{"id":11196,"date":"2025-07-04T20:09:53","date_gmt":"2025-07-04T19:09:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11196"},"modified":"2025-07-05T15:38:55","modified_gmt":"2025-07-05T14:38:55","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-30-june-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11196","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 30 June 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"

ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #27.<\/strong> By Alex Paknadel, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. This is a\u00a0Hellfire Vigil<\/em> tie-in, awkwardly interrupting an unrelated storyline featuring two of the same characters. It basically exists to explain Banshee grudgingly agreeing to attend the Vigil at the last minute, having started off with no desire whatsoever to commemorate the place where his beloved Moira turned out to be going through the motions, and then killed him. Cassidy Keep\u2019s last remaining leprechaun reminding him of the story of Tir Na Nog, and the upshot is for Sean to accept that Krakoa was a time of lost innocence for the generation below him. I\u2019m not sure you can really pull that line with characters like Husk and Skin who have been around since the 1990s, but the basic idea works well enough.<\/p>\n

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X-MEN: THE HELLFIRE VIGIL #1.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> This is an attempt to keep the\u00a0Hellfire Gala<\/em> one shots going, but not a terribly successful one. The Gala<\/i> one-shots were used as turning points for the whole line. Vigil<\/em> isn\u2019t that, and really can\u2019t be, because the whole approach of the post-Krakoa line is not to\u00a0have\u00a0<\/em>a single unifying approach. And that\u2019s a sensible approach, partly because there was never going to be a unifying high concept that could compete with Krakoa, but also because one of the downsides of Krakoa was the tendency to flatten out the line to a single setting. Nonetheless, it\u2019s an approach that doesn\u2019t lend itself to this sort of book, which leaves\u00a0Hellfire Vigil<\/em> feeling as if it\u2019s going through the motions of an annual special. In practice, it\u2019s an anthology – a collection of five-page scenes by the creators of various books, plus a few extra pages from the X-Men<\/em> team, showing what each book\u2019s characters are up to as mutantkind gathers to remember Krakoa.<\/p>\n

Well, as those in New York gather to remember Krakoa, anyway. In Chicago, they\u2019re watching a free Dazzler concert in a park. I didn\u2019t much care for the Dazzler\u00a0<\/em>miniseries and I never thought that the song lyrics gimmick worked – certainly not when everyone is telling us all the time how brilliant they are – and all of that is present and correct here. But more to the point, a Dazzler concert is not a vigil. It\u2019s just not.<\/p>\n

Two of the books involved, NYX<\/em> and\u00a0X-Force,\u00a0<\/em>have already been cancelled;\u00a0Dazzler<\/em> was always a mini. Wolverine <\/i>doesn\u2019t contribute at all, for some reason. Lead-in times are probably a factor here, but it doesn\u2019t help the sense of being, well, not very important.\u00a0X-Force<\/em> uses its pages to try and put a little flesh on the final issue reveal that Tank was Colossus, which has nothing really to do with the Vigil, but hey, they\u2019re the only pages on offer.\u00a0Phoenix<\/em> just does a throwaway five-page story.\u00a0Storm<\/em> elects to trail an unrelated subplot. \u00a0Uncanny<\/em> has Ransom and Temper meeting up, which is a nice scene but could equally have been done at the intra-X-Men baseball game. Exceptional<\/em> gets to have its teen characters attend a mutant-centric event, which is something, but doesn\u2019t have space to do much with the idea.<\/p>\n

While Jed MacKay gets to write the largest number of pages, they don\u2019t manage to impose much structure on the issue. Cyclops refusing to go is a nice character beat, though, and the X-Men<\/em> segments do at least advance the 3K plot by having the villains hijack the event to sell themselves to the wider mutant public as the true X-Men, pursuing the goal of Krakoan restoration. It\u2019s the one segment that actually feels like it needs the Vigil – or at least some major mutant cultural event – to play off. Overall, though, this is a scattershot anthology which doesn\u2019t add up to very much, and the title invokes expectations it can\u2019t live up to.<\/p>\n

