The X-Axis – 1 April 2026
Well, another quiet week. The solicitations had the Uncanny X-Men Annual coming out too, but that’s slipped a week. So just the two books, then.
X-MEN #28. (Annotations here.) Three chapters in, this is feeling a bit less than the sum of its parts, to be honest. There’s plenty to enjoy here in the details. I particularly like the way Jed MacKay writes Quentin and Idie, with Quentin shouting all the rightful indignation, but Idie as the one who actually seems more quietly dangerous. Netho Diaz draws a great Maxine Danger, giving her a fabulously inappropriate cheerfulness – and the book ends with a lovely splash page of Psylocke having already taken out Beyond’s men in time for the inevitable fight back next issue. The Beast’s frustration at being expected to have a magical scientific answer for everything is a nice beat.
But at the same time, it’s a story where a bunch of villains hunt down the X-Men because they’ve been hired to hunt down the X-Men, and aside from the living ship thing, it pretty much boils down to gunmen and conventional weapons and so forth. And… uh… and? It’s a bit par for the course for the X-Men, and while the individual Danger Room members have potentially interesting hooks to them, they don’t actually have any particular connection with this book. It all feels a bit interchangeable at the macro level. Still, the details are good.
LOGAN: BLACK, WHITE & BLOOD #4. Final issue of the anthology miniseries, which in turn is just the latest in a series of these Black, White & Blood anthologies. I just don’t think the format work – mainly it winds up convincing me that apparently there isn’t that much you can do with red spot colouring, and stories that use it mainly to make the blood stand out more end up feeling repetitive in a way that they wouldn’t have if they’d appeared as back-ups somewhere. “The Monster in the Dark” by Ethan Sacks, Garry Brown and Andres Mossa isn’t a bad story in isolation – there’s actually quite a neat idea about Wolverine defeating sort of vampire thing who treats the meeting as a wonderful discovery that he isn’t alone – but in the context of this series it feels rather samey.
Giuseppe Camuncoli’s “Kintsugi” is a slightly half-formed story about Mystique impersonating Wolverine to steal a magic mask, which is mainly a pretext for her to get driven briefly mad so that Wolverine can fight versions of himself. But it does use the colouring much more effectively, either for atmosphere or in an outright unnatural way, and on that level it works well enough. “End of Days” by Phillip Kennedy Johnson, Piotr Kowalski and Rachelle Rosenberg is an oddity set in the distant future, with alien archaeologists arriving on a dead planet and finding a semi-fossilised version of Wolverine still wandering around and defending a graveyard. It’s not exactly a story so much as a vignette which gestures at a story that it leaves to the imagination, but in an ideal world these anthology books would take the opportunity to do more weird things like this.
In the latest edition of X-Men Monday on AIPT, Steve Orlando stated that X-Men Infinity Comic is a series intended to be part of the main continuity. I thought it was set in the X-Men ’97 continuity, but it actually takes place on Earth-616.
It’s very difficult to place the first cycle chronologically; with some stretching, you could place it between X-Men (vol. 2) #23 and #24 (though that would greatly diminish the impact of Magneto’s arrival at Illyana’s funeral…).
As for the second cycle that started this week, it’s even harder, even though Orlando has specified that with Krakoa, the idea has taken hold that the X-Men can go back to using old costumes in different historical periods (okay, but Beast in human form?!?)
I’m aware that Orlando is claiming this, but that’s really not something I’m prepared to take seriously.
I discussed this on the Marvel Chronology boards but the problem is that there’s no good way to place it before Illyana’s funeral. Scott’s dialogue at Illyana’s funeral makes it clear that he wasn’t sure until this moment that Magneto was alive. Plus, the school wasn’t called the Xavier Institute until after Wolverine lost his adamantium, the X-Men didn’t know Kurt was Mystique’s son until after Wolverine lost his adamantium, etc.
Maybe human Beast in the second arc is the one from the Time Displaced Original X-Men but that causes other problems.
Orlando was born in 1985. He has admitted to buying his earliest issues of X-Men where he was very young. I’m wondering if his impressions of the X-Men in the late 80s and early 90s were formed from issues he read when he was a small child and didn’t really understand. Which doesn’t bode very well for the upcoming X-Men: Outback limited series.
Bleeding Cool’s Weekly Bestseller list is out. X-Men 28 came in 6th, right behind Venom 256, the long-awaited death of Paul Rabin. So that’s good.
