{"id":11491,"date":"2025-10-24T21:35:10","date_gmt":"2025-10-24T20:35:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11491"},"modified":"2025-10-24T21:35:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-24T20:35:10","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-20-october-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11491","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 20 October 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"

ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #41.\u00a0<\/strong>By Tim Seeley, Alex Paknadel, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. Mmm. This isn’t really working for me. At this point it feels like we’re mainly just going through what needs to be done to wrap up the story, and while the beats make sense, and the art is perfectly decent, it’s all a bit routine. Morph hasn’t been developed to the point where I care about him – as I’ve pointed out before, he was kept on the fringes of storylines that were supposedly about him, and at this point that no longer looks like a longer-term storytelling choice but just a weird decision. There’s a vaguely interesting idea about the X-Cutioner being under the influence of Cassandra Nova, since he was always weirdly cast in this role. His motivation was never meant to be that he hated mutants as such, so much as that he objected to them placing themselves above the law. Now, there’s a trope in X-Men books of “the bigots are actually just being corrupted by evil psychics” which dates back to the Shadow King in the X-Men and has never worked, because bigotry is\u00a0not<\/em> just a feature of a world where evil psychics exist. I can see something in using it as a radicalisation metaphor with characters like X-Cutioner who really do start off motivated by, well, legitimate concerns, and then get toppled into something else by Cassandra. But I don’t think it’s really landed. Plus, it runs up against the problem that your main villain winds up being Cassandra herself – and in this interpretation, she’s… not very interesting?<\/p>\n

THE LAST WOLVERINE #1.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> We’re three weeks into the “Age of Revelation” tie-ins and… you know, this is going pretty well. I still think it’s wildly ambitious to try and get this many tie-in books out of an X-event in 2025. But the actual stories are holding up well, even though only two of the minis genuinely seem to be relevant to the core plot. Sixteen books written in the margins of another story sounds like a recipe for disaster, but it’s serving a couple of functions. For one thing, we’re only about ten years into the future, so you can use these stories to do some actual foreshadowing for the regular stories and it doesn’t feel like the total detour you might expect. For another, it gives some space to flesh out the Age of Revelation world, which leaves the core books free to get on with the plot. And since the vast majority of that world is not occupied by Revelation, it isn’t just a string of post-apocalyptics stories. This, instead, is a story about Leonard the Wendigo attempting to take up Logan’s mantle as the beloved local superhero of a still-basically-normal Vancouver. It’s remarkably upbeat, even if that comes with an undertow of the value in clinging to optimism when everything is falling apart on the horizon. For regular Wolverine<\/em> readers there are obvious questions about why Leonard is still a Wendigo, which is why it feels relevant to that series even (mostly) in the absence of the lead character. Good fun.<\/p>\n

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X-MEN: BOOK OF REVELATION #1.\u00a0<\/strong>(Annotations here.)<\/a> Until now, I’ve been able to say that\u00a0Amazing X-Men<\/em> was the only “Age of Revelation” book you really\u00a0had<\/em> to read. Well, now we have two – and this one is also written by Jed MacKay.\u00a0Book of Revelation<\/em> is the series about Revelation and his Choristers, a group of power-boosting mutants who range from the more-or-less true believers to the ambitious Fabian Cortez to a child who doesn’t get a choice in the matter. It’s also the book where we find out what Apocalypse made of Bei’s message in the\u00a0Overture<\/em> one-shot, which is why it’s definitely core to the plot. With Netho Diaz on art, this is basically a second fill-in book for\u00a0X-Men<\/em>, rather than a completely free-standing miniseries. He’s not exactly the focus of this book, but Revelation is working for me as an arch-villain, particularly since we’ve seen Doug start off in the present day in a much more recognisable form. This is the Doug who believes his own hype and thinks that the end justifies the means, at least on the surface; he wants to present himself even to his inner circle as a reasonable man focussed on the greater good. I can believe that you get to that point in ten years in a “power corrupts” kind of way, though we’re also being told that there’s a hidden plan he’s keeping secret from everyone. Then again, if it his hidden agenda was that bad, would Apocalypse really be this opposed to it? I’m intrigued.<\/p>\n

OMEGA KIDS #1.\u00a0<\/strong>By Tony Fleecs, Andr\u00e9s Genlot, Fer Sifuentes-Sujo & Travis Lanham. We’ve heard about the Omega Kids before, as a spy network reporting to Quentin Quire. This book is specifically about the “honors class”, though, essentially a team of the four elite trainees. I was expecting a paranoia book, but that’s not what this is about at all. Instead, it’s a book about an adult Quentin Quire finding himself in the teacher role. And on that level it turns out to be a surprisingly good character piece for Quentin. He’s a true believer but still considers himself a hero – he genuinely does think he’s dealing with dangerous subversives and he honestly does care about making sure he only gets the right people. He’s sincerely trying to mentor young psychics with some alarmingly radical views. In other words, he’s found himself in the role of Professor X trying to handle a bunch of Kid Omegas. In his own way, this is Quentin being serious and responsible and trying to mentor the next generation and channel they’re enthusiastic radicalism. And as far as Quentin is concerned, it’s all going just fine. He’s not making the mistakes that his mentors did! He’s definitely getting through to these kids, who don’t see him as an out-of-touch loser at all! You get the idea. That’s not the book I was expecting – Andr\u00e9s Genlot does a rather nice job of Quentin in his wannabe-edgy adult costume giving a starry-eyed talk about his kids while making sandwiches for three pages – but it’s a book I’m rather interested in reading. The kids themselves, admittedly, blur into one at this point. But the concept works.<\/p>\n

RADIOACTIVE SPIDER-MAN #1.\u00a0<\/strong>By Joe Kelly, Kev Walker, Chris Sotomayor & Joe Caramagna. Well, hello to our guests from the Spider-Man office. Obviously, this really is on the fringes of “Age of Revelation”, but they’ve certainly put a strong creative team on it. There’s nothing wildly unexpected here: New York is part of the Revelation Territories, and Spider-Man isn’t a mutant, but he’s mutated enough that with some regular doses of radiation he can continue to hang around and do Spider-Man things. This book has a bit of a genetic caste system going on which isn’t really in evidence in other “Age of Revelation” books, but mainly the point is just to have Spider-Man still be Spider-Man, and New York still be kind of sort of New York, despite all the changed circumstances. It’s a “look, here’s the core that can’t be shifted” story. Walker’s always been a great artist and Kelly plays a pretty straight bat on it, taking the chance to dust off Cecilia Reyes (a character he used back in his run as X-Men<\/em> writer), and chucking in a neat closing twist to explain that Peter hasn’t stuck around simply because he loves Central Park so much. All that being said, as the umpteenth tie-in to an event where it isn’t especially important, it’s unavoidably one for the completists, but at least it’s giving us something decent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #41.\u00a0By Tim Seeley, Alex Paknadel, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. Mmm. This isn’t really working for me. At this point it feels like we’re mainly just going through what needs to be done to wrap up the story, and while the beats make sense, and the art is perfectly […]<\/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-11491","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\/11491","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=11491"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11491\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11492,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11491\/revisions\/11492"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}