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Tato posted:X-Men Blue was fun and I liked it a lot more than Gold, it really felt like it nailed the "Getting back to being heroes thing" a lot more than Gold did, but I guess it had less baggage to sort out so it could jump right into the action. I was most intrigued by the "Coming up in X-Men Blue" teaser page that had the old Generation X team (including Synch and Skin) in their uniforms, wondering what that's all about. Maybe they get time-displaced too. I think I saw Mondo in there? Also I thought Weapon X was pretty lifeless as far as Grek Pak comics go. Even with a better artist it would be a lot of generic looking anti-mutant cyborgs running around literally hollaring "DIEEEE MUTANT."
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Apr 13, 2017 05:48
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I love Hank. He was my favorite on the cartoon as a kid, he was often the only touch of groundedness in the sometimes operatic over-wroughtness of the 90s series, and when Morrison first dabbled with writing him as gay it was revelatory to me as a confused teen idiot even if it never really led anywhere. And yeah, S.W.O.R.D. was wonderful and charming and he's very good in some very good and some very not good 70s and 80s Avengers. I think he was stuck in an unfortunate place post-Morrison because he no longer had the legacy virus to busy himself with and as with so many Morrison concepts writers felt obliged to gesture vaguely at him falling from grace without ever getting there. So they just made him an ineffectual mope perpetually working towards nothing, except now increasingly moody and broody instead of just increasingly moody. I was disappointed that Bendis seemed to have so little to say about him considering his kind of campy, Borscht-belt persona from his Avengers days seems right in line with the kind of showy fun-guy voice Bendis seems comfortable writing. I feel like part of the point of bringing the young five into the present was to do some damage control on characters who had strayed far from what made them popular to begin with, or whose popularity took them down avenues that wound up being too twisty and baroque to be sustainable. I wish we could have gotten a Beast who could conceivably hang out with Wonder Man and roam around campus bothering Northrop Frye in the sensational guest appearance of 1981 or whenever. All things considered though the path Bunn is taking him on is probably not the worst idea-- I hope he ends up with some grace notes though, I'm sort of done with one of my favorite characters being the James Buchanan of mutantdom (my other favorite is Nightcrawler so who knows, I guess I chose poorly).
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Sep 2, 2017 08:05
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twistedmentat posted:It sure as hell looked like OML git his head blown off with a red murasama bullet though. He's apparently enjoying part one of a however many part adventure in Weapon X so I'm sure he'll be fine.
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Dec 15, 2017 21:29
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Gynovore posted:I have nothing against GLBBQ comic characters, but it feels like Young Iceman's only defining feature is being gay. If you have nothing against them why pull this unfunny poo poo about an extremely easy to type acronym?
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Apr 16, 2018 04:34
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Android Blues posted:One of the best things about Claremont is his obvious literary influence. He's bringing ideas into comics from romance novels, sci-fi novels, adventure, detective and mystery novels, throughout his run. He approaches the X-Men's powers with a sort of sci-fi zeal, rigorously elaborating on the nature of telepathy and how Storm needs to use a deft touch to prevent her weather control abilities from having a cascade effect on local weather systems. He uses words like "hydroplaning" and "compeers", and there's one whole issue where the villains are all characters from The Master & Margarita, a censored Soviet novel from the 1930s, and he never mentions this or calls out the reference, they just are. I agree with your basic point but I don't think Claremont's style of mega syncretic literariness would have been possible at all if Marvel hadn't already established a precedent for vaguely countercultural, omivorously nerdy, and thematically ambitious writers. I see him as an evolution of a certain mode that was already pretty evident in Steve Englehart, sort of found its footing in some elements of Roy Thomas and Denny O'Neil, and was in full bloom with Steve Gerber's early stuff. See too, I guess, Harlan Ellison's occasional (and often pretty stupid) fill-in work on various titles. I think that the difference isn't that Claremont had loftier literary aspirations than anyone else at Marvel, but that he knew how to combine those aspirations with working in a medium like comics better. Thomas and Englehart were continuity fiends and could come up with big wild ideas to throw around, and they could cite Shelley or whatever, but Claremont had this knack you allude to of making all of these things feel like they fit together, that his characters are people with some degree of psychological realism who can