{"id":11018,"date":"2025-04-26T21:25:08","date_gmt":"2025-04-26T20:25:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11018"},"modified":"2025-04-27T21:05:23","modified_gmt":"2025-04-27T20:05:23","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-21-april-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11018","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 21 April 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"

X-MEN<\/strong> #15.\u00a0<\/strong>(Annotations here.)<\/a> No Infinity Comic this week – the pattern seems to be that we skip a week between arcs. So instead, we’re straight into this middle chapter of the twin storyline. And it’s very much a middle chapter, with Quentin still missing and a lot of running around as we keep the evil twin busy. Its new giant monster body is a little comical, but at the end of the day it’s there to be manipulated by 3K, and the real point of this story is to start bringing them into the foreground. It does that well enough, and Ryan Stegman does a nice cuddly monster full of teeth. I don’t think the final page cliffhanger, with the appearance of the rival X-Men, quite works, since we’ve not seen these guys in costume before and it takes a moment to figure out that they’re meant to be the 3K guys from issue #1. Plus, to be honest, my first thought was that the one with dialogue was meant to be Ben Liu until I realised that the hair colour was wrong. They’re nice designs, though, and seem to play to Stegman’s strengths by being a little off-kilter, particularly the floating guy in the containment suit.<\/p>\n

X-FORCE #10.\u00a0<\/strong>(Annotations here.)<\/a> Oh lord. This is a premature cancellation, and with issue #9 being derailed by a crossover, it’s unavoidably a desperate scramble to tie things up by the end. And not a particularly successful one. Moses Magnum isn’t the sort of character you can just bring in as the main villain in the final act, and besides, nothing in his history makes him remotely suitable for his role in the plot here. Zanda is a similarly baffling reveal, unlikely to mean anything to most readers. And Tank turns out to be Colossus, but there’s no time to even gesture at explaining why<\/em>. Nor is there space to make most of the team members anything more than generic. You can see the broad shape of where the book was meant to be going, but the bottom line is that it’s a puzzle box series that messed up the landing – not entirely through its own fault, but it was taking its sweet time getting to the point anyway. If you’re been reading the series up to this point, you might as well get the last chapter, but there’s no reason for anyone else to spend time on it. Fabian Nicieza and Edgar Salazar contribute a ten-page back-up strip which is basically an opportunity to reflect on the main versions of X-Force down the ages, at least from Cable’s point of view, and does the job well enough for a legacy anniversary issue.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

MAGIK #4.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> All J Scott Campbell’s covers for this series have been eye-rollingly bad, but this one really is abysmal. I mean, you can’t blame him for the costume, but god, this one is going through the motions of selling the premise of the issue while making it very clear what the artist’s real area of concern is. Fortunately he’s only doing covers for the first five issues, after which we’re getting Pablo Villalobos, whose solicited covers are a massive step up. Still, it bears no resemblance whatsoever to the actual contents of the book, which continues to hold up rather well. Okay, there’s something a bit confusing about the idea that the mental barriers against Darkchild have been removed but Magik is still holding her back… um, mentally. I mean, I think<\/em> I get what they’re going for, but it is a little odd. At any rate, the heart of this issue is bringing in Dani Moonstar as a guest star and having Illyana be simultaneously relieved by the support from her old friend and defensive about what she’s been doing to date – there’s maybe an interesting contrast here between Illyana as a character who always wants to seem in control, and takes it to a slightly over the top degree, while Dani has that sort of assurance for real. I was very sceptical about this book at first, particularly with it going back to the Darkchild well, but what Ashley Allen and Germ\u00e1n Peralta are doing in the interiors is effective and surprisingly understated.<\/p>\n

DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE #4. <\/strong>By Benjamin Percy, Joshua Cassara, Guru-eFX and Joe Sabino. I’m not doing annotations for this book, partly because there are too many ongoing titles to do them all, partly because it’s not the sort of book where annotations make sense, but mostly because I’m just not very interested in it. The combination of these two characters has been overdone and it was never a strength of Percy’s X-Force<\/em> run in the first place. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with this series, and I quite like the attempt to reposition Stryfe as someone who’s trying to bring about a disaster now in order to avert an even more disastrous timeline in the future – that fits with him being an inverted version of Cable but has the advantage of giving him a relatively coherent motivation. But it feels like a fairly slight plot padded out with action scenes, and maybe that’s the way to go with a\u00a0Deadpool \/ Wolverine<\/em> book if you have to have one. The book’s real problem is that it never actually makes a case for why a Deadpool \/ Wolverine<\/em> comic is a good idea in the first place – if you don’t find their rapport entertaining (and I don’t, honestly), there’s really no point in the exercise.<\/p>\n

SABRETOOTH: THE DEAD DON’T TALK #5.<\/strong> By Frank Tieri, Michael Sta. Maria, Rachelle Rosenberg & Joe Sabino. I’m not sure this final issue sticks the landing in terms of plot – the final showdown between Creed and the crocodile guy feels too abrupt and has odd ideas about a hell-themed fairground ride being full of actual fire. On the other hand, it does get to the point of Creed rejecting his role as Sinister’s lackey but also rejecting a life as a conventional criminal, and striking out to do his own savage thing, and that part does feel right. Besides, this book’s strength isn’t so much the plot as the vibe, and Sta. Maria has done a stellar job selling a sort of proto Marvel Universe New York. This turned out a lot better than I was expecting, and the art actually does merit giving it a look on Unlimited.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

X-MEN #15.\u00a0(Annotations here.) No Infinity Comic this week – the pattern seems to be that we skip a week between arcs. So instead, we’re straight into this middle chapter of the twin storyline. And it’s very much a middle chapter, with Quentin still missing and a lot of running around as we keep the evil […]<\/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-11018","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\/11018","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=11018"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11018\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11030,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11018\/revisions\/11030"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}