The X-Axis – 29 July 2026
X-MEN #34. (Annotations here.) This is a Juggernaut spotlight issue, before we get into the DNX event with the next issue. It’s a simple enough idea. A statue of Bolivar Trask has mysteriously appeared in a small town that he was once associated with. It’s controversial. Juggernaut shows up to destroy it. Somehow, it’s protected by a force field (for reasons that I assume we’ll get back to in a future issue). And the rest of the issue is Juggernaut trying to batter his way through the force field while having conversations with assorted characters – Agent Lundqvist, a couple of pro and anti protestors, and eventually the statue itself. Which is to say that it’s basically a character driven conversation issue. Unfortunately, it’s a character driven conversation issue drawn by guest artist Greg Land, the man who’s mastered both the human emotions – Vacant Grin and None Of The Above.
Oh, alright, that’s not entirely fair. His Juggernaut’s actually pretty good. His Agent Lundqvist’s not bad either, for the most part. But those two local campaigners don’t look remotely consistent through the issue, and the woman feels the need to give herself a random hug and squirm in the middle of a conversation. Wonder where Greg traced that from. And when the script calls unambiguously for someone to look surprised or shocked… well, at best, he’s lapsing into a sort of cartooning that looks absurd next to the over-polished hyperrealism of the rest of the issue. I honestly don’t know how the guy gets work. There’s some interesting ideas in the script, but the art smothers it all.
GENERATION X-23 #6. (Annotations here.) Now this is more like it. It’s the obvious second arc for this book – Laura and Gabby have to mentor the three Generated who are still with them, and who have no real idea how to function in the real world. Obviously they get actual names with this issue, because they can’t be a memory test for ever. And while there are some routine low-level bad guys, they’re only really there so we can see how the trio fare against a problem in the outside world. (Badly, in most cases.) I’m a little unsure about equipping them with costumes even before they’ve decided that they want to accept Laura’s pitching of a mutant identity – shouldn’t that logically come after? – let alone having them just wander around Central Park in full costume. That feels off. But the characters work, Emilio Laiso help them feel believable, and the whole thing feels like a book I’d be very happy to see stick around for the long run. Not that I’m holding my breath, in this market – but it’d be nice.
BISHOP #2. By Saladin Ahmed, Mario Santoro, Reese Hannigan, Federico Blee & Travis Lanham. This is settling down into a fairly straightforward story. A bunch of villains from the future have come back in time to kill Bishop because they believe that this will somehow avert the rise of the Sentinels. Bishop’s younger sister Shard has come back in time to stop them, and she doesn’t know that she’s dead by this point in Bishop’s life. They have to fight the bad guys while Bishop decides what to tell her. That’s basically it. It kind of works. The sibling relationship makes sense, but it also forces Bishop into a slightly out-of-character role, which is maybe not what you’re looking for in a Bishop mini. The bit about killing him to stop the Sentinels doesn’t seem to make any sense, but to be fair, it’s all worded in such a way as to suggest that the real target is actually someone else (presumably Shard, because there aren’t any other candidates). The art does a decent enough job with the two leads, if you like your Bishop permanently on the back foot. The villains… uh. The gimmick seems to be that they’re somehow descendants of two classic X-Men villains and have the powers of both, but it’s done in such a gimmicky way that it’s impossible to take them seriously. The Pyro/Avalanche hybrid was just generic, but the Blob/Toad guy doesn’t work at all, visually speaking. Patchy, at this stage.
X-MEN: OUTBACK #2. By Steve Orlando, Stephen Segovia, Alex Sinclair and Joe Sabino. More continuity implant from the Australian era. And despite a bit of character material about how some of the team feel like they’re in a sort of limbo here, and some subplots about Mojo, this seems mainly to be just a collection of extra stories set in that period. This issue, the last Reaver who was in deep freeze wakes up and fights the X-Men. It’s perfectly fine, and Segovia’s art is really rather nice – he ought to be on a higher profile book than a continuity implant mini – but it doesn’t feel like there’s any particular point to the whole exercise.
Re: X-Men Outback 2:
The interesting thing about this issue is that it takes place after Uncanny X-Men 234 (because Maddie knows about Jean and Scott and Betsy is in her armor) but before Inferno. In other words it takes place after Maddie’s transformation into the Goblin Queen has started but before it’s completed.
One interesting revelation in this issue is that Maddie told Alex that she was having nightmares, which were part of her transformation into the Goblin Queen, but she refused to go into details and Alex assumed they were just normal nightmares. That would explain a lot.
