{"id":11224,"date":"2025-07-12T20:49:22","date_gmt":"2025-07-12T19:49:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11224"},"modified":"2025-07-12T20:49:22","modified_gmt":"2025-07-12T19:49:22","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-7-july-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11224","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 7 July 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"

ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #28.<\/strong> By Alex Paknadel, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. Back to the storyline in progress, following the\u00a0Vigil<\/em> tie-in last week. And apparently we’re not doing the Wicker Man – we’re just doing an island community where the people in charge are out for revenge on mutants after the drugs ran out, and have forced everyone else into line. And there’s a symbiote involved somewhere, which is played as a reveal, but I thought was already pretty clear last issue. It’s not clicking for me right now, but there’s nothing wrong with it.<\/p>\n

UNCANNY X-MEN #17.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> In which the hot film of the summer is a slasher film with a mutant as the killer. I like the idea, particularly because it avoids making the film itself an outright anti-mutant screed. If you were making horror films in the Marvel Universe, then a killer with powers would be a pretty natural direction to go in, and it’s not like there haven’t been \u00a0plenty of murderous mutants over the years. Okay, yes, it does strain credibility a bit that we’ve made it to 2025 without someone doing this before. But if you apply that sort of logic too rigorously to a book that’s been running since 1963, you’re going to wall off an awful lot of story material.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

It is, once again, an issue of\u00a0Outliers featuring Uncanny X-Men<\/em>, but those are the characters I find more interesting anyway. Vecchio does some lovely character work here, and the more this book spends time on this sort of story, the happier I am with it.<\/p>\n

LAURA KINNEY: WOLVERINE #8.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Well, we’re starting to build on some of the elements established in the series to date, with Polly from issue #1 returning to set up a branch of her mutant refuge in New York. I’m not entirely convinced that you can do that in a city where NYX already exists, but that book is dead, so I guess we can turn a blind eye – and Laura could hardly commute to Dubai just so that Polly could appear as a supporting character. I can’t say I’m particularly excited to see Haymaker back, a character from Erica Schultz’s\u00a0X-23: Deadly Regenesis<\/em> mini who seemed to have completed their story arc, and didn’t feel particularly memorable the first time round. The issue itself seems like a slightly underwhelming skirmish with some MGH dealers, too, although it looks like it’s setting up for something to come. The art’s got plenty of energy, we’re finally getting Gabby back into circulation… it’s\u00a0fine<\/em>, but this book still isn’t making a compelling case for why we need a Laura Kinney solo book.<\/p>\n

MAGIK #7.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Back to the Liminal plot, and while it slightly screwed up the timeline of Dani’s subplots, I think it was probably a smart move to spend an issue on something else as a palate-cleanser before going back to this. Magik finally meets Dani’s new allies in the Society of the Eternal Dawn, who are apparently working to free Cal and contain Liminal in some other way, but have a definite vibe of untrustworthiness. What Magik<\/em> really does well, though, is work Magik’s one-dimensional cynicism from so many other books into a facade for a more rounded character – both Ashley Allen and Germ\u00e1n Peralta are capturing the mood shifts when Illyana lets the act drop, or when she goes into defensive autopilot on meeting anyone new. It really is doing wonders for my interest in Magik, The Embodiment and her three Exemplars make a pretty good first impression as the faces of the Society too, although the Exemplars’ fight scene isn’t always clear – I was on my third reading of the scene before I realised that the sword was the new one that Illyana got last issue, not something that belonged to one of the Exemplars. That’s minor stuff, though –\u00a0Magik<\/em> continues to outperform my expectations.<\/p>\n

WOLVERINE AND KITTY PRYDE #4.<\/strong> By Chris Claremont, Damian Couceiro, Carlos Lopez & Ariana Maher. The big question in my mind is whether the concluding issue #5 will manage to tie together the Ziggy Trask \/ AI plot with the magical portal subplot, because right now it’s not at all clear to me what on earth is supposed to connect them. Still, Claremont does enough to keep both plates spinning to earn the benefit of the doubt that it’s going to come together somehow. This issue, though, is mostly about Ziggy Trask and her Sentinels, and feels terribly rushed in giving her a face turn – we go straight from “she hates mutants and built her own Sentinels” to “the AI has turned on her and actually she and Kitty have a lot to bond over”, which might have worked over a longer period but feels terribly forced in the course of, what, ten minutes? That aside, it’s solid enough trad-Claremont (which is the selling point, after all). And Couceiro’s art helps the book enormously by resisting the temptation to go for retro pastiche and just seeming to be on Claremont’s wavelength – hopefully they get some higher profile work off the back of this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #28. By Alex Paknadel, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. Back to the storyline in progress, following the\u00a0Vigil tie-in last week. And apparently we’re not doing the Wicker Man – we’re just doing an island community where the people in charge are out for revenge on mutants after the drugs […]<\/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-11224","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\/11224","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=11224"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11224\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11225,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11224\/revisions\/11225"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}