|
 The Onslaught saga is one of the more maligned of the many maligned and bloated crossovers of the mid-90s: it started with a half-baked pitch, continued apace into incoherence, and ended with a sizeable chunk of Marvel's A-list characters outsourced to Rob Liefeld for a year. It's no surprise that comics fans don't remember it with rose-colored glasses. But I think that reading bad comics-- especially when we have a pretty robust paper trail of how they came to be and how they came to be so bad-- can be super enlightening. It's my firm belief that there is the kernel of an interesting story in Onslaught-- one that largely peeks out in Mark Waid comics, bits and pieces of retrospectives, and mid-event promo materials-- that was simply overpowered by the bombast of the 90s event comic as a form, the interference of misguided editors, and the pressure of corporate narrative mandates, like so many Juggernauts confusingly pile-driven into the dust. There's a lot of interesting behind the scenes stuff going on to account for how and why this story wound assuming the shape, scope, and incoherence that it ultimately did, and it's a very 90s story of writers committing to long-simmering Claremont-style subplots with no payoff in mind, slow build-ups sabotaged by sudden changes in creative and editorial staff, and a company scrambling to adapt to a rapidly changing market. There's no one moment to point to in order to account for why Onslaught is the way it is-- it was a snowball, beginning small and picking up mass and speed as it went. So, rather than give a huge expository info dump up front, I want to pace this out. I want to cover one issue per day (with some skip days-- I'm moving next week), with commentary and pertinent information on the backstage goings on as they develop. I'll be going off the reading order suggested by Marvel's TPB compilations of the whole sordid saga: three volumes of The Road to Onslaught, four volumes of Onslaught: The Complete Epic, Onslaught: Aftermath, and maybe the Heroes Reborn stuff, which I have never really read much of. So if you want to follow alongside me and make this into a read-along thread, I encourage you to do so, and use those trades as our rough roadmap. So-- first on the docket is X-Men: Prime #1, a one-shot published in July, 1995. The Age of Apocalypse, a successful X-title crossover event, had just ended, and this issue attempts to set up everything that comes next while keeping up the narrative momentum. As we'll eventually see, this desperation to recapture lightning in a bottle, to immediately re-up the stakes without pausing to breath, is imo one of the first red flags of the event overall. But on it's own, X-Men: Prime #1 is pretty readable, with lovely art-- the kind of comic that to an eight-year old at the time felt like it was legitimately setting the groundwork for fun stuff to come. Which I'll dig into in my next post! 
|
#
?
May 21, 2021 19:15
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 29, 2024 02:18 |
|
|
I have every issue of Heroes Reborn Fantastic Four. I think the bags and boards are worth more than the comics.
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2021 19:35
|
|
|
Prior to this thread I would have happily bet money that Onslaught was just something that got created for Marvel Vs. Capcom.
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2021 19:43
|
|
|
This is fun since Jay and Miles have been (begrudgingly) covering this recently. Guess it's time to get Marvel Unlimited again.
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2021 19:51
|
|
|
Coincidentally I just finished reading Age of Apocalypse for the first time yesterday, may as well keep going! I enjoyed AoA. It's by no means the best written comic in the world but I liked the way it was structured and it did interesting things with a couple of the characters. Generation Next was the clear standout both in art and writing and it's ending was a very well executed gut punch. Overall the whole thing was fun, in a 90's sort of way. It will be interesting to see Onslaught in comparison as by all accounts it sounds like the one of the prime examples of not just the worst parts of 90's comics but comic events in general.
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2021 20:47
|
|
|
I read X-Men Prime and it suffers from having to set up too much without delivering any payoff. Here's my question: which Avengers do you think have told this joke? I'm thinking at least Iron Man.
|
|
#
?
May 22, 2021 21:12
|
|
|
Cloks posted:Here's my question: which Avengers do you think have told this joke? I'm thinking at least Iron Man. US Agent Worst Hawkeye Hank McCoy (self-deprecating humor, or to chide someone else) Hercules (terrible off color humor he doesn't understand the ramifications of) Sandman (technically counts, has run with the wrong crowds and bowed to peer pressure) T'Challa (same as Beast, doing it to highlight how racist jokes can be) Hank Pym (as Yellowjacket)
|
|
#
?
May 22, 2021 21:34
|
|
|
X-Men: Prime is an almost direct continuation of Age of Apocalypse, the cross-over which pre-empted every x-title for four months and showed an alternate universe in which Apocalypse had taken over the world. It was a publicity and a sales success, and X-Men: Prime feels as much like an attempt to reset the pieces and deal with the aftermath of AoA as it is a way of showing readers just how much of the flotsam and jetsam of Apocalypse's world was sticking around. It's an almost archetypal mid-90s X-Men comic-- a lot of foreshadowing, a lot of downtime, a pleasant enough time but kind of empty calories. It's especially interesting to look back 26 years later and think about which of these plot crumbs ever really paid off, which fizzled, which are forgotten. This was the era of Ron Perelman, and a Marvel desparate to maintain sales in the face of an eroding direct market, so the success of AoA, a big, flashy, nothing-will-ever-be-the-same-again style event, could not be allowed to stand as a one-off. The pressure was immediately on to start building up momentum to the next THING, even if nobody was quite on the same page about what that thing would turn out to be. This was an era in which Marvels different "families" were heavily siloed, with five editors-in-chief running their little bubbles as essentially self-contained fiefdoms. Bob Harras was the group editor for the X-books-- a divisive and often heavy-handed presence who, to put it politely, had a habit of playing favorites and being amenable to corporate-driven narrative mandates, so its fitting that Onslaught's first inklings came about as both a desire to recapture the seismic, PR-grabbing shakeups that succeeded with AoA, and the narrative peccadilloes of Uncanny X-Men and Gen X writer Scott Lobdell. As he puts it in Tom Defalco's interview collection Comics Creators on X-Men (thank you E&C): Scott Lobdell posted:
