{"id":11321,"date":"2025-08-16T20:26:19","date_gmt":"2025-08-16T19:26:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11321"},"modified":"2025-08-16T20:26:19","modified_gmt":"2025-08-16T19:26:19","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-11-august-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11321","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 11 August 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"

ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #32.<\/strong> By Tim Seeley, Edoardo Audino, KJ Diaz & Clayton Cowles. This is the start of a new arc, and I’ll warn you now that I’m going to spoil the ending, because that’s the real hook for the arc. Up to then, we have a framing sequence of Sean telling the story to Black Tom (nothing wrong with bringing those two together, and this is the natural book for Tom to be used in), and the story itself involving the return of… the Changeling. That’s the Silver Age Changeling, the one who was in a handful of issues from the Factor Three storyline and then got retconned into having replaced Professor X when they wanted to bring him back from the dead at the dawn of the 1970s.<\/p>\n

The Changeling is… not a character anyone has really been crying out to see again, which is why he didn’t even get used in the Krakoan era. But presumably he was resurrected off panel – he was an X-Man for one issue (retroactive), after all – and now he’s gone back to mutant radicalism. Tim Seeley does a good job of setting up why\u00a0Sean<\/em> would care about this character, reminding us that he debuted as a pawn of Factor Three back in the sixties – and Audino actually makes that wonky costume look pretty fun, giving the guy some presence, even though we\u00a0really<\/em> have to stretch to believe that the Tesco Value Mystique is going to get anywhere in a straight fight with Banshee. I mean, Banshee has range attacks that he doesn’t even need to aim with, right?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

But the\u00a0actual<\/em> point of all this is to bring in Morph at the end – presumably the\u00a0Exiles<\/em> version, but who knows. And that does kind of intrigue me, because the Changeling is a character with the rather odd legacy of being the notional template for a much more popular character who bears almost no resemblance to him whatsoever. There’s got to be a story in that, right…?<\/p>\n

X-MEN #20.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> We’re back to the single issue format, it seems, and that’s fine by me – it works better for Jed MacKay than longer storylines. With a bit of downtime conversation in the B-plots, this issue is built around a third confrontation between Scott and Agent Lundqvist, which ends up with them coming to blows and going to jail. It’s the first time that Lundqvist has come out more or less ahead – or at least that Scott has failed to bring him down a peg. MacKay has taken an odd approach in building up this character, presenting him as fundamentally outclassed from the word go; I suspect the whole idea is that we’re meant to be underestimating and misreading him to some extent. Diaz does a rather good job of making him smugly satisfied with finally getting a partial win over Scott. The reveal here, if you take it at face value (and Scott doesn’t), is Lundqvist arguing that he isn’t anti-mutant, he’s just anti the really powerful ones who think they’re above the law.<\/p>\n

That actually\u00a0is<\/em> a plausible reading of his behaviour to date – with hindsight, it’s unfortunate we didn’t get more of him and Scott interacting over “X-Manhunt”, where they actually seem to have had some sort of off-panel understanding – and honestly, it’s probably a more interesting direction for O*N*E. After all, we have Corina Ellis doing the anti-mutant lunatic angle over in\u00a0Uncanny<\/em>, so this gives Lundqvist something more his own. And “where do the X-Men get off acting as if they’re above the law” is a completely reasonable motivation for a law enforcement character to have, with a post-Krakoa subtext that you could also tap into. It’s an issue I like more, the more I think about it.<\/p>\n

LAURA KINNEY: WOLVERINE #9.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> This is… completely okay, I guess? I don’t really understand why Gabby was kept out of circulation in both this book and\u00a0NYX<\/em> for so long, especially if she and Laura are supposed to be in touch. Packing her off to hunt monsters with Xarus in the aftermath of\u00a0Blood Hunt<\/em> is at least a reasonable explanation for why she’s not been around and builds off the last story we saw her in, but it runs up against the problem that Xarus is not a very interesting character. Nor is Strega, the new villain, especially memorable. I kind of like Laura’s blatant inability to handle Gabby adventuring with a different partner, and it looks perfectly nice, but it’s all a bit surplus to requirements.<\/p>\n

MAGIK #8.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> So this is an odd issue. Magik, Mirage and Liminal are packed off to Las Vegas, supposedly to recover a mystical artefact for the Society of the Eternal Dawn in order that it can be used to free Cal from Liminal’s possession, but in reality in order to deal with the Society’s dissidents on their behalf. So far, so normal. But the issue also features an extended hallucinatory fight scene (and I’m still not\u00a0entirely<\/em> sure why these Scarlet Eye dissident guys are dealing in hallucinogenics). It’s wonderfully odd, particularly as Matt Horak’s art normally strikes such a grounded tone even when dealing in magical dimensions; this is where he gets to go nuts. And there’s a subtler level of weirdness as Liminal gaslights his way through the issue blandly denying what other characters have literally just seen him do, and calmly insinuating himself into steering the story even though he’s meant to be Magik and Mirage’s prisoner. In isolation it’s all a little confusing, but the book’s earned the benefit of the doubt on this sort of thing.<\/p>\n

GIANT-SIZE X-MEN #2.<\/strong> By Jackson Lanzing, Collin Kelly, Adam Kubert, Laura Martin & Clayton Cowles. Well, the\u00a0House of M<\/em> issue wasn’t bad, but on the whole I think we have to chalk this mini up as a misfire. I get that we’re trying to do stories about Kamala coming to mutant culture as an outsider, and in theory giving her a tour of X-Men history works with that, but in practice I’m increasingly convinced that this whole direction for the character is misconceived. She’s being dragged away from the neighbourhood hero role that was so central to her, yet she’s also too established a character to fit comfortably into this newcomer role. So none of this really leads up in a satisfying way to her coming out to her parents as a mutant – the strings are too visible.<\/p>\n

As for the story itself, it’s basically just a fight between some of the major X-Men and Legion (or the abandoned personalities of Legion, who get packed off to the White Hot Room at the end). Kamala seems to have rounded up these characters… um, somewhere? It’s all terribly arbitrary, and it\u00a0certainly<\/em> wasn’t worth having Phoenix show up on Earth for this. There are other books where that would be a much more meaningful deal. Kubert’s art mostly delivers – the page of the two sides of Legion being reunited is genuinely lovely – but the issue as a whole is a bit of a mess.<\/p>\n

The back-up strip is by Jed MacKay, Cafu & David Curiel, and basically consists of Mystique and Destiny trailing “Age of Revelation”. There isn’t much more to be said about it than that.<\/p>\n

SPIDER-MAN & WOLVERINE #4.<\/strong> By Marc Guggenheim, Gerardo Sandoval, Victor Nava, Brian Reber & Travis Lanham. Because you demanded it: a book whose only selling point is the Kaare Andrews art, with a fill-in artist.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #32. By Tim Seeley, Edoardo Audino, KJ Diaz & Clayton Cowles. This is the start of a new arc, and I’ll warn you now that I’m going to spoil the ending, because that’s the real hook for the arc. Up to then, we have a framing sequence of Sean telling the […]<\/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-11321","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\/11321","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=11321"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11321\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11322,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11321\/revisions\/11322"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11321"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11321"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11321"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}