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Dawgstar posted:The first story arc for Whedon's Astonishing? The difference there is (and I can't believe I'm having to offer a defence to what is probably going to be a terrible story.) The Cure (from Whedon/X3) was just that. A cure. Something that if you were a mutant you would volunteer to take so as to remove your power. It maybe offers a parallel with closeted gay people going to conversion therapies/ camps to "pray the gay away". but it can be shown as something that there is a choice in. This sounds more like a vaccine where its given to children before they develop mutant powers to take them away. The big difference is, a mutant cure has the obvious story elements of conflict. On the one hand (if mutants are viewed as a stand in for minorities) what do we have to cure. There's nothing wrong with us. On the flip side if you had a mutant with some awful power (like Cloudkill Boy)the idea of a cure is very enticing. The mutant vaccine story doesn't have as obvious a conflict (the conflict doesn't come from the person who takes the vaccine, it's from their parents in whether to administer it.) It's a lesser conflict since the child doesn't have mutant powers and isn't really a character more a plot element. And that's before we get to the real fact that people choosing to not vaccinate children for spurious reasons is costing lives. Having a story where there is a really good reason not to vaccinate your mutant kid just supports them. This sounds like a bad idea and it is smelly.
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Jun 20, 2019 10:45
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BrianWilly posted:Oh yea and then Illyana teleports Dark Beast's head into solid stone. You blockhead!
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Jun 20, 2019 11:37
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The Question IRL posted:The difference there is (and I can't believe I'm having to offer a defence to what is probably going to be a terrible story.) The vaccine is also mandatory. However grand design was really good and the age of x-man was also so much better than uncanny.
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Jun 20, 2019 12:46
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JordanKai posted:I'm sure Rosenberg didn't intend to write an anti-vaxx storyline, but the vibes are certainly there. Are you really that sure? Because this is like the third instance is of Rosenberg "accidentally" writing some really yikes-worthy stuff in as many months.
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Jun 21, 2019 05:12
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The Question IRL posted:This sounds like a bad idea and it is smelly. Welcome to Rosenberg Country!
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Jun 21, 2019 06:32
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So would you all say Rosenberg's run has dethroned Austen for the title of the worst X-Men run ever?The Question IRL posted:The Cure (from Whedon/X3) was just that. A cure. The thing I remember in this part was Beast seriously contemplating to take the cure so he'd be "normal" again. Which is already terrible by itself, but then you remember how in the run before this, Beast pretended he was gay just to spite his ex, who then publicly "outed" him in an article.
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Jun 21, 2019 07:52
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I’m having a hard time sleeping. Anyone want to argue about Neal Adams Havok being one of the best costume visuals of all time?
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Jun 21, 2019 08:28
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amigolupus posted:So would you all say Rosenberg's run has dethroned Austen for the title of the worst X-Men run ever? Rosenberg is basically going to end up as a historical footnote before the entire line gets redefined, and I think he knows it; especially in the latest issues, it feels like he's trying to cram a planned multi-year run into as few pages as possible. Austen had the keys to the kingdom with no end in sight for a long time, and if you compose a bottom five all-time list of X-Men story arcs, Austen still has a hammerlock on at least the bottom two. Rosenberg's bad weather; Austen was nuclear winter. Open Marriage Night posted:I’m having a hard time sleeping. Anyone want to argue about Neal Adams Havok being one of the best costume visuals of all time? I think you can make a fairly decent argument that nobody ever drew it as well as Adams did, despite decades of attempts, and that limits some of its effectiveness.
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Jun 21, 2019 09:14
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Right, but it’s one of the best designs for a two dimensional medium. It held so much promise for a Marvel that was losing Jack Kirby. I guess it’s not fair to give the costume the credit, because it was the way his power was displayed that made him.
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Jun 21, 2019 09:27
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Open Marriage Night posted:I’m having a hard time sleeping. Anyone want to argue about Neal Adams Havok being one of the best costume visuals of all time? gently caress, Adams even made that goofy headpiece look excellent.
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Jun 21, 2019 09:32
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:gently caress, Adams even made that goofy headpiece look excellent. Adams art is still amazing it’s just too bad he is a complete lunatic. However everyone should read/suffer through his recent Batman saga
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Jun 21, 2019 09:35
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Of course he’s a lunatic. He still remembers every word to the Bucky O’Hare theme song.
