The X-Axis – w/c 18 December 2023
X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #118. By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Phillip Sevy, Ceci de la Cruz & Travis Lanham. On to a new arc, then. It’s Christmas during “Fall of X”, and after a brief opening montage, we’re off to post-war Arakko, where they go in for an evening of semi-ritual mutual cudgeling which apparently unburdens people, or whatever. Out of nowhere, we’ve also got Bei showing up, to remind us that her husband has been missing for months and every one seems to have forgotten about it. This is certainly in the spirit of Al Ewing’s attempts to portray Arakko as a more rounded culture than it first appears, or at least one where we need to appreciate the symbolism to the Arakkii themselves. I can buy the idea that these guys go in for ritualised combat as part of a celebration, particularly since the story does seem fairly clear that joining in just to hurt people is disreputable. I’m rather less sure that I’m interested in reading an actual story about it, but we’ll see.
WOLVERINE #40. (Annotations here.) The last part of “Last Mutant Standing”, though it isn’t a storyline so much as a series of team-up stories. Benjamin Percy has a shot at tying it together into some kind of theme, by pushing the idea that Wolverine has been teaming up with non-mutant heroes to try to recapture the feeling of belonging that he had on Krakoa, and walked away from shortly before the Fall. There’s something in that idea – the book did indeed bring Wolverine to the point of rejecting Krakoa, and it makes some sense for the Fall to be something that makes him appreciate the positive side of the place, without needing to compromise Wolverine’s status as a sceptic. But it feels a bit of a stretch to make that into the moral of four issues of Wolverine Team-Up. Still, these four issues have at least been quite good fun, in a rather grim period, and maybe just taking a step back and doing something lightweight was a better call than putting Wolverine at the centre of the storyline.
ASTONISHING ICEMAN #5. (Annotations here.) This was a nice little series. Okay, sure, chunks of it don’t actually make sense when you stop to think about it. Why does sending Romeo away have any bearing on his ability to help Iceman re-form, given how it worked last time round? What was stopping him from freezing to death in the ice citadel anyway? But the book gets away with that by barrelling onwards and just feeling like hangs together. And the core thread works – Iceman needs Romeo to keep him together, but also needs the confidence to do it on his own, which gives him the unconventional symbolic victory of just allowing Mr Clean to set off a bomb that’s meant to destroy them both, confident that he’ll re-form sooner or later. Steve Orlando and Vincenzo Carratù have also done a great job on rehabbing Mr Clean, even for use as a one-off villain; in the original Joe Casey stories, he’s just a generic lunatic re-enacting the Morlock Massacre, but here he comes across more convincingly as a disturbingly rational fanatic.
UNCANNY SPIDER-MAN #5. (Annotations here.) Another of the “Fall of X” successes – Way of X and Legion of X could often feel crowded with competing elements, and leaving Kurt alone for five issues has made the book a lot more focussed. The Mystique retcon seems to have worked, Silver Sable’s a surprisingly good foil for Kurt, and the art is nice and clean. As against that, the use of the Vulture still feels odd – I just don’t buy this guy being far enough up the hi-tech scale to be messing about with techno-organics – and the Spider-Man angle feels decidedly nailed on for marketing. Okay, Kurt decides he’s going to dodge his problems and become a masked superhero, and that’s all fine, but… why specifically Spider-Man? I can sort of see a parallel with Kurt’s motivations and Peter’s obsession with responsibility, but it’s not really there on the page. None of that really matters, though, because the central story does land, and Kurt is just such a likeable character to spend time with.
UNCANNY AVENGERS #5. By Gerry Duggan, Javier Garrón, Morry Hollowell & Travis Lanham. Well, yes, that happened. The Avengers Unity Squad fight the evil Captain America, and the main upshot of all this seems to be to reposition him as the new Flag-Smasher. I don’t get the logic of that at all. Leave aside that Hydra Cap is not a remotely interesting character – the original Flag-Smasher concept works for a Captain America villain because he’s got a basically reasonable point about national divisions being a bad thing. This character is “Flag-Smasher” because he’s a Captain America villain, but the logical justification for it is that he wants to unite humans against mutants, which is not a Captain America angle, it’s an X-Men angle. I just don’t see what you do with this guy. He doesn’t seem to function as a villain for anything other than Captain America / X-Men team-up stories.
Also… didn’t the Free Comic Book Day one-shot trail a completely different plot for this series? Something about Deadpool’s kid being abducted, which never, ever came up again? What was that all about?