Jeph Loeb-school plotting shenanigans aside, I want to pause on this-- nobody knew who or what Onslaught was and at this point the ultimate scope of the plot was still up in the air as well. Lobdell continues about this built-in ambivalence: Lobdell posted:That's how I usually work. Some guys work out every last detail up front, but I intend to unwind my ideas slowly and just follow a character or a storyline. I feel like I'm somebody who has a clothesline that's all knotted up and I follow the line until I get to the end. Hopefully a story or a character will reveal itself by the time I get there. I don't have any problem with finding a story instead of telling a story. We will see if he has any luck finding a story, and how this leads to irrevocable tensions with X-Men writers Fabian Nicieza and, briefly, Mark Waid as the Onslaught era progresses. But the fact remains-- the Onslaught arc was in every way a set-up in search of a payoff, a dilemma which is borne out by the ultimately unsatisfying, confusing, and muddled way that the character plays out. Ok, so-- that's what was going on with the X-Men side of things. At the time, Marvel was working under a very peculiar editorial structure dubbed "Marvelution." Marvelution was in part a reaction to EiC Tom DeFalco's unpopularity with Perelman's executives and the sales and marketings departments-- so, Tom Defalco was pushed out, and instead of a single powerful EiC surveying the entire line, Marvel's titles were split into five silos each with their own EiC (Bob Harras being in charge of the X-titles). This arrangement, the brainchild of then-Marvel President Terry Stewart, was inelegant unwieldy, designed specifically to defang editorial power and keep as much distance from creative and corporate as possible. It also set up a deleterious level of inter-company competition as each editor had to deal with independent sales goals, and headhunting artists and writers from other Marvel editors. Per one anonymous staffer in Sean Howe's Marvel Comics: The Untold Story: "It would have been easier to have Spider-Man team up with Superman than to have Spider-Man team up with the X-Men." Meanwhile Stewart's problems compounded. Marvelution's restructure was confusing and discouraging to fans and retailers, and a nation-wide PR tour to do damage control only dug the hole deeper. To make matters worse, in 1994 Marvel purchased Heroes' World in an effort to gain some control of the mercurial and unpredictable market, leading their competitors to scramble for exclusive distribution deals as well. This led to an avalanche of uncertainty and increased precarity for comics shops, which found themselves in the post-bubble market with staggering amounts of overstock and often business-killing levels of debt which left the specialty comics shop landscape of the mid-90s gutted.  Marvel, already teetering on the brink of bankruptcy as 1995 ended and 1996 began, was in dire need of a dramatic shift in direction. We'll get more into that-- and the next stage of Bob Harras' Marvel career-- in a later post. For now: what actually happens in X-Men: Prime? Remember: at this point Onslaught was little more than a name and the idea that somebody should punch Juggernaut real hard. This is not an issue about Onslaught. Really, it's kind of a grab-bag of subplots, teasers, and little snippets of the fates of AoA characters. The issue is loosely structured around-- surprise surprise-- a deepening sense of pessimism and doom for mutantkind, structured around the tragic story this guy:  Dennis Hogan is a brand new character, a mopey blonde mutant who has come to New York to seek ambiguous help for his mutant condition. He has some kind of thing where if he loses control of his emotions, he turns scaly, and may or may not have a split personality.  It's standard Lobdell-morality play stuff. Dennis has a meal in a diner, leaves when the other patrons start going on anti-mutant tirades, and is followed out and beaten to death while turning into a lizard. The X-Men arrive, but too late, and the issue ends with poor Dennis dead and anti-mutant hysteria on the rise, as Beast's on-off girlfriend Trish Tilby grimly reports on the Legacy Virus' new ability to effect humans.  It's brute-force, on the nose melodrama, but effective for what it is-- a down to earth story of a mutant's hopes getting dash interlaced throughout all the collage-minutia of X-continuity that makes up the rest of the book. And what glorious mid-90s X-minutia it is, covering every current X-title (maybe not Cable?) and ticking off all kinds of continuity boxes. Let's go through it: -Wolverine is pissed off and feral, in part because his bones are still ripped out, in part because the X-mansion is harboring Sabretooth. The immediate lead-up to Age of Apocalypse featured a climactic brawl between the two, written by Larry Hama and drawn by Adam Kubert, in which Wolverine impales Sabretooth through the skull just as reality collapses. I believe this issue is the first hint that Sabretooth is alive but "lobotomized" (it turns out eventually that he's pretending) but the scene is pretty ambiguous. -Meanwhile Bishop has come out of AoA with his memories of both worlds intact, and is struggling with being torn between three or more timelines.  This leads to a scene in which he runs into the 616 Cyclops and Beast and reverts back to seeing them as their truly grimy AoA counterparts (at this point in 616 history Beast is only a regular level of grimy) and begins fighting them in the halls:  Whoah!!! Is Bishop going mad?? What could cause a man to act so recklessly, treat a tray of sandwiches so cavalierly?? We'll find out as Onslaught progresses. But speaking of those sandwiches, Beast wasn't just making them for fun. No, he was making them for Storm, who is holding a lonely vigil over Gambit's comatose form. In another pre-AoA cliffhanger, Gambit and Rogue finally kissed, leaving the former in a coma and the latter reeling from the mysterious revelations she absorbed in the process.  That's why he's shirtless in bed airing out his Bryan Hitch chest-hair.  And why Rogue is on a road-trip with a thinly-closeted Iceman, getting skanked at by some kind of pirate in Key Largo. Other subplots are tangential to our concerns here: the oldest living Genoshan mutate explodes while talking to Kitty Pryde, Pete Wisdom, and Douglock, as a means of revealing that Sugar Man had hopped from AoA back in time. Havok also explodes, destroying a dam as X-Factor captures Mystique. Exodus' Acolytes discover another AoA stowawa, Holocaust, floating in a huge space glacier. X-Force's house, feeling left out of the action, also explodes, the team accepts an offer to come live at the X-Mansion instead. Emplate rendezvous with Chamber's ex-girlfriend Gayle Edgerton in a lead-up to Gen X's underwhelming new incarnation of the Hellions, and Nate Grey, also of AoA fame, falls to earth in a big fireball because he heard there were explosions going on and wanted to get in on the action. The two big throughlines here-- and the ones that imo wind up being the most important to Onslaught-- are the continuing slow incremental progression of the Legacy Virus subplot, as Trish Tilby grapples over whether to announce to the world that it can now spread to humans, and Moira Mactaggart agonizes with Rory Campbell over what it all means and Beast grumbles about his crummy girlfriend, pulling a very oddly-drawn sorrow face in the process:  We also see the formal introduction of Marrow and the Gene Nation, a team of ex-Morlock terrorists who have a brief period of bad-guy prominence during this period. Marrow herself would briefly become an X-Man herself during Joe Kelly's run, and has recently popped up as an ally in Marauders.  