{"id":10954,"date":"2025-04-04T22:11:20","date_gmt":"2025-04-04T21:11:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10954"},"modified":"2025-04-04T22:11:20","modified_gmt":"2025-04-04T21:11:20","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-31-march-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10954","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 31 March 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"

ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #16.<\/strong> By Alex Paknadel, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. Well, we’ve got to the point of bringing Sean, Paige and Angelo together for the partial Generation X<\/em> reunion, but I can’t say this arc is doing much for me. It still feels too similar to the first arc. I’m not keen either on having random street level characters getting injections that turn them into the Hulk – diluting the big names for no real reason feels like it’s standing in for a lack of ideas that actually fit in this<\/em> story. There’s something in the subplot about Paige’s depression, but otherwise this is an underwhelming arc.<\/p>\n

X-MEN #14.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Gosh, there’s a lot going on in this issue – and since X-Men<\/em> has generally stuck to doing self-contained one or two-part stories when it isn’t involved in crossovers, that alone makes it feel like the book is kicking up a gear. It feels like we’re moving into the phase where things are starting to draw together Ryan Stegman is back on art, and I love the cover of this issue, with the broken glasses in the foreground. I’m not sure about that 3K table at all – how big is that thing? Do they have to yell to be heard on the other side? But the scene with Ben and Magneto is nicely done to continue the slow burn of Ben wanting to be an active character (even if I don’t remember any of this stuff about Magneto trying to mentor him), and the redesign of Wyre is a big improvement.<\/p>\n

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PSYLOCKE #6.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> In which Magik helps Psylocke to investigate her hallucinations. Having the other X-Men show up too prominently in a solo book can be a problem – it begs awkward questions about why every story doesn’t just involve calling in the team – but I think Alyssa Wong makes it work here because I can buy that Psylocke doesn’t like sharing her personal problems with the rest of the group. To be honest, there’s a slight tension between her take and Jed MacKay’s, since X-Men<\/em> Psylocke is a bit more emotionally intelligent than\u00a0Psylocke<\/em> Psylocke, but I can square it off in terms of whether she’s talking about her own issues or other people’s. Deathdream gets his first major role outside Uncanny<\/em>, and the issue nails the voice that Gail Simone gave him. The art is a little rough at the start – how do you do a whole scene with Orifice, who has literally nothing going for him aside from his weird face, and contrive to obscure his face in virtually every panel? But it picks up a lot once we get to Magik eating cinnamon rolls and Psylocke having nightmare visions of herself. This book is working out far better than I predicted before it launched.<\/p>\n

HELLVERINE #5.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> This is about as close as you’re going to get to decompression from a Marvel comic in 2025 – it spends three pages just on “Akihiro drowns and goes to hell”, and there are several pages of virtually dialogue-free fight scene later on. I’m not convinced that Raffaele Ienco is the sort of artist who can make the most of that opportunity, though. On the plus side, the drowning page is rather good, and the sequence of Akihiro being cut into pieces is creepily bizarre. Bagra-Ghul’s design has the merit of being off-kilter but becomes awkward when he actually has to do<\/em> anything. On the down side, the action sequences are nothing special, and a splash page which is meant to sell Mephisto’s vision of a demonically corrupted X-Men is terribly weak. Aren’t there better ways of selling demonic possession than spiky costumes? Mind you, I do like his Mephisto, who has a nice calm arrogance to him. In terms of the actual story, there’s not a huge amount going on here – Akihiro gets control of the demon that’s possessing him, goes back to Earth. It’s a book has that has a distinct voice within the line, but whether it’s actually saying anything very interesting is another matter.<\/p>\n

CONCERT OF CHAMPIONS #1.<\/strong> By Jason Loo, Rafael Loureiro, Ruairi Coleman, Yen Nitro, Fer Sifuentes-Sujo & Ariana Maher. This is basically a coda one-shot to Loo’s Dazzler<\/em> miniseries, although officially it gives co-star billing to Lila Cheney and Luna Snow (the K-pop superhero, if you haven’t come across her before), and Ghost-Spider shows up as a guest star too. For some reason Dazzler is losing her hair – it’s played as if it’s just stress but the art is more like chemotherapy and the overall effect is just a bit weird. Anyway, they team up to stop a band of supervillains from summoning a demon thing. If you’ve read\u00a0Dazzler<\/em>, it’s basically more of that, though a little less heavy-handed. I’m not sure why it’s setting up a storyline about Dazzler’s health when there’s nowhere to follow up, though.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #16. By Alex Paknadel, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. Well, we’ve got to the point of bringing Sean, Paige and Angelo together for the partial Generation X reunion, but I can’t say this arc is doing much for me. It still feels too similar to the first arc. I’m […]<\/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-10954","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\/10954","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=10954"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10954\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10956,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10954\/revisions\/10956"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}