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Ok, I moved from PA to Vermont and after a few really crazy days I'm sitting down at my computer so back to it. As mentioned last time, UXM is at this point involved in a soft-crossover with the recently launched Generation X (also written by Scott Lobdell, and at this point very memorably penciled by the great Chris Bachalo) involving the somewhat undercooked bad-guy group the Gene Nation. Now-- I know what Gene Nation's deal is because I am a compulsive checker of handbooks, wikis, and blogs, but so far Lobdell has not done a really great job in UXM or X-Men: Prime of conveying they are supposed to be up to. We know that they are embittered, somewhat nihilistic Morlocks who'd rather gently caress poo poo up than hide away in the sewers, and we know that in some ambiguous way they (or at least their leader, Marrow) answer to Dark Beast. So let's check out the Generation X side of things and see if the situation is any clearer. Real quick-- Generation X was introduced as a 90s analogue to New Mutants, a book focusing on younger, untrained mutants. The New Mutants kids had since been, for the most part, absorbed into X-Force which had undergone very drastic conceptual drift, or sort of fluttered off into obscurity, or died. So at this point Gen X is the book for teen mutants. In an interview with Tom DeFalco, Lobdell mentions wanting to offer a contrast with the "Ken and Barbie" elements of Claremont's New Mutants by creating characters who powers really presented problems, even grotesqueries-- Chamber has his face blown off, Penance is trapped in a mute and monstrous form, Skin is all drippy and weird, etc.. And to be fair Bachalo knocked it out of the park with his designs. They look kind of edgy and spooky-- even a little pathetic-- in a way that the original New Mutants did not. Of course Lobdell's characteristic flaws as a writer were here too-- lots of big hooks, lots of foreshadowing, muddled payoff and no clear road-plan to hand off to the next writer when he eventually left the book. So we wind up with stuff like pre-release hype surrounding one team-member, Mondo, who just never really winds up being in many comics, or Penance/M's extremely sloppily handled backstory. So that's Gen X in a nutshell. Generation X #5, published in July 1995, begins with most of our kids on a field trip (the moody Chamber has stayed home to watch TV with Gateway, Husk is drunk and lying on top of the pool table). Jubilee has a very brief team-up with the Fantastic Four in a cute scene:  After some more light subplot development their cab ride is interrupted by what turns out to be another attack on humans by Gene Nation. Lobdell is sort of odd here-- whereas in Uncanny #322 he shows us what turns out to be a scene of 33 humans just lying there entirely through Angel and Charlotte Jones' horrified reactions, here he feints in that direction with a slightly more effective montage at the bottom of one page:  But on the very next page we get the whole scene revealed as a splash. It certainly works better than what we got in Uncanny but I still think it would have landed harder without the full-page tableau. Anyway, three dead security guards at the Frost Enterprises building, and a garbled telepathic warning from Emma Frost to turn back and get help. They decide to meddle and Bachalo, again, gives us a very brief, simple sequence which sells the Gene Nation guys as a threat in a way that Uncanny completely fails to.   This is Hemingway. His power is that he is a big guy and he has sharp bone things. So not exactly high-concept-- but Bachalo does a great job with him, and gives him a sense of menace and power that is absolutely disproportionate to the effort that a Lobdell-created goon merits. This really is Bachalo's book.  (and here's a little example of the weird insistence throughout the 90s that Jubilee is secretly astonishingly powerful. I don't really care for this, or the more general sense that a dubiously popular character could be "fixed" by power creep that kind of crops up here and there throughout this era (see the stuff going on with Iceman over in Uncanny. I think just shooting fireworks and being snide is enough for poor Jubilee)  Ok. This kind of reads like word salad but the idea is that in an earlier, not very good storyline, Colossus' brother Mikhail Rasputin uses his reality warping powers to flood the Morlock tunnels, but at the last second opens a portal so that some of them can escape to some kind of dumbshit dimension. Time moves differently there so those Morlocks were trapped in a horrible fantasy land for around 20 years, hence Marrow being grown up instead of just a kid, as she was in her very first appearance. It's also why Gene Nation is so bellicose and aggressive-- because unlike the reclusive original Morlocks they grew up having to fight nonstop for their survival. Or something. The cliffhanger is that Emma had been storing Artie and Leech, the two kids who looked like cute aliens from X-Factor, in her penthouse, and Hemingway has now kidnapped Leech. Leech was a Morlock with the passive ability to cancel out the mutant powers of anyone around him. So there we go. We have not really learned much about Gene Nation, and you know-- the Mikhail Rasputin teleporting away the Morlocks poo poo happened in late 1992, so I don't know how many fans nearly three years later were like "ohhh the Hot Place! I bet the unnamed dumbshit dimension Mikhail Rasputin opened in the classic Uncanny X-Men #293 led to a place, and it might have been hot! I get it!" There's a little bit of a callback to that arc in 1994's Cable #15-- formally the first appearance of Marrow-- where we learn that the Morlocks in Mikhail Rasputin's dimension will be returning at some point. But still, important information is not being conveyed in the actual Gene Nation issues and when we do get the whole picture it feels less like a rewarding reveal and more just like the reader has been jerked around for months. Personally I think that the Morlocks were very badly mishandled as a concept after Claremont left. They were originally a colony of mutants and humans who were too ugly or damaged or dangerous to live on the surface world-- a community of self-imposed exiles with their own emerging civilization. And of course part of the shock and tragedy of the Mutant Massacre story is that this germinal society, which the readers got to see slowly cobbling itself together, was entirely wiped out. That didn't stop Claremont from occasionally going back to the well with pockets of survivors, but after he left people liked to draw just armies and armies of mutants living down in the sewers, and increasingly they were written as basically a horde of crazy monsters. So in a sense packing them all off to a dimension was a good way to get rid of two concepts that weren't working anymore-- the narratively damaged Morlocks, and Mikhail Rasputin, who nobody seemed to have any plans for at all after the unceremonious departure of his creators, Whilce Portacio and John Byrne. But here they are again and now they're alien barbarians from a Conan dimension so I'm not sure how much of the original concept is even worth clinging to anymore. It's just depressingly dire plotting. But Bachalo's pencils and his inventive layouts sell the threat of the bad guys as well as the calmer down-time stuff. He really was a treasure on this book and I think he singlehandedly makes it worth reading.
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May 28, 2021 15:11
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How Wonderful! posted:But Bachalo's pencils and his inventive layouts sell the threat of the bad guys as well as the calmer down-time stuff. He really was a treasure on this book and I think he singlehandedly makes it worth reading. When he's got an inker and colorist who understands Gen-X is a horror comic, Bachalo's art is just so strong. The art in those first half-dozen or so books is the reason why I still like Generation X in spite of all of its storytelling flaws. I also really loved M-Plate's presentation as an explicitly nonbinary/androgynous entity as far beyond the concept of gender as they were beyond good and evil (and actively malevolent only on account of the latter, not the former). I wish we'd seen them in the early style; with the right inker Bachalo managed to make Hemingway look menacing and he was just a big dumb punchman.
