{"id":9961,"date":"2024-03-30T17:01:21","date_gmt":"2024-03-30T17:01:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9961"},"modified":"2024-03-30T17:01:21","modified_gmt":"2024-03-30T17:01:21","slug":"the-x-axis-w-c-25-march-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9961","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – w\/c 25 March 2024"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Again, before anyone asks, no, I’m not doing X-Men ’97<\/em>, for essentially the same reasons that I’m not doing Ultimate X-Men<\/em>: it’s not part of the core X-Men line, and it doesn’t interest me enough for me to spend money on it.)<\/p>\n

X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #132.<\/strong> By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Nick Roche, Yen Nitro & Travis Lanham. In this issue, Wiz Kid and Trinary fight off hackers in one of those cyberspace stories that I thought had gone out of fashion twenty years ago. We’re twelve issues into this arc and if there’s meant to be a point to any of it beyond killing time with a farewell tour of Krakoan D-listers, I honestly have not got the slightest clue what it is. I’m afraid my patience has run out.<\/p>\n

RISE OF THE POWERS OF X #3.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> The Rise<\/em> half of this event continues to feel much more coherent than\u00a0Fall<\/em>, without the same sense of last-minute changes of plan being accommodated. Perhaps any changes hit the other side more extensively – maybe this plotline was always going to pay off around now, or it’s been easier to skip to the end by jumping over the failed ascensions of Orbis Stellaris and Dr Stasis. And RB Silva’s art makes this book feel convincingly epic, as well. But for all the epic time travel and cosmic weirdness, this issue is built around Professor X finally getting to confront Moira about the collapse of Krakoa. Which means it’s really a story about how he feels about the compromises he was driven into, and also that Moira gets to be written as something more than a one-dimensional lunatic, an approach which pretty much killed the character after Hickman left. Going back to an earlier version of Moira helps to re-establish her as someone to invest in, and she’s really needed that.<\/p>\n

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X-FORCE #50.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> The final issue of X-Force<\/em>, the one book to make it from the start of the Krakoan era to the end with the same writer and numbering. And it’s, er, a bit of an anticlimax. This is meant to be the pay off for the two Beasts confronting one another, and I suppose the heart of it is meant to be the older Beast getting himself killed in some sort of last-minute twinge of conscience after seeing his younger self and Wonder Man. But if that’s the idea then the moment isn’t played very effectively, and an obvious back door involving some ambiguity about which Beast dies achieves nothing beyond creating confusion and undercutting the story. X-Force themselves are given a marginal role in their final issue, and the pacing decisions towards the end are utterly baffling – this reads like a book that was written in the expectation of an issue #51, and has to rush its climax and shoehorn absurd amounts of exposition into the epilogue. I’ve always found X-Force<\/em> hit or miss, but there have been plenty of hits along the way. This is a miss.<\/p>\n

WOLVERINE #46.<\/strong> (Annotations here.)<\/a> Fortunately, this is much better, as “Sabretooth War” has move on from the shock tactics and developed into a fairly sane Sabretooth\/Wolverine story. Since they’ve been kept apart for the entire Krakoan era, this is actually somewhat fresh. And if there’s nothing radically different in the approach, there’s at least an unusual emphasis in playing up the love side of Sabretooth’s love-hate relationship with his nemesis. There’s remarkably little Wolverine in this arc, in fact – the focus is overwhelmingly on Sabretooth – but that’s working out just fine. Cory Smith’s art handles the split screen gimmick, with the same events shown in real-world and illusory form, quite nicely. It’s a bit of a surprise to see the Exiles get torn apart quite this swiftly, but by the nature of those characters, they really shouldn’t<\/em> be able to put up much of a fight against Sabretooth if it doesn’t suit his interests to keep them around.<\/p>\n

CABLE #3.<\/strong> By Fabian Nicieza, Scot Eaton, Lan Medina, Cam Smith, Java Tartagliana & Joe Sabino. This miniseries remains way off in the fringes of Fall of X<\/em>, doing its own thing, which has worked out just fine for it. One thing about the earlier issues was that Cable’s alarm about Henri Parvenu’s steps towards a unified human race didn’t seem entirely convincing. But it works better with this issue. What Nicieza seems to be going for is that the older Cable thinks he’s doing “kill Hitler as a baby”, despite the fact that all the people he identifies as villains seem to be genuinely well intentioned, while the younger Cable has been giving him the benefit of the doubt without actually being persuaded at all. Granted, I’m not sure that having the younger Cable turn on the older one is that strong a twist – he did<\/em> debut by killing his older self, so it’s nothing really new for him – but at least it’s coming together.<\/p>\n

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(Again, before anyone asks, no, I’m not doing X-Men ’97, for essentially the same reasons that I’m not doing Ultimate X-Men: it’s not part of the core X-Men line, and it doesn’t interest me enough for me to spend money on it.) X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #132. By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Nick Roche, Yen […]<\/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-9961","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\/9961","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=9961"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9961\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9963,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9961\/revisions\/9963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}