{"id":10977,"date":"2025-04-12T14:50:30","date_gmt":"2025-04-12T13:50:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10977"},"modified":"2025-04-12T14:50:30","modified_gmt":"2025-04-12T13:50:30","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-7-april-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10977","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 7 April 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"

ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #17.<\/strong> By Alex Paknadel, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. There’s not much more I can say about this arc that I haven’t said already. I completely get why we’re doing stories about radicalisation and how the understandable worries of normal people can be turned to hate while they believe they’re acting in self-defence. it’s a fairly natural theme in the USA right now. But it’s making for rather repetitive stories, and using it as the vehicle for a\u00a0partial\u00a0Generation X\u00a0<\/em>reunion isn’t adding much spark to it – Skin’s a nice enough character but there’s not really that much interest in seeing him reunited with Husk. It’s a perfectly competent story in plot and artwork but there’s nothing lifting it above that.<\/p>\n

UNCANNY X-MEN #13.\u00a0<\/strong>(Annotations here.)<\/a> Crossover season is in the rear view mirror and David Marquez is back for the first part of “The Dark Artery”. Obviously, that means the issue is worth your time for the art alone – okay, the dragon looks more stone than ice, but that panel of the Outliers approaching the Dark Artery through the swamp is wonderful, and the flashback pages of Henrietta Benjamin is lovely throughout. There was a time when the X-books worked on the principle that mutants had only started to appear in serious numbers at the start of the Silver Age once the post-nuclear generation hit puberty – that was the point of the “children of the atom” tagline – but that’s been downplayed for many years and doesn’t really make sense anyway given the sliding timeline. So embracing that change and doing stories about the secret history of underground mutant communities is a nice idea. Yes, it begs the question of why we’ve never heard of this pre-X-Men mutant history before, but… well, the current state of continuity does that anyway. I’m not quite so sure how I feel about doing the actual history of racial segregation at the same time – it risks equating the real with the fictional, and has the odd effect of presenting the mutant experience right next to the very thing that it’s a metaphor for – but I think the first chapter gets away with it.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

PHOENIX #10.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> This is the end of the Adani storyline which has been running since the start of the series. It started off promising some sort of thoughts about gods and religion, but winds up doing a fairly routine finale in which Adani is persuaded to reject power and enjoy her childhood. There’s some interest to that idea because of the clear subtext that Jean wishes she had done the same thing, but it really doesn’t have very much to do with the more interesting themes that the book began by gesturing to. Alessandro Miracolo does some quite nice surrealist landscapes with reality collapsing, and the story does pull off a decent sense of resolution, but it all feels very slight for ten issues.<\/p>\n

STORM #7.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> I really cannot get my head around this book. Luciano Vecchio’s art is lovely, but it’s an absolute chore to read. Cosmic power-ups rarely make for interesting stories, but that’s not the real issue here. It’s just so choppy, so hard to follow, so incredibly difficult to simply make sense<\/em> of. What the hell is that scene with Dr Voodoo, for example? Is it a vision? I figured out that the word Storm says is a reference back to a magical spell mentioned in issue #1, but I\u00a0still<\/em> don’t know what’s actually happening on the next page as a result. I’m genuinely baffled by how hard this book is to understand considering that it’s edited by Tom Brevoort, who ought to have the experience to smooth over this sort of thing. It’s certainly a book I’m far too busy struggling to comprehend to actually care about. And yet… it does<\/em> seem to be doing pretty well, and there’s certainly an audience there who really like it, so maybe it’s just doing something that fundamentally misses my wavelength. I rather respect its perverse distinctiveness, in fact. But I don’t enjoy it at all.<\/p>\n

LAURA KINNEY: WOLVERINE #5.<\/strong> (Annotations here.) The second half of a two-parter with the Revolution – that’s what the kids are calling the Winter Soldier these days – is… well, it’s a fairly straightforward fight scene and a bit where they kill the Nazi scientist. There’s a sort of token hook based on the idea that Bucky is an older and wiser figure who’s come to terms with his past life as a weapon in a way that Laura can learn from… except that doesn’t really make sense, because she’s been free of the Facility for longer than he’s been free as the Winter Soldier. Mostly, though, it’s a really simple story that relies on the art to carry it, and yes, there are some neat panels in here – but I honestly have no idea what’s meant to be happening in that spot with the land mine. It’s meant to be a set-piece but it’s really not intelligible. That aside, it’s another issue for the “Fine, I guess” category, which doesn’t make a compelling case for the book’s existence.<\/p>\n

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ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #17. By Alex Paknadel, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. There’s not much more I can say about this arc that I haven’t said already. I completely get why we’re doing stories about radicalisation and how the understandable worries of normal people can be turned to hate while they believe […]<\/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-10977","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\/10977","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=10977"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10977\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10978,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10977\/revisions\/10978"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}