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Robot Wendigo posted:I read the X-Men Holiday Special. The Jubilee connecting story was fun, although I'd forgotten that she had a kid. And was/is a vampire. I've always assumed that Christmas based comics like this are produced both for longtime fans and for frantic parents/grandparents to grab to stuff in some kid's stocking. If that's still the case, then the Domino story should have created some interesting discussions round the Yule log. Anthony Piper also wrote/drew the X-Men Annual story a few years back that was Domino murking an entire anti-mutant militia army base while bantering with Sunspot over the radio and that's the extent of his X-Men body of work so he certainly has an idea of what he likes to do with that universe
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Dec 29, 2018 06:19
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Alaois posted:Anthony Piper also wrote/drew the X-Men Annual story a few years back that was Domino murking an entire anti-mutant militia army base while bantering with Sunspot over the radio and that's the extent of his X-Men body of work so he certainly has an idea of what he likes to do with that universe I'm going to hunt that down. I liked his art on that page, and I love Domino sooooo
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Jan 1, 2019 01:38
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Robot Wendigo posted:I'm going to hunt that down. I liked his art on that page, and I love Domino sooooo it was the second story in Uncanny X-Men Annual from 2016, specifically. also I forgot, he has one more thing, which is the flashback pages in issue 3 of the Domino solo series, but that just kind of furthers my point 
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Jan 1, 2019 07:45
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Cheers, Alaosis. I appreciate it.Rochallor posted:The new X-Force series is pretty much more of the same. It's not aggressively bad, but it feels basically like everything else that's going on in the line right now. I like the idea of Kid Cable, but I don't have a grasp on his character yet, and I bounced off of Extermination pretty hard so no idea what he's like in that. Read this last night and tend to agree. I wasn't sold on the art, but came around by the end of the issue. I don't think it really works for the tone of the book, especially with the the darker, wetworks team version of the X-Men. I much preferred the art with the Boom Boom back-up.
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Jan 2, 2019 00:29
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Mr and Mrs X is a good comic, really enjoyed today's issue.
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Jan 2, 2019 15:58
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howe_sam posted:Mr and Mrs X is a good comic, really enjoyed today's issue. It's so good. In case anyone thought Mojo's comment was a throw-away line: https://twitter.com/nvtegrey/status/1080561158053134336 Also, I am really enjoying the heck out of Shatterstar - it's nailing the action and emotional beats, while still fitting in some deft moments of comedy, plus the flashback art and current art are brilliant contrasts. Big fan of Gringrave too, she's a fun antagonist whom I'd like to see more of. Finally, is there a word for the feeling you get when your favourite characters emerge unscathed from a crappy event, as is hopefully the case with Pixie, Armor and Rockslide? I am still concerned about a potential "big finish" however, because the phrase "not like this." will come to mind should anyone cool get killed off. I am hugely wary of this Anole development too. To end on a somewhat positive note regarding Disassembled, a X-Man/Legion mind-gently caress final battle could be cool if they get buckwild with it, but it will have to over come the malaise of the dreadful earlier issues.
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Jan 3, 2019 11:03
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So only after, what 8 issues Uncanny actually does something interesting? I haven't hated it, but I've certainly being buying it because I'll always buy the mainline X-men comic more than anything.
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Jan 6, 2019 05:41
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Android Blues posted:It's mostly telepathy power bloat that raised the problem of every villain needing psi-shielding in the first place. Like, various stuff from the 90s, or the scenes from New X-Men where Emma Frost turns whole crowds of people into mind puppets, that set a new bar for what telepathy "was" in the X-Men setting, in effect just perfect seamless mind control unless your target had an extraordinary out. Thinking about this over the course of the last week or so on the road, there's probably also an argument to be made that Xavier going public with his powers in the first place, and Emma never exactly being private with hers, would create one hell of an incentive for every government and organization in the Marvel Universe pouring a lot of money into affordable, effective psi-screening. We give Xavier a lot of poo poo for being a scumbag, and he deserves most of it, but he could've been the eminence gris for the entirety of the civilized world and basically only wasn't because he decided not to. There's a bit in Priest's Black Panther, where Everett Ross mentions offhand that Storm's existence terrifies most of the nations on the planet. I'd imagine Xavier is the same, if not moreso, and has been since he and Magneto were Nazi-hunting in the '60s.
