fell in love with their husbands’ brothers, etc. (Orlando mentioned that they were both mothers but that’s it.) Plus, the encounter only lasted half an issue and seemed irrelevant to the rest of the storyline. Unless this is setting up something in the future, it seems like a waste.
On Bleeding Cool today, there was an article about the cancellation of Marvel’s cosmic line:
https://bleedingcool.com/comics/marvel-curtails-its-imperial-cosmic-plans-over-low-audience-figures/
Rich seems to be saying that Exiles has indeed been cancelled.
He also thinks that Marvel is no longer guaranteeing at least 10 issues for a new title.
By the way, Stephanie Philips referred to her She-Hulk series being cancelled as “the beauty of comic books”. That would seem to explain why she claimed the Phoenix series wasn’t cancelled and sales were fine. She seems to have a *unique* way of viewing the world.
“A man who lives outside the law pointed a weapon in my direction and extracted an involuntary payment from me. It was exhilarating. “
Seems like there’s a backlash of sorts against Hickman. Maybe people don’t want him to be the architect of a line. They just want Hickman to pick a good series, have a good run, and just write the hell out of it from beginning to end just like everybody else.
They tried that with GODS, and it got cancelled after eight issues. I think it’s simply that he’s been shown to be a typical comic writer (one on the higher-end, mind), and not the second coming of Alan Moore. His Ultimate line seems to have been popular (it was always planned as a limited series, as Hickman doesn’t write unlimited series anymore), that’s even with Ultimate Invasion being absolutely terrible, if you ask me (and I’m a Hickman fan). Imperial was almost unreadable and deserved to be panned. I’m not sure what happened with GODS. It was a good read (better than Ultimate Invasion or Imperial), but it wasn’t anything I missed either. It read too much like a Warren Ellis comic, for mine. I enjoy a lot of Ellis’ comics too, but I shouldn’t have to keep reminding myself of the author of a comic while I’m reading it. Maybe the first issue being so woefully overpriced turned fans away from trying the monthly.
Hickman reached a high plateau with HoX and PoX, and I think he’s been struggling to live up to those standards since he left the X-Men. Marvel probably need to rethink his high price at this point. If you are going to hold yourself to different standards than the majority of your contemporaries, one must deliver without fail. Imperial has really shown a case of the “emperor’s new clothes”. Maybe Hickman would be better creating his own series, where he can create the world, tell a story with a beginning, middle, and ending without worrying about sales figures or the fact that he has priced his work out of the series being able to be an ongoing.
I’d just like to finally get a proper Legion book by Hickman. No imperial guard standing, no creator owned thinly veiled versions.
Imperial was the first Hickman series that just didn’t do anything for me. I’m not overly interested in Marvel’s cosmic characters, so that doesn’t help but it just didn’t grab me at all.
IMHO The point of all of the nostalgia series is to monetize the nostalgia of 1990’s fans who presumably are now experiencing their own midlife crisis so they would thus be ripe for being pandered to since after all , the number one way humans self-medicate during existensial crises is via indulging in their favorite comfort foods , especially from their own youths LOL
No-Prize Theory: Constrictor was one of the hundreds of people (heroes, villains, civilians) who were mass-resurrected * by Jackal 2 aka Ben Reilly in Spiderman: The Clone Conspiracy (which laid the ground for The First Krakoan Age and all future Marvel 616 actual-resurrections-via-physical-cloning-of-deceased-beings from that point onwards) and he’s only pretending that he faked his actual death
* This is also how OG 616-StiltMan is now living again
And JH’s GODS No.1 legacy is arguably that it directly inspired Murewa Ayodele’s now-cult-classic Storm Mary-Sue run (its No.2 legacy is that Al Ewing used it as the basis for the his further development of the cosmology of the 8th Marvel Multiverse in his Immortal Thor run) KEK
“Cosmic” superhero comics are often a tough sell. She-Hulk, Nova, and Black Panther haven’t had best-selling runs in a while (if ever for Nova). I’m not surprised the line isn’t lasting.
I’m reading all three, and they’re decent (although the most recent issue of BP felt a bit rushed). I’m enjoying them, but I don’t think I’ll miss them when they go away.
G.O.D.S. was great, I still miss it.
Imperial isn’t bad, from what I have seen.
But it is coming at just the wrong time, when there are just way too many godarned events happenning all together, practically on top of each other.
We are rather close to a situation which would fully justify letting go of ongoings for good and simply publishing event lines that mix and match available characters and teams according to the plot’s needs. Cable is far from the only character who has his continuity reset to some extent depending on the series he is participating on; it just happens more blatantly and with more backlash with certain characters than with others.
