{"id":10894,"date":"2025-03-15T20:49:48","date_gmt":"2025-03-15T20:49:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10894"},"modified":"2025-03-15T20:49:48","modified_gmt":"2025-03-15T20:49:48","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-10-march-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10894","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 10 March 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"

ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #13.<\/strong> By Alex Paknadel, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. I guess we’re doing alternating story arcs here. After the diversion to Black Tom and the Juggernaut, we’re back to the first arc, with Banshee and Husk hanging around at Cassidy Keep and not actually doing a whole lot to advance the plot beyond reminding us of the grass-roots anti-mutant Flatscanners movement. Meanwhile, the latest aggrieved human is a construction worker who’s out of work because the mutant crews are so much more efficient. I don’t actually mind that as an idea – if you had mutants trying to live in the real world, it makes sense that you’d get people complaining about them having an unfair advantage – but there’s something a bit odd about the idea that there are apparently tons of everyday mutants in America again after the fall of Krakoa. That’s not how the plot went – the entire population of Krakoa were marched into the White Hot Room and we were told that the vast majority of them stayed to build a new life there. I guess you can rationalise this by claiming that a lot more mutants came back in X-Men<\/em> #35 than the issue suggested, but that undercuts the earlier story, which I’m not keen on at all. It was a get out clause to allow particular mutants to be used in future, not a reset button for the entire population of Krakoa. It’s not like there weren’t plenty of civilian mutants still in the US anyway, since Orchis apparently found tons of them during “Fall of X”. None of which is really a point about this particular issue, but there’s a degree of goalpost-moving that feels a little too obvious to me.<\/p>\n

X-MEN #13.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Well, back to “X-Manhunt”. Fortunately, this week’s issues are rather more coherent than last week’s, since everyone now seems to be on the same page about what the problem is with Professor X’s powers, and NYX<\/em> seems to have been the outlier. Beyond that… it’s basically a fight scene. The memorable set piece is Kid Omega taking on Professor X telepathically, and beating him not through power or through skill but by pre-planning. That confrontation works, and I like the shift of art style to pencils in the astral battle, complete with subdued colours and Professor X’s complacent lecturing turning out to be misplaced. Psylocke’s exchange with Storm kind of works too, at least in as much as it has Psylocke rising to the occasion when Cyclops is out of commission, but it feels like Storm has to be forced into the plot in order to make it work.<\/p>\n

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X-FACTOR<\/strong> #8.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> This is legacy issue #300, but that gets no more than lip service. More to the point, this is an “X-Manhunt” tie-in, and it seems to be the penultimate issue as well, though we won’t know that for sure until the next solicitations come out. That seems like is ought to be an unhappy combination, but the result hangs together better than you might expect. X-Factor<\/em>‘s biggest problem has been its massively uneven tone, and forcing the book to participate in a straight plot at least fixes that. More to the point, though, Mark Russell’s main serious storyline is all about Havok realising that he joined X-Factor for the wrong reasons and that he ought to have been focussing on his relationships with his loved ones. Having him spend an issue interceding in a fight between Cyclops and Professor X fits perfectly nicely with those themes, and so “X-Manhunt” turns out to be a crossover that can be made to serve the book’s existing storylines. The notional stars of the book pretty much get thrown under the bus – at this stage there’s no point pretending that they’re a match for the X-Men, and it’s a better call to just focus on Havok and try to bring his story home. Bob Quinn would have been better served on a book where the light comedy aspects were working, but he does a decent enough job with a straight issue of mostly action.<\/p>\n

PHOENIX #9.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Well, we’re doing the story where Jean embraces her cosmic side and gets a bit dodgy as a result, presumably leading to Adani somehow bringing her down to earth next issue. The Dark Gods are hanging around on the fringes, but they’re not really contributing a whole lot – no doubt Adani turns on them next issue when she figures out that they’re manipulating her. It’s serviceable, and you can more or less see what it’s trying to do. I don’t particularly mind the art, either – if Adani and Perrikus are standing around in a generic landscape for no apparent reason, then that seems to be a story issue rather than an art one. But I don’t really buy into Adani as a rounded character and Jean’s arc doesn’t feel like it’s bringing anything beyond the obvious.<\/p>\n

HELLVERINE #4.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Seriously? We’re just pretending that Genosha has had a functioning, normal human city on it all this time? What? I know continuity isn’t really the point of this book, which is really about doing old fashioned ghost stories linked to traumatic events from Akihiro’s past. And it does that quite well, though the pacing is getting a bit odd as the book wraps up the Mother thread suspiciously quickly in order to rush on to the next demon. But suddenly declaring Genosha to be inhabited by regular people with access to normal city amenities is lunatic – Genosha’s whole function in the X-books is to be an empty wasteland serving as a symbol of anti-mutant genocide. The weird Gigosha idea from X-Factor<\/em> doesn’t undercut that because it’s precisely the sort of place where someone might put one of these weird crypto-libertarian projects, and the inappropriateness of the location works well. But just an ordinary city which was apparently there\u00a0before<\/em> Gigosha… we’re in “sorry, has anyone involved in this actually read a comic set on Genosha in the last quarter century” territory here, and it’s the sort of stumbling block that can’t help but derail the story.<\/p>\n

SABRETOOTH: THE DEAD DON’T TALK #4.<\/strong> By Frank Tieri, Michael Sta. Maria, Rachelle Rosenberg & Joe Sabino. I get the impression that this series has sunk without trace – if people are talking about it anywhere, I can’t find it – and it actually deserves better. It’s not so much Sabretooth’s own plot thread, which is a reasonable enough explanation of how he came to think of himself as more than just a henchman, plus a somewhat routine “meets a girl and she dies” subplot. But the period proto-Marvel Universe 1920s gangs are a fun environment in an Elseworlds sort of a way, and feel like a straightforward gangland crime story might be worth a punt. But Michael Sta. Maria’s art is fabulous, selling the set-up but with a nice sense of an early Creed still a little out of his depth. He really does deserve something higher profile on the back of this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #13. By Alex Paknadel, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. I guess we’re doing alternating story arcs here. After the diversion to Black Tom and the Juggernaut, we’re back to the first arc, with Banshee and Husk hanging around at Cassidy Keep and not actually doing a whole lot to […]<\/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-10894","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\/10894","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=10894"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10894\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10895,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10894\/revisions\/10895"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}