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Kalli posted:I think like Blob's first appearance was as part of a carnival of crime right? The Magneto baby prison stuff is really, really weird and probably emblematic of the worst excesses of the Claremont years. Like, man could write a comic, but sometimes things got flat out wonky.
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Jun 11, 2017 22:20
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X-Men Gold's serial killer brutally executing a bunch of teenage students in the X-Mansion really soured me on the book. For all the talk of getting back to the highs of Claremont's run on Uncanny, that's not something those stories would have done so perfunctorily.
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Sep 26, 2017 08:46
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Also Old Man Logan feels absolutely just like, "it's Wolverine with a hair colour change," in Gold. On the bright side, Astonishing is interesting and gorgeous and has a much better take on that character.
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Sep 26, 2017 09:23
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Metalshark posted:It's just a normal dude too, right? IIRC he goes away after his daughter's death and manages to be skilled enough with weapons & hacking to cause issues for the X-Men plus he has equipment that counters the Gold team. Even if Ms. Nance was funding/training him it's still ridiculous that the flagship book was so perfunctory (not that I wanted more of it), especially compared to, say, the Purifiers blowing up a bus of depowered students. Yeah, apart from the tone issues and the needless grimdarkness, it feels ridiculous. Like, he's ridiculously well equipped with adamantium laced armour and a power neutraliser and biotech explosives sourced specifically to prevent Kitty's phasing from disabling them, but he's just some guy who is mad about mutants. I would assume that he's being funded by Nance but it's still preposterous that this no-name shmuck just walks into the X-Men's house, hacks their computers, kills two people, and fights them nearly to a standstill with zero preamble. More than that it's just a weird failure of dramatic plotting. If you really must have a villain kill children under the X-Men's protection, at least build it up first and put the appropriate dramatic weight on it. The X-Men just look mildly upset that a random home invader broke into their house and killed their kids, and they're back to snarky quipping a few pages later. I liked Gold okay up until that point but it's pretty thin gruel compared to the classic run it's trying to pay homage to.
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Sep 26, 2017 14:08
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Decius posted:I never felt that (at least with Lemire's run, but not much different with Brisson yet at least). 2/3rd of it revolved about Old Man Logan timeline/adjustment issues after all. I'm specifically talking about his role in X-Men Gold, where he's pretty much just acting like 80s-era Wolverine but slightly grumpier.
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Sep 27, 2017 08:28
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rantmo posted:I think he got his soul back but now can't die because he escaped from heaven. He's my favorite X-Man of all time but even I can't be arsed to keep up with that stupid plot thread. That ridiculous scene in Gold where he gets beaten to "death" by a mob of fearful New Yorkers who think he's a demon (and for some reason doesn't teleport away) and then is angstily like, "Heaven will not accept me...I cannot die..." is just the blurst.
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Nov 15, 2017 01:46
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Nessus posted:Hasn't he been on TV? It's during the Secret Empire crossover where New York is in the Darkforce Dimension and so is actually full of real demons. It still feels like an ancient story beat, and the fact that he doesn't just teleport away from the mob of unarmed and unpowered humans makes it feel even cheaper.
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Nov 15, 2017 15:57
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Astonishing was the best but felt really decompressed, yeah. I dropped Gold after a while, it started out wobbly and just descended into being awful I feel like. I couldn't get into Blue.
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Dec 10, 2017 16:49
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AllNewJonasSalk posted:Are we speaking of Madelyne or, the ice birch, Emma? If anything, Jean stole Madelyne's husband. (Well, not really. Cyclops did it to himself.)
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Feb 1, 2018 22:22
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Skwirl posted:When did Gambit and Rogue become a thing? I was doing a big read through of Claremont's X-Men but quit a little bit after Xtinction Agenda and I'm not sure they'd even met by that point, Gambit was pretty new and mostly just being pissy about Storm no longer being his kid sidekick. It doesn't happen in Claremont's run on Uncanny, I know that much. He's off the comic a dozen issues or so after X-tinction Agenda, and it passes over to John Byrne and then (of all people) Scott Lobdell, who has like a 70 issue run. I have no idea who originated Gambit and Rogue's romantic tension, but it could have been Lobdell. No clue, though.
