The X-Axis – w/c 10 March 2025
ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #13. By Alex Paknadel, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. I guess we’re doing alternating story arcs here. After the diversion to Black Tom and the Juggernaut, we’re back to the first arc, with Banshee and Husk hanging around at Cassidy Keep and not actually doing a whole lot to advance the plot beyond reminding us of the grass-roots anti-mutant Flatscanners movement. Meanwhile, the latest aggrieved human is a construction worker who’s out of work because the mutant crews are so much more efficient. I don’t actually mind that as an idea – if you had mutants trying to live in the real world, it makes sense that you’d get people complaining about them having an unfair advantage – but there’s something a bit odd about the idea that there are apparently tons of everyday mutants in America again after the fall of Krakoa. That’s not how the plot went – the entire population of Krakoa were marched into the White Hot Room and we were told that the vast majority of them stayed to build a new life there. I guess you can rationalise this by claiming that a lot more mutants came back in X-Men #35 than the issue suggested, but that undercuts the earlier story, which I’m not keen on at all. It was a get out clause to allow particular mutants to be used in future, not a reset button for the entire population of Krakoa. It’s not like there weren’t plenty of civilian mutants still in the US anyway, since Orchis apparently found tons of them during “Fall of X”. None of which is really a point about this particular issue, but there’s a degree of goalpost-moving that feels a little too obvious to me.
X-MEN #13. (Annotations here.) Well, back to “X-Manhunt”. Fortunately, this week’s issues are rather more coherent than last week’s, since everyone now seems to be on the same page about what the problem is with Professor X’s powers, and NYX seems to have been the outlier. Beyond that… it’s basically a fight scene. The memorable set piece is Kid Omega taking on Professor X telepathically, and beating him not through power or through skill but by pre-planning. That confrontation works, and I like the shift of art style to pencils in the astral battle, complete with subdued colours and Professor X’s complacent lecturing turning out to be misplaced. Psylocke’s exchange with Storm kind of works too, at least in as much as it has Psylocke rising to the occasion when Cyclops is out of commission, but it feels like Storm has to be forced into the plot in order to make it work.
X-FACTOR #8. (Annotations here.) This is legacy issue #300, but that gets no more than lip service. More to the point, this is an “X-Manhunt” tie-in, and it seems to be the penultimate issue as well, though we won’t know that for sure until the next solicitations come out. That seems like is ought to be an unhappy combination, but the result hangs together better than you might expect. X-Factor‘s biggest problem has been its massively uneven tone, and forcing the book to participate in a straight plot at least fixes that. More to the point, though, Mark Russell’s main serious storyline is all about Havok realising that he joined X-Factor for the wrong reasons and that he ought to have been focussing on his relationships with his loved ones. Having him spend an issue interceding in a fight between Cyclops and Professor X fits perfectly nicely with those themes, and so “X-Manhunt” turns out to be a crossover that can be made to serve the book’s existing storylines. The notional stars of the book pretty much get thrown under the bus – at this stage there’s no point pretending that they’re a match for the X-Men, and it’s a better call to just focus on Havok and try to bring his story home. Bob Quinn would have been better served on a book where the light comedy aspects were working, but he does a decent enough job with a straight issue of mostly action.
PHOENIX #9. (Annotations here.) Well, we’re doing the story where Jean embraces her cosmic side and gets a bit dodgy as a result, presumably leading to Adani somehow bringing her down to earth next issue. The Dark Gods are hanging around on the fringes, but they’re not really contributing a whole lot – no doubt Adani turns on them next issue when she figures out that they’re manipulating her. It’s serviceable, and you can more or less see what it’s trying to do. I don’t particularly mind the art, either – if Adani and Perrikus are standing around in a generic landscape for no apparent reason, then that seems to be a story issue rather than an art one. But I don’t really buy into Adani as a rounded character and Jean’s arc doesn’t feel like it’s bringing anything beyond the obvious.
