The X-Axis – 13 August 2026
X-MEN #35. (Annotations here.) Billed as a prelude to DNX, this is mostly a character-based issue with the Beast and Magik, though it does end by leading into the story proper. The heart of it is to show us the conversation between the Beast and the Chairman that took place after the end of issue #25, which apparently still qualifies as recent. I guess logically it does, since “Danger Room” takes about a day, but it doesn’t feel like it, which is another reason I’m not so wild about the four-parters in this series. But this sort of issue leans into the book’s strengths. The broad idea that the Beast sees the Chairman as his dark side is hardly surprising – it’s the entire concept of having a rebooted version of the Beast in the first place – but it’s elevated by giving Illyana’s perspective on the idea, and by the hints of the Chairman himself having a slightly ambivalent attitude towards his “good” self. I’m not especially interested in the X-virus itself, but I am keen on seeing how this character arc plays out.
X-MEN UNITED #6. (Annotations here.) This seems to be cancelled with issue #10, and it’s now acquired a co-writer. To some extent, that does seem to have punched up its superhero aspects, which feel a bit tighter than they did before. There’s at least an attempt here to draw out an idea that the Shadow King is taking advantage of doubts and mutual distrust, so the X-Men need to beat him by drawing together (though that would have worked better as a justification for setting up the school in the first place, not as something that happens after the fact). It’s still a book with a lot of problems, though. Shuhvahrak is miles out of character from the way she was written in Uncanny X-Men, to the point where I was on my third reading of the book before it even occurred to me that she wasn’t meant to be an obvious illusion. The whole idea of all mutants having versions of their dark sides in the Penumbra is just bizarre, and falls apart if you think about it too hard – it’s there to justify a fight against dark doppelgangers, but makes no sense as an actual feature of the Penumbra. The book still can’t figure out the basic ground rules about whether people travel physically to Graymatter Lane or not. Nobody really feels in character, and the Exceptional X-Men cast have almost all been lost in the shuffle. I liked that book a lot. I’m just looking forward to this one being over with, I’m afraid.
WOLVERINE #25. (Annotations here.) The final part of the Mor storyline results in Wolverine getting his healing factor back, so he’s now a guy with one set of adamantium claws and one set of bone claws. Um… okay? Is this interesting? Why? At this point I’m just very underwhelmed by Saladin Ahmed’s Wolverine run. It’s not outright bad, it’s fine on a page by page level, he has the character’s voice down, the art is fine, but it doesn’t seem to add up to anything or to be going anywhere. It’s simply there. “What if he had one set of metal claws and one set of bone claws” doesn’t feel like it’s symbolising something or going anywhere, it just has a sense of “Well, I guess we haven’t done exactly this yet.” Competent and serviceable is fine when there are some stronger ideas in the mix, and this series has been hit and miss in that regard. The Adamantine didn’t work. The New Morlocks and the Wendigo mostly did. This storyline has a fairly generic scientist making a fairly generic sacrifice after turning himself into a revival of justly forgotten 90s villain Post; it’s not a particularly strong idea and Ahmed doesn’t sell me on it.
GENERATION X-23 #7. (Annotations here.) This is more like it, though. It does feel a little early to be going back to Facility-23, but then something tells me that this book isn’t making it past issue #10, and in that case we might as well get on with it and at least complete the arc. Logan seems to have been thrown into this issue as a random guest star, though I’m not sure how much he really helps any book these days. It’s not the nineties any more. But at least he fits in the story, and the three remaining Generated are starting to grow into themselves as characters. Surprise!’s inability to read the room is a nice touch in a bubbly extrovert, and having Gabby serve both as comic relief and as her mentor figure works surprisingly well. Post-Krakoa, Nanny and the Orphan-Maker are a welcome return, though I have a degree of nervousness that everyone involved has missed the fact that there was a whole miniseries about how they got out of the Pit and what happened afterwards. But Jody Houser and Marco Renna are really selling me on the new characters, and I do hope a home can be found for them in whatever’s coming up next year.
Bleeding Cool’s Bestseller list is out. X-Men 35 came in 5th. Wolverine 25 came in 10th. X-Men United 6 and Generation X-23 7 didn’t make the top 10.
On the one hand, it’s good that Wolverine made the top 10. On the other hand, it’s probably not a good sign that Wolverine was beaten by Infernal Hulk and Hello Kitty.
Storm and Rogue will be appearing in Avengers Armageddon 4. Since the spoilers say that things don’t end well for the heroes, Storm is probably back to her pre-Ayodele power levels.
