The X-Axis – 25 March 2026
UNCANNY X-MEN #25. (Annotations here.) This is the final part of “Where Monsters Dwell” and… um. Look, I like this book, and I like the creators, and I like the Outliers, but this arc is a misfire. To be fair, part of my problem with it is that the premise is pretty much that the Legion of Monsters are cool, and therefore a story where the X-Men fight the Legion of Monsters will be cool. And I disagree – I think the Legion of Monsters are boring and there’s really nothing here to change my mind. After all, they spend practically the whole arc hypnotised, so they’re not even really functional characters in it. But there are other problems too. The western strand seems to be implying that there’s more to Marcus than he lets on, but it doesn’t pay off coherently – the Rawhide Kid stuff falls away entirely and it winds up as just a pep talk to encourage the Outliers to be heroes. And issue #25 feels like it’s far, far too deep into the series for them to be learning that – doesn’t Ransom already want to be an X-Man? Some of the Gambit addiction subplot lands, and most of the issue is drawn by David Marquez, so it’s obviously going to look good, but mostly this feels like a forced attempt to shoehorn in some characters that the creators find a lot more interesting than I do.
INGLORIOUS X-FORCE #3. (Annotations here.) You certainly can’t accuse this book of dragging out its main storyline. The basic plot is that Cable has gathered this team together supposedly in order to protect Ms Marvel, but mainly in order to find out which of the team goes on to kill her in an alternate future. He only has three suspects, and by the end of issue #3 we’ve already eliminated two of them. We’ve already down Hellverine, and now this is Boom-Boom’s story. It’s partly a homage to Nextwave, but with part of the angle being that Boom-Boom doesn’t remember it fondly at all. After all, once you start incorporating Nextwave into the regular Marvel Universe, you run into the problem that it’s no longer a wacky comedy book in a wacky comedy world, but some sort of deranged collapse of rationality. Al Ewing did something similar with Spectrum’s reaction in Captain America and the Mighty Avengers, playing it as a sort of cosmic horror in which normal characters found themselves made into jokes, but doing it with Boom-Boom adds the fact that she’s the one you might expect to take it in her stride. To be honest, any attempt to get Nextwave elements to function in the regular Marvel Universe has problems – once you start grounding them in any sort of reality they kind of stop being funny, and this story feels like it’s trying to have its cake and eat it on that front. But Michael Sta. Maria’s art kind of pulls it off, and smooths over those competing elements. It kind of works, though I’m not sure how.
GENERATION X-23 #2. (Annotations here.) At the other end of the pacing spectrum, here’s an issue that consists entirely of Laura and Gabby introducing themselves to the characters they met at the end of the previous issue. Given the nature of the story, though, that’s probably the right call – there’s nothing we should be cutting away to just yet, and we’ve got a bunch of characters needing to be introduced. And since they all have versions of the same name, it’s all the more important to make them distinctive both visually and in personality terms. On re-reading, there’s more going on here than first meets the eye in terms of setting up the second-tier newbies, and in terms of how far their spokesman X-Infinite actually does reflect what the rest of the group are thinking. Jody Houser and Jacopo Camagni establish everyone well, and set up some questions about what Infinite is actually up to. It’s a strong book, but I do worry about whether it’ll get the time it needs to make this work.
WOLVERINE: WEAPONS OF ARMAGEDDON #2. By Chip Zdarsky, Luca Maresca, Jesus Aburtov & Joe Sabino. In theory, this miniseries is part of a crossover that has something to do with Origin Boxes, but in practice the Boxes have only received a passing mention. Instead, this is pretty much a straight Wolverine story, going back to the old standards of Wolverine trying to stop other people from being turned into weapons in the same that he was. We’ve seen this many times, and what makes this one distinctive is mostly the choice of characters. David Colton is the retconned-in 9/11 Captain America from Zdarsky’s current Captain America run, and fits sensibly in this story – there may be wider reasons for wanting to up his profile, but we’ll see. And thanks to Wolverine: Origins, Nuke now serves as a recognisable character where Wolverine himself was responsible for what happened, back before his face turn. Nuke is normally a completely one-note character, but for once, this story has him more interested in getting revenge on Wolverine, for entirely understandable reasons. Maresca draws him as a big imposing lug, but the scene with him squaring off against the bear plays him up as a Wolverine analogue, which is a very different way of using the character. Despite the crossover branding, this actually seems to be just a well executed Wolverine story, and more consistent than the ongoing title.