Technically this is not Marrow's first appearance-- she appeared as a kid in Cable #15 a year prior, but had spent most of 1995 in a time-accelerated dimension, which is why she's a gnarly and violent adult here. We discover that her shadowy leader-- and, it's suggested, the progenitor of the Morlocks in general-- is the evil AoA version of Beast, the aptly named Dark Beast, who we find has also pulled a Sugar Man and has been hiding out in 616 Marvel for some time. Does this make sense at all with the Morlocks as they were originally conceived, or as they had been used in the decades since? No, but they also weren't originally intended to have a close relationship with Mikhail Rasputin's stupid fantasy dimension. Get ready for more of this kind of plotting! So-- a lot of anticipation building, a lot of teasing, and it all works better than it should because it is interspersed with the skeletal but narratively whole story of Dennis, and also because it is coming hot off the heels of the rambling but more or less exciting and satisfying AoA. I remember reading this when it came out and really coming away with a sense of escalating stakes and real anticipation. Anyway-- next up is Uncanny X-Men, published in July 1995, in which the above-mentioned Juggernaut scene (kind of) plays out. Edit: Two quick notes. First, you might be asking-- what does anything in X-Men: Prime have to do with Onslaught? I guess the answer is not much. The organizational principle of the Road to Onslaught trades seems to be "cram in a bunch of stuff in between AoA and Onslaught proper" which means that you get the myriad issues in which somebody mumbles ominously about Onslaught or a computer ominously flashes ONSLAUGHT on the screen, as well as a grab bag of weird things like the X-Men/Clandestine mini-series. Which is fine by me because the lead-up to the Onslaught story in terms of substance is very very thing, but I think the trades give a good feel for what the X-line felt like leading up to the actual crossover. Secondly, I'd like to supplement some of this with bits and pieces of how the hype machine and eventual reception was handled in places like Wizard, but I'm still working on getting my hands on some stuff. I also was busy on a picnic all morning and wanted to prioritize that. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 03:14 on May 23, 2021 |
|
#
?
May 22, 2021 22:46
|
|
|
That was a fantastic write up! Prime definitely gives the impression of the writers having a general sense of where they want to take the story hooks present in the issue. Knowing that the gigantic crossover about having to punch one Really Big Man is where this is all leading makes me think that almost all of the stuff here will either go nowhere or get sidelined. I know that the legacy virus stuff didn't get resolved for several more years which to me seems like it should have been the focus of the next major story arc based on this issue, especially since it had already been around for three years at that point.
|
|
#
?
May 23, 2021 01:50
|
|
|
The thing about the Rogue/Gambit kiss was that they did it because reality was being overwritten, and they thought it’d be the end.
|
|
#
?
May 23, 2021 02:53
|
|
|
How Wonderful! posted:Jeph Loeb-school plotting shenanigans aside, I want to pause on this-- nobody knew who or what Onslaught was and at this point the ultimate scope of the plot was still up in the air as well. quote:When he came to OUR universe, Editorial and I just didn't see it the same way. I wanted Nate to be a rebel without a cause, the most powerful mutant in the Marvel Universe -- who didn't have anything to live for. He would find out he was going to be dead at 21 and so, he would take risks no one else would take. So, the idea was that at Issue #21, he would die. We had these outrageous stories -- he was going to beat the living daylights out of Magneto, toss Juggernaut into outer space -- really go wild since he knew it wouldn't matter. quote:Marvel, already teetering on the brink of bankruptcy as 1995 ended and 1996 began, was in dire need of a dramatic shift in direction. Revenue dipped again in 1995, but the actual losses (as opposed to lower profits) were all from the trading card and other sectors, not publishing. If the Marvel Comics Publishing Group was a freestanding company, it would have been profitable throughout the collapse of the speculator bubble, though it probably still would have been a shambles creatively/administratively. Though again, if it weren't for higher-up executives/accountants pushing for wildly unrealistic returns from the comics division, they might not have ever been in the position they were for MARVELUTION. Flying Zamboni posted:I know that the legacy virus stuff didn't get resolved for several more years which to me seems like it should have been the focus of the next major story arc based on this issue, especially since it had already been around for three years at that point. quote:Since he came from another universe, he was the perfect solution to the Legacy Virus. That something in his gene code could save mutantkind, but he would have to sacrifice himself to save the world.
|
|
#
?
May 23, 2021 05:58
|
|
|
Edge & Christian posted:I know I am a broken record on these things, but the lion's share of Marvel's business/money woes were down to areas other than Marvel Comics. This isn't to say there weren't a lot of issues in the comics division, as you've pointed out, but in 1992 Publishing made up 57% of their business. By 1993 publishing was only 35% with "sports cards" making up almost half. In 1994 the "publishing" part of their revenue stream was down to 22%. An obvious interpretation of this might be "well comic sales were shrinking", which is marginally true, but it was more that in that time Marvel kept on buying up companies making trading cards, toys, stickers, candy, etc. If you look at revenue for the publishing division each year, it was $127M in 1992, $145M in 1993, and had dipped to $114M in 1994. Yeah, I'll admit that I am not great at grasping the economic side of things in general and even worse at pulling them into anything like a cohesive narrative (eg the Heroes World deal has never quite made sense to me even as an ill-advised and rash gamble(I think I might have really abridged the timeline of things too, and obviously one could easily argue that I should have brought up Jerry Calabrese (who I sometimes see cited as John Calabrese?) here instead of putting it off until later, plus of course the first overtures to the Image guys had already been made by the time X-Men: Prime was on the stands). Anyway, as a result I wound up focusing somewhat myopically on the publishing side of things specifically-- it's a blind spot, because even if the managerial decisions most germane to talking about Onslaught were the ones focused on wringing money from the comics in particular, those were still decisions motivated by poor choices elsewhere in the organization, as you point out.
|
|
#
?
May 23, 2021 06:44
|
|
|
Thank you How Wonderful! and Edge & Christian for the behind-the-scenes bits. Often, but particularly with an event like Onslaught, I'm less interested in the comic itself and more interested in the inner workings of how it came to be.
|
|
#
?
