{"id":11131,"date":"2025-06-07T20:37:35","date_gmt":"2025-06-07T19:37:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11131"},"modified":"2025-06-07T20:37:35","modified_gmt":"2025-06-07T19:37:35","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-2-june-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11131","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 2 June 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"

ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #24.\u00a0<\/strong>By Tim Seeley, Edoardo Audino, KJ D\u00edaz, Clayton Cowles & Darren Shan. End of the current storyline, and I’m not convinced that this one really drew all its threads together. It looks great, and there are some elements of the Mutant Salvation Front that I really like. The idea of some of the MLF types being so dispirited by the post-Krakoa world that they’d rather try to travel forward in time to a better future than get there the long way is a nice one. Sure, the Krakoan era ended in a way that rather implied that all the\u00a0 mutants left on Earth were either new or had made a conscious decision to stay, but at this stage we’ve probably just got to assume that a lot more people didn’t fancy life in a conceptual realm than that story let on. And there’s an undercurrent to Wildside’s attitude to the post-Krakoa X-Men that makes a degree of sense: what do you mean we reverted to villainy? You’re the ones who turned your backs on mutant supremacism. We’re holding true to the Krakoan dream, mate.<\/p>\n

However…\u00a0 quite what any of this has to do with the influencer storyline, I don’t really get. Something about Wildside trying to use them to spread his ideas and coming up against self-interest and cynicism and…? No, it just feels like two storylines that don’t connect up. So there are good ideas in here but it’s less than the sum of its parts.<\/p>\n

X-MEN #17.\u00a0<\/strong>(Annotations here.)<\/a> This is by far the longest storyline we’ve had from Jed MacKay, despite it being basically a day’s fighting in the vicinity of the Factory. The X-Men themselves – and their 3K counterparts – don’t actually get that much to do in this issue, the real point being to expand a bit on the shadowy members of 3K. For that to work, of course, the art winds up having to gather them around one little bit of their enormous table, which always seemed a hostage to visual fortune. I’m not sure how effectively the new information about 3K is landing as a reveal – there surely can’t be many people out there who are excited to see Astra back, and Wyre is so obscure a character that he might as well be a new creation so far as X-Men\u00a0<\/em>readers are concerned. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with using either character here, but building them up as a mystery is an odd choice.<\/p>\n

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The Chairman is a more intriguing mystery, though, and we also get some fun stuff here with Magneto fighting the monster twin in his makeshift Sentinel kaiju. Stegman is at his best on the character work, though – the twin is faintly ridiculous but has the appropriate look of an angry child, and I really do like the splash page of Ben and Jennifer bringing Piper back home.<\/p>\n

STORM #9.\u00a0<\/strong>(Annotations here.)<\/a> Regular readers will know that I find\u00a0Storm<\/em> a bit of a slog, albeit with consistently lovely art from Lucas Werneck. This is at the better end of the range for the book, in that it starts drawing together some seemingly dropped threads, and Storm’s change of heart during her interrogation about whether she’s a danger to the USA actually makes reasonable sense in the light of scenes later in the issue. And I quite enjoy the absurd FBI agents, some of whom seem to be on loan from Doom Patrol<\/em>. On the other hand, Storm’s gone from ignoring her possession by Eternity to comparing it to a sexual assault seemingly out of nowhere, and a symbolic splash page of the Statute of Liberty in driving rain so that it looks like she’s crying is Not Exactly Subtle. That’s before you get to the oddity of characters trying to be American exceptionalist officials in the midst of\u00a0One World Under Doom<\/em>, but you can’t really hold that against Murewa Ayodele because it’s an inherent problem of trying to make that storyline into a line-wide event. Still a choppy and inconsistent title, then, but this is one of the issues where it’s easier for me to see what some people like about it.<\/p>\n

LAURA KINNEY, WOLVERINE #7.\u00a0<\/strong>(Annotations here.)<\/a> Ah. Well. The first half of this storyline did a really nice job of setting up Laura’s seemingly perfect world. The second half… does not stick the landing. On re-reading, and on a bit of reflection, there\u00a0is<\/em> an interesting idea at work here. It’s meant to be an inversion of the perfect dream world trope, where Laura is meant to be living in a utopia, but even that suburban paradise version of her life is a world where she’s mentally ill and her mother is dead. There’s only so much niceness her mind is willing to tolerate. Erica Schultz writes that part quite subtly, and Giada Belviso’s Wolverine family strikes the right vibe. The problem is that the story doesn’t have a good explanation for\u00a0why<\/em> any of this is happening, and so it winds up with a back end built around some hand-wavy throwaway stuff from the Badoon and a major role for walking plot device Beautiful Dreamer. That part of the issue is entirely unsatisfying, I’m afraid.<\/p>\n

HELLVERINE #7.<\/strong> By Benjamin Percy, Raffaele Ienco, Bryan Valenza & Travis Lanham. So you’ll never guess, but the twist is that the obviously sinister guy from the previous issue is a baddie. I know! I wondered for a moment whether Raffaele Ienco’s art had just really oversold how obviously evil the guy was, but no, it’s made fairly obvious in the previous issue from the script as well. Ienco does deliver a genuinely nice splash page of an out-of-context vision that Akihiro experiences, and there’s something appealing in the idea that Akihiro is keen to hang around with Project Hellfire just to get a bit of company from people he can relate to. But this is a bit of a mess, really.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #24.\u00a0By Tim Seeley, Edoardo Audino, KJ D\u00edaz, Clayton Cowles & Darren Shan. End of the current storyline, and I’m not convinced that this one really drew all its threads together. It looks great, and there are some elements of the Mutant Salvation Front that I really like. The idea of some […]<\/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-11131","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\/11131","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=11131"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11131\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11133,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11131\/revisions\/11133"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}