{"id":10450,"date":"2024-10-12T16:35:00","date_gmt":"2024-10-12T15:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10450"},"modified":"2024-10-12T16:35:00","modified_gmt":"2024-10-12T15:35:00","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-7-october-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10450","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 7 October 2024"},"content":{"rendered":"

X-MEN: FROM THE ASHES INFINITY COMIC #13.<\/strong> By Alex Paknadel, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. This is the end of the Beast\/Blankslate arc, which feels a bit too high concept and abstract to quite work. There’s a reasonable idea in here: Beast is worried that something about his powers inevitably drives him mad, Blankslate copies his powers and seems to immediately go down that line. But ultimately Beast gets reassured that apparently he does have self-control. But if the Beast’s concern is that he’s going to go mad in the long run, what does a couple of weeks with Blankslate actually tell anyone? And more to the point, Blankslate never feels like a functioning character – the very nature of the concept almost prevents him from being one. So it’s a hard story to really connect with. But it’s a nice idea in theory.<\/p>\n

EXCEPTIONAL X-MEN<\/strong> #2. <\/strong>(Annotations here.)<\/a> We’re still at the stage of introducing the cast, but this seems like a fun series so far. Thao and Alex get their debuts here, and while they’re certainly recognisable types, there’s enough in the details to make them feel more fully thought out than that. And the cast dynamics seem promising: Trista wants mutant friends, Thao wants to be a mutant activist, Kate and Alex would both quite like a normal life, and who knows yet what Emma’s up to. It’s clearly a character-driven book, but the art can carry it, and I’m happy to see a bit more mundanity in the X-books, both here and in NYX<\/em>. Okay, it stretches credibility at times – how many newly activated teen mutants can Kate stumble into while wandering around Chicago? Does Thao, the wannabe activist, really not recognise Kate Pryde even after hearing her name and seeing her powers? But I can let that sort of thing slide when I buy the characters.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

X-FORCE #4.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> I’m still not sold on this book. The idea that everyone is blindly doing whatever they’re told to be a device that Forge built, without anyone being quite sure why, seems somewhat interesting. But in practice it winds up feeling very arbitrary. It becomes “this happened, then this happened, then this happened…” Having said that, we’re four issues in and we’ve already reached the last of the locations that Forge learned about in issue #1, which suggests the book might be on the verge of moving into a second act, and if so, maybe it’ll turn out that X-Force <\/em>is simply taking a little time to get going. Forge’s weird paranoia and the mystery of who or what Tank is do have a bit of intrigue for me, and the art’s great. But there isn’t a compelling through line to hold it all together right now.<\/p>\n

PHOENIX #4.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> I thought the first issue of this series seemed fairly promising but I’m starting get the feeling that it doesn’t quite work. This issue brings in Gorr the God-Butcher, a Jason Aaron Thor<\/em> villain, to fight Phoenix in order that Perrikus can make a point. But it’s hard to say what’s really at stake with any of this. Part of the problem is that Jean was never really designed to be a solo character – her established role down the years has been “heart of the team” or some variant on that, and while a solo book might have been an opportunity to explore other sides of her, that hasn’t really come through. But another side is that Gorr and Adani are both characters designed for stories about organised religion, or at least stories about the frustration of the little people who are beneath the notice of the gods. And Jean isn’t acting like a god, doesn’t have worshippers, doesn’t want them, agrees that the ordinary folk matters, so… what’s the argument about, exactly? Is the point that we’re doing a Thor<\/em> story but replacing Thor with a character who doesn’t regard herself as a god at all? Where does that go? I don’t really get where any of this is heading right now.<\/p>\n

VENOM WAR: WOLVERINE #2.<\/strong> By Tim Seeley, Tony Fleecs, Kev Walker, Java Tartaglia & Cory Petit. I’m not thrilled that we’re getting such a flood of Wolverine comics again – the Krakoa era was actually quite disciplined i how it used him – but this is surprisingly decent for an event tie-in. It’s a story about a violent father returning to threaten his family, which could really have been done without any\u00a0Venom War\u00a0<\/em>elements at all. But it uses the crossover as a shorthand way to give the guy some powers and get some more visual interest into the story, and fair enough. Kev Walker’s symbiote art is rather neat, too. There’s a clunky beat where the rest of the X-Men show up, which feels a bit off, but that aside, this is actually pretty good.<\/p>\n

SENTINELS #1.<\/strong> By Alex Paknadel, Justin Mason, Federico Blee & Travis Lanham. This is a five-issue miniseries, but it seems to be reasonably closely connected to Uncanny X-Men<\/em>. The title team are actually a bunch of mercenaries powered up with nanotech, who seem to have been responsible for rounding up some of the mutants in the Graymalkin prison. It’s not exactly a villain book – the title characters come across more as professionals who didn’t quite realise what they signed up for, and aren’t entirely comfortable with it. The first issue sends them after Omega Red, who’s a more or less legitimate target, what with him being a seria killer and all. But while the Sentinels aren’t thrilled about the treatment of the mutants, they’re also well aware that they’re the cannon fodder in this story. Giving them all variants of the Sentinel design may have been a mis-step, since they all look terribly similar, and it’s not really a great design for human-size characters. But the concept has something.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

X-MEN: FROM THE ASHES INFINITY COMIC #13. By Alex Paknadel, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. This is the end of the Beast\/Blankslate arc, which feels a bit too high concept and abstract to quite work. There’s a reasonable idea in here: Beast is worried that something about his powers inevitably drives him mad, […]<\/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-10450","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\/10450","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=10450"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10450\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10452,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10450\/revisions\/10452"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}