ROGUE #3. By Erica Schultz, Luigi Zagaria, Espen Grunetjern & Ariana Maher. Issue #2 was shaky, but this seems to be getting back on track. I’m not quite sure when the Constrictor became a rich guy funding other villains – the footnote points us to She-Hulk #9, which was when he sued Hercules, but I thought that status quo had long since been dropped. It didn’t show up when he was in Wolverine not so long ago, and a bit of quick searching tells me there’s a story where he lost most of the money in a poker game, but whatever. I don’t actually mind it as an approach to the character – it gives him a distinctive angle as an ascended henchman, and Zagaria gives him a smug confidence that’s very effective. The actual story here – in which Rogue tries to figure out what happened in her memory gaps – seems to be heading towards “she copied Sabretooth’s powers during a mission and went briefly nuts”. I can’t say I’m especially invested in that side of things. But the mechanics of this issue are rather good fun.
PSYLOCKE: NINJA #3. By Tim Seeley, Nico Leon, Dono Sánchez-Almara & Ariana Maher. This is an unusual approach to a continuity implant miniseries – Uncanny X-Men #256-258 have happened since the last issue, and so Betsy is now free of Hand control and hanging around in Madripoor with Logan and Jubilee. Fortunately, Logan is packed off to deal with stories in his solo book, and so we get a Psylocke / Jubilee story. For some reason, despite the immediate continuity being quite well researched, the wider continuity is really quite shaky. The idea of Logan trying to pack Psylocke off to the X-Men to recover doesn’t make any sense, because the team doesn’t exist at this point. But none of that especially matters. What Seeley is actually doing is writing a couple of encounters with Elektra into the margins of this period of continuity, after all. It also means he has to address the elephant in the room, which is that Psylocke’s body swap was reversed for very good reason. The story has a reasonable go at it, both by making her adjustment to her new body more traumatic, and through a rather unsubtle exchange with an English Tourist Who Symbolises Colonialism. What it doesn’t do is make Jubilee a vehicle for voicing any of these points, even though she resented Psylocke’s presence even in the original stories… but as Seeley points out, Claremont already attributed that to a combination of legitimate distrust and of Psylocke’s presence disrupting Jubilee’s sidekick relationshipw ith Wolverine, so giving her a third objection risks cluttering the whole thing. At any rate, maybe there’s something to be said for trying to smooth over this part of continuity from a more modern standpoint – while it’s potentially ignorable as part of Betsy’s back story at this point, it isn’t ignorable as part of Kwannon’s. If you’re going down that line, this actually does it quite well, though I’m yet to be convinced that the story needs Elektra.
With most other writers I’d assume the glaringly obvious solution would be a red herring… but when Erica Schultz is involved, what one sees tends to be what one gets. Oh well.
Re: Rogue 3:
“I’m not quite sure when the Constrictor became a rich guy funding other villains – the footnote points us to She-Hulk #9, which was when he sued Hercules, but I thought that status quo had long since been dropped. It didn’t show up when he was in Wolverine not so long ago, and a bit of quick searching tells me there’s a story where he lost most of the money in a poker game, but whatever. I don’t actually mind it as an approach to the character – it gives him a distinctive angle as an ascended henchman, and Zagaria gives him a smug confidence that’s very effective. ”
Hercues won his money back in Thing 8 in a poker game. It’s annoying because it was a plot point in Spencer’s Captain America that when Cosntrictor was dying, Diamondback had to first turn to stripping and then to crime to pay for his medical bills. And this issue doesn’t explain how he survived his “death” in that storyline. This series makes the Spencer storyline completely nonsensical.
