{"id":12304,"date":"2026-08-28T22:38:01","date_gmt":"2026-08-28T21:38:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=12304"},"modified":"2026-08-28T22:38:01","modified_gmt":"2026-08-28T21:38:01","slug":"the-x-axis-26-august-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=12304","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – 26 August 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"

X-MEN #36.\u00a0<\/strong>(Annotations here.)<\/a> This is the conclusion of the two-part prologue to “DNX”. That seems to be a remarkably self-contained event, running through its own miniseries,\u00a0X-Men<\/em> and\u00a0Fantastic Four<\/em>. The inclusion of\u00a0FF<\/em> seems random, but I’m more than happy to see these things being kept tighter. “Age of Revelation” was a good\u00a0X-Men<\/em> storyline that suffered from being repurposed as a line-wide event, so if\u00a0DNX<\/em> is going to be a good\u00a0X-Men<\/em> storyline that stays that way, I’m all for it. The X-Men themselves are somewhat on the margins of this issue, which is more about the Chairman version of the Beast trying to win over Magneto (with predictable lack of success) and the 3K X-Men getting annoyed at being saddled with Joseph as their new field leader. Netho Diaz really does a great version of this Chairman Beast design, and I do enjoy the hints of the Chairman genuinely admiring Silver Age Magneto while backtracking to “never needed you anyway” when he gets rebuffed. Jed MacKay did something similar with him and Beast in the previous issue, and it’s being kept fairly subtle for now. I’m not all that bothered about the X-Virus, but I am intrigued to see where this is all going.<\/p>\n

WOLVERINE #26.\u00a0<\/strong>(Annotations here.)<\/a> Oh, we’re going back to revisit the alternate timeline Wolverines from issue #20? I guess I can see that – it makes their introduction seem a bit less random with hindsight. But we’re going to their worlds to fight the Adamantine? Again? Already? Even if the Adamantine storyline had worked better, this feels far too soon to be going back there. Julius Ohta’s art does sell the settings rather well, and I do quite like Red Hare being a relatively cheerful Wolverine despite his supposed “savage champion” status, but I can’t say I’m particularly engaged by any of this.<\/p>\n

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TOMB OF APOCALYPSE #1.\u00a0<\/strong>By Ashley Allen, Domenico Carbone, Fer Sifuentes-Sujo * Joe Sabino. Ah, it’s a Wolverine and Jubilee miniseries. A random thingy shows up at Haven House, and teleports Wolverine and Jubilee away to one of Apocalypse’s old tombs. Apocalypse just seems to want someone to defend it from mercenaries who are trying to raid the place, but he didn’t particularly these two in the first place. So for the moment, it’s less of an Apocalypse story – he only appears by video link – and more of a Jubilee story, with the main hook being that she feels she’s never escaped her status as the junior member of the team. That kind of feels like it’s more a meta thing than an in-universe thing – she’s been around since the 1980s, after all – but I guess I can see it. I’m less sure about the use of Apocalypse in this story, which seems to be defaulting to the idea that the X-Men don’t trust him and never did. That’s just not how Krakoa worked, and despite the best efforts to reset him to villain status at the end of that era, I simply don’t buy everyone behaving as if he’s Dr Doom. If that’s going to be a big part of this mini, then it’s going to have to work some to convince me. The art is decent enough, and I quite like its more subdued, slender take on Apocalypse.<\/p>\n

X-MEN: OUTBACK #3.\u00a0<\/strong>By Steve Orlando, Stephen Segovia, Roi Mercado, Alex Sinclair, Joe Sabino. Well, I’m still not convinced that this is a period of X-Men history that really needed more exploration – and the nature of the set-up, with the X-Men being hidden from the rest of the world at this point, doesn’t lend itself to untold stories either. Books like this leave me a bit antsy about Marvel’s overall health, anyway – it just doesn’t seem like a terribly good thing if a significant part of your publishing plan is to target people who have warm nostalgic feelings about comics that came out nearly 40 years ago. This issue, aside from the obligatory one page building up a Mojo story, we have random invaders from the Microverse, and a completely arbitrary connection with the Rasputin family. The story seems to have odd ideas that there’s a need to redeem the Rasputin family name – it’s not that uncommon a name – and as a story, it reads like something that would be more at home in Orlando’s Scarlet Witch book. There is something in the Piotr\/Betsy relationship, which was a bit underdeveloped at the time, and Segovia does a great Colossus, but I’m not seeing the big picture for this mini.<\/p>\n

GAMBIT: WANTED #2.\u00a0<\/strong>By Chris Claremont, Robert Gill, Bryan Valenza & Ariana Maher. Well, this is certainly a Chris Claremont book – characters from his previous Gambit<\/em> miniseries showing up without much in the way of context, and good old mind control. One of the things I liked about the first issue was that it had a worthwhile angle of Gambit being torn between joining the X-Men and leaving behind the people who depended on him in Louisiana. That isn’t really as present in this issue, which is much more fight-based. And why is Bullseye, of all people, just scattering bombs everywhere? He’s about precision aim, that’s his whole gimmick. Still, the art is very good and it does have momentum. Not bad.<\/p>\n

WHAT IF…?: X-MEN #1.\u00a0<\/strong>By Ashley Allen, Sumit Kumar, Sonia Oback & Clayton Cowles. What if Cassandra Nova killed Charles Xavier in the womb instead of it being the other way around? Well, Professor X is just out of the picture, so Cassandra sets up a school in order to try and exploit telepaths to bring more Mummudrai to Earth. There’s something to it, and some nice visual references to the original Cassandra Nova issues from\u00a0New X-Men<\/em>. And the basic idea that Cassandra overreaches when she tries to bring Jean and Emma into the fold makes sense. It’s got atmosphere. But it doesn’t really have an ending – it ends as if it’s promising Jean and Emma’s fight back in a future issue, which obviously isn’t going to happen. I get what it’s going for, I think – we all know how that bit of the story goes, since Cassandra versus Phoenix is only going to end one way, so we can leave it to the readers to fill in – but it doesn’t feel like it works on the page.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

X-MEN #36.\u00a0(Annotations here.) This is the conclusion of the two-part prologue to “DNX”. That seems to be a remarkably self-contained event, running through its own miniseries,\u00a0X-Men and\u00a0Fantastic Four. The inclusion of\u00a0FF seems random, but I’m more than happy to see these things being kept tighter. “Age of Revelation” was a good\u00a0X-Men storyline that suffered from […]<\/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-12304","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\/12304","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=12304"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12304\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12305,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12304\/revisions\/12305"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}