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Feb 2, 2018 09:52
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Rachel and Kitty have genuine chemistry in their tenure together in classic Uncanny. Also Romita Jr. draws Rachel in a bunch of zoot suits and skinny ties and other super butch clothing. It's absolutely the Ship That Should Have Been.
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Feb 5, 2018 11:18
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Like, here's Rachel's classic hero costume (suspenders!): And here she is in plain clothes hanging with Kitty (that tie!): 
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Feb 5, 2018 11:38
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In conclusion, while I will accept Kitty getting married to Colossus, I think it is sad that modern authors have not acknowledged Rachel's canonically stupendous gayness.
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Feb 5, 2018 11:48
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cant cook creole bream posted:I'm not that well versed in the xmen stuff and I've had a question for a while now. Who eyactly is Rachel? As far as I can tell, she's sone sort of alternate reality daughter of Jean, who is pretty much the same age. Is that right? This is actually something I find baffling about Gold, it doesn't explain who Rachel Summers is at all, like at any point, even when there are plot points that rely on her history. She's a character from the classic Claremont run in the 80s. She's Jean Grey and Scott Summers' daughter from the "Days of Future Past" timeline, where mutants are relentlessly persecuted by the government and only a few of the X-Men are still alive. In Rachel's timeline, the Xavier School was attacked by government forces when she was five or six, most of her friends and family (including both her parents and Professor Xavier) were killed, and she was taken by the government for use in black ops experiments. As a mutant with psychic potential, she was brainwashed and trained from an early age to use her psychic powers to detect and hunt down other mutants. She was treated like an animal - a "Hound" - and brought out like a piece of equipment when government forces needed to hunt mutants, something she now remembers with traumatised shame. The spiky costume she occasionally appears in in Gold, and the Maori-style facial tattoos, are her Hound getup. Kitty Pryde, who was now an adult and one of the few survivors of the mutant purges, freed Rachel from the government and rehabilitated her, and they worked as resistance fighters together for a while. Eventually, Rachel was sent through a time portal to the past, only to find that the X-Men's earlier interaction with her timeline had altered the course of history and that she was a sort of temporal orphan from a now-alternate timeline. She became a full-fledged member of the team (with no codename, just Rachel Summers) for a few years, but was eventually attacked by Wolverine in a really goofy piece of writing, abducted to the Mojoverse as she stumbled away holding her wounds together, and re-emerged when she was rescued once more by Kitty, becoming one of the founding members of Excalibur alongside her and Nightcrawler. Rachel is a little-known character among people who aren't familiar with the comics, but she's cool. She's the original "X-Man from the future" character, having made her debut long before Bishop or Cable, and the stories she's in back in the 80s feel fresh and exciting for that reason.
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Feb 5, 2018 22:44
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I've never stumbled across it, but I feel like there must be a reconciliation scene between Wolverine and Kitty at some point, right? Her last interaction with him before she leaves to form Excalibur is pretty much just an eternal repudiation of him for attempting to kill Rachel, but of course they're cool again in modern comics. Did the grudge just get dropped or did a writer address it at some point?
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Feb 5, 2018 23:07
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Skwirl posted:Honestly ignoring the whole actual Jean Grey was in an egg under the ocean while Dark Phoenix happened thing is probably for the best. Yeah, the egg Jean Grey was purely so that she could come back for X-Factor, and it's honestly one of the clumsiest retcons of all time, because Dark Phoenix is a great story and saying, "actually, that wasn't really Jean, it was just some clone (and Scott's marriage to Madelyne Pryor didn't count)," messes up literal years of meticulous storytelling. By all accounts Claremont hated the editorial decision that Jean was coming back and he had to break up Scott and Madelyne, and you can see why.
