{"id":11087,"date":"2025-05-22T21:28:19","date_gmt":"2025-05-22T20:28:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11087"},"modified":"2025-05-22T21:28:19","modified_gmt":"2025-05-22T20:28:19","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-19-may-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11087","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 19 May 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"

ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #22.\u00a0<\/strong>By Tim Seeley, Edoardo Audino, KJ D\u00edaz & Clayton Cowles. We’re still in the influencer storyline, although it tacks in a strange direction with this issue. At first we’re still doing stuff about Mondo’s attempts to be a pacifist influencer – and Audino really does make the guy look likeable – but then we tack into what seems to be some sort of origin story for Zero, as a rickety 1950s proto-AI. That’s certainly not what I was expecting here. Seeley also develops his attempt to take Wildside from merely a memorable Liefeld design into a viable lead villain, with some success. His revived extremism is based on claiming that he’s been to the far future with Zero and seen a world where mutants had wiped out humans – therefore, it’s fine for mutants to get rid of humanity because it’s happening anyway and they might as well get it over with. In other words, he’s seen the future and it validates giving up on coexistence. But his revived MLF is now the “Mutant Salvation Front” and he seems to have got a bit messianic. Does any of this tie to the influencer theme? Um… tenuously? I suppose in terms of the radicalisation and propaganda theme, maybe, but the link between Wildside’s schemes and the influencers isn’t terribly clear. Still, there’s a lot of neat details in here.<\/p>\n

EXCEPTIONAL X-MEN #9.\u00a0<\/strong>(Annotations here.)<\/a>\u00a0Well, it’s taken us nine issues, but we actually have a fight with a villain. And instead of throwing the kids into the fire, the teachers deal with him while the kids try not to mess it all up. It’s more realistic but… after this long a wait, you kind of want the kids to take the reins more? Then again, their frustration at being left to pointlessly train while the plot goes on somewhere else is nicely conveyed in a montage sequence, and since Emma collapses at the end of the isuse, maybe this\u00a0is<\/em> heading towards the kids having to step up and deal with it themselves.<\/p>\n

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This has always been a character-driven book, and fight scenes with Mr Sinister aren’t really something that plays to its strengths. Aside from the fact that his resistance to telepathy is all over the place from page to page, it’s a dubious call to have Emma just freeze him right off the bat – he never actually seems like that much of a threat here. But the character work is strong and the panels of Alejandro’s “affective core” with his family and friends are genuinely sweet.<\/p>\n

WEAPON X-MEN #4.<\/strong> By Joe Casey, ChrisCross, Mark Morales, Yen Nitro & Clayton Cowles. It’s hard to get excited about an ongoing series cancelled with issue #5, and boldly embarking on its second story anyway. Casey seems to be trying to re-establish Cable in a Hell’s Kitchen safehouse as in his previous Cable<\/em> run – and of course, if this book had survived, this would have been Cable’s home title. The main story here involves someone taking Red Ronin on a rampage and the team stopping it, all to get revenge for his brother, who was… in a Red Ronin story involving the Avengers in 1980? That’s more the sort of continuity reference you use to handwave motivation away. And having the team talking about how they’re here to stay is obviously a bit hollow. If you like Red Ronin, then hey, ChrisCross draws a good Red Ronin. But the book still hasn’t made a convincing case for why we need it to exist, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to. The cover strap – “Wolverine! Deadpool! Cable!” – remains telling, seeming to think that this is a hook in itself in a world where Deadpool \/ Wolverine<\/em> also exists.<\/p>\n

SPIDER-MAN & WOLVERINE #1.\u00a0<\/strong>By Marc Guggenheim, Kaare Andrews, Brian Reber & Travis Lanham. Now look, the world does not need two monthly Wolverine Team-Up\u00a0<\/em>titles. As a commission, this would reek of desperation if it wasn’t for the presence of Kaare Andrews on art, who’s a far bigger name than you’d expect to find here. And he’s the selling point, even if he’s in Todd McFarlane territory at times.<\/p>\n

What works well is the hallucinatory sequence of the two heroes reliving one another’s greatest hits. The plot is secondary, but it tries to find a sensible link between the characters by leveraging the spy past of Peter’s parents. I’ve never liked that idea – the whole point of Peter Parker is that he’s the boy next door until he gets his powers, and he shouldn’t have that sort of hidden ties to Marvel Universe weirdness. But it’s been established for years, so I guess that ship has long since sailed. The plot involves a supposedly incendiary file with the details of “every double agent in the world” which… what? Not every double agent working for a particular organisation? All of them in the world? Who assembled that? How? It’s an irritating bit of overreach, because what it’s actually trying to get to is the idea that Logan was involved in the deaths of Peter’s parents back in his black ops phase (which is when he was working for Romulus, so I guess there’s nothing fundamentally problematic with the idea).<\/p>\n

I suppose if you must<\/em> do a Spider-Man \/ Wolverine book then there are worse hooks, and it’s mainly an art showcase anyway… but I can’t get past the feeling that books like this are a case of “Well, we tried some interesting ideas and they failed, so sod it, have a Wolverine team-up comic. In fact, go on – have three.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #22.\u00a0By Tim Seeley, Edoardo Audino, KJ D\u00edaz & Clayton Cowles. We’re still in the influencer storyline, although it tacks in a strange direction with this issue. At first we’re still doing stuff about Mondo’s attempts to be a pacifist influencer – and Audino really does make the guy look likeable – […]<\/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-11087","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\/11087","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=11087"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11087\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11088,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11087\/revisions\/11088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11087"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11087"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11087"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}