The X-Axis – w/c 27 January 2025
ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #8. By Tim Seeley, Edoardo Audino, KJ Díaz & Clayton Cowles. Hmm… I have no trouble buying the idea that Captain America thinks Black Tom Cassidy is still a villain. After all, he was a behind the scenes member of X-Force. I have a bit more trouble with the idea that Cap thinks the Juggernaut is still a villain, when he’s a full fledged public member of the X-Men. That said, I do quite like the way Seeley writes Cap with calmly reasonable conviction even when he’s totally wrong – it’s quite fun seeing his voice of reason routine deployed at the wrong target – and there’s some really nice art on this, particularly with Cap’s bike stunts.
X-MEN #10. (Annotations here.) Basically an issue of Cyclops staring down the awful Agent Lundqvist, who’s getting more plausible with every passing day as American politics catches up with him. MacKay does this scene very well, I think – the point of having Cyclops cite things like the Hague Invasion Act is not to align him with the right, but to have him frame his point in terms of Lundqvist’s worldview. Not just to make sure the dimwit actually understands it, but because his whole message is “the US government behaves exactly like me all the time, so stop your whining”. It’s also a post-Krakoan Cyclops who’s given up on trying to be friends with the authorities and is openly just trying to keep them off his back by threatening mutual destruction – rather than going back to the outright revolutionary angle that never quite worked under Bendis. I think it’s a good approach, and Netho Diaz gets Lundqvist’s increasing loss of composure rather well.
Meanwhile, the Hellions are back, as someone’s been rifling through the big book of characters who couldn’t even find their way into a crowd scene in Krakoa – King Bedlam? Locus? But that’s probably smart too, since you don’t want everything to be defined by the contrast with how the characters lived in Krakoa. So there’s an upside to using characters who don’t have much Krakoan baggage.
PSYLOCKE #3. (Annotations here.) Not bad at all, but we’re very much in middle chapter territory here. What it does well is Psylocke’s relationship with Greycrow and the tension with Shinobi – and it continues to make Psylocke feel like a viable solo lead in a way she hasn’t before. I’m not so sure about the way it build up new villain Ty Haniver. He doesn’t seem to have any back story with Psylocke, unless we’re meant to take the butterfly motif as a hint, so it’s not at all clear yet what he’s after or what the threat is. He’s represented mainly by his weird cyborg animal creations, which seem like intriguingly wonky designs… but the book also seems to be trying to keep them obscured or on the margins until the cliffhanger. I can’t understand why you’d do that, when their oddity is the main thing that’s making him more than a generic villain during his build up, but the layout of the cave fight is just baffling if it’s not deliberate. One way or the other, there are some very strange choices being made with them.
SABRETOOTH: THE DEAD DON’T TALK #2. By Frank Tieri, Michael Sta. Maria, Dono Sánchez-Almara & Joe Sabino. It’s Sabretooth as a New York gangland enforcer in 1909, except the street gangs are a mixture of regular ones and proto-supervillains. That’s it, that’s the book. And… yeah, I think it works. It’s an angle that makes for a slightly wackier book than just “Creed kills a bunch of turn of the century criminals” and Sta. Maria’s art plays it deadpan while giving them an amusingly proto-MU vibe. Really, this issue is more of an attempt to set up a 1909 Marvel New York than it is a Sabretooth story, but it’s none the worse for that.
STORM: LIFEDREAM. By (deep breath) John Jennings, Edwin Galmon, Andrew Dalhouse, Angélique Roché, Alitha E Martinez, Brittney Morris, Charles Stewart III, Frank William, Curtis Baxter, Karen S Darboe, Yen Nitro & Ariana Maher. This is a Marvel Voices special, but despite the cover billing it as a “star-studded anthology” – so star-studded that they didn’t put any of the creators’ names on the cover, by the way – it’s actually more of a jam issue, with four different creative teams handling chapters of a single story. That story involves Storm being yanked to the far future so that archivists can copy her mind, and having to deal with a rogue AI that’s patterning itself on her. Really, it’s kind of an excuse to shows lots of parts of Storm’s life without having to worry too much about the details, and the payoff is a rather trite “this is what makes me human” ending, but it hangs together surprisingly well for something done in this format, and the first and third chapters in particular have some really nice art. The Voices anthologies can be very patchy, but this is solid.
Ah, miss the old reviews on a Sunday, but nice to see them on a Friday out the blue. Question, is it the 20 year anniversary this year of the first x-axis review on Usenet?
” I have a bit more trouble with the idea that Cap thinks the Juggernaut is still a villain, when he’s a full fledged public member of the X-Men. ”
Even worse, the Avengers have met up with the X-Men and know that Cain is a hero now. And Cap is a member of the Avengers Assemble team. Don’t the Avengers Assemble team and the main Avengers team share files? It’s even more ridiculous since Cap got his info on Black Tom last issue from the Avengers files.