The Constrictor in Wolverine was apparently supposed to be his son, who assumed the mantle after his father died.
That raises another problem- Constrictor claims that when he was associated with the Serpent Society, he charged 60 percent. But the original Constrictor was never a member of the Serpent Society- they offered him membership and he refused and squealed on them to Captain America. It was his son who was associated with the Serpent Society.
And if all that Constrictor knew was that Rogue absorbed Sabretooth’s powers and knocked him out, then why didn’t he just tell her that?
Bleeding Cool’s Weekly Bestseller List is out. None of the X-books made the list. This is just embarrassing.
Uncanny X-Men is one of the flagships of the line. There’s no excuse for it not making the top 10. Iron Man, Punisher and Fantastic Four all outsold it. As we’ve discussed before, part of the problem might be that Age of Revelation hurt the line long term. But it seems like a lot of people just don’t like Gail Simone’s writing and this story in particular. Gail doesn’t seem to actually want to write the traditional X-Men with their traditional villains. The story required an evil sorceress but instead of using Selene, Gail dug up a one-shot villainess who fought Werewolf By Night and turned her into a major sorceress.
Generation X-23 probably won’t last more than 10 issues. Maybe they shouldn’t have started things off so slowly.
Inglorious X-Force continues to do poorly. I’m not sure if the problem is that any X-Force without Wolverine won’t last long nowadays or that Kamala draws the sales of any X-book she appears in down or both or neither.
The minis doing poorly is to be expected. But the fact that Weapons of Armageddon is selling so poorly might be an indication that there’s no much enthusiasm for Armageddon.
Overall, the line seems like it’s a mess. X-Men and Uncanny are both doing arcs that seem like filler. And the next X-Men event was supposed to be revealed in the Free Comic Book day issue in May but so far, we haven’t heard anything about it. Taken together. it seems like Marvel is trying to figure out what to do about the X-Men.
In other news, Claremont will be writing a five-issue limited series featuring Gambit called Gambit: Wanted in July. It takes place shortly after Remy has joined the X-Men and it involves Bullseye being hired to kill Remy.
There’s another minor bit of continuity mix-up in Psylocke – Betsy refers to her previous connection with Jubilee, that there was little of it back when they had time for ladies shopping trips.
Except there was zero connection back in the Outback, Jubilee hitches a portal with the x-ladies coming back from a shopping trip and then lives in the base like a, well, mall rat. She observed the X-Men, but didn’t approach anyone before helping Logan get off from the cross.
One World Under Doom just ended. A lot of readers found it disappointing and overlong. So, let’s move on to the next crossover. No wonder fans are turning out to another crossover.
Wolverine probably wouldn’t help X-Force since the Wolverine comic is struggling.
There was another X-Force comic recently, and it got cancelled after ten issues. It might not be a good time to launch another X-Force, especially when it shipped as just another X-title comic amidst a glut of X-titles.
Notice that DC seems to realize that if every “Next Level” series shipped at once, titles would have a harder time finding their audience. Instead, they are staggering the release dates.
Marvel is solely concerned about putting out a certain number of books each month, and worried about having to cancel so many books. They’d rather see all the X-books shoved out within a month of each other, even if it means having to cancel most of the new ongoings with issue #10.
Well, there are plenty of crossovers coming up. They can just do another line-wide relaunch in a few months after “Armageddon” or the next X-events with a brand new X-Force #1.
I like the Outliers, except maybe Deathdream, who seems more like a cartoon character than a functional person. I get that people are annoyed that their favourite characters are largely in the background, though.
I don’t know about this Nextwave thing. The original series seemed in the same vein as Hickman’s comedy books, seldom rising above just cruelly mocking the characters. I guess it was popular, but popular enough to fold into the mainstream and revisit so many years later? I really don’t get it.
