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Saoshyant posted:I think most people would agree Marvel went down the shitter when Disney bought them. Except no, right now is one of their creative high points line-wide, even with Slott's reign of error on Spider-Man. Their whole creative strategy seems to revolve around scooping up successful talent from the indie scene and for the most part, it's working out. TwoPair posted:Regarding this week's Uncanny: You know, I'd probably be more inclined to be more sympathetic with Scott's camp of mutants if Scott weren't such a loving douchebag like constantly. Goddamn was he ever the epitome of I think it's safe to say now that Maria Hill has a "type," though: men who drive her insane with rage. She's overdue for another moment where she establishes that she's nothin' to gently caress with, though.
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Apr 17, 2014 00:28
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this issue.
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I wonder if they're going to pull the old "death of the identity, not the character" dodge and we'll find out Logan's been living by himself in a log cabin in Canada. "I got to sleep for nine hours!"  "...bub."
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Apr 25, 2014 21:05
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CapnAndy posted:Can you explain what she actually wants, then? I'm not being faceitious, I just can't imagine a story for Storm because I have no loving idea what she wants that she doesn't already have or could easily get. I think she's been routinely mismanaged since the early '90s, but you can make an argument like that for most of the X-Men who aren't Wolverine, Cyclops, or Rogue. A lot of her conflict got boiled away in favor of her being a sensible counterpart to Scott, and while some interesting work got done with the marriage to T'Challa, it also did some damage by making Storm somebody else's supporting character. If you go back to the seminal stories for her, like "Lifedeath" in Claremont's Uncanny X-Men, the problem she traditionally had was integrating the various lives she's led into a cohesive whole. She grew up a street urchin, she became a "goddess" and internalized that more than she'd care to admit, and then she grew up to become an often-distrusted professional superhero. Claremont did a fair job of finishing that arc before he left the books, however, and no one's sat down and puzzled out a new one for her in the last twenty years. I did like the take that Priest put on her in Black Panther, well before the marriage arc, where he pointed out that Storm scares the poo poo out of pretty much every governmental agency on the planet because she's a completely independent, one-woman weapon of mass destruction with strong opinions on the environment and no real respect for national borders. The first step, I'd imagine, would be to pick up where Hudlin left off and give Storm her own supporting cast that's independent of the Jean Grey School. She met her American father's parents and her young cousin back then, as I recall, although her aunt had died. You could do a lot with her going back to Africa and researching her mother's family line, which is a plot that Claremont put into place but, as was his wont, never got around to writing. There's also a fair bit to be written about her position in the world in general, since even after the divorce from T'Challa, Storm's still a genuine media figure with a ton of connections that other X-Men generally do not have. I think Pak's got enough to run with, but the first hurdle's going to be a certain amount of necessary reconstruction.
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Apr 29, 2014 20:58
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Metal Loaf posted:Is Storm's claustrophobia still a major part of her character? Every so often, if the book is set somewhere underground, somebody will ask Storm how she's holding up, and she'll say "Well, I'm coping."
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Apr 30, 2014 00:41
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If comic book time bothered me at all, the last couple of issues of Mighty Avengers would've given me an aneurysm.
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May 9, 2014 05:56
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You know you have a special franchise when one of the healthiest relationships in it, for years, was between Kurt and his adopted sister Amanda.
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May 17, 2014 01:20
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Claremont wanted to leave X-Men and write Fantastic Four for quite some time. Personally, I'd take him off the book before the Morlock Massacre, when the grim 'n' gritty really kicked in. I'm not sure who I'd replace him with, though. John Ostrander, maybe, or Walt Simonson.
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May 20, 2014 21:59
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I'm just not sure who's around in 1986 who'd be a good fit for X-Men. The worst thing you could've done to that book at that point was to hand it to one of the in-house Marvel guys for another thrilling round of Generic Superhero Adventure Comics (tm), so you'd want somebody with chops and courage moving into the seat. Claremont on FF at that point would dodge the "John Harkness" era, though, so I'm well in favor of that just on general principle.
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May 21, 2014 01:54
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anticake posted:My LCBS has a sign that says unaccompanied children under 16 are flat out not welcome in the shop. I guess that's one way to solve that problem. Man, when I was a kid, there was a whole shelf of '90s "bad girl" comics in the back of the store that I shouldn't have been allowed to get close to, let alone read. I wouldn't want to run the risk of some ten-year-old finding the Avatar books.
