The X-Axis – w/c 9 December 2024
Since we were running late last week, I already covered Astonishing X-Men Infinity Comic #2. This doesn’t leave us short of books. It’s an absurdly heavy week.
UNCANNY X-MEN #7. (Annotations here.) This is part 2 of the “Raid on Graymalkin” crossover with X-Men, although much of it covers the same material from the perspective of the Uncanny cast. That’s not as redundant as it might seem, since the good parts of this story are largely the character material, particularly with Calico. The actual plot still leaves me unconvinced – the prison villains feel both one-dimensional and too close to Orchis, and the fight between the two X-Men teams feels forced. Generally, the prison stuff feels like a distraction from what this book really wants to be doing – and the fact that this is the issue that gets partial fill-in art kind of reinforces that. It’s still not a bad issue on the whole, but the book does other things better than this.
X-FACTOR #5. (Annotations here.) This isn’t working. It ought to work – there’s nothing wrong with the idea of the US government sponsoring its own mutant team who sign up in good faith and find themselves answerable to shallow self-publicists and military incompetents. And Mark Russell seems like he should be a good person to write that book. But what we’ve wound up with is a book that’s too wacky to take seriously without actually being funny, and that’s the worst of all worlds. There are moments where it comes together – the Polaris subplot is maybe the one thread in the book that really works, perhaps because it’s been insulated from everything else. But five issues in, this is floundering.
PHOENIX #6. (Annotations here.) This isn’t really working either, but its problems feel rather more fixable. Jean as Phoenix is so powerful that you can’t put her on a regular team book for long, and going cosmic makes sense. The general idea that she’s torn between embracing the Phoenix and holding on to her humanity works, and offers a potentially satisfying way of getting her back to more workable power levels in the medium term. The religious themes kind of work. Adani’s role as a potential protégé torn between Phoenix and Perrikus is fine. I even quite like the art, which has some nice energy to it. But then we’ve got Perrikus as a one dimensional villain, and the baffling use of Thanos, set up with the Galactic Council handing the galaxy over to him for no adequate reason at all. It looks like the idea is meant to be that a degree of mind control is involved, but then that didn’t feel like the story being told last issue, which was more about everyone’s terror of Phoenix’s power levels. That stuff feels clunky and arbitrary, and it just doesn’t convince – it simply plays as a moron plot, where the Galactic Council have to do something monumentally idiotic in order to make the plot happen, and the book hasn’t pulled that off.
STORM #3. (Annotations here.) Well, look, the art’s great – that giant bird thing in the closing pages is fabulous. But this is a weird book. If you boil it down to a couple of sentences it all seems solid, but at full length it feels very strange. We’ve spent two issues building up Storm’s radiation poisoning, only for it to be cured off panel between issues. Sure, it’s a plot device for a magical deal means Storm can’t use her powers for a week, but… we’re not doing that on panel? Really? Then we’ve got Storm spending her week with the X-Men so that she can spend a quarter of the book in silent sparring with Wolverine, with a baffling intro sequence in which I guess the idea is that the X-Men pretend that Nimrod is attacking in order to surprise Rogue, but… what? Seriously? More to the point, if the angle is that Storm can’t pursue a romance with Wolverine because she wants to stick to the personal agenda she had in issue #1, why aren’t we doing stories about that agenda, instead of jumping straight to reactive stories where she never gets around to it? It all kind of sort of makes sense if you handwave it a bit, but it’s clumsy, and it just doesn’t feel ready for prime time.
LAURA KINNEY: WOLVERINE #1. (Annotations here.) I thought this was fairly bland on a first reading, but it grew on me as I was re-reading it for the annotations. At most points in X-Men history you’d be pushing your luck doing a story where the hero learns that some mutants are bad guys and some humans are nice, but coming off the Krakoa period there’s a bit more scope for Laura to start off being dogmatic about that sort of thing. Presumably we’re going to see more of Polly and her Oasis project in Dubai – we never do get told who’s funding it, and even though that only gets a passing mention, it seemed to be there for a reason. Polly seems like she could have a niche as someone who’s spent her life on the fringes of the mutant community or avoiding it entirely, and is now trying to make more of a contribution to it. I like Giada Belviso’s design for her too, although I’m not sure the issue really manages to sell its Dubai setting. Still, it’s a decent enough story. Is it a first issue, though? It feels like the sort of evergreen thing you could put in an annual rather than something that sets out the stall for a new title – and the fact that we’re moving on to a random guest star next issue (yes, okay, they’re both former living weapons) leaves me wonder what the direction is here, if there is one.
