{"id":9022,"date":"2023-05-05T20:36:10","date_gmt":"2023-05-05T19:36:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9022"},"modified":"2023-05-05T20:36:10","modified_gmt":"2023-05-05T19:36:10","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-1-may-2023","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9022","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 1 May 2023"},"content":{"rendered":"

At last, a nice quiet week.<\/p>\n

IMMORTAL X-MEN #11.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Okay, so it undercuts the ending of\u00a0Sins of Sinister: Dominion<\/em> to have the four compromised Quiet Council members who went to the Pit come straight back out again in the next scene. But that point aside, the slow burn approach feels like the right one. It’s not an immediate collapse – we don’t get to the “Fall of X” stuff for a while yet – but everything is pointing towards the looming failure of the Krakoan era, as everything about Krakoa starts to get a little bit hollowed out. Half the Quiet Council can’t vote any more. Resurrection can’t be trusted any more. And so on. In fact, the direction of travel seems so clear that part of me wonders whether it’s a feint and we’re going to get “Krakoa saved from the abyss”. But I do think it’s probably time to move on to something else, and the other way of reading it is that the focus is already starting to shift to “what next?”<\/p>\n

Storm is our spotlight character in this issue, and we pick up on the theme from\u00a0X-Men Red<\/em> of her being hopelessly overcommitted. It might seem a bit odd to play that angle with Storm rather than, say, Wolverine. But of course, he’s not in charge of anything, and thanks to his amazing ability to be in nine stories at once, he doesn’t have a track record of taking on leadership roles and not being there when it matters. It’s also an angle that helps to undercut her tendencies towards sainthood, and we can already see that her attempts to manage the problem here are just going to lead to catastrophe. And, despite being warned to her face that she failed to spot any of the problems in the Sins of Sinister timeline, she magnificently fails to spot any of them in this timeline either. Poor Storm.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Some of the art feels a bit rushed this issue, though – there’s something off about Mystique’s scene, and the closing page with Colossus doesn’t feel like the work of the same artist at all.<\/p>\n

X-MEN: BEFORE THE FALL – SONS OF X #1.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> This is a wrap-up issue for\u00a0Legion of X<\/em>, which also serves to get Nightcrawler and Legion off Krakoa, and set up Nightcrawler for his next issue in… er, in September. It’s patchy, if I’m being honest, and feels like the book has been accelerated to an ending.\u00a0The previous series,\u00a0Way of X<\/em>, ended in a similar way, with its final issue being billed as X-Men: The Onslaught Revelation<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The parts with Mother Righteous and Legion work pretty well – it’s good to have someone see through her pretty quickly, though she does make it terribly easy for him here. And since Legion promptly vanishes, it doesn’t spoil the wider plot. Phil Noto’s art is always a pleasure, and I really like the slightly organic feel of his Nimrod. But there are problems here. There are glaring problems in making this book fit with wider continuity – Immortal X-Men\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0Legion of X\u00a0<\/em>both pause for the Sins of Sinister crossover with Nightcrawler in completely different places, and that’s the sort of thing that it’s hard not to notice. And the whole subplot about Vox Ignis is so difficult to follow on a mechanical level that it’s hard to even get to the stage of feeling <\/em>anything about it. At best, all this is needlessly confusing and it distracts from the story. But it feels like a massive cock-up as much as anything.<\/p>\n

Then there’s a feeling of rush. There’s a whole subplot of Orchis sending Nightcrawler to kill mutant-hostile politicians in an attempt to turn the public against mutants. Or at least someone who looks an awful lot like Nightcrawler. It could always be a clone or something. This is meant to be a big deal, but it gets three panels and a couple of sentences on a data page. And after four issues of build up, we just get a bit of hand-waving magic to turn the monsterized mutants back to normal. These are the sorts of problems to be expected when a story is cut short, but they’re problems nonetheless.<\/p>\n

X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #85.<\/strong> By Grace Freud, Alberto Alburquerque & Yen Nitro. This is the end of the “unofficial X-Men” arc. It’s… not entirely satisfying, if I’m being honest? It kind of handwaves away the idea of the characters ageing over years in Mojo’s world, presumably thanks to resurrection, I guess, but I’m not sure that quite works. And the closing sequence where they choose a team name feels terribly abrupt. But I like Mojo Jr standing up for a version of Mojoworld that at least tries to make\u00a0vaguely watchable<\/em> television using captured mutants, which feels like there might be some mileage in it. Really, there’s nothing wrong with this arc that a bit more room to breathe wouldn’t fix – the ideas are there, it just feels cramped.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At last, a nice quiet week. IMMORTAL X-MEN #11. (Annotations here.) Okay, so it undercuts the ending of\u00a0Sins of Sinister: Dominion to have the four compromised Quiet Council members who went to the Pit come straight back out again in the next scene. But that point aside, the slow burn approach feels like the right […]<\/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-9022","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\/9022","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=9022"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9022\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9023,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9022\/revisions\/9023"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}