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New Mutants is visually gorgeous. The pencils and the colouring are stupendous - the pencils have this classic comics look, very rounded, striking, friendly figures, but then the painting over the top of them makes everything dreamy and modern. The scene with Doug and Mondo's a great example. Doug straight up looks like Johnny Quest on a linework level, and then the paints add layers of shading and overrun the lines to make that clean, iconic figure into a more visually rich and complex one. Rod Reis is doing all the art on this, on checking the credits, and he's nailing it.
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Nov 6, 2019 15:51
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Skwirl posted:Kudos to New Mutants for reminding me that Cyclops dad is a complete and utter poo poo. Corsair: leaving kids to fend for themselves in a hostile world is his only move.
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Nov 7, 2019 00:28
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Claremont Number
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Nov 27, 2019 10:31
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Sandwolf posted:Is Psylocke really that big of a character in the world or fandom? She just seems like a Hot Topic Elektra knock off so far in FA She is absolutely a big character in the world of fandom and a Hot Topic Elektra knockoff.
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Nov 27, 2019 23:51
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X-Force really does feel like a pre-Krakoa X-Men book that's missing the ostensible point of the reboot. Feels like their whole thing should be about black ops spy games on behalf of Krakoa, rather than them just doing generic edgy stuff with Krakoa as a home base.
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Nov 28, 2019 21:24
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Skwirl posted:Roberto should have been black, or at least darker skinned. It irks me so much that so many portrayals of Roberto just ignore/forget that he's black. Like, a bunch of artists just draw him as a light skinned Hispanic guy (or in this case I guess cast him as one). It's important to his backstory that he's black Brazilian!
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Jan 7, 2020 07:11
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LifeGetsWorser posted:That makes so much sense. He's also the dude who wrote a supremely creepy arc in Ms. Marvel (back when Carol Danvers held that title) about the Puppet Master sex trafficking superheroes with his mind control powers. Seeing his name pop up at the end of a Titans episode made a lot of intuitive sense, honestly. e: I am WRONG about this, see below Android Blues fucked around with this message at 23:38 on Jan 15, 2020 |
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Jan 15, 2020 23:32
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Archyduchess posted:I think you're mixing up Brian Reed (the Puppet Master guy) and Bryan Edward Hill (the Fallen Angels guy). I absolutely am. My bad!
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Jan 15, 2020 23:38
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:I think that's six of one, half a dozen of the other. Some status quo changes do stick, but they're few and far between; I'd argue that that's more a function of "hey the audience seems to dig this, let's run with it" than "the writers were brave." The illusion of change is still the standard operating procedure, but even comics companies will shut up and listen to audience response. I dunno, there's stuff that doesn't follow this model. Like "Tony Stark has an AI assistant in his suit" has become a baked-in part of the character due to a combination of the movies, and the fact that it just makes sense in the context of modern technology. The nature of the AI assistant frequently changes run by run, but it's pretty much always a part of the character these days.
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Jan 31, 2020 10:45
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:I don’t know where to post this, but I just have to say it: I’ve been reading old X-Men and New Mutants comics, and Chris Claremont is extremely horny. I don’t know if there was an editorial policy at the time that horny was mandatory, but wow is it noticeable now. It definitely wasn't editorial forcing Claremont's pen to veer horny. His plots are famously laden with horniness and paraphilia, although honestly it usually comes off as quirky and charming more than creepy. Like, standard comics horny is "leering over busty ladies getting their clothes ripped up while fighting space aliens" - scenarios that feel exploitative and sexist. Claremont horny is a villain turning Storm into a dragon, or a mind-controlled Rachel Grey doing BDSM on Bishop. It still sometimes feels exploitative, but it usually feels pretty equal opportunity, and it's often so weird that it doesn't really feel chauvinistic so much as odd.
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Mar 30, 2020 22:38
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Also, it counts for a lot that his female characters rule and lead the books in ways that modern comics still struggle with. Standard-grade horny comics usually pair the cheesecake with chauvinism, but that's never the vibe with Claremont. It's hard to begrudge him turning Kitty Pryde into a baby now and then when he's spent fourteen years making her a deeper and more central character than Cyclops.