HELLVERINE #4. (Annotations here.) Seriously? We’re just pretending that Genosha has had a functioning, normal human city on it all this time? What? I know continuity isn’t really the point of this book, which is really about doing old fashioned ghost stories linked to traumatic events from Akihiro’s past. And it does that quite well, though the pacing is getting a bit odd as the book wraps up the Mother thread suspiciously quickly in order to rush on to the next demon. But suddenly declaring Genosha to be inhabited by regular people with access to normal city amenities is lunatic – Genosha’s whole function in the X-books is to be an empty wasteland serving as a symbol of anti-mutant genocide. The weird Gigosha idea from X-Factor doesn’t undercut that because it’s precisely the sort of place where someone might put one of these weird crypto-libertarian projects, and the inappropriateness of the location works well. But just an ordinary city which was apparently there before Gigosha… we’re in “sorry, has anyone involved in this actually read a comic set on Genosha in the last quarter century” territory here, and it’s the sort of stumbling block that can’t help but derail the story.
SABRETOOTH: THE DEAD DON’T TALK #4. By Frank Tieri, Michael Sta. Maria, Rachelle Rosenberg & Joe Sabino. I get the impression that this series has sunk without trace – if people are talking about it anywhere, I can’t find it – and it actually deserves better. It’s not so much Sabretooth’s own plot thread, which is a reasonable enough explanation of how he came to think of himself as more than just a henchman, plus a somewhat routine “meets a girl and she dies” subplot. But the period proto-Marvel Universe 1920s gangs are a fun environment in an Elseworlds sort of a way, and feel like a straightforward gangland crime story might be worth a punt. But Michael Sta. Maria’s art is fabulous, selling the set-up but with a nice sense of an early Creed still a little out of his depth. He really does deserve something higher profile on the back of this.
Regarding the mutants in America, we’re told that 15 million mutants were resurrected in the White Hot Room. Suppose there were 250,000 mutants when Krakoa fell. If a fifth of the resurrectees returned to Earth that’s 3 million. Suppose that 2.5 million of the returnees went to Genosha and 500,000 stayed outside Genosha. The mutant population outside of Genosha has doubled. Even a small minority of the resurrected remaining on Earth could have big consequences.
“it seems to be the penultimate issue as well,”- I hate to be that guy but penultimate means second-to-last and this seems to be the third-to-last issue.
Some more X-related books this week:
The X-Men are appearing in Amazing Spider-Man 69 this week. Note that the Timeslide one-shot asked the question “Who Would Trade Away Immortality?” We find out the answer this issue- Cyra.
Apocalypse appears in Power Man: Timeless 2 this week. It’s by Kelly and Lanzing. I have a feeling that they meant to explain what happened to Apocalypse and Arakko in NYX but that book got cancelled early so they have to do it in this waste of a limited series.
Firestar appears in West Coast Avengers 5 this week. Am I the only person that thinks that Duggan is writing Flag Smasher as too powerful for someone who’s supposedly a duplicate of Captain America? He was able to shrug off Firestar’s microwaves and Spider-Woman’s venom blasts and even at the end it was implied they only caught him because he let them.It made sense when he was wearing the Captain Krakoa costume. because it was suggested that it enhanced his abilities and protected him but he’s wearing normal clothing in this sequence.
In other news a New Thunderbolts series is coming out in June and Laura will be a member. Annoyingly, Songbird won’t be a member so I guess she goes back to limbo. Clea, Namor and Hulk will be members which makes it seem more like a Defenders series. What’s next, Cable appears as a member of a Champions series featuring Mr. Fantastic, Invisible Woman, Human Torch and the Thing?
We finally found out what Hickman’s Imperial is about. It’s a four issue limited series that “lays the foundation for an entire new landscape of interconnected space-set stories”. It will feature among others Nova, Black Panther and Hulks. It’s not clear if Jean will become involved.
The premise is that the Marvel Universe is thrown into turmoil after the leaders of several galactic empires are killed. This fits with another future from Timeslide- “Galactic Leaders Assassinated”. This has caused fans to speculate that Xandra and Hulkling might be killed. Xandra seems likely- she’s in jeopardy right now. But killing Teddy would lead to accusations of Bury Your Gays. Probably he’lll survive but lose leadership of the Kree and Skrul empires.
