{"id":11175,"date":"2025-06-26T22:38:49","date_gmt":"2025-06-26T21:38:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11175"},"modified":"2025-06-26T22:38:49","modified_gmt":"2025-06-26T21:38:49","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-23-june-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11175","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 23 June 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"

ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #26.<\/strong> By Alex Pakandel, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo and Clayton Cowles.\u00a0The island of Mursay, which has proclaimed itself a mutant home despite a suspiciously small number of actual mutants, is indeed trying to lure people into a trap. But not, it seems, because they’re an anti-mutant front – instead, they’re a pro-mutant cult who look to be worshipping a symbiote or something, and won’t let anyone leave. So it looks like it’s The Wicker Man<\/em>. Fair enough, it’s a solid concept, and more interesting than the straightforward honey trap plot. Two chapters in, it’s not obvious whether there’s anything much else going on. But it’s perfectly fine, so we’ll see where it goes.<\/p>\n

UNCANNY X-MEN #16.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> This is the final part of the “Dark Artery” arc, which looks like it was intended more to set up the Artery and the Penumbra for future stories – everyone now knows that Henrietta is at the bottom of the garden, after all – than to resolve very much about them. What it\u00a0does<\/em> resolve is the question of what drew the four Outliers to Haven, which is Shuvahrak trying to force one of them to relieve her of the burden of looking after the Penumbra – evidently as much of a prison for her as it is for the people she imprisoned there by way of punishment. It seems like we’re meant to take the place as a vicious cycle that needs to be broken at some point, though nobody in the cast actually seems terribly bothered about that issue, whether in terms of freeing the prisoners or relieving Shuvahrak of her burden.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Instead, the immediate story (and the priority for the cast) is more about the Outliers resisting Shuvahrak’s pull. What makes that read a little oddly, at least at first, is the fact that her primary focus is on Deathdream, a very distant character who never seems at all bothered by the prospect of taking up the role. Of course, Deathdream never seems that bothered by anything, but it still leads to the unusual dynamic of all the other characters fighting to protect someone who doesn’t immediately seem terribly worried. I think Gail Simone mostly makes that work, since the upshot is to leave Deathdream with a clearer appreciation of his new family, and in his understated way to recognise that signing up to rule the Penumbra would not have been a good idea.<\/p>\n

David Marquez’s art is beautiful, even with the general gloom of the setting. We get some fill-in art from Luciano Vecchio on the subplots, which is very obviously different in style – but at least his scenes have been kept distinct, and having slightly dreamier art on the Penumbra sequences kind of works. Henrietta’s flashback scene feels a bit underdeveloped this issue, mind you. And there are a lot of loose ends about the Penumbra itself, but we’ll see how far the book is going to follow up on those.<\/p>\n

SPIDER-MAN & WOLVERINE #2.<\/strong> By Marc Guggenheim, Kaare Andrews, Brian Reber & Travis Lanham. Well, it’s an art showcase, and on that level it’s a pretty good one. The panels from the plane crash video scattered around the pages at weird angles are a nice effect, together with the still page immediately after the impact. In plot terms, though, it’s an issue long fight scene with a plot that boils down to: Spider-Man thinks Wolverine killed his parents, and Wolverine’s scrambled memories mean he isn’t sure it’s not true, so Spider-Man is very angry and they fight. That’s nowhere close to an issue’s worth of plot, so it depends entirely on how you feel about Kaare Andrews.<\/p>\n

WOLVERINE & KITTY PRYDE #3.<\/strong> By Chris Claremont, Damien Couceiro, Carlos Lopez & Ariana Maher. Another issue long fight scene, although this one is a bit more tempered with character beats, a subplot about a mystery portal, and a plot about an out of control AI. But the Ziggy Trask thread doesn’t feel like it has much to do with the story from the first two issues, so it all feels a bit random. Still, Claremont does enough to signal that he’s going to link it together somehow, and I really do enjoy Couceiro’s art on this book – not so much the opening splash page, which is a little rough, but he does a fun teen Kitty. And as a Claremont throwback book, which is after all the point, it does the job.<\/p>\n

GIANT-SIZE AGE OF APOCALYPSE #1.\u00a0<\/strong>By Jackson Lanzing, Collin Kelly, CF Villa, Rafael Loureiro, Edgar Delgado and Clayton Cowles. The tour through X-Men events brings us to “Age of Apocalypse”, which at least has some resonance for Legion, since he created the timeline in the first place. I still feel like Kamala has been shoehorned into this concept – even if the justification is to give her a tour of mutant history, latching her to the X-books hasn’t been to the benefit of the character in the slightest. But since this issue focusses on her and a depowered Legion trying to find a way out of the timeline before the bombs drop at the end of the big crossover, until Legion tries to screw it all up at the end, it’s actually one of the more sedate and character-driven issues, and the strongest of the Giant-Size<\/em> one-shots to date. The backup story is by Jeph Loeb and Simone Di Meo. It’s an prologue to the\u00a0X-Men of Apocalypse\u00a0<\/em>miniseries for September and I can’t say it contains anything to pique my interest in that project.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #26. By Alex Pakandel, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo and Clayton Cowles.\u00a0The island of Mursay, which has proclaimed itself a mutant home despite a suspiciously small number of actual mutants, is indeed trying to lure people into a trap. But not, it seems, because they’re an anti-mutant front – instead, they’re a […]<\/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-11175","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\/11175","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=11175"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11175\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11176,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11175\/revisions\/11176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}