{"id":10651,"date":"2024-12-27T21:27:06","date_gmt":"2024-12-27T21:27:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10651"},"modified":"2024-12-27T21:27:06","modified_gmt":"2024-12-27T21:27:06","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-23-december-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10651","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 23 December 2024"},"content":{"rendered":"

You’d think Christmas Day might be a quiet one for new releases, but here we are…<\/p>\n

ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #4.<\/strong> By Alex Paknadel, Phillip Sevy, Maichael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. And yes, this came out on Monday, I know. Anyway, the link between the two plot threads is someone who’s been giving shonky cyborg upgrades to low-rent Purifer types, which makes sense. Still, the main interest in this arc lies more in the material about radicalisation than the actual plot, and this issue (unavoidably, for plot reasons) tacks away from that to some interrogation cliches with Sean and some more sentimental stuff with Paige’s brother. All fine as far as it goes, but it’s more on the mechanical side of this story.<\/p>\n

X-MEN #9.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Part 3 of “Raid on Graymalkin”, and I’m kind of fascinatined that both books have wound up doing partial fill-in art on what you’d think would be a priority storyline. Then again, I still see this arc as something of a distraction from the more interesting things going on in both books because – repeat after me – I’m still not sold on the Graymalkin prison as bringing anything new to the table. I guess I’m mildly interested in why Scurvy is on their side, and I’m cerainly interested in Scott’s rejection of Professor X – though I really don’t buy him being willing to leave Xavier in this particular jail. There are a few moments with the two casts meeting, but there are also a lot of characters running around and, aside from the Outliers, seeing them interact with one another isn’t really that much of a novelty.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

EXCEPTIONAL X-MEN #4.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> This is more like it, though – it’s partly a spotlight issue for Trista and her audition for the school play, and partly about Bobby’s clumsy attempts to figure out what Kate doesn’t want anything to do with the X-Men. By X-standards, the stakes are low; the closest thing the story has to a villain is a monster passing through from X-Force<\/em> #5, which gets beaten by Trista alone in three pages. But that’s a good thing – the X-books need a title that feels more grounded in the real world, and it also offers more contrast with the story we’re apparently getting about Kate’s trauma following Gerry Duggan’s X-Men<\/em> run. Carnero’s art brings a lot of charm to a talk-heavy story, and the closing reaction shots do a great job of selling the kids’ reaction to learning that Kate has a body count. The book is<\/em> starting to pile on civilian supporting characters who are all broadly nice, and it could maybe stand to do a little more to distinguish between them all, but this is a good title.<\/p>\n

MYSTIQUE #3.<\/strong> By Declan Shalvey, Matt Hollingsworth & Clayton Cowles. This is a crossover with Sentinels<\/em>, of all things, since it explains the second Magneto from Sentinels<\/em> #3 and picks up the thread about Fabian Cortez’s powers acting differently. It’s a funny place to do a crossover and results in an issue which feels rather less oblique than the first two issues – frankly, it feels a lot like something that was nailed onto the series outline after the fact. It’s still a good looking issue, though, and the purple lighting in the opening scenes is a nice choice – it sets a mood, and cleverly takes the edge off the Sentinel designs so that the characters feel more natural in the context of this book. But it does feel like a detour.<\/p>\n

SABRETOOTH: THE DEAD DON’T TALK #1.<\/strong> By Frank Tieri, Michael Sta. Maria, Dono S\u00e1nchez-Almara & Joe Sabino. I don’t know who was asking for a sequel to the 2020 one-shot Ruins of Ravenscroft: Sabretooth<\/em>, but here it is. Mind you, Sabretooth was only just killed off at the tail end of the Krakoan era, so if you want to do a Sabretooth book right now, a flashback story seems a better option. And this is certainly something different: feeling unappreciated by Mr Sinister at Ravenscroft, Creed quits his henchman job and heads off to appear in a 1909-era crime story. Sure, why not? It’s a blank space in his back story and you can’t say it’s something that the line is already covering. The crime angle itself seems somewhat by the numbers, but it’s a nice looking book which uses violence sparingly enough to keep it effective, and I’m kind of intrigued by a story about a Sabretooth who hasn’t yet quite figured out that being an underling isn’t for him. And relatively straight crime is one of the things that I thought worked better for Frank Tieri on his Wolverine <\/em>run back in the day. Better than I was expecting, to be honest.<\/p>\n

TIMESLIDE #1.<\/strong> By Steve Foxe, Ivan Fiorelli, Frank D’Armata & Joe Caramagna. The annual one-shot comes from the X-office this year, with Bishop and Cable in the lead. Continuity afficionados may wish to note the first return of a character from the White Hot Room, though it’s an alt-future version of Tempus, so it doesn’t really count for much. The rest of the story is a bit of a runaround through history to stop the Children of the Vault from destroying the timeline, and it’s serviceable annual stuff, but I’d probably have matched Bishop and Cable against a different thread instead of retreading the one from their last series. It’s perfectly okay, it’s an easy read and it looks polished, but it’s really just a random annual-type story, serving as a delivery vehicle for the obligatory list of “coming soon” bullet points.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You’d think Christmas Day might be a quiet one for new releases, but here we are… ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #4. By Alex Paknadel, Phillip Sevy, Maichael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. And yes, this came out on Monday, I know. Anyway, the link between the two plot threads is someone who’s been giving shonky cyborg […]<\/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-10651","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\/10651","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=10651"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10651\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10652,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10651\/revisions\/10652"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}