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May 28, 2021 20:06
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Hopping back to Uncanny for issue #324, featuring Roger Cruz gamely trying out his best Joe Madureira impression. Roger Cruz has never impressed me much, but I guess he's doing all he can here. It's still quite ugly. We begin with Psylocke committing a major psychic faux-pas; after getting a bad vibe from Gambit in the last issue, she's sneaking around in his mind without his consent, looking to turn up some dirt. However, something really unexpected happens:  He catches her in the act and intercepts her within his own mind. As both a psychic and a ninja, Betsy was not expecting to be caught. This is treated as something really unusual, and only deepens her concerns that he's hiding something. To Lobdell's credit, the next few issues do suggest that at this point he had the big reveal in #350 roughly planned out, and is seeding hints via Psylocke and Rogue that actually do more or less hold together. Meanwhile Storm, Wolverine, Charlotte Jones and poor underwritten Cannonball are getting ready to face off against the two Gene Nation guys from last issue, Vessel and Sack, who explain that their agenda is to kill 100 humans for every one mutant killed by anti-mutant prejudice. Sack is so worked up about it that he veers wildly off model in the space of a single page.    His power, it turns out, is to "apply his body over a human host," in effect first possessing them and then killing them. Which presumably explains the 33 dead from #322. As for Vessel he can absorb the energy of the recently deceased and channel it into strength and durability. He can also apparently switch from normal tuff guy legs to lithe little satyr legs at will, or at Roger Cruz' will. Sometimes he even has weird cricket feet. The mutant body is a wondrous thing. Rogue and Iceman wind up at a roadside diner in Millstone, Arizona. Strange things are afoot-- Iceman hallucinates that a brunette waitress is Emma Frost and freaks out. After Rogue apologizes she spontaneously asks the waitress to give "Grey Crow" her regards without meaning to. Grey Crow of course is John Grey Crow, the Marauder who currently headlines Hellions and who previously went by the regrettable codename "Scalphunter." The waitress is puzzled and explains that Grey Crow quit working at the diner years ago, and shows a photo of herself, Grey Crow, and Gambit. Hmm, what could Gambit have been doing serving up hasbrowns... with a Marauder?? Outside, Iceman is frantically calling the school trying to get in touch with Emma Frost. To his credit and the story's credit, he recognizes that he's hallucinating and losing his grip, and doesn't seem to believe that Emma is running some kind of telepathic scheme-- but she lets the phone ring, content to let him work his poo poo out on his own. The rest of the issue is a big dumb fight-scene. The Gene Nation guys make a beeline to attack the nearby Friends of Humanity and Grayson Creed, only for Beast to protect Creed from a falling slab. Wolverine, sans his adamantium, continues to descend into an animal-like state, temporarily unable to communicate in anything other than grunts and howls. Vessel gives a really weak little speech about being the voice of all marginalized mutants, but it's just nothing. Lobdell is very fond of looking at the X-Men as a lens for talking about politics, but he's also exceptionally bad at doing so. Like Creed's speech last issue, it's just buzz-words strung together.  There's a really weird bit in which the X-Men recognize that Vessel has sucked up the actual souls of his victims and that they have an obligation to release them by hitting him with lightning. The souls fly out and fly into the morgue, he's weakened, and that's that. Sack melts into the sidewalk and god knows what happens to Vessel. Presumably he escapes because he's back with his team in the very next issue. A bad issue, incoherent in many respects. #325 wraps up the Uncanny side of this little crossover, and is at least much nicer to look at. Joe Mads definitely had a very assertive style, but it was a cohesive and clean one, and at the time I remember it being really excitingly novel. And of course over in Gen X Bachalo is really pushing himself and figuring out new stuff to do with the superhero form. But if Bryan Hitch was not quite the right choice for this kind of story, Roger Cruz just completely drops the ball, giving us an issue that's both ugly, generic, and difficult to follow.
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May 29, 2021 16:14
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I noticed that Beast repeatedly calls people "dude" in these issues and while I know at the time he was written as a more light-hearted character than he is nowadays that still feels really weird.
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May 29, 2021 21:48
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I don't know if it was planned, but it's kinda neat that Gene Nation are the remnants of the Morlocks, while the Gambit plot is wrapping up the last loose ends of the Mutant Massacre storyline; it means the two plots have at least some relevance to each other.
