{"id":9928,"date":"2024-03-16T17:12:55","date_gmt":"2024-03-16T17:12:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9928"},"modified":"2024-03-16T17:12:55","modified_gmt":"2024-03-16T17:12:55","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-11-march-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9928","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 11 March 2024"},"content":{"rendered":"

X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC<\/strong> #130.<\/strong> By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Phillip Sevy, Yen Nitro & Travis Lanham. In which Gambit and Feint go to New Orleans to see if Candra knows what Selene is up to with the Externals. On the one hand, this does actually do something useful: it follows up on Feint becoming a proper X-Man, of sorts, in Dark X-Men<\/em>, and on Gambit taking her with him at the end of the issue. Basically Candra explains that Selene is planning to sacrifice a bunch of mutants so that she and her allies can become invulnerable as well as immortal. Well, at least we’re advancing the plot, but bringing in yet more characters to do so only compounds this arc’s lack of focus, and the book still has the basic problem that – with the exception of a couple of characters created independently and retconned into the group – the Externals simply aren’t interesting. If you’re going to bring back a concept that’s been largely ignored or used simply as a plot device for a quarter century, you need a compelling case about what it is that everyone else has missed, and this arc doesn’t have one.<\/p>\n

FALL OF THE HOUSE OF X #3.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Well. I mean, I’ve read worse. But it’s not good, and as an anchor series paying off a whole era of the X-Men it’s really<\/em> not good. I’m inclined to give the creators the benefit of the doubt that some sort of backstage chaos has been going on, given oddities like entire trailed storylines going missing, cliffhangers not connecting with the next issue and such like. Or Alia Gregor turning out to be important to the plot of this series when basically nobody has done anything with her in a year or more, even though X-Men<\/em>‘s “Fall of X” issues seem to have been marking time with Latverian filler. Or… you get the idea.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

But what we’ve got is a clunky, arbitrary-seeming book where stuff just happens because it’s time for the heroes to win now. It’s full of pay-offs that haven’t really been built to and don’t land. It’s a book where mutants with no flight powers think that skydiving in from orbit might be a good idea, even though they’ve got a mass teleporter on hand from the previous page<\/em>. It’s a book where Magik decides that the best way to give Cyclops his visor is to throw it to him, even though he has his eyes tightly shut. It’s a book where Firestar is somehow reconciled with Emma because, again, it’s time now. The bit with Alia and Nimrod at the end kind of works, and there are other bits that might have landed better if they’d actually been built to. But it’s weak, and it feels hopelessly last-minute.<\/p>\n

DEAD X-MEN #3.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> The Dominion\/Moira side of the plot, over in Rise of the Powers of X<\/em> has seemed much less chaotic, and Dead X-Men<\/em> has the good fortune of tying into that side of things. This is by far the weakest issue to date, though. It’s clear by this point that Foxe doesn’t really have anything to say about any of the cast except perhaps Prodigy, and that most of the group are straightforwardly replaceable. What’s more, seven pages are devoted to the cast simply debating whether they ought to advance the plot and eventually agreeing that, yes, yes, they should probably advance the plot. You’d think the plot here would be the X-Men pursuing Moira back through her lives in reverse order on their way to the final destination, but no, it’s just randomly sequenced cameos and a lengthy conversation. It’s an issue of filler, in a 4-issue mini that shouldn’t need one.<\/p>\n

WOLVERINE #45.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Given how abysmally “Sabretooth War” started, I’m more than a little surprised to find myself saying that this is the best X-book of the week. The arc seems to have got the ultraviolence out of its system and it seems to be getting to some sort of point about the relationship between Sabretooth and Wolverine. It’s still some way distant from the previous Sabretooth arcs from the Krakoa period, but it’s entirely fine<\/em>, and seems to have a clear idea of what it’s doing, and it’s the sort of week where that’s enough.<\/p>\n

All this, of course, comes to an end soon with the new administration in town. We’re obviously going for a much more traditional and small-c conservative take on the X-Men, which was always to be expected. That’s just what the X-books do after their experimental phases, and the Krakoa model was so far removed from any version of the X-Men that Marvel would have movie plans for that a reversion to the mean was always inevitable. From the creators announced so far, I’m expecting some pretty decent books in a less ambitious line. Who knows, maybe we’re finally going to get that “mutants try to claim a place in the real world” angle that I hoped for when X-Men Gold<\/em> relocated the Mansion to Central Park. That’s never really been done. I can’t honestly say I’m excited about any of these books so far, but on paper they sound like they ought to be solid if nothing else.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #130. By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Phillip Sevy, Yen Nitro & Travis Lanham. In which Gambit and Feint go to New Orleans to see if Candra knows what Selene is up to with the Externals. On the one hand, this does actually do something useful: it follows up on Feint becoming […]<\/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-9928","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\/9928","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=9928"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9928\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9929,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9928\/revisions\/9929"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}