Housekeeping
Just a quick note to say that posts are likely to be running behind schedule for the next couple of weeks, so don’t expect annotations on day of release right now.
X-Men #3 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-MEN vol 7 #3
“Scott Summers vs. The United States of America”
Writer: Jed MacKay
Penciller: Ryan Stegman
Inkers: JP Mayer & Livesay
Colourist: Marte Gracia
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
THE X-MEN:
Cyclops tries unsuccessfully to persuade Rogue not to attack Graymalkin; we’ll see Rogue’s side of that conversation in Uncanny X-Men vol 6 #2, which won’t be out for two weeks. Cyclops is clearly aware of the fact that Graymalkin has been turned into a prison over in Uncanny X-Men and thinks that Rogue’s group are hopelessly outpowered by whoever’s in charge of it. Scott evidently had plans of his own to deal with this, and he’s going to have to accelerate them now.
At some point between the end of Krakoa and issue #1, Scott sued the US government over his treatment by Orchis. For some reason, he accepted the Factory as a settlement. So yes, the X-Men are there legally. Scott acknowledges that there was an “implication” that the US government expected the X-Men to stay in Alaska, but seems clear that he never agreed to anything. His ultimate position is that the US government would much rather his group were acting as the X-Men than acting as the Brotherhood, and those are the only two choices he’s offering them. He argues that he’s doing the government a favour by keeping his roster under control, and flags how dodgy they are: most of them are former villains, and Magik’s half demon.
The X-Axis – w/c 21 May 2024
This shouldn’t take long.
X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #140. By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Nick Roche, Yen Nitro & Travis Lanham. Well, if nothing else, we’ve reached the final boss phase. And a giant Selene made of blood is at least a strong image. But it’s pretty much just random fighting at this stage. Hey, speaking of which…
FALL OF THE HOUSE OF X #5. (Annotations here.) So there you go. We’re not quite at the end of the Krakoan era. There’s still Rise of the Powers of X #5 and one final issue of X-Men to go (oh, and a couple of stray issues of Wolverine and Ms Marvel). But this is the end of Orchis, 2019-2024.
In many ways people are right to say that this is the strongest issue of Fall of the House of X. The art feels more polished and epic than in earlier issues; the pieces that needed to be yanked into place were already there. Now, the book can go out with the X-Men defeating Orchis by restoring Omega Sentinel’s real personality, and defeating Nimrod. We can just get on with the fight scene. And Nimrod does look good here.
Service announcement
No annotations this week and next, because I’m on holiday. I’ll do a weekly review round up at some point over the next couple of days, though, and the next Incomplete Wolverine will be up on Sunday, covering 2014. There should also be a new House to Astonish episode coming up shortly.
Normal service will be resumed in two weeks time.
Housekeeping
Just for anyone wondering, the rest of this week’s posts are probably going to wind up slipping a week or so. I’ll catch up in due course.
House to Astonish Presents: The Lightning Round Episode 12
On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me… twelve lightnings striking!
It’s time for the latest episode of our reread podcast covering Marvel’s most wanted, the Thunderbolts, and we’re looking at issues 31-33 of the original run of the book. This is the end of series cocreator Kurt Busiek’s run as writer, so we’ve got a little tear in our eye as we revisit Arnim Zola From Work, the Marvel Universe’s most deadly drug and Citizen V’s emoji mask.
The podcast is here, or available via the embedded player below. Let us know what you think, in the comments below, on Twitter, via email or on our Facebook fan page. And don’t forget to go one post down to cast your votes for the 2022 Homies!
Meanwhile, some housekeeping…
It’s obvious to anyone that Twitter is at the very least becoming unstable and unreliable, and quite possibly on its way to uselessness and/or implosion. I can see that a fair amount of traffic comes to this site directly from Twitter, so it’s clearly time to make contingency plans. I’d like to imagine that most of you who come here via Twitter would probably just check in regularly anyway, but let’s assume that’s not the case or that there’s a convenience issue for you.
That’s why this post exists: to invite comments from you, YES YOU, on the alternatives.
You can find the same links on Hive, where I’m @ifdestroyed, and on my Mastodon account https://mas.to/@ifdestroyed.
But… I don’t honestly think either of those platforms is going to replace Twitter (or that they could cope with the infrastructure and moderation demands if they did), and I don’t know how much use any of you are likely to make of them. And if you’re going to check in on them once a week to see what I’ve posted there… well, you might as well just come here in the first place.
