{"id":11036,"date":"2025-05-02T19:42:39","date_gmt":"2025-05-02T18:42:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11036"},"modified":"2025-05-02T19:42:39","modified_gmt":"2025-05-02T18:42:39","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-28-april-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11036","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 28 April 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"

ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #19.<\/strong> By Tim Seeley, Edoardo Audino, KJ D\u00edaz & Clayton Cowles. It’s a fairly quiet week for the X-books, with one ongoing title, a couple of minis, and this. Yes, I know the FCBD book is out at the weekend, but we’ll cover that when it reaches Unlimited. This is the first part of “I Have Seen Tomorrow”, and the book continues to alternate between its two creative teams. This time, however, Tim Seeley takes up the baton of Alex Paknadel’s Generation X<\/em> reunion, and starts setting up a storyline about an influencer platforming anti-mutant types in a “just asking questions” way. For whatever reason, Seeley’s take on these characters clicks a little better for me – he writes more convincing banter, I think – and Audino’s art is a bit more dynamic too. But it also pulls off a nice cliffhanger that I didn’t see coming. Good start.<\/p>\n

NYX #10.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> And that’s another cancelled title. Still, never mind, I’m sure they’ll announce another Wolverine team-up book to replace it. Have we tried Wolverine \/ Wolverine<\/em> yet? We do have a spare!<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

NYX<\/em> was an interesting idea that worked for the most part, but had some glaring flaws. It basically wanted to be about a mutant community existing within the real world, which seems like a good idea and relatively untapped. But it also tended towards slightly trite plot resolutions that didn’t quite fit the vibe of that, with things like Empath being defeated by a day’s vigorous campaigning. Understandably, this final issue doesn’t even try to pick up all the various plot threads that had been put in place – we still have no idea what a character like Sobunar is doing living in a sewer, and there clearly hasn’t been time to do much with Kiden Nixon. Who knows, maybe Laura Kinney: Wolverine<\/em> will pick her up. The final issue focusses on resolving the Mojo\/Local storyline, and while it’s something of a power-of-love ending with fuzzy plot mechanics, I think the book more or less gets away with it, because it’s trying to do something about the\u00a0 power of the authentic city culture. Quite how Mojo maps onto the opposite of that isn’t altogether obvious, admittedly, and that’s the weakness.<\/p>\n

As for Kamala fretting about her dual identity, as people pointed out in the annotations comments thread, this feels like it’s going back over old territory – I liked the idea of Kamala as the one NYX<\/em> character with a superhero style dual identity, because she’s an import from a more traditional superhero book. I’m not quite sure about this as a direction to set up the upcoming one-shots (which seem terribly gimmicky anyway). But for all that, this works nicely enough as a final issue, with a neat reprise of the New York montage from the start of the series – it succeeds in enough of what it tries for me to miss it.<\/p>\n

WEAPON X-MEN #3.<\/strong> By Joe Casey, ChrisCross, Mark Morales, Yen Nitro & Clayton Cowles. Okay, I said one ongoing title. Apparently this was meant to be an ongoing title, even though Amazon had it listed as a miniseries from the off but… since it was dead on arrival and is cancelled with issue #5, let’s just treat it as a mini. Except… this issue is obviously meant to be the end of the first arc, with the impromptu team-up characters agreeing to hang around for further X-Force-style missions. The book itself is a harmless enough romp, perfectly competent and with ChrisCross’ art being easy on the eye. But it just feels so unnecessary – it’s really not at all clear to me what this book was meant to bring to the line. Maybe if they’d called it X-Force<\/em> they’d have gotten away with it, but that name was taken… and come to think of it, Weapon X-Men<\/em> would have made more sense as a title for that book, wouldn’t it? I mean, slightly?<\/p>\n

ROGUE: THE SAVAGE LAND #4.<\/strong> By Tim Seeley, Von Randal, Rachelle Rosenberg & Joe Caramagna. Another book for the “perfectly fine” pile – though to be fair, it’s a Savage Land story and I’ve never found the Savage Land all that interesting. There’s only so many dinosaur stories you can do. This one is more interested in the conflict between the tribes, though, and while it’s basically plugging a continuity gap, there are a couple of interesting moments in here, such as Magneto’s instinct to treat the more advanced Fall People as superior to the Man-Apes. I’m not sure it’s particularly a Rogue<\/em> story, though – it just happens to be playing on an untold story from her history.<\/p>\n

WOLVERINE & KITTY PRYDE #1.<\/strong> By Chris Claremont, Damian Couceiro, Carlos Lopez & Ariana Maher. This is another continuity implant miniseries, taking place immediately after the 1984 Kitty Pryde & Wolverine<\/em> miniseries. It’s the one where Kitty is possessed by Ogun and learns ninja skills. She’s also meant to forget them at the end, but then they just showed up again anyway – which is kind of the continuity gap that’s being plugged here. Kind of, because we move straight on to her being trained in these skills she doesn’t want. Claremont’s last miniseries, Wolverine: Deep Cut<\/em>, was a bit of a trainwreck, so I’m happy to report that this is a big step up. It’s Claremont playing the hits, to be sure, but that’s the point, and there’s a bit more character heft to this one. He even has a stab at straightening out the history of Kitty’s father and Professor X. Admittedly, there’s a henchman called Kill, but you can’t have everything. Couceiro is a good pairing on art, precisely because he isn’t doing any sort of 80s homage but just being clear and expressive, which makes it feel like less of a period piece.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #19. By Tim Seeley, Edoardo Audino, KJ D\u00edaz & Clayton Cowles. It’s a fairly quiet week for the X-books, with one ongoing title, a couple of minis, and this. Yes, I know the FCBD book is out at the weekend, but we’ll cover that when it reaches Unlimited. This is the […]<\/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-11036","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\/11036","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=11036"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11036\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11037,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11036\/revisions\/11037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}