The X-Axis – w/c 4 December 2023
A short one this week, because there’s not actually much out!
X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #116. By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Guillermo Sanna, Java Tartaglia & Travis Lanham. The penultimate chapter of the Firestar arc, and naturally it’s the turning point where Firestar gets the upper hand, still without anyone noticing. Judas Traveller tries to have a press event to depower the captive Justice, Firestar surreptitiously lets him escape, and it all goes horribly wrong. What doesn’t quite work is that in order for the plot to hang together, Judas has to go out and do a public press conference himself for no apparent reason, when until now that sort of thing has always been left to Dr Stasis (for some reason). The story even tells us that Judas doesn’t do this himself normally, which feels like a misstep. Still, the arc is dealing with the twin themes of media manipulation and Firestar’s undercover role better than anything else in “Fall of X”.
X-MEN #29. (Annotations here.) The X-Men go to Latveria to try and recruit Dr Doom’s mutants, and wind up having a fight with them. That’s pretty much the issue. The strength of it lies in the fact that Doom’s team actually seem like a fairly interesting bunch with some potential for future stories, even if it seems weird to be bringing them into “Fall of X” at this point. And Joshua Cassara has some lovely art in this issue, complete with a subtle change of art style for the flashbacks that feels like a direction worth exploring for him. On the other hand, the plot is real Silver Age level stuff – we’re the X-Men, you’re mutants, what do you mean you refuse to drop everything and come with us, let’s fight. The X-Men come across as pretty dim and arrogant, which surely wasn’t the intention.
ALPHA FLIGHT #5. By Ed Brisson, Scott Godlewski, David Cutler, Matt Milla & Travis Lanham. This is the final issue of the series, but of course “Fall of X” still has a way to run, which precludes any really satisfying resolution. Instead, we get something that feels more like a turning point into the next arc – which, according to the trailer page, will be in X-Force. Huh. So, Alpha Flight finally drop the pretence of being anti-mutant and burn their bridges with the government, Argent gets his tragic end, and the small victory is that most of the mutants that Alpha Flight were trying to rescue do manage to escape into space. It’s still a curious down ending, though I like the wrap up with the press conference recapping everyone’s status quo and ending the book with “I’m afraid that we will not be taking any questions at this time.” If you’re going to have an unresolved ending, might as well lean into it.
INVINCIBLE IRON MAN #13. By Gerry Duggan, Juan Frigeri, Bryan Valenza & Joe Caramagna. Over in the honorary X-book, Iron Man needs a big stock of mysterium, so he and Emma Frost head into space to steal it from Gameworld, a concept that Gerry Duggan is clearly very keen on, and which I still don’t get. Mind you, I don’t get the appeal of Las Vegas either, so maybe it’s just me. Unlike Alpha Flight, this book is building up the idea that we’re on the verge of the mutants fighting back and defeating Orchis, and I’m certainly glad to see us moving on to a bit more optimism. Oh, and for X-Men readers, this is the book where Forge finally shows up, having apparently built his own spaceship to get home from wherever it is he got stranded after the Hellfire Gala – though the ship doesn’t really look as thrown-together as the dialogue keeps telling us it does. Anyway, for those interested, you can see him team up with Ironheart next issue. Perfectly fine, though more for the momentum in an upbeat direction than for the Gameworld heist stuff itself.
It’s weird that Alpha Flight 5 didn’t explain why Bochs Jr. was helping them. It make sense if you know what happened to his father. His father, Bochs Sr., had mental health issues and Alpha Flight took him to Madison Jeffries’ brother, a doctor who was really an evil mutant. His father agreed to help Jeffries’ brother against Alpha Flight, then realized what a monster Jeffries’ brother was and tried to stop him and Jeffries’ brother killed him. So Orchis’s propaganda about mutants poisoning medical drugs must have resonated with him. The irony, of course, is that he thinks he’s avoiding his father’s mistakes by siding with Doiron against the mutants but he’s really repeating them. But oddly, none of this is spelled out in the story.
The other weird thing is that a big deal was made in issue 3 about Feedback leaving an innocent man to be tortured and killed to save his own life. I thought that was setting him up to die heroically but that’s not even mentioned this issue. I guess we’re supposed to assume he’s not a coward anymore based on his actions in the battle.
Tony’s plan apparently involves ferrying the mutants from Arrako to Earth using the Mysterium ships to attack Orchis. But why does he need Mysterium ships? I guess we’re supposed to assume that if the Mysterium is invisible to Peter’s Spider-Sense, it’s also immune to the Sentinels’ sensors, even though Peter’s Spider-Sense and the Sentinels’ sensors presumably work very differently.
Also, does Invincible Iron Man 13 take place after the Genesis War ended? Because if it takes place before it ended, then why are Tony and Emma assuming that Storm’s forces will be in any condition to fight Orchis when the war ends?