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Jun 21, 2019 12:20
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Open Marriage Night posted:Of course he’s a lunatic. He still remembers every word to the Bucky O’Hare theme song. And hollow earth
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Jun 21, 2019 12:27
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Wanderer posted:Austen had the keys to the kingdom with no end in sight for a long time, and if you compose a bottom five all-time list of X-Men story arcs, Austen still has a hammerlock on at least the bottom two. Rosenberg's bad weather; Austen was nuclear winter. That's my feeling as well. While Rosenberg is really bad, it's in a very banal way. Rosenberg isn't writing barely-legal Paige Guthrie having sex in the air with Angel in front of her mom, or revealing Nightcrawler is half-demon after all so if he's made Pope the world will end etc etc. In a way I feel Austen was more ambitious for trying to write 'big' X-Men stories (as you say he had more time), he just wrote them as if he got the ideas via rough description of a child's fever dream. Nobody will remember Rosenberg very much save as the blur of X-books being really bad or at least terribly forgettable around this time (the exception being X-Men Red).
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Jun 21, 2019 12:45
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Open Marriage Night posted:Right, but it’s one of the best designs for a two dimensional medium. It held so much promise for a Marvel that was losing Jack Kirby. I guess it’s not fair to give the costume the credit, because it was the way his power was displayed that made him. I love trying to work out how Havok's opponents perceive his power when he blasts them. Is it flat circles coming at you no matter where you are, or do they bend at some point? I prefer the former, it's such a great comics-only idea. I wonder if they ever tried to attempt adapting it for the films?
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Jun 21, 2019 13:13
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I'm in the minority for sure, but at this point I would genuinely prefer to have Austen back if the choice was between him and Rosenberg. Say what you will about Austen...namely, that he's a poor writer with one bewilderingly-bad idea after another, but at no point in his run did I ever get the impression that he didn't like these characters or that he wasn't, in fact, having the time of his life writing them. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Rosenberg writes the X-Men like he can't loving stand the X-Men. It's how he's written them even when he first started at Marvel, even before he was ever placed into this franchise for god knows why. If you come at his stories with the thesis statement that he despises everything about the X-books and genuinely believes the Marvel universe would be better off without them, all of a sudden the way he writes makes a hundred times more sense. Sure, Austen's ideas for his stories were so bad that they could almost come across like deliberate sabotage...and yet, I know that they weren't. Rosenberg, on the other hand, feels genuinely like he's trying to make these books and characters as unlikable as possible before anyone figures out that's what he's trying to do. sammyv posted:I love trying to work out how Havok's opponents perceive his power when he blasts them. Is it flat circles coming at you no matter where you are, or do they bend at some point? I prefer the former, it's such a great comics-only idea. I wonder if they ever tried to attempt adapting it for the films? 
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Jun 21, 2019 13:36
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BrianWilly posted:The Fox films? Havok actually appears in three of them. His blasts look...exactly like Cyclops' optic blasts. Oh, sure, I was just wondering out loud if they ever entertained the wacky notion of keeping it closer to the comic. Didn't DOFP also have Havok fighting in Vietnam? Alongside Toad of all people! I'd have loved to have seen more of that side-story. Mort and Alex and their Doors tapes teaming up with Forge to take out the Adversary.
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Jun 21, 2019 14:38
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BrianWilly posted:I'm in the minority for sure, but at this point I would genuinely prefer to have Austen back if the choice was between him and Rosenberg. I don't know about that. Austen's end run when he was on the way out, really seemed bitter. (Killing Sammy the Squid Boy amoung other things.) Like he seemed salty about how he was being made leave. All that being said, I would argue that a bad but infamous comic story (like Austen's) is "better" than a bad and forgetable story (like Rosenberg's sounds like.)
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Jun 21, 2019 15:04
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My favorite thing tangentially related to Austen's X-men run was a Wizards Special about the X-men books running at the time. In it he implies that Nightcrawler has 2 penises. It's so weird/gross that I can't help but laugh at this weird porn writer that's allowed to write X-men for some reason.
