{"id":10155,"date":"2024-06-14T21:14:36","date_gmt":"2024-06-14T20:14:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10155"},"modified":"2024-06-14T21:14:36","modified_gmt":"2024-06-14T20:14:36","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-10-june-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10155","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 10 June 2024"},"content":{"rendered":"

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.” – Antonio Gramsci<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

X-MEN: HEIR OF APOCALYPSE #1. <\/strong>(Annotations here.)<\/a> This is a truly weird month for the X-books. Krakoa is finished, but the new X-Men<\/em> titles don’t start until July. In itself, that’s no bad thing. I’m all for a season break. But you can’t really pause the line for a month, and so we have a month of… what? Well, there are Blood Hunt<\/em> tie-ins, and that event is nicely timed to provide X-filler. There’s a ludicrous number of Wolverine side projects. And then there’s this.<\/p>\n

I’m not sure the scheduling has done it any favours. It makes it seem less like the X-event for June and more like it was so inconsequential that you could ship it before X-Men<\/em> #1 without spoiling the launch. Yet it picks up on Apocalypse’s storyline from X-Men<\/em> #35 so… apparently not? There are mixed messages here. It’s puzzling.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The book itself sees Apocalypse holding a contest to choose an heir who can take over the role of shepherding mutantkind on Earth, while he devotes his attention to Arakko. Twelve contestants range from natural candidates (his acolyte Rictor) to curious but understandable ones (Exodus, Armageddon Girl) to names seemingly plucked at random from the phone book (Cypher? Forge?). Readers sceptical about the post-Krakoa direction probably won’t be hugely reassured by this.<\/p>\n

But it’s grown on me a bit. For one thing, despite his tantrum in X-Men<\/em> #35, this book doesn’t seem to be simply resetting Apocalypse to pure villain status; he’s mainly approaching heroes to follow in his footsteps, and he’s still getting to pursue his Krakoan agenda on Arakko. Exodus still seems to be recognisably in Krakoan mode as well. With twelve characters in the contest plus a scene for Archangel, there are a lot of moving parts here, and it does a pretty good job of balancing them. And while the cast seems completely random on the surface, the story seems aware of that, enough for me to give it the benefit of the doubt that there’s a reason for it.<\/p>\n

Netho Diaz’s art is quite 90s, but there’s some personality to his characters; I like his underwhelmed Exodus, and his Mr Sinister is appropriately smug. And if you’re going to use Genocide, then yeah, he looks pretty good here. I’m less sure about the pyramid death trap stuff; the overhead shot of the maze looks good, the spike traps are a bit by the numbers. Maybe that’s a concept issue as much as anything, though – the Indiana Jones stuff feels terribly basic for Apocalypse after what we’ve had in the last few years.<\/p>\n

I’m not exactly sold on this – it’s a puzzling project, weirdly scheduled, which feels stuck between two different takes on the X-books, and might yet turn out to be as random as it seems on the surface. But I did like it better on re-reading, and I’m willing to see where it’s going.<\/p>\n

DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE: WWIII #2.<\/strong> By Joe Kelly, Adam Kubert, Frank Martin & Joe Sabino. You know, this series really doesn’t lend itself to reading in digital format. Lovely things, double page spreads, but they don’t work on screens. Delta’s a lovely design, and I’m all for jazzing up a random teleporter by giving them a massive pink mouth that eats people. The layouts are inventive. It’s… not that easy to follow, though, certainly at digital scale, and it’s one of those Joe Kelly projects where I can’t help feeling I’m putting in an awful lot of work just to access a fairly basic story. It feels<\/em> like it ought to be good, but it’s just not connecting with me.<\/p>\n

X-MEN: BLOOD HUNT – JUBILEE #1. <\/strong>By Preeti Chhibber, Enid Bal\u00e1m, Elisabetta D’Amico, Jim Campbell & Ariana Maher. This is the first of several Blood Hunt<\/em> X-Men one-shots. We’re off on the fringes of the crossover here – no knowledge of the wider plot is required, beyond the fact that there are vampires everywhere right now. Basically it’s just leveraging the crossover to save the hassle of explaining why there are vampires all over the place. And if you’re doing vampires, sure, Jubilee is a natural character to go with. Making her a vampire for several years was, er, Certainly A Choice, but here it lets us play with the idea that while everyone else is out slaughtering vampires, Jubilee is much more inclined to see them as the victims and wants to help the newly bitten vampires to keep their personalities the same way she did.<\/p>\n

Whether the story really benefits from the Forgiven, I’m not so sure. They are, as advertised, a bunch of vampires who helped Jubilee to control her vampire urges back in the day, and they’ve got the same agenda as Jubilee here… but they’re not particularly compelling as individual characters, and maybe it would be a stronger story if it was just Jubilee. I suppose they give Jubilee a way to hand off Sonal, the new vampire she saved? And they do have some quite good character designs. There’s some nice art in this issue generally, with some likeably cartoony fight scenes and a bit of charisma for Sonal. It’s a surprisingly decent story, in fact, when you consider that it’s an event tie-in referencing a dead-end arc. For an issue, it works.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.” – Antonio Gramsci X-MEN: HEIR OF APOCALYPSE #1. (Annotations here.) This is a truly weird month for the X-books. Krakoa is finished, but the new X-Men titles don’t start until July. In itself, that’s no bad […]<\/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-10155","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\/10155","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=10155"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10155\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10156,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10155\/revisions\/10156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}