still fight ancient demons and teleport and whatever else. He had the rare gift of selling his world-building on the level of the personal-- his Wolverine makes sense and even when he goes off the deep end a little in the 80s you can be totally at sea with the plot of an issue while still being crystal clear about what the stakes are to the characters, what they're feeling, why they're reacting in the way they are, etc. (mostly-- there's a really bad issue shortly before they go to the Outback where they keep terrorizing and harrassing Havok that I've never understood, and some of the New Mutants characters are a mess just because there were so many of them). I guess I'd call it less a literary touch than a specifically novelistic touch-- he did things with comics as not just a serial form but a longform that I don't think anybody prior to him had really thought about putting into practice. Somewhere John Byrne has a post grumbling a bit about Claremont's insistance on downtime issues, but I think they're key-- they'd definitely existed before him, but he used them differently, in a way I'm not sure I can articulate off the top of my head, as a way of marking time as much as the more classic function of carving out some space to catch up with subplots and soap stuff. I think Claremont based his understanding of how he wanted the superhero serial narrative to work on accumulation-- that we get a sense of character through understanding a sense of history, which we can only get by seeing the same characters doing variations on the same things over and over, with signal differences, such that the "downtime issue" is a way of formalizing and instantiating important freeze-frames in the emotional choreography of his casts-- a way of lining everyone up in the doorframe and carving notches in the wood. He does so, so many interesting things, that we never stop to notice because they were also such useful things that they immediately got absorbed into the normative grammar of superhero comics. I think Morrison was the first writer to try to consciously follow up on Claremont as a formal innovator rather than as a generator of IPs (I'm not a huge fan of Lobdell or Nicieza or really any of the franchise caretakers throughout the 90s) and I really admire his run as an attempt to do a critique of Claremont within the narrative space that Claremont himself created, so I don't really want to think of them as competing with one another. Morrison helped me understand what Claremont was up to much better, as well as throwing out a lot of suggestions, deliberately left up in the air for other writers to fulfill (or, as it happened, for editors to immediately backtrack on) about where this sort of narrative could go next. I love both runs! How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 00:06 on May 26, 2018 |
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May 26, 2018 00:02
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Rochallor posted:I agree with this, too. A lot of people I know and a few people in this thread have said that Australia is where Claremont starts to peter out for them, but I love that he really just tries to upset the status quo and do something new (and then tries again when he disbands the X-Men for like a year). It's never perfect, but it works rather well. X-Tinction Agenda is a bit of a step back, but it's also at the tail end of his run, and even it's trying something new (that is the first crossover where the individual books were taken over to tell a sequential story, right?). The Australia stuff and the disbanded team bits are, if you can pretend you don't know how messily things pan out, thrilling comics because he's doing so much to shake up what a longform superhero comic even looks like. Silvestri is a blessing for him because his figures are so sleek and slinky and almost vampire-looking-- all of a sudden we see the X-Men as a human in the Marvel universe might see them, as kind of sexy and inhuman, a truly 80s version of what a species displacing and superseding humanity might look like. From what I understand that's around when Claremont started grating up against editorial more often-- not only having his plans curtailed, but having editors perhaps justifiably get annoyed with him about endlessly deferred resolutions and dangling plot threads-- so on one level its hard not to see the late 80s and early 90s portion of Claremont's X-Men as a failed experiment. But I'm glad he tried-- if you ignore everything you know about Gambit as a cartoon-accented cheeseball, his first appearance is a pretty tense 22 pages of horror/suspense, and it works because Claremont has unsettled so much at that point of what we expect from a superhero comic in terms of risk, pacing, escalation, etc.--- ditto that issue where Wolverine is crucified in the desert and a terrified teen Jubilee has to drag him to safety.
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May 26, 2018 05:05
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Jedi posted:This is it precisely. It was conceived as a way to backfill issues 67-93 which were reprints because the book wasn't selling well enough to warrant new stories. I've read the Hidden Years, and much like pubic works project, I don't recall a single thing about them. Neither do the X-Men I guess because I do recall them inexplicably running around with Storm.
