{"id":9467,"date":"2023-09-29T22:44:43","date_gmt":"2023-09-29T21:44:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9467"},"modified":"2023-09-30T11:55:10","modified_gmt":"2023-09-30T10:55:10","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-25-september-2023","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9467","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 25 September 2023"},"content":{"rendered":"

EDIT: Oh, hey, I completely forgot about\u00a0Ms Marvel: The New Mutant\u00a0<\/em>#2. That’ll happen when there’s still no functioning subscription mechanism for digital comics. Ideally, Marvel would dump Amazon entirely and use Marvel Unlimited as their primary vehicle for selling new comics, since for all its problems, it’s still a vastly better product than anything Amazon has to offer. But anyway, I’ll add\u00a0Ms Marvel<\/em> to the bottom of this post, and in the meantime…<\/p>\n

X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #106.<\/strong> By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Lynne Yoshii, Fer Sifuentes & Travis Lanham. You might remember that the epilogue to\u00a0X-Men\u00a0<\/em>#24 has Magik dropping off Sunfire in Otherworld so that he can look for the missing Redroot – and then jumped forward to “X Months Later” with Sunfire and Redroot on the verge of death in a blizzard. Well, this is the start of that storyline, which feels a lot more consequential than the last few issues already. After all the point of rescuing Redroot isn’t just to free her, it’s to let people talk to Arakko. Which seems like iti might be important to\u00a0X-Men Red<\/em>.<\/p>\n

So, in this first part, a characteristically overconfident Sunfire shows up at the Crooked Market and simply demands that Jim Jaspers hand Redroot over. As it turns out, Jaspers has got so bored waiting for anyone to remember this storyline that he’s already got rid of Redroot, so he does a typically questionable deal with Sunfire and then packs him off on a quest across Otherworld to rescue her. And that’s what we’re getting, from the sound of it – Sunfire tours Otherworld. Fair enough, as an opening scene. I’m not the biggest fan of Otherworld, but nobody else is using it right now, and it feels like there could be some potential in putting Sunfire there, because he doesn’t exactly seem like the type to be charmed by whimsical fantasy either.<\/p>\n

JEAN GREY #2.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Well, it looks like we really are doing four issues of\u00a0What If…? <\/em>with Jean Grey centred storylines, the loose idea being that this is her personality reconstituting itself after death, or finding its way back to life, or something. That’s all fine with me, though I have to wonder if it’s really what people were expecting from a\u00a0Fall of X<\/em> tie-in.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Issue #1 did the Silver Age, so this time it’s Phoenix, and the obvious question of what would have happened if Jean had let someone else take the big cosmic bird. That sort of cuts against a whole lot of continuity which tries to establish that the Phoenix was interested in her for other reasons, but if this is all in Jean’s mind then who cares. In some ways, I’m actually\u00a0more<\/em> interested in these stories if they’re\u00a0not<\/em> remotely real, and the angle is that we’re supposed to read something into the fact that Jean imagines it playing out this way. The logical hook here is that Wolverine volunteers to fly the ship, because with hindsight we know he’s got a healing factor that makes him a much more sensible choice anyway. That then leads to Phoenix Wolverine racing off to avenge himself on Weapon X, and a bunch of stuff about the Scott\/Jean\/Logan romantic triangle.<\/p>\n

There’s some very nice art on this, and the Phoenix always makes for a striking visual. On the other hand, while it’s trying to get to a conclusion where Jean realises that only she can handle the Phoenix, I’m not sure it really works. For one thing, the story presents Phoenix as a straightforward energy being that’s attracted to passion, which unhelpfully demystifies it – and playing pass the parcel with it in the climax doesn’t help either. For another, the story kind of blithely overlooks the fact that the original storyline ends with Jean becoming Dark Phoenix and committing genocide, and… nothing here actually seems worse than that? If the alternative is a world where Scott and Logan destroy one another and take Weapon X with them then… um, is that not better? Maybe the idea is that the Phoenix would end up with Jean anyway, so the extra damage achieves nothing, but it doesn’t say that. Or maybe the idea is that Jean’s focus on Scott and Logan’s fate rather than, you know, that planet she killed, says something about her priorities… but that’s kind of subtle and seems an odd direction to take.<\/p>\n

REALM OF X #2.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> You might think that a four-issue dream scene would be as peripheral to “Fall of X” as it was possible to get, but somehow this excursion to Vanaheim feels even more marginal. In itself, that’s not a problem – the further a tie-in is from the centre of “Fall of X”, the more I tend to like it, and this is simply a mini that happens to be occasioned by the mutants being in exile. At first glance this looks like generic fantasy, but in fact there’s a fair amount going on to make Vanaheim more distinctive than that. The basic angle of a society with a heavy emphasis on prophesies that they know are mostly accurate but still changeable is a nice one, and using Saturnyne as a villain gives it some anchor to the regular X-books. The art is perfectly solid, and Curse is well used. The main issue here is some very questionable interpretations of Typhoid and Magik, who feel wildly out of character to me. I can kind of buy the idea that Magik feels depressed and marginalised by not having access to her powers, and not being able to help more directly – at a push. But I just don’t get what this spoilt princess take on Typhoid has got to do with the basic concept of the character. It seems to miss the point of her entirely.<\/p>\n