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May 30, 2021 07:03
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So Generation X #6, released in August 1995. First of all let's have a look at the cover. You''ll see that the models for the Gene Nation characters is all over the place (as is the roster, as will be evident in Uncanny #325). Compare Marrow on this cover:  to her appearance in Prime:  to X-Men #70 a few years later, when she's becoming an X-Man [img]https://i.imgur.com/pcMm6Ei.jpg[/img This is not a huge deal and of course Pacheco's design is for functionally a brand-new character who needs to fit a brand new role. But it's weird to see this very strange, animal-like face on this cover, and then varying degrees of just "ghoulish person" elsewhere, even in the very same issue. We start with Marrow and Hemingway (with Leech in tow) torturing Emma Frost by tying her up and painting her with orange paint? I think this is another really lovely Bachalo page. I love how he sets up a big splash, but in-sets this little five-panel flourish in the corner. It gives the page a really interesting tempo-- like holding tension and then releasing it in a tricky little sequence.  The team is elsewhere in the sewers using their powers (mostly Synch's powers) to track Emma. They run into issues because, as planned, Leech as the Gene Nation's hostage cancels out everybody's powers, so for example Skin becomes a drippy mess. Marrow and Hemingway seem fine-- I guess "big strong guy" has always been a fairly Leech-proof power but I'd imagine a writer could have made having her powers canceled out a rather more complicated situation for Marrow if they wanted to. Bachalo continues to do a weirdly excellent job with Hemingway's sort of otherwise lackluster design. He really looks scary in these issues, compared to his next appearance under Joe Mad's pen in which he looks kind of cool but very action-figury. Bachalo, I think, takes advantage of all his spikes and protrusions, as well as his tendency to be cast in shadow, to play with his silhouette and make him just like he's put together wrong-- all weapon, no structural integrity. It's a deceptive design, very simple and generic at first, but Bachalo has fun with him to great effect imo.  Marrow and co. are operating under the assumption that by using Leech (who has to be conscious for his dampening field to work) they have Emma Frost under-wraps completely. But in a pretty elegant bit of writing, Emma just kicks him unconscious, freeing herself to use her psychic powers and shocking everybody present. Her hero-turn was pretty fresh at this point so this is a nice example that she still has a ruthless side and is willing to kick a child unconscious to save lives, and can also get physical when she needs to. I like the reaction shots-- this is an unexpected turn for both her new pupils and her new enemies, albeit in much different ways, which I think Bachalo sells.  So everybody is rescued, Gene Nation is psychically frazzled, etc., until Dark Beast monologues in his lair and detonates a bomb, forcing Gen X to beat a hasty retreat while Marrow and Hemingway are lost in the blast. Back at the school, Emma has a nice chat with Professor X-- we don't see iirc too many scenes of them together. However they mostly just talk about Gene Nation, so mixed blessings. Jubilee heads out to the woods on campus to check in on Logan, who is now rapidly devolving. Bachalo chooses to interpret this as him becoming giant.  A straightforward issue elevated again by Bachalo and Buckingam's art. There's not really any fight scene so to speak here-- Emma kicks a child in the face and then immediately puts a psychic whammy on the bad-guys and it's over, but Lobdell still finds opportunities to showcase some of the kids' powers, especially Synch, whose abilities risk becoming a little abstract without attention from the writer. This was Bachalo's last issue for a bit, as he took a break to work on Death: The Time of Your Life over at Vertigo. He'd be back on Gen X from #17-31 with a handful of fill-ins though and has continued working off and on at Marvel since then, often imo on books a little bit beneath him. I think this issue is a good example of how even as Marvel moved away from the "artists first" mentality that precipitated the Image exodus, this is still an era in which narrative wheel-spinning could be enlivened or redeemed by a creative, ambitious, and motivated artist. We'll see this with Joe Mad's pencils too-- while he is definitely an acquired taste and maybe not someone with the greatest work ethic, he brought a crystal-clear vision to his work that to a certain extent breaths life into Lobdell's otherwise slack scripts. Onslaught himself is a good example-- while he has a very 90s design, it is striking, and it functions as the semi-present center of gravity that the rest of the story orbits around-- a good vision in vain pursuit of a good story to match it. So in a way this Gene Nation stuff is kind of a foretaste of this narrative flaw. It really feels like somebody came up with some neat bad-guy designs without anybody having a particularly good idea for how to use them.
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May 31, 2021 15:00
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I predict "Emma Frost saves the day by dropkicking a twelve year old" will be the peak of this event and it's all downhill from here
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May 31, 2021 23:15
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Leech's power is really weird and inconsistent. It absolutely does affect big strong guys if their mutant power is "big and strong" and can even revert physical changes, but sometimes it just flat-out doesn't work. Hemmingway isn't the only one immune to it, Penance(Hollow) is too.