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Jul 29, 2018 01:14
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I'm living in a blissful fantasy land where X-Statix is back, so I'd also say Vivisector, Phat, and even good old Bloke. Oh, and Rictor. I think one of the nobody D-list one-offs that Scott Lobdell introduced at the very end of his run was gay-- some guy with transparent skin? I forgot Anole's erstwhile boyfriend Greymalkin but to be fair I think that was Greymalkin's power. I think half of the issue is the industry-wide difficulty of introducing new characters that readers embrace enough to have real staying power-- I think writers are eager to write cool new LGBTQIA characters, but once they finish up a run getting the next set of writers to follow through is difficult. Look at how Anole-- who has a fair bit of fan momentum behind him-- fades in and out of visibility. The other issue is getting past reader resistance in having old, established characters come out. A lot of very ugly takes came out when Iceman came out, for example, and if, for some reason, you find yourself trawling the letter columns of old Alpha Flight issues, you can read similarly reactionary responses to Northstar. Personally I'd love somebody to take up Claremont and Morrison's torch and just have old X-Men coming out left and right, as its always been a mega Foucauldian narrative about a polymorphously perverse heterotopia full of beautiful weirdos with magical bodies, so of course the sexual and social mores of the human order wouldn't hold much sway. Have Cyclops as the token straight mutant, who's always sitting at his computer buying socks off the Land's End website.
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Aug 25, 2018 15:41
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There's been a misunderstanding: Logan doesn't have normal claws that get hot. His claws have been converted into hollow pipettes which can secrete hot glue. He's in charge of bedazzling everyone's new uniforms, spearheading arts & crafts night around the mansion, and putting Rockslide back together. The idea is that Laura can remain Wolverine, Logan can inherit the Paste Pot Pete title, and Paste Pot Pete can either stick with the Trapster or try being X-23.
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Sep 28, 2018 22:26
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Williams writes a great Emma Frost, and it's a really interesting direction (has she just been THE Hellfire leader before? I want to say no?), but what's up with Selene vis a vis the Hellfire Club right now? I know she's been skulking around TNC's Captain America but I've unfortunately missed the last issue or two. Also-- and this is so pedantic-- isn't the end-all be-all leader of the Hellfire Club the Lord Imperial, not the Black King (possibly Sunspot)? I've been so in and out of X-Men titles over the last few years that I'm sure I'm just unaware of what's up with this and that, but wikipedia is only so up to date on these things.
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Nov 2, 2018 16:07
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Spoilers regarding the character Skwirl is asking about : He had a brief solo series, maybe a limited, earlier this year. Didn't read it but I believe it was Pete Milligan so potentially good?
How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 02:03 on Nov 22, 2018 |
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Nov 22, 2018 01:56
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nunsexmonkrock posted:So are the writers just avoiding that Psylocke is now back in her "original" body? I haven't seen much changes to her even in Uncanny 3. Is her telepathy better or not/does she still have her ninja skills or not. Seems like a bad choice to do another body switch and not do something with it. Seems like they did it just to do it and not change anything else. I'd guess it's just partially that the body swap was tangled up in 30-ish years of baroque plotting and an increasingly bad look for Marvel so somebody decided to just sweep it under the rug, rather than someone having a story that their soul was burning to tell that could only be told with a white Psylocke. Edge & Christian posted:It was cut short and riddled with crossovers by [insert everything wrong about Marvel editorial in the 2010s] but I really liked the hook/overall feel of Dennis Hopeless and Mark Bagley [and a bunch of fill-in artists]'s All New X-Men using the time-displaced teenagers. Oh yeah, that was pretty good. I totally forgot both Apocalypse Wars and Inhumans vs. X-Men existed though. How much of the past five years or so have the X-Men wasted in anodyne cross-overs and fighting either nanomachines or bland omnimutants? I was flipping through Gillen's run the other night and it was shocking to remember how purposeful and focused the tile felt even if in the broader view it was maybe just floundering a little more elegantly.
