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.
Agreed with Michael that Marvel has clearly tried with Kamala Khan—and heck, still is trying (a team book is a demotion but hardly banishment).
Even Kamala’s death in AMAZING SPIDER-MAN—which I think most people agree was awkwardly handled, since she scarcely appeared in the book prior to her death—wasn’t an example of fridging, since its point wasn’t simply to cause Peter grief but to reposition the character as a mutant.
“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.”
As others have said, Kamala has gotten plenty of chances. And Marvel’s still a business, and that means they have to constantly shift to try and respond to market trends. This is why under normal circumstances, they will always put out the Avengers, FF, Hulk, Captain America, Iron Man, Spider-Man, X-Men–their headliners, basically.
They’ve gotten lucky enough with writers and fan support to support a sustained Moon Knight run, as an example of their attempts to uplift B- and C- level characters. But right now, it seems like even Captain Marvel is having trouble maintaining a longer ongoing.
I mean, right now, former fan favorites like Moon Girl and Squirrel Girl are also relegated to cameos and team books, while all of the Asian heroes they were pushing in solos and team books (Agents of Atlas, Aero, etc) have all but fallen off the radar. Ironheart is another who went from series to cameos.
Of their big diversity push, it feels like Miles Morales is one of the only ones to still receive constant support with an ongoing.
But is that a backlash to diversity, or just the natural ebb and flow of the market? I’m not really one to ascribe malice when it’s not clear and present– characters come and go. Take the New Warriors: Nova was in Limbo after his series died, Speedball was barely an afterthought after his series ended, Firestar was obscure, Vance Astro little more than the Thing’s temporary sidekick, Namorita a Namor knock-off and it’s only the unexpected success of that series that made them popular again (or for the first time.)
Give it a year or two and someone will find just the right pitch for these demoted characters and we’ll see a new Moon Girl or Kamala or Ironheart series, or another Champions revival… (or keep your eyes peeled for another Marvel Unlimited series featuring them!)
Yeah, it’s mainly just the truism that new characters in general struggle to take off in superhero books (I’m pretty sure most Big Two solo books star characters who debuted before, let’s say 1970, and even pushing that out to 2000 won’t get that many more).
As long as there’s a push to make new characters quote-unquote diverse (as there should be, given that so, so many of the existing ones are not), it’s going to be a bad look when those books stall out, but it’s a worse look to never have those characters exist at all. It’d certainly have been a shame if Miles Morales never appeared.
I have a half-baked theory that a lot of newer characters fail because they are young, and the Big 2 comic book reading audience is mostly old. The new characters aren’t driving younger readers to the comics. Miles has an advantage, given that he’s a well-designed Spider-Man who’s starred in two amazing animated movies. But, look at which teen/ YA comics sell to us Wednesday Warriors: (Teen) Titans (a long-running concept starring familiar characters); sometimes Robin, Superboy, or Batgirl (but not so much lately, FYI latest Batgirl 1 was a good action comic); Miles Morales, a few of the younger X-character comics, and… not much else.
New Warriors, Infinity, Inc., Stargirl, Young Avengers/ Champions, Strange Academy, Gotham Academy, the solo teen characters mentioned above, and some I’ve probably forgotten aren’t being published or aren’t selling in big numbers. I think young, new characters don’t sell these days.
To be fair, New Warriors has been a clusterf*ck since the original run was cancelled and no one has ever come close to recapturing their original strength.
Infinity Inc hasn’t been a thing for nearly 40 years, but the characters are still in use mainly because of the writers who grew up as readers in the ’80s who remember them fondly.
The big publishers basically run in cycles of pushing “new” generations of characters which is how we get 6 generations of young mutants all trying to recapture the buzz of early New Mutants and 6 generations of young sidekick heroes trying to recapture the buzz of Wolfman/Perez Teen Titans and 6 reboots of Legion of Super-Heroes and every so often someone will try a -new- version of “young heroes team trying to defy The Man and Change The World”
It’s like with anything in popular media: 99% fails, 1% inexplicably sticks, and everyone will try to emulate what works, and most of THAT fails, and eventually something else new and exciting comes along. (The Harry Potter/Twilight/Hunger Games/Divergent effect). The one that sticks will last for as long as anyone can milk it for profit, as novelty becomes establishment becomes nostalgia becomes legacy. It’s just that the cycle has sped up in recent decades and years to compensate for society’s decreased attention span and increased consumption.