It does feel like it’s about time Beast got to dealing with the whole The-Chairman-Is-My-Evil-Original matter, which always seemed like good material. I found it weird when I saw the cover for the finale of DNX, which advertises Cyclops fighting the Chairman to the death; I get Cyclops and the Chairman are their respective team leaders but it seems like Beast’s job to take his double down. Hopefully Beast is nevertheless integral to the Chairman’s defeat in a way that also develops his character.
There were some interviews with X-Men creators at Terrificon:
Louise Simonson said she originally suggested Commander X, and the character eventually became Cable. Liefeld disputed that.
Nicieza said that he never liked the idea that Cable was Scott and Maddie’s son – he hated it since Jim Lee and Whilce Portacio suggested it. (Weirdly, Liefeld claimed that was his idea but that contradicts his previous remarks on the matter.)
Claremont claimed he’s never read Origin.
Claremont said that he felt the writers screwed up when they made Kitty into an adult and tried to change it but the readers complained because they wanted Kitty to be old enough to have sex. Claremont wanting Kitty to be a perpetual teenager is not AT ALL creepy.
Claremont says that one reason why staffers are reluctant to move to the West Coast with Marvel is that there’s no guarantee they’ll keep the jobs even if they move. He says a lot of people will have to make decisions in December.
I’m going to side with Lee and Portacio over Liefield on Cable being Scott and Maddie’s son. It was obvious in those early Cable appearances that Liefield had his own ideas for Cable, and it was not that he was baby Nathan returned from the future. It seems that Liefield’s character Prophet at Image was (to a large extent) the type of direction he originally wanted to take Cable.
I realize it was after they had (slightly) aged Kitty, but it was Claremont who wrote the Mekanix series. It was a very good series, perhaps the best book Claremont wrote after his first leaving Marvel, but it was definitely a title that also added some of that creepiness factor to Claremont writing Kitty. I can imagine him trying to do the same with a still-teenage Kitty.
Weren’t some of Liefeld’s possible ideas for Cable were that he was future version of Cannonball, and another that Cable and Strye were both time travelers but also the same person, just one was the older version?
Yes, the version I remember from a Liefield interview is that Cable and Stryfe were the same person from different points in future time. Stryfe was the older version of Cable who had become evil.
Actually, having said all that now, I realize that I knew very little about the Liefield-version of Prophet. Reading about the Prophet comic on Wikipedia, the two don’t sound alike. In fact, Liefield said he was going to introduce Prophet in X-Force, but had already made the decision to save his best characters for his creator owned work. I’m only familiar with Prophet from the Image-revival series, which was heavily indebted to Lone Sloane. I think that Cable & Prophet one-shot I also never read always confused me, making me think that Liefield’s Prophet was similar to Liefield’s Cable.
I can at least buy Logan as a guest star in Generation X-23 because he works in various ways. As Laura’s “father” and genetic progenitor, as an original Weapon X project, as the distant ancestor to all of these characters, and so forth. He is to Laura as Laura is to the Generated.
Whether or not that does anything storywise, is anyone’s guess. But he’s not the worst or weirdest guest star they could dig up. It’s not like Deadpool dropped by…
Kitty/Kate Pryde had to grow up the same way the New Mutants did… because you can only keep younger characters in stasis so long before they get weighed down by the sheer amount of stuff they’ve experienced.
At some point, Good Beast will need to integrate the memories of Bad Beast, too. We can’t have a Beast walking around who doesn’t remember half of his history. That’s too awkward for readers/writers, and it’s an obvious fix that’s screaming to be applied.
I still hate that, in a world that already had the Dark Beast from Age of Apocalypse floating around, they still decided to give us a fully evil main timeline Beast as well.
Like, sure, Hank had been up to some dodgy stuff for a while, but pushing him into full speechifying supervillain territory wasn’t necessary. You know it’s bad when your best option for fixing a character is “restore from the last uncorrupted backup” and wiping out decades worth of their experiences as a result.
I know there’s something of a X-Men villain deficit since their villains keep joining them (Emma, Magneto, Juggernaut, Apocalypse kinda) and some of the others are overexposed (Sabretooth, Sinister) but Beast’s long, slow villain arc just made me sad. And now we’ll never get rid of him because it’ll always be “I made a mental backup and now I’m a clone again.”
I just can’t see White Beast/Chairman picking up the rival ideological role previously held by Emma (alternative school), Apocalypse (survival of the fittest) and Magneto (mutant supremacy), just like I can’t see Doug/Revelation fitting that role long-term as well. I’m not sure who we need to contrast against the X-Men and Xavier’s dream these days though. Maybe it’s an outmoded concept?