In other news, Emma appears in West Coast Avengers 3 this week. She’s part of the new Illuminati that debuted last year. The weird thing is that she says she can’t help with Ultron because she’s too busy with mutant affairs. So far, in Exceptional X-Men, all she’s done is train three students. Maybe this issue takes place late run Exceptional X-Men’s run.
By the way, sales for West Coast Avengers are not good. I’m worried this run will be cancelled before Firestar gets a good chance to redeem herself and people will be left with the impression of Firestar as a drunken jerk.
Some news about the X-Manhunt crossover:
Storm will be getting new vibranium armor.
The Sh’iar and Deathbird will be appearing.
There appears to be a Krakoan egg. Presumably this is the “Who Waits Within The Last Egg?” plot teased in Timeslide.
Storm and Maggot will be defending Xavier against Scott’s X-Men. I hope that Scott’s X-Men don’t come off as complete idiots here. If Storm and Maggott try to explain that the deaths aboard the Agnew were faked and Scott’s team refuses to listen, they’re going to look like morons.
I still think Scott’s problem should be based on Xavier giving up on his dream to found Krakoa. Marvel is never going to go in that direction for fear of offending all the fans of Krakoa. I was an enthusiastic supporter of the initial Krakoan era. Hickman’s direction made me excited to be a fan for the first time in years. I dislike the “From the Ashes” relaunch. It’s because Krakoa was such a morally ambiguous ride that I love the Hickman Krakoa so much though. It’s not that I need Krakoa to be treated as a true utopia. I would be fine with a character like Scott to have hatred for Xavier when he looks back at Krakoa and rethinks his childhood being raised by Professor X.
I was reading the X-Axis on Usenet in the 90s, so it definitely can’t be the 20th anniversary – maybe the 30th?
I don’t think it’s quite the 30th yet. I’m going to say the X-Axis started in 1998 or 1999. I didn’t have internet until 2001, but after I discovered the X-Axis in 2002, I read back through the archives. I don’t remember any reviews from before 1998, but it may have been 1999. I think it’s been 26 years. Unless there were earlier reviews that were never archived of which I was unaware.
Paul started in late 1996 as I recall.
One of, if not the earliest of his reviews I recall reading was of Rob Liefeld’s Captain America 6 (featuring Cable!)
Pretty much all of his reviews were available still on Usenet and Google archive in the early-mid 2000s, which was the last time I went and looked for them, but I have no idea if they are still there today.
It was always really interesting to read his contemporaneous thoughts on the books through the dark days of the late 90s and his return to them with the indexes (generally doubling down on how incredibly incoherent much of the line was during the late Scott Lobdell era), while comparably being more charitable to the Joe Casey stuff from the early 2000s.
His earliest reviews must not have been archived with the later material as I don’t remember seeing any of the Heroes Reborn stuff being reviewed. The earliest reviews in the archives when I started reading in 2002 were books around the point of Mutant X.
Was he more lenient on Casey? I remember reading the indexes, but I don’t remember him changing his opinion on Casey’s Uncanny X-Men. It’s been a long time though
One of my favourite reviews was of the Casey ‘Nuff Said issue of Uncanny. It almost made that horrible stunt worth it to get the laughs from reading that review multiple times over the years. The other favourite was The Brotherhood issue by (ugh) “X” with Uncle Sam randomly showing up in the bar. Those two were classics.
“By the way, sales for West Coast Avengers are not good. I’m worried this run will be cancelled before Firestar gets a good chance to redeem herself and people will be left with the impression of Firestar as a drunken jerk.”
I assumed that this run of WCA was a 5-issue mini anyway… but I see they’re soliciting for issue 6, so maybe we’ll get 10 issues. Or 12. Despite Duggan writing it, I have trouble seeing this lasting long-term. Especially since it’s such an odd line-up. For a team focused on rehabilitating villains, to start off with Ultron and an original creation is a weird move. Not when there are so many other villains who could potentially be recruited.
Rhino, Shocker, Boomerang, Scorpion–they’ve all shown signs of potential growth in recent years while still being morally flexible enough to make for good storytelling. (I suppose Joe Kelly called dibs on all the best Spider-Man villains though.)
Meanwhile, as noted, Firestar’s gotten a really raw deal in the past few years despite her slightly higher profile.
Chris V
Yes that’s right. The old X-Axis website’s archive only went back as far as April 1999, though there was at least two years worth of stuff before it, covering Heroes Reborn/Operation Zero Tolerance era X-books. From memory, at that point he was only reviewing non X-books if they had a guest appearance by one of the cast. Re-reading those in the early 2000s was fun to see his views on the late Lobdell era as it as happening, as well as the promising start, followeding by the rapid collapse of the Kelly/Seagle period.
Yes he was more charitable to the Casey stuff in retrospect, but only a bit!