(By the way, Stephanie Phillips’ Daredevil 1 came in at number 1, twice as much as Batman. I guess it was the blind-bags? Because her recent Planet She-Hulk series did not sell very well.)
Rogue and Emma Frost will be appearing in Captain Marvel Dark Past 2 next month, trying to help Carol recover memories that were lost as a result of Rogue’s attack. I would be wary about continuity errors ,though. This week’s issue of Captain Marvel Dark Past featured Jessica Drew talking about her spider-sense. It doesn’t exactly fill one with confidence in the editors that they didn’t even know that Jessica doesn’t have a spider-sense.
X-Men 28 – pretty okay. I’m not convinced by the Danger Room, I kinda feel they could have been just one guy and it wouldn’t change a thing. (Unless by the end the X-Men will cause them to turn on each other or something…)
Daredevil 1 – that was good! I skipped Ahmed’s run, so I have no idea if it connects in any way, but this is a perfectly decent starting point. I like the angle with Matt teaching law.
Getting back to Paul Rabin, why on Earth did Marvel keep him around so long? It was obvious by 2023 how much hatred the readers had for him. I could see keeping him around until Wells’ run was over, since Wells created him. But Ewing kept using him in All-New Venom. Even after Paul broke up with MJ, Ewing seemed to want to keep him around. It should be noted that it was Nick Lowe who finally suggested killing. Paul- Al Ewing and Jordan White, the Venom editor, seems to initially want to keep using him. (To be fair, Ewing didn’t argue very hard after Lowe suggested killing him.) Why on Earth did Marvel keep such a hated character around for so long?
@Midnighter & Michael
In addition to human Beast, there’s also the Blink of it all, and Moonstar being the sheriff of an all-mutant town that has only ever appeared in the animated series.
Like, it’s just bunch of random characters mashed together. That’s fine for what it is, but don’t try to tell us it’s somehow in continuity, Orlando.
@Michael I don’t think Ewing likes to kill characters off without a reason. He loves to mine continuity and bring back forgotten characters. It feels like Ewing was originally mandated to use Paul and tried his best to use Paul in an interesting way. I wouldn’t be surprised if Ewing did have bigger plans for the character.
I kinda wanted Paul to be around until MJ wanted to get back with Peter. Then she learns that Paul and Peter are in a relationship.
Peter, Paul, and Mary sing Type O Negative:
My boyfriend’s boyfriend; he looks like you.
My boyfriend’s boyfriend; he’s my boyfriend too.
Speaking of Batman…who thought it’d be a good idea to make Poison Ivy the Mayor of Gotham? That’s not a believable idea (I realize this is not Fraction’s fault). It’s like someone saw the Marvel U “Kingpin as mayor of NYC” storyline and tried to copy it without thinking it through. Kingpin becoming mayor makes sense. Poison Ivy becoming mayor is random.
Also, if we’re talking about new releases from this week, Derek Kirk Kim’s Royals #1 (Image) was just delightful. There are a lot of bad comics being published in 2026 (and Assorted Crisis Events is not one of them! Read it when it returns.), then a comic like Royals get published, and I get a bit mellow and nostalgic about the entire comic industry.
@ChrisV: Isn’t Vandal Savage Commissioner of the Gotham PD? I know he was a couple of years ago. I feel like that makes even less sense, because not only should he not be anyone’s choice for that job, I can’t imagine why he’d want something so small-time to begin with.
At least I can sort of see Ivy wanting to enact a bunch of environmentally-friendly initiatives and figuring it might be better to start with one city. I have no idea if that’s how it’s playing out, and less idea how she got the job, since the only Bat-book I’m buying is Batgirl.
Yeah, Vandal Savage is Commissioner. That made no sense to me either, and I have no idea how he got the job, but I wasn’t following DC at all when they went with the Savage idea. I’m telling myself that Savage wanted the job because he’s 50,000 years old, and he gets bored, so he plays these random games. It does sort of take me out of the story every time he shows up in Fraction’s Batman, and I wonder what I am missing, and why this is the status quo Fraction inherited.
I also don’t know the details of Ivy, as ethat took place in her own book, and Fraction’s Batman is the only DC book I am reading. I assumed she was elected mayor. Maybe she used a plant pheromone to make everyone vote for her or something though, and I’m not giving the story the benefit of the doubt. It was just incredibly random to have her suddenly show up as mayor in Fraction’s Batman.