The symbiotes franchise in particular somehow gets away with huge amounts of blatant continuity disfunction with hardly any complaint, perhaps because its appeal comes from some other place – perhaps something adjacent to the appeal of the zombie apocalypse genre or the power fantasies that Punisher feeds on?
Come to think of it, I am not sure true crossovers can work anymore. Apparently most of the current readership strongly adheres to niches with very specific spectations and a lot of love for certain decades-long statuses quo. There isn’t a lot of love for cross-polinization opportunities right now. There are many events, but they don’t benefit from the shared continuity anymore, and may even actively attempt to avoid it.
I suspect that this is one reason why Imperial seems to have fizzled and being let go of entirely; there just isn’t a lot of interest in reading about how the various franchises which have a foot outside the Earth Solar System can interact. Each of them has become expensive to follow, not just in dollars but also in investiment of time and expectations.
I have often pointed out here that X-readers (and writers and editorial) seem to hardly acknowledge that Storm has been a frequent and influential character in the Black Panther books in the last two decades or so. Imperial may be suffering from a similar but more intense challenge: fans of Nova, X-Men adjacent characters (Xavier, the Imperial Guard, Lilandra), Hulk-adjacent characters, Black Panther-adjacent characters, Inhumans and the more established cosmic characters will at this point in time have very little intersection and less interest in being invited to further spread their comics reading. Particularly when those other franchises are not all that accessible either, often making references to storylines of years or decades ago with very little comment or clarification.
TLDR: current events have a strong tendency to be overblown and collapse under their own weight, and Imperial suffers particularly much from that weakness. Marvel would be wise to rethink its event strategy real soon and take measures to make events less frequent and more meaningful.
“I’d just like to finally get a proper Legion book by Hickman.”
YES. I’d also love a Legion mini by Tom King and…Mitch Gerads, maybe?
In the meantime, I’m hoping that Joshua Williamson can do them justice in his upcoming Legion book.
Joshua Williamson is an okay choice to write LoSH, but he’s a safe choice. I read a good amount of his Flash and Green Arrow runs plus some of his Crisis-y miniseries. They were mostly decent, but nothing super-exciting. I’ll take a Legion series by an okay writer over no Legion series, but I’d like to have seen a more interesting choice. Al Ewing, Ram V, Deniz Camp, Tom King, Eve Ewing, Vita Ayala, Chris Condon- any of those writers would have made me more excited about the upcoming book.
@Luis Dantas, I think part of the reason is Hickman’s an ideas man and not a character writer. Cosmic comics need a strong character focus to ground the characters and then you can world build around them.
I know Guardians and Nova fans didn’t like how he wrote Peter and Rich. I know Wiccan and Hulkling (and Young Avengers) fans didn’t like their status quo was destroyed for Imperial. I know some people didn’t like some of the talent for the post-Imperial books. I know X-Men fans don’t like Inhumans and especially the Royal Family.
I think a lot of things collided for Imperial which turned off several groups.
Gail Simone tweeted that two classic X-Men villains will be appearing in Uncanny X-Men. I guess people have been complaining that her book lacks regular X-Men villains- Blob doesn’t really count since he was under the control of Scurvy and Warden Ellis.
El Tigre! Mekano!
@Michael L.: I totally forgot to add Al Ewing to my shortlist of potential Legion writers. I think he’d knock it out of the park.
I liked G.O.D.S., too, and ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN was the last Marvel book I was buying off the rack every month (that one was kinda catnip for an elder millennial spider-fan like me). Now that it’s concluded, I’ve just got Marvel Unlimited.
I did finish IMPERIAL on Marvel Unlimited recently. I didn’t like it, either.
I wonder if Jeremy Adams could make a decent Legion writer. I am not a fan of his recent Green Lantern work, but he turned out a few great Flash stories in the late #790s.
Bleeding Cool’s Weekly Bestseller List is out. None of the X-titles made the top 10. Rogue and Psylocke are just minis, and Spider-Man & Wolverine is a last issue, so those are understandable. But Inglorious X-Force is living up to its name. (I wonder if Marvel kept it a secret that Kamala was going to be a part of X-Force because they were afraid her involvement would drive away readers.)
In non X-news, Williamson’s Iron Man came in 5th for the week. That’s not bad.
Maybe it was a bad idea to put out the first issue of X-Force on a week flooded with X-books. Who could ever conceive of such arcane ideas though? Issue #1 came in tenth, but there are a lot of consumers who buy first issues who don’t come back (either they are hoping it increases in value, they are sampling it and don’t care for it, or they decide they want to read some other new comic more than that one and quickly drop it). Often fans who passed on issue #1 for other titles don’t bother to come back for a series unless they hear that the series was a must read (I don’t see that for IXF). It’s looking likely that another volumn of XF will pass by with another ten issue run. Hey, that’s positively a success for Marvel in 2026, as the guaranteed ten issues mandate seems to have been dropped with the “cosmic line” getting cancelled before the titles hit ten issues.