This is what Paul wrote circa 2004:
” It would be fair to say that they weren’t very well received. In fact, even Joe Casey doesn’t seem all that keen on them any more. I’ve re-read the whole run before starting on this entry, and to be honest, history has been relatively kind to it. It’s not as bad as I’d remembered, and frankly, it’s much better than some of the dross that followed it.
So why was the Casey run so unwelcome at the time? Well, several reasons. Firstly, let’s be clear about one thing – it’s better than I’d remembered, but it’s still not that good. Even the best bits are really a trial run for ideas that Casey went on to explore much more effectively in WildCATS v3.0.”
That’s a pretty fair assessment. I re-read all of Casey’s Wildcats/WildcaTS 3.0 stuff during the pandemic and it’s really, really good (except the final arc which was editorially mandated). You can definitly see the stuff he does with Warren and Worthington Industries is very much in the same headspace as he went with Spartan and the Halo Corporation stuff over in Wildcats.
@The Other Michael: I think Duggan’s West Coast Avengers a case of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”
Launch it with more minor villains who are plausibly redeemable, and the book might not be able to get the attention and the sales it needs.
Launch it with a big-name villain, and you get attention, but perhaps have an unworkable long-term plot.
I think Al Ewing’s Avengers Inc. had a similar predicament as a book that wouldn’t have been salable if it weren’t Avengers-branded but also wasn’t set up to deliver what most readers expect from an Avengers-branded book.
It’s a tough market for quirky concepts, at least at the Big Two.
I have not even attempted to read a page of the current WCA, mainly because I know that it is a Gerry Duggan team book and I have read his X-Men run. It probably doesn’t help that it is marketed as an Avengers book at a time when there are too many of those.
To the best of my understanding, we are very much at a point in time when readership interest is easily diluted, and launching new books may actually hurt reader interest. Between that and largely Marvel-unrelated events centering around the current Diamond troubles, I expect that we may be quickly approaching a time when physical comics become very rare indeed, and Marvel and DC comics turn to a all-digital, line-wide monthly subscription model at least as a short term experiment.
The current concerns about tariffs and costs for printing comics are probably a major push in that direction as well. This is likely to be a very difficult year for independent publishers.
Oh Paul was definitely doing the X-Axis in 1995-96. How could we forget the Onslaught Index?
@Omar, The Other Michael- Yes, but Ultron was a weird choice for 2 reasons. First, Jed MacKay apparently called dibs on Hank Pym because he wanted to use him in Moon Knight. So we’ve got a story about redeeming Ultron without Hank Pym, which makes it much less interesting. Second, we already had a “good Ultron” story less than a year ago in Avengers Inc but instead of just using “Mark” from that story, Duggan invented ANOTHER good Ultron and didn’t even mention Mark.
Apologies, meant to say 30 not 20! https://groups.google.com/g/rec.arts.comics.marvel.xbooks/search?q=X-axis 01/03/97 I think is the first x-axis, so couple of years to go before the big 30th!
Yep, here’s the original, from Jun 2, 1996: https://groups.google.com/g/rec.arts.comics.marvel.xbooks/c/XU-TPGSw_kE/m/9_1cR9Ukq4AJ
“I don’t normally do reviews. But hey, I’m only doing four weeks of actual work this summer, and I’ve got to fill in my time somehow.”
The Benjamin Russel story arc…. Yeah I didn’t get that at all.
Avengers #400 was fun
I’ll take it.
I did go back and save as many of Paul’s old Usenet reviews as I could find, and I think I got most of them. They are probably in a text file on my computer somewhere, and I *think* I also went and grabbed the reviews at ifdestroyed (or whatever the site was called that was between the X-Axis and House to Astonish). The X-Axis was definitely a going concern when I started reading newsgroups in early ’97
Thanks for those links to the old Usenet posts, Dave and Freed. I read them for a bit because it was fun seeing contemporary fan reactions to Onslaught, etc.
I’m not someone who’s kept up with Paul’s reviews and commentary since Usenet times – I think I came across X-Axis some time around 2000/2001, when I ventured into buying English language comics.
But the X-Axis was an absolute joy. I’m sort of sorry the indexing was never finished, because even that was a great way to fill in the gaps for lots of stories I didn’t get a chance to read.
And the realtime Austen vitriol was truly inspired writing. Communion wafers at all.
Have to try and search through this older stuff, as I remember being completely befuddled by the total awfulness of Onslaught but not really having any additional insight on it.
Also wondering how readable If Destroyed is, in terms of the gap between X-Axis and House to Astonish?
I think that coincided with a period of fully giving up on X-Men comics…
*et al (not “at all”)
“Basically an issue of Cyclops staring down the awful Agent Lundqvist, who’s getting more plausible with every passing day as American politics catches up with him.”
How? What’s happening is that unelected bureaucrats are losing power.
Lundqvist is not presented as a career civil servant. He’s presented as an arrogant, bigoted moron with a disdain for the rule of law.