@Chris V- I think that they were thinking “We already have Vandal Savage as Police Commissioner”. Of course, Savage worming his way into positions of authority is consistent with his backstory. Ivy being mayor is just odd.
@Chris V- To make a long story short, Savage became trapped within Gotham and unable to leave without losing his immortality. So he became Police Commissioner.
A story about someone who shouldn’t be anyone’s first choice elected to power? In 2026? Where do writers get their ideas?
Maybe Fraction will make Mayor Ivy work – he’s the first to do something with the equally stupid Comissioner Savage (I hear great things about GWillow Wilson’s Poison Ivy book, so maybe it makes sense over there, haven’t read it yet).
As for Paul Rabin… I seem to find myself in the most extreme minority of Spider-Man readers – I enjoyed most of Zeb Wells’s run and I don’t have anything against Paul. I’ve actually enjoyed him as the sappy ex in the current Venom ongoing. Considering Ewing’s writing that as a rather wacky super hero adventure book, I wonder of the brutal murder – one of many in an extremely brutal crossover – won’t derail that book.
As a side note, over the years I was surprised to be interested in Mac Gargan Venom, Flash Thompson Venom and, incredibly, Mary Jane Venom.
Eddie Brock, on the other hand… I mean. Al Ewing and Ram V were writing the series a while back and I managed to get through one issue of that. And I’ve loved pretty much everything else I’ve ever read from them.
@Kryzxsiek Ceran- I think that Paul’s murder is meant to drive even more of a wedge between Dylan and Eddie. It wouldn’t have happened if Eddie had used that drug to kill Carnage- but Eddie refused because the drug would have also prevented him from bonding him to another symbiote.
I do wonder what’s going to happen to Eddie now since he’s shown that he can’t be trusted with the Carnage symbiote.
Regarding Al Ewing and Ram V’s run- I think that the problem was that they were writing different issues but they didn’t coordinate the whole plot well. After Ram V left, Ewing had no idea how Meridius planned to avoid becoming the Eventuality.
As written by Al Ewing in “All-New Venom”, Paul Rabin was perfect.
Perfect for being disliked, that is. I sincerely doubt it was meant for any other purpose; he could not even keep true to himself for the length of a single issue.
Stephanie Phillips’ Daredevil #1 is great. She really makes good use of the character. But it pretty much ignores everything from the Ahmed run, which I found rather unappealling (as expected). I am no fan of Matt as a supposedly spiritual character. His relationship with Elektra, though, I could like to see more of.
New kid-Yeah, but like I said, the Kingpin getting elected mayor makes sense. Poison Ivy getting elected is the equivalent of Theodore Kaczynski having been elected to public office. Putting aside the issues of “this person shouldn’t be in public office”, I can’t see a platform put together by Kaczynski being one that would appeal to anywhere close to enough voters to get close to being elected. Same with Poison Ivy. Wilson Fisk makes sense as a commentary, the other is just random and odd.
If you told me Ivy was elected because she did something to Gothams water supply and brainwashed enough people to get voted into office, I’d buy it. You’d think Gotham would have rules about felons and/or criminals committed to Arkham being eligible for office,
Did she run on cleaning up Gotham’s dirty rivers and parks? Who nominates an eco-terriorist? What’s the DC equivalent of the Green Party?
It all sounds outlandish enough for a Batman story. This is the DC Universe, not The Wire.
The Poisoan Ivy as mayor story is clearly satire. Batman comics tell over the top stories about the abuse of power.
It’s not about the plausibility or continuity of the story, but what parallels to society you pick up on and how it makes you feel.
“I can’t imagine why he’d want something so small-time to begin with.”
Vandal Savage’s first appearance involved committing identity fraud on Doiby Dickles, so maybe he’s just revisiting his roots.
‘Why is Savage doing this’ is a conversation Batman has with Alan Scott in this week’s issue.
“Who elects eco-terrorists?”
Uhm…
Setting aside real world examples…
The citizens of Gotham like her anti- corporate stances including the murder of CEOs.
She gets things done. She seems to be being set up as more of a Bruce Wayne nemesis than a Batman one.
Satire, yeah, lets go with that.
Is DC attempting to placate their soon-to-be Paramount masters? Marvel keeps trying to shove “super-villain of the month we want you to associate with Trump” down readers’ throats, so DC decided to respond with the “other side”.
I think it’s because writers have things to say and stores are about things. Same as always.