NextWave was hilarious. It was written by arch-cynic, Warren Ellis, though; the writer of Ruins…what do you expect? It was something different for Marvel when Marvel still took chances outside constant crossovers, relaunches, and more X-books. Ellis’ use of Machine Man was strangely touching and compelling, and the Devil Dinosaur thing was inspired. I can easily see why certain Marvel creators look back upon it fondly. It only works because it was Ellis allowed to be crazy. Trying to shoehorn it into the Marvel Universe, much like other examples of this from Marvel (like Kirby’s Eternals) misses the point and doesn’t do the original any favours.
I regret the era of goofy comics that NextWave was responsible for kicking off. It was an era of more and more memeable out-of-context panels, which immediately became diminishing returns as soon as NextWave ended. Or even before.
Back then, I was absolutely mining comics for the memes, and I remember that they impressed my friends less and less with every passing month.
And the thing about Warren Ellis comics was that he always positioned his heroes as the future and his villains as relics of the past, who would inevitably lose. Ellis might have been the most end-of-history writer of them all, which is really out of date in retrospect.
Well, he got the relics of the past part correct, at least.
I just wish there was more diversity in “mainstream” (i.e. superhero) comics. It seems like Marvel settles on one style and runs it into the ground. Mix it up a bit more.
That is something Ellis was good at, even when the villains were the protagonists of whatever story he was telling, they still lost to and were sadder than the heroes they were supposedly much cooler than. It was often subtle, but usually there. Tiny deliberate gaps in the cynicism, letting the light in.
Michael has already covered all of my Constrictor-related continuity quibbles… of which there were certainly a few. Heck, this one doesn’t even seem to have the cybernetic arms with built-in coils received from his time in Avengers Initiative.
I’ll accept “this one is an LMD with faulty memories” or something for 1000, Alex. Because a good editor should have dug in against this with a simple “Um, Frank died broke, and was never part of the Serpent Society when he was alive.”
The minis doing poorly is to be expected. But the fact that Weapons of Armageddon is selling so poorly might be an indication that there’s no much enthusiasm for Armageddon.”
They haven’t done a very good job selling the concept. As far as I can tell the idea is “Cap/Wolverine” crossover with Red Hulk and Doom in it. I don’t know what Armageddon is.
Apparently, Red Hulk decides to conquer Latveria (now that Doom is gone) leading to the Avengers declaring war on Ross. Then, something, something, Ultimate Universe boxes. Then, something, something, “new Avengers Disassembled”. Followed by, Hype:The Marvel Universe will never be the same…again!
Sounds like more of the same to me.
This Wolverine mini is good, though. And I trust Zdarsky to write an interesting story.
I don’t trust Marvel not to run it into the ground with countless pointless tie-ins, but I can try to ignore those.
As long as they’re not hamfistedly put into ongoings I’m reading. Oh, how I hated the King in Black. Look, in this one the heroes fight a goop dragon!
@New kid: To be fair, even crossover events that have had *relatively* succinct premises (e.g. Imperial being a murder mystery in spaaaaaaace, One World Under Doom being Emperor Doom Again But More Cynical This Time, Age of Revelation being Hey Remember Age of Apocalypse Do You Do You Really Well Here Have Some More, etc.) haven’t quite caught on. Maybe we’ve finally, *finally* entered the era of event burnout. Took ’em long enough.
“Armageddon” is such a generic title. I like most of Zdarsky’s writing, including the current Cap run and the Weapons mini, and I still can’t muster any enthusiasm for it. “Red Hulk takes over Latveria” isn’t hugely interesting, either. I’m not interested in continuity-implant minis, X-books that go nowhere, symbiotes, or whatever the next Avengers team looks like.
