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Why is Hank just so loving evil nowadays? He wasn't always like this, right? I swear I remember a time when he was a good guy.
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Jul 9, 2020 02:30
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Gologle posted:Why is Hank just so loving evil nowadays? He wasn't always like this, right? I swear I remember a time when he was a good guy. Ahahahahahahaha. Hank has consistently been the worst for a very long time now.
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Jul 9, 2020 02:33
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Gologle posted:Why is Hank just so loving evil nowadays? He wasn't always like this, right? I swear I remember a time when he was a good guy.
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Jul 9, 2020 02:35
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 Dude in the glasses is time displaced young Hank McCoy (circa Lee/Kirby X-Men #8 I think) that Beast brought into the future to try and show (the completely right and correct) Scott Summers that Scott had lost his way. Then older Beast proceeded to build a planet killing weapon that was used to kill a planet.
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Jul 9, 2020 02:51
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Characters pointing out how awful Beast has become is one of my favorite things in modern X-Men comics; I like how all the original 5, except Iceman, have darker sides to them, but in very different ways.
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Jul 9, 2020 04:02
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radlum posted:Characters pointing out how awful Beast has become is one of my favorite things in modern X-Men comics; I like how all the original 5, except Iceman, have darker sides to them, but in very different ways. Hank McCoy though, is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dc_6dlY5Qnk  (now that Scott, Jean and Logan are all living there I wouldn't be surprised if the moon does get blown up, have any of the three of them, together or seperate, lived somewhere that didn't get blown up?) (Edit: again, this is because he brought the O5 forward in time, against their will, to win an argument with Scott Summers) Air Skwirl fucked around with this message at 05:32 on Jul 9, 2020 |
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Jul 9, 2020 05:27
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Hickman is absolutely going to destroy the Moon now.
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Jul 9, 2020 07:28
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Nessus posted:Hickman is absolutely going to destroy the Moon now. X of Swords better have someone cut the moon in half, with a sword.
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Jul 9, 2020 07:32
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The moon’s core? It’s cheese.
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Jul 9, 2020 08:23
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Beast being the absolute worst was a character beat for a long time, to the point where he even betrayed the X-Men during IxV (IIRC, because like hell I'm going to flip back through IxV). Then all that stuff got soft reset at some point. I feel like there was a missed opportunity to bring Beast around to being an outright villain.
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Jul 9, 2020 11:17
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Good, there's ghosts on the moon.
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Jul 9, 2020 13:31
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X-Force feels to me like it's trying to walk a tightrope. Any one of Beast, Domino, Wolverine, Jean, Black Tom feels like they're portrayed as if something's ever-so-slightly off, but collectively... I'm left with the distinct feeling that there's some fuckery by Xavier and Moira going on.
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Jul 9, 2020 13:31
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I'm waiting for the shoe to drop re: the sheer number of deaths. I think only Beast hasn't died in X-Force or Wolverine. It's not like their self-preservation is lowered, and I can't think of any connective tissue that makes them hard to control/influence so they need to die every so often. Logan, Quire and Jean, sure, but Colossus and Domino don't fit that profile.
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Jul 9, 2020 14:30
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Honestly, both Black Tom and Mondo react super sketch to Krakoa, so there is absolutely something going on, but in Hickman fashion, it will be literally years before we find out what the deal is.
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Jul 9, 2020 18:26
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https://twitter.com/Doug_Tilley/status/1280554213093883912 Still better than Last Stand.
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Jul 9, 2020 18:33
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danbanana posted:https://twitter.com/Doug_Tilley/status/1280554213093883912 Please everyone click through and watch these clips. The X-Men clip with the Beast reveal is one of the funniest things I've ever seen.
