{"id":10060,"date":"2024-05-02T22:15:14","date_gmt":"2024-05-02T21:15:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10060"},"modified":"2024-05-02T22:15:14","modified_gmt":"2024-05-02T21:15:14","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-29-april-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10060","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis &#8211; w\/c 29 April 2024"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #137.<\/strong> By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Nick Roche, Yen Nitro &amp; Travis Lanham. When a story as slight as this makes it to part 17 and counting&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/L0C5nyOVTzc?si=u-ApSYFb7z61eJBG\" width=\"400\" height=\"225\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><strong>X-MEN #34.<\/strong> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10057\">(Annotations here.)<\/a> One of the problems with Marvel&#8217;s approach to crossover events is that they take a storyline from an ongoing title, but spin off a miniseries to carry the core plot for the event, which leaves the original title to hang around doing stuff on the margins of its own plot. That&#8217;s pretty much what we have in this issue of <em>X-Men<\/em>, which feels very much like the bonus material to fill time while the plot takes place in <em>Fall of the House of X<\/em>. Specifically, that means a further fight with MODOK, who already fled Orchis in defeat in <em>Fall<\/em> #2. Still&#8230; fair enough, he might as well be brought down for a bit more finality.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>But the actual plot boils down to MODOK causing a bit of chaos for no terribly clear reason in order that the X-Men can fight him again. And then we get one of those &#8220;sounds good, but hold on a minute&#8221; moments when Laura declares that the X-Men aren&#8217;t going to give MODOK a second chance like the Avengers do. But they <em>did<\/em>. In issue #8. Of this series. She was there. We do get some wrap-up for a couple of character arcs, which is a better use of these issues: Synch gets his moment with Laura after the death of Talon, and there&#8217;s a rather clumsy attempt to tie up the Shadowkat plotline which always felt excessively gritty and forced. And Joshua Cassara is a good artist for MODOK and his grotesques. But it&#8217;s an underwhelming story.<\/p>\n<p><strong>CABLE #4.<\/strong> By Fabian Nicieza, Scot Eaton, Lan Medina, Cam Smith, Jos\u00e9 Marzan Jr, Java Tartaglia &amp; Joe Sabino. The final issue of the mini. The <em>Cable<\/em> mini takes place during &#8220;Fall of X&#8221; but has nothing much to do with it &#8211; in fact, part of the point is that the older Cable has diverted from the big event to nip in the bud a different problem entirely, because his decades of time travel experience have convinced him that it&#8217;s another apocalypse on the horizon. So the &#8220;Fall of the House of X&#8221; logo on the cover is, um, let&#8217;s say <em>optimistic<\/em>, but the book itself is better for it. The central idea here is that the older and younger Cables split on how big a threat this is because older Cable is entirely focussed on avoiding negative outcomes, while his younger self has no direct evidence of this being a big deal at all, and is still looking for something more hopeful. Ultimately the older Cable is right, even if he learns that he&#8217;s lost touch with how to appeal to his younger self; but it also turns out that an attempt to transform humanity into something better runs up against the fact that they reject it anyway. There are maybe a couple too many characters running around as easter eggs for long time Fabian Nicieza readers when it would have been simpler just to create someone new for the story, but it&#8217;s a solid enough mini to fill out the line in the dying months of the Krakoan era.<\/p>\n<p><strong>INVINCIBLE IRON MAN #18. <\/strong>By Gerry Duggan, Creees Lee, Walden Wong, Bryan Valenza &amp; Joe Caramagna. Still tying in to <em>Fall of the House of X<\/em>, <em>Invincible Iron Man<\/em> has generally been the strongest of Gerry Duggan&#8217;s books in the last few months, perhaps because the solo lead gives it more focus. This isn&#8217;t its best issue, though. Iron Man teams up with Magneto and Feilong to smash up some Sentinel factories, which is apparently meant to be Iron Man allying with his enemies in an emergency. That kind of makes sense for Feilong, who&#8217;s the main villain of this book, but adding Magneto seems redundant, and Duggan has no real idea of what to do with him. The fact that Magneto would work with Iron Man against Nimrod hardly qualifies as news &#8211; he&#8217;d have done that at pretty much any point this century. It&#8217;s Nimrod! And having Magneto snub Feilong by claiming not to have heard of him is another unearned moment &#8211; there is just no way that Magneto didn&#8217;t know the name of the troublesome human who colonised Arakko&#8217;s moon. The end result is to undercut Feilong&#8217;s final defeat when it ought to be a huge deal for this book, and the ending feels terribly weak.<\/p>\n<p><strong>WEAPON X-MEN #3.<\/strong> By Christos Gage, Yildiray \u00c7inar, Nolan Woodard &amp; Clayton Cowles. Harmless <em>Exiles<\/em>-with-Wolverines fluff &#8211; more of a collection of fun moments than a satisfying whole, but there are at least fun moments. We get the origin story of Earth-1281 Wolverine, Jane Howlett, done as a pastiche of\u00a0<em>Origin<\/em>. I can actually see some potential in this character: she&#8217;s not just a gender-reversed Wolverine but a class-inverted one, who never gets driven out of the family home and simply grows up rich. It doesn&#8217;t really have much to do with the rest of the issue, though, which is a threat-of-the-month trip to another alternate earth where Onslaught has accidentally cast a spell that needs undoing. There are some cute lines in there, still. The book&#8217;s biggest problem is that I don&#8217;t really care about the Onslaught\/Phoenix stuff, which is meant to be the A-plot. But it does have its strengths.<\/p>\n<p><strong>DEADPOOL \/ WOLVERINE: WWIII #1.<\/strong> By Joe Kelly, Adam Kubert, Frank Martin &amp; Joe Sabino. Huh, that&#8217;s a stronger creative team than you&#8217;d expect for a random <em>Deadpool\/Wolverine<\/em> mini. Technically, this might actually be the first post-Krakoa X-book, though who the heck knows, since it&#8217;s entirely standalone. Wolverine investigates a string of strange murders in Vancouver and stumbles upon an apparently insane supervillain already fighting Deadpool. Deadpool tries to pass it off as a random team-up, but Wolverine (correctly) guesses that Deadpool actually has something to do with this guy and sets off after him. At least, that&#8217;s the thrust of it. Joe Kelly&#8217;s not always the most straightforward of writers to follow, and this has got some of his opaque tendencies on show, so a lot will turn on how it comes together at the end of the day &#8211; I&#8217;m fairly clear what&#8217;s happening at the most basic level, but I don&#8217;t have much clue why. Still, Kubert&#8217;s on form and Wolverine can be a good grounding character for this sort of thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #137. By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Nick Roche, Yen Nitro &amp; Travis Lanham. When a story as slight as this makes it to part 17 and counting&#8230; X-MEN #34. (Annotations here.) One of the problems with Marvel&#8217;s approach to crossover events is that they take a storyline from an ongoing title, [&hellip;]<\/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-10060","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\/10060","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=10060"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10060\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10061,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10060\/revisions\/10061"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}