{"id":9068,"date":"2023-05-14T17:35:41","date_gmt":"2023-05-14T16:35:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9068"},"modified":"2023-05-14T17:35:41","modified_gmt":"2023-05-14T16:35:41","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-8-may-2023","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9068","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 8 May 2023"},"content":{"rendered":"

FREE COMIC BOOK DAY 2023: AVENGERS \/ X-MEN #1.<\/strong> This came out last weekend, but as in previous years, Marvel have already put it on Marvel Unlimited. After all, it’s relevant to the plot. Well, kind of. As we’ve come to expect, it’s basically three teaser stories. “Prescribed Burn” by Gerry Duggan, Joshua Cassara and Marte Gracia is a flash forward to this year’s Hellfire Gala, and a mystery figure from Orchis attacking the Treehouse and stealing the Captain Krakoa costume. That leads directly into “Controlled Demolition” – Duggan again, Javier Garr\u00f3n and Morry Hollowell – in which “Captain Krakoa” starts making trouble in Washington, and a bunch of Iron Man-themed Sentinels make their debut (which builds on a storyline from Duggan’s\u00a0Iron Man<\/em>). It’s… you know, it’s basically a trailer and we know the key plot points will all be repeated when the actual story comes out. But you can’t really say much more than that about it. If I’m being honest, I’m a lot more interested in the general “Fall of X” storyline than I am in more specific things like the return of Uncanny Avengers<\/em>, a book which always felt like an awkward exercise in corporate synergy to me. But we’ll see how it goes. Rounding it out is literally a few pages of G.O.D.S. <\/em>by Jonathan Hickman, Valerio Schiti and Marte Gracia, which truly is just a trailer fragment.<\/p>\n

X-MEN: RED<\/strong>\u00a0#11.\u00a0<\/strong>(Annotations here.)<\/a> This is a very talky issue – Storm and Craig Marshall go on a date for five pages, and then for the main event Storm talks with Professor X for ten straight pages. There’s a B-plot, and it’s mainly talking. And it’s all great, of course, because Al Ewing is consistently great at finding insightful little angles on his characters, and leveraging continuity to make it serve those character moments in a way that feels organic. Stefano Caselli and Jacopo Camagni deserve credit too for making it visual – the current Professor X design naturally obscures most of his face and there’s something quite effective about having him lose his composure anyway. The double page montage is also a really good way of representing memory fragments, particularly in the way that the panels are taken out of context, broken up, and so forth. And, yes, there are some flashback panels thrown in just to break up the talking heads, but that’s what you do. Clearly, this dovetails somewhat with the Storm spotlight issue in\u00a0Immortal X-Men<\/em>, in which she recognises the need to take steps to guard against the state of the Quiet Council, and confidently marches off in completely the wrong direction. This issue is a lot more ambiguous about her decisions – she’s clearly right in most of her criticisms of Professor X, but turning her back on him feels like it’s heading towards another case of Storm managing to position herself in the wrong place at the wrong time.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

WOLVERINE #33.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> I still don’t really understand why we’re getting this storyline in\u00a0Wolverine<\/em> rather than in\u00a0X-Force<\/em>, which would seem to be its more natural home. But now that we’ve finally got to this point, I’m quite enjoying it. Beast treating even other Beasts as disposable is a nice idea, and while a bunch of identical Beasts sitting around a table calling one another by the same name is plainly silly, it’s the good sort of silly. I’m less keen on the more sentimental stuff with Jeff and his daughter, but the basic storyline here is endearingly over the top. There’s also a back-up strip written by Gene Luen Yang, which is a team-up with Sister Dagger from his recent\u00a0Shang-Chi<\/em> run. Marvel seem to have commissioned a bunch of these random team-up back-ups lately, for no terribly clear reason, but if they’re basically freebies then I’m all for a bit of cross-promotion. Seems a bit odd to do it with a cancelled book, mind you. It’s a standard odd couple team-up, but fine for an eight pager.<\/p>\n

