{"id":10006,"date":"2024-04-13T17:19:55","date_gmt":"2024-04-13T16:19:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10006"},"modified":"2024-04-13T17:19:55","modified_gmt":"2024-04-13T16:19:55","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-8-april-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10006","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 8 April 2024"},"content":{"rendered":"

X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #134.\u00a0<\/strong>By Steve Foxe & Steve Orlando, Phillip Sevy, Yen Nitro & Travis Lanham. Well, at least this issue has a fun bit which uses the vertical scrolling quite effectively for a leap across the room during an action sequence. Other than that, I don’t know what I can say that I haven’t said before. We’re apparently building to a fight between Sunspot and Gideon, and… um, that doesn’t feel to me like much of a hook in 2024. God, we must have another month of this to go. (Sighs deeply.)<\/p>\n

RESURRECTION OF MAGNETO #4.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> At first glance, it seems like an odd choice to do three rather abstract issues venturing into the afterlife and then end on a final issue of Magneto joining the fight against Orchis – even if the crossover context might make that unavoidable. But it fits better than you’d expect, since this issue isn’t really concerned with the crossover at all; it’s about what Magneto has learned from the last few issues and how he chooses to put that into practice when fighting the Orchis footsoldiers. It’s an issue of Magneto trying to be responsible, though he gets boxed into a corner where he winds up killing the Orchis guys anyway. I’m not convinced that the colour coding thing works – red doesn’t really work as symbolising a middle path for Magneto when it’s the colour most associated with his Silver Age persona as a one-dimensional villain, while the black and white versions of his costume come from much later stories that are much more nuanced – but the basic positioning of Magneto coming out the story works, and the way that the art makes Magneto look traditionally heroic plays nicely against all that.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I’m not sure that this miniseries leaves Magneto in a dramatically different position from where he’s been before – \u00a0he’s been a mostly equivocal figure since the 1980s, after all. But there are shifts of emphasis here, as well as Magneto trying to come to terms more directly with the conflicting ways he’s been interpreted in the past. Besides, Magneto was obviously never going to stay dead, and I’d rather see Al Ewing complete that arc himself. The mini is something of a coda to\u00a0X-Men Red<\/em>, but a satisfying one.<\/p>\n

WOLVERINE #47.\u00a0<\/strong>(Annotations here.)<\/a> After the first couple of issues of “Sabretooth War” I was absolutely dreading having to slog through the rest of it, but things have turned around dramatically. It’s still not exactly the way I’d have wanted to wrap up Victor LaValle’s Sabretooth stories, but it\u00a0does<\/em> feel like a proper continuation of them at this point. Wolverine himself is almost a marginal figure in the book – he’s an object of Sabretooth’s obsession, but Sabretooth is the real protagonist here. Wolverine doesn’t even get to narrate, which is unusual in a Wolverine solo story, but clearly the right choice. And the Exiles finally get to use that seed Cypher gave them ages ago. Granted, we’ve done “Wolverine has his powers removed before a final showdown with Sabretooth before” in the Paul Cornell run, which was very good; this is more in the realms of “solidly decent”, but that’s still a big step up from where we started.<\/p>\n

MS MARVEL: MUTANT MENACE #2.<\/strong> By Iman Vellani, Sabir Pirzada, Scott Goslewski, Arciniega & Joe Caramagna. What an odd book to be coming out during “Fall of X”. It’s not just that this has nothing to do with the crossover, and takes place earlier on – it’s a Mojo story, with Ms Marvel helping Lila Cheney to rescue her fans from the big blob guy. I guess he’s just back running Mojoworld again, but… well, that’s what always happens whenever someone tries to change the status quo of Mojoworld, so whatever. It seems a bit odd that Lila doesn’t know to steer clear of Mojo, but then again she doesn’t seem the type to be poring over the X-Men’s files. Despite the use of peripheral X-characters, this doesn’t really turn on Ms Marvel actually being in the X-Men at all, nor does it seem to be part of a wider storyline running through the miniseries – this book feels more like it’s just an extra four issues of\u00a0Ms Marvel<\/em> that were commissioned too late in the day to be billed as\u00a0Ms Marvel<\/em> #5-8. Still, rather that than shoehorning Ms Marvel even further into a grimdark event, and the line could do with a bit of lightweight fluff to balance things out. Okay, it’s the usual Mojo stuff, and there’s nothing very new here, but it’s a fine version of that story.<\/p>\n

WEAPON X-MEN #2.<\/strong> By Christos Gage, Yildiray \u00c7inar, Nolan Woodard, Clayton Cowles & Sarah Brunstad. It’s a spotlight issue for the Earth-X version of Wolverine – the version who retired in order to try and live a normal life with Jean Grey and became middle aged and out of shape. There’s actually a bit of legitimate pathos in this diminished version of the character trying to rise to the occasion anyway, to be fair. It’s pretty obvious at this point that there’s some sort of twist coming, because this collection of alternate Wolverines makes absolutely no sense as the team who are supposed to save the world from cosmic forces, and some fairly heavy hints are being dropped that Phoenix is lying to the group. It’s all extremely gimmicky, but there’s nothing wrong with it as a bit of throwaway counter-programming to round out the line.<\/p>\n

INVINCIBLE IRON MAN #17.<\/strong> By Gerry Duggan, Patch Zircher, Bryan Valenza & Joe Caramanga. Still tying in to “Fall of X”, but this one isn’t particularly essential reading on that count – most of it consists of Iron Man hallucinating about his life after being injured in battle last issue. Naturally enough, most of that material is largely of interest to regular\u00a0Iron Man<\/em> readers, though a hallucinatory Magneto does show up to harangue Tony for creating the technology used in the Stark Sentinels. The real Magneto shows up at the end (as promised over in\u00a0Resurrection<\/em> #4), so that bit will become important next issue. Meanwhile, Feilong has belatedly figured out that Orchis is really run by an AI conspiracy. In some ways I’m relieved that this doesn’t prompt him to do a full blown face turn, and that his first instinct is to try and club Tony to death before moving on to deal with the robots himself. In the grand scheme of things it was a mistake to make Orchis quite so one-dimensional, but having gone down this route, it wouldn’t really work for them to suddenly develop nuance now. And besides, this book needs Iron Man to get his win over Feilong somewhere along the line.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #134.\u00a0By Steve Foxe & Steve Orlando, Phillip Sevy, Yen Nitro & Travis Lanham. Well, at least this issue has a fun bit which uses the vertical scrolling quite effectively for a leap across the room during an action sequence. Other than that, I don’t know what I can say that I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10006","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-x-axis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10006","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10006"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10006\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10008,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10006\/revisions\/10008"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10006"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10006"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10006"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}