{"id":11338,"date":"2025-08-23T21:38:00","date_gmt":"2025-08-23T20:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11338"},"modified":"2025-08-23T21:38:00","modified_gmt":"2025-08-23T20:38:00","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-18-august-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11338","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 18 August 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"

ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #33.<\/strong> By Tim Seeley, Edoardo Audino, KJ D\u00edaz & Clayton Cowles. Okay, so the idea here is that the Changeling has a split personality, and (at least as Morph) doesn’t realise that he’s pursuing himself around America. That’s kind of the Sentry’s gimmick, but if it’s a way of transitioning Changeling into an Earth-616 Morph – and having access to that character without complicated alternate reality stuff – then I can see the attraction. Audino does a nicely baffled Morph, though it’s a slightly odd call to keep the character mostly off panel this issue and have Sean and Angelo relay to us what he’s like instead. Still, it’s all very readable.<\/p>\n

EXCEPTIONAL X-MEN #12.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Much of this issue is about getting Reggie into the cast as another mutant – and boy, you can’t accuse the book of rushing that storyline after debuting him back in issue #4 – though it looks like he’s being kept on the sidelines until now. The storyline, though, is basically an excuse to send Axo, Mel\u00e9e and Bronze back in time so that they (and present-day Kitty) can meet pre-X-Men teenage Kitty. Presumably this is the pay off for Kitty’s regular laments about how she shouldn’t have been a teenage hero, as well as a way of advancing her relationship with the kids.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

It doesn’t quite work. The plot mechanics to justify the trip back are decidedly wonky, but more to the point, it doesn’t really get the feeling of a different time period. I get that the sliding timeline makes these things complicated, but if you’re going to devote a big splash to the kids’ period costumes, and I’m still left none the wiser about what time period the story thinks it’s set in, we’ve got a problem.<\/p>\n

WOLVERINE #12.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Oh dear. This is the final part of the Elizabeth Howlett storyline, and apparently it really is all just Mastermind doing illusions for… no terribly well defined reason. The story kind of gestures at the idea that maybe Mastermind has also been driven mad by this, and really does think he’s offering himself as a parent figure. But that doesn’t get developed, and the general vibe is simply that Wolverine is being screwed with for its own sake. The high concept\u00a0seems<\/em> to be that all this matters because it helps Wolverine to realise that he never came to terms with his mother’s rejection, but I’m not exactly convinced that this tells us anything very interesting about the character. I can sort of understand how you could look at Wolverine’s back story and think that there’s never been any sort of follow-up on\u00a0Origin<\/em>, but that’s because\u00a0Origin<\/em> isn’t very interesting – it didn’t do any real harm to the character, but it doesn’t add anything very resonant either, because things like Weapon X or even Romulus have vastly more impact as an inciting event in his life. But I digress… The real problem with this arc is that it teases a lot of things that are a lot more interesting than the “it was all a dream” resolution that it ends up delivering, and so inevitably it’s an anticlimax.<\/p>\n

PSYLOCKE #10.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Cancelled after two arcs, which is a shame –\u00a0Psylocke<\/em> wasn’t perfect, but it certainly did prove that you can build stories around Kwannon as a solo character. This final issue does feel a little rushed, but not excessively so – you can see a couple of plot points being shoved to the margins, but it finds space for what it really needs to do. Had the series continued, the story would presumably have been about Psylocke’s deal with the Lady in White and the possibility of eventually redeeming Mitsuki and having the girls reunited as adults for real. But as a ten issue run, it feels plausibly complete. Given how much there is to fit in, Carrat\u00f9 does a sound job on the art, and it doesn’t feel as cramped as it might have. Creatively, I’d rank\u00a0Psylocke<\/em> as one of the successes of the current period, so it’s a shame to be losing it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #33. By Tim Seeley, Edoardo Audino, KJ D\u00edaz & Clayton Cowles. Okay, so the idea here is that the Changeling has a split personality, and (at least as Morph) doesn’t realise that he’s pursuing himself around America. That’s kind of the Sentry’s gimmick, but if it’s a way of transitioning Changeling […]<\/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-11338","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\/11338","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=11338"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11338\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11339,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11338\/revisions\/11339"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11338"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11338"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}