The annoying thing about this issue is that is takes place shortly after X-Men 232-234. That means that Maddie was knocked out twice in front of a computer screen by being electrocuted while thinking about Scott and Jean in the space of about a week.
Someone should tell Steve Orlando that a body of water far inland is a lake, not a lagoon.
The last Reaver seems to have been inspired as a result of Orlando noticing that there were FOUR Hellfire Club goons in Uncanny X-Men 133 and Cole ,Reese and Macon make only three.
The way Wolverine defeats some of his team mates seems contrived. Wolverine being able to defeat Longshot, Dazzler, Havok, Storm and Psylocke under these circumstances makes sense- they’ve got mortal bodies and they’re being controlled by a moron who has no idea how to properly use their powers and skills.
But Colossus and Rogue make no sense. Colossus is defeated by head butting Wolverine. That’s just lame.
Wolverine defeats Rogue by stabbing her and then touching her so that she absorbs his healing factor but he remains conscious. But Rogue couldn’t do partial absroptions at this point- if she touched someone, they fell unconscious.
Apparently, Orlando is having each issue focus on a specific X-Man or X-Men. The first issue was Storm, this issue is Rogue, issue 3 is Colossus and Psylocke, and issue 4 is Alex and Maddie. So issue 5 must be Longshot, Rogue and Dazzler.
Does the main Spawn title count as higher profile book? Segovia started as the new series artist with issue 375, along with former Uncanny X-Men writer Matthew Rosenberg.
According to Image’s website, he has been working various Spawn related books for a while – https://imagecomics.com/comics/list/creator/stephen-segovia/releases
I am kind of surprised Brevoort hasn’t used Segovia on the McKay or Simone X-Men titles.
Didn’t Segovia draw Hellions?
@Mo Walker- Keep in mind that Spawn 375 came in 90th in sales. Spawn has been a relatively low-selling book for decades now.
@Krzysiek- Yeah, Segovia drew Hellions.
Bleeding Cool’s Weekly Bestseller List is out. X-Men 34 came in 2nd. Generation X-23 6, Bishop 2 and X-Men Outback didn’t make the top 10. Pretty good for X-Men 34.
By the way, Queen in Black 1 outsold X-Men 34 by a factor of 3. I wasn’t expecting Queen in Black to do that well.
Your review of X-Men has big “somehow Greg Land returned” energy. I’m shocked he’s still getting X-Men assignments after he’s turned so many decent stories (Gillen’s Uncanny, Rosenberg’s Astonishing) into something that is just unreadable and unrelatable.
Hell it is weird that Land is doing a main title X-Men fill-in the same week Laiso and Segovia are on satellite books.
@Michael – I should have included a emoji with my statement about Spawn being a higher profile title.
I am aware that Spawn typically does not have the sales figures of yesteryear/decade. However, it does offer a more steady paycheck than a lot of Marvel titles which are mini-series or end after ten issues.
Michael-Queen in Black was a black bag book. Fans are going crazy for that gimmick right now. It’s a smart way to launch a new series. Customers who wouldn’t bother with a certain title decide they want it because of the black bag gimmick, then a percentage of those readers who’d have never bought that book read the first issue and decide they want to buy the series after all.
FYI – The site didn’t post my wink emoji.
Let’s try this again 🙂 “I should have included a ;] emoji with my statement about Spawn being a higher profile title.”
“I honestly don’t know how the guy gets work.”
As I recall, the main reason that Land always had so much work is how fast he can work (thanks to using tracings for so much). Even after this style fell out of vogue, his ability to turn around a book at 1960s speed (he’s also a really quick penciller in general; I’ve met him at cons back in the 90s and got sketches) has kept him on call for fill-ins and minis.
I was so looking forward to X-Men Outback, even though I don’t think I’ve read anything by Steve Orlando that I’ve actually liked. The Australian era was MY era of X-Men when I was a kid and I was so hoping for a really kick-ass “untold story”. Instead it’s just dancing between raindrops of the established issues without any of the characterization I loved from that period in Claremont’s run. At least Segovia’s art is pretty good, but it’s hard not to deeply feel my disappointment.
According to Christopher Yost. Betsy will NOT be called Psylocke in Maximum X-Men, despite the announcenment at SDCC. This is the kind of competence we’ve come to expect from Tom Brevoort.
“Someone should tell Steve Orlando that a body of water far inland is a lake, not a lagoon.”
In parts of the U.S. ‘lagoon’ is the common euphemism for an uncovered septic hole. This was my reading.