{"id":10129,"date":"2024-05-31T22:42:45","date_gmt":"2024-05-31T21:42:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10129"},"modified":"2024-06-01T16:36:07","modified_gmt":"2024-06-01T15:36:07","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-27-may-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10129","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 27 May 2024"},"content":{"rendered":"

X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #141.<\/strong> By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Phillip Sevy, Yen Nitro & Travis Lanham. The penultimate chapter of this exceedingly protracted arc, and at least it’s a half-decent closing fight, I guess. But it’s clear we’re not going to get anything at the last minute to tie this whole thing together in any very satisfying way.<\/p>\n

RISE OF THE POWERS OF X #5.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Right, the main event. And Kieron Gillen and Luciano Vecchio give us a rather more satisfying resolution than we had in Fall of the House of X<\/em>. In itself, that doesn’t come as a great surprise – the Enigma storyline seemed to be able to play out more or less as intended, and Rise <\/em>was able to leave Fall<\/em> to try and make something of Orchis. But I had my doubts about how well the Enigma storyline would work as a resolution for the Krakoan era, as opposed to just being a big storyline that happened to be ending at the same time. What did Dominions ever have to do with Krakoa, really?<\/p>\n

As it turns out, Gillen ties everything together remarkably well on that level too. Yes, sure, there’s a degree of arbitrariness going on in the plot. Stuff happens with Phoenix because, well, because it’s Phoenix and stuff can just happen with Phoenix. But you can get away with that if it makes sense thematically, and in the end Rise<\/em> does bring it together. The latest explanation for Phoenix – there’ll be another one sooner or later, I’m sure – has them as an embodiment of mutantkind, and frankly, that makes at least as much sense as any other explanation that’s been offered in the past.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

By tying those two ends together, the idea of the background population of Krakoa remaining in the White Hot Room forever starts to make sense. Of course, it serves the immediate purpose of removing Krakoa from the board, without sealing it off forever. But it lets Krakoa retain its status as a mutant paradise or even a mutant afterlife. Perhaps part of the angle is that without the big name characters seizing control of everything and steering the ship themselves, the true promise of Krakoa can now be realised – though if so, that’s undermined by the fact that the fall of Krakoa was never really caused by anything the Quiet Council did, unless you blame them for lax production line security. At any rate, I do like the possibilities of the remaining mutants being the fighters who were cast out of heaven, and the people who never wanted to go to Krakoa in the first place.<\/p>\n

And hey, if you really want to use a random background mutant (who isn’t Jumbo Carnation), you can always say they were among the no-names who got detoured to Vanaheim in Realm of<\/em> X. Nobody’s really off limits.<\/p>\n

On the Enigma plot itself, the Dominions refusing to help him is on one level an anticlimax, but works because it fixes the obvious plot hole of explaining why no other Dominions are around to hold him in check. They don’t care, because they really<\/em> transcended the material world. He’s the one still insisting on trying to control it, because he still never really got it. Sinister (of sorts) achieves his grandest ambition and still lacks the perspective to make it work. That works.<\/p>\n

Vecchio does some nicely weird work on the Dominions, but also echoes House of X<\/em> rather nicely in the Xavier\/Moira scene – and tacks well to George Perez-style crowd scenes when Phoenix has to channel all the mutants. It’s visually overwhelming but also crystal clear, and the effort has gone where it needed to go.<\/p>\n

Moira, then. Giving her a happy ending of sorts makes sense as a way of closing the door on Krakoa. Turning her into a one-dimensional villain after she left Krakoa was a terrible mis-step, and one which Gillen deals with here largely by pretending that she’d been more nuanced all along. Fine by me. The character<\/em> deserved some last minute rehab after the way she was treated post-Inferno<\/em>, and the last page of Moira celebrating her own freedom strikes a suitably ironic note.<\/p>\n

Just one week to go, then.<\/p>\n

WOLVERINE #50.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Hmm. “Sabretooth War” certainly turned the ship around from the first couple of chapters, which were just terrible. Despite the hype and the “Parental Advisory! Not for Kids!” warning on the front cover, subsequent issues dial back to fairly routine levels of violence for Marvel. In the end, it turns out to be a strange, half-formed story that feels full of stray threads that never come to anything. It does have a reasonable angle on Sabretooth himself, playing up the love-hate aspect of his feelings about Wolverine. But what was the point of all that stuff about alternate universe Sabretooths, and Graydon Creed? Do the Exiles really get very much to do here? And if you’re going to depower Wolverine, having him get his powers back in the last issue from a device that apparently just happened to be built into the armour he was going to wear anyway is, um, less than satisfying.<\/p>\n

To be fair, Geoff Shaw and Cory Smith do a decent job on the art. And part of the idea does seem to be that Sabretooth is a force of nature who simply refuses to bend to what would normally be the force of plot logic. So Cypher has a whole plan to shock Sabretooth into empathy which is build up over months and… does absolutely nothing, because he’s Sabretooth, for god’s sake<\/em>. And the Graydon Creed plot is perhaps meant to work along similar lines. But I think I like that in theory more than I do in practice.<\/p>\n

