{"id":8486,"date":"2022-11-21T21:30:59","date_gmt":"2022-11-21T21:30:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=8486"},"modified":"2022-11-21T21:30:59","modified_gmt":"2022-11-21T21:30:59","slug":"x-men-unlimited-infinity-comic-50-55-secret-x-men-2022","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=8486","title":{"rendered":"X-Men Unlimited Infinity Comic #50-55: “Secret X-Men 2022”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #50-55<\/strong>
\n“Secret X-Men 2022”<\/strong>
\nWriter: Steve Foxe<\/strong>
\nArtist: Alan Robinson<\/strong>
\nColourist: Carlos Lopez<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Joe Sabino<\/strong>
\nEditor: Jordan D White<\/strong><\/p>\n

Continuing our run through the recent\u00a0X-Men Unlimited<\/em> arcs, here’s something a bit more typical of the book – which is to say, a bit more marginal. Remember last year’s\u00a0Secret X-Men<\/em> one-shot, featuring all the losing candidates from the fan vote that decided the last place on the team? Well, it’s that, but with the 2022 line-up.<\/p>\n

I didn’t think this really worked last year, since the characters weren’t selected<\/em> to be the natural cast of a story in the first place, and it winds up being a bit of an exercise in pulling some elements out of a hat and seeing if you can get a story out of them. And this year… yeah, not dissimilar, if we’re being honest.\u00a0This is a\u00a0Hellfire Gala<\/em> tie-in story, though I’m not reviewing it quite as late as that makes it sound. It ran from the last week of August to the first week of September; the actual\u00a0Hellfire Gala<\/em> one-shot shipped in mid July. I suppose that probably means they waited to see who had won the vote before they started work on this, which would be fair enough.<\/p>\n

So who have we got here? Well, we’ve got Penance, who is unexpectedly at a loose end after\u00a0X-Corp<\/em> suffered early cancellation. We’ve got Siryn, who also counts as a reasonably big name. We’ve got a whole bunch of teen characters who aren’t doing much – Gentle, Armor, Surge and Bling!. I guess Bling! was in the\u00a0Sabretooth<\/em> miniseries, but this must be the most prominent appearance Armor has made outside Marvel Snap in several years. We’ve got Avalanche, the member of Freedom Force who never comes up, even though Mystique, Destiny and Pyro are big names. And we’ve got Micromax, who was very, very briefly a member of Excalibur at the tail end of Alan Davis’s run, treated here as a bit of a joke character.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

It’s been quite a while since I’ve read the original Micromax appearances, but he’s quite a weird character, since he originally had a secret identity as a Radio 1 DJ. Which means that in Britain he ought to be a celebrity of some sort, and you do wonder whether this character\u00a0really<\/em> wants to hang around on Krakoa being treated as an afterthought when he could be on\u00a0I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here<\/em> desperately trying to hold on to a public profile. But I digress. Davis did write him as a bit of a loser, which was kind of the connotation of making him a Radio 1 daytime DJ in 1991 anyway.<\/p>\n

Oh, and we’ve got Gorgon. We’ve seen very little of him since “X of Swords”, but this story goes with the\u00a0Way of X<\/em> interpretation of someone terrified and confused. The plot involves a bunch of HYDRA agents – who also run a rival pharmaceutical firm – showing up to punish him for turning on HYDRA. The rest of the vote-losers happen to be the ones who spot what’s happening, with a sort of token nod to “and now we will prove that we’re good enough to be X-Men”. Gorgon has to be stopped from accidentally petrifying some guests, and we get versions of that from the perspective of various different characters.<\/p>\n

The trouble is that the selection of characters is, as I said, pretty much random. Gorgon is stopped from creating an incident; everyone gets together and beats the HYDRA guys; the cast have apparently proved themselves as the X-Men of sorts. It’s passably diverting – Steve Foxe gets a bit of personality into the dialogue, and I quite enjoyed the arbitrarily retro costumes of the HYDRA pharmacists – but it can’t really overcome the essentially arbitrary nature of the thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #50-55 “Secret X-Men 2022” Writer: Steve Foxe Artist: Alan Robinson Colourist: Carlos Lopez Letterer: Joe Sabino Editor: Jordan D White Continuing our run through the recent\u00a0X-Men Unlimited arcs, here’s something a bit more typical of the book – which is to say, a bit more marginal. Remember last year’s\u00a0Secret X-Men one-shot, […]<\/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-8486","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\/8486","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=8486"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8486\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8488,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8486\/revisions\/8488"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}