The X-Axis – 29 May 2026
X-MEN #30. (Annotations here.) This is the fifth and final part of “Danger Room”. Why five issues? Well, it seems to be Marvel’s current standard length for trade paperback collections, up from four. And those four issue collections did look kind of flimsy. It’s under 100 pages, you know? But Jed MacKay’s X-Men tends to be at its best doing short and focussed stories, and “Danger Room” – which is fundamentally a romp in which some psychos try to take down the X-Men and fail because the X-Men show more heart than them – didn’t need to be five issues. It’s certainly good in parts. It’s nice to see Kid Omega’s radical side get an outing again; Greycrow is worth bringing into the regular cast now that the Psylocke solo title is over; I liked the idea of the two Danger Room members who think they’re Skrulls trapped in human form. (Or maybe they even are?) Still, it feels like less than the sum of its parts. The Beyond Corporation are kind of arbitrary as villains; the Danger Room members got big individual introductions but only one of them even gets any meaningful dialogue in the final chapter; the town-and-factory tension gets the mindwipe reset button. It’s fine, but it’s not a 5-issue premise, I think.
GENERATION X-23 #4. (Annotations here.) I have a few reservations about the pace of this opening arc as well – it’s another five-parter, naturally – but on the whole I think it’s working. The plot isn’t exactly breakneck, but there are a lot of new characters being introduced, and it’s giving them room to breathe. Okay, yes, X-73 and X-66 remain in the background relative to the others (that’s the two older girls), but X-92 is charming and Infinite is a good villain. Aside from the fact that he puts Laura in the position of defending a version of the Facility, Jody Houser has set up the reveal quite nicely – first you practically telegraph the bad guy, then you start trying to convince us that we’re jumping to conclusions and he’s just doing his best. So it’s a twist in plain sight, and it pulls that off. Marco Renna’s art is giving a ton of personality to Scout and X-92 in particular (and X-92 really needs it, since they’re the silent character and depends entirely on the art to sell their persona). That scorpion robot cyborg thing still makes for confusing fight scenes – I guess you could say that at least sells the chaos – but it’s a nice looking book all round. I’m enjoying this.
PSYLOCKE: NINJA #5. By Tim Seeley, Nico Leon, Dono Sánchez-Almara & Ariana Maher. Final issue of the continuity implant mini, which is a mixed affair. The basic idea here is to do a story set shortly after Betsy’s body swap from the late 1980s, and it does make a reasonable case for that being a worthwhile exercise. The whole body swap angle is widely seen as rather problematic in 2026, but even in its original form it glossed over Betsy adapting to her new body. There’s room for a story fleshing that out (which this does, a bit); and for filling out her relationship with Jubilee (ditto); and for trying to figure out how Matsu’o’s behaviour in the original story fits with the retcon that he’s meant to be in love with her. That, in theory, is what this final issue is about, but much of the issue is actually taken up with fighting other Hand warrior types, and Matsu’o’s part, which is surely the interesting bit, gets rather lost in there. It looks pretty good for the most part, but I feel like we’re focussing on the wrong bad guys here. Then there’s the decision to tie the whole thing in to Elektra – I know she has the Hand back story, so it’s not completely random, but her presence still feels like clutter, and it would be a stronger story without her.
Re: Psylocke: Ninja 5- Am I the only person who didn’t agree with the story that Kwannon’s coma was entirely Matsuo’s fault? What happened was this- Kwannon was in service to Lord Nyorin and Matsuo was in service to the Hand. Kwannon made it clear that if they wound up on opposite sides, she would try to kill him and she would expect him to do the same. Matsuo was sent to kill Nyorin. they fought and Kwannon fell into the sea. Matsuo rescued her but she was in a coma. That’s different from a normal case of domestic abuse. Both Kwannon and Matsuo were engaged in violent, illegal and dangerous activities so they both share responsibility for what happened.
(It doesn’t help that this issue depicts Kwannon as falling because Matsuo kicked her while X-Men 31 and last year’s Psylocke 8 depict Kwannon as slipping. Psylocke 8 even suggests that Kwannon fell on purpose because she didn’t want to kill Matsuo.)
Yes, everything that Matsuo did after Kwannon got put in a coma was monstrous. But this series seems to want to absolve Kwannon of any agency in what happened to her.
> Michael> What happened was this- Kwannon was in service to Lord Nyorin and Matsuo was in service to the Hand.
Of course, this has been muddied by repeated stories since Krakoa saying Kwannon was Hand as well. When the whole deal originally was a Romeo & Juliet thing, with Revanche & Matsu’o doomed by being on opposite sides, making her very firmly NOT Hand.
In other X-News. Infernal Hulk 7 is out this week.
This issue is significant because the Eldest killed Marrow.
