{"id":9729,"date":"2024-01-04T18:50:54","date_gmt":"2024-01-04T18:50:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9729"},"modified":"2024-01-04T18:50:54","modified_gmt":"2024-01-04T18:50:54","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-1-january-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9729","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 1 January 2024"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just two books this week and, yeah, well.<\/p>\n

X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #120.<\/strong> By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Phillip Sevy, Ceci de la Cruz & Travis Lanham. The third and final part of the “Blood Dawn” arc and, yes, it’s the story I feared it was going to be. Expressing your emotions is a good thing, these people are seriously injuring one another in order to express their emotions, therefore that’s a good thing. And… no it isn’t? Obviously? This is the sort of thing that Arakko had to be rehabbed from in order to work at all. Let’s just file this one under “Well, that’s a premise I fundamentally reject” and forget about it, shall we?<\/p>\n

FALL OF THE HOUSE OF X #1.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Mmm. Yeah, it’s not the best start to the year, is it?<\/p>\n

Look… House of X\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0Powers of X <\/em>\u00a0game-changing, rule-rewriting stories and if you’re going to invoke them you’ve got to do better than being just okay. And this is just okay\u00a0at best<\/em>. It’s not catastrophically awful or anything, but it’s not working.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Just for starters, there are at least two big issues here. One is Orchis. In Jonathan Hickman’s stories, Orchis are obviously a mirror of the X-Men and Krakoa. They’ve got Alia Gregor trying to create resurrection to bring back her husband, they’ve got Omega Sentinel doing her own Days of Future Past, and so on. All of that has clearly been dumped by this point, and look, I can understand a mindset that this isn’t the time to be doing “fascists are quite like us when you stop to think about it”. But it hasn’t been replaced by anything, which means Orchis is now mostly \u00a0a bunch of thugs who take turns with the personality trait. They’re too over the top to function as a proper metaphor for anything in US politics, but they’re too grimdark to be pantomime villains in a romp. They’re just slight<\/em>, and yet they’re being asked to serve as the main villains for the whole line for half a year.<\/p>\n

The other issue is that none of this seems to emerge organically from the “Fall of X” stories we’ve been reading up till now. Not only is there no apparent continuity with where we left the characters last month – and we already did<\/em> a jump forward in time at the start of “Fall of X” – but there’s no real sense that anything we’ve read in the last few months feeds into this at all. Except, bizarrely, in Iron Man<\/em>. What did the last few issues of X-Men<\/em> have to do with this? Why aren’t characters like Ms Marvel and Firestar doing anything of importance? Or Cable, or Bishop, or Alpha Flight, or anyone from Realm of X<\/em>? There’s no sense of things building to a head here – rather, a sense that we’ve been killing time for several months and now we’re cutting to the end, just because. And that’s not great either.<\/p>\n

The art’s pretty good on the whole. There are a few bits that feel slightly rushed – the courtroom sequence isn’t great. But that closing page with Polaris is lovely, the 9-panel grid page with Cyclops and Alia Gregor is very nicely done, and Krakoa uprooting itself from the island looks fabulous, even if it makes absolutely no sense.<\/p>\n

All told, though, this is very average. And the title promises a lot more than that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just two books this week and, yeah, well. X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #120. By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Phillip Sevy, Ceci de la Cruz & Travis Lanham. The third and final part of the “Blood Dawn” arc and, yes, it’s the story I feared it was going to be. Expressing your emotions is a good […]<\/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":[18],"class_list":["post-9729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-x-axis","tag-x-axis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9729","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=9729"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9729\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9731,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9729\/revisions\/9731"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}