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Nov 30, 2018 16:05
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Uncanny X-Men is extravagantly, almost decadently bad, and I think in a way even more offensive than Secret Empire because at least Secret Empire had a point it was failing to make. Positioning the X-Men as the stalwart defenders of the status quo is ludicrously stupid-- a mutant book should not be the most reactionary comic I've read this year, but here we are, I guess. In 2018 I'm not going to be rooting for the team trying to stop the oil industry from being dismantled. Spoilers for issue #4 ahead: Even on a basic storytelling level its both listless and confusing. A shirtless Angel with a weird Krusty the Clown mohawk appears with shoddily designed new versions of Magneto, the Blob, and Omega Red to blow up the mansion (which correct me if I'm wrong was currently already blown up in whatever mini-series has Teen Cable and Ahab running around) and everyone acts like this is a novel and startling betrayal. Why does Magneto suddenly have a luxurious flowing beard? Who are these teams? Is there a reason everyone is treating the New X-Men kids like garbage except to amplify an otherwise nonsensical tension? Nate Grey mopes around engaging in that most X-Men of hobbies, ruminating and giving extremely vague snatches of Plan to people. Legion is there too, his motivations inconsistent from issue to issue, which I guess is ok because he's sO cRaZy. In X-Men: Red Jean Grey is an exciting and dynamic character, with probably one of the more mature and thoughtful takes on the "we're the proactive version of the X-Men" trope I can think of. Here, she's like some gestalt of 90s Jean Grey and 90s Cyclops-- all of the wet blanket disciplinarian without any of the personality. I feel like aside from real gems like X-23 and other Laura books and things like Red this line is in more dire shape than it has been in the last dire decade or so. I can't see any reason why anyone would want to write this garbled, retrogressive filler when so many excellent comics are being made. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 22:01 on Dec 5, 2018 |
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Dec 5, 2018 21:58
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Teenage Fansub posted:I stopped reading, but I suppose Beard Magneto and all them are from whatever the Age of X-Man alternate world/timeline'll be. That would make the most sense, but all of the characters are acting so gormlessly shocked by this in a way that suggests that they've never heard of alternate universes before (aside from the alternate universe that Legion keeps expositing to them about). I can't quite articulate or put my finger on what feels so clumsy about this-- I guess it's like if I went to see a movie set in the 80s, where a bad guy gets away in a car, and all of the heroes were standing around gobsmacked going "I don't know, he got into some sort of gleaming metal canister and just took off at the speed of a comet. I've never seen anything like that before." I guess it's not just that it feels like a tired rehash of X-Men tropes-- horseman, alternate versions of characters, brand-new anti-mutant pundits, a cure/vaccine for the X-gene, etc. etc. etc.-- but that it both treats these as novel and writes them poorly.
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Dec 5, 2018 22:54
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A $100, 800 page Eve of Destruction HC is perhaps the least essential object on the planet earth.
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Dec 19, 2018 00:36
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I'm more concerned about the narrative beat of teen Bobby nobly stuffing himself back into the closet for the good of reality, which is an extraordinarily bad look for a book coming out in the waning days of 2018. Edit: I also flipped through the past two issues of Uncanny and it continues to be both narratively incompetent and thematically incoherent. X-Man is...making extinct flora and fauna come back, destroying offshore oil rigs, and taking away peoples' weapons, and the X-Men are uniformly reacting like he's driving tanks over preschools. Now sure, there are not unintelligible positions to take that gloss the above as de facto bad things to do, but it's a weird, weird ideological space to set the X-Men down in. We're certainly a long way from Claremont, Morrison, and Milligan's counter-cultural, queer, and radical-by-big-two-standards take on mutants, and it feels like a lovely place to land in this day and age. Sure, the X-Men franchise could realistically only be written as radical to a certain extent as corporate IP, but making them reactionaries is baffling and, more than that, boring. There's a way to tell this kind of story, I suppose, but they're doing it supremely poorly. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 23:54 on Dec 19, 2018 |
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Dec 19, 2018 23:39
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Alaois posted:i think brisson thought he was doing it gently with that last scene between young bobby and old bobby but B O Y I can only presume Ed Brisson is a straight guy because no queer person on earth could write that scene and mean it to be affirming or inspiring. It was bullshit.
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Dec 19, 2018 23:58
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Yeah, he has. His solo series deals with it quite a bit, I don't know how foregrounded it is in the team books though.
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Dec 20, 2018 04:46
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Wanderer posted:Making every second arc in every book about averting a dark future/fighting yourself from another dimension/dream sequences where everyone dies/fighting other heroes, though, is getting really tiresome. That's half my problem with the current Uncanny, in fact; it's just a bunch of old X-Men beats thrown into a blender without nuance and seasoned liberally with Rosenberg's bizarrely myopic take on Madrox. Also having everyone you fight be arbitrarily immune to telepathy so that nobody has to figure out how to write around Jean Grey. I mean, Christ, I get that she can be hard to write, but X-Men: Red was a perfectly game attempt to do it in a fun way, if writers are just going to find contrived ways to sideline her why did they bother bringing her back.
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Dec 24, 2018 00:32
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I caught up and it's astonishing how little is happening, how boring that little is, and how poorly it's all being conveyed. Every fight is just a tableaux of people making poses in space-- there's nothing to communicate any sense of choreography or dynamism, which I guess is partially on the art team, but narratively there's so little being done to convey on a panel-to-panel level why any of the bajillion combatants are making the decisions they're doing. I remember the days of Chuck Austen, the most meandering and aimless bits of Bendis' tenure, even Ultimate X-Men's descent into actual incoherence, but these might be the worst X-Men comics I've ever read. At least with Austen there was always some weird touch of extravagant excess to latch onto-- this is all just dismal.
