The X-Axis – 3 March 2025
No Infinite Comic this week, so we’re left with…
UNCANNY X-MEN #11. (Annotations here.) We have the first three parts of “X-Manhunt” this week, which is the sort of thing that happens these days if you want to do a line wide crossover and don’t want it to last months on end. I was slightly surprised to see Tom Brevoort’s comment in today’s newsletter that “as you’d expect, reactions so far have been mixed”, considering that it’s a product he’s still in the course of promoting. He went on to say that everyone seemed to have liked at least one of the three chapters, mind you, and that may well be a fair summary of where we are after the first week.
The storyline is basically that Professor X breaks out of jail in order to save Xandra, the daughter he barely knows, and then goes on a little tour of the X-books in order to pick up the resources he needs in order to actually get to the Shi’ar Empire. The resulting three books are rather better as standalone issues than they are as a coherent whole, because… well, they’re an incoherent whole. The big set piece of part 1 is to establish that Xavier is hallucinating in a big way, that he doesn’t recognise Rogue’s team, and that he sees them as the original X-Men – who he brushes aside without much difficulty. But in the other two parts this entire plot thread is totally missing. It’s at best confusing and makes it hard for the overall storyline to generate much momentum.
Wolverine #7 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
WOLVERINE vol 8 #7
“Ancient History”
Writer: Saladin Ahmed
Artist: Martín Cóccolo
Colour artist: Bryan Valenza
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso
WOLVERINE
Not much to say, really. He fights some people, listens to Romulus rant, and vouches for some of what Romulus says so that we know that there’s a core we should take seriously.
GUEST STAR
Wolverine (Laura Kinney). She’s there in the fight scene but doesn’t contribute much to the plot beyond that.
VILLAINS
Romulus. The story cuts through his garbled and confusing history by having Laura describe him as “the guy who claims to have founded Rome” and “to be the origin of our bloodline”, and immediately having Logan say that “Most of it’s lies and head games.” In other words, all that really matters for present purposes is that he makes these grandiose and self-mythologising claims about himself, which are probably (but not definitively) false. The story does seem to want us to accept that he’s been around since the classical era but it doesn’t greatly matter whether we believe his claim to be the mythological Romulus, co-founder and first king of Rome. Wolverine certainly believes that he’s been around since “before Jesus was born”.
Storm #6 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
STORM vol 5 #6
“X-Manhunt, part 3: Thundercloud”
Writer: Murewa Ayodele
Artist: Luciano Vecchio
Colour artists: Alex Guimarães & Rachelle Rosenberg
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Tom Brevoort
This is part 3 of the “X-Manhunt” crossover. We skipped issue #5, because it came out in a massively overloaded week.
STORM
And since we skipped last issue, a recap might be useful. In issue #1, Storm contracted radiation poisoning. In issue #3, she’s cured by the evil spirit Eégún in exchange for her agreeing to refrain from using her powers for a week. In issue #4, she breaks that deal to save an innocent from Dr Doom, and is immediately struck dead. In issue #5, she is resurrected by Eternity, and becomes his host. (It wasn’t actually clearly stated in the previous issue that her cosmic persona was Eternity, but this issue clarifies it by referring in passing to Oblivion as “my brother”.) For most of the previous issue, Eternity speaks through Storm and talks about her as if she’s a host body with some residual influence on what he’s doing. In this issue she’s just back to normal, until page 15 when she starts talking in the white-on-blue speech balloons from the previous issue, for no terribly obvious reason.
NYX #9 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
NYX vol 2 #9
“X-Manhunt, part 2: Charles”
Writers: Jackson Lanzing & Collin Kelly
Artist: Francesco Mortarino
Colour artist: Raúl Angulo
Letterer: Joe Sabino
Editor: Annalise Bissa
This issue is part of the “X-Manhunt” crossover, and also a tie-in to One World Under Doom (though that’s not billed on the cover). And it’s also the penultimate issue before cancellation with issue #10. So a lot to do.
