{"id":12123,"date":"2026-06-29T22:22:23","date_gmt":"2026-06-29T21:22:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=12123"},"modified":"2026-06-29T22:22:23","modified_gmt":"2026-06-29T21:22:23","slug":"the-x-axis-24-june-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=12123","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – 24 June 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"

X-MEN #32.\u00a0<\/strong>(Annotations here.)<\/a> I know, I know, we’re into the next week now… but let’s run through these anyway. This is part 2 of “Anomaly”, which is basically the X-Men’s science team finding a comatose Schwarzchild and running into Department H. I’ve said before that this book is generally stronger on its shorter stories, but this time the pacing is working better for me. Purely on a plot level, not a huge amount has actually happened in these two issues beyond, well, finding Schwarzchild and running into Department H. But that’s left plenty of time for the book’s second-tier characters to breathe, and I’m actually pleased to see we’re getting the generic Department H guys rather than Alpha Flight characters who would demand more of our attention (and redirect the focus of the story). Tony Daniel does a rather nice take on Magneto getting a chance to be himself again briefly, and Schwarzchild’s intentionally blank mental plane avoids being visually dull thanks to some nice colouring work. I’m liking this arc so far.<\/p>\n

WOLVERINE #22.\u00a0<\/strong>(Annotations here.)<\/a> In which the loss of Wolverine’s healing factor turns out to be to do with nanites that have stolen his powers and given them to Taskmaster. It’s rather weird to see nanites being presented as cutting edge stuff – they were a bit of a cliche twenty years ago – and the book can’t really seem to make up its mind whether Wolverine is on his last legs or whether he can still put up a fight against Taskmaster. And come to think of it, it’s a bit weird to treat the loss of Wolverine’s healing factor as life threatening stuff while referencing the fact that Cecilia Reyes has seen it before – which she has, in a story where it turned out to be pretty manageable, really. I don’t really mind if you want to ignore that story to sell the drama of this one, but don’t remind me about it while ignoring it! Still, I quite enjoyed this – the idea of a regular hospital which actually has the ability to treat mutants is quite interesting, and Logan’s reaction to the prospect of dying at least feels right. This run of\u00a0Wolverine\u00a0<\/em>has been patchy, but this story feels fairly solid on the bits that really matter.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

GENERATION X-23 #5.\u00a0<\/strong>(Annotations here.)<\/a> End of the first arc. I struggle to see it finding an audience in this market, but I’m enjoying this. Hopefully we’ll get some actual names for the characters in the next arc, because god knows I still can’t remember the numbers, but they’re distinctive enough in appearance and personality that it doesn’t actually matter as much as you’d think. And there’s a lot more going on in character terms than might first appear. X-Infinite is a genuinely interesting character with a mixture of self-absorption and sincere concern for his fellow Generated – I don’t think he’s lying when he claims to feel guilty for his role in their creation – but Laura’s apparent inability to grasp why he might feel that he had no choice in the matter is kind of fascinating. There’s still a lot of work to be done in fleshing out these characters outside Facility-23, but presumably that’s where we’re going next issue, and I”m looking forward to that a lot. I struggle to imagine this book finding an audience in the current market – if it makes it past issue #10 then I’ll be very pleasantly surprised – but it’s pretty good.<\/p>\n

X-MEN: OUTBACK #1.\u00a0<\/strong>By Steve Orlando, Stephen Segovia, Alex Sinclair & Joe Sabino. Another month, another flashback miniseries. I can’t help wondering who the audience is for these books – surely there can’t be that many current readers who are nostalgic for 30-40 year old continuity? If there are, that seems terribly unhealthy. With\u00a0Psylocke: Ninja\u00a0<\/em>there was at least a case to be made that it was worth going back to look at a glossed-over part of Betsy’s life from a modern perspective, and face the problematic aspects of that back story more directly. Outback <\/em>feels much more like “hey, remember this”? It’s mixed – Orlando has reasonable ideas about how the X-Men feel about having committed to hiding out in Australia and pretending to be dead, particularly those team members who were less on board with the idea. And Stephen Segovia handles those aspects fairly well. But I’m much less convinced about opening with a story where Sabretooth just\u00a0finds<\/em> them and has to get his mind wiped. Sure, you can have Sabretooth refuse to believe they’re dead and go looking for them – I don’t have a problem with him finding Logan in Madripoor, say – but having him succeed feels like it misses the point. The whole premise<\/em> of this phase of the X-Men was that they had completely dropped off the radar and it can’t go wrong that quickly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

X-MEN #32.\u00a0(Annotations here.) I know, I know, we’re into the next week now… but let’s run through these anyway. This is part 2 of “Anomaly”, which is basically the X-Men’s science team finding a comatose Schwarzchild and running into Department H. I’ve said before that this book is generally stronger on its shorter stories, but […]<\/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-12123","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\/12123","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=12123"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12123\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12124,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12123\/revisions\/12124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}