{"id":10775,"date":"2025-02-07T20:39:13","date_gmt":"2025-02-07T20:39:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10775"},"modified":"2025-02-07T20:39:13","modified_gmt":"2025-02-07T20:39:13","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-3-february-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10775","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis w\/c 3 February 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"

ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #9.<\/strong> By Tim Seeley, Edoardo Audino, KJ D\u00edaz & Clayton Cowles. Yes, well, it’s a “fight and team up” story with Juggernaut and Captain America. Nice art, and I sort of get the idea of doing “unstoppable force against immovable object” with the shield – except Juggernaut’s not literally unstoppable these days, surely? But it boils down to a fight-and-team-up story, and one that feels just a couple of steps removed from the way these characters are normally written, at that. Bit underwhelming.<\/p>\n

PHOENIX #8.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Look, I’m willing to accept that I might not be in the most receptive mood for entertainment this week. But even allowing for that, this isn’t good. It doesn’t have the glaring plot holes of issue #7, to be sure, but it’s choppy, disjointed stuff. Why is Jean suddenly in a cocoon floating in space, when she was on a planet last issue? What exactly are we meant to be learning from revisiting the Dark Phoenix Saga with changes? When did Adani get back together with Perrikus? Since when are either of them interested in bringing back the Dark Gods? Since when are the rest of the Dark Gods even missing<\/em>? I don’t actually mind the art on this book, for the most part, but it doesn’t always flow that well, and the black and yellow Phoenix design at the end feels like a distaff Nebulon.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Mostly, though, we’re eight issues into the series and I have no real idea what the point is of any of it. What’s this story actually about<\/em>? It’s just yet another “Jean comes to terms with the Phoenix” and random stuff happening in the background, isn’t it? It more or less hangs together on a surface level, but it feels empty.<\/p>\n

WOLVERINE #6.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Romulus? Seriously, Romulus? I mean, if that’s the direction, I can absolutely see why you gave it six issues to build up goodwill with other stuff first. Because I’ve read every Romulus story, and here’s a complete list of the ones that weren’t crap:<\/p>\n

That said, though, Saladin Ahmed has<\/em> earned enough goodwill for me on the book so far that my reaction to the final page was at least confined to the realms of “deep scepticism”. Admittedly, this issue isn’t the best illustration of the book’s strengths either; it’s pretty much more of what happened in issue #5, with Laura being added in. The best bits are the Wendigo subplot, where the art is still doing a great job of making the poor guy seem lovable and baffled. But the main story is something along these lines. Adamantium is a knock-off of a true mythical metal, adamantine. So if you’re wanting a villain who can seize control of adamantine and turn it to his advantage, you’re looking for a Wolverine villain with a mythical angle. And in fact, ideally, you want “the myth that Wolverine is an echo of”, and… well, yes, that’s probably Romulus.<\/p>\n

So I can see how you might find yourself going down this route. But at the same time, my god, that’s the Jeph Loeb take on Romulus – Daniel Way’s Romulus was just a manipulative mastermind dialled up to twelve and worked into rather more of Wolverine’s history than was entirely sensible, but Jeph Loeb’s Romulus stories are unintelligible drivel. Romulus is a character in need of massive salvage work to make him worth using, and I’m deeply unconvinced that Ahmed (or anyone else) can pull it off – or that, even if they can, it’s a more worthwhile effort than just creating a new character. But we’ll see – Ahmed’s a good enough writer that he surely has to have some reason for using Romulus. Right? Um… right?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #9. By Tim Seeley, Edoardo Audino, KJ D\u00edaz & Clayton Cowles. Yes, well, it’s a “fight and team up” story with Juggernaut and Captain America. Nice art, and I sort of get the idea of doing “unstoppable force against immovable object” with the shield – except Juggernaut’s not literally unstoppable these […]<\/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-10775","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\/10775","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=10775"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10775\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10776,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10775\/revisions\/10776"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}