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.