RSS Feed
Nov 21

X-Men Unlimited Infinity Comic #50-55: “Secret X-Men 2022”

Posted on Monday, November 21, 2022 by Paul in x-axis

X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #50-55
“Secret X-Men 2022”
Writer: Steve Foxe
Artist: Alan Robinson
Colourist: Carlos Lopez
Letterer: Joe Sabino
Editor: Jordan D White

Continuing our run through the recent X-Men Unlimited arcs, here’s something a bit more typical of the book – which is to say, a bit more marginal. Remember last year’s Secret X-Men one-shot, featuring all the losing candidates from the fan vote that decided the last place on the team? Well, it’s that, but with the 2022 line-up.

I didn’t think this really worked last year, since the characters weren’t selected to be the natural cast of a story in the first place, and it winds up being a bit of an exercise in pulling some elements out of a hat and seeing if you can get a story out of them. And this year… yeah, not dissimilar, if we’re being honest. This is a Hellfire Gala tie-in story, though I’m not reviewing it quite as late as that makes it sound. It ran from the last week of August to the first week of September; the actual Hellfire Gala one-shot shipped in mid July. I suppose that probably means they waited to see who had won the vote before they started work on this, which would be fair enough.

So who have we got here? Well, we’ve got Penance, who is unexpectedly at a loose end after X-Corp suffered early cancellation. We’ve got Siryn, who also counts as a reasonably big name. We’ve got a whole bunch of teen characters who aren’t doing much – Gentle, Armor, Surge and Bling!. I guess Bling! was in the Sabretooth miniseries, but this must be the most prominent appearance Armor has made outside Marvel Snap in several years. We’ve got Avalanche, the member of Freedom Force who never comes up, even though Mystique, Destiny and Pyro are big names. And we’ve got Micromax, who was very, very briefly a member of Excalibur at the tail end of Alan Davis’s run, treated here as a bit of a joke character.

It’s been quite a while since I’ve read the original Micromax appearances, but he’s quite a weird character, since he originally had a secret identity as a Radio 1 DJ. Which means that in Britain he ought to be a celebrity of some sort, and you do wonder whether this character really wants to hang around on Krakoa being treated as an afterthought when he could be on I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here desperately trying to hold on to a public profile. But I digress. Davis did write him as a bit of a loser, which was kind of the connotation of making him a Radio 1 daytime DJ in 1991 anyway.

Oh, and we’ve got Gorgon. We’ve seen very little of him since “X of Swords”, but this story goes with the Way of X interpretation of someone terrified and confused. The plot involves a bunch of HYDRA agents – who also run a rival pharmaceutical firm – showing up to punish him for turning on HYDRA. The rest of the vote-losers happen to be the ones who spot what’s happening, with a sort of token nod to “and now we will prove that we’re good enough to be X-Men”. Gorgon has to be stopped from accidentally petrifying some guests, and we get versions of that from the perspective of various different characters.

The trouble is that the selection of characters is, as I said, pretty much random. Gorgon is stopped from creating an incident; everyone gets together and beats the HYDRA guys; the cast have apparently proved themselves as the X-Men of sorts. It’s passably diverting – Steve Foxe gets a bit of personality into the dialogue, and I quite enjoyed the arbitrarily retro costumes of the HYDRA pharmacists – but it can’t really overcome the essentially arbitrary nature of the thing.

Bring on the comments

  1. Daibhid C says:

    Good lord, it’s been a long time since I’ve thought about Micromax. There’s been some discussion here before about how Krakoa doesn’t seem to have much in the way of media. I think we may have a solution.

    “Good morning, mutant music-lovers! You’re listening to KBC Radio X, and this is Micromax, spinning the discs from now until 12:00. KBC Radio X, available on all weird biotech receiving devices and the KBC Sounds website!”

  2. Diana says:

    Well. Broadly speaking, that’s rather the problem of the entire Krakoa era in a nutshell, isn’t it? Everyone’s on the same island and broadly getting along, so there’s no real reason for any particular person to end up on any particular team. Fabian Cortez pops up in two books, seems important, then disappears; Colossus has said a grand total of two words while on the Quiet Council; Rockslide got some focus at the start of X-Men Red and promptly disappeared.

  3. Mike Loughlin says:

    I’m all for comics featuring lesser-known or -loved mutants, but I agree that some of the already-used X-characters have been underutilized. I want to see more of Stacy X, Pyro, Greycrow, Sunfire, Manifold, Prodigy, Frenzy, etc. Unfortunately, writers keep moving on to the next set of characters they want to use. At least Ewing gives us updates on Cable, Whiz Kid, and some of the SWORD cast.

    The problem with Colossus is that everyone is waiting for Percy to get on with the story in X-Force, and he hasn’t. I don’t know if it’s his choice, or editorial saying “wait until issue XX,” but I find the constant deferment annoying.

    I’m all for more Micromax (not to mention Kylun, Cerise, and even Feron). Alan Davis’s solo run on Excalibur is my favorite non-Claremont or Morrison X-book. He’s a jerk, but I’d read a Davis X-Men Legends arc about him.

    Finally, I have no attachment to the post-Morrison New X-Men/ New Mutants/ Academy X class. I can’t find an in to most of those characters (I like Pixie fine, and Dust/ Congregation). Their designs are boring (compare them to the oddly memorable Generation X and Morrison-era special class) and I don’t care for that whole era. Am I missing anything? Is there a hidden gem out there that makes them click?

  4. Taibak says:

    Yeah, Micromax was a weird, weird character. It wasn’t just that he was a loser, it’s that he was deeply insecure about it too. The Radio 1 DJ was a cover identity just as much as Micromax was. He was trying to cover up the fact that he was a short, scrawny middle aged man so he used his powers to make him look like a tall, strapping youth who happened to moonlight as a superhero.

    Making it even more bizarre, other writers didn’t realize that the character was supposed to be a joke and played him straight as an ultra-earnest hero.

  5. MasterMahan says:

    I assume the Colossus plot being in a holding pattern is at least partly based on real life events. The whole Mikhael Rasputin story was probably meant to be a cheeky take on real-life Russian meddling in other countries. Mikhael uses weaponized Russian cliches like like living Matryoshka dolls and alcoholic novelists. I certainly hope it’s not meant to be completely serious.

    Then Russia invaded Ukraine and started committing war crimes. The idea of Mikhail Rasputin being Putin’s equal co-president noticeably vanished after that.

  6. Joseph S. says:

    Just about the kind of thing that could happen at a big party, I suppose. Monet not remember Avalanche was a nice touch, everyone ragging on Micromax works. Foxe was clever to reference old stories connecting the characters (“We were X-Corps together, the one with the silent S”) without overdoing it. And re-playing the night from three group’s perspectives saves a bit of the arbitrariness, since they don’t come together until the climax. Much less forced that last year’s mission.

Leave a Reply