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Jan 12, 2019 01:19
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It's not just continuity pedantry-- the X-franchise is such a baroque mess of trivia and shenanigans that every writer is going to have to compromise total adherence to the past in order to tell a story. Morrison, whose run I love, plays fast and loose with plenty of things, not least of which Emma Frost's characterization, but it does so in the service of a story that makes those nudges and blurs feel worth it. See the one-off with Sabretooth and Sebastian Shaw-- it flies in the face of decades of Hellfire Club stories, and was never adopted as a new status quo, but it sells the necessity of its conceit as a way of crystallizing Scott and Logan's shared bubble of rarely disclosed vulnerability in the middle of a sleazy wash of dangerous, sinister, sleazy machismo. If it makes decisions at the expense of the Hellfire Club, it does so in order to make a broader, and largely imo intelligently observed and compelling, point about these two characters and their shared imbrication in tropes of masculinity. Ditto Madrox, who has, to be sure, been all over the map since his introduction. The Madrox in Fallen Angels is (literally) not the same guy as in PAD's first X-Factor, who is in turn miles apart from the version in Joe Casey's X-Corporation story, and in turn the much more nuanced and elaborated character that PAD eventually turns him into too. Madrox is minor enough that it's to be expected that he's going to be in a state of flux in between appearances. That's fine! But, like-- Uncanny is ignoring the past in order to do-- what? Certainly not tell an interesting story, and even more certainly not to make any kind of considered point about Madrox or his powers. It doesn't read like a risk or a reasoned compromise-- it just reads like not giving a poo poo. That's how I feel about the half-assedness of the plotting and the pacing, too. That this is all leading up to a mega crossover and an AoA rehash seems to be not only the precondition but the point of this run. Everything leading up to it reads like nothing but apathetic shuffling. If this was a good story nobody would care if Madrox grew a trunk and started shooting club soda out of it, but it isn't. Ditto the sharp turns in the characterization of Anole or Armor-- they don't even read as misunderstandings of the characters because the story so clearly doesn't care about character. They needed somebody with limbs and a mouth to do poo poo in order to reiterate the same boring plot-beats, and just picked people to do it, seemingly at random. Anole's betrayal could have been done by Glob Herman or Rockslide, or, I don't know, Bird Brain-- what difference would it make? As long as things are trudging wearyingly towards Age of X-Man, this comic doesn't care. I know I've complained upthread about the curious conservatism of this run-- the X-Men as agents of the status quo, fighting against... disarmament (??) and for giant oil tankers (????)-- but having read more, duh, of course it's conservative. It's the laziest example of the big two's facile conflation between storytelling and IP curation. The whole thing is a tautological quagmire-- "this story is exciting and interesting because it's the X-Men doing the things that made you first think they were exciting and interesting," except that it fails to even recognize that people developed this attachment to the franchise not because of big group shots and journeyman-quality splash pages, but because the best writers of it were masters of specificity, density of detail, and the idiosyncratic touch. Claremont, for years, was not writing a perfect comic, but he was writing probably the least predictable thing that Marvel or DC were putting on the stands. PAD, as divisive as he is, has never been content to use his pet characters to tell the same story over and over. What's irritating is that it's performing a lukewarm cover-version of better comics using the broadiest, sloppiest strokes possible. It's like if someone insisted that the coloring book was the only legitimate form of art, but simultaneously insisted on only doing coloring books drunk and with no colors other than burnt sienna and beige-- in other words a reactionary slavishness to formula married with an astounding but totally uninteresting lack of competence.