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Feb 6, 2018 00:47
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Jedi posted:It wasn't so much that he wanted to get rid Cyclops specifically, more that he didn't want the X-Men to be the same static team forever. The way he envisioned it, was that as time went on, older characters would leave and new ones would come in. Scott was the only one left on the team from the original team. He got married and moved away - his time as a super hero was over. Claremont was super pissed that they yanked him back into X-Factor - especially because he didn't take Madelyne with him. He goes into it pretty deeply on the episode he did with Jay and Miles and they also talk about it when they get up to X-Factor. Yeah, it's more like he wanted the characters to develop organically. Cyclops wasn't "written out" while he was married to Madelyne and living in Alaska - he wasn't on the team, but there were still regular interludes where the X-Men would call him to catch up, or the comic would break to look at their domestic life. There was actually a point of drama during that period that turned around Rachel wanting to introduce herself to her father, so he was still an important character. He'd just developed past being an active X-Man. X-Factor in general felt like an exercise in backsliding, where all these characters who had either organically moved on, died, or were no longer relevant were clumsily mashed together and reverted to their 60s status quo selves so that people who'd grown up with them would buy a second book. Bringing Jean back was badly done, but breaking up Scott's marriage might actually have been worse. Madelyne these days is remembered as an evil clone, but for most of the 80s she was Scott Summers' wife and a totally normal, good person.
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Feb 6, 2018 09:54
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Also, the 70s and early 80s in comics were a time when writers were actually allowed to change the status quo. People had longer runs and there was generally less of an expectation that things happening today would be undone next week, so the editorial decision to mess with Claremont's storytelling in order to launch X-Factor was actually pretty out of bounds and an extreme decision in the context of the time.
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Feb 6, 2018 10:00
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irlZaphod posted:There's also the factor that, whether he was right to feel that way or not, Claremont felt that the X-Men were "his" at the time. He'd taken on the assignment 10 years previously when nobody wanted it, and helped turned it into a sales juggernaut. There were only 2 montly books, and he was writing both of them. X-Factor was effectively planned behind his back, and resurrected a character who he was told had to die and couldn't ever be brought back. Yeah, I mean I think he was totally justified in that. He wasn't the only person who contributed to making his run such a success - there were artists, co-creatives, editors - but he was the driving force behind turning what had previously been a failed relic from the Lee and Kirby era into one of the most popular comic books of all time. Like a good 70% of the most beloved parts of X-Men canon is stuff Claremont developed and established in that run, and a lot of it was from whole cloth. Plus if you read the early issues of X-Factor, they're really, really bad and a blind sop to nostalgia. Early on Beast gets captured and plastic surgeried to look like his "classic", non-furry self, because the commitment to retconning things back to how they "had been" was that extreme. Luckily, that didn't stick.
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Feb 6, 2018 18:17
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Cyclops could have gone home at any time. He spends way too long in the opening issues of X-Factor prevaricating like, "jeez, I should go back to my wife and newborn son who live alone in Alaska and who I haven't communicated with in weeks, but...Jean is here, and the guys want me to be a superhero again, so...". He has a whole thing where he doesn't even want to call his wife and delays doing it until it's too late. I mean, I'm willing to chalk it up to editorial fiat making the whole thing into a mess and effectively having the result of assassinating Cyclops' character, but if you look at his actions objectively it's pretty hard to excuse him abandoning his family, even in the light of finding out that Jean was alive. Jean has a telephone. Madelyne had a newborn baby and didn't know where Scott was. That should trump everything, especially since Nathan was his kid too.
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Feb 6, 2018 19:56
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Like, the knot of retcons and fiat that is required to kick-start X-Factor effectively turns him into Deadbeat Dad Cyclops, and it's just not a good look.
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Feb 6, 2018 20:00
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That scene flipping rules. I love how Storm is actually an incredibly good hand-to-hand combatant and at some points in the run, it's suggested she may actually be more skilled than Wolverine, since he relies on his regeneration and claws to even the odds, while she spends a long time leading the X-Men with no powers at all. The issue where she beats Cyclops in a duel without using her powers is similarly extremely good. Storm rules.