@Michael – “Also, does Invincible Iron Man 13 take place after the Genesis War ended? Because if it takes place before it ended, then why are Tony and Emma assuming that Storm’s forces will be in any condition to fight Orchis when the war ends?”
Maybe Tony means the mutants rounded up by Orchis and dropped off there? The “stragglers”. It also doesn’t seem like anyone knows what’s happening on Arakko – it’s been referenced that on Earth, people don’t know if Storm is alive or dead.
It also begs the question – those 300,000 mutants or whatever that walked through the gates intended for Arakko but ended up in the White Hot Room… I think it’s been pointed out that Orchis doesn’t know where they went; so are they telling the public that they’re on Arakko and then maintaining some sort of communications blackout so *entire months later* people take it for face value and nobody looks into where they went?
Like, how is it that NOBODY in the superhero community wants to check on a few of their missing friends and colleagues? Nobody wants to help the X-Men other than Captain America who is doing it as community service and Iron Man who is doing it because Orchis was already a common enemy and it might get him laid?
I feel like Fall of X would work better if the timeline was condensed. We are to believe it’s been going on for months, while some story arcs seem to take place in the span of a few days but still try to signal they are happening concurrently with the other books on the publishing schedule. Immortal gets away with it because you can handwave it away by saying time moves differently in the White Hot Room. A lot of the other titles have a serious problem in my opinion, because there has been no world building done to show you what everyone would be up to all this time in between the missions we see on panel. How can the Uncanny Avengers be operating for months and be doing absolutely nothing between the handful of days collectively that their issues take place over?
What has Orchis even been up to all these months? Other than rounding up or “curing” stragglers and having press conferences reminding people mutants are evil, what are they DOING? What is Nimrod DOING this whole time? What even do they as an organization or as individuals WANT anymore other than to twirl their mustaches?
Does Gameworld still have the thing of Duggan not understanding how the time dilation of black holes works?
J. Vais-This has been the problem with the entire Krakoan-era. Nothing was ever shown what all these mutants were doing in their day to day lives on this quasi-utopian island. Almost nothing was shown as to the affect the existence of the nation of Krakoa (and its drugs) was having on the wider world. How was it changing society for humans, how was the regular person on the street reacting to the existence of Krakoa. Nimrod, Omega Sentinel, and Moira went for longer stretches than this doing absolutely nothing, waiting for their time to enter on the stage she move some pieces around.
The whole thing has been sketched out barebones.
Apparently, based on upcoming solicitations, Orchis has given itself over to the Machines, and their wider goals are now to turn things over to Nimrod and Omega Sentinel.
We know that Nimord and Omega Sentinel’s endgame is to achieve Ascension, allowing the Phalanx to eliminate all non-mechanical life in this solar system.
@J Vais- Stasis mentions in the data page in this week’s X-Men that Orchis is planning on taking on the Avengers and the Fantastic Four next.
@Michael: Which, honestly, just further proves Duggan’s a moron as a wrier – the Avengers and the Fantastic Four are, essentially, posthuman, why would the one Essex clone specifically designed to pursue posthumanity target them?
Eh? Regular Sinister’s thing was mutants the way Stasis’ is post-humans, but that never stopped Sinister from targeting mutants.
Comics writers don’t like thinking about social engineering. There was that one guy who we aren’t supposed to talk about any more who started a series where the first half was talking about super-teens possibly being too successful to survive in a post-disaster environment, but even he dumped that in the second half for less interesting stuff.
Every Krakoa writer has concentrated on telling stories in an environment and leaving world-building to someone else who didn’t exist. I do wonder if this will all end with a huge number of mutants going to live ‘over there somewhere’ because ever since Morrison outed Xavier way back then it’s been difficult trying to tell interesting stories with that many moving parts. If we have to go back to the mansion again, having it for small teams rather than a sprawling school with hundreds of kids makes more sense.
@Chris V- “This has been the problem with the entire Krakoan-era. Nothing was ever shown what all these mutants were doing in their day to day lives on this quasi-utopian island.”
True; I just re-read HoxPox and Dawn of X and there’s the one issue of X-Men where some mutants are shown harvesting Krakoan flowers in the Savage Land, and it’s pointed at as this is the everyday job of some mutants. But that’s pretty much it. And occasionally you have some older mutants training younger mutants. And then you just have a bunch of drinking and subtle winking about group sex. Krakoa is rather reactive. They spring into action when antagonized but left to their own devices they lounge on the beach.
@Michael- “Stasis mentions in the data page in this week’s X-Men that Orchis is planning on taking on the Avengers and the Fantastic Four next.”
I still don’t understand what they do all day. At least during the Hickman years they were up in space tinkering away at Sentinels. They are presented as incredibly organized and strategic but Duggan writes them as chaotic personalities who threw a bunch of things at the wall to see what would stick (oh no it’s a metaphor for the writing), and now their main occupation seems to just be verbally abusing Firestar in between press conferences. The confluence is jarring.