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Jun 21, 2019 15:23
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Dreqqus posted:My favorite thing tangentially related to Austen's X-men run was a Wizards Special about the X-men books running at the time. In it he implies that Nightcrawler has 2 penises. It's so weird/gross that I can't help but laugh at this weird porn writer that's allowed to write X-men for some reason. I am curious who took a look at that War Machine series he did and decided 'yes, let us give him the keys to the X-franchise.' Sadly the things he did after X-Men are not insane enough to be entertaining like WorldWatch ("The Authority but SEX!") and his college relationship baseball manga that led one to think he didn't get relationships, baseball or even college. Dawgstar fucked around with this message at 15:50 on Jun 21, 2019 |
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Jun 21, 2019 15:47
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Dawgstar posted:I am curious who took a look at that War Machine series he did and decided 'yes, let us give him the keys to the X-franchise.' I can't find backup information for it right now, but I seem to remember that it was one of those right place, right time situations. Joe Casey's run was supposed to stay weird and go a lot longer, but he felt suffocated by having to work around both Morrison and the X-office, so he left unexpectedly. Somebody threw the job to Austen because he was a writer with time on his hands and they had a hole in the schedule. Subsequently, his run didn't actually impact the sales on Uncanny all that much (I assume because there were still several hundred thousand manic collectors at the time who would've kept buying the book if it gave them anthrax) and he was overshadowed by Morrison, so he got to stick around for 32 issues. It also probably didn't hurt that it was the early 2000s at the height of the Joe Quesada weird period, where a lot of similarly odd poo poo got thrown at the wall. Compared to something like Phoenix: Legacy of Fire, Bill Jemas's Marville, or the short-lived Emma Frost solo book with diet porn Greg Horn covers, Austen was at least hitting deadlines and selling well. ...according to IMDB, he's actually an executive producer on the new She-Ra show now. Wanderer fucked around with this message at 17:21 on Jun 21, 2019 |
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Jun 21, 2019 17:17
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Dreqqus posted:My favorite thing tangentially related to Austen's X-men run was a Wizards Special about the X-men books running at the time. In it he implies that Nightcrawler has 2 penises. It's so weird/gross that I can't help but laugh at this weird porn writer that's allowed to write X-men for some reason. That's unfair, Claremont's run was an all time classic.
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Jun 21, 2019 18:09
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I'm having a very rough day so far but that made me laugh, thank you.
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Jun 21, 2019 18:15
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Austen's run was incredibly lovely and written as if he'd never had a conversation with a human being, and like he'd heard about sex from a water-logged card from a sexy playing card deck, just like Gambit. But Rosenberg's run-- and in all fairness, this began before it was solo-written by him-- is worse I think because it's a fundamentally reactionary vision of the X-Men. I'm one of those people who is more beguiled perhaps than they should be by the lofty rhetoric of what the X-Men are "about"-- if I find Stan Lee's invocation of direct Civil Rights era parallels a little glib, I've always been hugely into Claremont's version of a marginalized community finding joy and pleasure and conviction in itself, Morrison's story of a global culture finding its feet, and even the throughline of the Gillen and Bendis eras of people rejecting old paradigms made for a remote dominant group and making their own set of rules. I like it as a franchise that, more than the Avengers or the JLA or whatever, has actually felt like a natural starting point for stories about people who initially think of themselves as freaks or monsters, I like that Claremont's insistence on a strongly multi-racial and international, women-forwarding, and (nascently) queer cast has become just baked into the premise. I think I'd be dumb as poo poo to call a 50+ year franchise helmed by a corporation like Marvel "radical" but the myth of it meant a lot to me growing up, and I think it meant a lot to writers like Morrison and Gillen and Fraction too. It's about picking what myths you want and which to leave behind, which narratives or ideological points to adopt into your weird superhero story, and I just think, more often than not, X-Men writers pick the right ones, and pick ones that they're passionate about. Even Austen in his incoherent, tacky way seemed to have ideas about... I don't know... sex positivity? The power of religious fundamentalism? That were a point of intent even if the execution was hopelessly garbled. The current run though, I don't know, it's just a bunch of scared, mostly white people, circling their wagons and running around murdering people. It first jumped from banal to kind of distasteful to me in the run-up to Age of X-Man when X-Man and his horsemen are going all over the world implementing radical changes of various sorts and the X-Men fly off to stop them. Except these "changes" constitute stuff that I feel like the X-Men should be sympathetic to or even doing themselves in the first place. The "bad guys" are shutting down offshore oil rigs and taking the guns away from riot cops. We were supposed to, as readers, be rooting against them? It felt surreal that the entire premise of the bad guy's scheme was making the world better, and we got pretty scant evidence that he wasn't actually doing so, putting the X-Men in the uneasy position of defenders of the status quo. This all got even worse after Rosenberg took over as solo writer, killing off female characters left and right, penning the infamously exploitative "trans panic" scene of Rahne's death, and now this vaccination plot twist, which indeed feels like it's playing in dangerous waters and with dangerous imagery. It's also just lovely to read-- characters pop in and out of scenes via Magik without any connective tissue, most dialogue is just combative grunts between people who seem to hate each other, and aside from Logan, Scott, and I guess Dark Beast, everyone mostly just hangs around in the background. It really is the whitest, straightest, most banally testerone-addled run I've ever read outside of like, Tieri-era Wolverine. None of the deaths feel like they have any gravity whatsoever-- it feels like a late-era Ultimate title. I think at the very least it's neck and neck with Austen at the bottom. Skwirl posted:That's unfair, Claremont's run was an all time classic. I mean yeah. Austen, especially with stuff like the two-dick thing, was picking up what Claremont was pitching, even if he immediately dropped it down a sewer once he had his hands on it. Rosenberg is doing something else entirely that feels like a slightly above average Comics Gate kickstarter project.