I’d be curious to know how well issue #11s sell these days compared to the previous ten issues of a series. Seems to me like there should be a bit of a sales spike at the eleven issue mark because of this “give it ten issues” thing. You know, readers waiting to see if a series can make it past ten issues before committing to it. “Oh, it made it to issue eleven? Guess I’ll give it a try then.”
They should start every new series at #11. It might sell better than starting with #1.
They may as well. Adopting a ten issues-and-then-we’ll-see policy is one thing, but actually letting readers know that this is your policy doesn’t seem like a smart idea to me. You’re practically inviting readers to hold off on even bothering with a new series until it reaches the eleven issue mark.
The more astute fans might figure out that Marvel is continually cancelling half its line when the book his issue #10. I’m sure some of the fans would never figure out a pattern.
Starting a series with issue #11 would just confuse the bigwigs at Marvel. “When’s issue #10 so we can cancel these things?”
If Tom King were writing Legion, how long would it be before the first reference to them as the UP’s child soldiers? First issue? First page?
@Daibhid – If Tom King wanted to play up the notion of Legionnaries as child soldiers, he would probably be inspired by the early years of the Post Zero Hour/Archie Legion.
Post-Zero Hour, the majority of the Legion mentors were drafted/appointed by their home world to join the LoSH. It lead to some interesting conflicts within the team (Gim Allon/Leviathan I vs Gates) or the political machinations of planetary leaders.
@Chris V El Tigre! Mekano!
I would shit a brick, no lie! 🙂
@Michael But Inglorious X-Force is living up to its name.
At the same time, I just saw issue #1 is getting a second printing, which suggests either there’s something Marvel is seeing about the book not reflected on BC’s sales list, or that the threshold for second printings is pretty low.
“First issue? First page?”
I’m sure we can incorporate it into the logo somehow.
@ Michael That seems to suggest that issues 1-2 take place BEFORE Matsuo approached the Mandarin in X-Men 256. But that raises the question of why Matsuo needed the Mandarin and Spiral if the body swap had already occurred.
Yeah, that bit’s wonky. I didn’t have high hopes for this mini being the continuity patch of dreams, but there was always a chance. As it stands, the Elektra stuff is still holding my attention. I always thought there was a missed opportunity to mine the indirect connection between Elektra and Ninja Betsy for drama. Much as she relished her upgrades as a more formbible hand-to-hand combatant, how did Betsy feel about essentially being remade in a dead woman’s role and likeness (even irrespective of the Kwannon reveal)? What did Elektra think of this Temu version of herself running around following her own resurrection? It’s kind of crazy this never led to a quickie guest appearance by Psylocke (and probably Wolverine, since he was running around with Elektra) in mid-90s Daredevil.
Then again: the Mandarin’s direct actions in the original story became a bit of a complication after the Nicieza retcon, which established (among other things) that Spiral’s involvement wasn’t just a hallucination Betsy was experiencing during the process. If we now have Spiral and her Body Shoppe, a physical template in the form of Kwannon, AND the Hand with their psychic pseudo-mystical bullcrap, what exactly is the Mandarin contributing? These considerable powers can’t pull off what now amounts to a simple (by Marvel science standards) mindswap (with some light gene splicing)? Maybe Matsu’o DIDN’T need him, and we can paper over any involvement shown to the contrary.
Mandarin still makes sense as the higher power and ultimate benefactor, and there’s something genuinely compelling to the idea of Matsu’o as this kind of middle manager brokering a deal for the Hand. He offers Mandarin a personal super-assassin and alliance with the Hand in exchange for the Mandarin’s access to the Hand’s interests in Hong Kong, greatly improving his standing in the organization. On a personal level, the story could lean into how Matsu’o is also exploiting this as a way to save his critically injured lover, Kwannon (in body if not in spirit, which he admitted he thought he could settle for), AND the ticket out of his dead-end feud with local crime lord, Nyoirin. Nyoirin had already entrusted Matsu’o with the comatose Kwannon; failing in his efforts to restore her as she was, Nyoirin seemed placated with whatever came out the other side of the mindswap (i.e. Kwannon’s fractured mind in Betsy’s body). A crafty play, since it permitted Matsu’o a greater degree of contact with and control over Kwannon – now in league with a new master to their mutual advantage. Of course, that blew up in his face with Betsy unexpectedly overcoming the brainwashing and asserting independence over her new form.
Basically, I’m in favor of anything that furthers Nicieza’s efforts to flesh out the likes of Matsu’o and Nyoirin as actual characters. However, the details matter, since they speak so directly to each participant’s motivation. And unfortunately, those details have become exceedingly complicated over the course of retcon after retcon to an already rather muddled story.