{"id":11555,"date":"2025-11-22T21:05:12","date_gmt":"2025-11-22T21:05:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11555"},"modified":"2025-11-22T21:05:12","modified_gmt":"2025-11-22T21:05:12","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-18-november-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11555","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 18 November 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"

X-MEN: AGE OF REVELATION INFINITY COMIC #3.\u00a0<\/strong>By Tim Seeley, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. Oh, it’s a three-parter. I figured we’d be spending longer with early-AoR Revelation. Instead, this issue switches to Revelation as its narrator. Tim Seeley does have an interesting angle on how Revelation feels about Cable: he doesn’t really know the guy, precisely\u00a0because<\/em> he died before the New Mutants met Cable, and maybe Cable is the hardening mentor that he missed out on. But the plot boils down to Revelation summarily defeating the villain, and then getting rid of Cable too. This\u00a0might<\/em> be heading towards Cable being the source of the techno-organics we’ve seen sporadically in “Age of Revelation”, and perhaps it does make sense in the wider scheme of things that Revelation just swans into the story and ends it… but it reads a little oddly.<\/p>\n

UNBREAKABLE X-MEN #2.\u00a0<\/strong>(Annotations here.)<\/a> I’m not sure this story has very much to do with “Age of Revelation” at all, but the flipside is that it has quite a lot to do with\u00a0Uncanny X-Men<\/em>, by picking up the Dark Artery\/Shuvahrak storyline in the near future. Shuvahrak is a weird character, with Gail Simone’s stories seeming to be intentionally vague about how she became transformed and how she came to turn against mutants in general. But it kind of works; the story wants her to be a sort of looming, ungraspable presence who’s been changed from a conventional character into a kind of Cthulhuesque monster of unavenged sins, and spelling her out too directly would point away from that. The downside is to leave the stakes a little bit obscure, but I think it’s a more interesting story for leaning into the mood. CF Villa’s art really sells Shuvahrak’s demonic angle too, even while it gives us the clearest view of her that we’ve had to date. The rest of the issue mostly consists of gathering the Outliers for a last stand, with a few more hints of things to come – though the clash with the way Deathdream was written in Amazing X-Men<\/em> is really, really hard to interpret as anything other than an error. I’m still not sure what Spider-Girl is doing in this book – maybe she’s showing up in\u00a0Uncanny<\/em> soon, maybe it’s just a vague gesture at the wider Marvel Universe for the sake of the event.<\/p>\n

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X-MEN: BOOK OF REVELATION #2.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> You know, even though three months feels like plenty of time for “Age of Revelation” to take over the event as a whole, I can’t help feeling that Jed MacKay’s core books would have benefitted from a little bit more space. But this is a nice bit of internal politics within Revelation’s Choristers, with a series of well executed swerves that take the story in new directions that make sense based on what’s come before. Cortez got Topaz and Bei killed; Kitty’s plan is more about getting revenge on Doug than actually achieving anything; and Elbecca turns out to be from Arakko. It all fits – Elbecca’s more simpering moments actually come off better on a second reading with knowledge of the twist. And it leaves me wondering who the hero of the next issue actually is, now that Kitty and Elbecca both seem to be out of the running. Khora? Or are we simply rooting for Elbecca to take Revelation down anyway? Netho Diaz’s art scores on getting the personalities across – the shift in body language for both Elbecca and Cortez in the final scene is perfectly done – though I’m not really sure what the grid effect layouts are adding. A pretty good issue, though.<\/p>\n

LAST WOLVERINE #2.\u00a0<\/strong>(Annotations here.)<\/a> Okay, yes, this story only works if you’re willing to accept that Leonard never presses Heather for a proper explanation of her plan before charging off to help her “save” Wolverine. But I’ll let that slide because he’s meant to be well-meaning and naive, and there’s something quite endearing about him and Nightcrawler trying to remain optimistic heroes in the face of everything. This is the book that’s bending over backwards to be hopeful and the basic question it’s asking is whether that’s a worthwhile thing to be doing or just something that makes Leonard a sucker. The art is a little stiff at times but it gets the idea across, and it does make Leonard’s innocence convincing.<\/p>\n

OMEGA KIDS #2.\u00a0<\/strong>By Tony Fleecs, Andr\u00e9s Genolet, Fer Sifuentes-Sujo & Travis Lanham. Pretty much the story you’d expect from issue #1: Quentin is trying to mentor these kid psychics to do what he considers the right thing, and they just want him out of the way so they can do their thing as the next generation. I’m not honestly sure what Rachel Summers is doing in this story, particularly as someone who’s thrown in the towel and gone into retirement – yes, she can play off the “mutants hunting other mutants” angle, but in order for her to be available to talk to, she can’t be actively opposed to Revelation, so her role winds up feeling awkward. But the twist in the closing scene is well executed (having been nicely set up in the previous issue), and the closing page of Bailey’s sociopathic devotion to the cause – if that’s even what she really cares about – is beautifully chilling.<\/p>\n

RADIOACTIVE SPIDER-MAN #2.\u00a0<\/strong>By Joe Kelly, Kev Walker, Cam Smith, Chris Sotomayor & Joe Caramagna. So basically we’re doing the idea that Peter is so devoted to May that he’ll stick with her even in the face of armageddon, and even at the point where he could be making more of a contribution elsewhere – a sort of inversion of the normal routine where his double life keeps him away from her. That’s fine as an idea, and Kev Walker’s ageing and hangdog Spider-Man is beautifully pitched. I’m not so sure it fits into “Age of Revelation”, since it seems to be depicted a more explicitly dystopian future in the Revelation Territories when mutants in general are supposed to be experiencing it as a utopia. It doesn’t quite feel like it’s working from the same memo as everyone else. Fortunately, precisely because it’s written in the margins of that story, it doesn’t really matter whether it fits or not; it’s really just a story about how some of Peter’s traits are immutable in the face of disaster.<\/p>\n

X-MEN OF APOCALYPSE #1.<\/strong> By Jeph Loeb, Simone Di Meo & Tyler Smith. Which is really issue #2 because the first issue was the\u00a0Alpha<\/em> one-shot. This isn’t as egregiously awful as that was, but it’s basically just a pointless fight scene with pretty art, in what seems to be intended as a jump through various points in X-Men history. This time, “just after\u00a0Age of Apocalypse<\/em>“. Next time, the Silver Age. It’s autopilot stuff, doing something not wildly different from the recent\u00a0Giant-Size X-Men<\/em> one-shots, from the looks of it. And look, Jeph Loeb is absolutely capable of writing acceptable material, as his work with Tim Sale has shown. But he’s also capable of putting his name to some of the most incompetent stories I’ve ever laid eyes on, such as Ultimatum<\/em> and his two Romulus arcs, and bluntly, those have done a lot more to set my expectations of a Jeph Loeb comic. This one exceeds my expectations, but it still falls some way short of being worth my time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

X-MEN: AGE OF REVELATION INFINITY COMIC #3.\u00a0By Tim Seeley, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. Oh, it’s a three-parter. I figured we’d be spending longer with early-AoR Revelation. Instead, this issue switches to Revelation as its narrator. Tim Seeley does have an interesting angle on how Revelation feels about Cable: he doesn’t really know […]<\/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-11555","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\/11555","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=11555"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11555\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11556,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11555\/revisions\/11556"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}