{"id":9781,"date":"2024-01-26T22:07:06","date_gmt":"2024-01-26T22:07:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9781"},"modified":"2024-01-26T22:07:06","modified_gmt":"2024-01-26T22:07:06","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-22-january-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9781","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis &#8211; w\/c 22 January 2024"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #123.<\/strong> By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Phillip Sevy &amp; Yen Nitro. Another relatively quiet week, then. And this is a pace of X-output that I&#8217;d be very happy with. Anyway, over at\u00a0<em>X-Men Unlimited<\/em>, the plot moves beyond simple punching into&#8230; well, um, stuff. We&#8217;re told that Orchis aren&#8217;t just kidnapping mutants on the reservation. They&#8217;re doing it everywhere. Well&#8230; yes, isn&#8217;t that the whole premise of Fall of X? Aren&#8217;t Orchis meant to be arresting every mutant in sight? I guess it&#8217;s the involvement of the Externals that&#8217;s supposed to be a hook, but the story never actually explains why we should care about them. They don&#8217;t seem to be doing anything materially different from what Orchis was doing anyway. It&#8217;s not like anyone&#8217;s been holding their breath all these years for a Crule and Gideon story. The reservation setting previously gave this some sort of focus, but now we&#8217;ve got Shatterstar, and El Aguila (a Spanish mutant superhero from <em>Power Man and Iron Fist<\/em>), and &#8230; Betsy is still active as Captain Britain, despite Orchis? What? And she&#8217;s doing media interviews? At this point, I&#8217;m just lost &#8211; I don&#8217;t understand at all what this story is trying to do.<\/p>\n<p><strong>X-FORCE #48.\u00a0<\/strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9774\">(Annotations here.)<\/a> The Beast storyline kicks up a gear, and not in the way I expected. When they mentioned that Beast had erased all his back-ups after the period when he was a shiny happy bouncing character, it seemed pretty obvious that the end game was to resurrect him with the older personality. Then the next writer could do a story where Hank comes to terms with what he did, but no longer remembers and can&#8217;t even understand wanting to do. But instead, the bouncing Beast is brought back as a clone, and that&#8217;s a much more interesting way of doing it. I still suspect we&#8217;re going to wind up killing them both off and resurrecting them in one body, or something of that sort, but the idea of leaving Hank Classic as a copy actually feels like a better way of getting a viable Beast back into circulation &#8211; it&#8217;s less of a reset button because this Beast genuinely didn&#8217;t do anything from the last few years. I kind of hope they just stick with that. After all, they replaced Kraven the Hunter with a clone, didn&#8217;t they?<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p><strong>RESURRECTION OF MAGNETO #1.<\/strong> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9761\">(Annotations here.)<\/a> Storm travels into the afterlife to bring back Magneto, in a story which has as much in common with Al Ewing&#8217;s\u00a0<em>Defenders<\/em> stories as it does with\u00a0<em>X-Men Red<\/em>. To be honest, re-reading\u00a0<em>Defenders Beyond<\/em> back to back with this in order to remind myself of the details may not have been to <em>RoM<\/em>&#8216;s advantage, since Luciano Vecchio&#8217;s work here is perfectly fine, but it can&#8217;t help suffering in direct comparison to Javier Rodriguez&#8217;s page-after-page fireworks. If I&#8217;m being honest, though, I found <em>Defenders\u00a0<\/em>a bit too abstract for my tastes, and the tarot \/ kabbalah stuff doesn&#8217;t do a great deal for me. Maybe it&#8217;s because I only ever seem to encounter the tarot in the context of comics, but I find it trope-y in a way that I&#8217;m sure isn&#8217;t intended by any of the creators who use it. Thus far, this is a book I find easier to admire than to actually engage with.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #123. By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Phillip Sevy &amp; Yen Nitro. Another relatively quiet week, then. And this is a pace of X-output that I&#8217;d be very happy with. Anyway, over at\u00a0X-Men Unlimited, the plot moves beyond simple punching into&#8230; well, um, stuff. We&#8217;re told that Orchis aren&#8217;t just kidnapping mutants [&hellip;]<\/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-9781","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\/9781","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=9781"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9781\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9782,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9781\/revisions\/9782"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}