{"id":11891,"date":"2026-03-28T21:20:41","date_gmt":"2026-03-28T21:20:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11891"},"modified":"2026-03-28T21:20:41","modified_gmt":"2026-03-28T21:20:41","slug":"the-x-axis-25-march-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11891","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – 25 March 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"

UNCANNY X-MEN #25.\u00a0<\/strong>(Annotations here.)<\/a> This is the final part of “Where Monsters Dwell” and… um. Look, I like this book, and I like the creators, and I like the Outliers, but this arc is a misfire. To be fair, part of my problem with it is that the premise is pretty much that the Legion of Monsters are cool, and therefore a story where the X-Men fight the Legion of Monsters will be cool. And I disagree – I think the Legion of Monsters are boring and there’s really nothing here to change my mind. After all, they spend practically the whole arc hypnotised, so they’re not even really functional characters in it. But there are other problems too. The western strand seems to be implying that there’s more to Marcus than he lets on, but it doesn’t pay off coherently – the Rawhide Kid stuff falls away entirely and it winds up as just a pep talk to encourage the Outliers to be heroes. And issue #25 feels like it’s far, far too deep into the series for them to be learning that – doesn’t Ransom already want to be an X-Man? Some of the Gambit addiction subplot lands, and most of the issue is drawn by David Marquez, so it’s obviously going to look good, but mostly this feels like a forced attempt to shoehorn in some characters that the creators find a lot more interesting than I do.<\/p>\n

INGLORIOUS X-FORCE #3.\u00a0<\/strong>(Annotations here.)<\/a> You certainly can’t accuse this book of dragging out its main storyline. The basic plot is that Cable has gathered this team together supposedly in order to protect Ms Marvel, but mainly in order to find out which of the team goes on to kill her in an alternate future. He only has three suspects, and by the end of issue #3 we’ve already eliminated two of them. We’ve already down Hellverine, and now this is Boom-Boom’s story. It’s partly a homage to\u00a0Nextwave<\/em>, but with part of the angle being that Boom-Boom doesn’t remember it fondly at all. After all, once you start incorporating\u00a0Nextwave<\/em> into the regular Marvel Universe, you run into the problem that it’s no longer a wacky comedy book in a wacky comedy world, but some sort of deranged collapse of rationality. Al Ewing did something similar with Spectrum’s reaction in\u00a0Captain America and the Mighty Avengers<\/em>, playing it as a sort of cosmic horror in which normal characters found themselves made into jokes, but doing it with Boom-Boom adds the fact that she’s the one you might expect to take it in her stride. To be honest, any attempt to get\u00a0Nextwave\u00a0<\/em>elements to function in the regular Marvel Universe has problems – once you start grounding them in any sort of reality they kind of stop being funny, and this story feels like it’s trying to have its cake and eat it on that front. But Michael Sta. Maria’s art kind of pulls it off, and smooths over those competing elements. It kind of works, though I’m not sure how.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

GENERATION X-23 #2.\u00a0<\/strong>(Annotations here.)<\/a> At the other end of the pacing spectrum, here’s an issue that consists entirely of Laura and Gabby introducing themselves to the characters they met at the end of the previous issue. Given the nature of the story, though, that’s probably the right call – there’s nothing we should be cutting away to just yet, and we’ve got a bunch of characters needing to be introduced. And since they all have versions of the same name, it’s all the more important to make them distinctive both visually and in personality terms. On re-reading, there’s more going on here than first meets the eye in terms of setting up the second-tier newbies, and in terms of how far their spokesman X-Infinite actually does reflect what the rest of the group are thinking. Jody Houser and Jacopo Camagni establish everyone well, and set up some questions about what Infinite is actually up to. It’s a strong book, but I do worry about whether it’ll get the time it needs to make this work.<\/p>\n

