{"id":7983,"date":"2022-06-21T22:11:45","date_gmt":"2022-06-21T21:11:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=7983"},"modified":"2022-06-21T22:11:45","modified_gmt":"2022-06-21T21:11:45","slug":"x-men-unlimited-infinity-comic-35-40","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=7983","title":{"rendered":"X-Men Unlimited Infinity Comic #35-40"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #35-40<\/strong>
\n“Eany Come Home”<\/strong>
\nWriter: Alex Paknadel
\n<\/strong>Artist: Julian Shaw
\nColourist: Dono S\u00e1nchez-Almara<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Joe Sabino
\nEditor: Lauren Amaro<\/strong><\/p>\n

If you’re going to have an entire series that’s exclusive to Marvel Unlimited, and you don’t want to do anything too important to continuity that might infuriate non-subscribers, then you may as well take the chance to do stories about little-used characters. And lo! A Maggott six-parter! That’s not something you get to say often!<\/p>\n

Okay, granted, it’s an Infinity Comic. So when we say “six-parter” we actually mean something closer to “two-parter” in regular comics. But still, Maggott’s usually lucky if he gets any parts at all. I’m not sure he’s actually done anything bigger than a cameo since being killed off in\u00a0Weapon X\u00a0<\/em>in 2003. You kind of wonder why he was even brought back. Maybe he was so obscure that everyone forgot he was dead.<\/p>\n

Or maybe people kind of like the guy and didn’t really want him to be cannon fodder. He’s got a reputation as an awful character, but there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with him. He’s a\u00a0weird<\/em> concept – a guy with an external digestive system in the form of two semi-autonomous slug thingies, Eany and Meany that can eat through anything and power him up afterwards – and it’s probably fair to say that the early stories trying to make this seem fascinating and tragic didn’t\u00a0quite land. But the idea is fine. And maybe it feels a lot less eccentric in 2022 than it did in 1997.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

So, what’s Maggott been up to? Well, he’s been marginalised. Obviously he has. Or else we’d have seen him.<\/p>\n

Basically, Maggott is the guy who gets called in to clear things up after the fight if there’s a big mess that needs consumed. He’s not very enthusiastic about it, but he’s more or less resigned to it. This being the Krakoan era, the X-Men manage to get the poor guy killed halfway through the first chapter, and he’s promptly resurrected. But this turns out to be the long-awaited botched resurrection story: the original Eany is still alive, and they’ve accidentally resurrected her anyway. With no Maggott to feed, she’s very angry, she’s growing to kaiju size – well, what non-humanoid isn’t these days – and she’s on her way to Krakoa.<\/p>\n

I like the idea. We haven’t done a botched resurrection yet (unless you count the X of Swords Otherworld stuff), and Maggott’s a good character to do it with, since he has the odd gimmick of a body split in three. Sure, you could do it with Madrox, but this is more interesting.<\/p>\n

The story slows down a bit from there, though. The hook is that the solution is to kill the second Eany, who seems to be starving herself to death anyway and completely up for a bit of death. But Maggott is too protective to let that happen, and Wolverine – the Laura version – shows up to side with him on that. I’m not sure this strand really lands, and it’s about half the arc. But I see the idea. Because he’s marginalised, Maggott thinks he’s disposable, and sees the suggestion of killing Eany in that light. And Laura empathises with the idea that Maggott is the guy who only gets called in for the jobs nobody else wants. And Emma Frost, at her most unsympathetic, gets to be the character lobbying for “kill Eany.”<\/p>\n

Except… does that angle work with Laura in 2022? It fits with her back story, and her time as a living weapon, and all that. But it’s not really where the character is today. She’s\u00a0in the X-Men, after all. A particularly high-profile, superheroic version of the X-Men at that. I guess it still works as a reason for her to identify with Maggott, but the story feels – particularly in the ending – as if it’s trying to draw parallels with where she is\u00a0now<\/em>, and that doesn’t quite work.<\/p>\n

Also, for some reason the story grinds to a halt in chapter five in order to recap Maggott’s origin story from\u00a0X-Men<\/em> #76. I guess the idea is to draw a parallel between New Eany trying to die, and Maggott viewing himself as a burden to his family in Joe Kelly’s story, but I don’t think it was really worth the detour.<\/p>\n

Alex Paknadel gives Maggott a convincing persona that fits with his marginal position in the Marvel Universe. Julian Shaw’s art isn’t flashy but it has a few good uses of the vertical scrolling format; it gives everyone, including the maggotts, a bit of charisma and it’s very readable. The whole thing does benefit from a re-read, where it’s easier to see the structure of the thing, and the parallels in Maggot and Laura’s conversations in the first and last chapters. My big reservation is that Laura just feels off – she’s too informal, and she’s a big enough part of the story for that to be an issue. She even gets the final beat, which is weird.<\/p>\n

Aside from that, though, this is pretty solid. X-Men Unlimited Infinity Comic<\/em> is not essential reading, but it’s not meant to be. For a series that could easily have been dismissed as bonus content, it’s turned out to be quite reliable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #35-40 “Eany Come Home” Writer: Alex Paknadel Artist: Julian Shaw Colourist: Dono S\u00e1nchez-Almara Letterer: Joe Sabino Editor: Lauren Amaro If you’re going to have an entire series that’s exclusive to Marvel Unlimited, and you don’t want to do anything too important to continuity that might infuriate non-subscribers, then you may as […]<\/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-7983","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\/7983","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=7983"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7983\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7985,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7983\/revisions\/7985"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7983"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7983"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7983"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}