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Jun 2, 2014 11:29
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I kinda hope they didn't just kill off Heather Hudson again, although come to think of it, this arc seems to be ignoring the ending of the Pak/Van Lente Alpha Flight.
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Jun 4, 2014 22:06
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I could also see them bringing in Magik simply on the basis of her being one of the only bulk teleporters in the Marvel Universe, since they needed to quickly evacuate a skyscraper in midtown New York.
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Jun 6, 2014 02:21
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Stagger_Lee posted:I don't know that it didn't occur to him, I think he thought it was cool to have a non-combatant dude on the team. He rather specifically wanted to write about a mutant who had a power that, while useful, also had absolutely zero combat application. It strikes me in retrospect as his way of having a grounded, "normal" dude running around in the middle of his New Mutants.
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Jul 2, 2014 22:31
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Metal Loaf posted:Speaking of the really early stuff, one "What If?" that I think would be pretty cool is "What if Professor X sent his first class of X-Men to join the Avengers?" I recently read through "Mutant Massacre", "Fall of the Mutants" and the original New Mutants up to that point, and one thing that struck me was, "Would the X-Men and mutants be looked upon more charitably if they'd been in an actual superhero team early on in their career, instead of Xavier basically sequestering them from the superhuman community at large?" You'd have to do something with Xavier first, like give him a slightly better upbringing. Stuff like Deadly Genesis and its ilk didn't come out of nowhere. One of Xavier's plot beats since the start was always how he wrapped a lot of arrogance and self-righteousness up in all his nice-sounding talk about the Dream, and that goes back to the Silver Age. I suspect what you'd end up with is "what if the Illuminati existed in the Silver Age?" Which could be fun by itself.
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Aug 4, 2014 21:16
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Diet Poison posted:You'd say something similar if you were reading Captain America, Uncanny Avengers, and Avengers. And the answer is the stories are happening at different times, not All Right Now. When you consider that it is very common for 6 months worth of a title to cover one or two days in the life of said hero, this is pretty easy to deal with. Also, Marvel in general made a very conscious decision about fourteen years ago to give zero fucks about continuity unless it would make the story better. If Writer A wants to have Wolverine trapped a hundred years in the past and Writer B has him punching aliens on a space station, the editors will tell them to go right ahead and not worry about having to make their stories fit each other.
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Aug 8, 2014 01:49
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She had a full suit of mystic armor that was part of her whole Limbo deal. When she was using magic or the Soulsword, parts of the suit would manifest on her.
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Aug 12, 2014 18:19
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SirDan3k posted:Dunno but they did forget 2099 already had a sorcerer supreme. You can probably assume it's not strictly the X-Men 2099 who had their own book, since Serpentina was alive. Unless they got her back at some point towards the end of that series and I didn't see it.
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Dec 15, 2014 09:20
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I ended up liking Nightcrawler more than I thought I would. Todd Nauck doesn't get enough work.
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Mar 25, 2015 23:40
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If current Bobby turned up with his current boyfriend and said, "Yeah, there was a weird spark, and I was so busy being offscreen that nobody noticed," that'd make more sense to me. With something like this, where Past Bobby is into dudes but Current Bobby isn't, that's a little weird and has some bizarre subtext. I have to agree that it'd be better to try to replicate the Ms. Marvel scenario with a brand-new character at this point, especially if you put some gangbuster team on there like Roberto Aguire-Sarcasa and Phil Jimenez, or maybe get Caitlin Kiernan back into comics.
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Apr 21, 2015 21:24
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Waterhaul posted:Nobody has said that current Bobby isn't into dudes yet, it's still a to be seen thing! Yeah, I should've been clearer in that I was being hypothetical. Right now, absent of context, it looks like Teen Bobby's going to surprise the hell out of Current Bobby, since Current Bobby's got a handful of serious female relationships behind him (even if the only one I can think of offhand is Opal Tanaka), but that might not be the case.
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Apr 21, 2015 21:35
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The chick with the cyber-leg looks an awful lot like Karma, which might take some explaining. This whole thing with Iceman could be redeemed if they suddenly flash back to the Jean Grey Academy and Bobby's sitting there with his arm around a dude. "What? I've been dating Steve for years. It's not like I've been on-panel for you to notice." ("But weren't you going to marry Opal?" ("She liked to watch.")