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Jan 6, 2019 21:54
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Wanderer posted:Thinking about this over the course of the last week or so on the road, there's probably also an argument to be made that Xavier going public with his powers in the first place, and Emma never exactly being private with hers, would create one hell of an incentive for every government and organization in the Marvel Universe pouring a lot of money into affordable, effective psi-screening. We give Xavier a lot of poo poo for being a scumbag, and he deserves most of it, but he could've been the eminence gris for the entirety of the civilized world and basically only wasn't because he decided not to. "Reed Richards had to build his own backyard rocket because Xavier and Magneto killed large swathes of NASA" is now my headcanon.
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Jan 6, 2019 23:49
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the x-treme x-men run that was really an exiles run was mostly about hunting down evil charles xaviers.
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Jan 7, 2019 08:08
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Oh hey I didn't even notice this thread was active again Uncanny's real loving bad, y'all!
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Jan 11, 2019 22:56
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It’s bad but I keep reading. Definitely dropping when it goes to monthly tho.
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Jan 11, 2019 23:04
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They're just using so many pages to do so little.
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Jan 12, 2019 01:14
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I caught up and it's astonishing how little is happening, how boring that little is, and how poorly it's all being conveyed. Every fight is just a tableaux of people making poses in space-- there's nothing to communicate any sense of choreography or dynamism, which I guess is partially on the art team, but narratively there's so little being done to convey on a panel-to-panel level why any of the bajillion combatants are making the decisions they're doing. I remember the days of Chuck Austen, the most meandering and aimless bits of Bendis' tenure, even Ultimate X-Men's descent into actual incoherence, but these might be the worst X-Men comics I've ever read. At least with Austen there was always some weird touch of extravagant excess to latch onto-- this is all just dismal.
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Jan 12, 2019 01:19
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That this is the start of Marvel's big push towards making the X-Men matter again is incredibly disheartening. I can't think of a single character in this book that isn't done dirty in some excruciatingly stupid way.
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Jan 12, 2019 01:49
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I'm just waiting for Uncanny to have Scott back.
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Jan 12, 2019 02:07
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I really can't get over the character assassination of Jamie Madrox, where apparently the fact that he's a shiftless incompetent has just always been his status quo for the entirety of his existence. Except no, there was a lot to say otherwise. Did someone in a Madrox-logo T-shirt kick Matthew Rosenberg in the dick at a formative moment in his young life? Did a beloved relative choke to death somehow on a rolled-up issue of the PAD run on X-Factor?
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Jan 12, 2019 02:07
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I'm real pissed about the characterization of Anole in this most recent issue, but it doesn't seem like anyone in the X-office has real affection for poor Victor. As for Madrox the idea that only Jamie prime can create dupes is loving absurd and not at all how his power has been described since forever.
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Jan 12, 2019 02:45
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rantmo posted:I'm real pissed about the characterization of Anole in this most recent issue, but it doesn't seem like anyone in the X-office has real affection for poor Victor. As for Madrox the idea that only Jamie prime can create dupes is loving absurd and not at all how his power has been described since forever. The writers have been doing that since forever. In Fallen Angels, he sits down and explains to Siryn quite plainly that there is no 'real' him; every dupe is the same as every other. Then Peter David changed it so there's a 'Prime' guy, and any dupe he creates has a wacky and unpredictable personality change. Now looks like they did it again.
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Jan 12, 2019 05:03
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Sure but those were more like refinements to his power, this directly contradicts things that have happened before, which I know I shouldn't be surprised by because X-Men but here I am mad on the internet. I dunno, I guess if the rest of the series/event/whatever was better maybe I would be willing to roll with it but it seems kind of like a revision made in bad faith. Also, I really like Madrox and I'm salty about the way he's been treated since Death of X.
