{"id":12025,"date":"2026-05-22T23:25:23","date_gmt":"2026-05-22T22:25:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=12025"},"modified":"2026-05-22T23:25:23","modified_gmt":"2026-05-22T22:25:23","slug":"the-x-axis-20-may-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=12025","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – 20 May 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"

X-MEN UNITED #3.\u00a0<\/strong>(Annotations here.)<\/a> Well, this isn’t working. There’s a whole load of problems here. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with retconning a mutant into\u00a0Truth: Red, White and Blue<\/em> – well, aside from the question of what mutants add to that story, I guess. I mean, it was about racism to start with, and making one of the victims randomly a mutant doesn’t actually add to that, and this doesn’t seem to be a story about intersectionality, and… actually, come to think of it, maybe it is just a dud idea even on that level. But it certainly doesn’t have anything to do with the supposed premise of X-Men United<\/em>, so at the very least, it’s a mystifying choice for issues #2-3. If this is meant to be a rotating-cast team-up book with guests from across the line, it doesn’t work on that level; this is a Captain America story with the mutants who accompany him playing a mostly generic role. The plot mechanics are mystifying, which is starting to feel like a recurring problem in Eve Ewing’s stories – the first chunk of the issue is taken up with the away team being split into different time periods. But Vernon Weaver seems to perceive it as all part of the same scene even though he sees them separately – why, if he’s in different time periods? – and in the end none of it seems to matter. It’s just something to spin the story out a bit before everyone sits down for a conversation. And that story seems to be trying to go for a resolution of Weaver forgiving himself for killing someone in self-defence during the Truth<\/em> experiments, but for that story to work we need some idea of what he’s actually been doing for the last eighty years – he can’t have spend the whole time moping in the family home, can he? Weaver’s emotional swings are so rapid that it’s hard to get any grip on him as a character, and… yeah, sorry, it’s a train wreck.<\/p>\n

INGLORIOUS X-FORCE #5.\u00a0<\/strong>(Annotations here.)<\/a> There are a few odd calls in this book – I don’t know why Sinister is suddenly so worried about a villain who isn’t even on the planet and shows no signs of coming back, and a relationship between Warren and Tabitha seems a little questionable given that she started as one of the X-Factor students. But I quite like Tim Seeley’s attempt to redefine how the Archangel split personality thing works, presenting it as something akin to a possession, with Warren tending to take a back seat. There’s some thought here going into how the characters work. What’s more, it’s burning through its first storyline at a refreshing pace – the format of this book is that Cable thinks he’s identified the four mutants who’ll kill Kamala Khan in the future, and wants to rule them out in turn, but we’ve got through that entire exercise and it’s only issue #5. It is, admittedly, a rather vibes-based approach to detective work, but I’ll let that slide. I’m not sure how much this book is really\u00a0about<\/em> anything, and the art feels a bit rushed in the first half – Sinister’s headquarters is a very bland room – but it’s got energy and it has some interesting takes on its cast.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

ROGUE #5.<\/strong> By Erica Schultz, Luigi Zagaria, Espen Grudetjern & Ariana Maher. Well, that’s a weird way to end a miniseries. This story is about Rogue regaining memories of having mutilated a man when she was in the Brotherhood (because she’d absorbed Sabretooth and lost control), finding out what happened, and then trying to apologise. Not surprisingly, he’s scared of her, tells her to get lost, and rejects any suggestion of help from the mutant community, despite being a mutant himself. And that’s it. It’s a story where the moral is that she doesn’t get to resolve the issue and she just has to live with it. That’s not a bad idea in theory, and Zagaria draws the exchange between the two quite well, but I don’t think we needed five issues to get to this point – evidently this is the current standard length for a Marvel miniseries, but strip out the busy work to pad it out, and this could almost have been an annual.<\/p>\n

MOONSTAR #3.\u00a0<\/strong>By Ashley Allen, Edoardo Audino, Arhtur Hesli & Clayton Cowles. Certainly the best looking X-book of the week. Much of it is Dani trapped inside the magic sword from the previous issue and encountering Hildr through a series of different locations, but they do feel different, and Audino gives Hildr a nicely smug confidence. There’s a neat idea, too, of Dani’s instinct being to summon up a version of her team to fight with her, and getting a lecture about how she can’t stand alone. This is meant to be her solo book, after all, but she’s a perennial team player. It all seems to be building to a fairly standard “do I save my family or save the world” dilemma, but it’s very well done.<\/p>\n

WOLVERINE: WEAPONS OF ARMAGEDDON #4. <\/strong>By Chip Zdarsky, Luca Maresca, Bryan Valenza & Joe Sabino. Final issue of the miniseries, which turns out to be a relatively normal Wolverine story that doubles as a lead-in to\u00a0Armageddon<\/em>. But for the most part you could take the story without those elements; it’s another story where Wolverine encounters a private super soldier programme, and helps someone escape from it, basically. Where it connects to\u00a0Armageddon<\/em> is in having an Origin Box running around as a macguffin, and in having David Colton from Zdarsky’s Captain America\u00a0<\/em>run as a major character. That sets him up for a role in the crossover, but his back story as a rejected super soldier means that he fits perfectly happily in a Wolverine story anyway. The use of Nuke is maybe the most interesting thing about this series; that character is normally presented as a one-note lunatic, but in this version he’s more of a big lug who comes across as almost sympathetic, unappreciated by his employers, who seem to want to replace him with cyborg clones. I’m not entirely convinced by that direction for him – his one-dimensionality is kind of the point of him, but maybe there’s a story to be done about what happens if he figures out he’s being used. Maresca’s art certainly sells him as a real character, and delivers on the action scenes. A pretty good miniseries, and surprisingly viable as a standalone book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

X-MEN UNITED #3.\u00a0(Annotations here.) Well, this isn’t working. There’s a whole load of problems here. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with retconning a mutant into\u00a0Truth: Red, White and Blue – well, aside from the question of what mutants add to that story, I guess. I mean, it was about racism to start with, and making one […]<\/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-12025","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\/12025","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=12025"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12025\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12026,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12025\/revisions\/12026"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}