{"id":11947,"date":"2026-04-18T21:30:37","date_gmt":"2026-04-18T20:30:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11947"},"modified":"2026-04-18T21:30:37","modified_gmt":"2026-04-18T20:30:37","slug":"the-x-axis-15-april-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11947","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – 15 April 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"

X-MEN UNITED #2.\u00a0<\/strong>(Annotations here.)<\/a> Erm. Right. Well. So… this is certainly a thing, isn’t it?<\/p>\n

I liked\u00a0Exceptional X-Men<\/em>, but this is a mess.\u00a0Exceptional<\/em>‘s strength was always in the character work; a slow pace, a down-to-earth tone and a small cast suited it. X-Men United<\/em>, with a sprawling cast, a high concept setting and some sort of X-Men Team-up remit, takes all the wrong things from that book. I described the first issue as a misfire which at least had some moments with the\u00a0Exceptional\u00a0<\/em>cast. The closest this issue comes to that is a scene with Kitty and Magneto. The art is okay, to be fair, and does a reasonable job on talky scenes.<\/p>\n

Beyond that, it’s pretty much a train wreck. Why can’t it explain the concept of Graymatter Lane? If people are travelling there physically then what’s all this stuff about how if you die in Graymatter Lane then you die in real life? Wouldn’t that be obvious? But if they’re only travelling there psychically, how do they exit to different locations? This is rudimentary and two issues in, the book still hasn’t explained its basic premise intelligibly. It gets worse, though: the resolution of last issue’s cliffhanger is “false peril”, Cyclops feels wildly out of character compared to his home book, and then that plot just goes away. Instead, we move on to a story about Captain America and a supporting player from\u00a0Truth: Red, White and Black<\/em>. It’s not exactly obvious why that’s an X-Men story in the first place, though there are some throwaway lines about hoping that Captain America learns something about mutants in the process. But it’s an utterly bizarre choice of story for issue #2, when the book has such a sprawling cast and hasn’t done a proper story with its own setting yet. If the idea is to sell the concept of a team-up book, it certainly doesn’t do that by picking X-23, Mel\u00e9e and Jitter out of a hat and getting them to stand interchangeably next to Captain America. This is going very badly.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

INGLORIOUS X-FORCE #4.\u00a0<\/strong>(Annotations here.)<\/a> We’re on to Archangel’s spotlight story, which for some reason is a two-parter. This book has generally worked, and its bombardment of oddball references has been fun for the most part, but this is probably my least favourite issue to date. Partly, it has fill-in art from Philip Tan, and I don’t really care for his work. I find it a bit fiddly and overrendered, and prone to rather blank expressions. But also, this story is built on some awfully convoluted continuity about Archangel’s history with Death Seeds, which I’m not even sure it’s getting right, and I tend to think that when a story is making my head spin about things like that, it could maybe use a bit more explanation of what it thinks happened. More generally… is the Archangel \/ Death Seed stuff interesting? It was part of a very good\u00a0X-Force\u00a0<\/em>run, to be sure, and I think ultimately Tim Seeley might be trying to use it to come up with some streamlined explanation for all of Warren’s various personalities over the years. That might be a useful thing to do, but right now it feels like it’s complicating matters more than simplifying them.<\/p>\n

STORM: EARTH’S MIGHTIEST MUTANT #3.\u00a0<\/strong>(Annotations here.)<\/a> Murewa Ayodele’s Storm run has to be the single weirdest book Marvel publish, and it’s not even close. Storm casually going on a tour of the afterlife. A spaceman who turns out to be an alternate version of her mother. A trip to the Source Wall, of all things. Not much at all about the Susanoo storyline which has been the main plot of this miniseries, although in fairness, the Death plotline gets some overdue attention instead. I’m not sure I could say I actually enjoy reading it. But a part of me can’t help admiring its insane level of ambition and its dogged perversity. For better or worse, there really is nothing else like it in Marvel’s line. That’s something, right? It’s a pretty good issue for artist Federica Mancin too, with some nice surreal settings and an admittedly inexplicable page of Ororo drawn as a sort of shadow figure. As a story, it’s all very chaotic and confusing, but at least it feels like someone’s vision.<\/p>\n

MAGIK & COLOSSUS #3.\u00a0<\/strong>By Ashley Allen, Germ\u00e1n Peralta, Arthur Hesli & Ariana Maher. In plot terms, this is an issue of Magik being held prisoner in an arena and Colossus coming to her rescue. And it’s nice to give him a chance to clearly make a difference. But this whole miniseries is really about Piotr and Illyana’s relationship, drawing out the similarities and differences in the way that they’ve each responded to trauma throughout their lives. Sometimes it’s a bit obvious about that, but it can get away with that. Allen has the clearest idea in years about how to make Colossus work as a character, and German Peralta’s art leans into that – we’re going back somewhat to the original innocence of the character and asking how much of it is really left, with Colossus himself wondering whether it’s anything more now than a persona that he adopts from time to time. But childhood flashbacks make clear that Illyana always was more of a natural fighter than him, and that Piotr is a gentle soul who’s been forced into a role he never wanted. My main reservation about the book is how far all this actually ties in to the main plot about Koschei and Russian sorcerers – if this story is trying to say something about Russianness, it’s going over my head for now – but it’s very much worth your time if you have any interest in the main characters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

X-MEN UNITED #2.\u00a0(Annotations here.) Erm. Right. Well. So… this is certainly a thing, isn’t it? I liked\u00a0Exceptional X-Men, but this is a mess.\u00a0Exceptional‘s strength was always in the character work; a slow pace, a down-to-earth tone and a small cast suited it. X-Men United, with a sprawling cast, a high concept setting and some sort […]<\/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-11947","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\/11947","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=11947"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11947\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11948,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11947\/revisions\/11948"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}