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Jul 9, 2020 18:53
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The whole Beast characterization is like the twentieth thing that I think sort of spun out of people half-getting what Grant Morrison was going for in New X-Men, or maybe just one of those forgotten plot threads from forty years ago someone decided to latch onto and make His One Main Thing. Steve Englehart did a Beast serial in Amazing Adventures back in the period where the original X-Men book was in reprints and the Claremont era hadn't kicked off yet. Hank was a genetic researcher for a shady corporation and he was doing some weird experiment and didn't want it to fall into the wrong hands and so he experimented on himself and turned into Furry Beast, who initially was much more of a Dr. Jeckyl/Mr. Hyde or Wolfman style 'transformation' than just "the Beast, but Furry". That characterization went away in the ensuing thirty years or so of him being on the Avengers, in Claremont-era X-Men/X-Factor, and in the 1990s cartoon where he was just the cute lovable furry Morrison's run did a lot to play up Beast's insecurities and also had him go evil (under the influence of Sublime) in his dystopian future arc. After House of M, they did the serial where he was so desperate to 'fix' the No More Mutants thing that he was willing to work with Mister Sinister and AIM and Hydra and Dark Beast to try to find a cure. I don't know if the original writers meant to make him unsympathetic/cold or just desperate and flailing, but this is where Beast is the Worst really started to infect all of his stories. It feels like they took six issues of a comic from 1972 and went "oh, that's the Beast's big character trait, he does Science poo poo without thinking or caring about any of the consequences!" and ran with it. And then layered on top "he's sensitive about his outer mutation and being seen as subhuman and that makes him insecure" and just took "he's insecure and also a big dummy who does dumb poo poo" as the takeaway of that. Edge & Christian fucked around with this message at 19:18 on Jul 9, 2020 |
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Jul 9, 2020 19:15
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Edge & Christian posted:"oh, that's the Beast's big character trait, he does Science poo poo without thinking or caring about any of the consequences!" and ran with it. It's not just Beast, though. This has been a trend in mainstream comics for a couple decades. You see this same general characterization with modern interpretations of Reed, Stark, Batman... Pretty much all the "smart" characters. Beast is just the X-version of it (along with Xavier, though his situation is a little different). I'd say it's linked to our society's current push for anti-intellectualism, but really it's mostly just writers going with the easy plotting.
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Jul 9, 2020 19:41
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Codependent Poster posted:Please everyone click through and watch these clips. The X-Men clip with the Beast reveal is one of the funniest things I've ever seen. "I spent like an hour painting myself blue and putting on this bizarre wig, so I'm tired and just gonna finish this costume up with a hoodie from my closet."
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Jul 9, 2020 19:43
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danbanana posted:It's not just Beast, though. This has been a trend in mainstream comics for a couple decades. You see this same general characterization with modern interpretations of Reed, Stark, Batman... Pretty much all the "smart" characters. Beast is just the X-version of it (along with Xavier, though his situation is a little different). Reed Richards' origin story is literally "does science poo poo regardless of the consequences." Like, being a caring friend, father and husband is the more recently added part of his character.
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Jul 9, 2020 19:50
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I hate how writers have turned Beast into this self-righteous rear end in a top hat who does Science, consequences be damned. Hell, Morrison's take on Beast especially sucks poo poo, too. Beast pretending to be gay just to get back at his ex for dumping him, and said ex "outing" him to the entire world, was extremely hosed up, and how the hell did no one catch that? I haven't read much about the X-Men after House of M, but I can see Beast approaching enemies of the X-Men for ideas probably works since Beast isn't getting enough rest and the desperation to save his species drives him to deal with the devil. But Beast over the last couple of years has gone up in being a sanctimonious piece of poo poo, starting with kidnapping the O5's young counterparts from their time just to prove a point to Cyclops. What really sucks is that Kieron Gillen's take on Beast was pretty great in the S.W.O.R.D. mini, and no one ever copied that. Hank played the goofball to Abigail Brand's grump, like trying to make a good first impression with Brand's brother, or saving the cupcakes he brought for her to cheer her up at the end. It had Hank pitting his wits against Unit, or telling Gyrich to gently caress off with trying to turn S.W.O.R.D. into ICE for aliens. Goatface Beast is the best Beast.
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Jul 9, 2020 20:53
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amigolupus posted:Kieron Gillen's take on Beast was pretty great in the S.W.O.R.D. mini, and no one ever copied that. This is based on his persona around his time in the Avengers. He was the lovable prankster, with Wonder Man as his straight man. Skwirl posted:Reed Richards' origin story is literally "does science poo poo regardless of the consequences." Like, being a caring friend, father and husband is the more recently added part of his character. I guess I can see this. There was also a big part of his character dealing with the fact that he turned his best friend into a monster (and generally loving up the lives of Sue and Johnny), and trying to make up for that. That's in conflict with the "I'm a scientist who doesn't give a poo poo about the consequences!" thing that many writers pull. As for the friend/father/husband thing... Hickman's run should have fixed that as well, since I'd argue he asked-and-answered that whole thing better than anyone else.
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Jul 9, 2020 21:04
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Seriously, people need to read the original Lee/Kirby Fantastic Four, Reed Richards is a loving dick all the time in that, not just in the hubris that lead to the original accident.
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Jul 9, 2020 21:06
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Skwirl posted:Seriously, people need to read the original Lee/Kirby Fantastic Four, Reed Richards is a loving dick all the time in that, not just in the hubris that lead to the original accident. I have, thanks! And he's definitely a dick! But like a lot of those early Marvel books, the characterizations have shifted over time and in the hands of different creators. And in most cases, I'd argue the definitive personalities of almost all of the Lee/Kirby/Ditko characters weren't done by those guys. The fleshed out characterizations came later. By your logic, Jean's character is a wallflower and Xavier really wants to gently caress her! Anyway, I think there's definitely been a shift in how characters like Hank and Reed and Tony have been characterized in the last 15-20 years, where they are constantly doing these horrible things because "logic" and being set as antagonists.
