The X-Axis – w/c 13 January 2025
EXCEPTIONAL X-MEN #5. (Annotations here.) No Infinity Comic this week, with no explanation that I’m aware of. But apparently it hasn’t been cancelled, so I guess it’s just running late. That still leaves three ongoings and a new miniseries, though.
Exceptional X-Men has been a consistently good book for the most part, but it’s also an almost entirely character driven one – five issues in, the closest thing it’s had to any bad guys is a random monster on loan from X-Force for two pages, and a few low-level bigots. Obviously the Verate plotline is setting up to be the first real villains of the series, but it’s still taking its time getting there. That’s all for the best in terms of the quality of the series, and hopefully the audience is fine with it getting that time. It’s not an X-Men book – it has more in common with very early New Mutants – but the new characters are all strong creations and Eve Ewing’s efforts to extricate Kate Pryde from the ill-advised Shadowkat storyline is largely successful. There’s two rather baffling pages with specific Orchis characters she never interacted with, I grant you, and I don’t know what they were thinking there. But the character material works. Carmen Carnero is doing a great job with the personality of the new mutants, and the closing panel with Ellie trying the Verate app is beautifully done.
STORM #4. (Annotations here.) I haven’t much cared for this series, but this issue works better than any of the previous ones. It just feels minimalist, where earlier issues felt skeletal. And the two scenes with Storm and her father are the best thing the book has had so far, since they actually feel like a believable relationship. Other than that… well, it’s improving, and the art remains beautiful, but I can’t say the actual story is doing anything to hold my interest. Storm and Doom in conversation over dinner has been done before, and better, in X-Men Red – and it really doesn’t come down to all that much beyond Doom monologuing a trailer for a crossover. And a cosmic storyline doesn’t interest me at all; we already have Phoenix for that, and it doesn’t seem like a strong direction for Storm. Still, the issue is a step in the right direction.
LAURA KINNEY: WOLVERINE #2. (Annotations here.) Well, Laura, Elektra and Luke Cage are in this book, and I have issues with the characterisation of all three of them. I can just about rationalise that Elektra and Luke are supposed to have some plan that Laura isn’t meant to know about, and that she’s failing to pick up on it, and give the book the benefit of the doubt on those two for now. But Erica Shultz’s take on Laura feels really off to me. Okay, she gets angry about people using mutants as weapons, fair enough. But Laura’s thing isn’t that she’s wildly impulsive and needs to be steered by calmer heads like Elektra – her traditional problem is that she lacks a frame of reference for normal life and normal relationships. The whole interaction between Laura and Elektra in this book feels alarmingly like a total misreading of Laura’s character, and hopefully the next issue can prove me wrong on that. Nice art, though – Giada Belviso does some satisfyingly kinetic and angular action sequences.
ROGUE: SAVAGE LAND #1. By Tim Seeley, Zulema Scotto Lavina, Rachelle Rosenberg & Ariana Maher. So we’re still doing continuity implant minis set in the past, but without the focus on the original creative teams. This is “What was Rogue doing in the Savage Land between Uncanny X-Men #269 and #275?”, basically – the period when she was hanging around with Magneto. To be fair to Kaare Andrews, his cover is a pretty straight pastiche of the art from the period, though in the context of 2025 the effect is to make the book look like Rogue: Tits in the Jungle. Lavina’s interior art is a bit more restrained, and the story itself seems to be basically an expansion on an underdeveloped plot thread from 1990 – Rogue tries to fend for herself in the Savage Land while she waits for the X-Men to come for her, and winds up dragging Magneto (in one of his isolationist moods) into a Savage Land conflict that he couldn’t care less about. It’s completely fine, if harmlessly unnecessary.
LK:W was pretty rushed, not as bad as issue 1, but scenes still doesn’t get much time to breathe. Also agree that the characterisation isn’t great. I think Shultz’s various Elektra minis have been better than this so I hope it will get better.
Exceptional is still great. I really like it being almost all character stuff.
I love Claremont’s New Mutants. Comparing a comic to early New Mutants is high praise (although, the Bill Sienkiewicz on art issues are my absolute favourite). I have to admit that Exceptional must be doing an even better job than the early New Mutants as there has been a lack of Team America or a Mr. T lookalike in Exceptional, as of yet, so the book is definitely doing some things right.
The Rogue series is much better than people thought it would be- many people were worried it just be an excuse to have Rogue half-naked in the Savage Land but there was actual characterization. Although, the sequence with Carol Danvers getting killed would be confusing to anyone who didn’t know the original continuity.
There’s a couple of references to Rogue’s childhood in the narration- Rogue says her parents used to leave her alone for weeks any time Phish would go on tour and Rogue says her mother was never around after dark to sing to her. I assume the parents she refers to aren’t Mystique and Destiny.
