{"id":10266,"date":"2024-08-02T23:40:48","date_gmt":"2024-08-02T22:40:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10266"},"modified":"2024-08-02T23:40:48","modified_gmt":"2024-08-02T22:40:48","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-29-july-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10266","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 29 July 2024"},"content":{"rendered":"

X-MEN: FROM THE ASHES INFINITY COMIC #8.<\/strong> By Alex Paknadel, Phillip Sevy, Arthur Hesli & Clayton Cowles. Havok’s demon nurse takes him to Limbo to try and get him healed, but it turns out that the plan is just to do a deal with N’astirh. Fair enough, and it’s all done quite efficiently. I raise an eyebrow at Havok actually taking<\/em> the deal, but then he’s always been a flawed hero at best. What surprises me more is the reveal that the Goblin Queen didn’t botch Havok’s magical resurrection, but did it this way on purpose. I get that From the Ashes<\/em> seems to serve the function of repositioning some characters for the relaunch and saving the regular books the need to do the job, and I get why they want to extricate Havok from this plot before he shows up in the new X-Factor<\/em>, but it does feel like we’ve had two stories in a row rather obviously trying to re-write plots from the outgoing regime. And even if the specific things they’re doing are fine, there’s a sense of being able to see the strings here.<\/p>\n

X-MEN: HEIR OF APOCALYPSE #4. <\/strong>(Annotations here.)<\/a> This was a patchy miniseries. The basic idea of Apocalypse deciding to withdraw to Arakko but being egotistical enough to think that he has to anoint somebody to shepherd mutantkind on Earth seems reasonable, and it’s done in a way that avoids just resetting him to villain status. The art is very 90s but quite readable, and it has some strong moments – I really like the page of successive teen teams hanging out. The eventual choice of Cypher as the heir works for me; the story makes a convincing argument that Cypher was much more closely bonded to Krakoa than even the other mutants, and is accordingly much more traumatised by its loss. (It’s also much more recent for him, since he was in suspended animation for the whole of “Fall of X”.) And while his redesign doesn’t look great, there’s something in the idea of Cypher as someone both peaceful and very angry, with Bei and Warlock still hanging around as his followers. On the other hand, the actual contest which has provided the A-plot of these four issues feels mostly like busy work that doesn’t have a great deal to do with the outcome; the attempt to tie the final four to the Horsemen in this last issue is too strained; and twelve characters was probably too many to try and juggle. Still, I think the end result has potential.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

X-FORCE #1.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> So if I’m being honest, I found this book a real slog to get through, and I’m not sure why. The premise is reasonable enough: Forge has decided to save the world by building a world-saving machine to tell him what needs to be done. “Random device hands out mission of the week” is basically Exiles<\/em>, and “hero rounds up guest star who he somehow knows is needed for this particular mission” is… well, it’s Secret Defenders<\/em>, but let’s not hold that against it. I’m more sympathetic to the idea where Forge is concerned because there’s an interesting little idea about how far Forge actually understands what he’s doing and how far he’s just placing blind faith in his own powers. I’m a little more sceptical about everyone else being quite so willing to get with him, but perhaps that’s the logic of bringing in Sage, who ostensibly vouches for his scheme while acknowledging to the reader that she doesn’t quite understand Forge either. That’s the dimension that makes this a promising concept to me. And Marcus To’s art is pretty good – I’m always happy to have an X-Force that isn’t going overboard on the grim and gritty, and really, there’s not much grim about this book at all. I’m not convinced that Betsy and (especially) Rachel are in character, though, and when we descend from the high concept to the details there’s something about it that just doesn’t engage me. Maybe it’s a bit too arbitrary, maybe there’s a bit too much hand-waving technobabble. The explanation of how feeding Deadpool to the monster leads to the monster dying is… well, it’s so far removed from making sense that it just isn’t satisfying. If the monster feeds on biomass, why does Deadpool’s cancer stop him counting? Why is the monster just going to stand around and starve for three days instead of wandering off to eat something else? I don’t get it. I kind of want to like this book more – the art’s good, the big ideas are quite interesting to me – but I can’t honestly say that I had much fun reading it.<\/p>\n

HELLVERINE #3.<\/strong> By Benjamin Percy, Julius Ohta, Frank D’Armata and Travis Lanham. This sequel to Benjamin Percy’s Wolverine\/Ghost Rider crossover has turned out to be good fun in a grindhouse sort of way. It’s deadpan silliness, if we’re being honest, but there’s nothing wrong with that as a take on Wolverine. I like the idea of the US military trying to weaponise Hell and screwing it up – it’s a nice classic idea, with General Harms getting fleshed out just enough to take him beyond the generic. To be honest, Daken as a reanimated Ghost Rider is almost relegated to a B-plot, at least up to the cliffhanger. But Percy is writing to his strengths and Julius Ohta’s designs for the General Harms and the Destroyer cyborgs are great.<\/p>\n

MS MARVEL ANNUAL #1.<\/strong> By Iman Vellani, Sabir Pirzada, Giada Belviso, Yen Nitro & Joe Caramagna. This would be the third Ms Marvel Annual<\/em> #1, if you’re wondering. I don’t know why they don’t just stick years on them. I swear they only do it to annoy me. Anyway, does this count as an X-book? It’s not from the X-office but Ms Marvel seems to be an X-books character by default these days. This issue is part of the Infinity Watch<\/em> crossover, which is barely a crossover at all – it picks up on a subplot from several years ago about each of the Infinity Stones having bonded with different obscure characters, and each annual is actually a more or less freestanding story about the title character having an encounter with one of those characters. There doesn’t really seem to be much of a through line beyond using these chapters to reintroduce the admittedly ultra-obscure characters. Ms Marvel gets to meet Multitude, the current holder of the Soul Gem, who debuted in the 2021 Avengers Annual<\/em> and has only appeared once since then (in an issue of Guardians of the Galaxy<\/em>). Kamala stumbles upon him trying to work as a medium in Atlantic City, and the confused rookie helps her out against some of her villains. It’s a perfectly good Ms Marvel story, though it’s fair to say that the best bits are about Kamala and her supporting cast, while Multitude himself seems more like a nice guy than a particularly compelling character.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

X-MEN: FROM THE ASHES INFINITY COMIC #8. By Alex Paknadel, Phillip Sevy, Arthur Hesli & Clayton Cowles. Havok’s demon nurse takes him to Limbo to try and get him healed, but it turns out that the plan is just to do a deal with N’astirh. Fair enough, and it’s all done quite efficiently. I raise […]<\/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-10266","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\/10266","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=10266"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10266\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10267,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10266\/revisions\/10267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}