{"id":11351,"date":"2025-08-29T22:24:38","date_gmt":"2025-08-29T21:24:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11351"},"modified":"2025-08-29T22:24:38","modified_gmt":"2025-08-29T21:24:38","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-25-august-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11351","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 25 August 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"

X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #34.<\/strong> By Tim Seeley, Edoardo Audino, KJ D\u00edaz & Clayton Cowles. One thing I like about this book is its enthusiasm for remarkably low-key real-world settings. We’ve had an influencer convention, we’ve had the Outer Hebrides (kind of), and now we’ve got an English seaside town with a community of retired spies. It’s not even going for Portmeirion, it’s going for cosy crime. That said, does the plot here actually make sense? The idea is that we’re meant to buy into the idea that the break-ins were committed by the Changeling in his villain personality, and Banshee certainly does, but… um, when? Because he was in America when the regular cast found him, and then he was in Ireland, and then the break-ins were already in the news, so… when do people think he sneaked off to Somerset to do some light burglary? Still, it’s a nice looking book and I do appreciate that it’s doing something different.<\/p>\n

X-MEN #21.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> With “Age of Revelation” approaching, I assume that\u00a0X-Men<\/em> is currently engaged in a bit of deck-clearing and a bit of set-up for the upcoming story. Specifically, if this is going to be an alternate future story, then I suspect it needs Jen Starkey to be heading in the right direction before we jump there. And so this is a sequel to issue #4, where Jen and some of the X-Men go back to Detroit and dispose of the eminently expendable Upstarts. Actually, the Upstarts put up a reasonable fight here, despite being made up mostly of bit-part characters from\u00a0X-Statix<\/em> – but they do have sensibly useful powers, so sure, I’ll buy that the X-Men can underestimate them and that Jen gets to have her moment as a result. I’m less convinced about Juggernaut killing Ocelot – yes,\u00a0logically<\/em> you can argue that he’s been involved in previous schemes where he seemed pretty relaxed about a body count, but that was a long time ago, some of it’s been attributed to the influence of Cyttorak, and besides, he was never a Wolverine or a Sabretooth. I know it’s meant to be a shock, but it doesn’t convince me. Still, good work here from Netho Diaz, who gives us a decently worked-out action scene and really sells Jen snapping.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

PHOENIX #14.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> This feels like it’s trying to drag things out until the crossover, to be honest. The last issue set up the idea that Jean has to reabsorb Sara to save the universe (for reasons), and I quite like the fact that Jean’s response this issue is that, no, she won’t be doing that. That feels more interesting than just having her not be able to bring herself to do it – though the book tries for that too. But for the most part the book seems to be marking time with some elliptical exposition from the In-Betweener and a flashback that doesn’t really seem to have anything to do with the rest of the story. Maybe it’ll tie into something in the next issue, but it just seems out of place here. It’s a good fit for Roi Mercado’s art, though – he’s an interesting choice for this book since his art doesn’t play to the standard cosmic tropes at all, and that works much of the time, but something a little more down to earth feels more natural for him.<\/p>\n

DEADPOOL \/ WOLVERINE #9.\u00a0<\/strong>By Benjamin Percy, Joshua Cassara, Guru-eFX & Joe Sabino. This doesn’t appear to have been solicited past issue #10, which would normally be the end of the second trade, so I assume we’re nearing the end. How on earth we ended up with ten issues for this storyline is beyond me. Joshua Cassara does get some showcase opportunities in this issue, though, in a sequence of Apocalypse telling us about his scheme to create a disaster and then repopulate the world with mutant clones once the Earth as healed. It’s almost comically utopian, which of course is the point. Other than that… well, look, if you thought Deadpool and Wolverine were the idea pair to bring back decompressed storytelling then this is the book for you, I guess.<\/p>\n

WOLVERINE & KITTY PRYDE #5.<\/strong> By Chris Claremont, Damian Couceiro, Carlos Lopez & Ariana Maher. The final issue and, well, I couldn’t honestly say it ties everything up in a satisfying way. A lot of it works, though. The mind swap thing with Kitty Pryde and Ziggy Trask, where they inexplicably become friends halfway through issue #4, makes a lot more sense when it’s clear that Claremont is going for the idea that their identities are blurring together – and he gets that across very well. Couceiro’s art continues to impress me, and I really hope we see more of him somewhere else. On the other hand, the thing with the snow samurai doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense to me. Claremont clearly has some idea about it being a mystical entity connected with the Yashida clan which Mariko has to embrace but… what on earth it’s got to do with the rest of the story, either plot wise or thematically, is completely beyond me. Nonetheless, viewed in the round, this mini has been a pretty successful Claremont-era throwback – vastly better than the previous Claremont mini Wolverine: Deep Cut<\/em>, and much more worthy of his name.<\/p>\n

EMMA FROST: THE WHITE QUEEN #3.<\/strong> By Amy Chu, Andrea Di Vito, Antonio Fabela & Ariana Maher. So to keep Emma sympathetic in her Hellfire Club days, we’re doing Emma versus the Hellfire Club – and bringing up all the insecurities about her family from the\u00a0Emma Frost<\/em> ongoing. I like the idea that, based on her encounters with them up to this point, the X-Men also register among her mental hang-ups at this point, even if she doesn’t show it. And in some ways this isn’t a bad way of bringing out the aspects of Emma that were consistent back to the Hellfire Club days. There’s some really nice art on this too, in a restrained sort of a way, though Di Vito’s hallucinatory monster deserves its splash page too. I still can’t help feeling something’s lacking in this mini, though, and I suspect it’s the fact that we’re doing a story set in Emma’s villain days that would prefer not to talk about her being<\/em> a villain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #34. By Tim Seeley, Edoardo Audino, KJ D\u00edaz & Clayton Cowles. One thing I like about this book is its enthusiasm for remarkably low-key real-world settings. We’ve had an influencer convention, we’ve had the Outer Hebrides (kind of), and now we’ve got an English seaside town with a community of retired […]<\/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-11351","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\/11351","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=11351"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11351\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11352,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11351\/revisions\/11352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}