ORIGINAL X-MEN #1. By Christos Gage, Greg Land, Jay Leisten, Frank D’Armata & Clayton Cowles. The original X-Men are plucked out of the timestream (again) and sent to an alternate reality where Jean Grey has been messing with people’s minds to create a utopia. Didn’t we just do a version of this story in the Jean Grey miniseries? Anyway, the one-shot ends with the villain turning out to be someone else posing as Phoenix, the original X-Men get sent home, and the whole thing seems to be a trailer for the Weapon X-Men miniseries in March, which is a whole team of alternate-universe Wolverines. Didn’t we do that once in Exiles? I guess that was 17 years ago, though. In itself, this is largely inoffensive, but very derivative. If you choose to see it as a sign of things to come in the post-Krakoa age then it’s a rather underwhelming one, and on any view, a gimmick mini about multiple Wolverines is not something I’d be building up as a big event. That said, though, Weapon X-Men starts in March, which is halfway through the Fall and Rise minis, so I think it’s probably just a bit of harmless fluff to round out the schedule while we wait to have something more substantial to announce. I can’t get worked up about the prospect of more of this, though.
So it WAS Selene who resurrected Hydra Cap- that makes sense, since she killed him and it makes sense for her to have a way to bring him back if she needed him.
In retrospect, this was set up pretty neatly in the Sinister Four. Stasis goes out of his way to resurrect Selene- now we know he needed her to bring back Stevil. Also, we saw that Stasis had witnessed Steve’s transformation into Captain America and had been trying to duplicate his shield, so it makes sense that using Stevil was his idea.
One interesting thing- Selene would have never sided with Orchis if the Council hadn’t voted against her in immortal X-Men 1 and Sinister only voted against her because something, presumably the Dominion, blocked his equipment from seeing the consequences in a future timeline. So the Dominion ensured Cyclops’s capture and helped caused the events of Fall of X.
The Captain Krakoa battle suit was built up as dangerous but Deadpool was able to hurt Stevil with his teeth and Cap was able to break his arm while he was wearing it. On the flip side, Stevil was able to hurt Monet just by head butting her with his exposed head.
A lot of people felt that “Stevil” was something that Betsy would say, not Kwannon.
What was Stevil thinking by trying to double-cross Orchis by setting off the nuke in New York while Stasis is there? Because the Nimrod. Omega Sentinel, Moira, Feilong and MODOK will then realize he betrayed them and try to kill him. It would work if ALL of Orchis’s leaders were within range of the bomb. Or if he overhead Stasis say that he planned to become a Dominion soon and would have no further need of Grant or Orchis. But there’s nothing in the issue to suggest either of these except the need to explain the plot hole.
I’m not buying that Roge couldn’t toss the bomb into space because the International Space Station was heading her way. Area 51 is 2,500 miles away from New York. If she had time to fly the bomb there, she had time to fly it to a “safe” section of space. Also, Rogue and Pietro travelling 2,500 miles in a couple of minutes is fast even for them.
I’m not buying that Rogue was able to share powers with Deadpool when they were both skeletons. Her power requires flesh-to-flesh contact, not skeleton-to-skeleton contact. Also, sharing powers in that situation should probably have killed Wade.
What happened to Blob? He disappeared from the plot after page 14.
Grant imagining Andrea by his side as his enemies are led into concentration camps was cute, in a twisted way. I guess his feelings toward her were genuine.
So who does Grant have supporting him? I can’t imagine Orchis is still behind him after he tried to kill Stasis. The dialogue implies that his old organization is behind him but they seem to be following Viper and supporting Diamondback in the current Spider-Woman series.
Re: Deadpool’s daughter- it wasn’t just the FCBD one shot. In X-Men 24, Destiny warns Rogue “I hear the poisoning lies of the false Captain, his rank earned. The fool who speaks the truth will pay the price.” “The false Captain, his rank earned” was clearly Hydra Cap, so the “fool who speaks the truth” had to be Deadpool. It looks like Hydra Cap was originally planned to kill Deadpool’s daughter or something. Deadpool’s daughter supposedly will play a major role in Cody Ziglar’s Deadpool series this April. It looks like what happened was that something bad was supposed to happen to Deadpool’s daughter in this series but then Ziglar came along and had a major role for her planned in the new Deadpool series, so any plans for her in Uncanny Avengers had to be scrapped.
Original X-Men was a cheat. The promos strongly suggested that an X-Man from the past would stay in the present. Instead, all we got was a teaser for Weapon X-Men.
Also, the dialogue in Original X-Men suggests that the world where Jean mindwiped Magneto in Jean Grey 1 was real. So Jean destroyed two inhabited worlds in the Jean Grey series just to prove her decisions were correct?
