The X-Axis – w/c 1 April 2024
X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #133. By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Nick Roche, Fer Sifuentes-Sujo, Travis Lanham. Look, there’s only so much I can say each week about an endless, rambling storyline with no apparent point beyond being a farewell tour. I can sort of see how that might work in theory, but what we’re actually getting feels very unfocussed. It feels almost as if it’s intended to come across as a victory lap. And while there’s still good stuff out there, the Krakoan era as a whole isn’t going out in a way that can pull off a victory lap.
X-MEN #33. (Annotations here.) Speaking of which. Not that this is an especially bad issue in its own right. It’s obviously making an effort to tie up loose ends, provide a bit of resolution, and generally clear away some of the dead wood so that Fall and Rise can take a clear run at the AI opposition. It does all that quite efficiently. Shinobi Shaw even shows up for a couple of pages, and he’s a character I actually am interesting in checking in on during Fall of X. It doesn’t have the mad-scramble feel of some other contributions to this crossover (though it seems to have been written in complete ignorance of Callisto’s role in Dark X-Men). At the same time, it doesn’t feel epic either, and the character moments rarely land. It’s mainly just the plot moving from A to B in quite a simplistic way. This isn’t how you want Krakoa to go out.
AVENGERS #12. By Jed MacKay, Francesco Mortarino, Federico Blee & Cory Petit. This is the first half of a Fall of the House of X tie-in. It’s also written by Jed MacKay, who’s one of the incoming writers for Whatever The Hell Is Coming Next. Don’t expect any particular pointers about that, though. MacKay’s Avengers is in the model of the sort of Justice League story where the big names go up against grand sweeping ideas. It does that well, but it’s not the way he approaches other books and I’d be surprised if it was the way he approached X-Men. This issue plugs Orchis into the villain of the week role (which has the downside that Orchis is a much weaker concept than most of the ones in this book have been, at least when it’s used as a straight anti-mutant organisation). Part of the story is intended to rationalise why the Avengers have been ignoring Orchis until now – they’ve been waiting for Iron Man’s cue that it’s time to move, basically, and now they get to go around smashing up a lot of Orchis stuff so that the X-Men don’t have to worry about it. The other part of the story, which is the actual hook, involves the 3-D Man resurfacing as an ally of Orchis, who’s been off panel until now because he’s supposed to be tasked with keeping the Avengers occupied, and they haven’t actually done anything until now. It’s not the best issue of this Avengers run, but in terms of the bad guys getting smashed up in a brightly optimistic way, Mortarino’s art is a better fit than what we’re getting in X-Men.
Rich Johnston did point out that the Alaskan Orchis base the Avengers smash up appears to be the base of Cyclops’ team in the previews for MacKay’s X-Men.
I vote that “Whatever The Hell Is Coming Next” be mandated as Marvel’s branding for the upcoming X-relaunch.
I second that, but move that we change the name to ‘whatever the hell is coming neXt”.
Make that an annual thing. And rename that year preview book accordingly.
Careful, Next Men is Byrne’s thing
So do we think 3-D Man is really working for Orchis or is he a double agent? On the one hand, MODOK points out that he’s using words like “liberated” to describe the Avengers freeing Orchis’s victims, so that suggests he’s a double agent. On the other hand, 3-D Man being a double agent would be the obvious twist.Plus, he’s the one who comes up with the scheme to have the Sentinels attack the Avengers’ headquarters knowing that the children the Avengers rescued from Orchis are aboard. It’s hard to see the Avengers agreeing to a plan that would endanger children, even if 3-D Man assured them he would keep the children safe. Of course, it’s possible that 3-D Man is a double agent but he came up with the scheme to send the Sentinels to attack the Avengers’ headquarters on his own, and the Avengers get mad at him for endangering civilians.
Is one of the people that the Avengers rescued from Orchis supposed to be Bishop? It looks like him but he’s not identified as Bishop in the story. We never found out what happened to Bishop after the Children of the Vault series, where he was working with Cable. I suppose Orchis could have captured him off panel.
Deadpool’s daughter Ellie appears in this week’s Deadpool and there’s no mention of her getting captured by Orchis in the FCBD Uncanny Avengers preview. I wonder why that plot came to nothing.
In other news, in this week’s Immortal Thor. written by Ewing, the Enchantress accueses Thor of not being there while people like Heimdall and her son were killed. So I guess Ewing writes everyone with weather-manipulating powers this way.
3-D Man is no less than a TRIPLE agent
It should be noted that Ellie, with the Preston family, lives in Flagstaff, Arizona, whereas previously we had always seen the Prestons living in Queens, if I am not mistaken.
It must have “skipped” some Ellie-related story, perhaps a Deadpool tie-in planned in Alyssa Wong’s previous series, if it had lasted beyond the tenth issue? On the other hand, the series had typical Krakoan series artwork and even featured the Fall of X logo in the last few issues, and was edited by Jordan White, unlike this one, which went to Ellie Pyle’s office (so it should not fall under Tom Breevort’s X office).
They were bragging about how heavily armed the Avengers HQ is last issue (or maybe the one before). So if 3D Man is a double agent this might just be a way to churn through some Sentinels. In any case it doesn’t feel like a big threat.
I think this was the first thing I’ve ever heard by MacKay, and boy was it bland. Reminded me of Marc Guggenheim.
MacKay is pretty good, but his Avengers is built around the team as foils for a series of big high concept ideas, and Orchis doesn’t really qualify. His Moon Knight and Dr Strange are both good books.
And his various Black Cat series and miniseries where very good. He even wrote one of maybe three good King in Black tie-ins.
Doesn’t 3D Man (assuming we are talking about the former Triune) have a history of being a double agent (during Busiek Avengers)?
If it’s a different 3D man, never mind
@Mark Coale- He wasn’t really a double agent. He was unaware of Jonathan Tremont’s schemes.
I really hope this isn’t going to wind up being some character assassination for 3-D Man/Triathlon.
Yeah, I’m not fond of 3-D Man but I don’t like him being a complete turncoat. But notably, he never had this “I see all the angles” trait before. He was just a super-athlete with magic Skrull-detecting goggles and kind of a chump at that. But McKay did remember that Delroy killed Crusader, not realizing he was a good guy Skrull so…
I’m enjoying watching Paul’s slow descent into madness trying to care about the current Unlimited arc, which really does seem to be pretty aimless and meandering.
MacKay’s Avengers run is one of those that doesn’t get to develop any of the characters because they’re mostly starring in their own books, which kind of curtails things.
I mean, it’s the kind of run where Captain Marvel and Thor change costumes off-screen because they launched new books partway through.
I like the Grant Morrison JLA series of the late 1990s, but it seems like Marvel’s attempts to turn the Avengers into something similar don’t work anywhere nearly as well. (DC’s attempts to recapture its magic also don’t work too well.)
I was no fan of Morrison’s JLA (too much Kyle, too much Bat-god, too much macho psturing).
I assume that it was well accepted due to the craving for a more memorable league at that point in time, after so many years of humor-oriented teams followed by long runs of rather forgettable and redundant teams and runs.
Even The Authority ended up having to laugh at the absurdity of the permanent situation of ludicruous stakes.
Please tell me that Avengers has a page of 3-D Man sitting around in an Orchis base for months on end impatiently waiting for the Avengers to actually do something.
“Got a report in, 3-D Man. The Avengers are off fighting some gods or something.”
“I could go and help the gods?”
“No, this isn’t our fight. Wait until the time is right.”
“Oh, okay then…”
It’s striking how much less murder-y the Avengers are as compared with… everyone in the Duggan books.
Mackay’s Avengers run has been so BORING….