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Mar 30, 2020 22:47
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:I just looked this up and it reminded me of the only thing I remember about Prime, which is that his gym teacher was a pedophile. There's a lot of pedophilia subtext in Prime. Apart from the relatively innocent "kid hits on adult women in his adult superhero form", his dad was secretly responsible for the experiment that turned the protagonist into Prime, and there's a series of (deeply disturbing in light of the revelations about Gerard Jones) scenes where the little boy protagonist - naked and afraid and dripping with slime after emerging from the Prime body - begs his dad to tell him why he did this to him, and his dad cradles him in his arms and tells him that they have to keep all this a secret from his mom. Oh yeah, and the little boy is always naked when he stops being Prime. He bursts out of the superhero body as a naked kid dripping with slime, sometimes crying and afraid. So there's that!
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Mar 31, 2020 14:03
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I think like you say, part of why Claremont's treatment of Empath works to sell him as a skeevy, despicable predator without it becoming unbearable to read is that he usually isn't allowed to go too far with it. Basically this:Archyduchess posted:I think in recent years and certainly in Marauders he's kind of been the victim of the same arc of escalation that the Joker has-- he can't just be a really gross, grimy guy, he has to be a terrifying sociopathic anomaly. Not to bag on Alias, but (in modern comics especially, where the tone is allowed to run darker than it was in the 80s) practically every villain with mind control powers is at constant risk of having a story arc written about them where they pull a Purple Man. There are a few similar vilains in Claremont's X-Men/New Mutants runs, and they're typically about as sexually menacing as Count Dracula. Mastermind pulls the same shtick in the arc where Madelyne Pryor is first introduced, but it's all done with such comparative restraint that we understand this guy's a creepy predator without him actually being allowed to commit a rape. I think Brainchild pulls the same shtick briefly in Claremont's 2000s run on Uncanny, and is promptly shut down. The Shadow King turns people into mind slaves in fetish suits during the kid Storm and Gambit arc, but he doesn't make out with them. There's a line that Claremont hovers around with these characters, but doesn't cross because on some level he recognises he's still telling superhero stories, colourful tales where the heroes prevail, and that sexual exploitation isn't a plot device on the same tonal level as Magneto's dastardly weather control machine. You can't have a villain do it and get away with it, and if they successfully violate someone - which is rare compared to these villains attempting to do so and being thwarted - there needs to be a serious reckoning of the impact of that on the characters. See also: his excoriating continuity correction of Avengers 200, where he has Ms. Marvel explain that the creators of that issue penned her rape without even realising they'd done so. I dunno. Dude's not perfect, some of this stuff was definitely fetish material, but he was drinking his respect women juice in a way a lot of (male) creators who handle the same subjects don't seem to be. I've lost count of the amount of modern comics I've read where some previously innocuous villain rapes or violates or sexually menaces a female character, usually a superhero, in a way that is far more skeevily fetishistic about the violation of a powerful woman.
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Apr 5, 2020 01:51
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:I feel kind of silly bringing up things from 35 years ago, but when X-Factor started did they really have Cyclops abandon his wife and child to go be a superhero with his resurrected dead girlfriend? How did nobody think, “hey, maybe this makes our hero somewhat unlikeable”? Yeah, it's a nadir for Cyclops as a character and it screams "editorial mandated a team with the original X-Men on it so the story and characters of the franchise as it stood had to be twisted into knots to meet that need". It's impossible to ever like him again if you don't just, like, forget that whole storyline ever happened. Madelyne Pryor as a character got done dirty. Cyclops more or less gets to skate on what he did to her, and she turns into an evil demoness and commits suicide, thereby absolving him of ever thinking about it again.
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Apr 22, 2020 22:23
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Also "Cyclops goes into retirement" is one of those things that almost stuck, and if it had, it could have been a defining moment in how comics storylines are told. Instead we got the opposite - all the original X-Men are back in action, Jean isn't dead anymore, Cyclops isn't married anymore, Cyclops no longer has a son. The years of storytelling that lead up to the current status quo are reset for the sake of bringing back the preferred status quo of old-school fans. The whole plot has strong One More Day vibes.
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Apr 22, 2020 22:31
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But what if someone catches him while he's not blastin'? Best to be safe.