THE CORE CAST.
Sophie Cuckoo. Her powers have returned to an extent, but she says they’re “still glitching half the time.”
She’s still playing Summoner, which was previously mentioned in issue #6 as a game that she’d become obsessed with after losing her powers in issue #5; it was indicated that she was spending more time on the chat function than actually playing the game, and we learn here that she’s talking to someone called TarnishedMoodRing who seems to be a boyfriend. The art indicates that the game has Krakoan-era mutant iconography – at least in a meta sense, with the graphics using the font that we as readers recognise from Krakoan-era logos, and what looks to be a version of the Marauders symbol.
Uncanny X-Men #11 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
UNCANNY X-MEN vol 6 #11
“X-Manhunt, part 1: Echoes of Madness”
Writer: Gail Simone
Artist: Javier Garrón
Colour artist: Matthew Wilson
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
This is part of the “X-Manhunt” crossover, which ships its first three chapters in a single week. It doesn’t come up in this issue, but part two establishes that One World Under Doom is also in full flow at this point. The plot of that series basically involves Doom getting all national governments to pledge allegiance to him, presumably through magical means, which is why the normal day-to-day authorities are continuing to operate.
THE X-MEN:
Rogue. Despite running the cuddly X-Men team, she’s becoming worried that everyone is treating their training exercise as a game, and that it’s actually making people complacent – the Outliers in particular. In classic Claremont fashion, her solution to this problem is to have Gambit chuck an exploding card at one of the group in the middle of a training session which has been specifically described to the kids as a game. Gambit sides with her on this, and doesn’t even seem particularly bothered about it. Wolverine says that he understands but seems a bit less convinced.
Daredevil Villains #47: Brother Zed
DAREDEVIL #130 (February 1976)
“Look Out, DD – Here Comes the Death-Man!”
Writer, editor: Marv Wolfman
Penciler: Bob Brown
Inker: Klaus Janson
Colourist: Michele Wolfman
Letterer: John Costanza
Once again, we’ve skipped some issues. Issues #126-127 are the debut of the Torpedo, a rookie rival superhero who does the obligatory misunderstanding-and-fight routine. He actually had some legs: he returns in issue #134 as a supporting character, then gets a try-out as a solo hero in Marvel Premiere , and finally winds up as a supporting character in Rom. But he’s not a villain, so he’s outside our remit. Issue #128 is another Death-Stalker story. And issue #129 brings back the Man-Bull.
In fact, focussing on the new villains will give us a rather unrepresentative view of Marv Wolfman’s run. He’s the first writer who seems to have looked at Daredevil’s pre-established rogue’s gallery and deemed them to be basically serviceable. There are only a handful of new villains in his run. And one of them is a very big name, but we’ll get to him.
It’s not that Wolfman didn’t create new characters for the book. He absolutely did, but they were mostly supporting characters. As well as the Torpedo, the issues we’ve skipped introduce Daredevil’s new love interest, Heather Glenn. We might not have much reason to talk about her here for a while, since her first major storyline involves the Purple Man, but she’s a major character who’ll stick around well into the 1980s. At this point, she’s a sort of prototype manic pixie dream girl.
The X-Axis – w/c 24 February 2025
ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #12. By Tim Seeley, Edoardo Audino, KJ Díaz, Clayton Cowles, Darren Shan. So the thing about Black Tom going mad turns out to be a teaser for another storyline, which was perhaps inevitable given how much he’d been kept to the margins of the story after the set-up. What that leaves us with is a Juggernaut rehabilitation story with some very nice art but which feels like it’s way, way too late – the Juggernaut first joined the X-Men over twenty years ago, for heaven’s sake! Even his last run as a villain ended before Krakoa. This would be a good story if it wasn’t so detached from where the Juggernaut actually is right now, but… well, that’s a problem, isn’t it?
