{"id":11774,"date":"2026-02-11T22:57:07","date_gmt":"2026-02-11T22:57:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11774"},"modified":"2026-02-11T22:57:07","modified_gmt":"2026-02-11T22:57:07","slug":"the-x-axis-11-february-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11774","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – 11 February 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week, five books. Next week, five books (including both\u00a0X-Men<\/em> titles and two\u00a0Wolverine<\/em> books). This\u00a0week… well, Marvel would say two, but I don’t count Deadpool<\/em> as an X-book for the same reason that I don’t count\u00a0Alpha Flight<\/em>. He’s his own thing, and there’s no reason to think that’s changing. So, no, I still don’t count Deadpool<\/em>.<\/p>\n

So.<\/p>\n

CYCLOPS #1.<\/strong> By Alex Paknadel, Rog\u00ea Ant\u00f4nio, Fer Sifuentes-Sujo & Joe Caramagna. Always nice to see Alex Paknadel getting an outing beyond the Infinity Comics. Ant\u00f4nio did a few issues of\u00a0Hellions<\/em> back in the Krakoan era, and he worked on the previous\u00a0Deadpool<\/em> run. I like his work – it’s shiny and dynamic but also makes things like the Reavers’ assembly lab suitably bleak. And he gives Scott an impassive self-control that contrasts with everyone else.<\/p>\n

There are good reasons why we don’t get many Cyclops solo stories – his defining characteristic is team leadership, and by definition a solo story takes him away from that. But it can work occasionally, as something that forces the character out of his comfort zone.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

So what have we got here? Well, after a brief intro to remind us that Scott sees himself as running a team of soldiers, we get Scott meeting up with Dr Hanover – the nice one from Sinister’s orphanage – to see the orphanage site finally being cleared. Hanover still doesn’t know that there was anything behind the orphanage, but does see it as an abusive regime that she didn’t do enough to stop. The more interesting idea here is that while Scott believes that Sinister fails to break his spirit, Hanover thinks that it absolutely did, and that he started off much less repressed. That’s actually an angle worth exploring, as is the idea that Scott has just blithely written off this presumably formative period of his life as a minor piece of continuity that doesn’t come up very often.<\/p>\n

Quite what this has to do with the rest of the story – which sees Scott being shot out of the sky by some overenthusiastic new Reavers, forcing Pierce to try his bunch of rookie cyborgs against Scott – is less obvious. Paknadel seems to be repositioning Pierce into more of a U-Men figure, who want to harness mutants for parts rather than kill them. And I guess that makes more sense for his cyborg gimmick, particularly given the sort of allies he’s had in the past. I suppose the idea is we’re going to get Pierce as the leader, and Scott as the lone wolf. But how that ties in with the orphanage material, it’s hard to say. Still, it’s a pretty strong first issue, all told.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week, five books. Next week, five books (including both\u00a0X-Men titles and two\u00a0Wolverine books). This\u00a0week… well, Marvel would say two, but I don’t count Deadpool as an X-book for the same reason that I don’t count\u00a0Alpha Flight. He’s his own thing, and there’s no reason to think that’s changing. So, no, I still don’t count […]<\/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-11774","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\/11774","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=11774"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11774\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11775,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11774\/revisions\/11775"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}