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Jun 21, 2019 18:27
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Archyduchess posted:I mean yeah. Austen, especially with stuff like the two-dick thing, was picking up what Claremont was pitching, even if he immediately dropped it down a sewer once he had his hands on it. Rosenberg is doing something else entirely that feels like a slightly above average Comics Gate kickstarter project. In retrospect, I'm honestly thinking Austen didn't give a poo poo and was deliberately trolling the readers. Nothing else can explain writing that awful.
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Jun 21, 2019 20:12
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I'm serious when I say I want the first scene in House of X to be this, with Rahne in the Patrick Duffy part and I don't know, Magick? instead of Victoria Principal.
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Jun 21, 2019 20:38
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Archyduchess posted:But Rosenberg's run-- and in all fairness, this began before it was solo-written by him-- is worse I think because it's a fundamentally reactionary vision of the X-Men. Those are interesting points. I suppose I'm too stuck in viewing it through the lens of the jaded comics fan, where there's just no way that most or all of the changes in Rosenberg's run aren't swept under the rug almost immediately the moment he's off the book. It's hard to take any of it seriously because it feels like a particularly bloody What If? or, as you said, a fan project. Conversely, Austen was a dark period in a weird time for the company as a whole, and some of his damages (most notably killing off Skin) have lingered to the present day. There's a lot about Rosenberg's Uncanny that reminds me of Frank Tieri's Days of Future Now miniseries from 2005, where Tieri was moving really fast, murdering vast numbers of characters, and making big changes, all because it was A) an alternate-universe story and B) utterly undone at the end of issue #5. Both books even have a somewhat sympathetic Juggernaut joining the X-Men. Come to think of it, that's actually weird. A lot of the worst and weirdest runs in X-Men history also involve a Juggernaut face turn.
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Jun 21, 2019 20:57
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I love face turned Juggernaut, he's so much more interesting when he's trying to be a good guy or is at least operating in that sort of conflicted space than when he's just a bad guy.
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Jun 21, 2019 21:14
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Archyduchess posted:I mean yeah. Austen, especially with stuff like the two-dick thing, was picking up what Claremont was pitching, even if he immediately dropped it down a sewer once he had his hands on it. Rosenberg is doing something else entirely that feels like a slightly above average Comics Gate kickstarter project. Yeah, Claremont's original idea for Nightcrawler was that Destiny was his biological mother and Mystique was his biological father.
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Jun 21, 2019 21:19
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rantmo posted:I love face turned Juggernaut, he's so much more interesting when he's trying to be a good guy or is at least operating in that sort of conflicted space than when he's just a bad guy. He’s at his best just being a bad guy. He’s an unstoppable force for the heroes to test their limits on. Having him try to be good occasionally makes him a more well rounded character, but it’d get boring real fast. Especially in Austen’s run where he’s powered down, and gets critically injured in an explosion. Best role for Juggernaut is doing Wolverine’s dirty work, and one punching Colossus.
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Jun 21, 2019 22:26
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Open Marriage Night posted:Best role for Juggernaut is doing Wolverine’s dirty work, and one punching Colossus. On this there can be no disagreement. That is probably my favorite single X-Men issue of all time.