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Jul 9, 2020 21:17
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Characters can change over time, Jean the adult in her late twenties/early thirties shouldn't be the same character she was as a teenager, but Reeds characterization as a dick has been pretty consistent except really in the Mark Waid run. Hickman had some great character growth for him, but even when he decided to give up the council of Reeds to be with his family he never actually told his wife about it, and in the very next series Hickman wrote he has Reed building planet killing bombs right alongside Hank McCoy, "just in case." Tony Stark too has been a pretentious rear end going all the way back to his original stories and that has continued for most of his career. Bendis' run is the only lengthy one I can think of where he's shows any amount of humbleness (haven't read Slott's run because, well, it's Slott). Maybe the Fraction run where he has to literally give himself brain damage to undo all the poo poo he was responsible for, but even in that he doesn't clue Pepper Potts into his plan.
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Jul 9, 2020 21:32
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Byrne and Simonson's runs certainly don't treat Reed as a loving rear end in a top hat. Hell, the most famous story in the Byrne run is about how Reed is on trial for doing a super-illogical thing... I think in any serial story-telling there are going to be these differences in characterization. That's fine! But the scientist-as-logical-rear end in a top hat thing is just extremely prevalent, and kind of lazy-feeling at this point.
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Jul 9, 2020 21:46
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Pictured here Reed Richards the not rear end in a top hat as drawn/written by John Byrne
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Jul 9, 2020 21:57
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Skwirl posted:Pictured here Reed Richards the not rear end in a top hat as drawn/written by John Byrne Well I didn't remember that... *googles* Oh, because that's out of context! https://www.cbr.com/fantastic-four-not-family-friendly/ (First item which literally starts talking about how that panel is misunderstood) Anyway, you have your opinion. That's fine!
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Jul 9, 2020 22:13
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Everyone says Superman is an inspirational role-model but then why is he always making Jimmy Olsen marry a gorilla and trying to kill all of his friends and turning into a bee or whatever? Makes you think.
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Jul 10, 2020 07:11
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danbanana posted:It's not just Beast, though. This has been a trend in mainstream comics for a couple decades. You see this same general characterization with modern interpretations of Reed, Stark, Batman... Pretty much all the "smart" characters. Beast is just the X-version of it (along with Xavier, though his situation is a little different). I think this reflects a broader shift in "the expert" as a cultural figure. Most of these characters (not Batman, but all the Marvel ones) were created in the 60s, when people still uncritically trusted scientists because they were scientists. Since then people have gotten a lot more cynical about the ways that experts can sell out like anybody else (doctors getting paid by tobacco companies to argue against a cancer link), or how research funding flows towards scientists who produce favorable results (Coke pays millions of dollars to scientists who emphasize the role of exercise in fitness, and zero dollars to scientists who emphasize the role of not drinking sugar water). And people have seen experts repeatedly deploy their expertise in favor of public policies that were later demonstrated to be disastrously stupid (financial regulation experts before and after 2008, foreign policy experts before and after Vietnam, public health experts endorsing state government reopening plans a month ago). I think the shift in those characters reflects a deeper shift in the symbolic meaning that they represent. Weirdly (or not weirdly, it's a great show), I think Venture Brothers does a great job with this. Dr. Venture Sr. had a public face of being a benevolent science-hero, but he was actually a piece of poo poo. Rusty is sketchy and not very good at his job, but he's at least honest and realistic about it.