May 23, 2021 14:35
|
|
|
Alright, so July 1995. This is the month that X-Men: Prime is actually published, but by this time more stuff has been going on behind the scenes. Notably, in early April Marvel gets a new president. As Sean Howe puts it:Sean Howe posted:On April 2, in the midst of the tour, Terry Stewart announced that he was being promoted to a vice chairman position and that Jerry Calabrese, a Marvel marketing executive with a magazine publishing background, would be the new president. The retail community knew Calabrese’s name, and didn’t like it: he had been the one behind Marvel Mart, a campaign to sell the company’s product directly to readers through mail order. As E&C correctly noted, comics themselves weren't the primary cause of Marvel's over-expansion and rapid deflation in the late 90s-- that was really on the hunger for buying up more and more speculation-friendly ancillary companies for things like trading cards, toys, and merchandise. But in the mid-90s we see a scrutiny of the publishing branch from higher up, trying to figure out why, essentially, Marvel's substantial dominance of the direct market (Trent Seely's "Inside Marvel's Onslaught," which I'm relying on quite a bit for these early expository bits, has the following chart:)  The point being-- even if Marvel had erred in acquiring Fleer, ToyBiz, etc.. (and to be clear, acquiring Fleer in mid-1992 only for the MLB strike in 1994 to ravage the business unit's profits was maybe just bad luck), Calabrese, notedly a "pure businessman" with no sentimental affection for comics, was interested in figuring out precisely why a medium which in the early 90s was fueling slick Levis commercials and dizzying speculation bubbles was no longer consistently doing so. In particular, he saw the flagging state of a lot of the non-Spidey, non-X books and wondered why the bumps those lines had seen in recent years (courtesy, in part, of AoA and the early buzz for the Clone Saga) couldn't be duplicated across the board. Sean Howe again on the situation Calabrese inherited: Sean Howe posted:Jerry Calabrese quickly found, to his dismay, that Heroes World didn’t have the infrastructure in place to support its business. There were billing errors, unfulfilled orders, and long wait times on the customer service line that ended with handwritten messages for someone who knew what to do. Meanwhile, Calabrese collapsed Marvelutions five editors-in-chief back into one-- X-Men line editor Bob Harras, who now oversaw the entire sweep of Marvel Comics, a move that came with a wave of title cancellations and a burst of laid-off work-for-hire talents. This was going on while negotiations played out with some of the Image creators who'd decamped from Marvel with such fanfare just a few years ago, notably Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld. The tentative plan-- initially dubbed "Unfinished Business"-- was that Liefeld and Lee (with their respective "studios") would take over four anemic titles: Fantastic Four, Avengers, Iron Man, and Captain America for twelve issues, with options to opt out early or stay on longer. These would be total revamps of each property, throwing continuity out the window and making a fresh start for the 90s. The precise mechanics of how to get to that point and how to structure it were still very much up in the air. So this is all taking place in the background as the X-titles sort of begin to lay seeds for a big event centered on someone or something called Onslaught. Just like the Image boys' impending reboot, this was a lot of hype and bombast underwritten by a big narrative and structural IOU. And all of that starts in Uncanny X-Men #322, written by Scott Lobdell and penciled by the talented Tom Grummett, which was released in July 1995, the same month as X-Men: Prime.  Check out this striking Joe Mad cover. It sets itself up as an intriguing mystery-- in 1995 the idea of "really powerful guy is beaten up by even more powerful guy" was not as played out as it would become, and I remembering being legitimately curious about who could lay out the Juggernaut like that. Juggernaut being defeated was not new-- he got defeated or waylaid almost every time he showed up, after all-- but that was often at the end of a long, hard-won fight. Covers were more likely to show him looming, towering, a menacing and physically imposing figure. Here we see him vulnerable and prone, his pose open and vulnerable. He's helpless, and we're looking down on him, a clever reversal of the dramatic low angles often used to underscore his size. The issue itself is structured around two mysteries, building up tension and mystique around Onslaught as well as setting up how dangerous Gene Nation is. As it happens both of these plots fall victim to mid-90s plotting, in that writers had come up with hooks but were basically improvising as they went along in terms of lending substance to those hooks. So here we see characters orbiting nervously around absent centers, being fed clues about nothing. This is interwoven, in typical Lobdell fashion, with bits and pieces of subplot development, character vignettes, and little downtime catchup scenes. These, I believe, are tools he uses less to evenly nudge forward plot developments and more to establish the tone he wants to create. Coming out right on the heels of Prime, the mood here is one of tension, as the X-Men begin to feel the presence of new threats they either know little about or, in the case of the Legacy Virus and Graydon Creed's political ambitions, that they can't do much about. Their prevailing mood is one of nervous helplessness, which in the moment makes for a tense, jittery but propulsive comic, but is not really the secret ingredient to interesting long-term plotting. We start with Angel, still rocking metal wings and red eyes but back in a classic blue and white costume, rendezvousing with his one-time love interest officer Charlotte Jones. Jones wants mutant insight on a crime scene we are assured is exceptionally grisly. In a somewhat baffling scene that speaks to how over the top anti-mutant hysteria was in the books of this period, an anti-mutant cop on the scene just spontaneously fires on Angel, which he moves on from with astonishing nonchalance.  Charlotte doesn't seem too flustered either, and inexplicably just brushes it off by saying that the guy hit by Angel's ricochet will be fine in "five minutes-- tops." It's weird plotting made weirder by what feels like an art error. The script implies that the officer fires a gun at Angel, who shoots back with one of his metal feather knife things, but the art shows the cop shooting-- a pink laser beam--- and being hit by a pink laser in turn. It's a tiny little scene but I think illustrative of lax editorial attention on the page-to-page level. Anyway: Charlotte has Angel fly her up in the air to get an aerial view of the crime scene (with both of them donning masks for some reason) and Warren is shocked. As readers we don't get to see what he sees-- we don't even get details about what went down-- but his monologue implies a further building up of the tensions established in Prime, namely an escalation of mutant/human antagonism. quote:Angel: ! I've been an X-Man for years... I've seen a lot of horrible things-- had a lot of horrific things happen to me... but this...? In a brief transitional scene, Siryn of the X-Force interrupts a meeting between Storm and Wolverine in order to bring the former along for backup in helping with whatever Angel saw. It's a quiet little scene mostly about Storm's relationship to Wolverine and ongoing woes reflected in his own series, but it also gives us a reminder that after a period of separation for the X-Mansion crew the X-Force characters