{"id":10718,"date":"2025-01-18T21:27:06","date_gmt":"2025-01-18T21:27:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10718"},"modified":"2025-01-18T21:27:06","modified_gmt":"2025-01-18T21:27:06","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-13-january-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10718","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 13 January 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"

EXCEPTIONAL X-MEN #5.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> No Infinity Comic this week, with no explanation that I’m aware of. But apparently it hasn’t been cancelled, so I guess it’s just running late. That still leaves three ongoings and a new miniseries, though.<\/p>\n

Exceptional X-Men<\/em> has been a consistently good book for the most part, but it’s also an almost entirely character driven one – five issues in, the closest thing it’s had to any bad guys is a random monster on loan from X-Force<\/em> for two pages, and a few low-level bigots. Obviously the Verate plotline is setting up to be the first real villains of the series, but it’s still taking its time getting there. That’s all for the best in terms of the quality of the series, and hopefully the audience is fine with it getting that time. It’s not an X-Men book – it has more in common with very early New Mutants<\/em> – but the new characters are all strong creations and Eve Ewing’s efforts to extricate Kate Pryde from the ill-advised Shadowkat storyline is largely successful. There’s two rather baffling pages with specific Orchis characters she never interacted with, I grant you, and I don’t know what they were thinking there. But the character material works. Carmen Carnero is doing a great job with the personality of the new mutants, and the closing panel with Ellie trying the Verate app is beautifully done.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

STORM #4.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> I haven’t much cared for this series, but this issue works better than any of the previous ones. It just feels minimalist, where earlier issues felt skeletal. And the two scenes with Storm and her father are the best thing the book has had so far, since they actually feel like a believable relationship. Other than that… well, it’s improving, and the art remains beautiful, but I can’t say the actual story is doing anything to hold my interest. Storm and Doom in conversation over dinner has been done before, and better, in X-Men Red<\/em> – and it really doesn’t come down to all that much beyond Doom monologuing a trailer for a crossover. And a cosmic storyline doesn’t interest me at all; we already have Phoenix<\/em> for that, and it doesn’t seem like a strong direction for Storm. Still, the issue is a step in the right direction.<\/p>\n

LAURA KINNEY: WOLVERINE #2.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Well, Laura, Elektra and Luke Cage are in this book, and I have issues with the characterisation of all three of them. I can just about rationalise that Elektra and Luke are supposed to have some plan that Laura isn’t meant to know about, and that she’s failing to pick up on it, and give the book the benefit of the doubt on those two for now. But Erica Shultz’s take on Laura feels really off to me. Okay, she gets angry about people using mutants as weapons, fair enough. But Laura’s thing isn’t that she’s wildly impulsive and needs to be steered by calmer heads like Elektra – her traditional problem is that she lacks a frame of reference for normal life and normal relationships. The whole interaction between Laura and Elektra in this book feels alarmingly like a total misreading of Laura’s character, and hopefully the next issue can prove me wrong on that. Nice art, though – Giada Belviso does some satisfyingly kinetic and angular action sequences.<\/p>\n

ROGUE: SAVAGE LAND #1.<\/strong> By Tim Seeley, Zulema Scotto Lavina, Rachelle Rosenberg & Ariana Maher. So we’re still doing continuity implant minis set in the past, but without the focus on the original creative teams. This is “What was Rogue doing in the Savage Land between Uncanny X-Men<\/em> #269 and #275?”, basically – the period when she was hanging around with Magneto. To be fair to Kaare Andrews, his cover is a pretty straight pastiche of the art from the period, though in the context of 2025 the effect is to make the book look like\u00a0Rogue: Tits in the Jungle<\/em>. Lavina’s interior art is a bit more restrained, and the story itself seems to be basically an expansion on an underdeveloped plot thread from 1990 – Rogue tries to fend for herself in the Savage Land while she waits for the X-Men to come for her, and winds up dragging Magneto (in one of his isolationist moods) into a Savage Land conflict that he couldn’t care less about. It’s completely fine, if harmlessly unnecessary.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

EXCEPTIONAL X-MEN #5. (Annotations here.) No Infinity Comic this week, with no explanation that I’m aware of. But apparently it hasn’t been cancelled, so I guess it’s just running late. That still leaves three ongoings and a new miniseries, though. Exceptional X-Men has been a consistently good book for the most part, but it’s also […]<\/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-10718","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\/10718","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=10718"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10718\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10719,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10718\/revisions\/10719"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}