X-MEN #19.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Oh, yeah, I missed this out when I first posted this. Oops.<\/p>\n

Well, with\u00a0Hellfire Vigil<\/em> shipping in the same week and the X-Men appearing there, this is a story in which the X-Men don\u2019t appear at all. Instead, it finally picks up on\u00a0X-Men: Heir of Apocalypse<\/em>, which set up Cypher as Apocalypse\u2019s heir on Earth, Revelation. That wasn\u2019t a direction which seemed very promising, but Jed MacKay retools it here and makes it much more effective. The basic idea – which Netho Diaz gets across very well – is to row back on the robes and the stuff about disciples, and make sure that Doug is clearly recognisable, with Bei and Warlock as his family. There\u2019s a bit more steel to Doug than before, but you could have said that at times during Krakoa. What\u2019s kept from the original story is the idea that Apocalypse chose Doug precisely because he wanted someone with an entirely different approach, and so we have Doug trying to figure out what \u201cSurvival of the Fittest\u201d actually means to him – from the look of it, in lieu of actually doing anything at all about it. It\u2019s a much more interesting approach to the basic idea, with the nagging doubt about whether Doug really is the sort of character who should be trying to change the world, and the sense that Bei is holding back her private doubts from him. I\u2019m less sure about giving O*N*E an extremist splinter faction – if you want me to believe that Orchis was acceptable to Biden, you\u2019re going to have to work awfully hard to convince me that summary execution is over any sort of line for Trump.<\/p>\n

HELLVERINE #8.<\/strong> By Benjamin Percy, Raffale Ienco, Bryan Valenza & Travis Lanham. A good chunk of this issue is the origin of the Hell Hulk, and there\u2019s a glimmer of an interesting idea in here: Severith is basically the Hell equivalent of a government scientist doing deranged experiments, and he\u2019s created the demonic equivalent of the uncontrollable Hulk. I kind of like the idea of a Hell where people have actual functions beyond just Being A Demon, and then having them repeat the mistakes of humans. Other than that, though, it\u2019s all quite by the numbers. The script seems to be going for a freewheeling lunacy that the art isn\u2019t really up to selling, and that might be the core problem here.<\/p>\n

WOLVERINES AND DEADPOOLS #1.<\/strong> By Cody Ziglar, Rog\u00ea Ant\u00f4nio, Guru-eFX & Travis Lanham. Marvel have gone back to wildly over-exposing Wolverine, and seem unaccountably convinced that he and Deadpool are a duo you\u2019d want to see on a regular basis, rather than just for the duration of a film. So this is not an enticing title in the slightest. In fact, though, it\u2019s simply a continuation of Cody Ziglar\u2019s\u00a0Deadpool<\/em> run, which already has Wade\u2019s daughter Ellie as a second Deadpool, and now gets to have Logan and Laura as guest stars for three issues. In that light, it\u2019s a lot less obnoxious. In fact, it\u2019s completely fine – Wade calls in the Wolverines to help investigate mutant abductions in a small town, but mainly just wants to have his first father-daughter team-up with his very favourite superhero. Since the mission is completely genuine, the Wolverines are stuck with him – and Ellie, the legacy Deadpool, gets to meet another legacy character for the first time. So within the logic of\u00a0Deadpool<\/em>, there are actually good reasons why you\u2019d want to do this story, which is a pleasant surprise. The art\u2019s generally quite attractive, and on the whole it\u2019s a lot more readable than you\u2019d expect from that title.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #27. By Alex Paknadel, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. This is a\u00a0Hellfire Vigil tie-in, awkwardly interrupting an unrelated storyline featuring two of the same characters. It basically exists to explain Banshee grudgingly agreeing to attend the Vigil at the last minute, having started off with no desire whatsoever to […]<\/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-11196","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\/11196","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=11196"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11196\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11206,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11196\/revisions\/11206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}