The X-Axis – w/c 4 November 2024
X-MEN: FROM THE ASHES INFINITY COMIC #22. By Tim Seeley, Eric Koda, Arthur Hesli & Clayton Cowles. Hey, that’s not the usual creative team for this book! I’m assuming this is the first half of a Thanksgiving two-parter, since it’s a slice-of-life story about Beak and Salvadore taking their kids to Alaska to visit the family, with Beak making up stories to entertain them, and a grumpy racist woman being in the next seat on the plane. The art gets across nicely the idea of these guys as low-level but extremely visible mutants who are just living in the ordinary world, and Beak trying (mostly successfully) to shield the kids from the bad stuff. Now, for obvious reasons, this might not be the best week to do a “normal America where minorities can just get on with life albeit with a certain degree of aggravation” story. It does feel a little bit… quaint, at the very least. Although come to think of it, unless we’re going back to the Orchis well very soon, Trump’s America will inevitably be better for mutants than Biden’s, which, um… okay. Anyway, I’m not going to hold all that against the story itself, which is really quite sweet.
X-MEN #7. (Annotations here.) Continuing to bring the plot threads together, as we find out what the “Iron Night” actually was – basically, Cyclops and Magneto saved the town from a Wild Sentinel. And we get some movement towards explaining why Magneto is in a wheelchair. But are we really going with the idea that Krakoan resurrection could be the cause of his problems? We’re apparently meant to take it seriously, but I figure it’s almost certainly misdirection. It would affect way too many mutants, and it would screw up the idea of the Krakoans heading off into the White Hot Room to live in post-human paradise. But it makes sense for the characters to suspect it, so I’m fine with teasing it. If I was taking it more at face value, I’d have more of an issue with it. We also have the local girl testing as a non-mutant when she apparently is, and 3K messing around with mutant powers as part of the plot, and I don’t for a moment believe that the Sentinel really just shows up randomly… No, this all feels like Jed MacKay is still patiently getting his elements into place and delivering some solid character work in the meantime, which has tended to be his style on other ongoings. Guest artist Netho Diaz remains a good fit with Ryan Stegman, and seems like a smart choice.
X-FORCE #5. (Annotations here.) This isn’t doing much for me. There’s a core idea in here that I quite like: Forge’s powers give him a way to achieve his desired goal, but he doesn’t know how it’ll work unless he can work it out after the fact, and so he doesn’t know what the cost might be. Forge sees that as an acceptable risk even though it gets Surge killed, at least when the “problem” is world-threatening; Sage doesn’t, presumably because it implies that he didn’t give enough thought to framing the problem. That’s all fine, and it’s certainly a nice looking book. But it feels too early to kill off Surge, who hasn’t really done much in this book to make her more than merely Nice. And way too much of the book’s plot still feels random. Why Nuklo? Why the Avengers from an early 1990s New Warriors story? None of this feels like it has much to do with anything in particular, especially that core idea I mentioned – except perhaps in the sense that it matches the arbitrariness of Forge’s powers. And maybe that is the idea – that the characters themselves don’t know why they’re doing this – but it’s very difficult to build a working story around that sort of lack of agency.
X-FACTOR #4. (Annotations here.) This isn’t really working either, is it? I’m mildly interested in the X-Term storyline – are they just a bunch of mercenaries with pretensions to a higher cause, or are they working as mercenaries to get themselves into positions of influence? But otherwise, this book continues to suffer from tone clashes. It isn’t funny enough to work as a comedy, but it has some broad comedic elements that stop it from quite functioning as a serious book either. Even aside from that, the underground rescue mission in this issue is pretty underwhelming, and I’m still not sure I really understand the mechanics of what the final crisis is or how the team escape. So it all falls a bit flat on the page. It’s another title where you can see in theory what it’s trying to do, but it just isn’t coming together.
I like(d) Surge, but the whole core of her character is that she wasn’t nice, so having her as generic nice girl seemed misjudged.
I agree about X-Force and X-Factor. This relaunch has a lot of meh titles, which is more disappointing than brave failures.
“Now, for obvious reasons, this might not be the best week to do a “normal America where minorities can just get on with life albeit with a certain degree of aggravation” story. It does feel a little bit… quaint, at the very least.”