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Jan 12, 2019 07:28
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Blockhouse posted:The thing is White has absolutely edited good books in the past, so I don't know if I want to blame him for this I think the issue is partially editorial. IMO the only good "writer's jam" weekly in recent memory was 52, which had the benefit of being by a bunch of writer's with very distinct voices, telling fairly weird and idiosyncratic stories-- it didn't feel like a normal comic just put out four times as frequently, it felt like a breathless and messy but very fun experiment in letting a bunch of stories that might not have otherwise been told weave in and out of each other unpredictably. It starred characters from the margins of the DC Universe, and sent them on bizarre tours of that universe's neglected corners. It felt like it was leaning into its form and its schedule to really accentuate its eclecticness and eccentricity. This was largely of course a success due to it being written by essentially the All-Star Monsters of Comics of that period, but it was also a stroke of editorial brilliance-- of taking the temperature of the moment, of assembling the perfect team, and of giving them just the right amount of leeway to explore and meander while insuring that things all cohered (unlike, say, Countdown). UXM isn't quite that. It's telling essentially a bog standard X-Men "event" story-- one in fact structurally very similar to Extermination. A friend becomes... a foe?? A foe becomes... a FRIEND???? Collateral damage is dealt! People cross vaguely defined lines! The mansion gets all wrecked up! Characters you haven't seen in awhile show up and get maimed! The only thing it gets from being weekly is sloppy, rushed art. Furthermore, Rosenberg, Brisson, and Thompson have all written fine-to-great comics, but I'd say that aside from Thompson none of them are close to having the sharply defined voices of Morrison, Rucka, or Waid. It's not easy to point to a scene or a page and say, ah, there's Brisson-- and when people are able to it's usually on the basis of an annoying tic. There's none of the frisson of putting a bunch of strong but very different authorial stances in the same narrative and letting them bounce off each other-- instead it all feels as if its written by committee, and any good elements that distinguish each writer-- say, Thompson's sharp dialogue and knack for recontextualizing continuity-- is averaged out into a mealy, bland porridge. This is all absolutely stuff that an editor conceivably could have pre-empted or adjusted for.
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Jan 12, 2019 09:24
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ElNarez posted:I'll give you Thompson and Rosenberg (though Rosenberg is highly dependant on having an artist that can play around with the format, see 4 Kids Walk Into a Bank for a great example of that), but what's Ed Brisson's fine-to-great work? Good point, and honestly I was probably just giving him the benefit of the doubt out of a misplaced sense of niceness. I guess Comeback was not at all my cup of tea, but it was, you know, fine. It had ideas. Now, as a letterer he's fantastic. Change and Rat Queens were gorgeously lettered. If they'd let him letter the X-Men I'm sure we'd all be golden.
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Jan 12, 2019 18:04
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Dawgstar posted:Having re-read it, mostly it's 'Deadpool has a motor-mouth' but he isn't even terribly funny. It honestly feels like Joe Kelly should get more credit for final form Deadpool. I think he was the one who made it implicit Deadpool hates himself. I haven't read the Simone stuff in years so I can't comment, but I've seen her name thrown around as helping DP along too, although I don't think she technically writes Wade that much but that's only because I can't really recall what the twist of Agent X was. I mean, I think he's definitely still popular in 2019 largely because of the trajectory Kelly set him on, but honestly Kelly was just running with a lot of the character beats that Mark Waid set up in the second mini-series.
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Jan 19, 2019 01:27
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I really didn't like it. It wasn't shoddily put together or anything but a bunch of elements rubbed me the wrong way. -Death of X was not a great story, but it was by an author I respect, and it felt kind of crummy for Cable and Cyclops (acting presumably as a vehicle for the voice of editorial) to say "that sucked! It was lovely! Boo to that!" I feel like they could have pulled off this retcon without any of the spite. -As mentioned, why does dying and coming back de-radicalize Cyclops, other than a desire by the creators to hit the reset button? It feels cheap, it undoes a bunch of character development I was very fond of, and it seems in line, in a way that makes me uncomfortbale, with the centrist political drift of Uncanny so far, this urge to turn the X-Men apolitical. -This is silly but I hate how comics tend to deal with incarceration and recidivism-- Arkham always gets on my nerves-- so I was disappointed but not surprised when the villain comes out from a 13-year sentence and immediately takes off on another robo-rampage. Again, this speaks to what I'm picking up on as a much broader political shifting away from what Morrison through Fraction and Gillen through Bendis were really digging into. It's cops and robbers poo poo and I'm not that interested in the X-Men as cops (except for Bishop, I guess, who was very fun in District X way back when).