One other weird thing this week- in Amazing Spider-Man 40, the Kingpin is shown with Typhoid Mary. Now this seems to confirm that the reason for the Realm of X series was that Mary needed to return to Earth before the mutants in the White Hot Room so she could appear in Spider-Man. But still, it was odd. In this week’s Uncanny Avengers, Mary was still missing and Fisk hadn’t reunited with her, even though Thor sent her home in last month’s Realm of X. But in Amazing Spider-Man 40, they’re shown together, already reunited. After all this build up., having them reunite off panel is odd.
So Arakko celebrate by… ritual combat. Again. Some more.
I can’t wait for them to quietly shuffle off in search of a second personality trait
And here I was thinking that Marvel would let go of Stevil as quietly as possible.
Apparently not.
It is indeed hard to guess who would be backing up him now. Maybe he will next turn up in Deadpool’s solo book so that we can have fun at his expense?
After all, at this point he must have built quite the reputation. He is a former Captain America impostor, a Supreme Hydra who betrayed his own recruiter, an acknowledged impostor Captain Krakoa, and has unexplainably gone from superpatriotic to a Flag-Smasher (a concept that Marvel has consistently treated atrociously despite a very good original idea). Oh, and he ends up betraying both the expectations of the “good soldier” who he congratulated a few short pages prior and the whole Orchis organization out of despite, apparently. He doesn’t burn bridges, he insists on demolishing them with sheer self-entitled wrath as a matter of course.
Is it too much to hope that he will paint his hair orange next and begin to talk to Deadpool about the need to vote for him? It would make at least as much sense going forward as anything else conceivable.
I wouldn’t say he’s become another Flag Smasher. He went from a nationalist to a white supremacist. The difference is that in the Marvel Universe there are mutants to fill the role of the “Other” rather than other races.
I wouldn’t say that either, @Chris V.
But he did. It is on the page.
I admit I didn’t read most of Uncanny Avengers — I read the first and decided I wasn’t interested, then was feeling bored this week and grabbed the last just to see how it ended. So maybe I’m missing something, but Stevil’s whole get out of jail free card seemed really weak.
I can accept that oh yeah, some people fall for a stupid explanation and he gets off scot free. But we didn’t even get that explanation unless it was set up earlier. He’s outed as Fake Captain Krakoa, he still supposedly should be a wanted man for past misdeeds. Kingpin is there to give evidence, Urich is there to back him up and publicize the reveal, and then… jumpcut to him walking free.
This is my problem with a lot of what Duggan’s doing for Fall. I could accept specific things happening if you give me a reason, but he doesn’t get around to it. None of the details of Orchis’s propaganda are explained, what they’ve actually taken over and how isn’t explained, it’s just all a series of bad stuff that’s happened and we’re not supposed to sweat the details. But maybe after the umpteenth “everyone is going wrong for our heroes just because” plotline, I’d like details.
I’ve seen comparisons to $Insert_Your_Political_Story_Here and the excuse that people are stupid sometimes. I can’t argue that, but there’s at least usually a narrative about *why* whatever party you expose is horrible flower pickers. Have Stevil explain that he was only in the CK suit for the final showdown after valiantly taking it off Cyclops’ body. Have deluded fans talk about how he was doing a valiant undercover sting. Give us something.
(And if they did set this up before, my bad. But it still feels very much in a line with where I feel like Duggan’s failing in general in this over-arc.)
“whatever party you expose” == “whatever party you oppose”. Edit-read first, *then* submit.
“Well, yes, that happened” seems to be the consensus for a lot of the Fall of X minis. Killing time and shuffling things around for a few months.
Also, I absolutely didn’t buy “Rogue and Deadpool survive a nuclear blast by sharing Deadpool’s healing ability” as that seems to be a little too powerful for either of them. That’s straight-up “Cosmically-powered Wolverine regenerates from a single drop of blood” levels of achievement. Not when we see them as ACTUAL SKELETONS.
I’m not sure whether it is even possible to kill Deadpool without, I don’t know, pulverizing him or something these days.
Even in that scene it was just the upper half of his body, wasn’t it? By now he reminds me of Daffy Duck and Wyle E. Coyote, who routinely survive what ought to be utterly fatal physical trauma without even worrying about it. Didn’t he spend a couple of X-Force issues as a disembodied head a year or so ago?
