{"id":9900,"date":"2024-03-07T22:08:01","date_gmt":"2024-03-07T22:08:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9900"},"modified":"2024-03-07T22:08:01","modified_gmt":"2024-03-07T22:08:01","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-4-march-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9900","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 4 March 2024"},"content":{"rendered":"

So before you ask, no, I’m not doing Ultimate X-Men<\/em>. It’s an Ultimate book, not an X-book, and I stopped covering the first Ultimate X-Men<\/em> after a while too. More to the point, though, Peach Momoko’s art is beautiful, but I found Demon Days<\/em> a complete slog, and Ultimate Invasion <\/em>didn’t do much to interest me in the new line either. So it’s really a book that I have no interest in. It’ll show up on Marvel Unlimited in three months time and I’m more than happy to wait and read it then.<\/p>\n

X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #129. <\/strong>By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Phillip Sevy, Yen Nitro & Travis Lanham. Now, having just said all that, I’m very conscious that this is a less than stellar week for the books I am<\/em> reading. X-Men Unlimited <\/em>takes a bit of a diversion from its main plot to explain what Sunspot was up to immediately before the Hellfire Gala. X-Men Red<\/em> seemed to be setting this up as some kind of subplot, but never got back to it. So, sure, if that book’s not going to get round to it, this is as good a place as any to tie up the loose end. But “he was planning to launch a PR campaign with X-Corp” is a bit of an underwhelming answer, and it ultimately just adds to the sense of this arc being a random collection of elements loosely arranged around a rather slight Externals story.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

X-MEN #32.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> This isn’t working, is it? The main plot is over in Fall of the House of X<\/em> – fair enough, that’s how event stories often work. But that leaves X-Men<\/em> itself to do a story where Magik is reunited with the other X-Men – specifically Kate – after returning to Earth at the end of Realm of X<\/em>. And it’s just kind of a mess. Magik is apparently dying from the nanites that shut down her powers before the Hellfire Gala, except there was no mention of that at all in Realm of X<\/em>. For some reason she fails to locate any of the X-Men (even though the Limbo Embassy is in the phone book and Mirage, who came back with her, has hooked up with the other X-Men over in X-Men Unlimited<\/em>), but equally inexplicably she manages to locate the Orchis facility that developed her nanites, which by sheer coincidence she attacks at the same time that Shadowkat is attacking it for unrelated reasons. Meanwhile, the lighthouse keeper from Mykines has apparently been nursing Lockheed back to health all this time (even though we never saw him get hurt) and it’s\u00a0only now\u00a0<\/em>occurred to Orchis that the guy might be an witness who needs erasing? Why the hell bring him up just to hang a lampshade over the fact that he’s a loose end? This is meant to be a big satisfying moment of the tide turning and things being set right, but it just feels unearned. The book wants to be building to a climax, but there’s no real sense of any of this developing from what’s gone before – it’s all just Arbitrary Stuff Happening.<\/p>\n

WEAPON X-MEN #1.<\/strong> By Christos Gage, Yildiray \u00c7inar, Nolan Woodard & Clayton Cowles. Well, it’s an Exiles<\/em>-style miniseries in which an alternate Phoenix gathers a team of alternate Wolverines to fight an alternate Onslaught who’s a mixture of Magneto and Jean Grey rather than Magneto and Professor X. This is the series that was trailed in the Original X-Men<\/em> one-shot in December, and giving that sort of build-up to what’s ultimately just a fun piece of fluff seems like it was misplaced. This issue is rather better than that one, partly because art is much better and partly because it hasn’t been overhyped. It’s still fundamentally a silly idea, and you have to assume there’s some<\/em> sort of twist coming, because it’s very hard to believe that there’s any cosmic problem to which the best solution is some of these Wolverine variants – the Marvel Zombies<\/em> Wolverine? The couch potato Wolverine from Earth X<\/em>? Still, it’s harmless nonsense and if it’s a case of filling out the publishing schedule in the dying days of the Krakoan era, at least it’s a change from Orchis.<\/p>\n

MS MARVEL: MUTANT MENACE #1.<\/strong> By Iman Vellani, Sabir Pirzada, Scott Godlewski, Erick Arciniega & Joe Caramagna. It’s the first day back at school after Ms Marvel’s summer camp with Orchis… which, hold on, means we’re back last September? Haven’t we already had Thanksgiving and Christmas stories during “Fall of X”? Well, okay, September it is, though the scheduling choice seems weird. And actually, this is the sort of story that Marvel probably should have done back at the start of “Fall of X”: it’s\u00a0Ms Marvel in New Jersey, basically just getting on with doing Ms Marvel stuff, while people she knows in civilian life react to the local hero’s new association with the X-Men. One of the weaknesses of “Fall of X” is that public opinion seems to turn on a dime depending on what the plot requires, and it doesn’t feel organic. As the only X-character with an actual civilian life among humans, Kamala is very well placed to try and plug that gap and make it feel more believable, and that’s basically what this story is doing. It also feels more like a regular Ms Marvel book than the previous mini, which is welcome. Even better, while Orchis are certainly hanging around, our main villains for this mini appear to be Hordeculture, who are gimmicky but fit quite happily into Ms Marvel’s tone. This is a book where one of the main villains is a part-cockatiel clone of Thomas Edison, after all. Rather better than I was expecting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So before you ask, no, I’m not doing Ultimate X-Men. It’s an Ultimate book, not an X-book, and I stopped covering the first Ultimate X-Men after a while too. More to the point, though, Peach Momoko’s art is beautiful, but I found Demon Days a complete slog, and Ultimate Invasion didn’t do much to interest […]<\/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-9900","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\/9900","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=9900"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9900\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9902,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9900\/revisions\/9902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9900"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9900"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9900"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}