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Apr 23, 2020 17:04
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Reading the Claremont run is like watching someone perform alchemy. It's messy, occasionally explosive, but in real time you see these relics of a failed franchise forcibly transfigured into the world's most dynamic superhero team. So very worth reading.
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May 7, 2020 21:57
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The end of the Claremont run is, yeah, pretty much a fever dream. Some of it's good, other parts not so much. I'm not clear on how much of that was caused by a return to stories being artist-lead, and how much was just fatigue.
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May 8, 2020 14:53
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Yeah, the computer thing was lead-in to Inferno, so without Inferno it's just a non sequitur.
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May 8, 2020 14:57
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Oh, whoa. I must have been thinking of an earlier moment!
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May 8, 2020 15:28
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That's absolutely one of the ways in which the Claremont run is fantastic not just by the standards of its time, but in comparison to contemporary comics. Like, Claremont's often horny, but his writing actually cares about the interiority and personhood of women. It radiates off the page that a) Claremont thinks Storm is hot and b) Claremont writes Storm as a person, rather than a narrative prop or a foil or a love interest. For my money, cheesecake in modern comics isn't groan-worthy because it's horny, but because it's usually exploitative: it uses female characters as brain-dead props who are secondary to the men until it's time for them to be tied up by a bondage monster, or mind controlled by a villain, or taking a shower, or etc. Even books with female protagonists often see their leads written as complete tools who repeatedly stumble head-over-rear end into whichever fetish scenario the writer has planned for them next, all the while giving the impression that their writer learned about women's interiority from half-watching three episodes of Ally McBeal. Claremont's women get into BDSM predicaments often enough, but they're also written as people who have agency in the story. More, that agency usually comes first, with the fetish-y predicaments being incidental. And his men are occasionally written into horny peril scenarios too, which I think ameliorates things as well.
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May 11, 2020 19:11
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Catching up on Marauders, and Storm reacting to power dampening tech by going sicko mode with a vibranium knife is exactly how I've been hoping she'd be written in this series. Writers who remember that Storm spent a good portion of the 80s as a martial artist with no powers have my heart.
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May 27, 2020 23:47
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Yeah, and in that time there's specific mention of her training with Wolverine until he thinks she's nearly his equal, plus storylines where she routinely defeats powered people using cunning and martial arts skills. Plus, who can forget the iconic "Storm knife fights Callisto" scene from the introduction of the Morlocks? Storm rules. I feel like an almost innumerable number of runs between Claremont and today have given her pretty short shrift characterisation-wise - she's usually the 90s cartoon version of herself, the serene weather goddess with very effective powers and a muted personality. It's cool to see Marauders painting a deeper portrait.
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May 28, 2020 00:42
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JRJR's outfit for Rachel in that issue absolutely kills, from what I recall.
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Jun 12, 2020 13:01
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Rachel's one of the coolest characters from that period of the run. Her drama's really interesting and fun.
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Jun 23, 2020 03:23
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A lot of the retro Wanda/Vision stuff in old Avengers is very sweet and is one of the most interesting things happening in those comics. That's where my love for the character comes from.
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Jul 23, 2020 00:09
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Rick posted:That feels like a propaganda res because if they bring him back they can say they really will give anyone a chance. Although, also, it feels like it's hard to do the Sabertooth to that guy if he gets out of hand. The Shadow King's horrible, but I think we've already seen people as bad strolling around Krakoa. Selene's whole shtick is sucking the life force out of teenage sacrifices, Apocalypse once employed a dude named Holocaust, etc. The Shadow King's just extra creepy. Does his evil stuff while turning you into a rubber gimp and having spider legs. Apocalypse at least obfuscates the petty banality of his evil by having a sleek visual design, and transforms his unwilling minions into similarly stylish forms.
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Aug 6, 2020 03:53
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Gologle posted:Isn't Shadow King like one of the hardest mutants to permanently kill too? If they need to imprison him, how the hell are they going to actually do it? Yeah, he's established as being a telepath able to rival and exceed Xavier. I would imagine Jean, Emma and Charles have some kind of contingency set up so they can overpower him together if they need to, but unsupervised Amahl could get up to a lot of horseplay on Krakoa in a way that a direct threat like Apocalypse probably couldn't.