The main issue to my mind of having all these mutant groups is that mutants should be vanishingly rare, or it messes up the “world outside your window” concept. That’s why Marvel have been trying to fix the problem as far back as the Morlock Massacre. But it seems that they never learn their lesson, because these stories keep coming out that inflate the numbers again.
I mean, you have to ask, why are Pryde and Frost arguing over who gets to teach four kids when there’s a whole society of Morlocks and multiple construction crews, and a specialist prison, and who knows what else. Emma should be like, “ok, you teach those four, I’ll look after these ten I found on Facebook this afternoon. We can compare notes.”
Michael: “Apocalypse appears in Power Man: Timeless 2 this week. It’s by Kelly and Lanzing. I have a feeling that they meant to explain what happened to Apocalypse and Arakko in NYX but that book got cancelled early so they have to do it in this waste of a limited series.”
I don’t think so; it’s obvious that the plan for this miniseries was to take the Power Man of the future around the entire solar system, since he’s bouncing from planet to planet, and a stop on Mars/Arakko must have been among the first things they thought of.
Yeah, I have no idea what the status for mutants is supposed to be in the current period. There was talk about mutants being more hated and feared than ever at the start of FtA, which was ridiculous after Orchis. I thought maybe mutants were trying to stay low (the “midnight M” thing, which seems to have been dropped). Now, we seem to be following in the direction where Morrison left off, at least as seems to be shown with this Infinity Comic.
I like the idea about mutants being able to outcompete with humans, if given a fair chance. It adds purpose to the unreasoning hatred for mutants as compared to other superhumans and aligns with the “next stage of evolution”. It’s been played upon at times, but Marvel’s mutants status quo since Morrison left had been such a mess until Hickman that it was never really touched on in a meaningful way.
I thought Gigosha worked. It’s one of the more relevant stories Marvel could tell in the current world. Much better than trying to make fit Flag Smasher, Modok, or whatever random Marvel villain as an ill-conceived metaphor for Trump. It feels like a satirical idea or extrapolation with some bite in 2025.
@SI- Really the problem got out of hand with Morrison. Before Morrison, the mutant population of Genosha was said to be in the thousands. Under Morrison the mutant population of Genosha was said to be sixteen million, with millions of other mutants around the world.
So we got House of M, where Wanda depowered “a million mutants”. And by the time Krakoa fell the mutant population had only recovered to a quarter million.
But then the writers decided to end the Krakoan Era by resurrecting 15 million dead mutants. Even if only a small fraction returned to Earth, then the mutant population should be seven digits again.
What, Gerry Duggan has not given up on making a “Flash Smasher” out of evil Steve Rogers? To call that misguided would be very charitable indeed.
I don’t expect hard numbers or even basic consistency in demographics about fictional mutants, and Genosha is a prime example of why that would not be a good idea. It can’t really work unless the specifics are kept fuzzy and subject to interpretation, because once to settle the specifics you end up creating unwanted creative restraints.
It is very hard to make a mutant-dominant Genosha avoid the appearance of being either overpowering or irrelevant. If you start making most mutants appear to be Genosha residents, you lose much of the relatability of mutant characters. And if you do not, then there is a risk of making Genosha look like a curiosity of little consequence. Krakoa had much the same dilemma and solved it by throwing relatability out through the window, which is a main reason why I have little nostalgia for that period.
The sad thing is that it is a false dilemma. At these high numbers there is plenty of scope for building a nice spectrum of nuance levels and varied situations. You could have stories focusing on immigrant Genoshas dealing with language barriers and generational clashes, for instance. You could deal with national identities and their huge downsides (something that the Krakoan era made a point of avoiding rather stubbornly). You could make some fine characterization out of good old homesickness. You could even use the choice to move to a “mutant community” as a parallel for changes of self-identification such as transgenderism – or, perhaps more subtly, earning a degree and a STEM job when one’s parents and family neither did not quite accept the resulting changes.
Of course, that would have worked better before Marvel started treating mutancy as something of an alien species that just happened to have arisen on Earth.