are, for the moment, back in the fold. It's just a little two page vignette that underscores a renewed feeling of interconnection and cross-pollination between X-titles (I saw "renewed" but we're really still not far out from both Age of Apocalypse and late 1994's "Phalanx Covenent" crossover). Wolverine, as sort of saw in Prime, has been living in the yard for the past two weeks because he's cranky. Why's he cranky? Because, again, his skeleton got mangled and his enemy Sabretooth is, as we'll see soon, being allowed to live in puppy prison at the X-Mansion. At least he still has a nose at this point. Next we see Beast and Bishop on a little hang-out expedition in Hoboken, having just seen Pulp Fiction. Bishop was not impressed:  In another little snippet of character-building, Bishop opines that the idea of escapist violence is alien to him as a guy who grew up in a terrible and violent future. It rings a little hollow-- a 1995 X-Men comic is obviously not as gory and explicit as a Tarantino movie, but it's still violent escapism. And as bad as Bishop's future might have been, Beast is also a guy who has spent his whole life fighting people who want to kill him. Still-- in a very Lobdellian move, this scene too is both character work and getting people into place for plot motion. As they're talking a meteor shoots across the sky and seemingly lands somewhere nearby in beautiful Hoboken (I'm not 100% clear on why two people who live in Westchester would go to Hoboken to catch a movie but hey). Anyway the two find a trail of destruction in the wake of whatever fell, and they discover the Juggernaut's beaten-up body in a nice splash page.  It's nicely structured-- Juggernaut doesn't land peacefully, he tears a huge ugly gash across Hoboken's streets, and we see various destroyed cars, knocked over streetlights, etc.. It gives us that "here's Juggernaut frisson" so that when we turn the page and see him totally beaten and exposed it still hits with a little shock. From there Lobdell takes the time to give us three pages of Jean Grey talking with her father about the death of her sister Sara, a thing we learned about in "The Phalanx Covenent." Neither Sara nor the rest of Jean's family have ever been super important characters, but Lobdell rightly intuits that Jean should at least get a few pages to process and grieve, or else the whole thing feels shallow. This is a nice scene, even if it ends with a bit of foreshadowing that, as far as I know, truly does not go ANYWHERE, as we see them being watched by an ethereal and apparently unseen guy. That's Noah Dubois, a telepathic agent of Landau, Luckman & Lake who previously appeared to as a member of Robert Kelly's entourage over two years prior in UXM #299. He eventually dies in a Joe Kelly Deadpool issue. I'd be curious to know how many readers remembered this guy after a two year absence, and how many cared.  I do kind of love that he's just standing in the middle of the street though. Back in Hoboken, Psylocke inexplicably shows up, leading me to believe that Lobdell really does not understand that Hoboken is sort of a schlep from Westchester, Juggernaut wakes up, and starts lashing out in a panic. We learn that he was punched to New Jersey straight from Canada, and ironically was trying to flee to the US precisely to warn the X-Men about whatever dangerous being laid the whammy on him. It's one of those irritating fights where both sides really want the same thing, but to be fair Juggernaut is freaking out and explicitly feeling insecure about being tossed casually across national borders.  It's a pretty standard fight scene somewhat undersold by Grummett, but it's neat to see Juggernaut truly scared and just lashing out because he doesn't know how to deal with. It's a novel spin on the character, that, since he's still wrecking the X-Men singlehandedly, doesn't really take any punch away from his as a threat. He eventually calms down a little after Bishop absorbs... all the electricity in Hoboken...? and channels it into a big dumb Bishop Blast, and gives them their standard-issue scrap of foreshadowing.  In hindsight it's sort of obvious that Lobdell is just making things up as he goes. Warren spends a chunk of the issue gaping at nothing, and at this point Onslaught of course is just a name that can punch really really hard. But I think if I clear my mind of all that it's a solid transitional issue, wrapping up old plot arc like Sara Grey's death with substantial downtime scenes while laying the first thing layers of groundwork for plots to come. Grummett is ok on the action scenes but does nice work with the parts where people are just talking. Incidentally, this issue more or less commits to Warren and Charlotte Jones' relationship fizzling out. As we saw in Prime, Trish Trilby's expose on the Legacy Virus drove a huge wedge between her and Beast, and Iceman essentially broke up with Opal Tanaka back in 1993's Uncanny X-Men #301. So aside from Scott & Jean and I suppose Skids & Rusty, that's most of the romantic pairings from classic X-Factor cleared away. I see this as a symptom of an increasing myopia in the X-books, paring down the supporting cast to other mutants as much as possible. Nobody wanted an Opal Tanaka pog (except me). Maybe this is a cynical and reductive reading on my part, but I just wanted to point out all three of these relationships being kiboshed in a pretty short window. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 16:06 on May 23, 2021 |
|
#
?
May 23, 2021 15:57
|
|
|
How Wonderful! posted:Yeah, I'll admit that I am not great at grasping the economic side of things in general and even worse at pulling them into anything like a cohesive narrative (eg the Heroes World deal has never quite made sense to me even as an ill-advised and rash gamble(I think I might have really abridged the timeline of things too, and obviously one could easily argue that I should have brought up Jerry Calabrese (who I sometimes see cited as John Calabrese?) here instead of putting it off until later, plus of course the first overtures to the Image guys had already been made by the time X-Men: Prime was on the stands). Even though it was denied (or evaded) in all of the initial public statements about the Heroes World acquisition, I really believe that Marvel Entertainment Group was looking at opening up their own "Marvel Stores" across the country, cutting out the middle man and running their own comic/toy/apparel/merch stores in malls. The Disney Store model launched in 1987 and had grown from 1 store to over 300 by 1994, and Perelman wasn't shy about comparing Marvel to Disney. The whole business model seemed to be controlling everything, which is why they were buying up the trading card company that made Marvel Trading Cards, the toy company making Marvel Toys, etc. So as a power play to both gain leverage over existing stores and to build infrastructure to launch their own stores, it 'made sense'. Those plans themselves were dumb and short sighted, and Marvel Stores never happened, though somehow Tekno Comix managed to open up a few of their own stores, including one in the Mall of America that outlived the comics line.
|
|
#
?
May 23, 2021 16:06
|
|
|
I was aware that there was a period of time in the comic where Wolverine was living in the woods and became a feral noseless animal man but I had assumed that meant he went to an actual forest in the wilderness or something. Reading this and finding out he was just living in the backyard was pretty funny.
|
|
#
?
May 23, 2021 16:36
|
|
|
At this point in time can beast change back to a human when he wants to or is that like a disguise or something
|
|
#
?
May 23, 2021 17:20
|
|
|
image inducers are pretty common in marvel
|
|
#
?
