The X-Axis – w/c 22 July 2024
X-MEN: FROM THE ASHES INFINITY COMIC #7. By Alex Paknadel, Phillip Sevy, Arthur Hesli & Clayton Cowles. Since they aren’t keeping the “From the Ashes” branding beyond the first few months, I suppose this is also going to be renamed or relaunched at some point? It certainly seems as if it has a specific remit at the moment, which is to bridge the gap between old and new status quos while saving the regular titles the hassle of taking up time on it. This is the first part of a Havok storyline, seemingly designed to explain why he’s not looking dead any more in the upcoming X-Factor book. There are worse ways to use the Unlimited books, and it’s a better solution than just saying “we’ll come back to that later” when telling that story isn’t really a top priority for the new books. This first part is basically set-up: Madelyne’s attempts to heal Havok still aren’t really working, and eventually the demon who’s charged with looking after him takes pity on the guy and tells him that they could sort him out properly in Limbo. It’s got a job to do and it’s decently entertaining along the way.
DEADPOOL VS. WOLVERINE: SLASH ‘EM UP INFINITY COMIC #6. By Christos Gage, Alan Robinson, Carlos Lopez & Joe Sabino. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but there’s a Deadpool and Wolverine film out. I guess somebody’s sat down and run the numbers and decided that it makes more sense to take advantage of that by commissioning random new Deadpool/Wolverine stories for Unlimited rather than promoting decent ones that already exist, but it seems odd to me. This is the concluding part of a functional mini which elevates itself with a few good moments but doesn’t actually have much going on under the surface. It’s absolutely fine, it has a nice enough ending, but it’s still hard to see why it’d be of much interest beyond completists like me.
DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE: WWIII #3. By Joe Kelly, Adam Kubert, Frank Martin & Joe Sabino. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but there’s a Deadpool and Wolverine film out… Mind you, this three-issue miniseries is a bit more understandable as a tie-in commission. After all, Kelly is a key Deadpool writer, and Kubert is a big name artist. It winds up as the sort of book where I feel vaguely guilty for not liking it more. It’s ambitious, at least in its storytelling, and the art is often spectacular. It doesn’t go for the easy option of playing the hits, and tries to do something about Deadpool’s quest for self-improvement instead. But it’s a book I find easier to admire than to actually enjoy. It’s not always easy to follow, and the underlying ideas seem quite familiar, with what seems to be a dash of meta about audience expectations thrown in. It’s an interesting book, yet it never really engages me.
WOLVERINE: BLOOD HUNT #4. By Tom Waltz, Juan José Ryp, Guru-eFX & Joe Caramagna. This is the end of the tie-in miniseries, which was at least twice as long as the plot merited. If you want to see a bit of good old fashioned decompression, then I guess this is it – it certainly allows room for the art to breathe and let the fight scenes play out, and that’s something. But there’s not really much to it, and the story ends by hitting the reset button in underwhelming fashion. If it wasn’t the umpteenth heroes-versus-vampires series of the moment then I might be a bit more receptive to it, but in this context it’s just More Of This.
NYX #1. (Annotations here.) So this was pretty good! This seems to be the street level book with mutants living in the real world among the humans. I’ve wanted Marvel to do more stories in that vein for years, so I’m perfectly happy with that as a premise – I think it’s a massively underexplored angle, all the stronger for the implied contrast with Krakoa as the previous status quo. I liked Collin Kelly and Jackson Lanzing on Guardians of the Galaxy, I found their Captain America run a bit too high concept for my tastes. This is more character driven, though, and plays to their strengths. It’s a good selection of characters, which finds a good role for Ms Marvel as the mutant with no first-hand attachment to Krakoa, and Francesco Mortarino’s art strikes the right tone while finding a few moments to switch things up – he really does a good job of selling Ms Marvel crossing town Spider-Man style. There are a couple of odd character beats and Anole feels like he’s been shoehorned into the first issue because he’s a regular, but I figure Kelly and Lenzing know where they’re going. (The silly QR code pages need to go, though.)
“I don’t know if you’ve heard, but there’s a Deadpool and Wolverine film out…”
LOL. I bet they’ve spent as much on marketing as on the actual film at this point. I hope it revives the general public’s interest in superhero movies, or the studios are going to get *really* desperate.
What does “too high concept” mean in this pr any context?
So the question is why can’t Maddie be told about this “cure” for Havok?
It’s probably Nastirh or old Storm or someone like that who doesn’t want Maddie to be aware of them.