There are a couple of short backup stories . A 90s Wolverine\/Jubilee story by Larry Hama and Daniel Picciotto is straightforward but perfectly decent and catches the vibe of Hama’s run quite nicely. And Percy’s “Endless” is not a story so much as a reminiscence by Wolverine as he looks back on his whole life, with Krakoa now just one more chapter among many; it’s a surprisingly effective idea, closing the book on Krakoa by reminding us that it will form a major chapter in X-Men history, but that another one will be along in a minute. Except…<\/p>\n

HELLVERINE #1.<\/strong> By Benjamin Percy, Julius Ohta, Frank D’Armata & Travis Lanham. This is a Benjamin Percy Wolverine story, and reading it immediately after his farewell issue from the same week<\/em> is, um, a bit weird. Like this week’s other X-book, it’s a post-Krakoa comic that exists in a curious sort of status quo limbo – no island, no Orchis, but no clearly defined arrangement to replace it either.<\/p>\n

Despite that, this turns out to be effectively Wolverine<\/em> #51. It’s a direct sequel to the “Weapons of Vengeance” crossover from Wolverine<\/em> #36, in which Wolverine briefly gets turned into an evil Ghost Rider. This time, a Ghost Rider Wolverine is back doing traditional vigilante things, albeit rather violently. Not unreasonably, the authorities decide that it’s Wolverine and arrest him. The authorities here are Project Hellfire, Percy’s wacky military outfit trying to weaponise Hell – now based in a hidden sub-basement of the Pentagon called the Pentangle. Cute. Naturally, Project Hellfire have also just come up with another bunch of Satanic cybors gone wrong, because their stuff never works. Anyway, when Hellverine keeps attacking people, even Project Hellfire figure out that they’ve got the wrong person, and it turns out that this Ghost Rider is apparently a reanimated Daken. (Except… shouldn’t his claws be different? Oh well, maybe it’ll make sense.)<\/p>\n

It’s all quite silly, but it’s clearly meant to be, and Ohta’s art leans into it with some relish. Pretty decent, in fact, if weirdly scheduled.<\/p>\n

X-MEN: THE WEDDING SPECIAL #1.<\/strong> This is an anthology under the Marvel Voices branding, but it’s effectively another coda to the Krakoan era. The main story, with Mystique and Destiny renewing their wedding vows, is by Kieron Gillen and Rachael Stott; it’s a framing sequence for the rest, but it’s 15 pages or so in its own right, and a fun little story which sidesteps being too sentimental and takes the opportunity to gesture at where those two characters go next.<\/p>\n

The other stories are shorts about the presents that various characters got for the event – which turns out to be a better linking theme than you might expect. Marvel’s anthology stories have a tendency to be fragmented vignettes rather than real stories, so there’s something to be said for leaning into that and literally making them parts of a whole, if you’ve got a hook to hang it on.<\/p>\n

There’s a Captain Britain story by Tini Howard and Philip Sevy, which if nothing else is a nice opportunity for Howard to do a farewell gesture, given that she was aroudn for most of the Krakoan era. And it’s quite well done up until a bafflingly undermotivated use of Saturnyne, which doesn’t work at all. Tate Brombal and Emilio Pilliu have Wolverine and some of the kids debating present ideas – weirdly, the art seems to show them hanging out in a mansion library, but maybe it’s meant to be Avengers Mansion, where the event is being held. It’s just a parade of teens offering their thoughts on wedding presents but it’s a fun throwback to Wolverine’s teacher phase.<\/p>\n

Yoon Ha Lee and Stephen Byrne do a weird story about Emma Frost offering couples counselling as a wedding present, which I don’t think really works at ten pages – a brief conversation and one insight doesn’t really deliver on the premise. Decent closing twist, though, and it looks nice. And Wyatt Kennedy and Jenn St-Onge do five pages of Rogue helping Destiny get ready and Gambit trying to stay out of trouble for the day, which is perfectly good for five pages.<\/p>\n

All that gets us up to page 57, which makes the somewhat intimidating \u00a38 price tag feel a bit more reasonable. But the issue is rounded out with a feature on Mystique and Destiny’s history, a Chris Claremont interview, a reprint of an Iceman story from Marvel’s Voices Infinity Comic<\/em>, and the Mystique\/Destiny back-up strip from X-Factor Annual<\/em> #6. All told, it’s a better package than I’d expected.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #141. By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Phillip Sevy, Yen Nitro & Travis Lanham. The penultimate chapter of this exceedingly protracted arc, and at least it’s a half-decent closing fight, I guess. But it’s clear we’re not going to get anything at the last minute to tie this whole thing together in […]<\/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,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10129","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\/10129","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=10129"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10129\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10132,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10129\/revisions\/10132"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}