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Jan 24, 2019 16:03
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Rhyno posted:I'm not up to date on X-Men, is he the Phoenix host or what? I didn't read the Infinity Watch book, but I had a lot of faith in Soule so unfortunately I wound up reading all of Return. Basically, There's a new bad guy whose power is resurrecting dead people, and either using them as host bodies or I guess giving them some degree of agency. She's trying to build a new utopia up in a satellite with a bunch of other satellites ringing the planet, to help extent the range of her powers. She resurrected Wolverine to act as muscle-- I either forget how she got him out of his adamantium shell or the book just didn't explain it-- and gives him his free will back, temporarily, to pitch him the idea of willingly joining her evil space colony. It goes poorly for her and her satellites and Wolverine falls through space, through the atmosphere, and into the ocean where his burnt-up rear end is rescued by fishermen. As the late Annette Hanshaw might say-- that's all! Edit: Also, I'm always a few days behind on a lot of the X-books because I don't buy many of them, I just read my office-mate's on Friday-- and I have no idea at this point if UXM is even in main continuity or not. It's suddenly some kind of nightmare dystopia with mutant concentration camps? Multiple Man continues to be written as some kind of perverse bizarro-Poochy where he's constantly showing up and people are constantly yelling at him about it? There's still an absurdly bloated cast with confusing and emotionally flat death scenes? Who is this for? It's wild that the first chunk leading into Age of X-Man were also so dismal, but the actual Age of X-Man book and most of the spin-offs so far have wound up being pretty fun, meanwhile UXM itself continues to spiral towards that sweet spot of banal and incoherent. What on earth is going on with Matthew Rosenberg? DId I just hallucinate 3 Kids Rob A Bank being good? How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 15:16 on Feb 22, 2019 |
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Feb 22, 2019 15:07
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I'm struck by how the only PoC on the Uncanny team have been turned into de-humanized cyber-monsters. And like-- I don't think he's doing this out of explicitly racist motives, I think it's just a testament to how half-assed and poorly-conceived this run is that this decision slid by without editorial going like, uh, maybe not. I'm usually not a stickler about typos and stuff but even just dialogue bubbles like "We don't need their cops and we don't their cops and we don't need you pretending to be ours" speak to a book that nobody involved really seems to believe in or take pride in. That would be awful, stilted dialogue even if it was lettered correctly!
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Mar 21, 2019 15:05
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I think Age of X-Man has a flawed and not very compelling premise but a lot of the individual books just sing in a way that few X-books have in years outside of ancillary stuff like Domino or Mr./Mrs. X or Wolverine/X-23. I think this is because, well, they're being written by fresh voices who have something to say about these characters-- surely X-Tremists starts from the most hackneyed position of anything of this books, but I'm still going to miss it when it's gone, because Leah Williams writes these characters with such a light touch. I wish this book would go on indefinitely. I care more about Moneta's true-believer zealousy than I cared about any of the last eighteen iterations of nano-sentinels or mutant-hating senators or whatever, and the weird, halting, uncomfortable scene between Betsy and Fred Dukes was the only time I've felt moved by anything either of those characters has ever done. I somehow give a poo poo about Psylocke and the Blob now, because, like, in a novel play by Marvel, they're being written by someone who gives a poo poo about them too. I'm abstractly on board with the Hickman thing because as much as I'm skeptical of a lot of his writing, and especially wary of how his pet themes will wind up informed by the basic premises of the X-Men, because it's the first time since Gillen that I've had any confidence that someone is coming onboard with an actual idea to communicate-- that being said, I really hope Williams and Thompson and McGuire stick around in some capacity. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 14:28 on Mar 27, 2019 |
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Mar 27, 2019 14:23
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Android Blues posted:Echoing that sentiment, X-Tremists #2 was fantastic. This is exactly what the X-Men franchise needs - human stories about oppression and longing that use the comic book setting to allegorise their themes. I was just intrigued by the first issue, but the second is Williams knocking it out of the park. Yeah I agree 100%. Claremont and Morrison both got that that element of desire and longing is so crucial to what makes the mutant stuff work, otherwise the soap-opera elements are just grand guignol misery and moping. Edit: I also want to celebrate that Northstar wasn't just speaking French, he was speaking Quebecoise French! Bibitte! I couldn't believe it! How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 07:15 on Mar 28, 2019 |
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Mar 28, 2019 00:19
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X-Statix is coming back!
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Apr 12, 2019 01:05
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X-Tremists #3 was, unsurprisingly, excellent, and once again the scenes between Fred Dukes and Betsy stole the show. I really, really, really hope Leah Williams winds up with a long-term X-book after this event is over.
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Apr 24, 2019 14:34
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Yeah, it sucked a lot and felt astonishingly tone-deaf. If it was unintentional Rosenberg is an idiot, if it was intentional he did an extraordinarily bad and tacky job with it.