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Jun 21, 2019 22:30
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Archyduchess posted:Austen's run was incredibly lovely and written as if he'd never had a conversation with a human being, and like he'd heard about sex from a water-logged card from a sexy playing card deck, just like Gambit. With the full admission that the flashback issue of The Draco was the very first comic I bought with my own money, yeah this is why I have to give the nod to current Uncanny being the worst of all time. Austen's run was bad X-Men comics, but you can immediately tell it's supposed to be an X-Men comic. Rosenberg doesn't feel like X-Men at all. As much as the X-Men have spent their time in desperate situations, it's never felt so much like a "hard men make hard choices" sort of book. And reading it is so. loving. Tiring. God help me, I can get some enjoyment out of Austen's stuff. It's got a decently written Juggernaut, it's chock-full of bizarre story choices, and it is relentlessly horny. It's a book that, while terrible, you can understand somebody writing. I can't understand why anybody would write a book like the current one.
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Jun 21, 2019 22:33
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Open Marriage Night posted:He’s at his best just being a bad guy. He’s an unstoppable force for the heroes to test their limits on. I like the issue where Dazzler attacks him just because she sees him, he instinctively strikes back and then is horrified he might have killed his favorite pop star.
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Jun 21, 2019 22:42
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Oh gently caress, there needs to be a Juggernaut as a dumber Parker miniseries.
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Jun 21, 2019 22:45
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Skwirl posted:Oh gently caress, there needs to be a Juggernaut as a dumber Parker miniseries. Oh absolutely. I like Claremont's groundwork for Juggernaut, that he's essentially just too stupid to be good on his own-- he was given the power to barge through and break stuff, and can only really think to apply that in the most straightforward way possible unless otherwise directed by someone smarter or more willful. That Dazzler issue is great, as are all the issues from around that era (like that famous Spider-Man fight iirc) where he's just walking around trying to live his life as a regular dumb guy but huge and invincible. Nicieza touches on this in his X-Force as well, this idea that Juggernaut is not going to pick a fight he doesn't have to, because it's a waste of time. I think a crime book where he gets to be that sort of brutish but essentially not actively sadistic operator would be a good fit. If they were still doing those Noir books that would be perfect.
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Jun 21, 2019 23:00
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I feel like most people just aren't reading Rosenberg's current run because of all the poo poo they've heard about it, as opposed to how everyone still read Austen's stories back in the day no matter how bad it was 'cuz those were still the halcyon days of X-books selling by the droves. Which has the weird side-effect of Rosenberg's run not actually being regarded as badly as it should be because the specifics of its badness just aren't as truly appreciated by the masses. Because yeah, I honestly feel like Rosenberg's run would be even more further disliked than it already is, if only more people were reading it...which I don't actually want to happen because haha no  And yeah, everything ArchyDuchess said too.
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Jun 21, 2019 23:15
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Rosenberg's long term plan was to just kill everybody but Cyclops and Wolverine to get maximum man pain.
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Jun 21, 2019 23:45
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Skwirl posted:Oh gently caress, there needs to be a Juggernaut as a dumber Parker miniseries. this is a phenomenal idea
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Jun 21, 2019 23:45
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Part of that is most people didn't have a message board to tell them all of the horrible poo poo that was happening, so they had to read the comic. I like the X-Men, so I want to know what's happening with them, even when it's terrible, but I don't want to buy bad comics. There's a reason I said "spoilers please" when X-Men becoming anti-vax was broached. I do agree that this whole run, including the bit where Rosenberg wasn't the only writer, is a very reactionary version of X-Men, counter to the themes of the comic that have been there since the very start. It's like having an F4 comic where they explicitly don't explore new frontiers of human discovery.
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Jun 21, 2019 23:52
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Skwirl posted:Part of that is most people didn't have a message board to tell them all of the horrible poo poo that was happening, so they had to read the comic. I like the X-Men, so I want to know what's happening with them, even when it's terrible, but I don't want to buy bad comics. There's a reason I said "spoilers please" when X-Men becoming anti-vax was broached. We did have comics blogs telling us why they were bad which didn't have nearly the audience (and indeed sometimes seemed to be mostly read by other bloggers), and as lots of them treated talking about comics like Open Mic Night and they were often of dubious value even when they were right and the stuff was bad.
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Jun 22, 2019 02:03
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