{"id":10934,"date":"2025-03-29T21:26:16","date_gmt":"2025-03-29T21:26:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10934"},"modified":"2025-03-29T21:26:16","modified_gmt":"2025-03-29T21:26:16","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-24-march-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10934","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 24 March 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"

X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #15.<\/strong> By Alex Paknadel, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. For the most part I’ve liked Paknadel and Sevy’s Infinity Comics stories, but this arc feels like it’s going back over the same territory as their previous arc. I can kind of see the appeal right now of having Americans cast the mutants returning from Krakoa as immigrants – yes, it undercuts X-Men<\/em> #35 for there to be that many of them, but okay, we’ll run with it for the purposes of the current stories. This sort of believable grassroots bigotry was the subject of the first arc and worked pretty well there. But it feels like we’re just repeating that idea rather than developing the theme here.<\/p>\n

X-MANHUNT OMEGA.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Well, that’s two crossovers under the current editorial office, and neither of them has exactly been great. They’re not catastrophic or anything, but at best they feel like a distraction that doesn’t play to the books’ strengths. Part of that is simply that the post-Krakoa X-books have opted to avoid a unifying theme in favour of going for a diaspora with a wide range of approaches, and that results in a bunch of comics that don’t particularly want to be yoked together into a single plot. Part of it’s just an inherent feature of old-school crossovers – Marvel do them because they move the needle, not because they make the books better.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

But… as a story, this doesn’t really work. The inciting event for the whole thing is Professor X – who was adamant about staying in jail back in January, not that I’m losing much sleep about that particular storyline being cut short – learning that Xandra is in danger and deciding to break out of jail and help her. But the rest of the story has nothing much to do with that – it involves him resurrecting Lilandra<\/em>, sorting out that tumour we only just learned about in January, and bidding farewell to the X-Men so that he can depart for a new life in space. It’s absurdly early to resolve the tumour plot, which I can only assume is a deck-clearing favour for Jonathan Hickman. But even aside from that, the emotional core of this story is meant to lie in Cyclops’ anger at the Professor, and the Professor bidding a final farewell to the mutants. Neither of these lands. Cyclops’ attitude to Xavier post-Krakoa has always seemed forced to me, and while I can kind-of-sort-of rationalise it to myself, I don’t really understand it, and I don’t believe<\/em> it for a second.<\/p>\n

As for Xavier’s farewell, the idea that he’s saying goodbye to Earth instead of going to help his daughter comes out of nowhere. It doesn’t feel final because we’ve seen him head off to live with the Shi’ar before, there’s no obvious reason why this is any different, and we know he’s not even being written out of stories. After all, the Xandra plot was never resolved and we’re directly told to go and read about him in the cosmic books in the weeks to come. So we wind up with a bunch of characters standing around loudly insisting that this is very emotional when it… well, it just isn’t.<\/p>\n

UNCANNY X-MEN #12.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> This is much more like it, though. It’s a simple little story about Gambit standing up to the Vig, a New Orleans enforcer that he’s been notionally in debt to since he was a child. The story gives him an out by saying that the Vig engineered the original debt, but the heart of it is really about Gambit standing up to someone who once seemed impossibly out of his league. Given that the story requires him to lose in his first issue, the Vig is set up rather well as a scary reptile guy with a southern gentleman persona, and Gavin Guidry’s art really gets the guy’s relaxed self-confidence across. His young Remy is acute as well. A simple and straightforward issue but a definite success.<\/p>\n

LAURA KINNEY: WOLVERINE<\/strong> #4.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> I’m puzzled by what this book is trying to do. In some ways this is a perfectly decent team-up story, with Laura and Bucky going on a road trip to hunt down a Nazi scientist. The random encounter with anti-mutant bigots in a gas station is maybe pushed a bit too heavily – it goes from zero to 100 at confusing speed – but the issue looks nice, the skull-and-tentacle robots in the form of the HYDRA logo are endearingly wacky, and the two leads have a decent rapport.<\/p>\n

As for the bigger picture, though… We’ve had Elektra and Bucky as guest stars, so the unifying theme seems to be that these are also characters who became conflicted mostly-heroes after escaping a life as a living weapon. But that’s practically a clich\u00e9 these days. It’s not just Laura, Elektra and Bucky who can claim that back story, there’s Logan and Kwannon too. Drawing attention to the fact that it’s such an overused trope seems a dubious call unless the stories are going to bring out what makes Laura different from those other characters, and right now the book doesn’t seem to be doing that. If anything, Psylocke<\/em> is covering very similar territory more effectively.<\/p>\n

ROGUE: SAVAGE LAND #3.<\/strong> By Tim Seeley, Zulema Scotto Lavina, Rachelle Rosenberg & Ariana Maher. Well, this is mixed. Some of the material with Rogue and Ka-Zar is quite good fun, with Magneto sulking on the sidelines. The actual A-plot with Zaladane and Savage Land alliances and such forth is rather more forgettable, though, and there’s some seriously wonky storytelling where the characters have to stand around telling us that a great big tower has collapsed because the art never showed it. Still, it’s fine overall, if entirely skippable.<\/p>\n

WEAPON X-MEN #2.<\/strong> By Joe Casey, ChrisCross, Mark Morales & Yen Nitro. After being solicited as an ongoing for its first four months, the June solicits have this as a five-issue miniseries – which is how it’s always been listed on Amazon. I’m afraid it’s another mystifying commission – rather less wacky and OTT than I’d been thinking it might be, and simply a fairly straight team-up story in the mould of an X-Force book, aside from the gags that come with any Deadpool story. It looks nice enough, it’s a perfectly functional story, but it just feels like more of the same. It may not be anything to do with Joe Casey, but it feels awfully telling that the recap page wants me to believe that Wolverine, Deadpool, Cable and Chamber are “unlikely allies”. Wolverine and Deadpool have a monthly team-up title right now? Cable and Deadpool, who had a team-up book that ran for years? Three characters who’ve all been in the X-Men and another who’s been in X-Force? You can’t sell this book on the idea that it’s an unlikely combination of characters, but there doesn’t seem to be any other sort of hook.<\/p>\n

WOLVERINE: REVENGE #5.<\/strong> By Jonathan Hickman, Greg Capullo, Tim Townsend, Alex Sinclair and Cory Petit. So this miniseries feels much more Capullo than Hickman, but it’s no bad thing to see Hickman just write a fun romp that lets the art do its thing. I was a bit sceptical about going down the post-apocalyptic route, but it works out quite well. By the end of the series, it really is post-<\/em>apocalyptic – the survivors seem to be living happily enough and getting back on their feet, which lets the story play up the idea that Wolverine just won’t let things go. There’s nothing earth-shatteringly new about the idea that an obsession with revenge rebounds on people, but having Wolverine retain his obsession even as the world moves on actually gives the story a reason to go so big in the first act, and lets the story narrow in on the character as it gets to the end. This has turned out much better than I was expecting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #15. By Alex Paknadel, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. For the most part I’ve liked Paknadel and Sevy’s Infinity Comics stories, but this arc feels like it’s going back over the same territory as their previous arc. I can kind of see the appeal right now of having Americans […]<\/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-10934","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\/10934","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=10934"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10934\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10935,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10934\/revisions\/10935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}