{"id":9001,"date":"2023-04-30T20:07:28","date_gmt":"2023-04-30T19:07:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9001"},"modified":"2023-04-30T21:40:04","modified_gmt":"2023-04-30T20:40:04","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-24-april-2023","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9001","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis: w\/c 24 April 2023"},"content":{"rendered":"

SINS OF SINISTER: DOMINION #1.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> The end of the\u00a0Sins of Sinister<\/em> crossover, which has been pretty successful. Yes, there’s still a degree of haziness over what exactly a Dominion\u00a0is<\/em> – we seem to have slipped somewhere from it being a collective consciousness into being a single ascended person. And yes, I’m not really sure I follow the mechanics of what Moira actually\u00a0does<\/em> to influence events in the rebooted timeline – there’s a bit of handwaving going on there. But I’ll let it slide because the big picture works. It’s a dead end, but it’s a thousand years of dead end. In a perverse kind of way, the sheer scale of its pointlessness contributes to the awfulness of it all. You could make a case that it’s all rather abstract and distanced from human concerns, but again, that feels to me like precisely the impression you want<\/em> to create about a timeline knocked disastrously off course in this way. And Paco Medina gives the finale a nice sense of scale, too.<\/p>\n

And besides, it’s not simply a self-cancelling time loop. Rasputin IV sticks around. The storyline of Sinister and his Moira Engine is resolved. The entire direction of Mother Righteous and the Quiet Council is changed. The ending here is a big surprise and it works all the better because, alongside three months of Sinister Gone Wrong, we’ve also had a pretty good idea of what Mother Righteous’s preferred timeline might look like. I can see why people might have issues with some of this arc, but I liked it a lot.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

BETSY BRADDOCK: CAPTAIN BRITAIN #3.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> On the other hand…<\/p>\n

This hasn’t been solicited past issue #5. It might be a season break, since Fall of X <\/em>is coming up, but given that Morgan’s plan seems to be cutting to the chase, I have my doubts. It’s not as easy to get sales figures as it used to be, but apparently ICV2’s estimates (which are paywalled) had issue #1 at number 87 and issue #2 at 184, which is… terrible, frankly. Part of me admires Marvel’s persistence in a story that they clearly believe in, but I really have no interest in seeing yet another relaunch of this book. It’s time to chalk it up to experience.<\/p>\n

Vasco Georgiev’s art is the high point here – the Union Jack Fury looks great, and he does a decent enough fight scene. Morgan’s base is a little bland but his the character work is solid. Otherwise, though, I have very little interest in this. To be fair, I’m never that keen on the fantasy side of the franchise. Even so, I thought that rebooting Excalibur<\/em> as\u00a0Knights of X<\/em> was a basically sound idea, since it got the focus onto the fantasy genre elements that felt like Excalibur<\/em>‘s most successful feature.<\/p>\n

Returning to present-day England is precisely the opposite. As I’ve said before, if your story is about who gets to be Captain Britain, you’ve kind of got to engage on some level with, well, Britishness. That doesn’t have to mean a British writer, but national identity and right-wing authoritarianism have been major political issues for the last few years and… well, some kind of grasp of them would help. When you ask me to believe in a reactionary Arthurian mystical group which is apparently just an influential thing in the British establishment… that’s batshit insane, but more to the point, it’s utterly divorced from anything it’s purporting to signify. The cultural reference points of the British right are closer to the nineteenth century than the ninth. Empire, monarchy, tradition, ceremony, nice castles, cultural conservatism, Jane Austen, Shakespeare, the village pub. You can add to that an irrational loathing of the European Union, of immigration and of a vaguely conceived liberal elite.<\/p>\n

But Arthurian mythology and Morgan Le Fey? It’s a universal reference point in the sense that it’s a story everyone knows. But it’s not contentious<\/em>, because an active interest in it is mostly confined to fringe religious groups, ageing hippies, and fantasy novelists. Britain’s version of the culture wars is being fought elsewhere. You can do a story about how this sort of mythos can shape unexamined assumptions, and how that can be manipulated. That’s basically what the recent Black Knight <\/em>mini did. But this just feels like a parallel reality for tourists, and if something’s going to change my feelings on that, it’s being left terribly late.<\/p>\n

X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #84.<\/strong> By Grace Freud, Alberto Alburquerque & Rachelle Rosenberg. Last week’s issue was too much of a generic Mojo story for my tastes, but this is better. Apparently we’re taking literally the idea that the “unofficial X-Men” have been trapped by Mojo in a time warp for decades making (dreadful) TV for him, and everyone has settled into a kind of routine, living actual lives. It’s a change from “Mojo tries to kill the X-Men and calls it a TV show”. It looks like we’re cutting to the chase next issue, with the real X-Men coming to the rescue, but I like the idea of Mojo being used for a broader range of “reality” programming. I’d actually have preferred to spend a bit more time on this part.<\/p>\n

DEADPOOL #6.<\/strong> By Alyssa Wong, Javier Pina & Matt Milla. Does this count as an X-book? I’d generally say no – Deadpool<\/em>‘s a spin-off that went its own way, like\u00a0Alpha Flight<\/em> – but it’s got an X-office trade dress so I guess it counts for now.<\/p>\n

Anyway, this is fun. It’s Deadpool’s first date with his new love interest Valentine Vuong, while dodging assassination attempts from the Atelier organisation from the previous few issues, basically. It’s quite sweet, there’s some good jokes, and I like the art – bright and clean works for Deadpool, since it’s something that the darker stuff can contrast with. Not that this is a particularly dark story, mind you. My main issue with the current run is that it feels a bit lightweight, not to mention a bit decompressed for 2023. There’s not a huge amount of forward progression or plot complexity. But that’s not really what it’s going for. What it does bring to the table is a likeable, if light and frothy, tone. I’m not entirely sure that’s what people are looking for in a Deadpool comic, but there’s certainly a space for it in the line.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

SINS OF SINISTER: DOMINION #1. (Annotations here.) The end of the\u00a0Sins of Sinister crossover, which has been pretty successful. Yes, there’s still a degree of haziness over what exactly a Dominion\u00a0is – we seem to have slipped somewhere from it being a collective consciousness into being a single ascended person. And yes, I’m not really […]<\/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-9001","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\/9001","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=9001"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9001\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9005,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9001\/revisions\/9005"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9001"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9001"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9001"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}