X-MEN #12. (Annotations here.) Mmm. I know Jed MacKay is Canadian, and I know this is kind of the status quo that was inherited from the previous editorial office, and I even think the new Vindicator is an interesting character, but… Canada is the North American country where the people who opposed Orchis are still in jail? Canada? Seriously? Because I don’t think you can do that story in 2025. At a bare minimum, it’s extremely tone deaf. At worst… look, I realise there are lead in times involved here and so forth, but my gut reaction to the whole angle was still a strong one. This sort of dissonance is likely to be an increasing problem for the X-books and Marvel in general in the coming months and years as the lead-in time issue fades away and the reality of writing X-Men stories for Disney under the second Trump administration sinks in – and I have a sinking feeling about how I’m going to feel about that. Maybe the creators will have a better idea of how to thread that needle. None of which is really a direct reflection on this issue, of course. But look, it’s the main thing I was left thinking about.
Hellverine #3 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
HELLVERINE vol 2 #3
“The Devil’s Orphan”
Writer: Benjamin Percy
Artist: Raffaele Ienco
Colour artist: Bryan Valenza
Letterer: Ravis Lanham
Editor: Mark Basso
HELLVERINE:
Mephisto has been taking locations where Akihiro suffered “great personal tragedy” and turning them into places that corrupt mutants in the vicinity and make them into serial killers. The incident at X-Force’s Greenhouse last issue was one of these places, the significance apparently being that Akihiro died there rather than anything to do with the mechanics of his resurrection.
It’s not entirely clear whether the people affected by these locations need to have any awareness of the relevant events; the people at the Greenhouse and Jasmine Falls presumably did, but it seems more likely that Mephisto is just somehow weaponising Akihiro’s emotional link to these places. At any rate, this means that Akihiro has to sort the problem out for magical reasons, rather than just handing the whole issue over to the experts.
X-Men #12 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-MEN vol 7 #12
“Work Release”
Writer: Jed MacKay
Penciller: Netho Diaz
Inkers: Sean Parsons & John Livesay
Colourist: Fer Sifuentes-Sujo
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
THE X-MEN:
Cyclops. The alien mercenaries want him so that he can be used as a hostage to keep Phoenix under control – or at any rate, that’s what they understand that their unnamed employer wants. For once, he doesn’t really contribute a great deal to the X-Men’s victory, but he remains as calmly confident as ever while waiting for his team to sort it out. He offers to break Alpha Flight out of jail if they want, but seems to regard it as their choice whether to play along with Department H.
Juggernaut. He can be stopped with “inertia foam” – since he isn’t as powerful as he used to be, presumably he isn’t literally unstoppable any more. It’s also possible that the foam doesn’t completely stop him but slows his progress to such an extent that it comes to the same thing in the heat of battle.
The X-Axis – w/c 17 February 2025
ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #11. By Tim Seeley, Edoardo Audino, KJ Díaz & Clayton Cowles. So we have an absolutely ridiculous number of X-books out this week. Perhaps they’re trying to get through stuff before One World Under Doom gets fully under way. Maybe they needed to get some things done before the “X-Manhunt” crossover. Or maybe they knew they were announcing a bunch of cancellations this week and thought that if they put out ten X-books in a single week then the news would come as a blessed relief.
Look: I had no problem with the end of the Krakoan era. With the number of titles set there, I think there was a decent argument to be made that it had run its course, or at least that it was time to quit while they were ahead. And frankly, the post-Hickman back end of the Krakoan era was seriously patchy. Still, whatever came after it was always going to struggle to have the same impact. I think Tom Brevoort took a basically sensible approach in the circumstances by not even trying to compete on the “high concept” front and just going for a broad range of mostly standalone titles instead. I’m largely sympathetic to what the current office is trying to do, and there are some genuinely good books in the line. But we’ve got ten X-books this week and I’d struggle to recommend more than two, maybe three. That’s not a good hit rate.
