{"id":11299,"date":"2025-08-08T21:48:15","date_gmt":"2025-08-08T20:48:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11299"},"modified":"2025-08-08T22:40:37","modified_gmt":"2025-08-08T21:40:37","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-4-august-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11299","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 4 August 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"

ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #31.\u00a0<\/strong>By Alex Paknadel, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. This is the final part of “The Cuckoo Song”, the story about the Scottish islanders becoming a weird anti-mutant cult after the Krakoan drug supply was cut off. It really doesn’t work. It doesn’t convincingly sell the idea that they blame the fall of Krakoa on the mutants themselves; the religious angle, which is fine in theory, doesn’t really go anywhere; and the symbiote thing is just another “they got it from the X-Cutioner” subplot, which is the norm for this series. And did I miss the bit where the Scottish islander that Husk impersonates has an English<\/em> accent? Anyway, it there are plenty of promising elements in here, but it winds up as just a half-formed thing.<\/p>\n

UNCANNY X-MEN #19.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> So this one is less than the sum of its parts, but the parts are very good. It’s a David Marquez issue, for a start, and they’re always a pleasure. I particularly like the X-Men’s confusion at how to deal with people’s overly enthusiastic embrace of mutants – they’re not quite used to this, and not entirely sure how to respond to horribly clumsy marketing proposals that seem to have the right idea at heart. Deadpool and Outlaw seem to be here mainly so that Gail Simone gets a chance to write them again – they really don’t do anything that they couldn’t have achieved by picking up the phone – so the A-plot is really the sequel to the\u00a0Free Comic Book Day\u00a0<\/em>issue from last year, with the rich thug from that issue coming back to the diner for revenge.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The basic idea of him chucking money at the “problem” and having enough of it to real harm is a perfectly good hook. And the opening sequence with Ellis and Ezra stumbling upon the hostage situation and doing nothing about it is a great little bit, simply from the fact of Ellis brushing it off as not their problem. I rather like Ezra as someone who sees himself as a professional and expects that he should be stepping in here, but doesn’t seem especially bothered about being told not to. Jubilee, who hasn’t had a huge amount to do in this book so far, gets a bit of a spotlight, even if the story has to bend over a bit to justify getting her there (and I’m a little sceptical at pushing it as a grown-up moment for her, considering that she’s been around since the 1980s and had an extended motherhood storyline). But plenty of good stuff in here regardless.<\/p>\n

STORM #11.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Part two of “Thunder War”, and it’s much as we’ve come to expect from this book. The art is still decent, you can sort of see what the plot is going for. Powering up Storm to cosmic level isn’t really a direction that does anything for me, but I can see it appealing to her hardcore fanbase, so sure, why not. But the execution is very choppy, and there’s a sort of fanfic quality to the whole thing – normally, when a character proclaims themselves a goddess, that’s played as a moment of hubris, but we’re apparently meant to cheer for it here. Still, you know what you’re getting with this book and it’s undeniably different. It’s a title that I find an unholy mess, but you could never accuse it of being phoned in.<\/p>\n

HELLVERINE #9.<\/strong> By Benjamin Percy, Raffaele Ienco, Bryan Valenza and Travis Lanham. This is cancelled with issue #10 – which, to be fair, is actually #14 if you count the preceding mini. So it’s rushing a little bit to Project Hellfire imploding rather earlier than you suspect Percy might have wished, but not outrageously so. Bringing Aurora back out of the blue to serve as hostage for the finale is a bit more obviously skip-to-the-end, though, particularly as there isn’t really much opportunity to set her up for the role within the pages of this book. Still, there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with any of this – there’s a baseline of competence with\u00a0Hellverine<\/em>, and it’s better than the gimmicky concept might suggest, even if it’s visually on the bland side. It’s not really a book I’m going to miss, though.<\/p>\n

WOLVERINES & DEADPOOLS #2.<\/strong> By Cody Ziglar, Rog\u00ea Ant\u00f4nio, Guru-eFX & Travis Lanham. As I mentioned last time, this 3-issue miniseries is a continuation of the last Deadpool<\/em> ongoing series, which has both Wade and his daughter Ellie as Deadpool already – so it’s really just a case of Logan and Laura guest starring in Deadpool’s book. Mind you, they haven’t solicited an issue of Deadpool\u00a0<\/em>for October… but that’s the month when they’re doing\u00a0Deadpool\/Batman<\/em>, so I guess it wouldn’t be a good place to launch a new title.<\/p>\n

This issue is… fine? It looks pretty slick, and the team-up dynamic works well enough, but it doesn’t feel like we’ve added much here to what we saw in issue #1. Other than the team-up, the actual plot is the Shadow King looking for a host body, with Agent X and Lady Bullseye feeling like rather arbitrary inclusions – it’s a plot for the sake of giving the title characters something to do, it feels like, rather than anything memorable beyond that. But it’s fine, and maybe the last issue will tie it together effectively.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #31.\u00a0By Alex Paknadel, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. This is the final part of “The Cuckoo Song”, the story about the Scottish islanders becoming a weird anti-mutant cult after the Krakoan drug supply was cut off. It really doesn’t work. It doesn’t convincingly sell the idea that they blame […]<\/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-11299","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\/11299","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=11299"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11299\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11301,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11299\/revisions\/11301"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}