DAZZLER #4. By Jason Loo, Rafael Loureiro, Alan Robinson, Java Tartaglia & Ariana Maher. Final issue of the miniseries, though some further Dazzler project is promised for April 2025. And yeah, we’re back to the refrain for the week: this book didn’t work. In theory, Dazzler doing her inspiring mutant-positive tour and fending off the haters seems like a fine angle. In practice, it turns out to mean randomly selected villains attacking the show – Pretty Boy? As a solo villain? And then the bad guy behind it all turns out to be a rogue Madrox dupe from one of Loo’s X-Men Unlimited Infinity Comic arcs. If that was foreshadowed at all in earlier issues, I missed it. As for the Dazzler song lyrics in this series, there’s a reason why nobody’s done this before. If the work is meant to be good, it’s generally best to leave it to the audience’s imagination, rather than actually put it on the page and then get the characters to give it (i.e., yourself) a five star review. That’s the case even if the work actually is good – but if these songs are as good as the characters claim, the tunes must be doing some seriously heavy lifting.
“This isn’t working” appears to be the most common refrain for the From the Ashes titles. The biggest praise Paul has given so far was probably “Quietly solid” (X-Men #6).
Regarding “Laura Kinney” #2, I’m not sure if Elektra counts as a “random guest star” as she’s also on the cover for #3. Erica Schultz being a quasi-regular Elektra writer, and both of her heroines currently being in New York doing similar things, teaming them up more than once may make sense. In fact, Laura and Elektra are a pairing which could be quite interesting, if done well.
Was the dupe supposed to be a rogue Madrox dupe from the Infinity Comics or a DIFFERENT rogue dupe that we’d never seen before? There really out to be a moratorium on evil Madrox dupe stories at this point. But yeah, nothing about a dupe being the perpetrator was foreshadowed at all.
Pretty Boy might have worked as a Dazzler villain if you acknowledge their history. The first time the X-Men fought the Reaver Pretty Boy tried to brainwash Ali into being a Reaver, but she escaped and he vowed to come back to finish the job one day. But the story didn’t acknowledge any of this.
Shark Girl and Wind Dancer were both Hellion’s love interests but there isn’t a scene to show how they feel about him going evil.
Note that Prodigy had more trouble defeating Pretty Boy than he did defeating Hellion.
It reads like the creative team found out about Sophie’s power loss at the last minute. There are scenes of Sophie gesturing but no powers being shown- it reads like a scene suggesting Sophie was using her powers was redone at the last minute. Although, it is kind of funny to imagine Sophie gesturing in the middle of a battle:
Sophie: What can I do to stop Pretty Boy? My powers are on the fritz.
Domino: Just stand there making hand gestures. I’m sure that will distract him.
Uncanny X-Men was the best X-book of the week, and it was only pretty good. I thought the art in LK: Wolverine was mostly mediocre, so I doubt I’ll be continuing with that series. I couldn’t believe the main plot in Storm was resolved off-panel; “show don’t tell” is a basic storytelling guideline. I’ll give the book one more issue to see if it finds its legs. I’m done with X-Factor, unless I read some really good reviews of the next issue.
Compared to DC’s Absolute books, Marvel’s Ultimate line, the Energon verse, and the stronger individual Big 2 titles (FF, Hulk, Thor, Birds of Prey, World’s Finest, etc), most of the X-books aren’t making the grade.
Does Brevoort’s X-Office even have a plan beyond “find out what the market saturation point for X-books is”?
I don’t think Elektra’s appearance should be reduced to “random gues-star”: during Gang War Elektra confronted Bellona, one of Laura’s clones in circulation, in the miniseries also written by Erica Schultz. I imagine that this element will have some relevance in future stories, not least because it was so closely related to the weapons trafficking in Hell’s Kitchen.
The weird thing is there does seem to be a plan: scatter the X-Men, explore how traumatized they feel by the fall of Krakoa, gather small groups of new mutants, introduce anti-mutant organizations, suggest that mutant powers are failing. But the execution is so *dull*.
What’s at stake for anyone at this point? And who are any of these incredibly generic villains? Why does Storm have an entire floating city that she doesn’t use and doesn’t share with anyone else?