But this issue issue also establishes that mutants, are in some sense, the Eldest’s creatures. This is how the Beast describes it:
“This Hulk considers himself the “father of horrors”: the ruler of all evolutionary deviations. I don’t yet understand how or why, but as distasteful as the notion is , it appears to be true. He is calling us to him.”
And we see that mutants worldwide are being drawn to the Eldest’s city of Golgotha.
I’m not liking this at all. Yes, the Beast later says that mutants aren’t like the Eldest. But still. the story establishes that mutants are in some sense the Eldest’s children. And he’s able to control them to some degree. But this story basically establishes that every time a bigot said mutants were unholy. they were in some sense right.
At the end, the Eldest chooses Glob as his herald. In the Comics Giveaway issue, the Eldest complained that humans choose people like Perseus, Odysseus and Gilgamesh as heroes instead of monsters like Goliath of Gath. So I guess that one of the reasons the Eldest chose Glob is because he doesn’t look human.
But also. Glob’s past suggests why the Eldest might have chosen him. He was one of Quentin’s Omega Gang. And after that, he was treated as a potential villain. Of the nonhuman X-Men present (Factory Beast, Animalia and Glob). he is the one with the most blood on his hands.
It should have been Beast. That would have been an amazing move on Marvel’s part. “3K Beast isn’t the most evil Beast any longer.”
Well, considering that every anti-mutant bigot except the ones who believed mutants were unholy was driven to their hatred of mutants by having relatives who tortured them in their formative years, it only makes sense that all the anti-mutant bigots would be given a plausible reason for their anti-mutant bigotry.
I still think that a more elegant solution to the whole Betsy/Revanche thing would have been to make Betsy’s mum Asian. Her mum’s been dead since before the character debuted and has less than a handful of appearances and her (also dead) dad is from Otherworld, so make her mum from Hong Kong or somewhere.
As for four issue collections, the answer is putting all the one billion variant covers in the back. That can easily pad a book out to over 100 pages. (I’ve seen this happen with some comics from other publishers.)
@Matthew,
BTW Pete Milligan did that in his 2010’s 5-part AU mini-series set in Shogunate-era Japan, with Japanese counterparts of Psylocke (biracial daughter of English father and Japanse mother) , Wolverine, Punisher, Hulk, Deadpool . But the problem with doing it in 616 is that 1) it breaks suspension of disbelief that a Eurasian couple would produce a blond-haired blue-eyed pair of fraternal boy-girl twins , and 2) it removes the Braddock’s connections to Britain & England , since it was their mother who was British Englsih , their father was a migrant from OtherWorld , he just happened to be able to pass himself as a White Englishman (like Dr. Who)
Bleeding Cool’s top 11 list is out. X-Men 30 came in 10th. Generation X-23 4 and Psylocke 5 didn’t make the list.
It’s interesting to note that Infernal Hulk 7, which featured the X-Men, came in 9th. So a Hulk book that guest-starred the X-Men beat the actual X-Men book. There’s probably a message in that.
That Hulk is more popular than the X-Men now? I could believe it.
Yeah so Brian’s Caucasian appearance comes from the fairy nature that was a dominant trait on the Y chromosome or something
Also kinda works because they are already so different in nature, one’s a fair-haired hunky magic guy and the other’s a thinner dark haired mutant, not a lot of overlap. I kinda like that for them actually
Even ignoring the fairy nature of their dad, the way fraternal twins are conceived already allows for twins from biracial parents to have different skin colours.
Betsy isn’t dark haired, her natural hair color is as blond as Brian’s hair is.
My bad. I also forgot they were twins
I am irrationally annoyed by the Hulk story. In it, we see Marrow, Erg and Pyro safeguarding/accompanying a group of mutants, including Leech, apparently on the run from… I dunno. The authorities. Angry villagers. Whatever. Are these mutants following the lure of the Infernal Hulk to Golgogogogolathaga?
Now, we JUST saw Erg with the New Morlocks in Canada in the recent Wolverine storyline. So did he abandon that group and make his way from Canada to the American Midwest just to hook up with a different group of dispossessed mutants? Are these another splinter faction of New Morlocks? Again, I have trouble imagining Erg abandoning his BFF Ape. Those two always felt like a package deal.
Why is Pyro there when he had a perfectly good gig with X-Factor not too long ago? Did he accept a mercenary bodyguard gig or something? Or is this Pyro II, last seen I don’t know when?
Marrow, I can see at least. As a former Morlock and perennial outcast, she might have felt kinship with these mutants, most of whom apparently can’t pass for “sape.”
Leech, though… why is he on his own, since he seemed quite happy with the Future Foundation and his BFF Artie? Dangit, did they just… -misplace- Leech one day? I know we haven’t seen the Foundation in quite a while–Dammit Reed, you need to check on the -old- Foundation before making a new one!