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Apr 23, 2015 01:04
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Two Tone Shoes posted:Alright, tell me why a guy who is only gay and not even the slightest bit bisexual would be sexually and romantically interested in women. What other factors of sexuality am I missing that make you totally 100% gay and not fully interested in women while...simultaneously being interested in women in every way? You're trying to simplify a surprisingly complex topic and it's not going to end well for you. It is entirely possible for someone to identify as "gay" while having a couple of personal exceptions to that rule, or while pursuing the occasional opposite-sex relationship. I don't know who said it originally (I first encountered it in an article by Stoya, but I'm pretty sure she was quoting someone else), but "human sexuality is a moving target."
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Apr 23, 2015 19:58
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Looks like it happened to everything on Bendis's schedule. Is he okay?
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May 18, 2015 20:07
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Whedon's run was just Good Comics and did a lot to set up Cyclops and Emma in particular, going forward. I'd probably be more kindly disposed to it if it hadn't taken a geologic epoch to conclude, of course. Did anyone ever come forward and establish why that book shipped twice a year?
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May 29, 2015 23:52
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Brocktoon posted:I'm reading through Uncanny X-Force (which has been amazing) and can someone give a quick primer on Otherworld? I know nothing about it/the Braddocks/Meggan/etc... If I remember correctly, that's something Alan Moore introduced via his old Captain Britain run. It's probably faster to just do this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avalon_%28Marvel_Comics%29
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Jun 3, 2015 16:15
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Man, there's an article for you: the bizarre dumping ground of Louise Simonson's late-'80s Marvel output. I don't think there's a single original character of the lot that didn't end up in limbo, hero or villain.
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Jun 25, 2015 19:36
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bobkatt013 posted:What about that Cable guy and Archangel? Archangel's half credit at best. Cable's a good point, though. I thought he was Nicieza at first.
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Jun 25, 2015 23:23
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PantsOptional posted:I always had a soft spot in my heart for their competition in the "mutant ghostbusters" industry, the M-Squad. They were almost literally the Ghostbusters - matching jumpsuits, crazy backpacks, poor understanding of what they'd gotten themselves into. They first showed up trying to catch Jubilee in a mall, which would never work given her home court advantage. Last I saw them, they walked into an elevator in the Empire State Building in the middle of Inferno. If memory serves, the elevator burped shortly after closing the doors, and I don't recall seeing them again. Poor bastards. I'd forgotten about those guys until you mentioned them. Marvel Wikia posted:
Huh. Never knew that, either.
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Jun 29, 2015 21:32
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I actually really liked the last arc with the town of supervillain widows.
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Jun 30, 2015 03:32
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I tend to agree with Paul O'Brien: Austen is as bad as it gets. It helps that there haven't been quite as many X-Men writers as one would expect, since so much of the body of work is just Claremont, but Austen is easily the worst writer to ever be given an extended run, and there's a big gap between him and whoever's second worst. I'd argue it's Lobdell, and Lobdell wasn't that bad. (Michael Higgins's Uncanny X-Men Annual set during Atlantis Attacks is really bad in kind of a hilarious way, but it's one issue.) More to the point, he's really uneven, which makes it interesting. He handled Juggernaut very well for the most part and is one of the primary authors behind his short-lived stint as a hero. His dialogue often isn't awful, and he had a couple of decent arcs on Exiles. On the other hand, if you were to compile a list of the bottom ten arcs in the history of the X-Men, at least two of the bottom three would be from Austen and it wouldn't even be a contest. It's just a question of which one gets #1.
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Jul 23, 2015 04:37
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Cocks Cable posted:Lobdell was just very mediocre with very few original bright spots (mainly AoA). That's my point. There are surprisingly few writers who've had a go at the X-Men, since so much of the body of work is from just one guy, and post-Claremont, it tends to be an exalted position. Lobdell is near the bottom, and the worst thing you can say about Lobdell is that he's the Dan Slott of his day; he's funny, he does all right with quieter issues, but he doesn't do "epic" well despite multiple attempts. Hell, I'd say that Bendis is just above Lobdell and Bendis's runs are best characterized in my mind as "inoffensive." If you take Claremont's body of work as a whole, and I'd argue that you should, he's yet to do anything in his post-1992 insane period that strikes the best of his work from the table. It sinks his average but doesn't completely torpedo it. Hell, if you expand the list to include the Ultimate universe, I'd say Kirkman is probably somewhere between Austen and Lobdell, though still nowhere near Austen.
