{"id":12213,"date":"2026-08-06T23:03:42","date_gmt":"2026-08-06T22:03:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=12213"},"modified":"2026-08-06T23:03:42","modified_gmt":"2026-08-06T22:03:42","slug":"the-x-axis-5-august-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=12213","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – 5 August 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"

UNCANNY X-MEN #33.\u00a0<\/strong>(Annotations here.)<\/a> Well, this is certainly a quiet week. To be fair, I think\u00a0Midnight X-Men<\/em> #1 may have originally been scheduled for this week before they decided to launch the whole line in October. But as it is, we have just the two books.<\/p>\n

First up, we have Rogue and Gambit looking for an exorcist. And Gail Simone continues to dust off unlikely genre characters for the purpose, with an improbable guest-starring role for Devil-Hunter. It doesn’t really matter whether you recognise him or not (you almost certainly don’t, he had a vanishingly short run in a horror anthology in the mid-seventies), since he’s basically serving here as an all-purpose grumpy exorcist. There’s a nagging question about why they’re going to this guy at all. Isn’t Magik the obvious first port of call? I know there’s a limit to how far you can take the consequences of a shared universe, because that way lies “why doesn’t everyone just call the Avengers”, to which the answer is “because it would be boring”. But Magik’s in the other X-Men book.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Still, the idea here is obviously to have Rogue and Gambit on a tour of people who are out of their comfort zone, and Magik is way too familiar to work in this role. Gabriel does bring something a little off-kilter to the proceedings, and I do like the weirdly insectoid demon that Vecchio draws, which is quite far off Marvel Universe norms. It works, mostly, I think?<\/p>\n

The B-plot sees Monet and Pietro show up at Haven, where despite their best efforts, they’re entirely unsuited to fit seamlessly into the warm, family-themed X-book. I like the idea in broad terms, though the Outliers … sorry, the New Mutants seem a little too hostile to them. Admittedly, it’s most obviously coming from Calico, and she’s crazy. But Gambit and Rogue going off on a solo mission just doesn’t seem to warrant the reaction we’re getting here, and that’s a problem for the story – it feels like the characters are reacting to some sort of impending finality that hasn’t actually happened yet.<\/p>\n

X-MEN OF APOCALYPSE OMEGA #1.\u00a0<\/strong>By Jeph Loeb, Simone Di Meo & Tyler Smith. In practical terms, this is issue #6 of a 6-issue miniseries. Because it’s a quiet week, I re-read the thing to see if it hangs together any better as a whole.<\/p>\n

And to be fair, it does, in some ways. If you go back to issue #1, Loeb certainly is laying the groundwork for the reveal about what the villains are really up to. And it’s clear enough too what he thinks this story is really about. He thinks it’s about Age of Apocalypse Gambit, unable to bear separation from his world’s Rogue, grasping at the opportunity to travel to another world where they could be together. The ending involves our Gambit apparently agreeing to swap places with the AoA Gambit so that he can spend some time in our world… or something… without actually telling anyone. That, it seems, is the plot of next month’s\u00a0Gambit: Gone <\/em>miniseries, by Steve Orlando and Eduardo Audino.<\/p>\n

So… yes, if you read it through, it does at least answer the question “what is the point of any of this”. But it’s still not good. As an Age of Apocalypse nostalgia trip, it fails by getting the continuity of the original series wrong, not to mention ignoring the fact that sequels have taken place already. We’ve had years of stories in\u00a0Exiles\u00a0<\/em>with AoA Blink and Sabretooth, for god’s sake. As a story in its own right, it doesn’t feel like any of the elements other than Gambit’s plot have been thought through. Why does Sinister want Nate Grey back? If Forge is an impostor, how did two telepaths fail to notice? What exactly were the AoA X-Men trying to achieve on Earth in the first place? Something about setting the timeline right but… what? I realise it’s all a ruse and in that sense it doesn’t matter, but I ought to at least understand what the characters’ motivations are, shouldn’t I? Why in the name of god would our Gambit spontaneously agree to go on an exchange trip to the Age of Apocalypse without telling his wife? (If you’re feeling really\u00a0<\/em>generous you could maybe rationalise this in terms of his current demonic possession problems.) Has he even checked how he’s going to get back?<\/p>\n

The art is a problem too. Simone Di Meo’s art is often lovely to look at on the level of individual images, but the flow is choppy in the extreme. It’s often very hard to follow, in a way that makes the story look even more confusing than it actually is. Backgrounds are generally vague to non-existent, and there’s no real sense of place or atmosphere. It’s kinetic, to be sure, but it doesn’t tell a story.<\/p>\n

All told, it does benefit from a re-read, but only in the sense that some sort of coherent intention does emerge. It’s still a mess, and still one to steer clear of.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

UNCANNY X-MEN #33.\u00a0(Annotations here.) Well, this is certainly a quiet week. To be fair, I think\u00a0Midnight X-Men #1 may have originally been scheduled for this week before they decided to launch the whole line in October. But as it is, we have just the two books. First up, we have Rogue and Gambit looking for […]<\/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-12213","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\/12213","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=12213"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12213\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12215,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12213\/revisions\/12215"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}