Or it’s a trap. He is a demon after all, just because he likes Havok doesn’t mean he won’t betray him.
I recently reread Joe Kelly’s Deadpool run for the first time in a couple decades, and while he has some truly fantastic standout issues, there are some that lay the groundwork of so much of his bizarre and meandering work to come. Like Paul, I appreciate the fact he never seems satisfied to tell a straightforward story – ambition counts for something, I guess – but almost all his “experimentations” are interesting failures, and sometimes they’re not even interesting.
@Chris As I understand it “high concept” is a work that has a premise which can be summed up in a single sentence, such as “snakes on a plane” or “all the Marvel heroes are fighting vampires”, and that sentence pretty much tells you all you need to know. “Too high concept”, I guess, is when it turns out there really is nothing else to the story. I’ve not read Collin Kelly’s Captain America, though, so I don’t know how it applies to that.
@Josie: IIRC, Kelly said that he tried and dropped a number of plots, especially early on, and that contributes to the sense of meandering. For instance, Taskmaster and later Deathtrap were each intended as archenemies for Deadpool, but Kelly wasn’t happy with his execution of their actions, so he quickly dropped the idea. Those issues come across as pretty random and unsatisfying in retrospect.
I think the other archfoe, T-Ray, was also convoluted, since Kelly’s take on Deadpool was that he was fairly self-deluded about his rottenness. It was also a bit hard to grasp what T-Ray’s powers and codename were about. Kelly also tends to present these kinds of genre concepts indirectly or elliptically.
Kelly’s Deadpool also a book that had an especially well-regarded “high concept” one-off issue early in its run: #11, the one that repurposes a Silver Age Spider-Man story. But some of the other high-concept stuff didn’t work as well.
The book was at its best when it managed to play with the ridiculousness of superhero comics while also questioning the 90s antihero archetype, asking whether self-loathing is the same thing as real accountability, and more generally asking some tough questions about the whole “traumatized, false memories, 90s antihero” thing.
It was at its worst when Kelly tried to put a spin on other 90s-style superhero plots, especially “mysterious” characters with teased-out motivations. Did anyone really care about Landau, Luckman, and Lake?
The high concept of the Lanzing and Kelly Cap run: Cap’s shield does not actually symbolize America, but a cabal that secretly runs the world from their flying shield-shaped headquarters.
However, Cap is able to reclaim his shield as a symbol because the shield secretly encodes the key to the cabal’s defeat.
Might be a bit too straightforward even for an MCU movie?
Kelly’s Deadpool faced the same dilemma as all the succeeding runs.As Mark Waid put it, he would have never written a Deadpool limited series if he knew how rotten Deadpool was. Wade kills people for money and he’s horribly abusive to people he considers friends like Vanessa and Blind Al. So it’s hard to make the readers care about him. (And this gets worse when actual heroes tolerate him instead of sending him to jail.) At least Kelly tried to grapple with this dilemma instead of focusing on wacky fourth wall hijinks. (Kelly introduced the fourth wall breaking but used it sparingly.)
(The T-Ray stuff, though, was a mistake because it convoluted Wade’s origin, which had previously been a relatively straightforward “merc gets cancer and goes to Weapon X for experimental cure”.)
Later writers have struggled to grapple with the consequences of Wade’s violence without cheating. So we got attempts to make readers forget about Wade’s murder of Phil Coisoun by turning Phil into a servant of Mephisto (and Phil only now appears to be getting his original personality back) and the Cable limited series revealing that Wade’s murder of Irene Merryweather was erased by Cable through time travel and nobody told the readers, which is why no one mentioned it during the Krakoan Era.
And of course, we get stats quos where Wade is in the Uncanny Avengers in one book and he’s almost killing Ben Reilly just to make a point about the importance of the definite article in another book.
In some ways, I guess this was inevitable, since Wade is based on Deathstroke- Marv Wolfman saw Deathstroke essentially as a victim of circumstance and tended to make excuses for Deathstroke, while Perez saw Deathstroke as a man who was willing to sacrifice his son’s life out of notions of “honor”.
News out of SDCC:
Kwannon will be starring in a Psylocke series written by Alyssa Wong. Greycrow will also appear in this series. It’s not clear yet if it’s a limited series or an ongoing.
Firestar will not be returning to the X-Men but will appear in a new West Coast Avengers series written by Gerry Duggan featuring Tony and Rhodey. The goal will be to redeem supervillains. The first villain they’ll attempt to redeem is Ultron. No word yet on whether this is Mark from Avengers Inc or a different Ultron.
