{"id":10554,"date":"2024-11-24T14:38:13","date_gmt":"2024-11-24T14:38:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10554"},"modified":"2024-11-24T14:38:13","modified_gmt":"2024-11-24T14:38:13","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-18-november-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10554","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 18 November 2024"},"content":{"rendered":"

X-MEN: FROM THE ASHES INFINITY COMIC #24.<\/strong> By Tim Seeley, Eric Koda, KJ D\u00edaz & Clayton Cowles. Well, we’ve done the Thanksgiving stuff, so it’s time for the plot. There’s a reason of sorts for the Bohusk family to show up at the Factory without anyone expecting them, though it doesn’t exactly work. One of the kids is seriously ill, and the Beast is meant to be finding them a solution. But it turns out that conversation was back on Krakoa, and the current version of the Beast doesn’t know anything about it. Now, on a mechanical level, this doesn’t really work – what, the Beast said “drop by wherever I happen to be at Thanksgiving next year”? And if you stop to think about it, would that version of the Beast have actually done anything about it anyway, or would he just have been fobbing Beak off? But even so, it’s a good moment as Beast tries to bluff his way through the conversation and the penny drops for Beak that nobody’s been looking at this problem at all. That works, and Koda’s art really sells Beak as a beleaguered everyman.<\/p>\n

EXCEPTIONAL X-MEN #3. <\/strong>(Annotations here.)<\/a> You might question billing the trainee book as an X-Men title, but the comic itself is working. Okay, yes, there are a few suggestions around the edges here that Eve Ewing has some odd ideas about the extent of Kate and Emma’s early relationship, and the kids are remarkably relaxed about mind control… but the three new mutants are well defined characters, with Carmen Carnero’s art really helping to get their personalities across through their body language. And we have a distinct hook on the trainee book, with Kate wanting to help them to live in the normal world, Emma wanting to draw them into the X-Men’s orbit, and the kids having their own views on matters. It’s basically a character driven title relying on the regular cast for conflict, but it’s making that work. One of the successes of the “From the Ashes” period.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

WOLVERINE #3. <\/strong>(Annotations here.)<\/a> Back to basics can be riskier than you might expect, at least from the standpoint of longtime readers – you need to restate the themes from time to time, but at the same time, what, this again? Wolverine<\/em> is getting away with it, though, because even if Saladin Ahmed is playing the hits of Wolverine doing hunter and hunted things in the wilderness, he’s hitting the details. I like the shift of emphasis away from Wolverine being unable to control his anger and towards him being a creature of instinct, which seems easier to fit with the way he’s developed over the years. C\u00f3ccolo’s designs for the Department H soldiers are neat, and the subplot about Cyber and his adamantine points to something less well trodden coming in future issues. Nothing complex, but it’s playing the hits successfully.<\/p>\n

PHOENIX #5.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Hmm. The cosmic stuff isn’t my thing, but I can see why you’d go in that direction with this character. It’s the only real option for her. Part of the direction here seems to be: does she ascend to become a cosmic being or does she try to hold on to her humanity? That seems reasonable enough as far as it goes. The details, I’m less convinced by. If you want me to buy the rulers of the galaxy handing everything over to Thanos, you’re going to have to work a lot harder than this. And I’m not convinced you can just blithely assert that Jean can control the Phoenix power when, you know, the whole iconic status of the thing rests on the Dark Phoenix Saga. Maybe you could argue that the lesson of the Dark Phoenix Saga is that things go wrong when the Phoenix tries to be human, and so Jean needs to surrender her humanity for the good of all, but… that’s not really the story we seem to be doing. Equally, I don’t buy a fight with Gorr as something that has that much impact on the Galactic Council – isn’t the bigger point here that no matter what she does, they don’t trust her because they’ve seen Dark Phoenix? The general idea of all this seems sound, but the specifics are starting to lose me.<\/p>\n

STORM #2. <\/strong>(Annotations here.)<\/a> This isn’t working. It’s beautiful – I could happily read Lucas Werneck’s scenes of animals being fed all day – but there are some weird writing choices in here. You’d think we’d be setting up the premise of Storm as a solo character, instead of doing a reactive story where she gets radiation poisoning. But given that that’s where we’re going, why is a character based in Atlanta (who isn’t well) randomly fighting pirates in Nigeria? How do we jump from “bit of a cough” to “six hours to live”? The hidden superhero hospital is a nice enough idea, as an extension of Night Nurse’s clinic, but what’s the point of having the doctor hate the X-Men for not contributing to his budget and then resolving the whole thing in one scene? The story doesn’t even make clear whether the X-Men knew about the hospital, or (if they did) why they didn’t contribute. And as in the first issue, there’s a dearth of actual characters as opposed to bit parts who move the plot along. It’s all weirdly disconnected, feeling both rushed and strangely empty.<\/p>\n

SENTINELS #2.<\/strong> By Alex Paknadel, Justin Mason, Federico Blee & Travis Lanham. Not bad at all. I’m not sure about the way it uses Sebastian Shaw, and he doesn’t normally balloon with muscles when he gets powered up. But there’s something quite charming about the roughness of the art, which also takes the edge off what could otherwise be bland character designs for the cyborg Sentinels themselves. And the book is successfully pitching the idea that the Sentinels are sympathetic enough people who’ve stumbled into this for various reasons. Poor Lockstep seems like a basically nice guy who can see that there are problems with the whole set-up but, hey, they’re hunting down actual villains, aren’t they? It’s likely to get lost in the shuffle, not least when it ships in a five-book week, but it’s quite decent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

X-MEN: FROM THE ASHES INFINITY COMIC #24. By Tim Seeley, Eric Koda, KJ D\u00edaz & Clayton Cowles. Well, we’ve done the Thanksgiving stuff, so it’s time for the plot. There’s a reason of sorts for the Bohusk family to show up at the Factory without anyone expecting them, though it doesn’t exactly work. One of […]<\/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-10554","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\/10554","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=10554"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10554\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10555,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10554\/revisions\/10555"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}