{"id":11060,"date":"2025-05-11T12:04:13","date_gmt":"2025-05-11T11:04:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11060"},"modified":"2025-05-11T12:04:13","modified_gmt":"2025-05-11T11:04:13","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-6-may-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11060","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 6 May 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"

ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #20.<\/strong> By Tim Seeley, Adoardo Audino, KJ Diaz & Clayton Cowles. This feels like it backs off a bit from the cliffhanger of the previous issue (which I liked a lot). But the basic setting of a bunch of influencers who don’t really care about anything other than engagement – including the ones who are supposedly the good guys – seems like a good angle. Building up Wildside as the leader of a new MLF is, um, a choice, but I guess that of the established MLF guys he’s the one with the most charisma. Audino makes good use of the format, bringing a lot of personality to his bit part characters. It’s pretty decent, all told.<\/p>\n

FREE COMIC BOOK DAY 2025: FANTASTIC FOUR \/ GIANT-SIZE X-MEN #1.<\/strong> This came out last weekend, but it was added to Marvel Unlimited on Wednesday. There are three 8-page stories here, and the main attraction is the FF strip by Ryan North, Humberto Ramos and Edgar Delgado. It gets across the strengths of North’s FF run – a simple strong idea, and genuinely self-contained – which also makes it ideal for FCBD. The X-Men story, by Jackson Lanzing, Collin Kelly, Iban Coello and Brian Reber, is basically just an advert for the upcoming Giant-Size X-Men<\/em> one-shots and does nothing to increase my interest in what currently looks like a rather tiresome gimmick. It’s certainly hard to see why it would hold any interest to the new readers that FCBD is ostensibly targetting. Finally, there’s a Chip Zdarsky story about a fan and his non-fan wife ending up the Marvel Universe as “Wolverpool and Deadverine” which… feels too close to what Gwenpool did already, I guess?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

X-MEN #16.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Three parts in, and still not finished? This is the longest story X-Men<\/em> has had in its current run. The focus here is the debut of the 3K X-Men, and as the centrepiece of an issue, I’m not sure it entirely works. In theory, I quite like the idea of a random group simply declaring that they’re as legitimate the X-Men as anyone else – but the obvious answer is the absence of any existing X-Men to endorse them. So it may work better if and when we establish that Cypher or some other such character is involved in 3K. The new group have decent designs and seem to work better as a team than the regular cast. But what doesn’t come across is a great deal of personality. Schwartzchild and Timebomb show something, but the rest feel quite ill-defined – I don’t have any real sense of why these adult-created mutants want<\/em> to be the X-Men.<\/p>\n

STORM #8.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Look, I get that there’s an audience for a Storm<\/em> solo title that wants to build her up as an iconic figure on a par with Superman and Wonder Woman. It’s not particularly the version of Storm that interests me, but it’s the version that interests a lot of her fanbase, so I can absolutely understand why that’s the book we’re getting. Hell, it’s the sort of Storm <\/em>book I’d commission if I was making those decisions. That’s not the issue I have with this series. And the art is consistently good too. No, my issue is with the writing, the neverending parade of utterly baffling storytelling and pacing choices, and the general unintelligibility of the plot. It’s the one current X-book where I approach each issue with a heavy heart, knowing that a massive chore lies ahead. Of course, you might well say that nobody’s making me read it, and you’d be right, but… it’s amateur hour stuff, it really is. I get what this book is trying to do in the very broad sense of the direction it has in mind for the character. Literally everything else about it mystifies me.<\/p>\n

PSYLOCKE<\/strong> #7.\u00a0<\/strong>(Annotations here.)<\/a> This is more like it. The whole question of whether Psylocke is being possessed by one entity or two is a little confusing, but I think it’s meant<\/em> to be obscure at this point, so it gets a pass. The Mitsuki flashbacks have built up Kwannon’s childhood friend (i.e., fellow victim) very effectively so that I actually care about seeing something done with that relationship now, and Carrat\u00f9’s art really helps sell the pairing in this issue’s graveyard flashback. I raise an eyebrow at the apparent stalker tendencies of the supporting cast in monitoring Psylocke, but I’m going to assume for the moment that that’s the intended reaction. The hybrid ghost thing is suitably grotesque, too. The issue does seem a bit of a waste of Deathdream, who notionally has a major role here but in practice spends it all either possessed or unconscious, but the book has me interested in where it’s going.<\/p>\n

LAURA KINNEY: WOLVERINE<\/strong> #6.\u00a0<\/strong>(Annotations here.)<\/a> The previous issues of this series felt a bit generic to me, but this is more like it. Sure, there’s nothing original about the story where the lead character is told that the regular series is a hallucination. But it’s done well here by having Laura unaware that these hallucinations are even meant to be part of her back story. It’s nice to see Gabby brought back even for this sort of role, and there are some genuinely subtle choices being made to make the book a bit weirder – the story never leaves the house and there’s something just a little too prominent in the way the art keeps showing us the sunlight streaming in through every window. It’s the first issue of the series that’s really felt like it has a take on Laura, and her awkward feelings about what passes for family, and a big step up for the book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #20. By Tim Seeley, Adoardo Audino, KJ Diaz & Clayton Cowles. This feels like it backs off a bit from the cliffhanger of the previous issue (which I liked a lot). But the basic setting of a bunch of influencers who don’t really care about anything other than engagement – including […]<\/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-11060","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\/11060","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=11060"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11060\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11061,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11060\/revisions\/11061"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}