{"id":11150,"date":"2025-06-14T21:16:48","date_gmt":"2025-06-14T20:16:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11150"},"modified":"2025-06-14T21:16:48","modified_gmt":"2025-06-14T20:16:48","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-9-june-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11150","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 9 June 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"

EXCEPTIONAL X-MEN #10.\u00a0<\/strong>(Annotations here.)<\/a> It’s a skip week for the X-Men’s Infinity Comic, before you ask. So, first up we have\u00a0Exceptional X-Men<\/em>, as the three kids finally get to do something. I’m all for the slow pace and character focus that Eeve Ewing brings to Exceptional<\/em>, and while it’s questionable to bill it as an X-Men comic, I’m happy to see the current X-books doing something as commercially… stubborn as this. The flip side, though, is that it has taken an awfully long time for the kids to actually do anything, and even when they have, they’ve remained in the shadows of the established cast. Axo does get his moment in the sun here: Sinister’s goth Alice in Wonderland<\/em> mindscape is fun and nicely realised by Carmen Carnero, and Axo gets to save the day by bringing to bear a level of empathy that Emma just can’t summon. Bronze and Mel\u00e9e still feel like they haven’t had their chance to shine, though, and ten issues in, it’s starting to feel like the book needs to kick it up a gear. As the coming out moment where the three teens declare themselves X-Men this… works for one of them? It’s still fine but it’s not really the book at its strongest.<\/p>\n

PHOENIX #12.\u00a0<\/strong>(Annotations here.)<\/a> Mostly an account of how Sara Grey got here, which calls for an awful lot of fudging of the timeline in order for it to work – and on top of that, we’re pretty much encouraged to doubt the whole thing. Visually, it feels a bit punchier than the previous issue, but I’m a bit puzzled by what we’re doing here. Sara Grey is a dropped subplot from the 1980s given a throwaway resolution in the 1990s – she’s hardly someone that was crying out for a second go. Perhaps the idea is to give Sara someone from home to relate to, but retooling Sara as a messiah figure for a world cuts against that. The issue doesn’t do a great deal to make me interested in Sara as a character – there’s a history here but no real hook.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

MAGIK #6.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Moving on from the Liminal arc – or possibly serving as a breather before we return to it – this is a single-issue story with Magik helping Madelyne Pryor to deal with a rebellion in Limbo. Whether Madelyne likes it or not. It makes sense for Ashley Allen to go back to Limbo and nail down Illyana’s current relationship with the place and its new ruler, since although it’s been handed over to Madelyne, Illyana is apparently still linked to it somehow. This issue handles the relationship with Madelyne rather nicely, giving Illyana a range of conflicting ideas – she doesn’t want to undermine Maddie but she can’t resist imposing her authority on the demons, nor can she resist the temptation to snark her way through Maddie’s scenes. But her narration strikes a more fretful note, and I like the idea that Maddie is a good enough psychic to see through Magik’s persona without letting on about it. Some really nice art from Jes\u00fas Herv\u00e1s, too, particularly in the opening scenes on Earth, but he gets Illyana’s mix of persona and sincerity rather well. Best X-book of the week, no doubt.<\/p>\n

DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE #6.<\/strong> By Benjamin Percy, Robert Gill, Guru-eFX & Joe Sabino. I know, I did annotations for the previous issue, but it’s a four-comic week and besides, I really can’t get worked up about this. Basically, yes, this Stryfe\u00a0is<\/em> Apocalypse, but not our Apocalypse. He’s the Apocalypse from Cable and Stryfe’s timeline, or some version thereof, who went back to the plan of using Stryfe as a host body and eventually pulled it off. And if the aim is to get a version of Apocalypse into circulation without directly reversing anything that was done with the main Apocalypse during the Krakoan era, there are worse ways of doing it. The issue has fill-in art from Robert Gill, which is completely fine, and probably more to my taste than the regular art, if I’m being honest. But six issues in, I don’t get the impression that anyone involved knows why a Deadpool & Wolverine<\/em> comic exists, or has any idea what to do with it. Benjamin Percy is writing a story where Deadpool and Wolverine barely interact and take turns to be mind controlled anyway, and the story itself could have been done with pretty much anyone as the affected heroes. The title characters are interchangeable to the extent that they’re even in the book at all, and that’s never a good thing.<\/p>\n

GIANT-SIZE X-MEN: DARK PHOENIX SAGA #1.<\/strong> By Jackson Lanzing, Collin Kelly, Rod Reis & Clayton Cowles; back-up by Steve Foxe, Lucas Werneck & Clayton Cowles. Ms Marvel visits a version of the Dark Phoenix Saga, with Legion hijacking the plot to become Dark Phoenix himself. The overreaching storyline here seems to be that Legion – the personalities left behind when David Haller when to the White Hot Room at the end of the Krakoan age – is trying to get into the White Hot Room to be reunited with him, and is cheerfully wrecking history in order to get there. So clearly the cosmic reset button is going to get hit on all of this.<\/p>\n

The plot hinges on Phoenix leaving Jean for Legion, which runs into the obvious continuity problem that, since the 1980s, this version of “Jean” was supposed to be just a duplicate created by Phoenix. I don’t think that’s an error, though, since Tom Brevoort has been publicly musing about the fact that the Krakoan era ended by trying to establish Jean and Phoenix as one and the same. In which case, the whole “duplicate of Jean” thing no longer makes sense. It was always a convoluted affair designed to try and preserve the notion that the Dark Phoenix Saga character was “Jean” while exonerating Jean from genocide, none of which is necessary any more – so if the plan is to retcon all that out and declare that Jean\u00a0did<\/em> become Phoenix and just came back from the dead in a cocoon, then fair enough, I can see how that potentially works.<\/p>\n

Not sure I’d just throw it into this story without explanation, though, because anyone familiar enough with the source material to care is likely to be very familiar with the established history, and so it’s liable to just be confusing. That aside, the series is still very gimmicky, and runs squarely into the problem that Ms Marvel isn’t particularly a fan of X-Men history and has no real investment in the events she’s visiting. Fundamentally, she’s just the wrong character to be doing this with. It’s a Rod Reis book, so it looks lovely, but the basic concept isn’t good.<\/p>\n

The back-up strip is very pretty but doesn’t seem to amount to much more than a five page musing about how Jean and Scott were made for each other, with a reminder about that bonding thing from the Dark Phoenix Saga. I guess we’re re-establishing that that’s a thing (which, again, follows from the fact that Phoenix was Jean After All), but I don’t feel like this is telling me anything new.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

EXCEPTIONAL X-MEN #10.\u00a0(Annotations here.) It’s a skip week for the X-Men’s Infinity Comic, before you ask. So, first up we have\u00a0Exceptional X-Men, as the three kids finally get to do something. I’m all for the slow pace and character focus that Eeve Ewing brings to Exceptional, and while it’s questionable to bill it as an […]<\/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-11150","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\/11150","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=11150"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11150\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11151,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11150\/revisions\/11151"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}