The X-Axis – w/c 4 March 2024
So before you ask, no, I’m not doing Ultimate X-Men. It’s an Ultimate book, not an X-book, and I stopped covering the first Ultimate X-Men after a while too. More to the point, though, Peach Momoko’s art is beautiful, but I found Demon Days a complete slog, and Ultimate Invasion didn’t do much to interest me in the new line either. So it’s really a book that I have no interest in. It’ll show up on Marvel Unlimited in three months time and I’m more than happy to wait and read it then.
X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #129. By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Phillip Sevy, Yen Nitro & Travis Lanham. Now, having just said all that, I’m very conscious that this is a less than stellar week for the books I am reading. X-Men Unlimited takes a bit of a diversion from its main plot to explain what Sunspot was up to immediately before the Hellfire Gala. X-Men Red seemed to be setting this up as some kind of subplot, but never got back to it. So, sure, if that book’s not going to get round to it, this is as good a place as any to tie up the loose end. But “he was planning to launch a PR campaign with X-Corp” is a bit of an underwhelming answer, and it ultimately just adds to the sense of this arc being a random collection of elements loosely arranged around a rather slight Externals story.
X-MEN #32. (Annotations here.) This isn’t working, is it? The main plot is over in Fall of the House of X – fair enough, that’s how event stories often work. But that leaves X-Men itself to do a story where Magik is reunited with the other X-Men – specifically Kate – after returning to Earth at the end of Realm of X. And it’s just kind of a mess. Magik is apparently dying from the nanites that shut down her powers before the Hellfire Gala, except there was no mention of that at all in Realm of X. For some reason she fails to locate any of the X-Men (even though the Limbo Embassy is in the phone book and Mirage, who came back with her, has hooked up with the other X-Men over in X-Men Unlimited), but equally inexplicably she manages to locate the Orchis facility that developed her nanites, which by sheer coincidence she attacks at the same time that Shadowkat is attacking it for unrelated reasons. Meanwhile, the lighthouse keeper from Mykines has apparently been nursing Lockheed back to health all this time (even though we never saw him get hurt) and it’s only now occurred to Orchis that the guy might be an witness who needs erasing? Why the hell bring him up just to hang a lampshade over the fact that he’s a loose end? This is meant to be a big satisfying moment of the tide turning and things being set right, but it just feels unearned. The book wants to be building to a climax, but there’s no real sense of any of this developing from what’s gone before – it’s all just Arbitrary Stuff Happening.
WEAPON X-MEN #1. By Christos Gage, Yildiray Çinar, Nolan Woodard & Clayton Cowles. Well, it’s an Exiles-style miniseries in which an alternate Phoenix gathers a team of alternate Wolverines to fight an alternate Onslaught who’s a mixture of Magneto and Jean Grey rather than Magneto and Professor X. This is the series that was trailed in the Original X-Men one-shot in December, and giving that sort of build-up to what’s ultimately just a fun piece of fluff seems like it was misplaced. This issue is rather better than that one, partly because art is much better and partly because it hasn’t been overhyped. It’s still fundamentally a silly idea, and you have to assume there’s some sort of twist coming, because it’s very hard to believe that there’s any cosmic problem to which the best solution is some of these Wolverine variants – the Marvel Zombies Wolverine? The couch potato Wolverine from Earth X? Still, it’s harmless nonsense and if it’s a case of filling out the publishing schedule in the dying days of the Krakoan era, at least it’s a change from Orchis.
MS MARVEL: MUTANT MENACE #1. By Iman Vellani, Sabir Pirzada, Scott Godlewski, Erick Arciniega & Joe Caramagna. It’s the first day back at school after Ms Marvel’s summer camp with Orchis… which, hold on, means we’re back last September? Haven’t we already had Thanksgiving and Christmas stories during “Fall of X”? Well, okay, September it is, though the scheduling choice seems weird. And actually, this is the sort of story that Marvel probably should have done back at the start of “Fall of X”: it’s Ms Marvel in New Jersey, basically just getting on with doing Ms Marvel stuff, while people she knows in civilian life react to the local hero’s new association with the X-Men. One of the weaknesses of “Fall of X” is that public opinion seems to turn on a dime depending on what the plot requires, and it doesn’t feel organic. As the only X-character with an actual civilian life among humans, Kamala is very well placed to try and plug that gap and make it feel more believable, and that’s basically what this story is doing. It also feels more like a regular Ms Marvel book than the previous mini, which is welcome. Even better, while Orchis are certainly hanging around, our main villains for this mini appear to be Hordeculture, who are gimmicky but fit quite happily into Ms Marvel’s tone. This is a book where one of the main villains is a part-cockatiel clone of Thomas Edison, after all. Rather better than I was expecting.
Why is the Ms. Marvel series coming out so late? The only other mini that came out so late was X-Men Forever and it’s part of the Fall/Rise crossover. The Fall/Rise crossover started in January. and all of the books that weren’t directly part of it started their side quests in January ( X-Force, Wolverine, Cable). And the story seems to take place some time ago.