May 23, 2021 17:25
|
|
|
He's using an image inducer, a little hologram doohickey that was introduced very early in Claremont's run as a means to letting Nightcrawler run around in public.
How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 17:28 on May 23, 2021 |
|
#
?
May 23, 2021 17:25
|
|
|
site posted:At this point in time can beast change back to a human when he wants to or is that like a disguise or something It's pretty much the same device Nightcrawler was using way back around X-Men #94, it breaks during the fight with Juggernaut.
|
|
#
?
May 23, 2021 17:26
|
|
|
I don’t hate Onslaught, but I’m fully aware it’s very much a time and place thing for me. More specifically, the time and place are ’90s Finland. I started reading Marvel comics sometime in ’92, and at the time we had four monthly magazines, each issue consisting of three to four original US ones: X-Men and Spider-Man had their own books, and then there were two other catch-all ones where every issue would be about different characters. Both had incredibly unimaginative names; ”Marvel” featured stories about big things like Fantastic Four or Avengers (both group and various solos) and all things space and cosmic like The Infinity Gauntlet, while ”Sarjakuvalehti” (lit. ”Comic Book”) had a more down to earth tone with characters like Punisher and Daredevil. X-Men was my favorite from the beginning. This all changed in the summer of ’96 when X-Men and Sarjakuvalehti were cancelled because of low sales, and the last X-Men story to be released in its own magazine here at the time would be Legion Quest. For the remainder of ’96 and all of ’97 a couple of issues of the ”Marvel” magazine would have X-men stories so we’d get a glimpse of things like AoA, but that was it. On top of the monthly issues there would sometimes be various ”special issues” that would include one-shots and other things that couldn’t fit in the regular release schedule for whatever reason. In the spring of ’98 there was an X-Men Special that consisted of UXM #334, X-Men #54 and Onslaught X-Men #1 (I think; these magazines were very bad at noting the original issues so I’m just going by wikis here). As someone who was extremely disappointed when the original book was canceled, having this new X-Men story that was released as its own separate thing was incredibly exciting to me. The Onslaught story would then be finished in the renamed ”Mega-Marvel” later on in ’98. The X-Men special was followed by other specials in ’99-’00 that went through some other stuff we’d missed, and then finally a relaunch of the standalone X-Men magazine in January 2001, this time every other month. So to me Onslaught has never been ”the bad story that followed AoA”, it’s ”the story that brought the X-Men back”. Veib fucked around with this message at 13:30 on May 24, 2021 |
|
#
?
May 24, 2021 13:11
|
|
|
Uncanny X-Men #323 was released in August, 1995, and continues to rapidly ramp up the Gene Nation plotline. One of the weird tics of 90s X-titles is while some subplots would simmer interminably in the background for years, others would be introduced, dug into, and then more or less resolved with a rapidity that undercuts some of the attempted gravitas. The Gene Nation plot is definitely the latter. I had UXM #325 and it felt like the culmination of years of tension, so it's surprising to learn that the duration between Marrow's adult introduction and her "death" was less than half a year. It doesn't help that the stretch of #323-325 feels narratively disjointed, and not at all like a satisfying three-part story. This issue has guest art by Bryan Hitch, who has a nice grasp on expressions and body language that I feel gets lost in some of his more polished later work.  Although at other points some polish might be welcome:  Anyway, if the action seems to promise a big splashy fight between the X-Men and these two gross-looking new characters, I have bad news. The Gene Nation characters-- in this case, Sack and Vessel-- appear only in the final two pages of the issue. This is otherwise still very much Lobdell in table-setting mode. Let's do a quick breakdown by subplot. Iceman & Rogue (5 pages) We pick up on Bobby and Rogue's road-trip and learn that they've made a no-powers-allowed pact. So, faced with a flat tire, they have to walk through the desert into town without recourse to the tire made of ice which Bobby suggests. I'm not a car girl but that seems like a shaky idea to begin with, but fine. At this point the official from Marvel is that Bobby is straight. That'll be the status quo for awhile-- Bendis has him come out in the aughts, and shortly prior to that Marjorie Liu wrote him as ambiguously closeted. But-- the fan theory was already circulating vis a vis Gay Bobby, and without Opal Tanaka around it's easy to peer at the page and convince yourself that Lobdell and Hitch are in on it (Lobdell also wrote the Bobby/Emma Frost scenes which comes up sometimes as bits and pieces of evidence, and their dynamic will crop up in this issue as well). As it is, the road trip dynamic is cute and remains overwhelmingly platonic-- Bobby does grumble and gripe about Gambit, but from a position of friendship. And I think Hitch's staging speaks for itself.  They take a brief break in the desert and Bobby suggests that Rogue is in denial about what she saw in Gambit's head-- calling himself a "master of denial" and has a brief episode where he's taunted by a vision of Emma Frost which may or may not be in his head, reminding him of how she managed to tap into greater potential for his power when she briefly shared his body. Remember-- this was hot on the heels of Age of Apocalypse, which featured a vastly more powerful Iceman, so this was something which seems to have been on Lobdell's mind a great deal. So-- not a ton of forward momentum, and not a lot of new information, but it is some nice character work for the two, albeit imo nothing that has not already been demonstrated in their little road trip arc. But it does chew up a kind of surprising number of pages, including the opening splash which mostly feels like an excuse for Hitch to draw a pinup-style Rogue page. Archangel & Psylocke (3 pages) We cut to Psylocke & Archangel training in the Danger Room. This is kind of interesting to me-- the captions suggest that there's already "a bond akin to love' between the two of them, which at this point feels premature-- they had a few scenes together in X-Men #29 and #32, the latter of which was published in May 1994. So they have not had a lot of time together as a couple and a lot of it was spent fussing with Shinobi Shaw, which in my experience sets a bad precedent for a relationship. But sure-- at this point Warren has been broken up with Charlotte Jones for precisely one issue, so it does feel like this era's insistence on making the mutant world as insular as possible. Why date some random human when you could date somebody who also has her own action figure? She tried to get him to open up about the massacre from last issue but before he can Gambit staggers in looking for Rogue, grunts some ominous words of warning and then collapses (I think 30% of panels in this era are people grunting ominous words of warning and then collapsing). Sabretooth (5 pages) We also get an early glimpse of post-lobotomy Sabretooth. I believe it eventually comes out that he's just faking it, which feels strange, but we'll cross that bridge when and if we get there, and I suppose it's possible that with his healing factor he really did have a brief period of