FF, Thor, and Hulk have been chugging along with their own stories, and they’ve been my favorite Marvel series. Iron Man is off to a decent start, and Cap has also been enjoyable. Other than the Ultimate line, which is ending soon, I have little enthusiasm for Marvel’s current output. I don’t see anything on the horizon that will lift the line as a whole.
North’s FF is really a case study in how Marvel comics *should* be, but aren’t. It’s not just that he’s been on the book long enough to deliver his thesis statement on every single character in the cast, and give each of them something fun to do at least once; he’s also maintained a proper balance between action/adventure/Big Plot on the one hand and character work on the other. I mean, that Ben Grimm/Puppet Master one-off in the middle of OWUD? Gold standard right there.
As much as I’m enjoying MacKay’s Adjectiveless in terms of plotlines, I don’t think he’s actually done *anything* meaningful with his cast besides Scott and Hank. I don’t know what Quentin’s arc is, or Cain’s, or Idie’s. I keep forgetting Xorn’s in the cast.
@Mike Loughlin- I think Mortal Thor is losing steam. (Why did the Enchantress need a magical arrow from Ullr to kill the victim in issue 8 without Magni knowing? Couldn’t she have just used her own powers?)
But then again, both Venom and Mortal Thor are selling less than they used to. In Venom’s case it’s become dependent on crossover and double-size issues to mask the fact that the non-crossover, regular size issues don’t sell very well. I think Ewing’s Marvel work is losing its shine with readers.
Yeah, Nextwave was the best. The team were mostly misfit losers with hearts of gold, but Ellis really made Monica seem cool again. She was a good leader and a powerhouse on the field. When was the last time someone had made such good use of that character? Also, Stuart Immonen’s art was STUNNING and every bit as dumb-funny as the writing.
As for Marvel’s spate of terrible crossovers: can they put out *one* that isn’t “X takes over the country/world/galaxy as king/emperor/messiah and it’s BAD!” They have such anxiety about leadership that it makes me wonder if it’s not a meta-textual commentary on their own company. There must some other story out there waiting to be told.
Maybe there’s a meta element that I can’t speak to, but anxiety about crazy people taking over the world seems justifiable at the moment. That and the fear we live in a post empathy society seems to be the driving force in fiction these days.
I feel like “authority figures are untrustworthy and will abuse their position,” has been pretty bog-standard at Marvel for decades.
Jonah Jameson was using his newspaper to run a smear campaign back against Spider-Man almost right from the start in the ’60s, and whether he knew he was full of crap when he accused Spider-Man of being in cahoots with Electro or delusional enough to actually believe it, it wasn’t a great look. And that’s when he wasn’t outright funding the creation of super-villains.
You could throw Thunderbolt Ross and later on, Gyrich, into that category as well. Probably a bunch of other characters I’m not remembering. Marvel just didn’t make linewide events centered on those guys back in the 60s thru the 80s.
When I was a kid, villain continuity was largely regarded as a writer’s choice. Died last appearance? Explain it away if you want. Or don’t. Nobody cares.
@Oldie- I don’t think it was THAT bad in the 80s and early 90s. Usually if a writer screwed up, complains from the fans would force that writer or another writer would explain it later. Shooter forgot about Egghead’s death and Roger Stern explained he survived by teleporting away when he started his run on Avengers. PAD forgot about the Leader’s death when he started writing Hulk and complaints from the fans forced PAD to explain he teleported away. (Teleporting away was a common excuse.)
It’s expected that villains will keep coming back. It was a surprise that Green Goblin was brought back after being dead for over 2 decades and it a vacuunm bringing back was the wrong move, but it was understandable given how big of a hole they had dug themselves into with the Clone Saga and the need for a hidden villain as big as Norman Osborn to explain how off the rails the whole thing had gotten. The worst case in recent years I think hs been Belasco – not because they seem to have completely forgotten that Darkchild killed him and have provided no explanation for his being alive, but because his presense in recent stories has actively made the stories so much worse. There was zero point in the retcon that Belasco has a long-lost soul sword other than to cheapen and ruin the soul sword and to erase far better stories. There was again zero point to the Belasco story in the terrible Age of Revelation infinity comic other than for Marvel to say ‘screw you’ to everyone who bought the Ashley Allen Magik book and to create more bad retcons that make no sense. If you’re going to bring back a long dead villain, at least try to tell a halfway decent story, and with Belasco it seems like they are actively trying to write as badly as possible.
