{"id":9173,"date":"2023-06-10T21:31:48","date_gmt":"2023-06-10T20:31:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9173"},"modified":"2023-06-10T21:31:48","modified_gmt":"2023-06-10T20:31:48","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-5-june-2023","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9173","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 5 June 2023"},"content":{"rendered":"

IMMORTAL X-MEN #12.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> The Colossus spotlight issue was always going to be interesting, given his weird status quo as the puppet of a Russian novelist. For the most part,\u00a0Immortal\u00a0<\/em>has been content to leave that as a lurking issue in the background, but the premise suits Kieron Gillen’s style perfectly – in fact, it’s arguably more at home in this book than it was in\u00a0X-Force<\/em>. I’m still not sure how far we’re meant to take this narration as literally describing Piotr’s state of mind and how far we should see it as reflecting Scrivener’s, but that’s fine – it’s an interesting tension in itself. A bit more consistency on the ground rules between titles wouldn’t have gone amiss, but this works well. And again, Gillen and Lucas Werneck get plenty of visual interest into a very talky, political story – nearly half of this issue by page count consists of people talking in the Quiet Council chamber, but you wouldn’t know it. What’s surprising me somewhat is how quickly the Council seems to be falling apart after Sins of Sinister, but then maybe that’s in the nature of a system with no checks and balances that concentrated all the power in twelve secretive people. It works up until it doesn’t, at which point it goes really, really wrong, really, really fast.<\/p>\n

X-MEN #23.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> One of those stories that exists largely to build up a new threat, in this case the Stark Sentinels. I’m not entirely sold on the concept of these things – the Iron Man iconography feels like it doesn’t have much to do with this book – but I can see the point that if you’re going to do the Sentinels, they need a bit of rehabbing. And borrowing some credibility from Iron Man might not be the worst way to do that. It makes for a decent enough fight scene, at any rate, though I’m not altogether sure it plays to Joshua Cassara’s strengths as an artist. . It’s the opening scene with Mother Righteous and Dr Stasis that works best for me, though, since the relationship between the various Sinister iterations seems like something worth exploring.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

X-MEN: BEFORE THE FALL – MUTANT FIRST STRIKE #1.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> The second of the four\u00a0Before the Fall\u00a0<\/em>one-shots is an odd book. The other three all seem like they’re fairly important to the wider storylines. This, on the other hand, feels like a decently executed but ultimately stock X-Men story. The bad guys frame mutants for doing a bad thing, the heroes save the day and win hearts and minds on a small scale, but the wider media narrative remains firmly against them. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it feels more like a routine restatement of the premise than anything else. I\u00a0think<\/em> the idea is to tell the story of the mutants losing control of the narrative to Orchis, but the problem is that it’s done in a way that would have fitted equally in the 80s or 90s. Surely in the Krakoan era there ought to be other dimensions to this. Even if you’re not going to have the Krakoans go out there and bribe their own TV shows, a big part of the premise of Krakoa is that the mutants are transforming people’s lives with medicine, they’re embedded in the economy, they’ve got the power and influence they never had in the past… shouldn’t they have at least\u00a0some<\/em> strategy for this? Even if the idea is meant to be that they took their eye off the ball and didn’t pay enough attention to their relations with the human world, this doesn’t feel like that story – it just feels like the X-Men playing the hits. It’s nice to see some of the more obscure characters get an outing, mind you. As for the art… well, it’s patchy. Judas Traveller’s control room looks great, some of the Watchdog sequences look good, but the scenes with Thunderbird look really off.<\/p>\n

BISHOP: WAR COLLEGE #5.<\/strong> By J Holtham, Sean Damien Hill, Victor Nava & Espen Grundetjern. Well, it didn’t come together in the final issue. This is a weird miniseries in which a bunch of unrelated concepts, all perfectly viable on their own, seem to coexist without really having much to do with one another. Bishop is training a bunch of students and pushing them too hard. They stumble into an Orchis attack on Krakoa and the kids have to rise to the occasion and prove themselves to Bishop. That’s fine… but then Bishop himself gets transported to another world for most of the miniseries, where the story is about (i) a world where only black people are mutants (except in practice it means that all the established mutants are black), and (ii) Tempo trying to recreate her life with her late father. You’d think the idea would be that Bishop learns something that makes him go easier on the kids, and he\u00a0does<\/em> meet himself as a more relaxed teacher, but any change doesn’t really come across – and he’s not actually there to see his charges prove themselves individually. If anything it feels like a story where Bishop doesn’t change and winds up making the other world more like him, which is just a bit odd. Our Bishop comes back learning about the importance of defending paradise when it exists… which is what he was doing in issue #1 anyway. The Tempo thread feels disconnected and the black angle underdeveloped. It doesn’t work, I’m afraid.<\/p>\n

X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #90.<\/strong> By Steve Orlando, Emilio Laiso & Rachelle Rosenberg. Mostly another issue of Nature Girl fighting the X-Men, up until the point where they finally get the upper hand and she gets yanked off for the big confrontation. We’re kind of repeating the points here, but I think that’s probably the right choice for pacing, and I’m glad that the ending of this storyline isn’t just going to be “the X-Men defeat her”.<\/p>\n

DEADPOOL: BADDER BLOOD #1.<\/strong> By Rob Liefeld and Chad Bowers. This is a sequel to Deadpool: Bad Blood<\/em> (which I haven’t read and came out when Deadpool wasn’t in the X-office), which established that Deadpool’s childhood best friend also signed up for Department H and wound up as an uncontrollable super-soldier with the improbable name of Thumper. Deadpool feels responsible for the guy. He finds out that Thumper is now making a move into supervillainy, and sets out to cut him off. I was braced for another haywire stream of consciousness, like the last few stories that Liefeld contributed to the X-office, but this is actually fairly straightforward and coherent. Bowers’ script helps to keep it together, but it does feel generally more focussed than I was expecting. That’s not to say it’ll appeal much beyond Liefeld’s core audience. It’s still pretty slight, and it could actually use a bit more manic energy. But it does exceed expectations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

IMMORTAL X-MEN #12. (Annotations here.) The Colossus spotlight issue was always going to be interesting, given his weird status quo as the puppet of a Russian novelist. For the most part,\u00a0Immortal\u00a0has been content to leave that as a lurking issue in the background, but the premise suits Kieron Gillen’s style perfectly – in fact, it’s […]<\/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-9173","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\/9173","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=9173"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9173\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9174,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9173\/revisions\/9174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}