{"id":9698,"date":"2023-12-23T21:33:35","date_gmt":"2023-12-23T21:33:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9698"},"modified":"2023-12-23T21:33:35","modified_gmt":"2023-12-23T21:33:35","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-18-december-2023","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9698","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 18 December 2023"},"content":{"rendered":"

X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #118.<\/strong> By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Phillip Sevy, Ceci de la Cruz & Travis Lanham. On to a new arc, then. It’s Christmas during “Fall of X”, and after a brief opening montage, we’re off to post-war Arakko, where they go in for an evening of semi-ritual mutual cudgeling which apparently unburdens people, or whatever. Out of nowhere, we’ve also got Bei showing up, to remind us that her husband has been missing for months and every one seems to have forgotten about it. This is certainly in the spirit of Al Ewing’s attempts to portray Arakko as a more rounded culture than it first appears, or at least one where we need to appreciate the symbolism to the Arakkii themselves. I can buy the idea that these guys go in for ritualised combat as part of a celebration, particularly since the story does seem fairly clear that joining in just to hurt people is disreputable. I’m rather less sure that I’m interested in reading an actual story about it, but we’ll see.<\/p>\n

WOLVERINE #40.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> The last part of “Last Mutant Standing”, though it isn’t a storyline so much as a series of team-up stories. Benjamin Percy has a shot at tying it together into some kind of theme, by pushing the idea that Wolverine has been teaming up with non-mutant heroes to try to recapture the feeling of belonging that he had on Krakoa, and walked away from shortly before the Fall. There’s something in that idea – the book did indeed bring Wolverine to the point of rejecting Krakoa, and it makes some sense for the Fall to be something that makes him appreciate the positive side of the place, without needing to compromise Wolverine’s status as a sceptic. But it feels a bit of a stretch to make that into the moral of four issues of\u00a0Wolverine Team-Up<\/em>. Still, these four issues have at least been quite good fun, in a rather grim period, and maybe just taking a step back and doing something lightweight was a better call than putting Wolverine at the centre of the storyline.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

ASTONISHING ICEMAN #5.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> This was a nice little series. Okay, sure, chunks of it don’t actually make sense when you stop to think about it. Why does sending Romeo away have any bearing on his ability to help Iceman re-form, given how it worked last time round? What was stopping him from freezing to death in the ice citadel anyway? But the book gets away with that by barrelling onwards and just\u00a0feeling<\/em> like hangs together. And the core thread works – Iceman needs Romeo to keep him together, but also needs the confidence to do it on his own, which gives him the unconventional symbolic victory of just allowing Mr Clean to set off a bomb that’s meant to destroy them both, confident that he’ll re-form sooner or later. Steve Orlando and Vincenzo Carrat\u00f9 have also done a great job on rehabbing Mr Clean, even for use as a one-off villain; in the original Joe Casey stories, he’s just a generic lunatic re-enacting the Morlock Massacre, but here he comes across more convincingly as a disturbingly rational fanatic.<\/p>\n

UNCANNY SPIDER-MAN #5.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Another of the “Fall of X” successes –\u00a0Way of X<\/em> and\u00a0Legion of X<\/em> could often feel crowded with competing elements, and leaving Kurt alone for five issues has made the book a lot more focussed. The Mystique retcon seems to have worked, Silver Sable’s a surprisingly good foil for Kurt, and the art is nice and clean. As against that, the use of the Vulture still feels odd – I just don’t buy this guy being far enough up the hi-tech scale to be messing about with techno-organics – and the Spider-Man angle feels decidedly nailed on for marketing. Okay, Kurt decides he’s going to dodge his problems and become a masked superhero, and that’s all fine, but… why specifically Spider-Man? I can sort of see a parallel with Kurt’s motivations and Peter’s obsession with responsibility, but it’s not really there on the page. None of that really matters, though, because the central story does land, and Kurt is just such a likeable character to spend time with.<\/p>\n

UNCANNY AVENGERS #5.<\/strong> By Gerry Duggan, Javier Garr\u00f3n, Morry Hollowell & Travis Lanham. Well, yes, that happened. The Avengers Unity Squad fight the evil Captain America, and the main upshot of all this seems to be to reposition him as the new Flag-Smasher. I don’t get the logic of that at all. Leave aside that Hydra Cap is not a remotely interesting character – the original Flag-Smasher concept works for a Captain America villain because he’s got a basically reasonable point about national divisions being a bad thing. This character is “Flag-Smasher” because he’s a Captain America villain, but the logical justification for it is that he wants to unite humans against mutants, which is\u00a0not<\/em> a Captain America angle, it’s an X-Men angle. I just don’t see what you do with this guy. He doesn’t seem to function as a villain for anything other than Captain America \/ X-Men team-up stories.<\/p>\n

Also… didn’t the\u00a0Free Comic Book Day<\/em> one-shot trail a completely different plot for this series? Something about Deadpool’s kid being abducted, which never, ever came up again? What was that all about?<\/p>\n

ORIGINAL X-MEN #1.<\/strong> By Christos Gage, Greg Land, Jay Leisten, Frank D’Armata & Clayton Cowles. The original X-Men are plucked out of the timestream (again) and sent to an alternate reality where Jean Grey has been messing with people’s minds to create a utopia. Didn’t we just do a version of this story in the\u00a0Jean Grey\u00a0<\/em>miniseries? Anyway, the one-shot ends with the villain turning out to be someone else posing as Phoenix, the original X-Men get sent home, and the whole thing seems to be a trailer for the\u00a0Weapon X-Men<\/em> miniseries in March, which is a whole team of alternate-universe Wolverines. Didn’t we do that once in\u00a0Exiles<\/em>? I guess that was 17 years ago, though. In itself, this is largely inoffensive, but very derivative. If you choose to see it as a sign of things to come in the post-Krakoa age then it’s a rather underwhelming one, and on any view, a gimmick mini about multiple Wolverines is not something I’d be building up as a big event. That said, though,\u00a0Weapon X-Men<\/em> starts in March, which is halfway through the\u00a0Fall<\/em> and\u00a0Rise<\/em> minis, so I think it’s probably just a bit of harmless fluff to round out the schedule while we wait to have something more substantial to announce. I can’t get worked up about the prospect of more of this, though.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #118. By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Phillip Sevy, Ceci de la Cruz & Travis Lanham. On to a new arc, then. It’s Christmas during “Fall of X”, and after a brief opening montage, we’re off to post-war Arakko, where they go in for an evening of semi-ritual mutual cudgeling which apparently […]<\/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-9698","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\/9698","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=9698"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9698\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9699,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9698\/revisions\/9699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}