That’s how we now have at least -two- new batches of young mutants, of which maybe one or two will someday be as established as Jubilee, M, Pixie…
@The Other Michael- it’s not just the diversity push characters that failed to catch on but also the All-New, All-Different Marvel characters. During ANAD, Marvel tried to present Sam Alexander. Kamala Khan and Miles Morales as a power trio but Sam has hardly been used since the last Champions series concluded. Whenever Marvel needed a Nova to appear in books like X-Men Red or Phoenix, they used Rich.
“it seems like even Captain Marvel is having trouble maintaining a longer ongoing”
Well. Carol was never really a popular character before House of M. She had a series that lasted 23 issues, more than Shanna or the Cat but less than She-Hulk or Dazzler or Spider-Woman.
She was an Avenger for two years, Michelinie had trouble writing her and she was written out in an historically awful story. She was then moved over to X-Men as a supporting character but was written out after issue 177 and after that hardly appeared until Busiek’s run. Before Busiek’s run, other characters like Mockingbird, Tigra and Monica Rambeau were far more important in Avengers history than Carol.
She finally became a regular Avenger again as Warbird thanks to Kurt Busiek. But Johns wrote her out after a year. She played a major role in Avengers Finale thanks to Bendis, who had been writing her in Alias and who liked Carol. It was around the time of House of M that she started getting a major push. Bendis wanted to make her Captain Marvel, but that was rejected. Instead, she became Ms. Marvel again, joined the Avengers and got a new series by Brian Reed. Marvel kept pushing her and decided to promote her to Captain Marvel years later.
This was largely because Marvel wanted their own equivalent of Wonder Woman, especially for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And most of Marvel’s traditional non-X major female characters- Sue, Wanda, Jan- are meant to work as part of a group. She-Hulk was the only one who really managed to carry a solo series past 50 issues.
But the sales on Carol’s books eventually declined, and the Marvels was a flop. And now Marvel seems to be trying to turn Storm into their Wonder Woman.
Captain Marvel’s popularity changes depending on how much clothing she wears. She was a popular supporting character when she wore normal clothes. She got a costume with no pants, and that let her sustain a title for a little while. She switched to her more revealing black costume, and faded into near-obscurity. She got her own title again while wearing that godawdul g string, but she didn’t get really popular until she put on a full bodysuit. Now she’s swithched to a tank top, and she’s not doing as well again.
I’m telling you, put her in A head to toe covering like Spider-Man, and she’ll be thr biggest comic in the industry.
It’s interesting that everyone’s willing to ascribe the failure of “diverse” characters to either reader pushback or market trends, rather than consider the possibility they failed because Marvel editorial’s commitment to them was mercenary as hell, and they had no problem throwing the characters *and* the writers who championed them under the bus when they felt like it. It’s *really* not a coincidence that Miles Morales – one of the few who stuck – was created by Brian Bendis, who may as well have been Marvel’s EIC himself for the creative freedom and influence he had at Marvel at the time.
“they had no problem throwing the characters *and* the writers who championed them under the bus when they felt like it.”
I certainly don’t have any problem calling Big Two editorial policy “mercenary”, but I don’t recall any specific instances of the above behavior offhand, at least not recently.
Why would Marvel be any less mercenary to Miles Morales because of Bendis, who’s been long gone?
Miles Morales sticks because he’s black/Latino Spider-Man (there is a reason why he isn’t Spider-Boy or Spider-Kid).
I also doubt Mila Morales, Spider-Woman would still be around in the same way.
It’s simply the name Spider-Man that sells. Is there a more recognizable character?
If you mean “he’s stuck around because he was positioned as another Spider-Man rather than a sidekick”, then that’s true. But Miles is an exceptional case, because he’s actually been used prominently as Spider-Man in other media, and has a profile as Spider-Man outside comics in TV, film and video games, sustained for some years now. This doesn’t normally happen to “replacement” characters – Sam Wilson as Captain America hasn’t had nearly the same impact, for example. It might be tied to the fact that for a long time he wasn’t just *a* Spider-Man, but *the* Spider-Man, at least in the Ultimate Universe. (I still think it was a mistake to bring him to the mainstream Marvel Universe, where he gets overshadowed by Peter – at least creatively speaking.)
I don’t understand Diana’s objection. To my mind, editors being “mercenary” *is* responding to reader pushback, market trends, et al. by throwing characters and writers under the bus.