Simply put, in the process of giving us several recognizable C-Listers and one plot-relevant target, this story creates narrative and logistical hiccups. Sure, none of it is particularly impossible or egregious, but an editor should at least catch it when a character like Erg, who never gets screentime, shows up in multiple stories in a very short timeframe…
Also, what a lousy way to kill off Marrow. I can’t say I ever had strong feelings about her, but it sucks when characters become cheap cannon fodder.
I assume Artie and Leech left the Future Foundation for Krakoa, and we know Reed was not fond of Krakoa. So, he probably did lose touch with Leech after the fall of Krakoa. Which seems like a Reed thing to do. I was going to mention that the FF are forming a new FF in this very month’s issue of FF, but I see that you are aware.
Maybe they killed Marrow because Simone created a new Morrow in the pages of Uncanny X-Men. The fact that the Mutina subplot has already been done before needed to be quietly swept under the rug, and the best way to do that is to make the old version disposable.
@Chriv V- To be fair, the entire point with Mutina seems to be that it’s not clear if she’s an actual mass murderer or just an idiot who thought pretending to be a mass murderer was fun and happened to attract the attention of a real mass murderer (Oscar). In Marrow’s case, we knew she killed multiple innocent people.
They can always get Mephisto to rewrite Betsy’s ethnicity. Mephisto’s great for explaining long term retcons.
Like Bryan or Rachel or somebody is dying and Mephisto offers to save them in exchange for Betsy’s fairy heritage, which rewrites her history and incidentally her new parents happen to be Asian. Also, some twit in a man-bun shows up as her new boyfriend.
Betsy is just an odd character now. In the 80s Claremont reasonably thought it would fun to merge Captain Britain and X-Men mythology. He was right. I love Excalibur classic.
but having Betsy have a foot in both the X-Men’s world and British Otherworld magic is an awkward hangover 40 years on, even before you factor in the Asian Ninja makeover.
Yeah, but Psylocke had nothing to do with the original Excalibur. Psylocke was a straightforward character under Claremont, until he decided to do the ninja body swap, which was apparently only supposed to be for a story-arc but her thong was so popular that it became her default for years.
The Otherworld connection was her brother’s gimmick. Betsy was Captain Britain for about five minutes under Alan Moore before she got her eyes clawed out. It was only very recently when Marvel was trying to figure out something to do with the “other Psylocke”, who was the original but now everyone remembered the sexy Asian ninja version instead, that they decided she could be defined by being British and part fairy now.
They could always do a Northstar with Betsy. Her being part fairy was a lie all along, it turns out that Betsy is really a lesbian. Well, I guess bi because she is a Chris Claremont female character.
Claremont got really into mixing niche properties with the X-Men around that time to the point where they’re still associated with X-Men even when there’s no conceptual relation, like Longshot and Mojo. Psylocke wasn’t on Excalibur, but shoehorning a Marvel UK character onto the X-Men at the same time he was sending Nightcrawler and Kitty to slum in a new C-list title to prop up other Marvel UK characters was certainly related.
I think the more elegant solution to the Betsy/Revanche thing would have been to fire Jim Lee, and let Claremont finish his original plan.
Hong Kong was British at the publication time, but with the sliding timeline… Betsy wasn’t even born back then.
Okay… storytime! I will wait while you get popcorn. Your back now? I read First Flight when it came out and the book had an advertisement for the sequels in the trilogy. I very much enjoyed First Flight so I sought out the other books. I asked my local comic store, and the couldn’t get it. Paperback bur not comic, so that made sense. I tried my local bookstore and they told me that the advertised sequels were never published. Later when they were new to my area, I tried Hastings, Waldens, Newbury Comics, Borders Books, Barnes & Noble… they each told me either they were never published or that the were not available through their distributors. I whined about thw sequels nir existing, and Chris V corrected me. They do exist. Amazon sold then to me. They say in large font that they are not for sale in Canada and the back covers give New Zeland and Austrailian pricing. I am on page 107 of Grounded and loving it. Fresh (to me) Claremont at the height of his craft. 10/10 recommend. I see no more popcorn. Thank you Chris V.
Yeah, as much as I hate to say it (I’ll end up like Mack Reynolds and the Socialist Labor Party, heh), for obvious reasons, but Amazon really was a godsend. When I was a kid we had B. Dalton and Little Professor stores in malls, with very limited stock. Then, in high school, a Borders opened near me. It seemed amazing. An entire actual store full of books, not just space in a mall. Then, the year 2002 came, and I entered the brave new world of cyberspace, creating an Amazon account. Now, I have a thousand books in my TBR pile, a large percentage thanks to Amazon. Books I thought I’d never come across were now available to order.