INVINCIBLE IRON MAN #10.<\/strong> By Gerry Duggan, Juan Frigeri, Bryan Valenza & Joe Caramagna. Of Gerry Duggan’s three “Fall of X” titles, this is the strongest, if only because the rapport between Tony Stark and Emma Frost seems to work. It actually may work better in Tony’s own book, where he’s a more rounded character, since as a guest star he can often feel unsympathetic.\u00a0This issue does in fact do the wedding of Tony Stark and Emma Frost – repeating the set-up scene from\u00a0X-Men<\/em> for the benefit of this book’s readers – though it’s a shotgun wedding in Vegas. And what’s more, the story goes out of its way to stress that Tony is marrying Emma’s “Hazel Kendal” persona, who doesn’t really exist, so that it can all be conveniently cancelled when the storyline is over. But it sets up the two of them having to hang around one another for the rest of the arc, which is the real point of this, and that’s fine.<\/p>\n

The more immediate plot mechanics… um, yes. The idea seems to be that Tony and Emma are manipulating Feilong into showing up to crow at their shotgun wedding, so that Emma can take off her power inhibitor ring, raid Feilong’s mind for important data, and then wipe his memories of anything of the sort happening. Which would be fine, except… the rationale for them having this wedding is a need to explain away why Feilong saw Tony giving Emma the ring… when she’d already taken it off… in a room with no one else around… so…. um, why didn’t she just do it then, if it’s that simple? It works in the moment – we need a nice clear win for the good guys at this point in the story – but the more I think about it, the more I think, hold on…<\/p>\n

STORM #5.<\/strong> By Ann Nocenti, Geraldo Borges, Andrew Dalhouse & Ariana Maher. The final issue of the mini. There’s a lot I like about this series. Even though it’s more Nocenti than Claremont, it does somehow capture the vibe of the X-Men circa\u00a0Uncanny<\/em> #175. It’s refreshingly dense – it certainly benefits from re-reading as a whole, because you’re supposed to remember things like Storm telling Rogue to pull her punches three issues ago. There’s a nice energy to the art, with an appealing sketchiness and some great lighting in this issue. Whether it sticks the landing, I’m not so sure. The basic theme here is about the competing sides of Storm’s personality, her then-recent sudden jump to her quasi-punk look, and whether all her different aspects can be coherently integrated. The villain is meant to provide a contrast with that, by literally being a Jekyll and Hyde figure of sorts – except the “nice” guy is a con man, and Blowback is physically powerful but just acts on the other personality’s impulses, in a more direct way. But the series spends quite a while setting up red herrings and winds up leaving Blowback’s back story until the last minute, and we end up with a final issue that feels like it’s more about him than it is about Storm. Still not a bad story, though.<\/p>\n

X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST – DOOMSDAY #3.<\/strong> By Marc Guggenheim, Manuel Garc\u00eda, Cam Smith, Yen Nitro & Clayton Cowles. The first couple of issues of this series were doing somewhat interesting material about how society slipped slowly into the Sentinel takeover. That feels like an underexplored aspect of Days of Future Past, and one with some obvious wider relevance – even if the middle of “Fall of X” was a bad time to be doing the story. With this issue, though, we’re deep into the Sentinels and Hounds stuff, and it really is difficult to see what this sort of expansion is adding. It’s not badly done, but it doesn’t feel like something that was needed.<\/p>\n

MS MARVEL: THE NEW MUTANT #2.<\/strong> By Iman Vellani, Sabir Pirzada, Carlos G\u00f3mez, Adam Gorham, Erick Arciniega & Joe Caramagna. What we have here is a pretty strong Ms Marvel idea – her mash-up fanfic creations haunt her in her dreams – mixed in with the Orchis stuff. And while it’s not dialled up to quite the absurd levels that we get in other books, it’s still a bit of a dirge that can’t really explain\u00a0why<\/em> almost nobody is standing up for the mutants. In fact, it pretty much lampshades the fact that this doesn’t make any sense. That would almost make me think we were heading to a mind control idea down the line, if it wasn’t for the fact that all the build-up has been about propaganda and the like. There’s stuff to like here, but in no way is it a better book for tying in to “Fall of X”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

EDIT: Oh, hey, I completely forgot about\u00a0Ms Marvel: The New Mutant\u00a0#2. That’ll happen when there’s still no functioning subscription mechanism for digital comics. Ideally, Marvel would dump Amazon entirely and use Marvel Unlimited as their primary vehicle for selling new comics, since for all its problems, it’s still a vastly better product than anything Amazon […]<\/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-9467","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\/9467","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=9467"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9467\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9470,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9467\/revisions\/9470"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}