{"id":10518,"date":"2024-11-10T10:17:44","date_gmt":"2024-11-10T10:17:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10518"},"modified":"2024-11-10T10:17:44","modified_gmt":"2024-11-10T10:17:44","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-4-november-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10518","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 4 November 2024"},"content":{"rendered":"

X-MEN: FROM THE ASHES INFINITY COMIC #22.<\/strong> By Tim Seeley, Eric Koda, Arthur Hesli & Clayton Cowles. Hey, that’s not the usual creative team for this book! I’m assuming this is the first half of a Thanksgiving two-parter, since it’s a slice-of-life story about Beak and Salvadore taking their kids to Alaska to visit the family, with Beak making up stories to entertain them, and a grumpy racist woman being in the next seat on the plane. The art gets across nicely the idea of these guys as low-level but extremely visible mutants who are just living in the ordinary world, and Beak trying (mostly successfully) to shield the kids from the bad stuff. Now, for obvious reasons, this might not be the best week to do a “normal America where minorities can just get on with life albeit with a certain degree of aggravation” story. It does feel a little bit… quaint, at the very least. Although come to think of it, unless we’re going back to the Orchis well very<\/em> soon, Trump’s America will inevitably be better for mutants than Biden’s, which, um… okay. Anyway, I’m not going to hold all that against the story itself, which is really quite sweet.<\/p>\n

X-MEN #7.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Continuing to bring the plot threads together, as we find out what the “Iron Night” actually was – basically, Cyclops and Magneto saved the town from a Wild Sentinel. And we get some movement towards explaining why Magneto is in a wheelchair. But are we really going with the idea that Krakoan resurrection could be the cause of his problems? We’re apparently meant to take it seriously, but I figure it’s almost certainly misdirection. It would affect way too many mutants, and it would screw up the idea of the Krakoans heading off into the White Hot Room to live in post-human paradise. But it makes sense for the characters to suspect<\/em> it, so I’m fine with teasing it. If I was taking it more at face value, I’d have more of an issue with it. We also have the local girl testing as a non-mutant when she apparently is, and 3K messing around with mutant powers as part of the plot, and I don’t for a moment believe that the Sentinel really just shows up randomly… No, this all feels like Jed MacKay is still patiently getting his elements into place and delivering some solid character work in the meantime, which has tended to be his style on other ongoings. Guest artist Netho Diaz remains a good fit with Ryan Stegman, and seems like a smart choice.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

X-FORCE #5.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> This isn’t doing much for me. There’s a core idea in here that I quite like: Forge’s powers give him a way to achieve his desired goal, but he doesn’t know how<\/em> it’ll work unless he can work it out after the fact, and so he doesn’t know what the cost might be. Forge sees that as an acceptable risk even though it gets Surge killed, at least when the “problem” is world-threatening; Sage doesn’t, presumably because it implies that he didn’t give enough thought to framing the problem. That’s all fine, and it’s certainly a nice looking book. But it feels too early to kill off Surge, who hasn’t really done much in this book to make her more than merely Nice. And way too much of the book’s plot still feels random. Why Nuklo? Why the Avengers from an early 1990s New Warriors<\/em> story? None of this feels like it has much to do with anything in particular, especially that core idea I mentioned – except perhaps in the sense that it matches the arbitrariness of Forge’s powers. And maybe that is the idea – that the characters themselves don’t know why they’re doing this – but it’s very difficult to build a working story around that sort of lack of agency.<\/p>\n

X-FACTOR #4.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> This isn’t really working either, is it? I’m mildly<\/em> interested in the X-Term storyline – are they just a bunch of mercenaries with pretensions to a higher cause, or are they working as mercenaries to get themselves into positions of influence? But otherwise, this book continues to suffer from tone clashes. It isn’t funny enough to work as a comedy, but it has some broad comedic elements that stop it from quite functioning as a serious book either. Even aside from that, the underground rescue mission in this issue is pretty underwhelming, and I’m still not sure I really understand the mechanics of what the final crisis is or how the team escape. So it all falls a bit flat on the page. It’s another title where you can see in theory what it’s trying to do, but it just isn’t coming together.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

X-MEN: FROM THE ASHES INFINITY COMIC #22. By Tim Seeley, Eric Koda, Arthur Hesli & Clayton Cowles. Hey, that’s not the usual creative team for this book! I’m assuming this is the first half of a Thanksgiving two-parter, since it’s a slice-of-life story about Beak and Salvadore taking their kids to Alaska to visit the […]<\/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,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10518","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\/10518","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=10518"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10518\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10522,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10518\/revisions\/10522"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}