The X-Axis – w/c 15 April 2024
X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #135. By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Phillip Sevy, Yen Nitro & Travis Lanham. Well, apparently we’re going with Sunspot versus Gideon as a huge showdown that everyone’s been waiting for. And… I mean, it’s a storyline from thirty years ago that hardly ever comes up. Even I barely remember anything about it. Seemed like a big deal in early X-Force, never came to anything much? Something like that. At any rate, it’s the sort of continuity reference that’s fine for a bit of background colour but hardly carries the weight of being the hook for an issue. You’re going to have to work a lot harder than this to persuade me to care about Gideon in 2024.
FALL OF THE HOUSE OF X #4. (Annotations here.) Fall of the House of X is feeling a little more coherent than it was when it started, but it’s still not pulling off the epic feel. Apocalypse rounding up mutants to sacrifice themselves to kickstart Krakoa – okay, that kind of works. It’s the sort of thing that you can imagine making sense to Apocalypse and some of the guys from Arakko. But the material with the X-Men and Orchis just feels rather rushed. The art doesn’t give a sense of a grand scale, the plot feels truncated, and the whole thing is just rough around the edges. It’s like reading an outline.
DEAD X-MEN #4. (Annotations here.) Not a great week, this. The final issue of Dead X-Men is okay at best, but doesn’t stand up to much thought. You can see how this miniseries made sense as a pitch. The X-Men who died at the Hellfire Gala get a chance to be a team; we visit some of Moira’s past lives; and it can all feed in to Rise of the Powers of X around the edges. It looks decent enough and it has a reasonable shot of providing closure by looping us back to the first issue. But… aside from Prodigy, literally any bunch of characters could have been in this series, and the book never finds anything much to do with its specific set of characters. Ideally you’d want this book to make a case for its cast as a great lost X-roster, and it doesn’t do that. And the plot mechanics boil down to some arbitrary stuff happening in order to bring about a result which arbitrarily advances the plot of Rise. It’s not like anything very meaningful happened during the visits to Moira’s past lives, and I just don’t buy that anything was actually learned from the exercise.
I think having Sunspot fight Gideon makes sense. All you really need to know is Gideon killed Roberto’s father and Roberto never got a chance for closure.
The preview for X-Men Forever 2 is out:
https://aiptcomics.com/2024/04/19/marvel-preview-x-men-forever-2/
It makes it clear that Xavier appearing to turn traitor is part of the plan.
Note that Xavier asks Hope to bring back the X-Men that have been killed. I guess there IS going to be one last resurrection and that explains how Warren, Daken, Toad, Rockslide, etc. come back from the dead.
Note that Xavier asks Hope to bring back the X-MEN that have been killed, not the mutants. Does this mean that obscure characters like Solarr, Snot and Lourdes Chantel won’t be brought back? Or Xavier just counting all mutants as X-Men now (like Kate did in her conversation with Woofer)?
One thing bothers me. Will Azazel be brought back with the rest of the mutants? I mean, if Xavier does choose to bring back the non-X-Men mutants, presumably he’ll include people like Solarr and Snot. Yes, they’re villains but Alex, Maddie and Remy promised them protection from Orchis and a properly characterized Xavier would honor that promise. But Azazel is arguably too dangerous to be brought back. Plus, I can’t see Destiny agreeing to resurrect Azazel considering all that she went through to make sure Kurt stopped him. Also, it seemed like Dark X-Men was meant to get rid of him permanently.
OTOH, it’s possible that he gets brought back and promptly killed by Mystique and/or Destiny.
It’s not so much that people don’t remember the story, it’s that surely nobody cares. It was a terrible story that’s had virtually no impact on any character. It was just one more cameo murder in the Extreme era. But as I said elsewhere, it is nice to see Sunspot take charge and direct the story *somewhere*, even if it’s somewhere not very interesting. It could have been Sunspot playing chess with the rest of the cast from the start, and this story would have felt a bit less random and pointless, but never mind.
Breevort said on his blog that there will be more series launching in September and October, although some of these might be miniseries.