serious injury. But for this issue he's written as essentially a big bipedal puppy dog barely incapable of speech or sense, with Cannonball literally having to "walk" him on the school grounds. Not that he's doing a great job, as the over-excited Creed yanks him around all over the place. It's an uncomfortable status quo which eventually leads to stuff like Sabretooth lapping milk out of a saucer before he reverts back to his usual beeswax. Creed eventually stops running around because he smells Wolverine, who prowls over and for the third issue in a row does nothing but pout about the situation, doubting (correctly, as it turns out!) that his innocent act is precisely that. We get a little bit of Cannonball trying to get Wolverine to back down not by appealing to his decency but by... I guess... what are meant to be pragmatic concerns, which Wolverine approves, noting that his time with Cable has toughened him up. I don't really see it-- this is one of Sam's first appearances as X-Man instead of an X-Force guy, and he does in fact seem to be written as a bit more of a rookie than he had been in recent years, so it feels like a very hastily thought out exchange. Anyway, I believe the status quo as of 1995 was that Sam was immortal anyway so standing up to Wolverine doesn't seem like much of a gutsy move (don't worry about it). The scene ends with Storm showing up to chide Wolverine again, and then invite him to tag along to investigate the mass-murders at the disco, discovered last issue  I want to pause here and note two things. First, not all of these subplots are presented in one unbroken stretch. The Iceman & Rogue stuff in particular is almost but not quite a bookend, since we do have a cliffhanger after Bobby talks with Emma. That helps with the pacing a little. The other is a reminder that this is a normal 22 page issue. That means that at this point I have described well over half of the action of the book-- note how little of it is information that was not already conveyed in previous comics. I understand taking time to let a scene breathe, but Lobdell is extremely indulgent in this regard. Not only that, but there's a weird sense of misplaced priorities in terms of pacing. Characters will take two pages to say something they've already said, but then something like the romance between Warren and Betsy will be presented as a given by kind of asking the reader to fill in the gaps on their own. By breaking issues like this into a lot of little vignettes they still feel busy and give the surface sense of a lot of stuff going on, but so much of it is wheel-spinning that it becomes frustrating to read without a month-long gap on either side of it. In any case, we're not done here. Beast & Trish Tilby (3 pages) Beast shows up at CNBC to take Trish Tilby to task for her piece on the Legacy Virus. He calls it irresponsible reporting which is bound to put more mutants at danger-- she calls it reporting on the truth and being honest with her audience about a disease that is now, presuming most of them are human, a very real threat to them as well. There's a little more to it than that, really-- Beast implies that she's reporting based on rumors and should have waited until more was known about the effect of the Legacy Virus on humans, but the fact is that this plot moves so slowly and is told in such a fragmented fashion that it's impossible to know who's correct. We certainly know that Moira MacTaggart has it (and in 1995 she was very much still being written as a normal homo sapiens human) so Beast's objections here feel a little thin, or at least not well-served by the story as it's actually being told in the comics. She slaps him, he pouts, he leaves. Graydon Creed (1 page) Meanwhile Graydon Creed gives an extremely vague speech about the danger of mutants in response to the disco massacre. In typical 90s anti-mutant demagogue fashions he pontificates about "doing something" about mutants but gives no details, presumably because Lobdell had not come up with any details for him to have. It's extremely incoherent to the extent that I want to share the whole scene here. I know that, duh, this kind of smash-mouth punditry is never, like, predicated on extremely sound logic, but I think this is really just remarkable word salad.  Robert Kelly's aide Noah Dubois, the secret Landau, Luckman & Lake agent, is also there. I think? I don't know who else this could be but he's not listed anywhere as appearing in this issue. It's oblique 90's fake-foreshadowing nonsense either way. Gene Nation (5 pages) Finally, Cannonball, Storm & Wolverine arrive to get the scoop from Charlotte Jones. I am not sure what they're meant to be accomplishing here that the NYPD couldn't do on their own. Charlotte doesn't seem sure either, since she's just walking around with her gun in the air.  They all head in and meet with the forensics officer, Doctor Chen, who explains that all thirty-three humans killed at the disco appear to have simply dropped dead for no reason, with no signs of injury, illness, or whatever else. This is new information to us and somewhat discordant since the previous issue seemed to carefully frame the off-panel deaths as especially grisly and gruesome, enough to give the normally quite jaded Warren considerable jitters. But as it turns out Dr. Chen has his own bias, since he himself is a dead body inhabited by a yucky green skeleton mutant named Sack. Wolverine sniffs Sack out, who then emerges from the doctor's corpse  So I'm not sure how much of what Sack was saying about the bodies is meant to be read as believable and how much of it was supposed to be him just feeding the X-Men nonsense. It doesn't really matter because as soon as Sack pops out we get a cliffhanger.  You might be asking yourself what sort of interesting teleportation powers Vessel might have to explain a giant green man suddenly bursting onto the scene. The answer is that his powers are that he's very strong and has a healing factor and he's full of ghosts. So who knows, maybe he was hiding behind a filing cabinet or under a desk. This was not a very good issue, and does very little to advance much of anything. It's very emblematic of this period-- a lot of planes spinning, but they're spinning in place and not going anywhere. To be fair to the Gene Nation plot, they were also showing up in Generation X at this time and may have gotten some more compelling development there, but what we're getting in UXM is pretty thin broth. I'll be honest-- I am not a Lobdell fan, and I think I'm much closer to laying a lot of the faults here on his feet than on the era as a whole. It's just an unfortunate fact that he exerted such a strong influence on that era such that it can be difficult to extricate the two. In a few issues the Road to Onslaught trade will switch over to Fabian Nicieza's X-Men which, while certainly bumpy, shows a much more elegant way to handle the post-Claremont mutant soap-opera form. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 20:24 on May 24, 2021 |
|
#
?
May 24, 2021 20:21
|
|
|
Actually, I'm moving this week so for a change of pace I might intersperse those Gen X issues because this whole little arc is kind of nothing as is.
|
|
#
?
May 24, 2021 20:29
|
|
|
Wasn’t there almost a Sack action figure as a pack in with another figure from a canceled X-Men wave in the late 90’s? I remember seeing a picture of him in Toyfare as an immobile lump of plastic.
|
|
#
?
May 24, 2021 21:36
|
|
|
If anyone has info on this alleged Sacktion figure please post it.
|
|
#
?