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Feb 6, 2018 21:51
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Also the issues where she gets Most Dangerous Gamed by three superpowered WW2 veterans who hunt criminals for sport, while lugging around an injured and unco-operative girl, and still defeats them on their own turf. Classic Storm just completely rules. Modern stories should play up her martial and survival skills a little more.
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Feb 6, 2018 21:56
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Storm's bluffing because the fight is meant to be a battle to the death, and Storm has sworn not to kill. From Kurt's perspective, that makes it inevitable that she'll lose, so any amount of showboating is just her trying to bluff Callisto down.
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Feb 7, 2018 13:59
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Storm specifically swore never to kill, it's one of her character beats in the early part of the run. There's a great scene in #150, when the X-Men are infiltrating Magneto's island base, where she finds Magneto sleeping in his chambers and debates whether or not she should slit his throat with a knife.  Classic comics. I love that final panel. Around this part of the run, Storm is getting more and more jaded, and it's a big shocking moment that she actually stabs Callisto in the heart in the knowledge that the Morlock healer may be able to resuscitate her - so not quite killing, but walking over the line.
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Feb 7, 2018 17:29
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Also about that scene: it really demonstrates the power of the thought bubble. I guess the first person narration box would do some of that job in modern comics, but just as likely the intent wouldn't be conveyed with words at all. I think there's some value in Storm having this huge overwrought moral crisis, it really elevates the melodrama and makes the scene memorable.
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Feb 7, 2018 17:34
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Earlier in the issue Kitty finds his coffee at the desk of his giant world tyrannising computer installation, and is like, "it's still warm! Magneto was here recently!". I actually love the sincerity of this classic stuff, because a modern issue would absolutely have played that as a gag, like, "wha-huh, Magneto drinks coffee?!" while someone basically mugs at the camera, but in this issue it's just like, yes, he's a human person, of course he drinks coffee. He was drinking some coffee while using his giant tyranny computer. Nothing weird about that.
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Feb 7, 2018 21:38
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Back when District X was a thing there was a nightclub called Wannabee's where humans slummed it in mutant cosplay.
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Feb 8, 2018 13:26
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Kitty Pryde's glory days were during Claremont's original run on Uncanny. She was a thirteen year old who joined the X-Men and, through her spunk and intelligence, became the de facto heart of the team. She's a pretty well-written, relatable teen who exists as the audience identification figure and gets lots of character development. Like remusclaw says, there are a few years of the Claremont run where Kitty is almost like the main character of X-Men. She also ages in real time for a while, because this was before comics were so rigid about their sliding timescale. Kitty was Wolverine's original teen girl protege, and the success of the Wolverine-Kitty dynamic is why writers keep repeating that pattern and throwing different teen girls at Wolverine for him to mentor. This was when Wolverine himself was still being fleshed out as a character, too, so in a sense Kitty was a way of humanising a guy who'd previously been a gruff roughneck-y cipher. She also had heartwarming relationships with Storm, Kurt and Peter (..ish). Storm is like a surrogate mother for Kitty and there are multiple scenes where Kitty is stressed out and scared about being a superhero, so she goes and gets cuddles from Storm. She brought a lot of warmth to the team, and gave the other X-Men more emotional stakes because one of their members was a child that they had to teach, guide and protect. As annoying as that all sounds like it might be, it actually works really well. Kitty is genuinely well-executed and gives the whole team some emotional depth. She has believable emotions and places the team's larger than life adventures in a real life context. Nowadays, Kitty's thing is very much, "hey, remember Kitty Pryde? She's an adult now, and you loved her as a teen, and isn't it cool that now she's a competent adult who leads the X-Men?" And in that context, yeah, it is kinda cool. But if you're not already familiar with Kitty as a character and you're reading X-Men Gold, I don't think there's very much to her in that comic.