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Jul 10, 2020 08:13
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Edge & Christian posted:The whole Beast characterization is like the twentieth thing that I think sort of spun out of people half-getting what Grant Morrison was going for in New X-Men, or maybe just one of those forgotten plot threads from forty years ago someone decided to latch onto and make His One Main Thing. I think one of the missing pieces here is Dark Beast, who was really no more or less a deviation from his 616 counterpart than Havok or Juggernaut or whoever else, but who of course survived the cross-over itself by a few years and kind of set the tone for a more sinister and suspect Hank. I suspect that Dark Beast himself was kind of a reaction to how meandering Normal Beast's subplots were in the years between X-Men #1 and AoA-- he was definitely stuck on a narrative treadmill where he was always puttering away on the Legacy Virus but never allowed to make any progress. He was a casualty of the general sense of stasis and water-treading in that era insofar as his main trait became working constantly at something and not making any headway, which made him look not only boring but kind of stupid. Dark Beast was obviously a typical "twisted version of the hero" but he was also a version of Hank McCoy that the story allowed to do things and have plans which came to fruition-- he was not a great or compelling character by any means but on a nuts and bolts level he was a lot more dynamic than the actual Beast. amigolupus posted:Beast pretending to be gay just to get back at his ex for dumping him, and said ex "outing" him to the entire world, was extremely hosed up, and how the hell did no one catch that? Here's how I read that scene, and I know people have disagreed with me on it before. I stick by it though because it makes NXM a lot more interesting to me. I think Morrison put his foot in it big time and handled this as clumsily as possible, but I read the bit in NXM #125 and the followup in #134 as an articulation of intent-- here's what the X-Men are going to be. Maybe gay, maybe not, but certainly not identifiably straight in any conceptual sense. By 2001 we'd had decades of editorials and hagiography hamfistedly describing mutants as an allegory for race, but that never made any sense-- I think Morrison recognized the notion, especially as a product of Claremont's hyper-libidinal and stridently non-heteronormative tenure, as a sally less against racism than against heteronormativity and specifically reproductive futurity (which is something I find very weird to think about in the context of Hickman's Krakoa). Beast could be read as implying that any relationship between himself, a big furry lion man, and Trish Tilby, a human woman, is a priori outside of the discursive bounds of "straight" sex and romance-- "straightness" being a very tiny little manicured lawn in the midst of an enormous jungle. As he protest in #134, "Come on, I'm as gay as the next mutant! I make a great role model for alienated young men and women. Why not?" And like-- yeah? Why not? A mutant culture implies a lot of things (mutant fashionistas like Jumbo Carnation, mutant delinquents like Quentin Quire) which necessitate or enable throwing out a lot of presuppositions from the human world. Even if a particular mutant isn't m4m or f4f or whatever, why should heterosexual monogamy be the base line they work off of? He's essentially-- to take a term that has been driven into the ground in my field for the past 20 years-- "queering" mutant-hood even if he is not quite coming out as "gay" in the moment. And again, I think Morrison explains this pretty poorly in the comic and even worse in his Rich Johnston interview where it comes up, but this feels consonant with how he treats sexuality in other stuff around the same time, as well as resonant with why his run felt so interesting and exciting and true to me when it was coming out. It's a reparative reading to be sure, with all the pitfalls that method entails, but I don't know, it makes me like the comics better so I'm sticking to it. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 09:09 on Jul 10, 2020 |
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Jul 10, 2020 08:58
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something else to keep in mind how that specific characterization of Beast is absolutely perfect for the kind of Intelligence Community Guy to make the head of the Mutant CIA in a story that does not have good things to say about the concept of a Mutant CIA
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Jul 10, 2020 09:01
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I figure the "make more mutants" thing is not exactly an exhortation to gently caress and make babies. You can also make more mutants by cloning, genetic engineering, or exposing people to mutagens. Or more bizarre ways.
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Jul 10, 2020 10:41
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Ponsonby Britt posted:I think this reflects a broader shift in "the expert" as a cultural figure. This is what I was referring to with my anti-intellectualism comment. And I don't disagree with some underlying aspect of that but really I think it is more about a generation of writers (Bendis, Millar, etc.) bringing a more cynical perspective towards superheroes, which leads to a "oh, look at the nefarious hidden reason for these actions!" And that is just easier to do with "smart" characters than, say, Captain America. I mean, the whole Illuminati thing is Bendis basically making a handful of heroes into secret, retconned villains. I think there's good stories that can come of those things but it's happened so much it just starts to feel lazy/jump the shark type writing.
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Jul 10, 2020 13:35
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Nessus posted:I figure the "make more mutants" thing is not exactly an exhortation to gently caress and make babies. Hickman straight-up said this in an interview or a tweet or something and that he had shown multiple ways to make more mutants beyond sex.
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Jul 10, 2020 16:16
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Is there any idea of when the next Marauders issue drops?
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Jul 15, 2020 14:14
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Laughing Zealot posted:Is there any idea of when the next Marauders issue drops? Maybe soon. Next week's X-Comics have increased in quantity for the first time since the pandemic, so maybe they're starting to bring things back up to speed. From Previews.com (trimming out the non-X-Men comics): quote:MARVEL COMICS
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Jul 15, 2020 14:43
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I just caught up on Marauders, and am also eagerly awaiting the next issue. Bring back our drunk Captain/Queen, you cowards!
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Jul 15, 2020 16:34
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What's this Empyre X-Men thing? I saw something titled Empyre in the new releases listed today. Is it a new cross-over event? A dumb new cross-over that nobody asked for that will ruin currently running stories?
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Jul 15, 2020 17:04
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Empyre is the invasion by the combined armies of the Kree and Skrull led by their Emperor Dorrek VIII aka Teddy Altman aka Changeling. No idea how derail-y it might end up being, but I'm looking forward to it at least.
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Jul 15, 2020 17:07
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