{"id":10324,"date":"2024-08-22T20:54:02","date_gmt":"2024-08-22T19:54:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10324"},"modified":"2024-08-22T20:54:02","modified_gmt":"2024-08-22T19:54:02","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-19-august-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10324","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 19 August 2024"},"content":{"rendered":"

X-MEN: FROM THE ASHES INFINITY COMIC #11.<\/strong> By Alex Paknadel, Phillip Sevy, Arthur Hesli & Clayton Cowles. Part 2 of the Omega Red arc, which seems to be mostly concerned with giving the guy a home town and some sort of vaguely normal background. Given the way he’s being used these days, that seems like a worthwhile exercise. There’s a bit of rustic Russian cliche going on here, and maybe it takes itself a little seriously, but on the whole I’m enjoying the way that this story is letting Omega Red do something more grounded and low key than we’re used to seeing with him.<\/p>\n

SAVAGE WOLVERINE INFINITY COMIC<\/strong> #4. <\/strong>By Tom Bloom, Guillermo Sanna, Java Tartaglia & Joe Sabino. Another depressed small town arc, and this one is turning out quite well too. Logan finds himself in a town where somebody’s been using anti-mutant paranoia to “innoculate” the locals with a supposed cure, with predictably disastrous results. The weird body horror designs are well done and the take on Logan is nicely understated. Okay, there’s an action sequence with an overturning car that doesn’t work at all – I honestly can’t figure out what’s supposed to make it flip. But that aside, this arc is much better than I expected from a Wolverine Infinity Comic.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

PHOENIX #2.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Hmm. I generally liked the first issue, but I’m rather less convinced by this one. The art is generally fine, aside from a burial sequence which looks very odd indeed – are those rocks floating or something? But the book’s take on Corsair is genuinely baffling. I can see how you might look at the “space pirate” angle and decide to play him up as a real pirate rather than some sort of genre swashbuckler, which is what he’s generally been. What you really can’t do and get away with it is suddenly decide that the X-Men don’t trust him an inch, and that doing something noble and heroic is wildly out of character for him. Literally decades of stories say otherwise.<\/p>\n

The other thing with this issue is that it doesn’t make a great case for Jean Grey as a compelling lead. With Corsair at least as a strongly defined rogue, and some genuinely intriguing subplot build with Perrikus and Adina, Jean is in serious danger of being the least interesting character in her own book. I am<\/em> interested in where the book is going with Perrikus, though, who was a one-dimensional bruiser in his previous appearances, but seems to be developing a more philosophical bent here. You could argue that he’s as out of character as Corsair, but the difference is that Perrikus only has a handful of previous appearances, and he spends most of them being obsessed with revenge on Thor – it’s much easier to persuade me that he has other sides we haven’t seen before.<\/p>\n

WOLVERINE: REVENGE #1.<\/strong> By Jonathan Hickman, Greg Capullo, Tim Townsend, FCO Plascencia & Cory Petit. Well, this isn’t what I expected from a Jonathan Hickman Wolverine story. There’s not a diagram or a spreadsheet in sight. It’s also very obviously out of continuity, which I don’t remember Marvel mentioning in the solicitations. But whatever. I never thought the book would have any wider impact.<\/p>\n

This is, in fact, basically Jonathan Hickman doing an action story. An electromagnetic pulse has wiped out all technology in the northern hemisphere. Millions of people are dead. (And if that’s not non-canon enough for you, the original Nick Fury is running SHIELD.) The Russians have the only working power source in the northern hemisphere, so America needs it in order to survive. Wolverine, Captain America and the Winter Soldier try to get it back, facing a mixture of villains and Colossus, who points out that America has no greater claim on the thing than Russia does. Anyway, it’s a heist\/action issue, simple as that. I wouldn’t think of this as playing to Jonathan Hickman’s strengths, but it’s actually very good. It gives Capullo plenty to do, the set pieces are nicely set up without being overly elaborate, and it’s just a well told, well paced affair. Not what I was expecting at all, but I liked it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

X-MEN: FROM THE ASHES INFINITY COMIC #11. By Alex Paknadel, Phillip Sevy, Arthur Hesli & Clayton Cowles. Part 2 of the Omega Red arc, which seems to be mostly concerned with giving the guy a home town and some sort of vaguely normal background. Given the way he’s being used these days, that seems like […]<\/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-10324","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\/10324","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=10324"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10324\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10325,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10324\/revisions\/10325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}