X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #86.<\/strong> By Steve Orlando, Emilio Laiso & Rachelle Rosenberg. This is the first part of a new arc – or rather, the first part of the latest chunk of X-Men Green<\/em>, the book about Nature Girl’s eco-terrorist splinter group that claims to be the X-Men and embarrasses the hell out of Krakoa. We’re apparently before Sins of Sinister here, if you’re wondering – Nightcrawler’s still around. Steve Orlando being Steve Orlando, what’s left of X-Men Green is a truly bizarre combination: Nature Girl herself, the Armageddon Man from John Francis Moore’s\u00a0X-Force<\/em>, and Spider-Girl. No, not that Spider-Girl. No, not that one either. This is the genetically engineered mutant\/spider girl from Avenging Spider-Man<\/em> #16 – but an incredibly obscure mutant makes sense here, since her role is to be taken under Nature Girl’s wing and quickly figure out that she may have hitched her wagon to a lunatic. I’m surprised that the X-books have wound up going in this direction with Nature Girl, who you’d expect them to be a lot more sympathetic to… but honestly, I find this direction a lot more interesting, precisely because it’s unexpected. I wasn’t sold on Orlando’s Marauders<\/em> but his X-Men Unlimited<\/em> stories have worked a lot bettter for me. Good art in this issue, as well – there’s a lot of personality here, and making the arrival of Eye-Boy look cool is quite an achievement.<\/p>\n

ROGUE & GAMBIT #3.<\/strong> By Stephanie Phillips, Carlos G\u00f3mez & David Curiel. Rogue is still trying to carry out her mission from Destiny and find the bad guys who kidnapped Manifold. Gambit is… helping? He winds up sending her on her way alone, but then his whole thing in this series seems to be to feign stupidity and get underestimated because he’s actually a few steps ahead. So I assume this is something along the same lines, and his scepticism of Destiny’s motivations turns out to be reasonable. It’s light, it’s bright, and it’s nice to see a bit of on-panel chemistry between the two leads when they’ve been in separate books for so long. It feels a bit throwaway but that’s not always a bad thing.<\/p>\n

CAPTAIN MARVEL #49.<\/strong> By Kelly Thompson, Sergio D\u00e1vila, Sean Parsons, Roberto Poggi & Ceci de la Cruz. This is the final part of\u00a0Captain Marvel<\/em>‘s Brood arc and, ostensibly, the point where the Brood arc from\u00a0X-Men<\/em> ties in. And… er, yeah, that doesn’t happen. I mean, Cyclops’s X-Men do show up in this issue and they duly help to fight the Brood, but the plot doesn’t need them in the slightest. The stuff about Broo losing control of the Brood thanks to Nightmare, and even the core theme from the X-Men <\/em>issues about the morality of exterminating the Brood, are just not relevant here at all. What you\u00a0do<\/em> get is a perfectly decent\u00a0Captain Marvel<\/em> story, paying off the plot from the last few issues, which has two main plot points it wants to hit. First, it wants to kill off the new Binary and make that a big deal. And second, it wants to give Rogue – who was in the\u00a0Captain Marvel<\/em> issues – a chance to use her powers to save Carol when her energy is getting out of control, so that she can symbolically redeem herself for wiping Carol’s mind back in the 80s. Those bits mostly work – though the plot is really\u00a0<\/em>handwavy about how Carol fails the Brood’s scheme, in a way that’s less than satisfactory. But neither the X-Men<\/em> nor the\u00a0Captain Marvel\u00a0<\/em>arc benefitted from being linked to the other –\u00a0X-Men<\/em>‘s arc ends by feeding into a finale that doesn’t want it, and\u00a0Captain Marvel<\/em>‘s arc is cluttered with X-characters who are surplus to requirements. This arc needed Rogue, but it didn’t need anyone else.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

FREE COMIC BOOK DAY 2023: AVENGERS \/ X-MEN #1. This came out last weekend, but as in previous years, Marvel have already put it on Marvel Unlimited. After all, it’s relevant to the plot. Well, kind of. As we’ve come to expect, it’s basically three teaser stories. “Prescribed Burn” by Gerry Duggan, Joshua Cassara and […]<\/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-9068","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\/9068","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=9068"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9068\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9069,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9068\/revisions\/9069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}