{"id":9762,"date":"2024-01-18T22:17:57","date_gmt":"2024-01-18T22:17:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9762"},"modified":"2024-01-18T22:17:57","modified_gmt":"2024-01-18T22:17:57","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-15-january-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9762","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 15 January 2024"},"content":{"rendered":"

X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #122.<\/strong> By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Nick Roche & Yen Nitro. Well, this is certainly a slimmed-down phase for the core X-titles, which is no bad thing in itself. This is the second part of the Thunderbird arc and… well, it’s mostly just random fighting, honestly. The Proudstar brothers assume that Crule is working with Orchis so they attack him. Crule is apparently there for his own reasons, which is something to do with stealing the refugee mutants himself, but there’s nothing to flesh that out. And if you want people to take Crule seriously, that does need some legwork, because nobody cared about this bozo even back in the early 90s. Nick Roche draws some nice punching, but it really is one-dimensional as a story.<\/p>\n

X-MEN #30.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Oh boy.<\/p>\n

So issue #29 ends with a cliffhanger where the other X-Men get back from Latveria, find the base trashed and covered in blood, and Synch and Talon missing. The next issue caption says we’ll find out in this issue where they are. And… this issue has nothing to do with that at all, unless I’m missing something fundamental. After an opening scene with Scott (which is pretty good, and the best thing in the issue) it shifts to a completely unrelated story about how to distribute the cure to the killswitch that Orchis placed in Krakoan medicines… which I don’t think has been mentioned at all until now, but somehow involves Spider-Man and Norman Osborn. Aside from a couple of pages of subplot with Firestar, what we then get is Synch and Talon visiting the High Evolutionary – and the exercise of getting to him is compressed to a single page – to recover a device last mentioned in issue #3. The entire confrontation lasts four pages, and at the end it turns out that Talon died and Synch is keeping her alive in his mind.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Um… what? The basic\u00a0idea<\/em> of this is fine – the X-Men need a way to make sure that Orchis can’t kill random humans as punishment when the mutants from Arakko invade. The High Evolutionary thingie from issue #3 could be adapted to do the job. Someone being trapped in someone else’s mind is an old standby and sure, why not? But the pacing is just inexplicable. The disconnect with issue #29 is downright incoherent. The killswitch thing is ignored for months and then desperately rushed to a resolution. It feels as though someone discovered at the last minute that they desperately needed to get some plot points set up months ahead of the original plan. This is what you expect from a book undergoing a guillotine cancellation, not from the first chapter of a tie-in arc to a major storyline. I have no idea what’s going on behind the scenes here, but the main impression given by this comic is that the wheels are coming off.<\/p>\n

INVINCIBLE IRON MAN #14.\u00a0<\/strong>By Gerry Duggan, Andrea Di Vito & Bryan Valenza. By comparison, this is a lot more coherent – and semi-important to the plot, since it covers the creation of Iron Man’s invasion fleet, and more detail of Orchis’ response to Firestar’s disinformation. Invincible Iron Man<\/em> has generally felt a lot more focussed than\u00a0X-Men<\/em>, but then it’s a solo book, so there are fewer plates spinning. Okay, this particular issue isn’t really an Iron Man story at all – it’s Ironheart and Forge making the fleet, and the main event is the resolution of a subplot about Ironheart and the Mandarin’s rings, inherited from the previous writer, if I remember rightly. But Di Vito’s a solid artist who lets Forge and Ironheart give some grounding to the fantasy settings, and the whole thing draws on the wider Marvel Universe quite effectively to let Iron Man out-plan Orchis. Perfectly fine.<\/p>\n

CABLE #1.<\/strong> By Fabian Nicieza, Scot Eaton, Cam Smith & Java Tartaglia. In which the older Cable rescues the younger Cable from Orchis, where he’s been languishing since just before the Hellfire Gala. Despite the “Fall of the House of X” branding on the cover, this is a bit of a red skies crossover – Cable Sr has just discovered that there’s a threat so pressingly urgent that the two of them have to deal with it right away, even though it has nothing to do with Orchis. That’s fine – it feels a lot like a story that could have been done at any time, but I’ve got no problem with some books sitting out the crossover and doing something else. And if you’re going down that route, you may as well leverage the Fall of X stuff to stress how extra important this must be, because we’re doing it instead!<\/p>\n

To be honest, as a set-up, the story maybe needs that sort of push, because the basic premise is that Cable has spotted the first signs of a social media campaign by the Neocracy, which (at least in some timelines) is a pharmacy company’s well meaning attempt to end all conflict by making everyone identical, leaving a bland hive mind. It doesn’t actually sound that bad, to be honest. Everyone’s “enlightened” and “at peace”. But Cable wants to nip this in the bud and so drags young Nate along with him on this mission. There’s a nice rapport between the two versions of the lead character, and Eaton’s always been solid – the opening break-out sequence is well done. It feels a lot like it exists to pad out the line without doing a proper tie-in book, but there are far worse ways of dealing with that problem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #122. By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Nick Roche & Yen Nitro. Well, this is certainly a slimmed-down phase for the core X-titles, which is no bad thing in itself. This is the second part of the Thunderbird arc and… well, it’s mostly just random fighting, honestly. The Proudstar brothers assume that […]<\/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-9762","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\/9762","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=9762"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9762\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9763,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9762\/revisions\/9763"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9762"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9762"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}