{"id":11965,"date":"2026-04-25T18:02:55","date_gmt":"2026-04-25T17:02:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11965"},"modified":"2026-04-25T18:02:55","modified_gmt":"2026-04-25T17:02:55","slug":"the-x-axis-22-april-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11965","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – 22 April 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"

WOLVERINE #19.\u00a0<\/strong>(Annotations here.)<\/a> The Adamantine storyline, which has been going since issue #1, seems to be building to some sort of a conclusion. I certainly hope it is, because at this point it’s taxing my patience. When it started, I figured that Saladin Ahmed was doing something about how adamantium was a human imitation of the mythical adamantine, and perhaps some kind of Tower of Babel angle, which felt like it might work. But by this point we’re being told that the Adamantine is “the very idea of the Earth’s metal made alive and aware”, which has some sort of objection to “man’s creation, adamantium, which it calls false metal”. And, erm… what? What does any of that mean, and more importantly, what is any of it\u00a0about<\/em>?<\/p>\n

What even\u00a0is<\/em> “the very idea of the Earth’s metal”? Metal as a naturally occurring phenomenon? Which is… what, ore? Meteorites? But it can’t be that, because the adamantine keeps going on about how it was used to forge weapons in the past – there’s meant to be some angle where this personification of weaponry has discovered from seeing Wolverine that a weapon can be self-animating. So the Adamantine is about war and weapons, then? But that’s not the same thing as metal. If the Adamantine is meant to personify “metal”, why is it so interested specifically in war? Why not farming tools and jewellery? And if it’s okay with metal as forged by humans, what’s its problem with adamantium? If the objection is simply that it’s a man-made metal, what makes adamantium different from steel? It just doesn’t hold together, either in terms of plot logic or in terms of theme. Again, what’s this story supposed to be about?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

It does have some decent art, although the closing sequence with Wolverine’s claws is extremely confusing (and we’ve gone back and forth with bone claws enough in the past that breaking his claws barely registers as a big deal, at this point). This is losing me.<\/p>\n

CYCLOPS #3.<\/strong> By Alex Paknadel, Rog\u00ea Ant\u00f4nio, Fer Sifuentes-Sujo & Joe Caramagna. Comfortably the best X-book of the week. There’s nothing particularly new about a story where Cyclops is on his own and has to get by without his visor and without a team to lead, but it’s a fun idea to do every few years. Once the miniseries has got over the initial plot contrivance of Scott simply stumbling onto the newest incarnation of the Reavers, it gets a lot of mileage out of pairing Scott with Mei, a mutant who was too young to make it to Krakoa and isn’t particularly impressed by Scott as a representative of the older generation who, as she sees it, managed to screw up paradise before she got her turn. The squabbling among the various Reavers gives them more dimensions than just being the usual anti-mutant lunatics, even if it does have the side effeect of making Blitz Tempo look practically reasonable (because she spends most of her time dealing with her deranged colleague). And Ant\u00f4nio’s art is bold and energetic. I like Paknadel’s take on Scott, as well – the rookie Reavers expect him to play by the superhero rules, and he simply doesn’t care about them any more. It’s just useful when people think he does.<\/p>\n

ROGUE #4.\u00a0<\/strong>By Erica Schultz, Jim Towe, Espen Grundetjern & Ariana Maher. This is kind of okay, and the art has a nice clean feel to it. Jim Towe does bring an unusual amount of grace to basic flying, as if it wasn’t just something we should take for granted. I appreciate that. The basic story, though, seems to be resolving to the fact that years ago, Rogue used her powers on Sabretooth, went made, and mutilated a guy called John Stelton. For whatever reason, her memories of the incident have been blocked out, and the unfortunate victim is understandably terrified of her. That’s fair enough but it feels like the story has had to really drag things out to get this to five issues, with a lot of busywork in terms of drip feeding the history, and (in this issue) a rather clumsy subplot about an initially sceptical reporter who gets won round. And “Rogue needs to atone for something she did in the Brotherhood” doesn’t feel like that productive an angle to explore, at the end of the day – wasn’t it a major focus of her character for years already, with Carol Danvers? You could argue that this is worse, since she scarred and mutilated John for life… but\u00a0 I think that’s difficult to pull off when Carol is so much more established as a character. Besides, where does it actually go, beyond having Rogue re-learn a lesson about having to atone for her past? It’s okay, but I’m not sold.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WOLVERINE #19.\u00a0(Annotations here.) The Adamantine storyline, which has been going since issue #1, seems to be building to some sort of a conclusion. I certainly hope it is, because at this point it’s taxing my patience. When it started, I figured that Saladin Ahmed was doing something about how adamantium was a human imitation of […]<\/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,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11965","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\/11965","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=11965"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11965\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11966,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11965\/revisions\/11966"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}