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Jun 1, 2021 00:15
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I've been reading through following this read order and I'm a bit ahead of this (it doesn't have the Gen X stuff, which I guess makes sense, even though the UXM side of the Gene Nation stuff is in there). There's a bunch of stuff in there that seems to be of spurious connection to this event, but I suppose I'll see how it goes. Like X-Men Annual '95 is a story about Mister Sinister having been in love. Will this matter? At all? I kind of doubt it!
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Jun 1, 2021 01:14
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I stopped reading the X-men a fair bit before this event, but followed along well enough to know the bulletpoints of where this all went. Looking at that reading list really hammers home why I did. Man, X-cutioners song was annoying enough to track down the issues of at the time, who's got time for all that nonsense.
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Jun 1, 2021 01:23
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Endless Mike posted:I've been reading through following this read order and I'm a bit ahead of this (it doesn't have the Gen X stuff, which I guess makes sense, even though the UXM side of the Gene Nation stuff is in there). There's a bunch of stuff in there that seems to be of spurious connection to this event, but I suppose I'll see how it goes. Like X-Men Annual '95 is a story about Mister Sinister having been in love. Will this matter? At all? I kind of doubt it! That annual is a little silly but it has some beautiful John Paul Leon sequences!
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Jun 1, 2021 02:01
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Read through X-Men: ClanDestine last night and they was some bad writing. Alan Davis certainly did what he could with what he had, but that couldn't save it. I need to check the credits, since there's one character who seems to change from Asian to Black between the two issues which could be attributed to a colorist change but that still seems like something the editors would catch. The weirdest thing was that everyone seems to react to everything as flatly as possible. Xavier is getting attacked by a tentacle demon and Storm's reaction is "The tentacles appear to be attacking Xavier." or something similar. That said the ClanDestine characters seem pretty neat and I'd like to see more of them. I'll have to see if the miniseries is on Unlimited.
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Jun 1, 2021 13:36
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 It's Uncanny X-Men #325, with a gatefold cover and a lovely holographic X in the middle. Released October, 1995 this concludes the loose Gene Nation crossover. I actually received this as a birthday present as a child, from some relative who just popped into the comic book store and grabbed a few fancy looking issues on their way over to eat cake, and I thought it was a truly amazing piece of literature. It had it all-- skeleton guys, big green guys, Wolverine, baseball... so I'm kind of reading this through rose-colored glasses since I recall having such a fun time reading it way back when. I will say that after the past few UXM issues (and especially in contrast to Bachalo's very specific and ambitious vision in Gen X) having Joe Madureira's pencils here are a blessing in terms of making this comic actually feel like something. His work is very much of its moment and it's easy to look back and id his various tics and shorthands, but this feels further afield of the house style than Hitch or Grummett or god forbid Roger Cruz, and what's more it feels like someone excited to be drawing these characters, someone somehow emotionally invested in getting to convey this nonsense. So there's a spark there that has been lacking in this title so far. This is nominally the 20th anniversary of the All-New All-Different X-Men and so Lobdell opens with the archetypally Claremontian scene of everybody playing baseball.  It's cute enough-- the X-Men are playing Gen X and as usual people begin to cheat and use their powers and get into all sorts of merry mix-ups.  It feels a little slack though, since both teams are nominally in the middle of dealing with a new group of bad guys bent on mass murder. It would be one thing if this issue put a pin in the Gene Nation story-line, but as we'll see it very much does not, so I wonder if it would have been a more effective story if Lobdell had kept up the momentum from #323-#324 rather than giving us this lull. Of course as we've seen the past couple issues have been like 80% lull by volume to begin with so who knows. Anyway, what next? Do the X-Men track down a lead about these Morlock malcontents? Do they venture down into the tunnels to make a proactive strike? Nope, they sit there in a fleshy bundle until Colossus teleports in to deliver the plot to them.  