{"id":9256,"date":"2023-07-14T22:00:26","date_gmt":"2023-07-14T21:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9256"},"modified":"2023-07-14T22:00:26","modified_gmt":"2023-07-14T21:00:26","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-10-july-2023","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9256","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 10 July 2023"},"content":{"rendered":"

X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #95.<\/strong> By Jason Loo & Antonio Fabela. This is the end of the FF team-up arc and it’s what you’d expect. You can see the idea – the rogue dupes are a way of externalising Madrox’s inner doubts about accepting responsibility, becoming a family man, and so on. And that’s a pretty good idea. But it winds up being tagged on to a rather routine action story, and the FF’s role as guest stars never quite clicks. Yes, they’re the superhero family so they offer something Madrox can feel insecure about… but along with Blastaar they wind up cluttering the plot more than helping it.<\/p>\n

IMMORTAL X-MEN #13.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> There are only twelve members of the Quiet Council, so with issue #13 we move on to Cypher, the low key observer. Once again, Lucas Werneck does great work with his reactions, and generally in bringing visual life to an issue that’s almost entirely conversation. The big surprise here is that the collapse of the Council continues to run faster than you’d expect. I’d assumed things would be building to a head during the “Fall of X” event, but instead the Quiet Council is imploding already, At first glance there’s something a little awkward about Professor X dutifully playing along with his non-voting role in the previous issue, only to turn around here and decide to help tear everything down, but I suppose the key distinction is that he still isn’t trying to put\u00a0himself<\/em> into a position of power. And there’s a very good scene here that finally confronts head on the question of what Krakoa ever had to do with Xavier’s dream of coexistence. Excellent as ever.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

X-FORCE #42.\u00a0<\/strong>(Annotations here.)<\/a> The conclusion of “The Ghost Calendars”, which doesn’t really work. This whole arc feels like a way of giving the rest of X-Force some sort of pay-off for the Beast plot even though the real story has been shunted over to\u00a0Wolverine<\/em>. And while I quite like the idea of Beast setting up a surveillance state as the logical extension of his agenda – and justifying it as an extrapolation from Cerebro – the actual defeat of Nimrod Beast is cursory in the extreme. Paul Davidson does some good work on the Nimrod Beast design, though, and on the jester Deadpool – though the Beast’s alternate future feels a bit too generic for my liking.<\/p>\n

ROGUE & GAMBIT #5.<\/strong> By Stephanie Phillips, Carlos Gomez, David Curiel & Fer Sifuentes-Sujo. The miniseries wraps up, and the plotline about Manifold does wind up figuring into the wider line, for what that’s worth. Otherwise, this is patchy. It\u00a0is<\/em> nice to see Rogue and Gambit together again, and the relatively light tone is welcome, but there’s a lot of power-of-love stuff about Rogue breaking free of the Power Broker’s control Just Because. And Gambit is played as a bit of a klutz in this issue, more than in previous ones – reckless is fine, but sometimes it strikes the wrong tone and lands on dim.<\/p>\n

X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST – DOOMSDAY #1.<\/strong> By Marc Guggenheim, Manuel Garciia, Cam Smith & Yen Nitro. The latest in Marvel’s endless array of nostalgia minis, this is not quite what you might expect from the cover. It’s not the X-Men at war with the Sentinels in the rubble – it’s the X-Men still doing X-Men stuff as the DoFP timeline is\u00a0just starting<\/em> to go off the rails, with the Sentinels still under human control but starting to get ideas of their own. If you’re going to do a story filling in the back story of DoFP then this is certainly a period that’s largely been glossed over – and there’s certainly room for a topical angle about democratic slippage here. On that level, it’s actually quite decent, and sensibly sticks to a standard superhero style instead of cranking up the grit. On the other hand, we all know how this ends – that’s the premise, after all – and so the question is how you turn that into a compelling story. I’m not entirely convinced the book has an answer to that, but it was more interesting than I expected.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #95. By Jason Loo & Antonio Fabela. This is the end of the FF team-up arc and it’s what you’d expect. You can see the idea – the rogue dupes are a way of externalising Madrox’s inner doubts about accepting responsibility, becoming a family man, and so on. And that’s a […]<\/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-9256","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\/9256","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=9256"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9256\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9257,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9256\/revisions\/9257"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}