{"id":11392,"date":"2025-09-11T22:40:40","date_gmt":"2025-09-11T21:40:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11392"},"modified":"2025-09-11T22:40:40","modified_gmt":"2025-09-11T21:40:40","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-8-september-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11392","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 8 September 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"

ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #36.<\/strong> By Tim Seeley, Edoardo Audino, KJ D\u00edaz & Clayton Cowles. Um… yeah, you’ve kind of lost me here. What does the LMD stuff have to do with Morph and Changeling again? If Changeling\u00a0was<\/em> responsible for the break-ins then when the hell did he make it to the town for that to happen? Is the plot really <\/em>that you can waltz into nuclear facilities just by copying the face of someone who used to work there but retired several years ago? Why have we been spending so little time with Morph\/Changeling on panel if that’s the point of the story? I’m just confused. I usually like the Seeley\/Audino arcs on this book but… this is a bit of a mess, honestly.<\/p>\n

EXCEPTIONAL X-MEN #13.\u00a0<\/strong>(Annotations here.)<\/a> The wind-down for “Age of Revelation” continues. This book has an obvious temporary successor in\u00a0Expatriate X-Men<\/em>, with the same writer and two of the same characters, so I’m assuming that it’s continuing for now. Nonetheless, this issue is an evident attempt to draw a line under one major plotline – Kitty’s ambivalence about having been a teen hero herself – by using a time travel plot to give her a chance to change her history, and then letting her make the choice to affirm her history. It does that adequately on an emotional level, but it’s not the strongest issue of the book. The time travel gimmick is weirdly played, with some bemusing signals about when exactly this is meant to be happening. As a general rule, unless there’s some sort of meta point being made, the first rule of the Marvel Universe is “Don’t draw attention to the sliding timeline” and the second rule is “No really, for christ’s sake, don’t.” And this does, for no reason at all.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

But also… if the whole plot hinges on the idea that there’s an opportunity to change the past and alter history, and if you’ve used the butterfly effect as a reason why Kitty can’t meet her past self and why Emma and Bobby can’t go back in time, you really, really,\u00a0really<\/em> can’t just leave a bloody great Sentinel outside Kitty’s house and have her discover her powers two months early without some sort of gesture towards how that all gets sorted out. Because the plot mechanics here depend on telling us that this\u00a0does<\/em> matter, so you can’t turn around on the final page and decide that it doesn’t.<\/p>\n

The art is generally good, even if it also struggles to make sense of the time frame (and there’s a panel where Trista seems to have momentarily lost a foot in length from her legs). I quite like the more organic take on the Wolfpack Sentinels, though it wouldn’t work for every artists. And the scene with Trista and Kitty on the swings, which is the heart of the story, is beautifully drawn. But… it’s not the book at it’s best.<\/p>\n

HELLVERINE #10.<\/strong> By Benjamin Percy, Raffaele Ienco, Bryan Valenza & Travis Lanham. So, another cancelled book. This is simply the final issue of the Hell Hulk arc, and doesn’t make any particular effort to resolve the series more generally. Instead, it winds up putting Hellverine back with the Project Hellfire characters from the preceding miniseries… which is where I thought that miniseries had left him anyway. It’s perfectly adequate but really nothing more than that.<\/p>\n

Hellverine<\/em> joins NYX<\/em>,\u00a0X-Force<\/em>,\u00a0X-Factor<\/em>,\u00a0Psylocke<\/em>,\u00a0Magik<\/em> and Deadpool \/ Wolverine<\/em> in being cancelled after ten issues. That’s pretty much a 50% failure rate. It’s\u00a0possible<\/em>, of course, that some books might get a relaunch coming out of “Age of Revelation” –\u00a0Magik<\/em>, which seems to have sold quite respectably, is the most obvious candidate there.\u00a0Is that bad? Well… the first phase of the Krakoan era had ten ongoing titles, and three of those didn’t make it past ten issues either (Fallen Angels<\/em>,\u00a0Cable<\/em> and\u00a0X-Factor<\/em>). And that was in one of the hottest periods in X-books history; nobody is seriously expecting the current office to match that.<\/p>\n

It’s not as if this issue is unique to the X-office, either. Iron Man’<\/em>s last run managed less than a year. The last run of\u00a0Spider-Woman <\/em>was ten issues. West Coast Avengers<\/em> was the same.\u00a0Spectacular Spider-Men\u00a0<\/em>made it to 15. But still, it doesn’t look healthy and I can’t help thinking there would have to be some big announcements coming out of “Age of Revelation” to make a difference.<\/p>\n

WOLVERINES AND DEADPOOLS<\/strong>\u00a0#3.\u00a0<\/strong>By Cody Ziglar, Rog\u00ea Ant\u00f4nio, Guru-eFX & Travis Lanham. Final issue of the miniseries, and it really is just the tail end of Cody Ziglar’s\u00a0Deadpool<\/em> run with Logan and Laura as guest stars. But hey, that’s no bad thing. It’s a perfectly good little Deadpool story that ties up some loose ends with Ellie and her mother and puts the toys back in the box as Ziglar leaves. The art has quite a nice Leonard Kirk style quality to it. It doesn’t really need the Wolverines but it uses them well enough. Completely fine on its own terms. Not an X-book, but better for not trying to accommodate the guests too much.<\/p>\n

X-MEN OF APOCALYPSE ALPHA #1.<\/strong> By Jeph Loeb, Simone Di Meo and Tyler Smith. Oh dear. Oh dearie me.<\/p>\n

Let’s start with the positive. Di Meo’s art is generally pretty striking and not a bad fit if you’re trying to capture the style of Madureira-era X-Men. There’s a tendency to fill the panels with characters to the point where the backgrounds are barely present and the flow of the action gets lost, but it really is quite pretty. And bringing in Comicraft for the lettering is a nice touch.<\/p>\n

It’s also a Jeph Loeb comic. And look, there are some good Jeph Loeb comics. But there’s also the Romulus stories in Wolverine<\/em>, and Ultimatum<\/em>, and they’re some of the worst things I’ve read in my life. This isn’t as bad as either of those, but it’s getting there. The high concept is to have everyone wondering how the Age of Apocalypse timeline can still exist after the bombs fell at the end of the original storyline. There’s some hazy blather about fixing the timeline though it’s never really clear what needs fixed. The whole thing is a continuity train wreck: it talks about Scott and Alex being former X-Men (they weren’t, in this timeline), Holocaust is still there (he was one of the characters who escaped to the mainstream universe), and so on. Oh, and there have already been tons of stories explaining how the Age of Apocalypse timeline continued after the end of that storyline. We’re apparently meant to just ignore all those.<\/p>\n

Now, with some writers, I might give all this the benefit of the doubt and say, ah, these are all hints that things are not as they seem. But frankly, I’ve read enough incoherent drivel from Jeph Loeb over the years that he’s long since forfeited the benefit of the doubt. Maybe I’ll be proven wrong, but I’m not holding my breath.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #36. By Tim Seeley, Edoardo Audino, KJ D\u00edaz & Clayton Cowles. Um… yeah, you’ve kind of lost me here. What does the LMD stuff have to do with Morph and Changeling again? If Changeling\u00a0was responsible for the break-ins then when the hell did he make it to the town for that […]<\/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-11392","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\/11392","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=11392"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11392\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11393,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11392\/revisions\/11393"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}