{"id":9366,"date":"2023-08-31T19:25:22","date_gmt":"2023-08-31T18:25:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9366"},"modified":"2023-08-31T19:25:22","modified_gmt":"2023-08-31T18:25:22","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-28-august-2023","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9366","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 28 August 2023"},"content":{"rendered":"

X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #102.<\/strong> By Steve Foxe, Stephanie Williams, Noemi Vettori, Pete Panazis & Travis Lanham. Continuing our series of short solo stories with the members of the abortive X-Men team, this is Jubilee’s issue. She takes some of the Krakoan kids to the Savage Land on a field trip. They stop some poachers. That’s pretty much it. I honestly don’t understand what this run of stories is meant to be achieving. It just feels like generic filler, I’m afraid.<\/p>\n

WOLVERINE #36.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Part 3 of the “Weapons of Vengeance” crossover with\u00a0Ghost Rider<\/em>, which has essentially nothing to do with “Fall of X”. I mean, there’s some passing mention of the idea that there are fewer mutants around, but the plot says otherwise, with the demon Stitcher having no apparent problem finding an endless supply of backwoods mutants to mutilate. This probably isn’t the best issue to raise the point, but: this is actually a problem. We’ve had years where the dominant narrative was that all of mutantkind were together on Krakoa – that was the point, after all – but “Fall of X” keeps trying to do stories about people pursuing the supposed handful of non-Krakoan mutants who, it turns out, were apparently teeming worldwide all along. If this was the direction, why march the rest of the world through the gates? Why not just do it with the population of Krakoa? Or, y’know, do “Fall of X” storylines that are consistent with the premise of there being virtually no more mutants around.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

But this isn’t really\u00a0Wolverine<\/em>‘s problem. It’s doing counter-programming. Percy’s\u00a0Ghost Rider<\/em> isn’t really my thing, being a grindhouse horror book, but it knows what it’s doing and commits to it pretty thoroughly. This arc is basically a\u00a0Ghost Rider<\/em> arc with Wolverine as a guest star, with Ghost Rider and Wolverine teaming up to stop a demon that leaves mutilated corpses strewn behind it. The Wolverine angle is that Weapon Plus, apparently associated with Orchis, are now experimenting with demons as a super-soldier enhancement, which I guess works in theory. It’s probably a mistake, though, to bring out Father Pike as the main villain without explaining who he is. The anti-mutant angle feels tacked on, though – the best stuff here is about the kid and his social worker treating the murderous demon inside him as a symptom management exercise, which is a really good opening sequence.<\/p>\n

MS. MARVEL: THE NEW MUTANT #1.<\/strong> By Iman Vellani, Sabir Pirzada, Carlos Gomez, Adam Gorham & Erick Arciniega. Despite the repositioning of Kamala as a mutant, this is basically a\u00a0Ms Marvel<\/em> miniseries against the backdrop of Fall of X, but otherwise pretty much as we know it. Kamala and Bruno go to a university summer camp which is run by Orchis, and Kamala is hoping to get some spying in. There’s a bit about the public being against her now that she’s in an X-Men uniform, but “Kamala has to prove that an institution is full of villains” is a pretty normal\u00a0Ms Marvel\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0Champions<\/em> plot. And that’s fine – I don’t want this book to lose its identity in service of the X-Men. But yeah, it’s an issue of Ms Marvel<\/em> with Orchis as the villains. It’s perfectly okay, it reads nicely enough, but I think I’d rather have read this creative team just doing a regular Ms Marvel<\/em> story. It certainly doesn’t persuade me that the book is better off for being yoked to the X-Men.<\/p>\n

DEADPOOL: BADDER BLOOD #3.<\/strong> By Rob Liefeld, Chad Bowers, Jay David Ramos & Joe Sabino. Yeah, it’s really not the strongest of weeks. So, hey, I completely missed issue #2 of this. Back when I reviewed issue #1, I said that it was unexpectedly coherent for a Liefeld Deadpool<\/em> story. Well, issues #2 and #3 aren’t – they’re basically just unending random fight scenes about a completely different plot thread involving a woman who claims to be Arcade’s younger sister. She’s called Arcata. Chad Bowers gets in some good lines of dialogue, but this is what I was expecting issue #1 to be, and, yeah, it’s not good at all.<\/p>\n

LOVE UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #65.\u00a0<\/strong>By Preeti Chhibber, Carola Borelli, Carlos Lopez & Ariana Maher. Continuing the Rogue\/Gambit heist arc. This is following up on the reveal last issue that the billionaire collector they were meant to be robbing is actually Maurice Fortuit of the ClanDestine, a pre-existing but quite obscure character. I kind of see what Chhibber is going for here, but I’m not sure it quite works. Because he’s immortal, he’s meant to be an icon of colonialist collection-building, and a thief in his own right, whose attempts to take the moral high ground against Rogue and Gambit are ultimately hypocritical. That’s fine, but… it’s really just restating the rationale for robbing the guy that Rogue and Gambit already put forward in part 1, so it doesn’t actually add anything beyond explaining why his last line of security turns out to be better than you’d expect. Still, I do like the way Fortuit is convinced of his own legitimacy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #102. By Steve Foxe, Stephanie Williams, Noemi Vettori, Pete Panazis & Travis Lanham. Continuing our series of short solo stories with the members of the abortive X-Men team, this is Jubilee’s issue. She takes some of the Krakoan kids to the Savage Land on a field trip. They stop some poachers. […]<\/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,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9366","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\/9366","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=9366"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9366\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9367,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9366\/revisions\/9367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}