{"id":11430,"date":"2025-09-26T23:05:51","date_gmt":"2025-09-26T22:05:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11430"},"modified":"2025-09-26T23:05:51","modified_gmt":"2025-09-26T22:05:51","slug":"the-x-axis-26-september-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11430","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – 26 September 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"

ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #37.\u00a0<\/strong>By Tim Seeley, Edoardo Audino, KJ Diaz & Clayton Cowles. You know, sometimes a plot makes so little sense that it’s hard to see past that to anything else. The basic idea here is that Changeling and Morph are a split personality who don’t realise that they’re the same person – okay, fair enough. Changeling wants to start a nuclear war so that mutants can rebuild civilisation in the ruins – bit mad, but okay, it’s what he was trying to do back in the Silver Age as a member of Factor Three. Changeling wants to use his shape-changing powers to impersonate someone with high enough security clearance to get into a military base and fire the missiles – I’m going to doubt that there’s any one military type who can do that, but sure, I’ll go with it. But… the guy in question is a SHIELD agent? Who retired twenty years ago? And he can just waltz in with a bit of facial scanning? What? No, this is silly. Nice art on the shapechanging, and I get that there’s some kind of point being made about Banshee’s attitude to rehabilitation, but… no.<\/p>\n

X-MEN #22.\u00a0<\/strong>(Annotations here.)<\/a> Okay, now\u00a0this<\/em> is good. I was saying last week that most of the line wasn’t doing a great job of building up to “Age of Revelation”, and to be honest I still see it as basically an\u00a0X-Men<\/em> storyline that seems to be interrupting the other titles. But as an\u00a0X-Men<\/em> storyline, I’m quite looking forward to it. This is pretty much an entire issue of conversation, picking up on a series of character subplots, and it even sells me a bit more on Juggernaut killing Ocelot last issue – I’m still not convinced that that’s in character, but there’s follow-up which feels more convincing. C F Villa’s art keeps a very talky issue interesting and I’d really like to see more from them. The pay-off of all this is Doug Ramsey showing up to join the X-Men, which we already know from the\u00a0Age of Revelation<\/em> one-shot is a slippery slope towards disaster. I’m not quite sure whether he’s meant to come off smug as the art makes him look here – he didn’t come across this way in issue #19, his spotlight story. But then again he’s talking to a different audience here, and trying to sell his alpha male status to an audience who aren’t used to thinking of him that way so… I guess it makes sense. Anyway, this was fun, and it was one of those stories where there turned out to be a lot more to say about it in the annotations post than I thought there would be. And it\u00a0does<\/em> raise my interest in “Age of Revelation”.<\/p>\n

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STORM #12.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> This is the end of “Thunder War”, imaginatively titled “Thunder War Ends”. I gather this has been compressed slightly from the original plan, and it shows – the final act of Eternity reconciling with Storm, betraying her again and getting expelled from her body is horribly rushed. And a bunch of meta elements are added at the last minute with no real opportunity to go anywhere. Still, Storm<\/em> has always had very questionable storytelling choices. Looking back on the series as a whole, it’s now possible to piece together a basically coherent narrative for the Eternity plotline, which is what I did for the annotations post. But you really have to work to get there. More fundamentally, though, is this really a Storm story? On the letters page, Ayodele describes Eternity as the antagonist, but surely he’s the protagaonist. You can summarise his plot and barely mention Storm except as a passing host body. The inciting event of this story is Oblivion threatening to kill Eternity, which leads to Eternity embarking on a misjudged scheme to stop that happening. The scheme backfires, things get even worse, and Eternity learns an important lesson about how he needs to work with his host in order to get the job done. That’s an Eternity story! Storm’s role in the plot is to be a host body because Eternity either can’t or won’t fight in person, and that’s an essentially passive role. She gets no choice in anything that happens and the turning point in the final issue is nothing to do with her – it’s Eternity having a chat with his dad. There’s an audience that seems to love this book because it’s giving Storm a ton of power, but it sure isn’t giving her much agency.<\/p>\n

SPIDER-MAN & WOLVERINE #5.\u00a0<\/strong>By Marc Guggenheim, Kaare Andrews, Brian Reber and Travis Lanham. The end of the first trade paperback, and good lord, this doesn’t have much to recommend it beyond the art. And as I’ve said before, when you’ve got Kaare Andrews, maybe that’s enough – maybe the only function of the plot is to avoid having to test the theory that Kaare Andrews really could draw his shopping list and make it look good. But there\u00a0is<\/em> a plot here, and it really doesn’t work. So there’s a new villain called Dreadshadow – which is already a bad start unless you’re doing a 90s comedy revival – and he wants revenge on Spider-Man and Wolverine for the death of his daughter. His daughter was killed by long-dead villain the Enforcer (he was one of Scourge’s victims back in the 1980s), and Dreadshadow blames Spider-Man and Wolverine because, um, they once arrested the Enforcer. But they didn’t kill him, you see. So Dreadshadow’s aim in this story is to make some sort of point about how they aren’t real heroes because they don’t kill people by… um… making them angry? That doesn’t even get off the ground as a concept for a Wolverine story, and while it might work if Dreadshadow was a\u00a0parody<\/em> of a revenge villain, we get a sequence of Spider-Man solemnly reflecting that the guy had a point. What? Come off it.<\/p>\n

EMMA FROST: THE WHITE QUEEN #4.<\/strong> By Amy Chu, Andrea Di Vito, Antonio Fabela & Ariana Maher. One more issue to go in this mini, and right now it’s landing squarely in “fine, I guess”. I like the idea of doing a tour of the wider Hellfire Club network and playing it up as a global organisation, but there are problems with doing Club politics in a continuity implant series – I’ve said before that it ducks the awkwardness of Emma as villain, but it also means that the main plot tension is about whether Emma gets ousted as White Queen, which is something we all know can’t happen. That’s not necessarily fatal – sometimes it’s enough that the characters believe it’s a risk – but in this case it feels like there’s a lot of false jeopardy. A book that feels a little bit less than the sum of its parts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #37.\u00a0By Tim Seeley, Edoardo Audino, KJ Diaz & Clayton Cowles. You know, sometimes a plot makes so little sense that it’s hard to see past that to anything else. The basic idea here is that Changeling and Morph are a split personality who don’t realise that they’re the same person – […]<\/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-11430","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\/11430","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=11430"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11430\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11431,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11430\/revisions\/11431"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}