{"id":9679,"date":"2023-12-16T17:38:23","date_gmt":"2023-12-16T17:38:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9679"},"modified":"2023-12-16T17:38:23","modified_gmt":"2023-12-16T17:38:23","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-11-december-2023","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9679","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 11 December 2023"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gosh, are we winding down for Christmas? Well, maybe not – there are five books out next week, plus\u00a0Unlimited<\/em>. But this is another light week.<\/p>\n

X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #117.<\/strong> By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Guillermo Sanna, Java Tartaglia & Travis Lanham. This is the end of the Firestar arc, and it goes pretty much how you’d expect. Firestar has successfully screwed up Judas Traveller’s PR event to the point where he’s outlived his usefulness to Orchis, which is a problem when he’s a mutant. He’s lost control of the story he was telling, and nobody else in Orchis realises that it’s because Firestar was messing it up for him. That’s a nice angle for Firestar, and I rather like Sanna’s low-key art on it, which gives Firestar a nicely impassive look. Do I buy Orchis putting her in Traveller’s place? It doesn’t really fit with Gerry Duggan writing scenes in\u00a0X-Men<\/em> about the Orchis higher-ups viewing her as expendable. I suppose she’s meant to win the doubters round by throwing Judas under the bus, but it still seems a stretch. I’ll put that one down as a case of dubious inter-title continuity, though, rather than being a problem with this arc in itself.<\/p>\n

X-MEN RED #18.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> The final issue, although part of the plot feeds into Resurrection of Magneto<\/em>. Still, this is the wrap-up of the main series, and … well, it runs up against the fact that it’s an Arakko story. Al Ewing sold me on Martian Arakko as an interesting location, but only by reinventing it as something subtler and more nuanced than the one-dimensional original concept. The war storyline is presumably meant to contrast Arakko as it developed under Storm and co with the original version of Arakko, and that runs up hard against the problem that the original concept of Arakko was very dull, and the nature of the plot makes it difficult for this story to try and convince me otherwise – the comparative flaws of Arakko Classic are a large part of the point, after all.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

So… yeah, I have problems with this storyline. It doesn’t feel like we’re going back to Arakko as it stood at the start of X-Men Red<\/em> – the start of Ewing’s retconned interpretation, in other words – but to Arakko from “X of Swords”, where it was mostly just a bunch of violent morons. Genesis is not a very interesting character. Annihilation is somewhat more intriguing but remains a weird, abstract thing. The White Sword and his hundred champions who get resurrected daily are the sort of thing that I can kind of get into as a throwaway detail but they’re completely unrelatable as actual characters. And… ultimately, didn’t this fight come down to Storm zapping a staff, rather than anything to do with the way the people of Arakko had changed, or even with the raising of the land itself as a new Krakoa? Ironically, we’re left with a version of Arakko that seems worth keeping around in the Marvel Universe, but not for anything that it still retains from the original “X of Swords” incarnation of Arakko, of which there is (mercifully) precious little.<\/p>\n

DARK X-MEN #5.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> End of the miniseries, with Madelyne Pryor resisting the temptation to sign on with her multiversal counterpart and go on a rampage together. I like that basic idea – Madelyne kicks back at anything she sees as an attempt to determine her role for her, even when it comes from her own counterpart. And she comes round to realising that trying to position herself and Havok as the new Scott and Jean was really just another way of letting her role be determined by someone else. Nice art, too – heavy on the contrast but not going too heavy on the darkness. The main issue with\u00a0Dark X-Men<\/em> is that it tries to cram in too much, and some storylines never get enough space to be truly satisfying – the whole thing with Zero, Albert and Elsie-Dee seems particularly hard done by. But that just means I wouldn’t have minded seeing this mini run a bit longer.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gosh, are we winding down for Christmas? Well, maybe not – there are five books out next week, plus\u00a0Unlimited. But this is another light week. X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #117. By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Guillermo Sanna, Java Tartaglia & Travis Lanham. This is the end of the Firestar arc, and it goes pretty much […]<\/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-9679","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\/9679","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=9679"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9679\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9680,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9679\/revisions\/9680"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}