{"id":10387,"date":"2024-09-20T20:00:43","date_gmt":"2024-09-20T19:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10387"},"modified":"2024-09-20T20:00:43","modified_gmt":"2024-09-20T19:00:43","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-16-september-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10387","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 16 September 2024"},"content":{"rendered":"

X-MEN: FROM THE ASHES INFINITY COMIC #15.<\/strong> By Alex Paknadel, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. This is the first part of a Beast story, and it spends much of the time setting up its take on the character. We’re directly reminded that this guy is in fact the last surviving Beast clone with copied memories – something that X-Men<\/em> itself has largely danced around, for perfectly good reasons, since it hasn’t been relevant yet. In this series, it does matter, because it goes to the fact that Hank has skipped all the decades of continuity in which he became evil or showed up as an evil version from another universe. Reasonably but predictably, Hank is struggling with the idea that this might be an inevitable direction for his character. Perhaps more interesting is the idea that he doesn’t even feel able to trust his own reasoning to avoid that direction, because his evil versions were all hyper-rational anyway. Having set up all that quite nicely, the story then packs Beast off to rescue a new mutant (everyone else is busy), and in true Silver Age style it turns out to be a villain. That side of things is a bit more sketchy so far, but it seems like a story that should be able to come together.<\/p>\n

SAVAGE WOLVERINE INFINITY COMIC #8.<\/strong> By Tom Bloom, Guillermo Sanna, Java Targalia & Joe Sabino. End of the arc and, yeah, this was actually good. The story is perfectly fine, but Sanna’s angular and brutal art really is the draw for this series. I’m not 100% sure about the final reveal, but on balance I think it works – and I quite like the idea that the mutants who did<\/em> skip out going to Krakoa might feel a bit uncomfortable about looking to the big name characters for help now. Anyway, if you’ve got an Unlimited subscription and you’re not overdosing on Wolverine already, this one is worth your time.<\/p>\n

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X-MEN #4.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Jed MacKay’s X-Men<\/em> feels like it’s still at the phase of getting its pieces into place with a series of single-issue stories, while hinting at a bigger picture to come. That bigger picture is obviously about the new mutants suddenly emerging in adulthood, but instead of getting back to 3K from the first issue, this story brings in Trevor Fitzroy and the Sugar Man as more players. I’ve seen this sort of approach work for MacKay’s other books, and I’m sure it’ll come together here. Mind you, this is an issue that really does need some faith in the bigger picture, since as a single-issue story it boils down to “Trevor Fitzroy is hunting mutants on social media” and a fight. I’ve never really been convinced by villains whose schtick is livestreaming murder – I just don’t buy that there’s enough of an audience to make it worthwhile. Most people want to rationalise that they’re the good guys. Still, it does give Fitzroy a clearly defined personality, which is all for the best, and guest artist Netho Diaz gives him a nicely pitched level of flamboyance. There’s some mileage too in playing him against the comparatively sullen Magik as rival teleporters, although I’m not sure those two aspects of the issue mesh as well as you’d think.<\/p>\n

X-FACTOR #2.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Polaris tries to stage an intervention to drag Havok away from the misconceived new X-Factor, which seems sensible enough. And at first this looks like Polaris is going to be the mouthpiece for Mark Russell to explain to Havok why he’s wrong, more or less by reading out last issue’s editorial. Except as things turn out, it looks a lot like Polaris has joined some sort of paramilitary cult, and that the bits Russell agrees with are maybe just the pitch. I’m intrigued by where he’s going with this, because the book certainly seemed to be setting up a story about X-Factor being suckers who signed up for the team out of desperation to be loved, and Polaris being the voice of reason. By the end of this issue, Havok feels like he might be one of those suckers, but Polaris seems to be losing the plot just as much, while the rest of the X-Factor members – all still relatively peripheral – seem to have a fairly sensible attitude to the whole thing. This issue is also a lot less open to comparison with X-Statix<\/em>, which is for the best, though there’s still a sort of ironic distance to the whole thing. Still, plenty of interesting things here.<\/p>\n

WOLVERINE: DEEP CUT #3.<\/strong> By Chris Claremont, Edgar Salazar, Carlos Lopez & Travis Lanham. Well, that’s an issue-long fight scene. Edgar Salazar does an extended sequence with Wolverine affected by Scrambler – you might recall that Claremont has just randomly retconned what Scrambler does – and that’s visually memorable. Beyond that… it really is just a fight scene that continues from last issue and continues into the next one, and I’m not convinced that’s what people are looking for in a Claremont nostalgia mini.<\/p>\n

DAZZLER #1.<\/strong> By Jason Loo, Rafael Loureiro, Java Tartaglia & Ariana Maher. File under “not subtle.” Dazzler has a hit album and is going on tour as an icon of mutant pride. There’s a bit of fretting about whether Shark-Girl on drums will scare the humans (um, have we all forgotten that she can change back to human form at will?), there’s a random villain who attacks during the show, and there’s a song called “Out and Proud”. As a one-shot, it’d be fine, I guess? As issue #1 of a miniseries, I’m kind of baffled. It doesn’t seem to set up anything, and if anything it felt like the point was being stretched out even at issue length. There’s a certain cheerleading charm to it, but four issues seems like overkill.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

X-MEN: FROM THE ASHES INFINITY COMIC #15. By Alex Paknadel, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. This is the first part of a Beast story, and it spends much of the time setting up its take on the character. We’re directly reminded that this guy is in fact the last surviving Beast clone with […]<\/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-10387","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\/10387","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=10387"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10387\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10388,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10387\/revisions\/10388"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10387"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10387"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}