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May 2, 2019 03:36
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Rahne's plots in later PAD X-Factor was also pretty bad-- her changeling son and all of that run's meandering stuff about Hell. Rahne is a great character who has not really had a lot of compelling plots of her own I guess.
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May 3, 2019 05:08
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Android Blues posted:Yeah. Also, when this stuff happened to Claremont's characters, it was usually the start of a storyline about them overcoming adversity. Wolfsbane just dies, and because she's not the most popular character and has had like four lines in this whole run, it feels like a cheap way to milk pathos. Especially since the only justification given for how four guys managed to kick a regenerating werewolf to death is, "oh, she let them because she just wanted to be normal". 100%, I was thinking of that precise plotline. When Claremont has Xavier helpless in the face of stupid, bigoted violence, it's in order to, in part, show us about Xavier-- his strength of character as well as the extent to which, perhaps, he'd become reliant on his powers. It's a great moment of vulnerability and development for a character whose physical vulnerability was too often read as his defining feature. Wolfsbane on the other hand only dies because this run thrives on images of female suffering-- see Blindfold's gratuitous and tacky suicide scene a few months ago. As has been mentioned, there's no reason she doesn't fight back or just, like, shrug it off and leave, other than that this book only exists to give Scott and Logan interminable scenes of grieving and sulking.
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May 4, 2019 01:05
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The Stepford Cuckoos have also had a pretty consistent present here and there since their introduction.Also, like Rockslide, a few Academy X kids have stuck around as stable supporting characters-- Anole, Pixie, etc..
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May 5, 2019 19:17
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I've walked away from UXM but I'll maintain that between all the Age of X-Man writers you have a great stable of emerging talents. The X-Men franchise at its best is about social difference and the ways that marginalized people form communities and solidarity, and I think it's telling that the best X-titles of recent years have been by women and queer folks. Hickman's baroque, hyper-stylized story-telling was great for the vision of the FF he had, mixed (imo) for his Avengers stuff, but just feels like kind of an off-puttingly "safe" move for the X-Men. I'd rather see Kelly Thompson, Leah Williams, Mags Visaggio, Eve Ewing, Saladin Ahmed, Seanan McGuire, etc.. on flagship X-titles than someone with as fundamentally conservative a vision of what superhero comics are for as Hickman. Like-- Cyclops should be a revolutionary, and he should be scary to a lot of people. If Bendis' tenure was uneven and often listless, he at least took one of Gillen's best ideas (which itself felt merely like a recognition and extrapolation of the trajectory Morrison set up) and ran with it.
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May 16, 2019 05:43
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Android Blues posted:The Age of X-Man crossover books are pretty fun, although I feel like some of the titles have failed to stick the landing and are spinning their wheels in the home stretch. Leah Williams' X-Tremists has escaped this fate, and is notably good. Uncanny is mostly terrible grimdark nonsense, stiltedly related by a fool. I thought X-Tremists was actually really beautiful this week. I like Leah Williams a lot when she's doing more intimate character studies like this and What If?: Magik, less so the jokey stuff like Giant Men although I liked that too. Today's issue really got to me though, especially back to back with a particularly cruel issue of A Walk Through Hell. She gets the horror of Age of X-Man's high-concept in a way nobody else seems to, and is really leveraging it as a way of giving attention and thought to characters that have been one-note or neglected for too long.
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May 29, 2019 17:56
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The Vanisher is a very cool character who eventually came to occupy a niche that's pretty common in the broader Marvel Universe but fairly rare in the mutant titles-- he's a guy with a power that makes it exceedingly easy to get away with crimes, so he runs around getting away with crimes. He's venal, cowardly, and he knows which side his bread is buttered on, which can make him a refreshing presence amidst the operatic morality tales that make up the bulk of X-Men arcs, just like softball issues or Harry's Hideaway. He was great in Fallen Angels as a Fagin-type and a lot of fun in the pre-Remender X-Force as sort of a slimy sleazy guy being extorted into working with them who eventually comes around on his team-mates. It's a familiar arc but one that suited his powers and personality. He's not an A-lister by any means but he was a longstanding and memorable character with a healthy backlog of interesting and entertaining stories. I've dropped UXM because, well, it sucked to read and to look at, but look, I'm sure that like everything else going on before Hickman starts, it'll be forgotten the next time someone else feels like they need a bad guy who can teleport.
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Jun 6, 2019 19:11
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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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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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