@Thom H.: We did get Empyre, in which Hulkling taking over the Kree and the Skrulls was shown as both a heroic act and an end to their ancient wars. Of course, that was the end of it, not the premise, which was “the Cotati are taking over everything and it’s bad,” so…never mind.
@Michael: In fairness, “the villain was blown up/fell into a pit of lava” was a pretty standard way to close out a story without permanently killing off the bad guy.
The problem with Egghead and the Leader was more the omission of the standard “how I survived” flashback or monologue the next time those characters were used.
And, hey, at least Egghead was actually using teleportation in that Defenders story, even if it’s unclear why he was zapped into the swamps of New Jersey rather than back up to his satellite HQ.
@Omar- It was mentioned that the teleporter burned out, so presumably it only had the power to transport Egghead to New Jersey and not to his satellite. Of course, the real reason is Rule of Funny. “Unlike death, one can usually return from the state of New Jersey.”
No-Prize Theory: OG Constrictor got resurrected by Jackal Ben Reillu as one of the literally hundreds of en masse resurrections of notable deceased Marvel-616 characters in The Clone Conspiracy
“ In fairness, “the villain was blown up/fell into a pit of lava” was a pretty standard way to close out a story without permanently killing off the bad guy.”
If it’s good enough for Blofeld …
It’s one thing to keep track of major villains like Luthor, Doctor Doom and the Green Goblin. They’re essentially members of the main cast.
I don’t know anybody who’se really keeping up with the status of the Eel from month to month.
How hard could it be to have an Excel spreadsheet with a list of all the characters and a “last used” cell next to it? It’d take a while to compile, but it would take seconds for an editor to update.
Id bet one of us nerdlingers has a site for it, if not the marvel wikia themselves.
@New kid- The Constrictor has had over 100 appearances. He’s a relatively major villain.
@Michael: The Constrictor’s also a villain who writers seem to like to flesh out. DeMatteis had him betray the Viper out of horror at her mass murder plans. Much later, he got a belated backstory as a disillusioned S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, and Dan Slott and Christos Gage later gave him a lengthy ups-and-downs reform storyline. A decent percentage of those hundred appearances were from that plotline in Avengers: The Initiative.
Not bad for a character who debuted as a one-issue-wonder for the Hulk to beat up and then served as the less-colorful partner to Sabretooth back in Creed’s C-list villain days.
I don’t want to get into a goofy argument about it, but I think there’s a big difference between being a major villain (or even a relative one) vs. being in a lot of comics.
Constrictor is all well and good, often used as a henchman sometimes in a crowd of henchmen, but he has zero cultural impact. If his 50 year history doesn’t line up to a T, that’s okay. Most people won’t notice.
I was going to say that’s a whole story in its own right, but Clone Conspiracy already did that story!
Mirage, the background villain who keeps dying and coming back without fanfare – and being self-conscious about it.
Nextwave was so much of its era that it had a theme song that was posted on MySpace. It seems like an insane thing to bring back as a plot point two decades (!!) later. But that’s certainly comics for you.
I vaguely remember that some of the characters were drawn into a scene in Civil War, and seeing Stuart Immonen’s versions of the characters drawn by Steve McNiven felt both uncanny, and a little icky.
Immonen was so good on that book!
(Stuart Immonen has kind of disappeared, but for a while he developed what became Marvel’s house style – a pretty massive achievement considering his artwork looked like no other superhero books for a long time.)
