{"id":10917,"date":"2025-03-22T21:08:53","date_gmt":"2025-03-22T21:08:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10917"},"modified":"2025-03-22T21:38:21","modified_gmt":"2025-03-22T21:38:21","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-17-march-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10917","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 17 March 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"

ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #14.<\/strong> By Alex Paknadel, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. Well, this is pretty much a second chapter hitting much the same beats as the first. Paige is staying with Sean in Ireland but she can’t get away from anti-mutant sentiment; Angelo is working on a construction site and outclassed human workers are annoyed. It moves things on a little bit, by trying to make Sean simultaneously a protective father to Paige and a badass to the villagers, and by having Paige try to use her powers to live as a different person at the end, but to be honest most of the issue feels like it’s covering quite familiar ground.<\/p>\n

X-FORCE #9.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> So the June solicitations are out and X-Factor<\/em> is indeed finished. Which means that this seven-part crossover runs through the penultimate issues of three cancelled books. It’s hard to believe that this was the best way of doing things, though admittedly X-Factor<\/em> and NYX<\/em> more or less made it work.\u00a0X-Force<\/em>, though, finds itself having to interrupt a fight scene in progress so that a character who isn’t technically on the team can help Professor X borrow a spaceship. As an issue of X-Force<\/em> it’s a distraction, which could have been used to resolve the book’s actual story.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

As a chapter of “X-Manhunt”… well, the crossover is getting more coherent as it goes on, though it would have been nice if the art in X-Factor<\/em> had clearly established that the last Krakoan egg had been taken, instead of leaving it to be spelled out here. It turns out that the purpose of this last egg is to bring back Lilandra Neramani, a character who’s always been more notable for her plot function than her personality – if you want an excuse to write Professor X out for a bit then she’s fantastic, but there’s not much too her beyond that. Come to think of it, if Xavier had the ability to bring her back during Krakoa – and he must have done, in order to have this egg created – why did he hold off? And how any of this detour assists him in helping Xandra isn’t really explained either, although I guess I can imagine some sort of story where he believes that Lilandra is best placed to unite the Shi’ar Empire and quiet the rebellion or something.<\/p>\n

The concluding one-shot is going to have to do something pretty impressive if “X-Manhunt” is going to go down as a success, though. The whole approach of the current X-books is to go for the diaspora angle and have a range of quite different titles. That’s perfectly sensible but it means that they don’t want to be yoked into a single crossover like this, and it doesn’t really work even aside from the clunkiness about Xavier’s telepathic bleed.<\/p>\n

EXCEPTIONAL X-MEN #7.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Not a core part of “X-Manhunt”, but it gets the banner anyway on the strength of a two-page scene in which the regular cast note that the crossover is happening elsewhere, and have a quick chat about it. That scene has precisely zero connection to the rest of the plot. If I’d bought this issue on the basis that it had been promoted as a tie-in I’d be pretty annoyed.<\/p>\n

Of course, I’d have bought the issue anyway, and from that point of view I’m very happy to see it stick to Axo’s storyline. Exceptional X-Men<\/em>‘s languid pace – we’re seven issues in and a proper villain has finally shown up in the cliffhanger – is a bold choice but I’m glad to see the book stick with it, and Carmen Carnero’s art has the subtlety to sell the personalities. This is a good place to use Mr Sinister, even if the reveal is shamelessly blown on the cover. In a book like Jed MacKay’s X-Men<\/em> he might seem a bit obvious, but here there’s a real sense of the regulars being a bunch of amateurs who are comprehensively out of their depth against an A-list villain.<\/p>\n

PSYLOCKE #5.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> It’s not ideal that Psylocke<\/em> and\u00a0Magik<\/em> both find their lead characters doing a version of the “your traumatic back story does not excuse your villainy” speech in the same week, but so it goes. This issue is basically a showdown between Psylocke and the Taxonomist – I’m still not sure why he’s called that – and it actually seems an odd speech for this story, since the Taxonomist comes across more as delusionally well-meaning than as someone who actually blames anything on his past. Then again, maybe Psylocke is just projecting onto him? It’s certainly a good looking issue, and I don’t have a problem with playing up the links between Kwannon and Betsy again – I don’t think we’ve had a decent explanation for why Kwannon’s taken the Psylocke identity beyond trade mark renewal, after all. The book has certainly managed to sell me on the idea of Kwannon as a viable solo lead, and while this isn’t the strongest issue of the series, it’s still solid.<\/p>\n

MAGIK #3.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Liminal didn’t particularly interest me in the first two issues, which basically treated him as a generic imprisoned demon. But this issue makes him much more intriguing, by essentially making him an alternate Magik – another child banished to a demonic dimension, but one who wound up fully embracing the results. Now we’ve got a clear reason why this is a\u00a0Magik<\/em> story as opposed to something you could do just as well with Ghost Rider or Dr Strange. I can’t help thinking the book would benefit from Liminal’s realm being a bit more, well, liminal – it looks more like a twilight war zone – and Magik’s costume doesn’t really fit with the more humanised take on the character we’re doing here, but the design of Liminal himself as a blandly normal shell containing a weird demon thing is a nice touch, and it’s good to see Illyana showing a bit more emotion as the lead.<\/p>\n

DEADPOOL \/ WOLVERINE #3.<\/strong> By Benjamin Percy, Joshua Cassara, Guru-eFX & Joe Sabino. Um, yeah, I completely forgot about this book when I wrote the first version of this post, despite the fact I’d read it. I’m not going to keep up annotations on this title – aside from the fact that it doesn’t particularly interest me, it’s not really that sort of book anyway, and there are far too many other X-books to keep track of already. But the fact that I had barely any memory of actually reading the thing kind of tells you all there is to know about it. It’s not terrible, but it has a definite vibe of “apparently this needs to exist, and I guess we work back from there”.<\/p>\n

CABLE: LOVE & CHROME #3.<\/strong> By David Pepose, Mike Henderson, Arif Prianto & Joe Sabino. The story here is nothing out of the ordinary – Cable’s virus is out of control, he hallucinates while other characters try to save his life. And it’s a tough sell to make the character we met two issues ago into the greatest love of Cable’s life, though admittedly it’s not as if he has many other defining life-changing relationships in his back story. But it’s the art that justifies this book on its own, with a real solidity and weight to it, alongside a refreshing brightness, that seems perfectly suited for Cable. It really does look fabulous.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #14. By Alex Paknadel, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. Well, this is pretty much a second chapter hitting much the same beats as the first. Paige is staying with Sean in Ireland but she can’t get away from anti-mutant sentiment; Angelo is working on a construction site and outclassed […]<\/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-10917","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\/10917","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=10917"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10917\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10920,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10917\/revisions\/10920"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10917"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10917"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}