That said, I fundamentally disagree with the characterization of Marvel editorial, at least in so far as Kamala’s concerned. I think Kamala’s likely had as good a run as she’s had (multiple series, a TV show, co-star status in a movie, participation in major crossovers, etc) due to a strong desire on the part of Marvel’s generally liberal employees to make the character a success.
It was sobering reading Crisis on Infinite Earths for the first time a few years back and realizing they were already in this conundrum back in the ’80s, trying to use the big event storyline to launch more diverse characters (an asian Dr. Light, a latina Wildcat) who’ve since vanished into obscurity.
Though on that note, how many successful franchise-supporting characters of any demographic have Marvel or DC created this century? I’m still thinking of Deadpool and Harley Quinn as “recent” hits compared to most superhero stalwarts, and they’re both from the ’90s.
@Diana: I agree that Marvel’s editors dropped the ball in regard to some new characters, but I don’t think Bendis co-creating Miles has much to do with his sustained success (see Paul’s comment above). Bendis co-created Ironheart as well, and she hasn’t had anywhere near as much traction. Yes, she was in World of Wakanda, but the character wasn’t particularly well-received. I think there are a number of factors that make or break new characters, including editorial not putting high-profile creators on their comics, and creators’ relationships with higher-ups can only go so far if the concepts aren’t hits.
Mile Morales also benefits from having some elements of the “classic” Spider-Man status quo, the one that most of the previous adaptations of Peter Parker have used: the adolescent hero dealing with school stuff and adolescence stuff long with the usual love life problems and superheroing.
For all of Marvel’s efforts to make Peter a young single, they can’t quite send him back to high school.
Linking Kamal Khan to the X-Men may also be a way of having a similar youth appeal character who might serve as an entry point to the X-franchise for younger readers, as Miles perhaps does for the Spider-franchise.
@Adam: “Diverse” characters – or even something as basic as existing characters assuming new mantles – can’t and don’t stick without a concerted effort to push them. Kamala Khan got that treatment largely thanks to Sana Amanat; in almost every other instance, Marvel basically dumps minority characters at the first sign of trouble (Sam Alexander’s been mentioned, but it’s certainly true of Robbie Reyes as well, and more recently Somnus).
That, in turn, sends a clear message on its own: Marvel has no real conviction or genuine interest in diverse characters beyond sales stunts. Easy come, easy go. So why should the readers bother investing in them?
The Robbie Reyes Ghost Rider got a 12-issue solo series, a five-issue follow-up, a co-starring role on Agents of Shield for a couple seasons, assorted appearances across the MU, and was a core member of Jason Aaron’s five-year-long run on Avengers that ended last year.
I don’t think he’s doing much right now, but I don’t think the above is exactly unfair treatment. It’s better than, say, Gravity ever got. Or Alpha and Spider-Boy, to pick two recent Spider-Man spinoff characters that didn’t catch Miles’ heat. (or the Slingers, to pick some older ones)
I still feel like it’s unusual for any new character to “make it” in comics, however we want to define that, regardless of that character’s demographic.
“trying to use the big event storyline to launch more diverse characters (an asian Dr. Light, a latina Wildcat) who’ve since vanished into obscurity.”
To be fair, Yolanda (and Beth Chapel, the black Dr. Mid-Nite) were revived in Geoff Johns’ much-delayed Justice Society of America v4 a year or so back, and looks to be on Jeff Lemire’s new JSA relaunch. (Well, technically they just showed up alive for no reason, but it was later revealed they were revived in the Lazarus Planet event, I think.)
Which in no way diminishes your accurate point that after Infinity Inc ended, they were unceremoniously killed off for decades.
Robbie Reyes got a bigger push than a lot of characters…
@Joe I- Spider-Boy got his own series that’s lasted 12 issues and counting. That’s more than most characters get.
A lot of that is simple lack of market viability. The days when, say, Daredevil could go well beyond 150 issues without ever approaching stardom are long gone. Even the Avengers, Fantastic Four, Hulk and Spider-Ma aren’t necessarily having an ongoing at any given month now. It is a very competitive market where it is very easy to have even a DC or Marvel book go unnoticed.
In some cases, I think editorial does its best to try to catch lightining in a bottle despite a scarcity of viable proposals. The 2006-2010 “Ms. Marvel” book is a good example. I don’t think it did Carol much good, seeing how she was very frequently the least engaging character in her own book.