There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of drama, and there’s no real connective tissue holding the line together. I like Tom Brevoort as a newsletter writer, but I’m not sure he’s leading the X-books to renewed popularity and relevance here.
This is the X-quantity over X-quality era.
I could see all the titles except Uncanny, X-Men, Exceptional, and Wolverine getting cancelled within a year. Maybe they might change the creative team and direction on X-Factor in order to try to keep it going.
Four or five books a month does seem about right for the amount the current market could bear for one line of books.
I personally really like that it is not too closed as an editorial line.
Storm is a superhero series that is yes related to mutant themes, but wants to stand independently without being connected to the X-Men series. Kind of like how Thor’s or Captain America’s personal series are not dependent on the Avengers series.
To date, each series is independent, and this was surely Brevoort’s main goal: to launch a series of titles that can survive on their own legs.
Evidently the response so far must not have been bad, since what I considered one of the weaker projects, Dazzler, was deemed satisfactory enough to return with a new project next year.
@Midnight- the sales rankings of Dazzler per month was as follows:
September: #1- 15
October: #2- 65
November:#3- 140
We don’t know what December will be but it didn’t make the top 10 this week, so probably not good.
As you can see. the sales of Dazzler declined rapidly with each issue. We don’t know what month of sales Marvel had access to when they decided to approve Dazzler for whatever project next April.
I mean, the Dazzler thing could end up as an Infinity Comic (like an arc of Astonishing X-Men) if they deem it too far along to cancel but too unprofitable to publish normally.
I am really surprised by how few people seem to be enjoying the books I’m loving. That isn’t a complaint, there are sincere reactions of this not working across a lot of fans. But I’d love to be able to share what excites me about like 80% of these titles.
I hate how many of the From the Ashes line are turning out to be mild clunkers. “Not really working for me” really does fit a lot of them. Nothing is spectacularly BAD but…
I agree that in general, transcribing musical lyrics in fiction tends to come off as … underwhelming. I’m not exactly blown away by Dazzler’s music as depicted in this series, and it might have been better to leave it to the imagination.
Also, I groaned at the revelation it was just another rogue Madrox dupe. Like… THAT was the big bad of the storyline? This really was just a collection of random villains disrupting her tour, and not anyone actually interesting or relevant to the character. Er, not that Dazzler has a particularly deep or abiding rogue’s gallery, not with actual Rogue long since reformed, Enchantress busy… This wasn’t a bad story, just not a very -good- one.
Chris V> This is the X-quantity over X-quality era.
Yeah. I mean, currently or coming shortly, *just in “X-Men” and Wolverine titles*, there’s X-Men, Uncanny X-Men, Exceptional X-Men & Weapon X-Men; and Wolverine, Laura Kinney: Wolverine, Hellverine and Deadpool/Wolverine.
And that’s not even counting the *other* X-books, both team and solo.
@Scott:
I encourage you to share what you’re enjoying about the titles here. Negative responses certainly aren’t the only valid ones, and it’s nice (even more interesting) to get an alternative viewpoint when general opinion is leaning heavily in one direction.
“Leave the lyrics to the imagination” might be something you can’t do nowadays.
Think about it. When was the last time you saw anything left to the imagination in a book, show, or movie that wasn’t done by old-school creators.
Thanks @Adam
In general, I feel like the mutant metaphor is working really well in From the Ashes since the books are geographically diverse and show mutants approaching life Post-Krakoa in their own way. I see a lot of parallels to immigration in the current storylines where mutants are ending up in different places, bringing elements of their culture while incorporating new people in need of a community. This status quo is far from the Back to Basics fear a lot of fans had post-Krakoa. A lot of this is not overly explicit but I see these themes playing out with Storm trying to do outreach without an existing system, members of X-Factor being exploited because they just need a job, S.H.I.E.L.D. being concerned with a Mystique that is suddenly without loyalty. and the ways so many books feature X-characters being up against the assumptions that grew in a world that really never took the time to get to know them.
I also love how diverse the art is. Krakoa had somewhat of a house style (which made sense for the shared setting), but most of these books have their individual approach. Which I’m finding in the writing and pacing. It is fun seeing so many creators having so much leeway to play with these characters.
My favorite book is adjectiveless. Stegman’s style is so energetic and Mackay is finding an interesting approach to utilizing so many characters. But I also love Exceptional, X-Factor (I find it insightful, hilarious and clever), Mystique, Storm and Sentinels. But I’ve been surprised how much I enjoyed Wolverine and Phoenix as their stories progress. Even in the books that don’t entirely work like Uncanny, the creators are clearly invested in the characters. Which isn’t always the case as so many X-Men eras felt like a publishing obligation.
