{"id":10829,"date":"2025-02-28T23:11:46","date_gmt":"2025-02-28T23:11:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10829"},"modified":"2025-02-28T23:11:46","modified_gmt":"2025-02-28T23:11:46","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-24-february-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10829","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 24 February 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"

ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #12.\u00a0<\/strong>By Tim Seeley, Edoardo Audino, KJ D\u00edaz, Clayton Cowles, Darren Shan. So the thing about Black Tom going mad turns out to be a teaser for another storyline, which was perhaps inevitable given how much he’d been kept to the margins of the story after the set-up. What that leaves us with is a Juggernaut rehabilitation story with some very nice art but which feels like it’s way, way too late – the Juggernaut first joined the X-Men over twenty years ago, for heaven’s sake! Even his last run as a villain ended before Krakoa. This would be a good story if it wasn’t so detached from where the Juggernaut actually is right now, but… well, that’s a problem, isn’t it?<\/p>\n

X-MEN #12.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Mmm. I know Jed MacKay is Canadian, and I know this is kind of the status quo that was inherited from the previous editorial office, and I even think the new Vindicator is an interesting character, but… Canada is the North American country where the people who opposed Orchis are still in jail? Canada? Seriously? Because I don’t think you can do that story in 2025. At a bare minimum, it’s extremely tone deaf. At worst… look, I realise there are lead in times involved here and so forth, but my gut reaction to the whole angle was still a strong one. This sort of dissonance is likely to be an increasing problem for the X-books and Marvel in general in the coming months and years as the lead-in time issue fades away and the reality of writing X-Men stories for Disney under the second Trump administration sinks in – and I have a sinking feeling about how I’m going to feel about that. Maybe the creators will have a better idea of how to thread that needle. None of which is really a direct reflection on this issue, of course. But look, it’s the main thing I was left thinking about.<\/p>\n

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HELLVERINE #3.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Well, the book has certainly answered my initial question of what makes this different from Ghost Rider<\/em>, since apparently we’re doing a horror-theme tour of important sites in Akihiro’s life in order that he can – um, it’s not really spelled out, but the obvious ending would be something like him coming to terms with his history so that Mephisto can’t use it as a source of power. The Ghost Rider elements are really on the margins of this issue, too, which is mostly Akihiro visiting the town of Jasmine Falls and finding the population being plagued by a ghost story. Given that we’re doing a tour of his history, it’s surprisingly light on continuity, as well (which is good, since nothing in the established continuity linked to Jasmine Falls would particularly lend itself to a Ghost Rider story). It still feels to me like a gimmick that’s been crowbarred into an actual story, which undercuts the mood it’s going for, but it works reasonably well on its own terms.<\/p>\n

SENTINELS #5.<\/strong> By Alex Paknadel, Justin Mason, Federico Blee & Travis Lanham. I’m not sure the Juston Seyfert reveal here works – he’s a fairly obscure character, and the ending of this mini feels like it needs the reader to be a bit more familiar with him. Still, the overall arc of poor old Lockstep trying to be a reasonable professional in a dodgy environment and getting crushed for his troubles is an effective tragedy, and sliding Drumfire from the B-plot into the hero role at the last minute stops it from being too dark. The art feels a little bit rough in the opening pages – Scurvy is really a bit over the top as a leering villain – but the closing fight and the belated appearance of a real<\/em> Sentinel are nicely handled. An odd mini, but quite good.<\/p>\n

ROGUE: THE SAVAGE LAND #2.<\/strong> By Tim Seeley, Zulema Scotto Lavina, Rachelle Rosenberg & Ariana Maher. Um… fine, I guess? It’s certainly not the T&A book that the covers suggest, and there’s some very nice art with the shark hologram and the diving pterosaurs. But it’s tribal feuding in the Savage Land, which I’ve never found particularly appealing, and it doesn’t really have a hook to change my mind. Still, more in the territory of “not my thing” than anything else.<\/p>\n

SABRETOOTH: THE DEAD DON’T TALK #3.<\/strong> By Frank Tieri, Michael Sta. Maria, Dono D\u00e1nchez-Almara & Joe Sabino. This is turning out to be surprisingly fun. Despite being billed as a Sabretooth story, it’s really more “Marvel New York in 1909”, complete with a proto Crimson Dynamo, proto Kingpin and so forth. And the art looks great in terms of selling that idea, with pre-superhero versions of the ideas. My main reservation is that the story seems to be riding two horses – notionally, the plot is Sabretooth coming round to the idea that he should be in charge because he’s the most powerful. And that story feels like it wants normal<\/em> gangsters, so the MU trappings cut against it, even if technically they’re all normal humans. But it’s working just as a simple fun set-up, so fair enough.<\/p>\n

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ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #12.\u00a0By Tim Seeley, Edoardo Audino, KJ D\u00edaz, Clayton Cowles, Darren Shan. So the thing about Black Tom going mad turns out to be a teaser for another storyline, which was perhaps inevitable given how much he’d been kept to the margins of the story after the set-up. What that leaves us […]<\/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-10829","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\/10829","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=10829"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10829\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10831,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10829\/revisions\/10831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}