{"id":10230,"date":"2024-07-18T22:39:31","date_gmt":"2024-07-18T21:39:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10230"},"modified":"2024-07-18T22:39:31","modified_gmt":"2024-07-18T21:39:31","slug":"the-x-axis-15-july-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10230","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – 15 July 2024"},"content":{"rendered":"

X-MEN: FROM THE ASHES INFINITY COMIC #6.<\/strong> By Alex Paknadel, Di\u00f3genes Neves, Arthur Hesli & Clayton Cowles. Hmm, so we are indeed already retconning the bit from Fall\/Rise <\/em>about Professor X killing the crew of the Agnew. I’m not especially<\/em> hostile to the retcon in principle – I’m willing to buy that he fakes it if he has the chance, and that he’s convinced himself that the best thing he can do for mutantkind is to present himself as the villain and draw fire from everyone else. And the way in which he’s trying to cover his tracks hardly tries to rehabilitate him as a straight hero, rather than just getting rid of the single worst thing he did in Fall\/Rise<\/em>. But… honestly, blowing up one ship doesn’t seem so extreme in a world where Wolverine is a hero as to call for urgent reversal. And this does feel way too early. It only happened a couple of months ago and even if you do think it was a beat too far, it’s not obvious what’s so urgent about undoing it. That aside, the story makes a reasonable fist of selling it, but I don’t get why we’re doing this now.<\/p>\n

DEADPOOL VS. WOLVERINE: SLASH ‘EM UP INFINITY COMIC #5.<\/strong> By Christos Gage, Alan Robinson, Carlos Lopez & Joe Sabino. Serviceable movie tie-in romp, innit? Decent for what it is, has some good lines, looks perfectly decent, but there’s not a great deal going on beyond that.<\/p>\n

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PHOENIX #1.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> If you’re going to go down the line of making Jean Phoenix, and making Phoenix a full-on cosmic force, then you might as well follow that to its logical conclusion and send her out to do actual cosmic stories, Silver Surfer<\/em> style. And that’s basically what this book seems to be doing, with Jean out in space with a rather hazy agenda of redemption and finding herself or whatever. I’m willing to credit that the vagueness of Jean’s agenda is part of the point, because Stephanie Phillips has some decent ideas and themes being introduced here. It’s not laboured, but the opening scene of Phoenix saving a world by stabilising is literally the inverse of what Dark Phoenix did to the D’Bari, and there’s no suggestion of it making any real difference in terms of redemption. The angle seems to be that she can never lose a fight but she can make wrong choices, and that her potential downfall lies in thinking like a superhero when she’s working on a larger scale now. That can work, and giving her an apparent foil in an anti-religious narrator seems interesting.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, while Alessandro Miracolo’s art is generally quite pretty, there are some clarity issues going on here – the story really<\/em> needed a clear visual indication of which character is the narrator, and god only knows what I’m supposed to take from that final page of Jean, Corsair and the Black Order. Oh, and once again, the decision to stick an epilogue page behind a QR code gimmick only makes it less effective than it would have been in the actual comic. It’s a story, not a menu. I could understand the thinking if it really was a big surprise reveal that they didn’t want leaked, but it’s not.<\/p>\n

Still, I quite liked this, and I’m interested to find out where it’s going. Whether it’s what people want from an X-book, we’ll see.<\/p>\n

X-MEN: BLOOD HUNT – LAURA KINNEY THE WOLVERINE<\/strong> #1. <\/strong>By Stephanie Phillips, Robert Gill, Nolan Woodard & Travis Lanham. Boy, that’s a title. They seem to have run out of punctuation marks about 75% of the way through. Anyway, this is very skippable and doesn’t make a huge amount of sense. The plot is meant to be that since the sun went out, a group of vampires have been abducting mutant children in the hope that mutant blood will give them extra powers. Gabby and Laura get drawn into this in some way, and somehow or other Gabby is already aligned with Xarus, who is apparently on the good side in this crossover. I’ll assume all that got covered somewhere in the wider crossover, but… what? Isn’t the whole premise of Blood Hunt<\/em> that the vampires are just roaming free and attacking everyone in sight? How does targetting mutant children even work in that context? Are there really enough of them around for it to be viable? And since when do vampires gain powers from drinking mutant blood? It’s not like this is the first time. It’s got quite good art, but the only real story hook is another “you’ve escaped being a killer so you ought to believe that vampires can too” bit, which we’ve had already in these one-shots, and it doesn’t really feel like it nails Laura’s character. Not very good.<\/p>\n

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X-MEN: FROM THE ASHES INFINITY COMIC #6. By Alex Paknadel, Di\u00f3genes Neves, Arthur Hesli & Clayton Cowles. Hmm, so we are indeed already retconning the bit from Fall\/Rise about Professor X killing the crew of the Agnew. I’m not especially hostile to the retcon in principle – I’m willing to buy that he fakes it […]<\/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-10230","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\/10230","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=10230"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10230\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10231,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10230\/revisions\/10231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}