Seeing some NextWave concepts revisited here after re-reading the original series sits weirdly. It’s not just that they don’t work very well when drawn in a straight superhero style. In Inglorious X-Force those elements seem to be reduced to wackiness, instead of the very specific mix of dry humour, absurdity and straight-faced action pastiche.
Like – Dirk Anger was a pastiche of the kind of hyper-masculine machismo of characters like Cable, so feels like missing the point to see him reduced to a kind of babbling clown while Cable gets the kind of brooding ‘big man alone in a room’ scenes that NextWave used Dirk Anger to parody.
That said, this is a pretty decent Boom Boom issue, and at least gives her a character beat. NextWave did a lot well, but its treatment of female characters has aged very badly (especially in light of what we’ve learned about Ellis in recent years) and the way Tabby was written in NextWave was particularly egregious.
What I don’t understand is why can’t writers just Google a villain before writing them? In the old days researching a villain’s status quo meant looking at a physical copy of either their last appearance (and if you weren’t sure of the issue number that meant looking through potentially dozens of issues) or a Handbook but now there’s plenty of websites that should be able to give you the information you need.
There will be another Hellfire Gala issue in July called the Hellfire Murder. The plot is that while at an exclusive masquerade ball hosted by Sebastian Shaw, a mutant power player is murdered. Wolverine and Jubilee have to figure out who the murderer is. The murderer’s purpose was apparently to prevent the victim’s reckless plans from endangering mankind. And Logan and Jubilee have to decide whether or not to reveal the truth.
The writers are Jed MacKay, Gail Simone, Eve Ewing, Saladin Ahmed and Erica Schultz.
Why are the X-Men going to a party hosted by Shaw? That would be as stupid as using Sinister’s technology to protect their school. Um, never mind.
Why is Schultz writing? The other four are all writing ongoing X-series. Schultz isn’t. Maybe it has to do with the ending of her Rogue series.
In other news, there will be a Defenders series as part of the Queen in Black crossover and Gunfire and Darkstar will be part of the Defenders team. So it’s looks like Darkstar is back on the side of the angels now that X-Factor is over.
That should probably be “Sunfire” above. Wasn’t Gunfire one of the new Bloodline characters at DC? It’s a very random Defenders line-up. I realize they are the “non-term”, there have been other weird teams under the name (Joe Casey’s version, which was a fine enough comic anyway), and, well, Red Guardian was a member under Gerber (best I could come up with). This really has nothing to do with the “Defenders” concept though.
Yeah, “Gunfire” should be “Sunfire” and “mankind” should be “mutantkind”. Autocorrect hates. me tonight.
Inglorious X-Force: I think Krzysiek Ceran is absolutely right. That would be good structure! Even knowing this as a reveal for the story’s end makes just makes me more interested in reading it. Still questioning if the tone can be pulled off, but I am invested.
Generation X-23: Thinking this isn’t expected to last. Maybe it will try to rehab X-23 as her name instead of Wolverine in the eye of readership. Eve Ewing softened the return of Kitty from Kate. This might be the primary goal. I am enjoying this story anyway, even if it is introductory. Adding it to the metaphorical pile of stories that are written just for me.
Weapons of Armageddon: Given only the title and synopsis this sounds like the sort of book that I would hate. Zdarsky is of course excellent, but I can imagine that his name alone doesn’t draw enough casual interest for the sales.
Age of Revelation infinity comic: Gary did you count Belasco’s arms too? I am with you on this.
Mortal Thor: “Why did the Enchantress need a magical arrow from Ullr to kill the victim in issue 8 without Magni knowing? Couldn’t she have just used her own powers?”
Isn’t obscuring who was the source of the manipulations a common theme with Asgardians in general and especially her in particular? If she used her own magics directly, it could be immediately spotted by the many truthtellers / seers of fate / forensic style magic users. She is constantly adding a step so some [insert some version of a magic mirror on the wall here] reveals the doer of the deed instead of her being the puppeteer behind the scenes. It is her schtick since sometime right after the Eddas.