{"id":9303,"date":"2023-08-04T22:49:22","date_gmt":"2023-08-04T21:49:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9303"},"modified":"2023-08-04T22:49:22","modified_gmt":"2023-08-04T21:49:22","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-31-july-2023","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9303","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 31 July 2023"},"content":{"rendered":"

X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #98.<\/strong> By Alex Segura, Alberto Alburquerque & Pete Pantazis. Oh, okay, we’re\u00a0not<\/em> doing the obvious arch-enemy for Polaris after all. So the issue of ignoring what happened to Malice in\u00a0Excalibur<\/em> doesn’t arise. Instead, we’re going even further back to the villain from Lorna’s first appearance from the Silver Age. Which was originally meant to be Magneto, but he was retconned into being a robot in that story. So instead it’s good old Mesmero, which I guess does make the point that Lorna has been stuck in this kind of storyline literally since day 1. The downside is… well, it’s Mesmero, who’s always been one-dimensional, and probably hasn’t even crossed Lorna’s mind in about 50 years of publication time. And we don’t get much in this issue to explain why he ought to be a big deal – and yes, he does need the help. Still, I get the logic of what we’re doing here.<\/p>\n

X-MEN #25.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> “Grindhouse of X”, it says on the recap page, and … I dunno, I think the tone here lands a lot closer to grimdark than the gleefulness that that implies. I’m kind of annoyed, as well, that they sold the premise in Hellfire Gala<\/em> as “all the mutants get marched through the gates”, and now – sure, there’s always going to be a few stragglers, but we seem to have enough still lying around to fill entire detention centres, and that feels too much like backtracking. The Ms Marvel death also feels like a mess, where the X-books are acting as if it played out entirely differently from the way it did, allowing it to be handwaved away. Anyway, this is a double-length issue devoted to setting up the Fall of X\u00a0<\/em>status quo, which (in the end) it does well enough. Despite\u00a0X-Men<\/em> ostensibly being a team book, it’s really a Kate Pryde story as we have her going back into depressing and reverting to the quasi-ninja Shadowcat… oh god, must we… Shadowkat persona. The prologue flashback with Kitty and her rabbi is probably the best thing in the book. I get what they’re doing, and the art’s pretty good, but… no, this isn’t really doing much for me. I’m not sold on the direction and there are just too many irritating points of detail to boot.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

ASTONISHING ICEMAN #1.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> This is more like it! We’re still in\u00a0Fall of X<\/em>, but what Steve Orlando and Vincenzo Carrat\u00f9 are giving us here is a display of relentless positivity in the face of the abyss. It’s actually one of the more cheerful X-books I’ve read lately. It’s pretty simple – Iceman is out there being inspiring and heroic, a B-list Orchis officer is tasked with getting rid of him, and Iceman is secretly dependent on his beloved Romeo to (literally) keep him together. While everyone else is doing brooding darkness, Iceman has built himself the Fortress of Solitude, something that was too goofy for Marvel even in the Silver Age<\/em>. Obviously it would be mad if the whole “Fall of X” sub-line was like this. And yes, the full page spread of Iceman kissing the guy he’s just saved is badly pitched, because it plays as a romantic beat when it’s not meant to be. But this is just a defiantly cheerful comic, which is a pleasant surprise.<\/p>\n

MAGNETO #1.<\/strong> By J.M. DeMatteis, Todd Nauck & Rachelle Rosenberg. Another month, another flashback miniseries. This one is set somewhere in the late 40s of\u00a0New Mutants<\/em>, just after Magneto became headmaster of the Xavier School. DeMatteis is trying to square Magneto’s modern persona with his status as a ranting Silver Age villain, and the sceptical New Mutants make a good foil for that – aside from giving us an excuse to open with a traditional Danger Room skit against Silver Age villains, we get some of the New Mutants refusing to take moral lectures from this guy, and Wolfsbane genuinely trying to make sense of the guy while offending him in the process. Todd Nauck’s a good artist for these Silver Age hybrid sequences, and feels like a good fit for what DeMatteis is doing here. Part of the idea is that Magneto is unwilling to start talking about his personal history to these people he barely knows. But a lot more contentious is DeMatteis rationalising Silver Age Magneto as an act which he put on to provoke the X-Men into emerging as mutant heroes, and which he then got a bit carried away with due to mental health problems. He’s pretty much retconning X-Men<\/em> #1 into Magneto putting on an act, which is… um, it’s bold, certainly. I’m not exactly precious about the continuity status of X-Men<\/em> #1, which isn’t even in the top 10 Lee\/Kirby X-Men stories. But halfway through the first issue seems a bold place to try and pull something like this, and at first glance it seems to miss the point about Magneto and Xavier having competing visions. I’m curious to see if DeMatteis can pull it off.<\/p>\n

LOVE UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #61.<\/strong> By Preeti Chhibber, Carola Borelli & Carlos Lopez. If you don’t follow the Unlimited books, Love Unlimited <\/em>takes its remit pretty loosely, and seems happy enough if the story just features an established couple.\u00a0So this is a Rogue & Gambit heist arc, set a “few years” ago, so we don’t have to worry about\u00a0Fall of X<\/em>. It’s a simple first chapter: they go on holiday to London, they make a bet to see who can pull of a heist first to steal some colonial treasures from a rich guy. It’s mainly an exercise in setting up the banter, and you could make a case that by 2023 it’s not really\u00a0necessary<\/em> to spend your first chapter introducing Rogue and Gambit’s relationship… but it does that job quite charmingly, both for writing and art, so what the heck. This looks like it might be a cute romp.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #98. By Alex Segura, Alberto Alburquerque & Pete Pantazis. Oh, okay, we’re\u00a0not doing the obvious arch-enemy for Polaris after all. So the issue of ignoring what happened to Malice in\u00a0Excalibur doesn’t arise. Instead, we’re going even further back to the villain from Lorna’s first appearance from the Silver Age. Which was […]<\/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-9303","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\/9303","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=9303"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9303\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9304,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9303\/revisions\/9304"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}