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Jul 23, 2015 05:33
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Apparently Austen's current gig is as a director for a show called "Part-Time Hero" on Disney Animated, which I did not see coming. Apparently he was on "Steven Universe" for a while.Wheat Loaf posted:Austen's always at the bottom but two that I've seen placed just above him fairly consistently are actually Alan Davis and Matt Fraction (I like the former's X-Men a lot and haven't really read the latter). I think Fraction gets more poo poo than he deserves because he was saddled with Greg Land for most of his run. Alan Davis as a writer is kind of Generic Superhero Guy. Really, there's a pretty huge gap between Austen and everyone else. The X-Men have had a pretty good run overall, even in the last few years when nobody seemed quite sure what to do with them and the writers were neglecting characters left and right.
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Jul 23, 2015 18:41
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Skwirl posted:I didn't hate Brian Wood's Adjectiveless X-Men, and if we can count books that don't actually have X-Men in the title but are about mutants, Milligan/Allred's X-Force/X-Statix is loving brilliant, and while I have't read it yet, I've heard good things about Warren Ellis' Excalibur, and I like Warren Ellis in general (though I know the consensus is against his Astonishing X-Men). Ellis's first arc was decent unless you happened to be a fan of Forge, his second was pretty good, and Kaare Andrews managed to gently caress up the third beyond all recognition. His Excalibur hasn't aged particularly well, but it's head and shoulders above everything else that was going on in the X-books at the time.
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Jul 24, 2015 07:00
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You got me to go look and see if any of Claremont's scripts were available online, and I found a page. He doesn't write comics like anyone else I've ever seen, which is interesting. http://www.alandavis-comicart.com/images/WScriptExcal1.jpg I'd be equally likely to attribute the, ah, boobishness of that particular scene to Art Adams, myself.
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Jul 26, 2015 03:59
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Rick posted:Man I've always felt like writing comics was impossible because I thought I had to make storyboards and draw for poo poo. I can write a screenplay. For a lot of recent writers, that's more or less exactly what they do. Track down a few "Director's Cut" reprints and you can find script samples in the back.
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Jul 26, 2015 17:18
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twistedmentat posted:I'm not too familiar with Adams work, but its kinda jarring for this era, as I always associated super sexy superhero ladies with more modern artists like the 90s to today. Adams is pretty foundational. He's a big influence on J. Scott Campbell, by Campbell's admission, so Adams is one of the grandfathers of the early '90s Image art style along with Masamune Shirow.
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Jul 26, 2015 19:55
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twistedmentat posted:The thing with Dazzler and Diamondback body switch is kinda weird because the issues are in black and white and it was confusing as hell at first until they explain whats going on. Yeah, you could be excused for any confusion having to do with that. That's the work of one Michael Higgins, my arch-nemesis and the only time I'm aware of that there was ever a fill-in writer for Uncanny during the Claremont years. The body-switch happens off-panel and has nothing to do with anything.
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Sep 15, 2015 21:13
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I saw a few people earlier posting the scene with the super-awkward pat on the head so they could overreact about how weird it looks out of context. People need to figure out some way to live without a daily recreational rage-boner.
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Nov 11, 2015 23:20
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Archyduke posted:Exactly. I have no idea what there was to be mad about in his portrayal. She was a more or less perfectly functional part of an ensemble cast. To be fairer than is perhaps warranted, Bendis's voice for Laura was a notable if not radical departure from her past portrayal, at least at first.
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Nov 11, 2015 23:25
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I want to say that she was trained to take full advantage of looking like a 90-pound Goth chick, only to suddenly explode into death-blender mode, but I might be conflating that with something else.A Tin Of Beans posted:Wait, people hate the head pat? I thought that was super funny/charming. I didn't like how the Warren and Laura relationship was written under Bendis, but this felt promising to me. It looks weird out of context, so you know, Tumblr. In context, I thought it was kind of sweetly awkward. It'd be a hug, but she just told him not to, so he tries some other kind of friendly contact. It's a nice bit of characterization for both of them.
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Nov 12, 2015 03:15
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I'm actually super surprised that post-Battleworld, characters are still dimensional refugees and stuff like that, rather than a sort of Crisis on Infinite Earths thing where they think they've always been this way. I was expecting the old Logan to be quietly reintroduced as the real thing as a way to bring the character back.
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Nov 20, 2015 20:48
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