{"id":9269,"date":"2023-07-22T17:44:12","date_gmt":"2023-07-22T16:44:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9269"},"modified":"2023-07-22T17:44:12","modified_gmt":"2023-07-22T16:44:12","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-17-july-2023","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9269","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 17 July 2023"},"content":{"rendered":"

By normal standards, a very quiet week.<\/p>\n

X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #96.<\/strong> By Alex Segura, Alberto Alburquerque & Pete Pantazis. This is the start of a Polaris story. And it’s a pretty reasonable angle which I don’t think has been done before – after reminding us rather heavily at the start that Polaris has spent a distressing amount of her career under mind control of one sort of another, she gets dragged by an old college friend into investigating a cold case where the murderer seems to be her in the days when she was possessed by Malice. I get that we don’t want Polaris to be a character overshadowed by this sort of thing, but it’s a reasonable enough hook. There are also some pretty blatant hints that all is not as it seems, since something is very obviously up with the old college friend – subtlety is not this story’s strong point – but it’s pretty dense and it hits the ground running.<\/p>\n

X-MEN RED #13.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> The parallels here with the collapse of the Quiet Council are presumably intentional, as we build to Hellfire Gala 2023.<\/em> This is Genesis confronting the Great Ring, and everything more or less falling apart instantly. I’m still not all that interested in Genesis in her own right, but the contrast between her and the regular cast works better here, as she tries to drag Arakko back to the way it was before Al Ewing started rehabbing it. There’s a certain sleight of hand going on here – Genesis is asserting the sort of one-dimensional Arakko that X-Men Red\u00a0<\/em>was at pains to emphasise was never a fair reflection of their rounded culture, but evidently it’s a pretty good reflection of Genesis herself. At any rate, she’s a great foil for the regulars here. It’s a very talky issue – essentially an extended meeting in one location – but Jacopo Camagni makes it work. New Great Ring member Lycaon is fun but it seems an odd place to bring in what’s effectively a comedy character.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

NEW MUTANTS: LETHAL LEGION #5.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> The end of this odd little coda to\u00a0New Mutants<\/em>, and the end of Charlie Jane Enders’ Escapade arc. It may be one of the more obvious cases of a book being handed over to the new writer’s pet character and the regular cast getting sidelined as a result, but I really don’t have a problem with that –\u00a0New Mutants<\/em> had a fairly diffuse cast in the first place, and Escapade is a good lead. Obviously a core aim for Anders is to create a high profile trans character, but Escapade also offers a web of other character relationships and an outsider perspective on Krakoa which is something that’s been missing from the books. There’s a lot of it, but it all fits together nicely. The art veers to cartoony, and can get a little busy at times – and the action climax could admittedly flow better – but it brings a lot of charm to the characters. It’s not really\u00a0New Mutants<\/em>, but I liked it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By normal standards, a very quiet week. X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #96. By Alex Segura, Alberto Alburquerque & Pete Pantazis. This is the start of a Polaris story. And it’s a pretty reasonable angle which I don’t think has been done before – after reminding us rather heavily at the start that Polaris has spent […]<\/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-9269","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\/9269","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=9269"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9269\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9270,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9269\/revisions\/9270"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}