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Aug 6, 2020 04:00
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I definitely think "what do you do when a Krakoan citizen starts preying on other citizens?" is a question that arises naturally from the, "all of the X-Men's most heinous mutant villains have citizenship and it's fine, they're fine now" setup, and (from the books I've read) doesn't seem to have really come up yet, barring some of the subterfuge in Marauders. Like, killing mutants isn't as big a deal any more, but people like the Shadow King can do way worse than kill you, and in fact that's their preferred mode of operation. Same with Mister Sinister, although he's less subtle and less powerful. Does someone who starts hurting other mutants go in the Sabretooth hole? What if they start hurting Sabretooth, or other prisoners, down there? Is that even possible, or are they all in indefinitely extended solitary confinement? I'm enjoying the Krakoa status quo but the answers to some of these criminal justice questions seem pressing, and would be interesting.
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Aug 6, 2020 04:06
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Jean and Emma could probably outmatch Amahl individually. Quentin has raw power, but he's also a clumsy goon, so I think that would depend on whether he was taken by surprise or not. The real problem would be the Shadow King subtly using his powers on non-psychic mutants, people who weren't close to the major telepaths, to transform them into thralls without anyone noticing. This kind of subterfuge is apparently possible on Krakoa, since it isn't a telepathic surveillance state - otherwise (Marauders) Sebastian Shaw wouldn't have been able to have Kitty Pryde assassinated. And the Shadow King is consistently established as being a subtle manipulator who can warp your perception of reality, send you into inescapable dream realms, spread his consciousness like a memetic virus, etc. Unless you kept constant tabs on him it would be hard to be sure that he wasn't doing that to like, Bling and Shark Girl while Jean Grey was hanging out on the moon.
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Aug 6, 2020 04:17
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I think they're the same place. The newer version has just changed somewhat because the time dilation means it's continually evolving. I think? Definitely could be wrong. That wasn't my favourite issue.
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Aug 6, 2020 05:26
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Carey's run on X-Men Legacy was also really good.
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Aug 6, 2020 05:43
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I think with Selene it's not so much a tragic congenital condition as the fact that she had a natural human lifespan that was used up well over a millennium ago, and now she needs to regularly eat people to stop her 1700+ year old body from rapidly aging. But I'm not clear on that - I'm not sure if it's ever been properly established.
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Aug 6, 2020 06:52
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In early New Mutants much is made of Dani and Rahne's special bond that allows Rahne to communicate with Dani while she's in wolf form. There's definitely some coding there, and yeah, it's easy to read Rahne as deeply closeted.
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Aug 25, 2020 05:35
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I think he was just operating on 2000s-era X-23 as brooding, damaged loner canon.
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Sep 4, 2020 14:01
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Retro X-23 is extra damaged and extra brooding. Logan usually surrounds himself with allies, apprentices, and love interests, even in his low moods.
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Sep 4, 2020 15:01
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I'm pretty sure Rosenberg was expressly told to write an apocalyptic story where most of the X-Men canonically died so that the prevailing feeling going into the sea change of Krakoa was, "a drastic change is needed/how will they get out of this one?!". He didn't do that well, but I think it's silly to assume he was somehow rebelling against editorial or being malicious because he knew his run was just a prelude that would be undone. Writers usually need to get approval from editorial to kill major characters in the first place!
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Sep 23, 2020 14:11
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It's more tiresome, I think, because House of X/Powers of X already introduced a vast amount of mythology that felt like table-setting, but then in the status quo proper this repeatedly happens every few issues, and the myth-scale table-setting from House/Powers is rarely relevant.
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Sep 23, 2020 16:57
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How Wonderful! posted:Maybe Magneto could explode his head all along but didn't want to wear it out. "It's a great trick...but I can only do it once."
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Oct 20, 2020 17:44
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Fritzler posted:Haven't read this week yet, also want to check out indigenous voices which is kind of X-related. Here is a page I saw on reddit from I think new FF that is about Franklin's relationship to X-Men: This is so dumb. He's been a mutant since forever and making him not one just makes the Marvel universe feel less like a world and more like a siloed off series of franchises.
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Nov 18, 2020 18:33
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