It’s (very darkly) funny — despite loving the X-Men for decades, I’ve always found the sheer number of anti-mutant bigots in the MU a bit unrealistic. Like, sure, they exist, but there can’t be enough to fill out THAT many different groups.
To an extent, I still think that. But I never realized until this week how many Marvel citizens would just shrug and say, “Sure, do what you need to do” if Nimrod lied that he could lower their grocery bills, or Cameron Hodge told them mutants were taking their jobs. Turns out it’s most of them. Magneto WAS right.
Supposedly, a threat spawned in X-Force will be showing up in Exceptional X-Men. I guess that has something to do with the monster Sinister created in issue 1?
In which sense could Trump’s America be conceivably better for mutants than Biden’s, even for a second?
I think his point is that in continuity, Biden’s term had the rise of Orchis and the insane anti mutant ramp up towards the end of krakoa….. the ashes titles are all rather more placid in their status quo and seems like they will continue to be
Made me wonder: has covid been mentioned in any marvel title, in any way?
I also think that the “R-whatever” explanation for Magneto’s state is misdirection, but I am less certain now.
The conclusion that, if true, it would harm the situation of the huge mutant population in otherdimensional Krakoa is natural but questionable. It has been established that they are going through accelerated time, and there are so many of them… it ought to be unrecognizable next time it appears. For all we know they were striken by that hypothetical malaise and some mutant developed an instant cure and it is now far better off for that.
Come to think of it, that environment will logically be so deeply changed no matter what that I don’t expect that it will be seen again without some sort of event-like explanation of why it is nothing like what we knew before.
I don’t know what to make of the failure of the mutant detection test. Maybe it is one of the assorted hints that mutancy itself is somewhat in flux? Maybe we are about to learn that Cerebro isn’t all that reliable anymore, perhaps as a result of 3K’s actions.
Or maybe we are about to enter into a period when no one will have any real means of saying whether any given person is a mutant, even when there are obvious signs of superhuman powers? That could be good at least for a while, as a means of exploring previously unaccessible dynamics and better social commentary.
Weird how the one X-Force permutation that I find palatable isn’t being well liked.
@David: In Ryan North’s Fantastic Four a rogue (albeit sympathetic) AI detects a potential pandemic and Reed acts proactively to curtail it. IIRC it’s clear it’s meant to refer to COVID and provide an explanation for why it’s not a thing in the MU.
Yes, the FF story is meant to explain how Covid was not a thing in the MU. However, I think the Krakoan drugs would have been a better explanation, although I guess there wouldn’t be any way in-universe to give that explanation. It would have been nice if the Krakoan drugs were shown to have a net benefit for human society, in any way. There might have been one or two examples given, but I think the drugs were a placebo used by mutants to fool the rubes, until they were tampered with to become a plot device, of course.
Seriously, you had the nation of Krakoa and the Krakoan drugs to set the MU apart from our world “outside the window”, and they couldn’t even allow the Krakoan drugs to be the reason that Covid never became a pandemic.
What Drew said November 10, 2024 at 1:05 PM
@Chris V: It might be more thematically appropriate to have the Krakoan drugs actually stop the pandemic, but people’s opinions of mutants and Orchis’s manipulations mean no one believes it in universe, so mutants are still hated just like before.
Paul> Although come to think of it, unless we’re going back to the Orchis well very soon, Trump’s America will inevitably be better for mutants than Biden’s, which, um… okay.
Sliding timeline. Orchis will have happened under Trump soon enough, given how recent that is.
(Until then, we can blame the time Biden was replaced by a demon in Daredevil)
Breevort discusses the QR pages on his blog:
Andrew Albrecht:Does Storm #1 lack of a QR page mean the practice is done? Initially it was said it would be for all From The Ashes books, but oh my god it made my day to have the last page printed instead of hidden away. I’m a bit confused about what does and doesn’t have one, it seems like Dazzler didn’t but Wolverine did? I ended up not picking up a few books because of missing pages, would’ve been nice to see this advertised better
TOM:Well, first off, I know that you don’t want to believe me when I say this, Andrew, but none of those X-Books was missing a page. And what this meant for STORM is that you actually got a page fewer in that title than you did on the others—because those QR code pages were bonus content, not an actual necessary part of the stories at all. In the end, though, given all of the pushback that we saw from fans on the initial ones, I simply stopped doing them for the books launching in September and later. Why put in the extra effort just so that fans could be unhappy with us? It didn’t make sense at that point.
