{"id":10372,"date":"2024-09-14T17:06:01","date_gmt":"2024-09-14T16:06:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10372"},"modified":"2024-09-14T17:06:01","modified_gmt":"2024-09-14T16:06:01","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-9-september-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10372","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 9 September 2024"},"content":{"rendered":"

X-MEN: FROM THE ASHES INFINITY COMIC #14.<\/strong> By Alex Paknadel, Di\u00f3genes Neves, Arthur Hesli & Clayton Cowles. Just a two-parter, this one – the first time the series has broken from a three-part format. It’s pretty much what you’d expect from the first part, which is to say, it’s a vignette designed to remind Magneto that even without his powers he can still help by providing direction. Given the limits of that sort of story, it’s quite well done and avoids feeling too trite, even if it has to reach for some sense of resolution without actually advancing very much.<\/p>\n

UNCANNY X-MEN #2.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Two issues in, I have mixed feelings about this title. Having Rogue act as if there isn’t another X-Men book out there might be intended to suggest that she doesn’t regard Scott’s team as real X-Men, as I suggested in the annotations… but in the absence of any hints at a reason for that, it feels<\/em> more like a weird discontinuity than an intentional plot. And I’m entirely un-sold on Corina Ellis as a main villain, since she’s both one-dimensional thus far and way, way too close to Orchis, a villain type that’s been beaten into the ground for most of the last year. Quite a few of these From the Ashes books read as if the new office wasn’t expecting the “Fall of X” period to be anywhere near as bleak and fascistic as it was, and thought they were taking over just after Krakoa had fallen; it’s a pervasive problem across the line. On the other hand, the Outliers all seem like promising new characters, and the art is consistently beautiful – David Marquez adds a ton of depth and emotion to the cast.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

WOLVERINE #1.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Saladin Ahmed and Mart\u00edn C\u00f3ccolo’s run gets off to a very back to basics start, complete with Logan running around naked in the wilderness with wolves, Nightcrawler fretting about his soul, and a villain showing up for revenge. For the most part, it’s an issue devoted to restating the premise rather than setting out an immediately gripping high concept. That said, it restates the Wolverine baseline very solidly, and there’s no harm in doing that from time to time. More to the point, and more encouragingly, it mostly gets that side of things out of the way in the course of its first issue, on the way to setting up a rather odder plot about some sort of self-aware metal that hates adamantium. Cyber seems to have been selected as the first issue villain mainly so that he can feed into that storyline. That does feel like something new, and Ahmed’s other work has been strong enough to give him the benefit of the doubt that this is heading somewhere interesting.<\/p>\n

VENOM WAR: WOLVERINE #1.<\/strong> By Tim Seeley, Tony Fleecs, Kev Walker, Java Tartaglia & Cory Petit. Are we going back to the days of a random Wolverine tie in for every event going, then? Hope not. This is the kind of commission that I take an instinctive dislike to, simply because it feels like it exists for mainly spreadsheet-related purposes. That said, it seems to be doing its best to tell an actual story in the margins of the Venom War<\/em> crossover: the idea seems to be that Logan has encountered this family before and dealt with the abusive father in his inimitable style, but with symbiotes everywhere, the guy has a chance of putting up more of a fight in the rematch. So at root, it seems to want to be a relatively normal Wolverine story where Venom War<\/em> levels the playing field for a villain who’d normally be entirely outclassed, and that’s not a bad way of using the gimmick. Walker is a great choice of artist, with a cartooning quality that really suits the symbiotes.<\/p>\n

SAVAGE WOLVERINE INFINITY COMIC #7.<\/strong> By Tom Bloom, Guillermo Sanna, Java Targalia & Joe Sabino. Fight chapter, and quite a brutal one at that. Marvel Unlimited has odd policies on this sort of thing – it doesn’t cover the Max books or “red band” variants, but it does cover main line Marvel titles that are graphically violent. It doesn’t make an awful lot of sense. Anyway, it’s a fight scene, but very effectively done, and Sanna’s bold angles and shapes suit this format very well.<\/p>\n

LOVABLE LOCKHEED INFINITY COMIC #1-2.<\/strong> By Nathan Stockman and Tr\u00edona Farrell. I’m not going to review three Infinity Comics a week and this isn’t the sort of series where you can really find anything new to say about individual issues, but I ought to at least acknowledge its existence. Marvel Unlimited runs quite a few silent gag strips, which tend to have lovely art and no jokes. This is in a similar ballpark – it’s Lockheed as the X-Men’s house pet somewhere just after he arrives in Uncanny<\/em> #168. It’s simple but it has better ideas than a lot of these books, and the art is genuinely adorable. But barring some surprise developments, I don’t plan to come back to it every week just to say that again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

X-MEN: FROM THE ASHES INFINITY COMIC #14. By Alex Paknadel, Di\u00f3genes Neves, Arthur Hesli & Clayton Cowles. Just a two-parter, this one – the first time the series has broken from a three-part format. It’s pretty much what you’d expect from the first part, which is to say, it’s a vignette designed to remind Magneto […]<\/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-10372","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\/10372","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=10372"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10372\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10373,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10372\/revisions\/10373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}