Of course, part of the issue is that when Rogue got her first ongoing in 2004, it was decided to start off by revealing the story of Rogue’s childhood. Now Scott Lobdell and Chris Claremont both thought that Mystique met Rogue before Rogue hit puberty- in X-Men Unlimited 4 by Lobdell and X-Men 93 by Alan Davis but rumored to be influenced by Claremont, Rogue is clearly pre-pubescent when Mystique took her in. (Although Claremont depicted Rogue as being taken in by Mystique before she had her powers and Lobdell depicted it the other way around.)
But the first arc of the 2004 series wasn’t written by Claremont or Lobdell but by Robert Rodi. He had some questionable ideas about Rogue’s origin. He established that she initially grew up in a commune and depicted Mississippi as mostly white when it has the highest percentage of black people out of any state. But he also established that Rogue’s mother disappeared at an early age and she was raised by her father and an aunt Carrie. The problem is that he seemed to suggest that Rogue had spent quite some time with aunt Carrie. The implication seemed to be that Rogue ran away when she was a teenager, even though the only flashbacks of Rogue we saw in the story were pre-pubescent. Later writers seemed to try to ignore aunt Carrie, and every later flashback suggested Mystique took Rogue in at a very young age.
In other news, Joe Casey did an interview with Newsarama about Weapon X-Men. In it, he revealed that one of the goals of this series is to upgrade Strucker and turn him into a big threat again. He also said that one of the major threats in this series will be WMDs- Wolverines of Mass Destruction- which appear to be robots patterned after Wolverine.
I agree that trying to make Strucker a major threat again is a good idea- he hasn’t been used much as a villain in the past few years. But robot Wolverines seem like a bad idea. We already saw Orchis using Sentinels created using Wolverine’s skeleton during Fall of X, so using Wolverine robots again in such a short time seems repetitive. Part of the problem seems to be that Casey’s original proposal for this series was submitted prior to Fall of X and the WMDs were apparently part of the proposal.
BTW, the Newsarama interview was supposed to be released after Weapon X-Men 1 was released but it was released early. First Marvel slaps the One World Under Doom banner on Weapon X-Men 1 without telling Casey and now this. It seems like Casey can’t catch a break with this series.
@Micheal
From what I see in the preview, Rogue’s aunt Carrie is in the next week What If. Two reference in a row after years… Coincidence, or are they preparing her return in Uncanny X-Men?
There was the recent comic with Destiny and Mystique, where Rogue looked about six years old. Maybe they looked after her from a young age because her real parents were deadbeats, but she didn’t live with them officially until she was a teen.
“and hopefully the audience is fine with it getting that time”
They might not be, since it sold the least of the X-books out this week, according to Bleeding Cool.
I spent a moment wondering if it was in-character for Mystique to be the default caregiver of a possibly-mutant child with deadbeat parents and not decide to take her away from them, but then I remembered the all-purpose motivation “Irene says this is how it’s supposed to go.”
Some stuff from Breevort’s blog. First, here’s a conversation between Breevort and our own Mark Coale:
MARK COALE: Do you think it’s realistic we could ever see an accepted hero turn bad that wasn’t just designed as a temporary change in personality or exposure to Element X or being possessed by a noxious cloud of fear? Unlike other parts of entertainment where the flip flop of white hat/black is not unusual?
As was happened with some recent examples, the fan outcry from however large or small a percentage of the audience, likely just wouldn’t accept it and would likely make life miserable for creators/editors . (Imagine what this page would be like you someone like Jean or Storm had a heel turn.)
Would it even work using a minor C list hero? The best example I could think of the other day was Sargon, GA Hero revived as SA villain before a heroic death in Crisis and then a shades of Grey role in some Vertigo stuff. He might as well been a new character to most of the audience reading Flash #186.
TOM: Yes, i think it could be done, Mark, but it requires an extraordinary amount of commitment, more than we typically have, Because every character is somebody’s favorite, and having a hero take a turn to the dark side is always something that fans of that character will want to see overturned. Just look at how many different creators over the years have attempted (unsuccessfully as it turns out) to redeem Hank Pym after he struck his wife Janet. In that story, writer Jim Shooter was trying to chart the course of a hero going legitimately bad, but that course was reversed even before the story was completed, and so creators still try to take back the bad stuff the character did in those set-up stories. More recently, a decade-plus back, when we were working on the SHADOWLAND crossover, there was a real push internally to make Daredevil an out-and-out villain. At the time, Fox controlled the media rights to the character and it didn’t seem like they’d be coming back any time soon, and there was an interest in beginning to build up Moon Knight as a similar player that could be exploited across other media. The DD editor of the period, Stephen Wacker, had to work very carefully and very quietly to prevent Matt Murdock from crossing any lines-of-no-return in that story. And it’s a good thing that he did. Because only a couple of years later, those rights did come back to Marvel and we wound up doing three seasons of a television series (plus DEFENDERS) And so, had we gone for it during SHADOWLAND, we would have had a lot more work cut out for us in suddenly needing to redeem Matt so that he could be a headliner again.