Again, I get how this isn’t for everybody. A lot of these books have very individual approaches. It is getting to be a bit too much, I had to drop NYX and probably won’t start Laura Kinney just based on budget. But too many good options isn’t a bad thing!
“’Leave the lyrics to the imagination’ might be something you can’t do nowadays.”
Lyrics in comics are mostly awful- even Alan Moore didn’t pull it off- but there’s one example that I love. In Preacher: The Story of You-Know-Who the future Arseface goes to see a local punk band. The lyrics are: “F@#& it! Just f@#& it! F@#& it! Just f@#& it!” over and over again. It made me laugh.
@Scott: thanks for your summary of why you like the FtA books. I see some of what you’re saying about the mutant metaphor poke through (mostly in NYX), and agree that the many of writers seem to be invested in the characters.
The “Venus of the Hard Sell” lyrics by Jamie Delano in Hellblazer worked.
Also, special mention to the parody song lyrics Steve Gerber wrote for the Infernal Man-Thing comic.
These Dazzler song lyrics (I found some of them online) are really bad. They’re at the level of the infamous Howard the Duck movie song.
Marvel has announced a new crossover called X-Manhunt in March 2025. It features Professor Xavier on the run and the X-Men have to decide whether or not to protect him. recapture him or kill him. Highlights include:
Another confrontation between Scott and Alex. (Again?)
Exceptional X-Men will not be more of a tie-in than an actual part of the crossover and it will feature a technologist called Sheldon Xenos, who judging from the cover is a disguised Mr. Sinister.
Xavier’s escape will be prompted. by a telepathic virus that “wreaks havoc on his mind- and on those around him”
Are you sure it’s not the Stranger, considering the last name?
I guess the surname could be an anagram: No Sex…which refers to the asexual nature of Mr. Sinister; or it sounds like Essex, I guess, which is less fun. heh
Perhaps the anagram is No Hold Essex. Maybe this is a totally unhinged version of Essex. Considering how emo the character looks on the cover, it could be.
And the description of the X-Manhunt Finale ends with “This time around, everyone is wide awake”. Reminds me of a certain project…
@Claus- I think it’s a reference to Xavier’s “While you were sleeping the world changed” speech in House of X.
“X-Men: This Isn’t Working” is what the Infinity Comic should call itself next re-branding.
@The Other Michael: In fairness, this is hardly the first time a popular era of X-Men ended in an editorial fustercluck, followed by a year or so of mindless flailing. It happened after Claremont, it happened after Morrison… the best thing to do is typically to walk away until the next relaunch/creative team rotation, and try again then.
Re: Comic book lyrics that worked.
I keep going back to the Mickey Eye theme song from Seaguy. I have no idea how Grant Morrison pulled this off, but that damn song can get stuck in your head.
I thought “So Happy To Be Happy” from Adam Warren’s Gen 13 was appropriately brainless bubblegum pop, as it was intended to be.
I think I only read the first issue of Dazzler, and didn’t read any lyrics. I think I trained myself too well to ignore data pages in the Krakoa books. But sight-unseen, I have to say, most lyrics ate rubbish. They’re meant to be sung, not read like a poem. Of course, some lyrics *are* poetry, beautiful and meaningful, but for every Bohemian Rhapsody there’s a Devil’s Haircut.
“I hate how many of the From the Ashes line are turning out to be mild clunkers. “Not really working for me” really does fit a lot of them. Nothing is spectacularly BAD but…”
This is what happens when you’re constrained to the same genre after 60+ years of publishing the same characters. There just isn’t much to do. You do the same thing, it’s stale. You do something different, you risk destroying the formula.
The problem with printing lyrics in comics isn’t just the lack of musicality and rhythm, it’s also how instantly dated the material becomes. If it’s a very recent pop tune, you risk alienating the (largely pop-averse) fan base who doesn’t recognize them, and if it’s a classic oldie, you date your own sensibilities. Like yeah, plenty of people today still like Stairway to Heaven, but if you go out of your way to quote Stairway to Heaven in a comic, my first thought is, “Really, you couldn’t find any other worthwhile song to reference from the past half-century?”
The only time I can remember lyrics in comics working for me was the Roger Langridge Muppet comics.