Some fans are going to be upset with whatever is done, be it QR codes or actually content in the books. An American coach. Once said “if I listen to the people in the stands, I’ll end up sitting with them.”
The reaction by comics pros to the news this week has been Iinteresting. Waid said he didn’t know if he could continue to write superhero comics in this environment.
The bad timing for Orchis just reminds me that DC really played their cards right by using the multiverse to reflect election results, of all things.
Didn’t Norman Osborn running Shield as a War on Terror allegory kick off right when Obama was taking office? I think this is always a problem when writing stories with a lot of lead time that are intended to reflect on current events.
I don’t want to get into a whole thing, but a Democratic US president isn’t going to be *that much* less likely than a Republican to open internment camps or start wars against an ethnicity or whatever.
Though that said, such a storyline is probably better off in times when it’s less likely in real life.
Si: Yes. The illegal immigrant internment camps which became so infamous under Trump1 were first established under Obama. And Biden didn’t close them. One could certainly argue that Trump made them *worse* — but Democrats opening internment camps has absolutely happened.
I think the last time I remember Marvel comics, let’s say, alluding to current political developments was in Thunderbolts – the new president, a Black man hidden in shadows (despite Obama already having appeared in a very bad Spider-Man special), says to Osborn that he (Osborn) is what the previous administration saddled him with.
…IIRC Osborn then staged an assassination attempt on him, only so he could foil it?
Some of you are definitely more optimistic about the current situation than I am.
The cover of West Coast Avengers 4 shows Firestar kissing Blue Bolt. Considering that Blue Bolt has been described as “the biggest jerk in the Marvel Universe” and Duggan said “what we’re doing with her is maybe more surprising then what we’re doing with Ultron”, I don’t think Angelica’s fans will like Duggan’s new direction for Angelica.
In other news, remember how Emma “forgot” to tell Tony that she got the money she gave him by stealing from villains? Some of those villains will be coming after Tony. If Kitty heard about this, I could see why she wouldn’t want Emma to help with the kids.
In terms of Marvel’s “politics,” it may be worth a reminder that up until recently, Ike Perlmutter was head of Marvel Entertainment which oversaw the comics. He was a member of Trump’s cabinet from 2016-2020 and therefore wasn’t going to be gung ho for comics that made that administration look bad. In that context, Orchis rising as Biden took office may have been a convenient plot detail.
Now, Marvel Entertainment no longer exists, and Ike was kicked out of his position. Then again, he still is a Disney board member with lots of stock and keeps trying to do corporate takeovers. The Republicans see most of the entertainment industry as an enemy, especially Disney, who has become an enemy of Florida governor Ron DeSantis. As much as angry YouTubers whine about Marvel being “too woke,” the treatment of Ms. Marvel should show that their diversity ends where the buck stops. The moment Kamala could not sell a solo title, and the movie she co-starred in bombed, she’s been reduced to one team book and sporadic mini series or anthologies like Firestar or Echo.
So, while Ike is not part of the day to day running of Marvel Comics anymore and may not be able to stop some non-flattering Trump “metaphors,” it will remain to be seen if Disney wants to play things safe, i.e. “let us not irritate the president who will hike tariffs and make our comic printing costs go up.”
I doubt we get the full throated “the gummint is EVIL!” stories that we got during the Bush years. But none of us really knows.
@AMRG- I do think it’s fair to say that Kamala got chances most other characters wouldn’t have gotten. By most accounts, her series was selling badly throughout most of its history and yet Marvel kept it up as long as possible. And even now, Lanzing and Kelly have said that Kamala was the one character (besides Laura?) that editorial insisted by part of NYX. That’s certainly more than can be said for Echo or Firestar- Echo’s currently in limbo and Firestar is lucky she won the 2022 X-Men vote and Duggan decided to keep using her after he left X-Men. (Arguably, no writer between Busiek and Duggan kept using her consistently.)
In any case. I think it’s fair to say that she’s being treated better than Carol when she was Ms. Marvel before House of m and better than Sharon when she was Ms. Marvel.