{"id":9435,"date":"2023-09-17T14:01:41","date_gmt":"2023-09-17T13:01:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9435"},"modified":"2023-09-17T14:01:41","modified_gmt":"2023-09-17T13:01:41","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-11-september-2023","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9435","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 11 September 2023"},"content":{"rendered":"

X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC<\/strong> #104. <\/strong>By Steve Foxe, Stephanie Williams, Noemi Vettori, Pete Pantazis & Travis Lanham. Continuing with the series of spotlight stories on the members of the abortive X-Men team from\u00a0Hellfire Gala<\/em>, this is Dazzler’s issue. She wins a “Cultural Vanguard” award for (one assumes) diversity or something. The X-Cutioner shows up to complain about mutants appropriating human culture, but everyone loves Dazzler, and she easily defeats him.<\/p>\n

Aside from last week’s Frenzy story, these shorts aren’t working – I think there’s meant to be a bittersweet undertone knowing what happened to the characters, but the stories are far too generic to suggest that we lost very much. I don’t think you can really do a story about Dazzler as a massively popular, accepted mutant artist one week before a U-turn where apparently everyone hates mutants now and there’s no pro-mutant sympathy to be seen – well, unless the story is meant to be about the shallowness of diversity awards, but I don’t think that’s the idea. X-Cutioner isn’t the right choice of villain for this – his schtick is meant to be that he resents mutants feeling that they’re above the law, which is at least a semi-legitimate complaint. And the art doesn’t capture the sense of “the music industry’s most prestigious awards ceremony” at all – it looks way too small scale for that. Not good, I’m afraid.<\/p>\n

X-FORCE #44.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> I really, really don’t like the fact that we’ve just got Orchis working in both the US and Russia without any explanation. I’m not even sure having them here adds anything to the story. Wouldn’t it have been easier to have the Russians with their own bootleg Orchis – or even to twist the knife by offering “sanctuary” to the remaining mutants? I suppose my bigger problem here is that the whole “Fall of X” set-up doesn’t feel like it’s been coherently thought through – the books keep contradicting each other; the premise is that all the mutants are gone and yet there seem to be more of them around in human society than ever; public opinion lurches to a ridiculously one-sided degree overnight, simply because That’s The Story. The exile side of the plot seems to work, but the Orchis police state rings false to me whenever it comes up.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Still. Orchis are not a key point in this issue, which is mainly about the Chronicler\/Colossus mind control storyline that’s been running from the outset of this issue. And that’s a story I\u00a0am<\/em> interested in. I really like the idea that the limit on Chronicler’s reality-warping powers is whether he can convince himself that this works as a story. For the purposes of that plot, “Fall of X” serves a function that\u00a0does<\/em> seem to work, by clearing away of lot of clutter and forcing Mikhail to bring his plans to a head, or at least to change direction. His basic problem here is that he’s got his one vastly powerful mind-controller dedicated to controlling a character who is no longer of any importance or influence at all. So Mikhail wants to move on to someone more relevant, but that doesn’t work as a story. That stuff interests me, and so do the remnants of X-Force trying to find their teammates – that’s a good role for Domino and Sage. So the actual story being told here works for me – and since “Fall of X” is really no more than the occasion for that story to happen, it isn’t a huge problem.<\/p>\n

X-MEN RED #15.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Since it’s a story about a civil war on Mars, X-Men Red<\/em> is even more peripherally linked to “Fall of X”. It’s about the conflict between old Arakko and the post-war version shown in X-Men Red<\/em>; in this issue, that basically means the origin story of the Fisher King. The problem here is different: I’m not interested in the original version of Arakko. Fantasy isn’t my genre at the best of times, but even allowing for that, Amenth just doesn’t engage me. It feels like a trope more than a place, and the bits that are distinctive are so high concept that I can’t relate to them. Al Ewing’s done great work over the course of this series in convincing me that present-day Arakko is a real place with real characters and making me care about that. But none of that makes me any more invested in the original Arakko, because it never felt to me like “Here’s what was interesting about Arakko all along”, it felt to me like “Here’s something better that we’re replacing it with.” I don’t mind Arakko Classic so much when it’s foil for the present day version, but when it becomes a focal point, as it does here, I still don’t get what’s supposed to be interesting about it.<\/p>\n

ASTONISHING ICEMAN #2.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> This, on the other hand, I’m enjoying a lot more. Yes, it’s a “Fall of X” book, but here that becomes more of a device to strip away most of the cast and give us a story with just Iceman and Romeo, something that would be trickier to do if Krakoa was still around. It’s a pleasantly straightforward story with Iceman as the last hero standing, singlehandedly running rings around the Orchis forces, even if he’s starting to wear down behind the scenes. Perhaps this issue could have made a bit more of the central gimmick of using the Elements of Doom – specifically, Helium, who can’t be frozen. Iceman seems to jump to the solution (you don’t have to attack him directly) a little bit too quickly to get maximum mileage out of that. But maybe not. Maybe it\u00a0is<\/em> more entertaining for Orchis to build up a sensible sounding plan and have it just fail – it’s not like Iceman doesn’t have to put in any effort, after all. He just doesn’t take long to figure out the workaround. The bigger story here is meant to be justifying Orchis’ resort to an uncontrollable lunatic in the next issue, and the finish still provides visual flair. Simple but quite satisfying.<\/p>\n

CHILDREN OF THE VAULT #2.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Another Fall of X tie-in that isn’t remotely interested in all the Orchis stuff, but just wants to take advantage of the mutants being off the board. It does seem a little odd for this storyline to go completely unreferenced in any other books, bearing in mind that it’s marketed as part of an event, but if you’re willing to let that slide, this is a pretty decent rendition of the old trope of the bad guys setting themselves up as superheroes in order get into a position of trust – with the added point that the Children are manipulating everyone’s minds as well. I like the way that the tensions between Cable and Bishop remain understated, despite their history – they’re both professionals, after all, and there are more urgent problems to worry about – though at some point the story’s surely going to have to do a little bit more with them. The psychic interrogation with Martillo is patchy; the intercutting between the real world and the psychic plane is appropriately disorienting, but the final beats are a bit too random to really get the idea across.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #104. By Steve Foxe, Stephanie Williams, Noemi Vettori, Pete Pantazis & Travis Lanham. Continuing with the series of spotlight stories on the members of the abortive X-Men team from\u00a0Hellfire Gala, this is Dazzler’s issue. She wins a “Cultural Vanguard” award for (one assumes) diversity or something. The X-Cutioner shows up to […]<\/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-9435","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\/9435","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=9435"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9435\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9438,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9435\/revisions\/9438"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}