{"id":10757,"date":"2025-01-31T22:17:38","date_gmt":"2025-01-31T22:17:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10757"},"modified":"2025-01-31T22:17:38","modified_gmt":"2025-01-31T22:17:38","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-27-january-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10757","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 27 January 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"

ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #8.<\/strong> By Tim Seeley, Edoardo Audino, KJ D\u00edaz & Clayton Cowles. Hmm… I have no trouble buying the idea that Captain America thinks Black Tom Cassidy is still a villain. After all, he was a behind the scenes member of X-Force. I have a bit more trouble with the idea that Cap thinks the Juggernaut is still a villain, when he’s a full fledged public member of the X-Men. That said, I do quite like the way Seeley writes Cap with calmly reasonable conviction even when he’s totally wrong – it’s quite fun seeing his voice of reason routine deployed at the wrong target – and there’s some really nice art on this, particularly with Cap’s bike stunts.<\/p>\n

X-MEN #10.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Basically an issue of Cyclops staring down the awful Agent Lundqvist, who’s getting more plausible with every passing day as American politics catches up with him. MacKay does this scene very well, I think – the point of having Cyclops cite things like the Hague Invasion Act is not to align him with the right, but to have him frame his point in terms of Lundqvist’s worldview. Not just to make sure the dimwit actually understands it, but because his whole message is “the US government behaves exactly like me all the time, so stop your whining”. It’s also a post-Krakoan Cyclops who’s given up on trying to be friends with the authorities and is openly just trying to keep them off his back by threatening mutual destruction – rather than going back to the outright revolutionary angle that never quite worked under Bendis. I think it’s a good approach, and Netho Diaz gets Lundqvist’s increasing loss of composure rather well.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the Hellions are back, as someone’s been rifling through the big book of characters who couldn’t even find their way into a crowd scene in Krakoa – King Bedlam? Locus<\/em>? But that’s probably smart too, since you don’t want everything to be defined by the contrast with how the characters lived in Krakoa. So there’s an upside to using characters who don’t have much Krakoan baggage.<\/p>\n

PSYLOCKE #3.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Not bad at all, but we’re very much in middle chapter territory here. What it does well is Psylocke’s relationship with Greycrow and the tension with Shinobi – and it continues to make Psylocke feel like a viable solo lead in a way she hasn’t before. I’m not so sure about the way it build up new villain Ty Haniver. He doesn’t seem to have any back story with Psylocke, unless we’re meant to take the butterfly motif as a hint, so it’s not at all clear yet what he’s after or what the threat is. He’s represented mainly by his weird cyborg animal creations, which seem like intriguingly wonky designs… but the book also seems to be trying to keep them obscured or on the margins until the cliffhanger. I can’t understand why you’d do that, when their oddity is the main thing that’s making him more than a generic villain during his build up, but the layout of the cave fight is just baffling if it’s not deliberate. One way or the other, there are some very strange choices being made with them.<\/p>\n

SABRETOOTH: THE DEAD DON’T TALK #2.<\/strong> By Frank Tieri, Michael Sta. Maria, Dono S\u00e1nchez-Almara & Joe Sabino. It’s Sabretooth as a New York gangland enforcer in 1909, except the street gangs are a mixture of regular ones and proto-supervillains. That’s it, that’s the book. And… yeah, I think it works. It’s an angle that makes for a slightly wackier book than just “Creed kills a bunch of turn of the century criminals” and Sta. Maria’s art plays it deadpan while giving them an amusingly proto-MU vibe. Really, this issue is more of an attempt to set up a 1909 Marvel New York than it is a Sabretooth story, but it’s none the worse for that.<\/p>\n

STORM: LIFEDREAM.<\/strong> By (deep breath) John Jennings, Edwin Galmon, Andrew Dalhouse, Ang\u00e9lique Roch\u00e9, Alitha E Martinez, Brittney Morris, Charles Stewart III, Frank William, Curtis Baxter, Karen S Darboe, Yen Nitro & Ariana Maher. This is a Marvel Voices special, but despite the cover billing it as a “star-studded anthology” – so star-studded that they didn’t put any of the creators’ names on the cover, by the way – it’s actually more of a jam issue, with four different creative teams handling chapters of a single story. That story involves Storm being yanked to the far future so that archivists can copy her mind, and having to deal with a rogue AI that’s patterning itself on her. Really, it’s kind of an excuse to shows lots of parts of Storm’s life without having to worry too much about the details, and the payoff is a rather trite “this is what makes me human” ending, but it hangs together surprisingly well for something done in this format, and the first and third chapters in particular have some really nice art. The Voices anthologies can be very patchy, but this is solid.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #8. By Tim Seeley, Edoardo Audino, KJ D\u00edaz & Clayton Cowles. Hmm… I have no trouble buying the idea that Captain America thinks Black Tom Cassidy is still a villain. After all, he was a behind the scenes member of X-Force. I have a bit more trouble with the idea that […]<\/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-10757","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\/10757","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=10757"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10757\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10758,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10757\/revisions\/10758"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10757"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10757"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10757"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}