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Jan 12, 2019 05:16
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The (Character) Assassination of James Madrox By the Coward Matthew Rosenberg.
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Jan 12, 2019 05:33
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I never knew Maddrox was so popular.
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Jan 12, 2019 05:50
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twistedmentat posted:I never knew Maddrox was so popular. He's the main character in PAD's X-Factor run, which has a lot of fans.
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Jan 12, 2019 06:00
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Skwirl posted:He's the main character in PAD's X-Factor run, which has a lot of fans. For my part, it's not even so much that I'm a huge Jamie fan as that this is such a stark reversal of the character. There were around a hundred issues of PAD stories that discussed how Jamie's problem wasn't competence, it was indecision. Whenever he ran into a choice that he couldn't make by sending a dupe off to pursue every option, he just froze up. As far as actual ability went, the duplication meant that he's a human Swiss Army knife who's studied and mastered an enormous number of talents, disciplines, and abilities. The Jamie of Multiple Man and now Uncanny being a constant roiling human disaster who can only make a situation worse--and to go from the dialogue of other characters surrounding him, like what Storm says in the most recent issue, who has always been that way--is such a blatant divergence from the previous text that it feels like the work of a writer with a grudge.
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Jan 12, 2019 06:34
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The universe has been remade. So Franklin has the grudge, canonically.
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Jan 12, 2019 06:43
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He just felt like a background character to me, as I never read that X-factor run. That was the time where if it wasn't Wolverine it wasn't going to interest me.
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Jan 12, 2019 06:47
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Let's be real though: none of these characters are written anything like they have been in the past. X-23's enthusiastic about murdering things, Legion's back to being a wacky bundle of crazy with no real pathos, Armor is...I don't even know what's going on there, and of course everything going on with Nate Grey. Hell, the only character who kind of reads right to me is Rockslide and even he got an inexplicable new nickname out of nowhere
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Jan 12, 2019 07:06
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It's not just continuity pedantry-- the X-franchise is such a baroque mess of trivia and shenanigans that every writer is going to have to compromise total adherence to the past in order to tell a story. Morrison, whose run I love, plays fast and loose with plenty of things, not least of which Emma Frost's characterization, but it does so in the service of a story that makes those nudges and blurs feel worth it. See the one-off with Sabretooth and Sebastian Shaw-- it flies in the face of decades of Hellfire Club stories, and was never adopted as a new status quo, but it sells the necessity of its conceit as a way of crystallizing Scott and Logan's shared bubble of rarely disclosed vulnerability in the middle of a sleazy wash of dangerous, sinister, sleazy machismo. If it makes decisions at the expense of the Hellfire Club, it does so in order to make a broader, and largely imo intelligently observed and compelling, point about these two characters and their shared imbrication in tropes of masculinity. Ditto Madrox, who has, to be sure, been all over the map since his introduction. The Madrox in Fallen Angels is (literally) not the same guy as in PAD's first X-Factor, who is in turn miles apart from the version in Joe Casey's X-Corporation story, and in turn the much more nuanced and elaborated character that PAD eventually turns him into too. Madrox is minor enough that it's to be expected that he's going to be in a state of flux in between appearances. That's fine! But, like-- Uncanny is ignoring the past in order to do-- what? Certainly not tell an interesting story, and even more certainly not to make any kind of considered point about Madrox or his powers. It doesn't read like a risk or a reasoned compromise-- it just reads like not giving a poo poo. That's how I feel about the half-assedness of the plotting and the pacing, too. That this is all leading up to a mega crossover and an AoA rehash seems to be not only the precondition but the point of this run. Everything leading up to it reads like nothing but apathetic shuffling. If this was a good story nobody would care if Madrox grew a trunk and started shooting club soda out of it, but it isn't. Ditto the sharp turns in the characterization of Anole or Armor-- they don't even read as misunderstandings of the characters because the story so clearly doesn't care about character. They needed somebody with limbs and a mouth to do poo poo in order to reiterate the same boring plot-beats, and just picked people to do it, seemingly at random. Anole's betrayal could have been done by Glob Herman or Rockslide, or, I don't know, Bird Brain-- what difference would it make? As long as things are trudging wearyingly towards Age of X-Man, this comic doesn't care. I know I've complained upthread about the curious conservatism of this run-- the X-Men as agents of the status quo, fighting against... disarmament (??) and for giant oil tankers (????)