I have also have accounts as @ifdestroyed on Post.News and Cohost which are currently dormant. If there’s a lot of you out there who’d actually find it helpful for me to post links on those platforms then let me know.
The other option is Substack. Using that just to send out alerts of a new post seems a bit clunky, but I could do a weekly round-up, maybe with a bit of extra material thrown in. Or I could go the whole hog and have every post on Substack as well as on here.
Thoughts?
X-Men Red #7 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-MEN RED vol 2 #7
“The Winning Side”
Writer: Al Ewing
Artist: Stefano Caselli
Colour artists: Federico Blee & Fer Sifuentes-Sujo
Letterer & production: Ariana Maher
Design: Tom Muller
Editor: Jordan D White
COVER / PAGE 1. Storm fights Isca in the Great Ring chamber. This is another Judgment Day tie-in.
PAGE 2. Obituary for Mike Pasciullo.
PAGES 3-7. The aftermath of Magneto’s battle with Uranos.
Issue #6 ended with Storm, Magneto & co setting off to confront Uranos. Magneto defeated Uranos in A.X.E.: Judgment Day #4, and this picks up directly from the end of that scene. (Despite what it says on the recap page, at least the vast majority of this story takes place during Judgment Day #4, not after Judgment Day #5.)
“You have new gods now.” This comes from the end of Magneto’s speech to the human ambassadors in House of X #1.
Resurrection. In issue #4, Magneto and Storm both destroyed their backups in order to disavow the possibility of resurrection, and prove themselves to their Arakkii colleagues. Magneto’s refusal to waver on this in his last moments was something that impressed the Progenitor in Judgment Day #4. Storm is clearly less wedded to the idea – at least when it becomes a reality – and immediately proposes resurrecting Magneto even without the benefit of a backup. She seems clear that this would work, despite having presented the backup deletion as a crucial factor in issue #4. Presumably she’s anticipating the return of a blank-slate Magneto in that situation.
House to Astonish Presents The Lightning Round Episode 10
It’s the big 25th issue spectacular, and there are 25 supervillains just waiting to make the Tbolts’ lives harder (because they’ve been having such an easy time of it up until now), so we’ve got an extra-big bumper special episode for you, as we take on issues 24-26. Waffle Christ cereal! Mark McGwire vs peeing the bed! Me not connecting the mic properly so I sound like I’m talking through a megaphone from across the room!
The episode is here, or here on Mixcloud, or available via the embedded player below. Let us know what you think, in the comments, on Twitter, via email or on our Facebook fan page. And hey! Has there ever been a better time to buy a House to Astonish t-shirt at our Redbubble store? I don’t think there has, and I’m the guy who asked the question, so you know I’m not biased!
X-Men Unlimited Infinity Comic #41
X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #41
“Birthday Side Quest”
Writer & artist: Jason Loo
Letterer: Joe Sabino
Editor: Lauren Amaro
It feels like only yesterday that I reviewed Jason Loo’s last single-issue Unlimited story, the one where Lila Cheney went speed dating. Actually, that was issue #28, and it came out in March…but it took me a while to get around to reviewing it.
This is very much in the same vein. It’s Jubilee’s birthday; she invites her former teammates from Generation X to join her in a fantasy-themed escape room. You might wonder whether Jubilee doesn’t have any other friends than the people she hung out with in a series from more than twenty years ago, who she might want to spend her birthday with… but then again, most of the candidates are currently in Knights of X, so maybe she doesn’t. Anyway, Jubilee wants to do it in full cosplay, and nobody else is really on board with that. And only about half the team show up, though that’s probably a good move given how many characters that would be.
If you remember the Lila Cheney story, you probably know where this is heading. There’s a bit of light comedy. Loo’s art is really good at that kind of thing – one thing this story does really well is make these characters look like old friends hanging out. But it’s got the same basic problem as the Lila story – rather than just commit to making “they hang out and that’s entertaining” into a plot, it randomly throws in a bunch of anti-mutant bigots in the second half so that the heroes can beat them up. That’s all a bit generic, and it doesn’t resolve anything that was set up in the first part of the story. Once again, it feels like Loo didn’t actually have an ending for the gentle character comedy he had set up, and just reached for the stock X-Men ending of the Krakoan era.
Yes, I get it, it’s satisfying when the bad guys get beaten up. But it’d be even more satisfying if it had something to do with the first half of the issue.