Doom WILL be Sorcerer Supreme following Blood Hunt.
RE: NYX:
I have always been a PASSIONATE fan of the street-level mutant works (RIP District X, gone so long ago and yet not forgotten). And yet they’ve spent more than a decade playing out scenarios that conflict with that kind of book – Decimation, Utopia, Krakoa.
If they’re returning to the idea that mutants are a visible minority in the United States, then I’m glad they’re reckoning with what that means in terms of politics and culture!
My understanding is that it’s the Avengers Inc Ultron.
That Cap story sounds like a parody more than a real story.
The problem with trying to rehabilitate Ultron is that it’ll never stick. Sure, you can have a “good” Ultron just like you can have a “good” Doombot, but you can never fully erase the Ultron core programming in a way which stops the evil Ultron from coming back in some form or another. The best we’ll get is Mark Twelve as a hero until he inevitably sacrifices himself…
Meanwhile, he’s still an incarnation of a killer robot while literally killed an entire country.
I was hoping for a West Coast Avengers a little less ambitious, featuring some of the villains seen in Invincible Iron Man. Sandman, Living Laser, Stilt-Man, Rhino — a few of those have flirted with going legit over the years, there are some others who might lean that way with the right incentive. Not that I hate the lineup described in the WCA description but… it honestly feels like a limited series desperately hoping to get 12 issues in.
You only need one writer or editor to reverse all the work done to rehabilitate a character.
Not to steal the podcasts thunder (pardon the pun), but look at all the work done to rehab Zemo of all people in Thunderbolts and then Brubaker starts on Cap and boom, he’s a heel again.
Same with Flint Marko or half of the Flash’s Rogue Gallery.
I don’t think Zemo’s a good example. Redeeming him was always destined to fail since his philosophy is elitist and fascistic. (See also: Why it’s a bad idea to redeem Apocalypse.) Plus what he did to Edward Whelan was unforgivable. As what everything he put Arnie Roth through, some of which was explicitly homophobic. And of course, torturing Jarvis.
You’re definitely right about Sandman, though.
That one episode of Sqirrel Girl, where Kraven had turned good and became like a belived uncle, but but he told Squirrel Girl that forces outside his control (metacontext) would always drag him back to the darkness even if he didn’t want to. That was poignant.
I think it was the same month that in another comic he was trying to murder Spider-Man again.
More from SDCC:
Psylocke will be an ongoing.
Dani will be popping up somewhere in the X-Titles soon.
We will be seeing more of the New Mutants eventually but some characters will have to wait their turn.
The Beast situation will be addressed.
The inability to permanently rehabilitate Utron is a feature not a bug.
The lack of a permanent status quo for Ultron is the best part.
Ultron Mark 12 spent most of his operational life attempting to make amends with his father, Henry Pym, and was then murdered by Ultron-13. Pym then mourned his dead robot child.
The ongoing Ultron mess is the best part of Sad Pym. Spousal abuse is the worst.
After the Psylocke announcement, I’m officially over the “Brevoort hates diversity” argument.
“That one episode of Sqirrel Girl, where Kraven had turned good and became like a belived uncle, but but he told Squirrel Girl that forces outside his control (metacontext) would always drag him back to the darkness even if he didn’t want to. That was poignant.
I think it was the same month that in another comic he was trying to murder Spider-Man again.”
If I recall correctly, that issue of the Nick Spencer Spider-Man run tipped its hat to the SG plotline: Kraven monologues about how every time he finds peace he inevitably gets dragged back into violence, over a symbolic panel of him lounging in an idyllic forest watching a squirrel climb a tree.
@Si, Joe I- more to the point Spencer’s Kraven story ended with Kraven realizing what a monster he’d become and releasing everyone before killing himself. So Doreen DID get to Kraven!
Sebastian Shaw will be back in Sentinels 2- although from the cover, you’d have a hard time telling it was Shaw.
It seems I didn’t actually read that particular Spider-Man story, or I had it mixed up with another one. It sounds like it was handled a lot better than I thought. Thanks and sorry.
Pym’s spousal abuse is a retcon.
Pym’s battery of his wife is contextually as bad as Peter Parker’s. Whether it canonically means something greater is up to the current writer or the fan’s.
