{"id":10142,"date":"2024-06-06T20:55:11","date_gmt":"2024-06-06T19:55:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10142"},"modified":"2024-06-06T20:55:11","modified_gmt":"2024-06-06T19:55:11","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-3-june-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10142","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 3 June 2024"},"content":{"rendered":"

X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #142.<\/strong> By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Nick Roche, Yen Nitro & Travis Lanham. Well, at least this is finished. Clocking in at a ludicrous 22 issues, this really does seem to have been nothing more than a bunch of side quests to occupy the C-listers. There’s no interesting concept in here, and it’s ultimately just self-indulgent sprawl. The book wraps up by annoying me one last time by having the X-Men gratuitously torture their defeated prisoners, and actually express regret that they can’t do the same thing to Selene. This was terrible.<\/p>\n

X-MEN #35.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> On the other hand, this is much more like it. The final X-book of the Krakoan era (well, except for the other one that comes out this week) is a massive epilogue issue, and with Gerry Duggan, Kieron Gillen and Al Ewing co-writing the main story. A price tag of \u00a38 is somewhat alarming, but at 88 pages in digital format, that’s not such bad value. It still triggers the involuntary “Blimey, how much?” reaction, though.<\/p>\n

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Since Orchis and Enigma were already dealt with in Fall<\/em> and Rise<\/em>, this issue is left to try and provide some\u00a0 resolution to Krakoa itself – and transition into what comes next, as smoothly as it can. When Rise<\/em> exiled Krakoa and its population to the White Hot Room, I’d assumed that it was leaving a back door for future writers to bring it back. But this issue seals off that route more definitively. Weeks have passed since Fall<\/em> and Rise<\/em>, and Krakoa now returns for one day only, with the background characters having aged 15 years in the interim. Some of them choose to stay (off panel), but mostly it’s a case of the Krakoans turning up to explain that Krakoa actually turned out pretty well once it was left to develop on its own. At first glance 15 years seems to short for the sort of changes that the story has in mind, but perhaps the idea is to stress how quickly the mutants move on.<\/p>\n

The three big names on the Quiet Council back at the start were Professor X, Magneto and Apocalypse. Only Apocalypse shows up for Krakoa’s farewell. Professor X and Magneto instead get to have a farewell conversation before the Professor is carted off to jail as per the new status quo. For them, the premise of Krakoa was ultimately flawed. Professor X thinks he caved in to mutant separatism and look where it wound up; Magneto has come round to the view that he ought to have been representing all the oppressed, all along. Ironically, neither of them gets to see a version of Krakoa which seems to have done absolutely fine once it got rid of the humans – but also once it got rid of the leaders. Apocalypse takes the rejection of his values and his leadership rather more badly.<\/p>\n

There are some dodgy fight scenes that do the book no favours – Wolverine’s attempt to kill Professor X at the start seems to wildly misread the character, and expanding Apocalypse’s tantrum into an artist jam session feels like someone was casting about for a plot element that lent itself to the guest pages. But the core of what’s going on here is solid, and the art is largely on point; Krakoa gets to go out as a paradise rather than a ruin.<\/p>\n

Of course, much depends here on how you feel about Apocalypse being very obviously repositioned for future use as a villain, but the basic angle that any true utopia would eventually reject him seems sound to me. He was killing people in ritual combat, for god’s sake. We’ll see where they’re going with Apocalypse in\u00a0the upcoming X-Men: Heir of Apocalypse<\/em> miniseries, and how much of a reset button it really is. It looks like he’s getting to keep Arakko, after all. But if you find the strings are a bit too visible in terms of getting us to the next relaunch, well, fair enough.<\/p>\n

As back-ups, we have a Claremont\/Larroca story which gives Chris Claremont the chance to write Mystique and Destiny’s family as he’d conceived it. It’s a perfectly decent vignette given the limitations of him not controlling where the characters are going next, and it’s nice to see Claremont occasionally get the chance to do something with the present day X-books rather than flashback projects.<\/p>\n