I don’t mind Deadpool being able to regenerate from a skeleton, even while it annoys the hell out of me when Wolverine does it. First, it’s all Deadpool has (not counting his very good but presumably human fighting skills), while Wolverine has a whole suite of barely related powers. Second, Deadpool pays for those powers with his physical disfigurement and mental instability. Third of course, it’s in the same basket as Squirrel Girl always winning. It’s his schtick, drama be damned.
Rogue presumably would need to be properly alive to use her power. None of that applies to her.
Uncanny Avengers makes more sense if it’s the opening arc of an ongoing. As a story in its own right, my god – what was the point? The main adjectiveless X-Men book makes a point of essentially having them be the “public” counterpart to the “underground” team in X-Men but it ends up not mattering at all to anything. They don’t play off each other, there’s no interesting contrast. They met up in the tunnels like twice for the narration to just be like “they are aware of each other”, then they shared a Thanksgiving meal in like one panel of a THIRD book and that was it. (Sidebar: I can’t believe of the 3 books Duggan writes for Fall of X, the non-X-Book Invincible Iron Man is the only one doing anything that relevant or interesting.)
And I still have serious issues with the pacing. It’s been months since the Gala and the team only pops up to further this plot along in what feels the span of a few days but is clearly intended to be stretched out over a much longer period of time. The pacing extends to the truncated ending, which is just bizarre. Like Duggan felt compelled to offer a counterargument to Cap’s argument from earlier in the series, but why? It’s not like Stevil has any points worth considering, HE’S A NAZI.
The one and only thing I really liked was Blob at the press conference with Wilson Fisk. That was cute. And the art was pretty good, but it’s wasted on a completely inconsequential story.
Maybe things got shuffled due to editorial interference, maybe this is just a seed being planted for a future Uncanny Avengers volume (and if Duggan is writing it, I’m a hard no) but it doesn’t matter, it just doesn’t work.
Hydra Cap is one of Marvel’s “every idea we have is a good one” concepts – everyone and their dog knows that it’s not working, barring the House of No or Bad Ideas. Stevil is apparently meant to be Marvel’s critique of everything wrong in American politics, but in reality he’s a one-note doppelganger who wanders from identity to identity in the hopes something clicks. Certainly Flag Smasher is a dumb choice; he’s only using it because Flaggie was an enemy of Deadpool during Duggan’s run (where he didn’t get the point of Flaggie back then either). Can’t wait for Stevil to become Big Wheel next, with a Hydra symbol slapped on the side…
On the other hand, Iceman and Uncanny Spider-Man are great books, we need more of them.
“So Jean destroyed two inhabited worlds in the Jean Grey series just to prove her decisions were correct?”
Jean Grey and destroying inhabited worlds, name a more iconic duo.
@Jon R: You hit the nail on the head as to something that’s been bothering me since the 2023 Gala – the feeling that it’s all happening too fast and Duggan has skipped some essential steps between where Destiny of X started and now.
It’s especially weird because we keep getting these repeated assurances from White and other writers that Fall of X was part of Hickman’s original plan – but if they rejected that plan in order to pad out the Reign/Destiny phases, why was ORCHIS barely a factor in anything that was going on since Inferno?
@J Vais- the cover for X-Men 33 is out, and it’s a Fall of the House of X tie-in. and Doom’s X-Men are on it. So apparently Doom’s X-Men WILL be playing some role in the final battle against Orchis.
I think that the problem is that Duggan wanted to have Kamala. Fisk and Doom all play roles in the final battle against Orchis. But in Kamala’s and Fisk’s cases, Duggan was able to show Fisk arriving on Krakoa and Scott and Emma talking about Kamala’s death as if it were reversible before the Gala, so their involvement didn’t feel too shoehorned in. In the case of Doom’s X-Men, Duggan either decided to have Doom play a role at the last minute or didn’t plan very well. So he had to shoehorn them into the last 2 X-Men issues before Fall of the House of X and it felt forced. Scott’s a prisoner of Orchis, Alex’s a zombie, mutants have been forcibly depowered, deported to Mars and imprisoned, people have been poisoned by the Krakoan drugs, including MJ’s aunt, and the mutants who went through the gates are still missing. And in the middle of all this Kate, Kamala and Logan decide to take a junket to Latveria to meet three mutants who are working for Doom of their own free will instead of solving these problems! Why? Because Duggan, as the writer, knows they’ll be relevant.
As I mentioned to Al on blue sky the other day, I love the original Flag Smasher black and white costume.
What kind of weird niche is Stevil supposed to be occupying as an anti-nationalist fascist? Is that even a thing in the actual world? Who would he be meant to appeal to — certainly not the right-wing movement in the US whose leader famously HUGS the American flag?
Pretty good question, @Karl_H.