It isn’t a ret-con though, as the same writer (Jim Shooter) wrote both stories dealing with the topic within months of each other. It’s true that in interviews Shooter claims that the artist decided to embellish the scene he wrote (which he said wouldn’t have been so violent), but that was the final product that got published. Shooter said that as soon as he realized what had been published in that issue of Avengers that he had to quickly address it in the next issue of Avengers where Janet files for a divorce.
Hank Pym screaming, “Shut up!” while backhanding Janet across the room as he is building his newest killer robot is well-nigh incontrovertible evidence.
The fact that it wasn’t a ret-con is most likely the reason that interpretation of the scene has stuck with Pym, unlike Parker. DeFalco, being the master writer he is known to be, decided to completely ignore what happened in that scene going forward. Shooter, on the other hand, decided it had done irreparable harm to a superhero (one who was already in the midst of falling from grace, mind).
I’m sure the visibility of each hero and the time period also played a role: Peter Parker is far too valuable a commodity to have Mary Jane divorcing him over spousal abuse compared to Pym, and the 1990s were notorious for shoddy narrative, where the business of clones was far more important than bothering to deal with Peter shouldering aside Mary Jane (without considering his spider-powers). That was called an attempt at “dramatic tension” in a 1990s comic, whereas it was something that would (and did) become a major plot-point in the 1980s.
It’s just a good thing that Mephisto made sure that no such action on the part of Peter Parker ever occurred. If only Pym would have had the good sense to make a deal with the Devil instead of allowing his wife to go to court.
The only scene worse than Pym’s abuse in the annals of Marvel history is Reed slapping Sue in front of Franklin, as their son cheers on the monstrously abusive father, “Hit her again, daddy! I like when you hit mommy!”. It must be such a regular occurrence that the poor boy has ingrained the behaviour.
(I realize this is a completely out-of-context reading of that issue of FF.)
Forgive me if I’ve said this before.
I was going to a do a podcast on Avengers 59-60 (first YJ and the wedding) but it was a very unpleasant read in 2024. Hank has another breakdown, assumes the YJ identity, announced she has killed Hank and is going to marry Jan. She goes along with it because she knows it’s really Hank after he forcibly kisses her.
Sadly, as a kid Hank was my favorite Marvel character, but as I read her earlier stories and how he has been treated in the decades since, it’s hard to like the version Marvel writes. Even with the breakdowns and the abuse, he’s always had this annoying inferiority complex regards Tony and Reed.
@Chris V- But it seemed like that scene was supposed to drive a wedge between Peter and the readers so that the readers would accept Ben Reilly as the new Spider-Man. Remember, Peter leaves a sobbing MJ on the floor and runs off, then joins the Jackal because the Jackal claims he isn’t trying to kill anyone (and doesn’t realize the truth until the very end, even though Kaine says “the Jackal tried to kill me” and Ben says “All I saw was death”, which should have been clues that the Jackal was still killing people.) But DeFalco quickly tried to claim that Peter didn’t realize that he was hitting MJ, even though he was talking to her.
(Weirdly, DeFalco also claimed that Busceme drew Peter hitting MJ more violently that intended.)
But yes, plenty of other heroes have hit their significant others. Ka-Zar hit Shanna and Flash hit Sha-Shan. Professor X started to use his powers to make Amelia Voght change her mind about leaving him.
When Hodge tricked Scott into thinking Jean was the Phoenix, Scott shot his optic beams at Jean with enough force to blow a hole in a wall and was only stopped from killing him by Leech, who was a child at the time. And not only was Scott forgiven for that, the hallucinations he was having in previous issues disappeared. This teaches us the valuable lesson that if you thing you’re having hallucinations, you should physically assault your spouse and they will go away!
Storm stabbed Forge when the Adversary tricked him into thinking Forge was trying to open a portal to a demonic dimension (in reality, Forge was trying to close it,) She didn’t give Forge a chance to explain.
And then there’s Brother Voodoo raping his girlfriend, which everyone seems to have forgotten.
@Thom- Unfortunately, it will never be enough.
On his blog, Breevort says of Heir of Apocalypse 4, “What’s more, this book features the first appearance of a new player on the mutant scene, one whom you can expect some wild things from as we head into 2025!” If he’s talking about the heir, then it’s not Forge, because Forge is appearing next week. But if it is the heir, then it’s nice to know they’re going to be used.
Laura will be getting a new ongoing series in December, written by Erica Schultz of Hallow’s Eve fame. Schultz also wrote the Daredevil:Gang War series which was basically Elektra vs. Bellona, so it’s possible Bellona will appear in this series.