This is unrelated but still bugs me: Dr Stasis should never take his helmet off in public, and since the Hellfire Gala he has been drawn with it consistently off. He’s a near identical Sinister clone and the general public knows who Sinister is now. Plus his costume has a cool design and looks incomplete without the helmet. Again – this is really stupid behavior on the part of a character who is supposed to be an evil genius.
@Loz – I could see that; they dump half a million mutants or whatever it is and the remaining Arakko mutants on Counter-Earth or something and Xavier and the core (recognizable and marketable) X-Men stay behind to start a school for the child mutants that are still emerging in the human population. Monet and Quicksilver break up off panel.
@ylU: Sinister uses mutants – he’s never tried to exterminate them. The whole point is that the Essex clones are meant to follow their respective paths to reach Dominion status before the machines; we’ve seen Orbis Stellaris, Mother Righteous and Sinister follow those routes, I have no idea how anything Stasis is doing is meant to further his own cause
New solicitations are out and there’s a furiously shaking curled monkey’s paw somewhere, as Victor LaValle gets to continue his Sabretooth story… as Benjamin Percy’s co-writer on Wolverine.
This is why we can’t have nice things and so on.
“Sinister uses mutants – he’s never tried to exterminate them.”
Just the Morlocks, that one time…
I get the feeling that the answer to “why use the mysterium for this” is “so that those ships can all be blown up in the endgame and get rid of all the mysterium”. Of course there’s still plenty backing up the galactic economy, so it’ll probably end up like adamantium is sometimes — both absolutely rare and yet easy to get depending on the story.
In-story yeah, they’re not bothering to give a reason yet. So for now my joke-canon is that Tony’s absorbed the worst parts of tech culture and is trying to shoehorn his new pet obsession into everything he builds. The ships will have mysterium! And use crypto to outwit Orchis and have cool LEDs with color changing patterns!
@wwk5d: Wiping out the Morlocks was consistent with Sinister’s overall agenda – he’s meant to be carefully harnessing the X-Gene towards Dominion ascension, the Morlocks were the product of a rival genetic experiment. Stasis, on the other hand, doesn’t appear to be doing much of anything to advance posthumanity.
It’s a shame we ended up with Duggan and Percy as the mainstays. Duggan wants to write action figures fighting and Percy wants to do nothing but wallow in a Wolverine self-fetishisation away from everyone else from his metaphorical writers’ log cabin built on a boat on a lake. Their instincts and biases drag them away from the more interesting or even necessary areas of the era to tackle or explore.
I think I would have preferred the Firestar plot to be in the main book. X-Men is just all over the place, each issue barely feels connected to its own title, let alone the rest of the line. The Firestar sub-plot feels like it would have made more sense there and given the storyline a through-line or backbone to hang all the random toys doing action scenes to.
Alpha Flight was pretty straightforward, but for me that made it work more than I was expecting. There were clear stakes and (mostly) clear character motivations and perils, the story flowed from one scene to the next.
It feels unwise, from a marketing perspective, for Duggan to be putting the big mutant plot in Iron Man when he’s also writing regular X-Men. AND Uncanny Avengers.
What’s the legal definition of treason in Canada?
Why is the method of working mysterium a secret? One of its selling points was that its properties enabled construction of a ship that could go through the sun.
Loved the Alpha Flight mini. It left plenty of room for follow-up, including exploring Bochs Jr’s motivations. Not sure I want to see those threads continued in X-force, but I’ll take what I can get. So fun to see some more familiar faces right at the end. I hope this iteration of the team continues post-Krakoa era.
Do we have any idea what the deal is with Forge since the Gala? In the Gala issue itself (p52) we see him in formal attire Red Triangle R-ES-ISTing like a badass, and then in X-Men #25 (p24) we see him wake up on a strange planet in his standard X-Men duds, with a narration box saying “he was coerced through a Krakoan gate and ended up on a distant world”.
Is this a Mystery or just a mistake?
Ben Percy is not who I would want to see handle Alpha Flight. But this was a good series.
Pseu42, up until last week that was all we’d seen of Forge as far as I know, however he turned up in the last few pages of Invincible Iron Man, where he ran into Riri Williams in deep space, before being attacked by …. a space dragon tied to the Ten Rings (which are currently in Iron Heart’s possession) or something like that. Presumably the next issue will explain what happened to Forge.
@Diana
“Sinister uses mutants – he’s never tried to exterminate them.”
Well, Stasis isn’t trying to exterminate superhumans, either. He wants to deal with the superhero teams like the Avengers and Fantastic Four, presumably because they could interfere with Orchis’ evil schemes.
In other words, he has no qualms with killing posthumans that might interfere with his plans, in the same way Sinister never had qualms with killing mutants that might interfere with his plans.