Next, a few more little tidbits:
NEON FROST: Any plans to have Exceptional X-Men crossover with NYX? I’d love to see Emma get to reunite with the Cuckoos, even if it’s just Sophie. If not a crossover, any plans to have them reunite in the future? Feels like it’s been forever since they shared pages together. Also any chance we might see Banshee or other Gen-X characters cameoing in Exceptional?
TOM: I think you’re going to get just about everything that you want over the next several months, Neon, though likely not in the way that you mean, and possibly not in the places that you expect. How’s that for vague?
PANDORO: Since Kid Omega was Xavier’s prize pupil in Morrison’s New X-Men, are we going to see them interact or even fight in X-Manhunt?
And speaking of, are we going to see a mentorship between him, Cyclops and Psylocke?
TOM: You’ll have to wait and see, Pandoro, but I’ll give you a hint: yes.
MICHAEL SIMPSON: In Exceptional X-Men #1, I think we saw a glimpse into Emma’s headspace (the messy room, etc). Are we going to get a chance to perhaps get back to that and explore what Emma has been dealing with since the fall of Krakoa?
TOM: We’ll definitely be delving deeper into Emma as we go, Michael, though it’s more likely to be about where she is at the moment than where she was in the recent past. I’m concerned that we’re still taking about the Krakoa era maybe a little bit too much as we move ahead.
Regarding Tom’s answer regarding the villains, my question would then be “Why did you agree to turn Julian, the Cuckoos and Darkstar into villains?” Because Breevort seems aware that sooner or later they’re all going to be going back to being heroes, and they’ll just be saddled with the baggage of having hurt innocent people.
I can’t believe Marvel was planning on trying to replace Daredevil with Moon Knight like they tried replacing the X-Men with the Inhumans. That does explain a few things, though.
Also, one more thing- Claremont will be writing a new Kitty Pryde and Wolverine series.
I’m sorry, but Daredevil going bad was an awful, awful idea.
It really is hard to think of what (A-list or B-List) hero could make a permanent, successful, no-holds-barred villain turn, even given proper motivation and opportunity. Hal Jordan may have been the biggest name to ever have a long-term run as a bad guy, and even he got a redemption-death-resurrection arc after a while. Tony Stark during the Crossing? Eugh.
Marvel and DC are too fond of their moneymaking properties to risk permanently damaging most of them to such an extent. And there’s just no impact when it’s a C-lister with a handful of appearances. “Oh, no, it’s Dove-Man! He’s gone EVIL!” “That’s right. DOVE NO MORE. NOW I AM ALL FOR WAR.”
Now, introduce a character as a hero. Young, powerful, idealistic, motivated. Give them 12 issues acting as the typical young hero. Selfless, driven, determined. Give them the usual team-up with some established hero to earn their new hero credit. Even appear in this year’s big crossover. And then, without warning, have something happen which completely erodes their morals. A devastating accident, a personal loss– something which absolutely undermines their value in being a hero. And where any other hero would struggle through and bounce back… they just go full villain. Maybe it’s a perceived need for revenge, selfishness, whatever, it’s that they broke under the pressure.
Just like there were so many moments in early Spider-Man where Peter Parker could have become a monster had he only been a little less morally strong. The problem is, it’s harder to do a villain turn on a hero with decades of stories behind them thanks to sheer narrative momentum. It can happen, but writers will look at those thirty years of Daredevil being a selfless do-gooder and swing back to it…
While we’re on the subject of heroes turning into villains, Kurt Busiek posted something interesting on Breevort’s blog about Quicksilver’s turn to villainy:
“Another attempt at that was Quicksilver’s heel-turn, set up in VISION & SCARLET WITCH with Crystal’s infidelity, and built up in FANTASTIC FOUR and, I think, a couple of AVENGERS annuals. It was pretty much all written by Steve Englehart, but I was told at the time that it was at Shooter’s request — and Steve was pretty frustrated at doing all that work and then told it had to be reversed due to an INHUMANS graphic novel that, plot-wise, predated any of this stuff but would be coming out later.”
“Just like there were so many moments in early Spider-Man where Peter Parker could have become a monster had he only been a little less morally strong.”
I was just thinking about the whole Chasm thing the other day… if they absolutely insisted on having Peter Parker’s clone lose his memories and become evil, it would have been a lot more interesting (if less crossover-synergistic) to basically just have him be a version who never learned “with great power comes great responsibility”. If nothing else he’d have a lot more story hooks than just being a purple version of Spawn.