{"id":9334,"date":"2023-08-20T18:49:05","date_gmt":"2023-08-20T17:49:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9334"},"modified":"2023-08-20T18:49:05","modified_gmt":"2023-08-20T17:49:05","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-14-august-2023","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9334","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 14 August 2023"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the most absurdly busy week we’ve had in ages. And alarmingly, this isn’t due to slippage – this is how it was solicited. That’s not a good thing, and hopefully it won’t be repeated any time soon.<\/p>\n

Anyway, I’ve done annotations for four of these books already, so we’ll run through things quickly.<\/p>\n

X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #100.<\/strong> By Steve Foxe, Stephanie Williams, Noemi Vettori, Pete Pantazis & Travis Lanham. There’s also a thing called X-Men: Hellfire Gala Last Rites Infinity Comic<\/em> #1 added to X-Men Unlimited this week, but that’s just an Infinite Comics edition of the trailer strips with X-Men election candidates, so we’ll pass that by. This is an anniversary issue, and rather than launch a major storyline, it’s more of a farewell to the Krakoan era. Prodigy learns that resurrected mutants need more than just the bare facts of what’s happened in their absence, and so starts collating some more emotional memories that can help people to understand better. It’s a perfectly solid idea, decently executed in a montage sequence, and a nice alternative to the more obvious way of doing an anniversary issue.<\/p>\n

X-MEN: RED #14.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> We skip forward a few months to join the Arakki civil war in mid flow. And for the most part this is scene-setting for what that looks like. It’s the points of detail that elevate it above that, and Sunspot’s recap of Hellfire Gala<\/em> works as an emotional sequence even if you’ve already read the original. I’m still not especially interested in Genesis, but I’m not entirely sure the story is either – she’s very much an off panel figurehead for the enemy forces, and a foil for the people we are\u00a0<\/em>interested in.\u00a0X-Men: Red<\/em> is somewhat detached from the rest of “Fall of X”, but since that means it’s continuing to pursue its own story, that’s not a bad thing.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

DARK X-MEN #1.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Outside the confines of\u00a0X-Men<\/em> itself, “Fall of X” is a lot less bleak than you might have expected it to be. Dark X-Men<\/i> is about the mutants who are still on Earth because they were hanging out at the Limbo Embassy in New York. There’s a nice angle in here about Madelyne Pryor finally getting her chance to be the only Jean Grey, leading a team of “X-Men” that more or less maps to Jean, M, Nightcrawler, Cyclops and… well, okay, yes, Zero doesn’t quite fit the pattern. Forge, at a push, maybe? But Limbo is comically absurd rather than grim, and even that darkness is leavened by including a handful of actual refugee X-Men like Gambit, and Gimmick as the wide-eyed rookie. It’s surprisingly good fun and seriously overperformed my expectations for it.<\/p>\n

UNCANNY AVENGERS #1.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Technically an Avengers book, but seriously, come on now. It’s a five-issue mini by the writer of\u00a0X-Men\u00a0<\/em>that exists solely to tie into an X-Men story. And while traditionally\u00a0Uncanny Avengers<\/em> is an Avengers\/X-Men mash-up book, this is basically Captain America and Quicksilver (who might as well be a mutant) plus a bunch of X-characters, some of whom qualify as Avengers thanks to previous volumes of\u00a0Uncanny Avengers<\/em>. This is the book that winds up with the Captain Krakoa plot, and while we’re still deep into the territory of outright fascism on American streets, it’s less of a grind than\u00a0X-Men<\/em> was. I still find this storyline rather heavy handed in Duggan’s version, though. He’s playing it a bit too straight to get away with something quite so extreme. And after reading the whole issue, I’m not really clear what Captain America is actually\u00a0doing<\/em> about any of this in public, which feels like something I ought to know.<\/p>\n

ALPHA FLIGHT #1.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> The trope of a subverted Canadian government is overused in Alpha Flight stories – which feels especially weird given that it’s\u00a0Canada<\/em>, for god’s sake – but that point aside, this is another pleasant surprise. Guardian has enough of a background with Orchis to make it just about plausible that he’d lead a core Alpha Flight team who stuck around to make sure someone was doing the actual superhero work in Canada, at least until we get to the twist and establish that for once, Alpha Flight are actually a step ahead of the bad guys. Ed Brisson’s previous work on the X-books was generally good, and this is another solid bit of storytelling. Going with a bright superhero art style is probably a good move too – it fits the misdirection of Alpha Flight as a seemingly oblivious hero team, but they’re also just characters who work best with a classic look.<\/p>\n

X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST – DOOMSDAY #2.\u00a0<\/strong>By Marc Guggenheim, Manuel Garc\u00eda, Cam Smith, Yen Nitro & Clayton Cowls. Scheduling this series alongside “Fall of X” may not have been the best move, since it’s a miniseries expanding on how the “Days of Future Past” timeline came about – well, one version of it, anyway. Which means it’s doing “slow slide into fascism” at the same time that the regular X-books are doing “rapid slide into fascism”. It’s not exactly counter-programming, is it? It does what it does perfectly competently, and probably a little more believably than the regular titles because it has things play out over a few years – but it’s also bound by some familiar story beats from established continuity. At this point, it feels like a well executed expansion of the story, which gives the characters more room to breathe – but if the end point is just everyone in a camp, it’s hard to see how it’s going to be a satisfying mini.<\/p>\n

MARVEL’S VOICES: X-MEN #1.<\/strong> Well, this is a new direction for the Marvel’s Voices anthologies – and we’re getting\u00a0Marvel’s Voices: Avengers<\/em> after this, which, um, okay. Not much has really changed in terms of the content, though, except that there are some more established names in here, with Al Ewing and Greg Pak both contributing stories. Marvel’s anthologies have always been patchy and the\u00a0Voices <\/em>books are no exception – writers who are unfamiliar with the short-form format often struggle to do something satisfying in that space, and wind up with a half-formed vignette or a glorified lecture. Others, of course, get it right. Deep breath…<\/p>\n