{"id":10346,"date":"2024-08-31T17:38:38","date_gmt":"2024-08-31T16:38:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10346"},"modified":"2024-08-31T17:43:15","modified_gmt":"2024-08-31T16:43:15","slug":"charts-26-august-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10346","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – 26 August 2024"},"content":{"rendered":"

X-MEN: FROM THE ASHES INFINITY COMIC #12.<\/strong> By Alex Paknadel, Phillip Sevy, Arthur Hesli & Clayton Cowles. Some From the Ashes<\/em> arcs have been rather obviously designed to yank a character into a new status quo so that a main line title doesn’t have to waste time on it. The Omega Red arc isn’t one of those, and turns out to be just a nice little story about a violent murderer returning to the miserable town where he grew up. There’s some low-level villainy for him to deal with but it’s more of a character and tone piece than anything else. I’m all for trying to round out Omega Red, who’s a very one-dimensional character with rather convoluted powers – honestly, I’ve never really understood what links the tentacles, the death spores and everything else about him. A perfectly fine little story designed to flesh him out a bit, without actually toning him down too much.<\/p>\n

SAVAGE WOLVERINE INFINITY COMIC #5.<\/strong> By Tom Bloom, Guillermo Sana, Java Tartaglia & Joe Sabino. It’s a middle chapter of an Infinity Comic and so there’s not much to add to what I’ve said before: it’s a small town body horror story, pleasingly low key and well executed. Certainly at the high end of the range for Infinity Comics and worth a look if you have a subscription. (And if you don’t… well, Unlimited is very good value for the archives and for almost the whole Marvel line on a three month delay, but the Infinity Comics exclusives are at best in the “nice to have” category, rather than being a reason to sign up in themselves.)<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

X-MEN #3. <\/strong>(Annotations here.)<\/a> The O*N*E try to raid the Factory and it doesn’t go well. We’re still doing single-issue stories with background elements building towards a bigger picture, but they’re getting a little bit more prominent by this stage. Having read Jed MacKay’s Moon Knight<\/em> and Dr Strange<\/em>, this approach doesn’t come as a surprise to me, and it worked out well on those titles. It is fair to say that we’re devoting the A plot of each issue to fights against comprehensively outpowered bad guys, and I’m not entirely sold on Agent Lundqvist as a rival for Cyclops – he seems like a standard issue government bigot at this point, but we’ll see how it goes. I do like Ryan Stegman’s design for him, though – it’s nice to have a few more normal people in this book for a change. There are some creative bits in the action sequences, and a bit more going on with Scott than you might assume, with his established persona starting to fray a little around the edges. The book is settling in well.<\/p>\n

NYX #2.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Looks like we’re doing the approach of spotlight issues on each character, which is fine, but can be an odd way of building an ensemble cast, since it takes the better part of a year before they actually get around to being an ensemble. Some interesting choices here. If we’re calling the book NYX<\/em> then it makes sense for Laura to be calling back to her roots in that title, and I’m fine with the idea of her instinctively separating herself from the mutant community that she thinks she’s protecting, only joining it as a means to an end. Mojo is a really odd choice of villain for the street level book, but then again he’s being retooled as a more sinister and violent version than we’ve seen in years, and god knows we’ve all seen enough TV parodies to last a lifetime, so by all means let’s find a different angle. Spinning “Mojo gains power from audiences” to “Mojo gains power from a community” makes a kind of sense, even if it’s a bit of a reach for this to be a better option than running his own dimension. Still, maybe he got booted out again. On the whole I think the book gets away with using him, at least in this issue, and Francesco Mortarino makes him look more of a legitimate threat than he has been in years. Plus, it sends the message that NYX<\/em> still gets to have some scale to it. I’m curious to see if the whole storyline can make him work, at least.<\/p>\n

X-FORCE #2.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Mmm. This was more readable than the first issue, but there’s still very little going on here to hold my interest. We’re doing random threat of the month here too, but it feels vastly more arbitrary, and there’s no real sense of any reason for this particular cast to be together. To be fair, I think this is partly the point – Geoffrey Thorne is trying to do something with the idea that Forge’s powers lead everyone to essentially arbitrary things because they to trust in his instincts – but I don’t think it’s translating into a satisfying story. It’s far too “This happened, and then this happened, and then…” The book looks perfectly nice, and there’s a baseline level of competence to the whole thing, but it’s not doing anything to hook me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

X-MEN: FROM THE ASHES INFINITY COMIC #12. By Alex Paknadel, Phillip Sevy, Arthur Hesli & Clayton Cowles. Some From the Ashes arcs have been rather obviously designed to yank a character into a new status quo so that a main line title doesn’t have to waste time on it. The Omega Red arc isn’t one […]<\/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-10346","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\/10346","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=10346"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10346\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10348,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10346\/revisions\/10348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}