What IS Logan doing making eggs in the Morlock tunnels. Every other story this time period has him living in the Greenhouse. Someone suggested that this is after X-Men 28-29. but the dialogue seems to imply that issue 30 takes place before issue 28-29, and issue 29 leads into issue 31, which is part of the Fall/Rise crossover. Then again, I suppose it’s possible Wolverine dropped by the Morlock tunnels to coordinate activities between X-Force and the X-Men.
Also. Rogue seems to have the hairstyle and costume she adopted in Uncanny Avengers 5. But in that same issue, the Kingpin told the media what happened at the Gala and none of the characters in this issue mention it when discussing whether the X-Men are guilty. One character even says the X-Men haven’t told their side of the story yet.
It’s interesting that Emma’s mindwipe not only wiped people’s memories of Kamala’s death but also made people who knew Kamala’s identity forget she was Ms. Marvel.
Speaking of Emma, if Logan was hanging around the Morlock Tunnels a while back, you’d think he’d have had someone tell her Phoebe was alive. Yet she hasn’t mentioned it so far.
@Michael: I was going to say that expecting any real inter-writer coordination at this stage is probably futile – then I remembered that X-Men, FotHoX and Uncanny Avengers all have the same writer. Damned if that doesn’t just say it all.
Note that Sunspot is on Earth in X-Men Unlimited 129. That raises the question of how he got there. We haven’t found out how the X-Men are planning on getting the mutants from Mars to Earth now that we know the “ships” were really part of the Sentinel Buster armor. Maybe Lila took him, since we saw her inn Ms. Matvel this week. Still, since the plan hinged on tricking Orchis into thinking that the “ships” were bringing the mutants to Earth, you’d think Sunspot would avoid going to Earth before the invasion, since that might make Orchis suspect the mutants had other ways to get from Mars to Earth. Then again, maybe Sunspot had to come early because of an emergency.
Isn’t Manifold the key to teleporting the mutants from Mars to Earth? I’m not reading everything and following a lot of this through these reviews, so I could be mistaken. I thought that was the importance of Manifold recently becoming an integral player again.
I don’t think he is, Chris. Rogue and Gambit seemed to just stop whatever they were supposed to be doing against Orchis to revive Manifold- it didn’t seem to be part of the plan at all. I think Manifold is needed to bring the hundreds of thousands of mutants from the White Hot Room to Earth, since we’ve been told Rachel can’t do it.
Sunspot said he got to Earth with some tech he “borrowed” from Cable. Probably that bodyslide thing.
And much as I love Sunspot, yet another character in that story is just not productive.
I think Weapon X-Men was really dumb. It’s basically a parody team, but the book doesn’t attempt any humor (beyond the compulsory quips). If there is going to be a twist, it should, at the latest, have been the last page reveal in the first issue. Dragging out the dumb setup is just bad.
Ultimate X-Men was completely divorced from ultimate setup. The premise of the Maker’s time traveling shenanigans was mentioned in the credits blurb, but not at all in the story. So it felt like a random What If (since Armor’s powers work slightly different from 616).
The Ms Marvel mini probably got greenlit after the first one was deemed successful enough, and is only coming out now because of production lead times being what they are.
@Paul: I share your opinions of both Demon Days and Ultimate Invasion, but I really enjoyed Ultimate X-Men 1. It read like the first chapter of a supernatural/horror manga, and the art was a beautiful as expected. I hope you like it when it shows up on Unlimited.
I also thought Ms. Marvel: Mutant Menace 1 was alright, even if the continuity was off (not that I care, much, as *all* the continuity in FoX is a mess). I’m glad Kamala’s supporting cast got a decent amount of page time. I think it would have read better with a different artist. The action and some of the character work was lackluster. Hopefully, the artist will get better as the book goes.
As someone said on Reddit, Uncanny Spiderman had a data page saying that Lila Cheny was torn in two at the Hellfire Gala, which raises the question of how she’s alive in Ms. Marvel and why she didn’t save the non-mutant guests.
@neutrino- It wasn’t a data page, it was Kurt repeating a story he heard but didn’t witness personally. So for all we know, Lila wasn’t even at the Gala and that was just a rumor.
Lila Cheney is usuually the musical guest, and Orchis’s plan involved removing all teleporters. At least, you’d expect an explanation of why she hasn’t been helping the X-Men. her powers would be invaluable in getting mutants to safe havens.
She’s on tour in the Badoon Colonies and they couldn’t book her. Where’s my No-Prize?
Well, you can get Kurt and Lila on the same panel at the end of all this and let him go “huh, I thought you were dead?” or something.
[…] Paul O’Brien isn’t going to be talking about this title. That’s disappointing, but not entirely surprising as he’s stated that this isn’t 1) part of the main comics line and 2) doesn’t interest him in the slightest. Given that he did review the original run of “Ultimate X-Men” up until its cancellation, you’d hope that he’d have given this first volume a shot just to see how it compares. […]