Which is why I am hoping we will see next as a foil for Deadpool.
Perhaps as a member of a 12-step recovery group for fascists.
There is potentially an interesting story to tell about human “nationalism” in response to Krakoa, but it probably can’t be done reasonably in the Marvel Universe. For it to make sense it would have to oppose the non-mutant superhumans as well, and there’s really no way to come back from a story like that without just memoryholing it (as they’ve basically done with Secret Empire). As a real world analogue, there are alliances among the various neo-fascist movements around the world, but certainly not in the sense that they would want their home nations to be subsumed into a bigger formal entity.
ASV-Not totally true. Pan-Europeanism was a major strand in post-World War II neofascism. There were certainly also national Socialist movements outside of Germany during the WWII era which embraced Aryan “master race” ideology and saw Hitler and the Nazis as “liberators”, having no problem with Nazi Germany as the “superpower”, as long as the “white race” would be given positions of prestige and power in the “New Order”.
There is the still-prevalent idea of a white supremacist movement which will purify the European continent of the non-white race and establish a Fortress Europa, keeping the white race safe from all the other races.
This ideology of neo-fascist Cap seems to be along the same lines of thought, except in the Marvel Universe there are mutants to serve as the “Other” for this type of ideology, rather than other “races”. So, it could be an actual global movement in the MU, unlike in the real world.
I’m not saying bringing back evil Captain America is a good idea or that Duggan really has any idea what he is doing. It’s amazing that Marvel insists on keeping this character around after Secret Empire. The obvious route was to use the Cosmic Cube to get rid of him. Nope. He gets locked away. Now, I’m pretty sure Spencer meant that ending to be more symbolic, as a warning that this type of thinking would always be alive, rather than with the impression he would be brought back as a recurring supervillain. Regardless, Coates made the logical decision to simply kill him off. Nope. Marvel decided to bring him back.
I haven’t read the Grunewald Cap in a long time, so I don’t remember if Flag-Smasher & ULTIMATUM were anarchist or globalist. Either way, you can’t mesh fascism with the former, while with the latter it becomes a supervillain’s “ruling the world with an iron fist!” So, no, Stevil does not make any sense as “Flag-Smasher.”
Uncanny Avengers was the only Fall of X series I dropped before the end. Even Realm of X wasn’t this bad. As others have pointed out, the Fall of X world and Orchis’s role in it should have been better defined at the outset. An Uncanny Avengers arc could have worked, especially if the reader saw how other super-heroes reacted to the FoX status quo, but this one didn’t.
Flag-Smasher was a globalist, but as with comics, his actual policies weren’t explicitly spelled out. He wasn’t anti-government and was definitely not anti-Capitalist. I would hazard his beliefs were the World State model that was heavily promoted between the two World Wars by different shades of the political spectrum.
The lack of concrete goals and beliefs allowed Joe Casey to portray Flag-Smasher as a naive pawn of transnational corporations when he wrote a Cap Annual, while Nick Spencer had Sam Wilson describe Flag-Smasher as simply wanting to force people to listen to his tirades about the evils of tariffs (Richard Cobden dressed up as a supervillain? That’s a comic I have been waiting to read).
@Chris V- A lot of the original Flag-Smasher’s motivations had to do with his background. His father was an ambassador who tried to promote peace and as a result he moved around from country to country a lot as a child and as a result always felt like a foreigner and was picked on. Then his father was killed at a demonstration outside the Latverian embassy.
He did say that he hated what the USSR stood for as much as what the US stood for and he was disgusted when he found out one of his schemes was being bankrolled by the Red Skull as part of the Skull’s plans to take over the world.
But after Gruenwald died, writers didn’t know what to do with him. Brian Vaughan wrote him as an anti-mutant bigot. which made him a hypocrite. And Casey wrote him as a pawn of a corporation like you mentioned. And then Fabian Nicieza killed him off.
Since then we’ve had two Flag Smashers that were both killed off and a Flag Smasher LMD working for Hydra Cap that appeared in the Spencer story you mentioned.
My best guess is that Marvel has convinced itself that Grant fills the role of Red Skull better than the original, at least for the moment.
Which is arguably true, if you subscribe to the notion that Captain America’s own role is to oppose the Red Skull.
But having him claim to now be a Flag-Smasher is still nuts.
Howard Mackie wrote him as an enemy of multi-national corporations.
The whole point of fascism is as Mussolini put it, “Everything for the state, nothing against the state, nothing outside the state.” That’s why Hitler called his version National Socialism.He may have wanted German speaking regions annexed to Germany, but he still wanted a nation-state.