-- but having read more, duh, of course it's conservative. It's the laziest example of the big two's facile conflation between storytelling and IP curation. The whole thing is a tautological quagmire-- "this story is exciting and interesting because it's the X-Men doing the things that made you first think they were exciting and interesting," except that it fails to even recognize that people developed this attachment to the franchise not because of big group shots and journeyman-quality splash pages, but because the best writers of it were masters of specificity, density of detail, and the idiosyncratic touch. Claremont, for years, was not writing a perfect comic, but he was writing probably the least predictable thing that Marvel or DC were putting on the stands. PAD, as divisive as he is, has never been content to use his pet characters to tell the same story over and over. What's irritating is that it's performing a lukewarm cover-version of better comics using the broadiest, sloppiest strokes possible. It's like if someone insisted that the coloring book was the only legitimate form of art, but simultaneously insisted on only doing coloring books drunk and with no colors other than burnt sienna and beige-- in other words a reactionary slavishness to formula married with an astounding but totally uninteresting lack of competence.
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Jan 12, 2019 07:28
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I'm suddenly thinking back to the episode of Jay and Miles where they interviewed Jordan D. White and he was hyping up this whole thing, and I realized that he became the X-Men group chief editor after the things that I like or liked happening at the time (Weapon X, Domino) had already been decided on and that he's responsible for a lot of bad recent stuff (like Extermination). I guess what I'm saying is, maybe he's not the right person to be helming this ship.
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Jan 12, 2019 08:22
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Madrox is gonna be part of Scott's team, so I think there will be a point to this.
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Jan 12, 2019 08:26
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Alaois posted:I'm suddenly thinking back to the episode of Jay and Miles where they interviewed Jordan D. White and he was hyping up this whole thing, and I realized that he became the X-Men group chief editor after the things that I like or liked happening at the time (Weapon X, Domino) had already been decided on and that he's responsible for a lot of bad recent stuff (like Extermination). The thing is White has absolutely edited good books in the past, so I don't know if I want to blame him for this
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Jan 12, 2019 09:08
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Blockhouse posted:The thing is White has absolutely edited good books in the past, so I don't know if I want to blame him for this I think the issue is partially editorial. IMO the only good "writer's jam" weekly in recent memory was 52, which had the benefit of being by a bunch of writer's with very distinct voices, telling fairly weird and idiosyncratic stories-- it didn't feel like a normal comic just put out four times as frequently, it felt like a breathless and messy but very fun experiment in letting a bunch of stories that might not have otherwise been told weave in and out of each other unpredictably. It starred characters from the margins of the DC Universe, and sent them on bizarre tours of that universe's neglected corners. It felt like it was leaning into its form and its schedule to really accentuate its eclecticness and eccentricity. This was largely of course a success due to it being written by essentially the All-Star Monsters of Comics of that period, but it was also a stroke of editorial brilliance-- of taking the temperature of the moment, of assembling the perfect team, and of giving them just the right amount of leeway to explore and meander while insuring that things all cohered (unlike, say, Countdown). UXM isn't quite that. It's telling essentially a bog standard X-Men "event" story-- one in fact structurally very similar to Extermination. A friend becomes... a foe?? A foe becomes... a FRIEND???? Collateral damage is dealt! People cross vaguely defined lines! The mansion gets all wrecked up! Characters you haven't seen in awhile show up and get maimed! The only thing it gets from being weekly is sloppy, rushed art. Furthermore, Rosenberg, Brisson, and Thompson have all written fine-to-great comics, but I'd say that aside from Thompson none of them are close to having the sharply defined voices of Morrison, Rucka, or Waid. It's not easy to point to a scene or a page and say, ah, there's Brisson-- and when people are able to it's usually on the basis of an annoying tic. There's none of the frisson of putting a bunch of strong but very different authorial stances in the same narrative and letting them bounce off each other-- instead it all feels as if its written by committee, and any good elements that distinguish each writer-- say, Thompson's sharp dialogue and knack for recontextualizing continuity-- is averaged out into a mealy, bland porridge. This is all absolutely stuff that an editor conceivably could have pre-empted or adjusted for.