The final ten pages or so, which are the lead-in for the next wave of X-books, are basically a trailer, with a bit of plot set-up for Professor X’s set-up. Since that next wave doesn’t really have a unifying theme, it’s inevitably rather scattershot. Xavier’s own plotline interests me somewhat, but I’m puzzled about the decision to go with such an Orchis-like lead villain in Corina Ellis – surely it’s too quick to go back to that well. Perhaps the angle is that this is who’s left on the anti-mutant side now that Orchis are all out of the way, and there might be something in that; but it’s not the point I’d be pushing after months of “Fall of X”.<\/p>\n

MS. MARVEL: MUTANT MENACE #4. <\/strong>By Iman Vellani, Sabir Pirzada, Scott Godlewski, Erick Arciniega & Joe Caramagna. I can’t imagine the original plan was to have this story – set way back before Fall of the House of X<\/em> – ship its final chapter in the same week as the end of the Krakoan era, particularly when it really is an X-book in name only. But here we are. And hey, Ms Marvel<\/em> is better off when it’s an X-book in name only. This issue is mainly the Inhumans helping Ms Marvel out with regaining control of her powers, which were a bit out of control thanks to her resurrection. There’s a rather clumsy corporate synergy bit suggesting that her mutant powers would have been the powers she has in the movies, and a villain who seems to be setting up for a future arc. But this would be a perfectly solid middle issue of Ms Marvel<\/em>. It’s an odd thing to run as the end of a miniseries, though, unless some of these plot points are going to be picked up in NYX<\/em>. There’s no reason why they shouldn’t, mind you.<\/p>\n

WOLVERINE: BLOOD HUNT #1.<\/strong> By Tom Waltz, Juan Jos\u00e9 Ryp, GURU-eFX & Cory Petit. Right, back to business. This seems to be the first main line X-book credited to the new office. It doesn’t really shed any light on wider questions of the status quo – after all, why would you do that in a random tie-in miniseries. What’s more surprising is how keen it is to present itself as a smooth continuation of Benjamin Percy’s Wolverine<\/em> run. He had Wolverine fighting vampires in the first couple of years of Krakoa, so there are plots to draw on there, but he also has Maverick show up. And Ryp was drawing Wolverine stories during the Krakoan era too. It’s all quite familiar. Maybe that’s a deliberate strategy, maybe it’s just a side effect of the fact that Wolverine<\/em> #1 isn’t out for a while yet and you can’t jump the gun on that. The premise of Blood Hunt<\/em> is that vampires have used Darkforce to make it night all over the world, so as long as your story involves fighting vampires, you can claim it as a Blood Hunt<\/em> tie-in. That’s pretty much the territory we’re in here, and I’m not sure the world really needed a Wolverine vs zombies comic, but hey, something’s got to fill out the schedule while we wait for the relaunches in July, and this is very solid for what it is. And I do appreciate that we’re taking a few weeks before diving into the new launches, by the way. It means a very quiet June, but so it should.)<\/p>\n

X-MEN: FROM THE ASHES INFINITY COMIC #1.<\/strong> By Alex Paknadel, Di\u00f3genes Neves, Arthur Hesli and Clayton Cowles. So this appeared on Unlimited without warning on Tuesday, and technically is<\/em> the first new X-book from the new office. Well, aside from the Free Comic Book Day<\/em> one-shot. And I’ll be honest, for all that I’ve despaired of the final X-Men Unlimited<\/em> arc, the Infinity Comics were one of the things that worried me about the new regime, because Avengers Unlimited<\/em> was consistently the blandest of the Infinity Comics. This is promising enough, though. It’s a weird thing to release in tandem with X-Men<\/em> #35, since it’s got no huge surprises – it’s Scott and Jean taking a holiday together before her planned trip into space, which is apparently something to do with adjusting to the Phoenix again. But the story itself seems to be a relatively straightforward ghost story type thing. So far, it seems promising enough.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #142. By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Nick Roche, Yen Nitro & Travis Lanham. Well, at least this is finished. Clocking in at a ludicrous 22 issues, this really does seem to have been nothing more than a bunch of side quests to occupy the C-listers. There’s no interesting concept in here, […]<\/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-10142","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\/10142","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=10142"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10142\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10143,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10142\/revisions\/10143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}