The problem is that Marvel wants to lean into the mutants as metaphor for persecuted minorities role as much as possible. This limits the types of villains that they can use as rivals for the X-Men’s ideology. Revelation being portrayed as the ultimate threat was a poor fit, as what does it say? The biggest threat to a minority is someone they thought they could trust who has gotten too powerful and now threatens either the majority or everyone. That might have worked in the 1960s, but is toxic in 2026.
Hickman attempted to set up a new paradigm with the Machines and post-humanity as mutantkind’s biggest threat, and that worked. Except, who is the Machine equivalent to Magneto, other than Nimrod? The Machines side wasn’t made for a long-term threat to the mutants. Post-humanity is more interesting, but limiting in the “world outside your window”. Hickman’s Orchis worked well for a science fictional scenario, but is hard to fit into our 2020s. The best that post-Hickman writers were able to do was turn Orchis into another faceless, generic anti-mutant organization, putting them in the same role as the Friends of Humanity (or others). They have never worked as a long-term threat for the X-Men in the same way as “evil mutants”.
If you want to be really cynical, the best threat for mutants would be someone who they supported against all rhyme or reason, who now turns on them. You know, a politician who runs on an anti-Inhumans platform, and who immediately starts enacting genetic purity policies which affect mutants as well. (Okay, so maybe no one cares about Inhumans at this point…)
I mean, where are the “no mutants in sports” and “no mutants in bathrooms” and “no mutants hosting events where children are present” storylines? What about threatening mutant marriage or mutant health insurance or gerrymandering mutant-strong districts? How about “no mutants in the military?”
Sure, going straight to rounding up the mutants with killer robots and putting them in concentration camps is a classic scenario, but we’ve all see what true, banal evil looks like.
Problem is, none of these ideas, however reflective of the real world, work very well when most of the audience wants to see people in bright costumes fight stuff with flashy powers. You can punch a robot, you can’t punch the school board.
Perhaps, but the problem is that banal evil becomes quite reasonable around mutants. We saw that 30 years ago when Northstar was stripped of his skiing medals because he has super speed. That’s a fairly benign case, but it’s easy to justify restrictions on mutants when people like Mystique or Xavier or even Kitty can invade people’s privacy any time they want – or when someone like Magneto, Cyclops, or Iceman can kill you just by looking at you.
Giving Wolverine one set of claws that’s slightly less useful is a good opportunity for him to develop some new fighting techniques like the Stranger Slash.
Peter David’s government X-Factor, with Havok and Wolfsbane and such, did a bit with mutants in society. I remember a storyline where some parents were deciding whether to abort their unborn mutant child, and I’m pretty sure there were others. The team called Cooper out for “some of my friends are mutants so I can’t be racist” talk.
I don’t know if Cable was ever meant to be an old Cannonball. I do recall a theory going round at one time, based on them having the same hairstyle of all things (an undercut, which was a popular style in real life at the time). I’m not sure Cable was even meant to be a mutant at the start.
“The team called Cooper out for “some of my friends are mutants so I can’t be racist” talk.”
That happened during Fatal Attractions, after PAD left the title.
@Michael
At this point Rob Liefeld has become both the Andy Dick and Donald Trump of USAmerican comics , it’s Maximum cringe and pathetic to the Extreme . In comparison, at least fellow Marvel alumnus credit-grabber Roy Thomas had an actual well-established positive reputation when he self-destructively thrashed his own once-respected legacy by his delulu retcons of having either solely or mainly created The Wolverine , and it happened when he was already an old man , and it happened either once or a few times. RL has none of those mitigating circumstances , but all their opposites , which are aggravating circumstances. Much worse , like too many once-popular USA entertainment celebrities who peaked in the 1990s, he’s also degenerated into an far-right-wing alt-right-wing curmudgeon, like all his other countrymen who are ragebaiting grifters on global internet social media , as well long been proven as a notorious conartist scammer , of his own cult of deluded fanatics.
@TheOtherMichael,
Well, the difference between AoA Dark Beast and 616 The Chairman is that the former is more an amoral apolitical “for the evulz” traditional mad scientist (even when he was working for Apocalypse) while the latter is a fascist eugenicist who has deluded himself with a traditional messiah complex “for the greater/greatest good” . Dark Beast is of Chaos , while The Chairman is of The Imperium.
In other news, there will be a five issue Jean Grey limited series written by Jed Mackay spinning out of DNX starting in November and Jean will be coming to Merle.
