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I was thinking about the Sinister/Mother Righteous connection and suddenly a lightbulb went off: "Sinister" derives from the Latin word for "left." The negative modern definition comes from heraldry in the middle ages, where the bastard children of royalty were marked with an inverted, left-leaning version of the family coat of arms: a "bend sinister." The ordinary coat of arms, indicating the legitimate heirs, is sometimes referred to as "bend dexter" - from Latin for "right." So "sinister" once meant "left-facing" but now means "ominous or malevolent." The opposite of "bend sinister," "bend dexter," means "right-facing." But the opposite of our modern definition of "sinister" would be something closer to "virtuous," or "principled," or... "Righteous." ...I've read a ton of Gillen and Spurrier's stuff and they both love these kind of etymological shenanigans. If anyone still had any doubts about Sinister/Righteous connection, as far as I'm concerned this is the smoking gun.
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Jan 23, 2023 21:09
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 22:26 |
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BrianWilly posted:I don't think anyone's saying that Krakoa wasn't shady or corrupt. Half the posts this week have been people conceding that. But Krakoa can be shady and corrupt and people can still like it and want to read about it being saved and fixed. Both things can be true at the same time. An important angle I think people overlook is that Krakoa (like the majority of superhero stories) is on some level a power fantasy, while at the same time (like a fair number of modern superhero stories) it wants to examine and critique that power fantasy. The interesting thing is that, while a lot of these power fantasies are inherently authoritarian and reactionary (Batman, Iron Man, the Punisher), Krakoa speaks to progressive and leftist frustrations. The left-wing power fantasy of Krakoa is: I'm sick of fighting for tolerance and a chance at a better life in a world where oligarchs and ignorant bigots profit from maintaining the status quo. What if me and my friends could just say "gently caress you" and move to a magic treehouse island? And then we roll up to a g20 summit and tell everyone "gently caress you, we quit capitalism, and you can't stop us because we found an infinite money glitch with magic treehouse drugs." And then a bunch of lovely diplomats show up and tell us to stop being awesome and we're like "gently caress you, YOU HAVE NEW GODS NOW." The self-aware element of Krakoa is the writers noticing that, when you let that power fantasy play out in a story, the magic treehouse island has a lot of nationalist/isolationist undertones, and there's greater narrative potential in playing around with that stuff instead of pretending it's not there. I'm not going to lie, I found some of the mutant nationalism in HoXPoX to be intensely cathartic, at least in the context of the story. And the same time time, even the most wholesome parts made me a little queasy, because of their adjacency to the fascism. So while it's interesting to debate whether mutant nationalism is a justified response to oppression, or a capitulation the oppressor's ideologies--that debate ignores that the tension is deliberate, and an important part of the narrative logic. Indie Rocktopus fucked around with this message at 14:37 on Mar 27, 2024 |
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Mar 27, 2024 01:45
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Maybe it's because I was raised Catholic, but the crucible issue just hit different for me. I think fight scenes in superhero comics are always partly metaphorical. They're like the songs in a stage musical--a more dynamic way of illustrating character conflict, playing to the strengths of the medium and genre, instead of just showing a monologue or conversation. Obviously, if read literally, the crucible is horrifying. But in the idiom of superhero comics, where super-powered violence is metaphor... the emotional logic of crucible, at least, made sense to me. Confronting suffering and death to earn transformative grace. Maybe that's an ex-Catholic thing. At least there weren't any exploding communion wafers. Indie Rocktopus fucked around with this message at 14:39 on Mar 27, 2024 |
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Mar 27, 2024 06:58
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fatherboxx posted:Someone on twitter said that Krakoa is 40k Imperium for leftists and the fan discourse of the era certainly felt like that. Flatscans amirite Absolutely. Although to be fair, "I want to live in a magic treehouse and overturn late-stage capitalism with soft power and magic vaccines" is at least prosocial and relatively innocuous. At least compared to, say, "I wish I was so rich and smart I could totally kill Superman, so I could beat up petty criminals and the mentally ill." Or "Elon Musk is such a lovable jerk with a heart of gold, so instead of buying twitter he should invent a flying tank suit." Or "what if I bought a kickass skull t-shirt and a fuckton of guns." EDIT: Also, appropriate that Gillen's big "be careful what you wish for" story about what happens when the power fantasy goes horribly wrong was basically superhero Warhammer in dominatrix gear. Indie Rocktopus fucked around with this message at 00:32 on Mar 28, 2024 |
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Mar 28, 2024 00:27
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Fishylungs posted:It really speaks to the Clairemontian ideal of what the X-men is, and I'm glad it still lives on in this day and age. The standard X-Men power fantasy that Claremont pioneered is "I wish I was an oppressed minority, but instead of confronting the ugly realities of systemic oppression, I just want to live at hogwarts with my found family of sexually-repressed fetish models." Indie Rocktopus fucked around with this message at 20:09 on Mar 28, 2024 |
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Mar 28, 2024 20:01
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It's pretty funny how Peach Mokomo's version of Ultimate X-Men effortlessly outclasses every single one of the original series' 100+ issues, just by being a pretty good Image-style YA horror comic, and also by totally ignoring every previous issue of Ultimate X-Men.
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Apr 12, 2024 00:33
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X-O posted:The old Ultimate X-Men wasn't even very good at the time it was written much less a decade plus later. Man, those books were like if the X-Men: Last Stand movie was an 8-season FX original series. Just this passionless slog of halfway-rewritten stories and botched cameos from unrecognizable characters and it just wouldn't die. It's wild if you look at the rest of the line, Bendis was writing really solid teenage Spider-Man stories, and Millar and Hitch kind of fell bass-ackwards into accidentally creating the MCU, and then X-Men was just... nothing. Anyone remember how Bryan Singer was supposed to write an arc, and it kept getting postponed? OnimaruXLR posted:I really like the lineup of NYX in terms of characters but I have no idea who the hell the talent involved is and the fact that it's named NYX makes me...skeptical (cuz the first one was bad!) If I remember correctly, the first NYX was sort of the mutant version of Euphoria? Edit: \/ \/ Agreed! Indie Rocktopus fucked around with this message at 03:16 on Apr 12, 2024 |
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Apr 12, 2024 03:05
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 22:26 |
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Air Skwirl posted:Storm has had a mini and a (short lived) ongoing before and Jean Grey has had at least two minis, so they're good choices for X-Men solo books. I think most of the Claremont era X-Men could hold their own in an ongoing with the correct writer because he was so adept at adding an internal narrative while all of these big things were happening around them so there's a poo poo ton to draw from. It's strange that if you look back at the history of the line, the most successful X-Men solo books (aside from Wolverine, obviously) are Cable, Deadpool, and... Gambit, maybe? It seems odd that the really big-name, widely-beloved Claremont-era characters aren't the ones who can sell a comic. I guess if you want to do an X-Men spin-off, it's safer just to add another team book. Fans in the 80s might have supported a Kitty Pryde or Nightcrawler title, for example, but Excalibur probably did better numbers than either character would have alone.
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Apr 14, 2024 22:56
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