May 24, 2021 22:53
|
|
|
Open Marriage Night posted:Wasn’t there almost a Sack action figure as a pack in with another figure from a canceled X-Men wave in the late 90’s? I remember seeing a picture of him in Toyfare as an immobile lump of plastic.     Husk (and to a lesser extent Trapster) feel like logical outgrowths of lines, but for context the number of appearances the other characters had at the time of this publication: Hemingway: 5 (Generation X #5-6, Uncanny X-Men #325, Storm #3-4) Ever: 2 (UXM #325, 339) Sack: 5 (UXM #323-325, Storm #3-4) Controller 13: 2 (X-Men 2099 #3-4) Caretaker: 29 (he was a regular supporting character in the period where there were multiple Ghost Rider/Midnight Sons comics, though he disappeared when Howard Mackie left and wasn't seen after 1995 except to get brought back/murdered in Jason Aaron's 2000s run) Gauntlet: 18 (he was one of Apocalypse's DARK RIDERS and went by Barrage until Toy Biz pointed out that name was trademarked for toys, so they changed his name to Gauntlet during X-Cutioner's Song. They never made the toy but the name stuck, even though the character disappeared in the 1990s and did not resurface again until Cullen Bunn's 2016 Uncanny X-Men run, where he was quickly killed by Xorn. This sheds some light on the overall structure of the greater Marvel corporate machine in the mid 1990s, as they were at least considering churning out figures for literally any 'hot new character' they could find, despite not having anything resembling real story plans for the same characters in the comics. Sensational character finds like Commcast, Killspree, Krule, Senaka, Slayback, and Tusk all actually got figures produced, despite not being much besides a character model sheet.
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2021 00:43
|
|
|
That’s it! That pose has been stuck in my memory all these years. I had the article mixed up with another one that showed an Iron Man, and possibly X-Men, lines that were never released. I think the Iron Man one had Living Lazer?
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2021 01:03
|
|
|
I may be dating myself a bit here, but back in the Subreality/Usenet days of the X-Men fan community, I remember a lot of the fans had a pet theory about Bobby being queer-coded, to the point where it snuck into a lot of fan work of the period. It was one of those things that was so widespread that I occasionally forgot it wasn't canon. (RIP, Kelly "Kielle" Newcomb.)
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2021 05:38
|
|
|
I'm just struck by how much Grummett's humanized Beast looks like a slightly stockier version of his Superman.
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2021 06:22
|
|
|
Holy heck an Xmen comic i actually owned and remember reading. I will say as a child it was enough to get me intrigued and also care about Bobby and Rogue.
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2021 17:31
|
|
|
How Wonderful! posted:Emplate rendezvous with Chamber's ex-girlfriend Gayle Edgerton in a lead-up to Gen X's underwhelming new incarnation of the Hellions I wanted to expand on this a little because I reread it recently. This is also where we learn that Monet (or more likely, one of the twins) is Bishop's mother. With as disorganized as the writing of the time was, this was probably before the twins were created. I'm pretty sure that group of Hellions appeared just that one time and are then never mentioned again (presumably Emplate ate them). The Gen X tie in to Onslaught itself is simultaneously wild and incredibly bad. IIRC Onslaught doesn't even put in an appearance and just gets mentioned after the fact to justify an 'Emma Frost Goes Crazy (again)' story.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2021 01:37
|
|
|
I finally got around to reading X-Men Prime this afternoon. That's certainly a ton of plots going in different directions, huh? When are we going to see Dennis on Krakoa? Also I want Beast's sweatpants.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2021 03:01
|
|
|
PoptartsNinja posted:I wanted to expand on this a little because I reread it recently. This is also where we learn that Monet (or more likely, one of the twins) is Bishop's mother. With as disorganized as the writing of the time was, this was probably before the twins were created. I'm pretty sure that group of Hellions appeared just that one time and are then never mentioned again (presumably Emplate ate them) My understanding is that while the twins hadn't been introduced yet, they'd always been part of the plan for who Monet was. The concept did get screwed around with a bit - originally, there wasn't going to be a 'real' Monet, nor was there meant to be a familial connection to Emplate, but the idea of who Monet was at this point was fairly well planned out. IIRC, Emplate's Hellions don't even get named that in story; which makes sense, given that there's absolutely no reason for them to be using that name.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2021 06:22
|
|
|
I miiiiiiiiiight still have my copy of the pre-release Generation X preview "comic" that might give some hints about what Lobdell was thinking for Monet. Unfortunately, I can't lift anything for at least a month, so I can't get to it to check.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2021 13:07
|
|
|
Endless Mike posted:I miiiiiiiiiight still have my copy of the pre-release Generation X preview "comic" that might give some hints about what Lobdell was thinking for Monet. Unfortunately, I can't lift anything for at least a month, so I can't get to it to check. Is that the one that has "MONDO WILL BE IMPORTANT" and he never was?
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2021 16:30
|
|
|
BooDooBoo posted:Is that the one that has "MONDO WILL BE IMPORTANT" and he never was? I believe that is the one lol
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2021 16:45
|
|
|
Mondo is important in my heart.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2021 17:34
|
|
|
He's the backup Cypher. He hates it, Krakoa hates it, but there you go.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2021 19:35
|
|
|
How could they not make an action figure for Sack, the Sensational Character Find of 1995?
|
|
#
?
May 27, 2021 03:07
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 29, 2024 02:18 |
|
|
Angry Salami posted:IIRC, Emplate's Hellions don't even get named that in story; which makes sense, given that there's absolutely no reason for them to be using that name. I think it did on one of the covers? Where it gave their names (after half of them were already defeated). I don't even remember most of them. I think there was a belts-on-face guy who looked like a proto T-Ray, and some guy who turned himself into smoke? I do remember that's the story where Monet and Marius were revealed to be brother and sister (it's Monet's big reveal to Bishop, something something Emplates in the future). It's the Penance/Hollow link that's still left up in the air, since Marius calls her Yvette that story and it started out with Emma getting a little glimpse of her history in some eastern European warzone that might have been in the news at the time. They really had no plans for Penny other than "bulletproof female Wolverine."  They just kept throwing more and more twists onto that family. Edit: I can talk about the Gen-X tie in to Onslaught when it comes up. It's really bad. PoptartsNinja fucked around with this message at 05:53 on May 27, 2021 |
|
#
?
May 27, 2021 05:46
|
|