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Jan 12, 2019 09:24
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I will say, I've never been one for the "main" X-Men book or books, my current pulls are all either character specific spinoffs (Domino, though I guess now I have to see if Hotshots is the end of the line or if the solo series reemerges from the conclusion of that, Mr. and Mrs. X, X-23, Shatterstar) or a side-book I'm very, very cautiously optimistic about (X-Force, though including the absolute worst possible version of Deathlok isn't winning me over any). I was actually looking forward to Uncanny after that Jay and Miles episode I mentioned but word of mouth on here soured me on picking it up.
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Jan 12, 2019 09:40
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I do wonder if they felt Avengers: No Surrender was successful enough that they should do something similar to relaunch the X-Men. I know A:NS wasn't particularly well-received around here, but it was miles better than what's going on in UXM right now. It actually felt like there was some level of stakes and constant movement in the plot. It even gave time for smaller character moments like the talk between Jarvis and Banner. Maybe that group of writers meshed better (or are just plain better writers) than this group.
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Jan 12, 2019 15:46
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Endless Mike posted:I do wonder if they felt Avengers: No Surrender was successful enough that they should do something similar to relaunch the X-Men. I know A:NS wasn't particularly well-received around here, but it was miles better than what's going on in UXM right now. It actually felt like there was some level of stakes and constant movement in the plot. It even gave time for smaller character moments like the talk between Jarvis and Banner. Maybe that group of writers meshed better (or are just plain better writers) than this group. Comic book direction is influenced more by film/TV dealings than by book sales. X-Men films were off limits for a long time, so they pushed Inhuman books. Those failed and now X-Men are back with Marvel Studios so it's time to hype up the X-Men again before they start making those movies.
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Jan 12, 2019 16:00
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Oh you're one of those.
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Jan 12, 2019 16:26
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Well I mean it’s true, but I don’t see what it has to do with your post
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Jan 12, 2019 16:27
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Archyduchess posted:It doesn't read like a risk or a reasoned compromise-- it just reads like not giving a poo poo. That's the essence of it right there, it feels like there's an implicit disdain for what's come before that's the opposite of a lot of what we've been getting in X-books recently--Thompson's two series have been outright love letters to the past while still advancing the story and characters. I wish it was Thompson, Taylor, and Tamaki taking over the line and not just for Stan Lee style alliteration.
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Jan 12, 2019 16:37
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Archyduchess posted:Furthermore, Rosenberg, Brisson, and Thompson have all written fine-to-great comics, but I'd say that aside from Thompson none of them are close to having the sharply defined voices of Morrison, Rucka, or Waid. It's not easy to point to a scene or a page and say, ah, there's Brisson-- and when people are able to it's usually on the basis of an annoying tic. There's none of the frisson of putting a bunch of strong but very different authorial stances in the same narrative and letting them bounce off each other-- instead it all feels as if its written by committee, and any good elements that distinguish each writer-- say, Thompson's sharp dialogue and knack for recontextualizing continuity-- is averaged out into a mealy, bland porridge. This is all absolutely stuff that an editor conceivably could have pre-empted or adjusted for. I'll give you Thompson and Rosenberg (though Rosenberg is highly dependant on having an artist that can play around with the format, see 4 Kids Walk Into a Bank for a great example of that), but what's Ed Brisson's fine-to-great work?
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Jan 12, 2019 16:37
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CharlestheHammer posted:Well I mean it’s true, but I don’t see what it has to do with your post I guess if you ignore that the deal isn't done and X-Men has been continually published, then sure it's true. But yeah the Avengers movies feature Ghost Rider and She-Hulk and Broo so I can see the influence. Endless Mike fucked around with this message at 16:50 on Jan 12, 2019 |
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Jan 12, 2019 16:47
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