{"id":12166,"date":"2026-07-17T21:54:04","date_gmt":"2026-07-17T20:54:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=12166"},"modified":"2026-07-17T21:54:04","modified_gmt":"2026-07-17T20:54:04","slug":"the-x-axis-15-july-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=12166","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – 15 July 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"

X-MEN #34.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Another quiet week, then. Next week will be busier, with five books coming out. In the meantime, we have the final part of “Anomaly”, a three-parter which in one sense is all about Schwarzchild, but more as a plot point than a character. He’s unconscious for pretty much the entire thing. The real meat of this issue is Ben Liu having the chance to kill Schwarzchild and being kind-of sort-of talked out of it by Quire. As so often in this book, we’re getting appeals to pure pragmatism rather than moral principle, and that seems like it’s going to come back to bite us; it’s set up as a story where Ben gets to make the right choice, and then loops back to tell us that he really hasn’t. But MacKay also makes good use of Quentin Quire, who’s perhaps the last person you’d want to be giving pep talks about moral responsibility to anyone. Still, there’s a low-key appeal to seeing him stepping into that role in the absence of any authority figures to wind up. Visually, it’s not the most exciting issue – that’s kind of a consequence of the decision to make Schwarzchild’s mindscape a blank slate, I guess. The silent page of Ben’s decision intercut with flashbacks to his experiments stands out as an exception. At any rate, it’s good to see this arc limited to three issues – it feels tighter than the five issue arc that seem to be the standard, even if in this case it may be dictated by the scheduling need to get it finished before\u00a0DNX<\/em> starts.<\/p>\n

INGLORIOUS X-FORCE #7.\u00a0<\/strong>(Annotations here.)<\/a> She’s not technically in the team, but once again this is really Domino’s issue, with Tim Seeley and Michael Sta Maria riffing entertainingly on the idea that, against sufficiently dimwitted opponents, her luck powers will take care of her without her even noticing. It’s all very satisfying and creatively done. The rest of the issue sees Cyclops and Kid Omega drop by at X-Force’s headquarters, in order to gently probe what the hell Cable is up to. It’s a nice enough idea, though Kid Omega feels out of character here to me – he’s a brat, but this more malicious take on the character feels a good few years out of date to me. As for the imprisoned Mutant Liberation Front members, most of them don’t get much to do in this story, but as a group they’re growing on me. They’re quite nicely pitched as a bunch of amateurs who are further out of their depth than they realise, but not so inept as to be a joke. It allows Resonant to be quietly established as the one who has a better grasp on what’s happening. Now, admittedly, I’m not sure about the wisdom of bringing in the wackier elements from Seeley’s Shatterstar<\/em> mini. But then again, this is the least grimdark incarnation of X-Force in many a year, and while I doubt it’s getting past issue #10, I’m having fun.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

X-MEN #34. (Annotations here.) Another quiet week, then. Next week will be busier, with five books coming out. In the meantime, we have the final part of “Anomaly”, a three-parter which in one sense is all about Schwarzchild, but more as a plot point than a character. He’s unconscious for pretty much the entire thing. […]<\/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-12166","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\/12166","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=12166"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12166\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12167,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12166\/revisions\/12167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}