{"id":11381,"date":"2025-09-07T15:47:06","date_gmt":"2025-09-07T14:47:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11381"},"modified":"2025-09-07T15:47:06","modified_gmt":"2025-09-07T14:47:06","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-1-september-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11381","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 1 September 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"

X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #35.\u00a0<\/strong>By Tim Seeley, Eduardo Audino, KJ D\u00edaz & Clayton Cowles. This is a weird arc, isn’t it? We’ve moved on to a rogue LMD that’s turned on humanity and is trying to get nuclear codes, which all feels a bit disconnected from the Changeling\/Morph story that we started with. I guess there’s a vague impersonation theme going on, but other than that it feels like two separate stories. More to the point, there’s surprisingly little of Morph in it; he’s mainly a character being talked about by other people, which is a really odd choice. Given that it’s Tim Seeley, and he’s a perfectly solid writer, I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt that there’s a reason for doing it this way, and we’ll find out by the end how it’s supposed to connect up, but it’s all a bit confusing right now. Audino’s doing some lovely art on this series, though, and deserves a higher profile assignment than an Infinity book.<\/p>\n

UNCANNY X-MEN #20.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a>\u00a0Uncanny X-Men<\/em> has an awful lot of characters to juggle, and it’s rather striking to realise that we’ve only just got to a spotlight story for Ransom with issue #20. To be honest, in some ways I’m more intrigued by the opening scene which moves the Corina Ellis subplot along a bit, since dodgy anti-mutant cults aren’t particularly out of the ordinary for the X-books. But there’s something interesting about Wolverine and Ransom as a pairing – Logan has tended to be paired with the likes of Kitty Pryde and Jubilee who serve as a contrast to him, and it actually makes a change to let him mentor someone more like himself. All the more so given that Logan’s status as an elder has come to be one of his defining traits. So that dynamic is something that carries the issue more than the actual plot. Vecchio’s art is perfectly fine in terms of telling the story but feels like it’s lacking something in atmosphere much of the time. Still, the hall of Word of Strength members in hoodies is surprisingly effective and the costume design itself is an intriguing mixture of the everyday and the cult-like.<\/p>\n

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WOLVERINE #13.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> It’s not a great week for claws. There’s a slight sense of books filling time while they wait for “Age of Revelation” to start, to be honest. In the meantime,\u00a0Wolverine<\/em> gives us a story that was foreshadowed with a five-page back-up in\u00a0Giant-Size House of M<\/em> but reads pretty much like a fill-in. It’s possible that it’s introducing the Andiamo family for future use, but on the face of it, you could have combined the back-up strip and this story into a rather forgettable annual. As I explained in the annotations, it’s a story that suffers very badly from a contrived plot that only works if we’re willing to credit that everyone involved is honour-bound to play along. And when you ask me to believe that the Flanagan family will ignore their patriarch’s wish to sign a peace treaty (to the point of preventing the other side’s Don from reaching the meeting by force), but that they’ll still honour the treaty once it’s signed… no, that just feels completely arbitrary and stupid. There’s a somewhat cute idea in here about Logan having to deliberately not kill the cannon fodder, and C\u00f3ccolo’s art makes him look appropriately out of place in a suit, but it really doesn’t work.<\/p>\n

LAURA KINNEY: WOLVERINE #10.\u00a0<\/strong>(Annotations here.)<\/a> Well, it looks nice enough. The art is not the problem here. Giada Belviso makes the book look perfectly dynamic, and draws a quite a nice literal wolverine in Jonathan. Gabby’s energy comes across well. And then there’s the story, which is … there? I think there’s meant to be some sort of parallel going on here between Laura rebuilding her supporting cast and Strega pressganging people into being her own distorted family, but it’s hopelessly underdeveloped. And the epilogue literally amounts to Laura telling us that she’s finally figured out a direction for herself: she’s going to, um, help mutants. Really? Ten issues to figure out that the character who was already in the X-Men is going to help mutants? That’s the statement of intent for this book? Honestly, it’s depressing that\u00a0Psylocke<\/em> and\u00a0Magik<\/em> got cancelled while this book is limping on into “Age of Revelation”.<\/p>\n

MAGIK #9.\u00a0<\/strong>(Annotations here.)<\/a> Speaking of which: this seems to be the penultimate issue of\u00a0Magik<\/em>, which is a real shame. It’s a book with a real sense of its own identity and it actually repays repeated reading (without being hard to follow on a first reading, which is so often the trade off there). Germ\u00e1n Peralta’s art keeps it grounded, and I really do like Embodiment’s back story – not only does it give her loose parallels with both Magik and Liminal, she’s drawn completely the wrong lesson from it. The tension between Illyana and Dani has maybe been a bit heavy handed at times, but I think it mostly works, and it’s good to see Illyana being written with a bit more depth than has been the norm in recent years.<\/p>\n

IMPERIAL WAR: EXILES #1.\u00a0<\/strong>By Steve Foxe, Jonathan Hickman, Francesco Manna, Davide Tinto & Erick Arciniega. This one-shot is an Imperial <\/em>tie-in, but to all intents and purposes it’s a set-up issue for the upcoming Exiles <\/em>book. To be honest, I haven’t read Imperial<\/em> past issue #1 – it feels like something I should be able to catch up with just fine on Unlimited. Fortunately, all you really need to know about\u00a0Imperial<\/em> is that it’s happening: there’s a revolution going on, Xandra and Deathbird are on the run, and that’s what the distress call in “X-Manhunt” was about. This is the issue where Professor X and Lilandra actually show up, but not in order to restore Xandra to the throne. From the look of it, what we’re getting with the Shi’ar Empire coming out of\u00a0Imperial\u00a0<\/em>is a self-proclaimed grass-roots revolution led by Electron, of all people. And honestly, the Marvel Universe is overburdened with space opera monarchies and could use a bit of range. So this is a surprisingly decent story devoted to grouping Xavier, Lilandra and Xandra together as counter-revolutionaries, with Xavier and Lilandra awkwardly trying to offer parental input to Xandra. It’s a basically straightforward plot jazzed up with some non-linear storytelling, which leaves room for those characters to get established. Better than I was expecting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #35.\u00a0By Tim Seeley, Eduardo Audino, KJ D\u00edaz & Clayton Cowles. This is a weird arc, isn’t it? We’ve moved on to a rogue LMD that’s turned on humanity and is trying to get nuclear codes, which all feels a bit disconnected from the Changeling\/Morph story that we started with. I guess […]<\/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-11381","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\/11381","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=11381"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11381\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11382,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11381\/revisions\/11382"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}