WOLVERINE: WEAPONS OF ARMAGEDDON #2.<\/strong> By Chip Zdarsky, Luca Maresca, Jesus Aburtov & Joe Sabino. In theory, this miniseries is part of a crossover that has something to do with Origin Boxes, but in practice the Boxes have only received a passing mention. Instead, this is pretty much a straight Wolverine story, going back to the old standards of Wolverine trying to stop other people from being turned into weapons in the same that he was. We’ve seen this many times, and what makes this one distinctive is mostly the choice of characters. David Colton is the retconned-in 9\/11 Captain America from Zdarsky’s current\u00a0Captain America\u00a0<\/em>run, and fits sensibly in this story – there may be wider reasons for wanting to up his profile, but we’ll see. And thanks to\u00a0Wolverine: Origins<\/em>, Nuke now serves as a recognisable character where Wolverine himself was responsible for what happened, back before his face turn. Nuke is normally a completely one-note character, but for once, this story has him more interested in getting revenge on Wolverine, for entirely understandable reasons. Maresca draws him as a big imposing lug, but the scene with him squaring off against the bear plays him up as a Wolverine analogue, which is a very different way of using the character. Despite the crossover branding, this actually seems to be just a well executed Wolverine story, and more consistent than the ongoing title.<\/p>\n

ROGUE #3.<\/strong> By Erica Schultz, Luigi Zagaria, Espen Grunetjern & Ariana Maher. Issue #2 was shaky, but this seems to be getting back on track. I’m not quite sure when the Constrictor became a rich guy funding other villains – the footnote points us to She-Hulk<\/em> #9, which was when he sued Hercules, but I thought that status quo had long since been dropped. It didn’t show up when he was in\u00a0Wolverine\u00a0<\/em>not so long ago, and a bit of quick searching tells me there’s a story where he lost most of the money in a poker game, but whatever. I don’t actually mind it as an approach to the character – it gives him a distinctive angle as an ascended henchman, and Zagaria gives him a smug confidence that’s very effective. The actual story here – in which Rogue tries to figure out what happened in her memory gaps – seems to be heading towards “she copied Sabretooth’s powers during a mission and went briefly nuts”. I can’t say I’m especially invested in that side of things. But the mechanics of this issue are rather good fun.<\/p>\n

PSYLOCKE: NINJA #3.<\/strong> By Tim Seeley, Nico Leon, Dono S\u00e1nchez-Almara & Ariana Maher. This is an unusual approach to a continuity implant miniseries –\u00a0Uncanny X-Men<\/em> #256-258 have happened since the last issue, and so Betsy is now free of Hand control and hanging around in Madripoor with Logan and Jubilee. Fortunately, Logan is packed off to deal with stories in his solo book, and so we get a Psylocke \/ Jubilee story. For some reason, despite the immediate continuity being quite well researched, the wider continuity is really quite shaky. The idea of Logan trying to pack Psylocke off to the X-Men to recover doesn’t make any sense, because the team doesn’t exist at this point. But none of that especially matters. What Seeley is actually doing is writing a couple of encounters with Elektra into the margins of this period of continuity, after all. It also means he has to address the elephant in the room, which is that Psylocke’s body swap was reversed for very good reason<\/a>. The story has a reasonable go at it, both by making her adjustment to her new body more traumatic, and through a rather unsubtle exchange with an English Tourist Who Symbolises Colonialism. What it doesn’t\u00a0<\/em>do is make Jubilee a vehicle for voicing any of these points, even though she resented Psylocke’s presence even in the original stories… but as Seeley points out, Claremont already attributed that to a combination of legitimate distrust and of Psylocke’s presence disrupting Jubilee’s sidekick relationshipw ith Wolverine, so giving her a third objection risks cluttering the whole thing. At any rate, maybe there’s something to be said for trying to smooth over this part of continuity from a more modern standpoint – while it’s potentially ignorable as part of Betsy’s back story at this point, it isn’t ignorable as part of Kwannon’s. If you’re going down that line, this actually does it quite well, though I’m yet to be convinced that the story\u00a0 needs Elektra.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

UNCANNY X-MEN #25.\u00a0(Annotations here.) This is the final part of “Where Monsters Dwell” and… um. Look, I like this book, and I like the creators, and I like the Outliers, but this arc is a misfire. To be fair, part of my problem with it is that the premise is pretty much that the Legion […]<\/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-11891","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\/11891","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=11891"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11891\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11893,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11891\/revisions\/11893"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11891"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11891"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11891"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}