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Mar 14, 2018 14:56
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I wasn't alive when those books were published and wasn't a teen when I read them, but genuinely, I think Kitty works well and is likeable regardless of whether you're like, "she's the X-Man that could be me!". I think she's valuable in part for that reason though. A lot of young readers, and teen girls especially, found their way into loving Uncanny because it featured someone like them being treated as an emotionally complicated person and having adventures with these cool rear end superheroes.
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Mar 14, 2018 14:58
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Storm and Callisto have had weird on-off sexual tension for like decades, too. So I guess Callisto? e: although to be clear, Callisto is definitely gay.
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Mar 14, 2018 15:08
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X-treme X-Men wasn't perfect, but at the same time it was amazing and perfect.
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Mar 14, 2018 15:54
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I always liked when the telepaths in X-Men were written as people with a more limited range of power and normal people were capable of resisting them without special training. The arc where Xavier gets beaten nearly to death by a mob of anti-mutant protesters just because he can't concentrate on six or seven people well enough to use his powers on all of them effectively is one of the best stories in the classic years, and it all hinges on his extremely powerful telepathy still being contingent and limited. It's strange, but over time that interpretation has become less and less common than the modern take that telepaths can subtly erase memories, control minds, and basically tell people to mentally turn on a dime at will unless they're also a telepath or have some kind of special resistance to telepathy. I don't exactly hate that, it can be cool, it's just a really significant departure from how the X-telepaths used to be written.
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Mar 15, 2018 17:34
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It's not good. There are some fun moments, but a lot of it is just the increasingly awkward character assassination of Madelyne Pryor by editorial mandate. It almost feels like the whole purpose of the big crossover is just to answer the Madelyne question, take her off the board, and fold some things back into Jean's character that the whole rigamarole kind of stole from her.
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Mar 16, 2018 15:30
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On the bright side, you do get Havok dressed like this:
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Mar 16, 2018 15:32
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Rick posted:I find most of the X stuff out right now to be decent but the problem is it feels like they're all missing that building to something way off in the future that may never happen and the constant relaunches are apart of that because it seems as soon as a writer gets their legs the creative team changes. I kind of completely agree, the constant relaunches and new teams just makes it impossible for anything to settle. It's also hard to latch on to character development when you know it's probably going out the window in a year anyway. This is more an endemic problem than an X-Men problem, but they are pretty well plagued by it. It's been a while since we've had something as long-running and lovingly crafted as, say, Hickman on Fantastic Four or Aaron on Thor for the X-Men.
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Mar 29, 2018 20:13
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Re: X-Men Red, I'm so, so sick of "villain kills mutant children at the Xavier School to establish their credentials". It's hokey and cynical and shallow. I miss when they just beat up on Wolverine. I guess it's in character for Cassandra Nova, but it's also not the most interesting thing she could have done. Her evil deeds in New X-Men were always more elaborate and harrowing than outright shock violence.
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Apr 11, 2018 15:49
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It's pretty wild that "that one time Storm was Thor once briefly in the 80s" is being called back up now.
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May 10, 2018 10:29
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I don't think that's necessarily true, or books that sold low numbers would continue in perpetuity and books that were big hits wouldn't generate a million spin-offs. If money was irrelevant to these decisions, they wouldn't make much sense. Also, money-making tactics retailers hate, like having to order unrealistic amounts of an issue before you can order its variant covers, would have no reason to exist. If comics were being sold at a loss to generate public awareness of the characters, the industry wouldn't be so obviously constrained by financial concerns.
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May 16, 2018 18:42
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Metalshark posted:I can't stop laughing when people refer to Guggenheim's awful Gambit writing as Remy LeBoyo. No idea why he's suddenly got the most stereotypical Welsh (or Irish, where it's actual slang) affectation but he keeps saying "Boyo" and it's the weirdest thing, even by Guggenheim's low, low standards. It is extremely weird. I half-thought, "wait, do Cajun dialect speakers say 'boyo' and I'm just not aware of it?".
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May 17, 2018 23:35
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