@yrzhe- To be fair to Claremont, he didn’t see Excalibur as a C-list title. Part of the problem was that when he agreed to do the title, he was told that Ann Nocenti, the X-Men’s editor, would be the editor. Unfortunately, an editorial shakeup occurred, and Bob Harras ,who was X-Factor’s editor at the time, wound up taking over all the X-titles, except for Excalibur, which would be edited by Nocenti’s former editor, Terry Kavanagh. Excalibur having a different editor than the rest of the X-titles made Exaclibur crossing over with the other X-titles difficult., and two different editors complicated Kitty, Kurt and Rachel appearing in the X-books.
In any case, Excalibur was intiialy Marvel’s second best-selling title, after Uncanny X-Men. The problem was that after the Cross-Time Caper ended, there were several months of fill-ins, then Claremont wrote his final 3 issues, then Scott Lobdell had to fill in until Alan Davis took over and get rid of plot points Davis didn’t want to deal with, like Kitty and the Soulsword. By the time Davis took over, Excalibur was one of Marvel’s lower-selling books.
That should be “Nocenti’s former ASSISTANT editor”.
“Betsy was Captain Britain for about five minutes under Alan Moore before she got her eyes clawed out.”
Apologies for pedantry, but that was Alan Davis on the Captain Britain monthly.
(Moore’s responsible for the crucial character-defining concept of dyeing her hair purple, though. Also I think the telepathy.)
Moore made her precognitive, if I remember right. I think her being telepathic was ambiguous until Jamie Delano started writing her.
Sounds like writers have been trying to figure out what to do with Betsy from the very start. “Sister of Captain Britain” isn’t a very strong character hook, I suppose.
Now that she’s a telepathic, purple-haired, bionic-eyed former ninja and current Captain Britain, does that put her in the running for “most tacked-on stuff” against Kitty and Dani?
@Woodswalked …
This is the best story I’ve heard all day.
I love Grounded! I think it’s the best book in the Nicole Shea trilogy … probably my favorite of any Claremont prose work, really.
Sundowner, the third book, didn’t *quite* hit as well for me, but it was still a fun read.
Grounded, though … the GOAT!
@Thom H- It’s not just Betsy. Her brother Jamie started out as “Captain Britain’s brother who’s a race car driver” and was turned into an insane, former gunrunner, former human trafficker, reality warper.
Part of the problem is that Betsy and Jamie were originally two of the blandest supporting characters ever created.
in Jamie’s case. Jamie Delano, who was writing Captain Britain within Alan Davis doing art. wanted to do a subversion of the traditional “Europeans captured by Africans” story where the European is a horrible human being and the Africans have legitimate grievances. But it’s hard to see how Jamie got from where he was in his last appearances (where he was wealthy and loyal to his brother) to where he was in Delano’s story. (An Excalibur Annual a decade later tried to explain it.) I understand why Delano wanted to do a story like that but it’s best to use original characters for these kind of stories instead of retrofitting existing characters into the role.
It isn’t that hard to see.
This “mutants are the scions of a cosmic abomination” thing is incredibly stupid but so is the entire line of reasoning it stems from, where there’s a capital-G God in the Marvel universe and a capital-S Satan opposed to him. One of the fun and interesting things about the old cosmic universe that Kirby and Ditko (and their followers like Starlin) set up was that it was filled with concepts that were neither good nor evil but were just there: Galactus and Eternity and the Celestials were big and weird and dangerous but not bad per se, just part of the way things are. It made Marvel seem more fun and energetically chaotic, as opposed to DC, where the universe really did seem to be run by a cosmic committee of bald men.
Fast-forward a few decades and writers start taking “the one above all” very seriously, when the whole concept was very obviously a fig leaf Stan Lee wrote in just to make religious readers more comfortable with the idea of the Living Tribunal, a big all-powerful three-in-one cosmic deity sitting on a throne and judging the universe who is definitely not god you guys, don’t worry, there’s some other guy he works for but he’s off stage somewhere where you’ll never see him. But eventually we do see him, way too much of him, and guess what, he’s boring as hell, and also suspiciously like the Abrahamic God, and now he also comes with a Devil or two that’s just as dull and conservative and he is.
When the One Above All was kept nebulous and distant as a vague concept of ultimate creation, that was one thing. I could buy into “The Fantastic Four meet what’s essentially Jack Kirby” as a manifestation of that because it was done out of pure love for the story. I could accept Al Ewing’s take on the multiple universe cosmology/chronology of cosmoses because it was epic, awesome, and added to a rich tapestry without undermining other stories.
But when the One Above All takes on a form to fight Storm or punch the Infernal Hulk, I draw the line at “no, too far, too silly.”
@Michael, @ThomH: To be fair, up until Alan Moore, nobody really had any idea what to do with Brian either. He started off as a staff-wielding Captain America knockoff, then he got his magic club, then he got his Union Jack costume and turned into a Superman knockoff. In between he wound up as the Black Knight’s sidekick in a very 80s fantasy realm where his superhero tights make him stand out like a whale on the savannah.