{"id":10185,"date":"2024-06-27T22:34:13","date_gmt":"2024-06-27T21:34:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10185"},"modified":"2024-06-27T22:34:13","modified_gmt":"2024-06-27T21:34:13","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-24-june-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10185","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 24 June 2024"},"content":{"rendered":"

X-MEN: FROM THE ASHES INFINITY COMIC #3.<\/strong> By Alex Paknadel, Di\u00f3genes Neves, Arthur Hesli & Clayton Cowles. The first arc turns out to be just three parts, which is fine – that feels like the natural length of a fairly straightforward ghost story. The ghost turns out to be mostly preoccupied with his wife, a mountaineer whom he assumes must have died on the mountain for no particular reason beyond sexism. That comes somewhat out of the blue as a plot point in this story, which hadn’t really hinted very much about what the ghost was up to, but it does dovetail nicely with Scott’s discomfort about how his relationship with Jean can survive their power disparity in the long run, which is the idea that Paknadel really seems interested in. It’s a solid idea for an Infinity Comic short, nicely illustrated for the most part (though some of the vertical scrolling feels a bit clunky in this one). A pretty good little story.<\/p>\n

DEADPOOL VS. WOLVERINE: SLASH ‘EM UP INFINITY COMIC #2.<\/strong> By Christos Gage, Alan Robinson, Carlos Lopez & Joe Sabino. Well, yup, that’s an extended fight scene. There’s not much to this in the way of plot. Wolverine has a vaguely interesting motivation: he’s helping a old man who, as a kid, used to help him out in Madripoor, until he forgot about the boy due to memory wipes and abandoned him. But it really is just an extended fight scene, even if it’s done with a bit of wit.<\/p>\n

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X-MEN: HEIR OF APOCALYPSE #2.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> This is a weird book. Tom Brevoort mentioned in his weekly newsletter that it had originally been planned as a tail-end book from Jordan White’s office, and it does feel a little bit caught between two worlds. The basic idea of Apocalypse deciding to devote himself to Arakko and pick someone to carry on his self-appointed role as a shepherd of mutantson Earth makes reasonable sense. The selection of candidates remains so random that I’m genuinely curious about why some of them are there. And it does seem more in touch with the Krakoan era interpretation of Apocalypse than I’d feared – the appearance of a dodgy character like Genocide rings alarm bells at first, but he seems to be here precisely to represent a sort of throwback, pre-Hickman Apocalypse. Besides, Exodus kills him before the issue is out.<\/p>\n

Or does he? A bunch of characters die in rather unconvincing, no-body-visible manner here. And while I could easily believe some minor character getting killed off in order to remind us that death matters again, there’s no way the likes of Penance and Exodus are dying here. (To be fair, killing Armageddon Girl first is a nice feint, since she really is expendable.) And the art doesn’t quite figure out how to sell those moments without a body, either. It’s a pretty decent extended fight scene on the whole, though, and while it’s very nineties, some of the character work is solid. The book’s major problem may actually be the weird sense of weightlessness that comes with appearing during this odd transition months.<\/p>\n

X-MEN: BLOOD HUNT – MAGIK #1.<\/strong> By Ashley Allen, Jes\u00fas Herv\u00e1s, Yen Nitro & Travis Lanham. More Blood Hunt<\/em>, and this time it’s a Magik solo story, as she pops back to visit her home town in Siberia, and winds up dealing with the local vampires. The hook this time is that the local vampire leader turns out to be a figure from local myth more usually presented as a hero. That’s quite a nice idea, although I’m not sure the story really does all that much with it – it’s more of a rare opportunity for Magik to just get out there and do some unequivocally heroic stuff as she tears through the vampires. She’s quite well equipped for dealing with this problem, after all, and the local vampires aren’t exactly the elite. The art on this issue is lovely, though, with some really nice atmosphere to it. Hopefully we’ll see more of Herv\u00e1s in future.<\/p>\n

WOLVERINE: MADRIPOOR KNIGHTS #5.<\/strong> By Chris Claremont, Edgar Salazar, Carlos Lopez & Cory Petit. Well, if you’re going to buy a Chris Claremont nostalgia mini, you can’t exactly complain when he plays the hits. It’s a demonic possession story with the Hand, and you know general idea of how this goes in Claremont stories. Part of the angle here is to have Captain America more shaken by his dark side than Wolverine and Black Widow, who are used to this sort of thing, and I guess if you’re going to do this trio then you want to push the idea that Steve doesn’t really fit in a Madripoor story; he’s a conventional hero and this is a noir-ish setting, in Claremont’s day. Still, it does feel a bit by the numbers in this final issue, but like I say, you can’t complain too much that a book like this sticks to what it promises.<\/p>\n

HELLVERINE #2.<\/strong> By Benjamin Precy, Julius Ohta, Frank D’Armata & Travis Lanham. So, yup, that’s Daken back already. This is all quite silly – Daken has literally been reassembled by a Ghost Rider demon, and the US military’s black magic project has reanimated some dead soldiers who aren’t very happy about it – but for the most part it’s the good sort of silly which commits to the bit and has fun with it. Ohta’s designs for the resurrected Destroyers are a little odd, but they’re distinctive. I’m enjoying this a lot more than I was expecting to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

X-MEN: FROM THE ASHES INFINITY COMIC #3. By Alex Paknadel, Di\u00f3genes Neves, Arthur Hesli & Clayton Cowles. The first arc turns out to be just three parts, which is fine – that feels like the natural length of a fairly straightforward ghost story. The ghost turns out to be mostly preoccupied with his wife, a […]<\/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-10185","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\/10185","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=10185"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10185\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10187,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10185\/revisions\/10187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}