So it looks like Scott will be the character who dies in DNX.
How many haircuts could Liefeld even draw, anyway? I mean, didn’t he give Cannonball the same hair as Boom Boom?
It was the early-‘90s. Everyone wore their hair in a mullet or ponytail. Liefield had the very pulse of popular culture.
What, already? It’s not his turn, he’s just had a go!
There’s some other tidbits from an AIPT interview today with Tom Brevoort and Jed MacKay:
Due to the backlash against Age of Revelation, Marvel crossovers- DNX, Queen in Black, Hulk War- will now involve fewer books.
Magneto, Forge and Corsair will be playing major roles going into 2027. The fact that Corsair’s going to be appearing is further evidence that it’s Scott who dies. Jean’s miniseries is coming the week after DNX 5 and the X-orcists miniseries featuring Maddie is coming out the same day as DNX 5- all of these are characters who are closely connected to Cyclops.
One weird thing is that Brevoort was asked where the Hellfire Brotherhood will be appearing next. His response was:
“As far as where, some of that’s still a bit up in the air. But I’d guess that X-Men United wouldn’t be a bad place to look.”
Some people took this as evidence that X-Men United won’t be cancelled with issue 10. X-Men United 10 will come out in December. By now, Brevoort should know who’s appearing in X-Men United 10. But Brevoort sounded unsure if the Hellfire Brotherhood would be appearing there. So maybe X-Men United will continue beyond issue 10., Of course, it’s possible there’s another explanation for Brevoort’s remarks.
I hope Scott’s not slated for death. I mean, he’s already died in a major way once, and last time, bringing him back involved ALL sorts of weird nonsense. (Death of X era). It’s someone else’s turn again. Like Storm.
They’re saying it’s going to be one of the original X-Men. That narrows it down to six choices, but with the hype this is getting presumably it won’t be Angel, Iceman, or Xavier.
Why kill Beast again so soon? The character of Beast is just a mess and a convoluted death leading to another eventual return isn’t the way to go about fixing the problems.
Marvel has done everything they possibly can to telegraph it is going to be Scott. Which means it probably will be Angel and no one will care. The “spoiler” hints about it being Scott will be “red herrings”. Jean will be upset about Warren’s death because of the fact that he once was Scott’s rival for her affections sixty years ago. Corsair will return because Scott will have a breakdown over the fact that he once feared he attempted to murder Angel back in the ‘60s, and Warren’s death brings the memories flooding back.
Well, it could be Jean. The best way to deal with her being too powerful. The same problem as with Hank though. The upcoming mini-series could be a redo of the last Jean Grey mini after she was supposed to have died, during the Krakoa-era. Corsair is returning to comfort Scott. Brevoort’s line about “you may regret Jean’s return” could be because she’s going to die. Marvel won’t do that with the upcoming movie supposedly featuring Phoenix so prominently though.
All the 05 X-Men have already been dead for lengthy periods except Iceman. It still won’t be Iceman though. The bored reaction to Warren’s death would only be amplified by Bobby being the one.
Oh, you can’t kill Bobby because–forgive me-he’s the gay one and Marvel doesn’t want to be seen invoking the “bury your gays” trope at the moment. Even though–and again forgive me–Bobby’s love life is about as impactful as Northstar’s marriage.
You can’t kill Warren because it just wouldn’t have that much of an emotional impact. Even with him being in recent projects like Inglorious X-Force and X-Factor, he just doesn’t feel… important.
You can’t kill Beast this soon after getting back the young one, and killing the Chairman wouldn’t mean anything when he’s already come back from the dead once this decade.
To kill off Professor X, you’d have to bring him back first and there’s been no buildup for that.
Killing Jean would just lean into the same old stories. She dies, she returns. It’s a Phoenix thing.
I guess if Scott goes, that give the Alaskan X-Men a chance to shake things up, especially ideologically. Maybe Magneto takes charge.
I love that the response to “Who’s going to die?!” is now immediately an exhausted “Who cares?”
Maybe both Beasts die, and Jean comes back to resurrect them as one new Beast with all his memories intact and his evil tendencies burned away. That could be slightly interesting.
Also, Northstar should have married Sasquatch instead. There, I said it.
It would have made Bill Mantlo’s Walter/Wanda arc all the more memorable had Sasquatch been involved with Northstar instead of Jean-Paul’s sister at the time.
Northstar and Sasquatch would have been awesome!
Thought experiment – how would the body switching between Leonard and Doc Sampson have played out with that scenario?
*Walter not Leonard…
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