Colossus has an unconscious Callisto (wearing sci-fi battle armor?) in tow and needs the X-Men's help. Now-- at around this time Colossus was not on any X-teams. In fact he had defected to Magneto's Acolytes several years prior, in Uncanny #304 (9/23) and had stuck around there through several crossovers and a lot of nonsense up in space. As it turns out, he, along with all the other Acolytes, fell out of their space station after AoA-refuge Holocaust carelessly tipped it over in X-Men #42-44 which ran from July to September 1995 and actually ends with Colossus being picked up by Callisto. So I'm not sure why the Road to Onslaught trades choose to arrange the issues like this, other than the fact that tidily arranging the baroquely and often incoherently intertwined x-titles of this period together must have been kind of a nightmare to begin with. Anyway, Callisto is wounded (or something) but has grave warnings about Gene Nation, who seem to be preparing some kind of catastrophic attack on the NYC subway system to celebrate the anniversary of the Mutant Massacre. Callisto offers the clearest explanation of their whole deal that we've yet to receive-- they were refugees from Mikhail Rasputin's pocket dimension who grew up in a barbarous and violent world in which time flowed differently. Gene Nation is made up of second generation Morlocks who only ever really knew Mikhail's world and grew up bitter and resentful of having to flee from the sewers. So here they are, back again and violent. Callisto explains that they plan to kill one human for every mutant killed during the Massacre, which you know, two issues ago they were talking about killing one hundred humans for every mutant killed period so I guess thank god for small blessings. She shows a little hologram slide of their roster which is interesting because the yellow brain guy here never actually shows up as a member of the team.  His name is Ever, I do not care what his powers are, and he eventually shows up as a member of Evil Havok's Brotherhood in the egregiously bad Howard Mackie X-Factor. To my knowledge he does not matter at all and never will. This is indicative I think of the disarray that the X offices were in at this point-- here we have a rather nice, dramatic looking splash page of the bad-guy team that has been built up for months at this point, and front and center is some rando guy who isn't even on the team. Meanwhile, actual Gene Nation characters are just not on this splash so we'll have them to look forward to in just a few short pages. It's a mess. Callisto teleports a small team (Wolverine, Colossus, and Storm) into a tenement building with her while the rest of the X-Men fly over in their jet and they discover that the murders have already begun. Meanwhile Gene Nation is spying on their progress courtesy of another green guy, Reverb, who for years I thought was Sleepwalker's brother.  We finally get a substantial fight, as Hemingway and Vessel, the designated strong guys of the group, ambush from the sewers. We get some vague hints that both of them have evolved or developed in startling ways since their last appearances but artistically and narrative they both still seem to be big strong guys. I suppose Vessel's legs are no longer shuttling wildly from guy legs to goat legs to cricket legs between panels so let's call that a secondary mutation and move on. Storm and Callisto leave them to it, recognizing the fight as a distraction, and soon we get some backstory tying Marrow to the Sarah character from Cable. We get a nice little bit of business about Storm's lackluster leadership of the Morlocks, which actually feels sort of earned.  It's not subtle but it at least feels like it hearkens back to the whole point of the Morlocks, which is a refreshing change of pace from all this stuff about Mikhail's time dimension and cyber armor and this and that. In any case Marrow has strapped bombs to a bunch of human hostages, and also, inexplicably, to herself. The bombs can only be defused by stopping her heart which feels... like a dubious plan. But it does lead to a fairly engagingly drawn duel between herself and Storm, which of course is a call-back to UXM #170 back in 1983. Now in my opinion Joe Mad is no Paul Smith and in fact the fight kind of suffers from being such a straight homage to a really masterfully done sequence. But you know, in late 1995 I think I'll take whatever I can get.  She eventually tears Marrow's heart out to stop the bomb...  ...Callisto for whatever reasons returns to Mikhail's hell-plane with the captive members of Gene Nation, and Colossus meanders off to appear in Warren Ellis' Excalibur in which he behaves truly poorly. Some of the Gene Nation people will show up again in the 1996 Storm miniseries with new, even worse names (Hemingway becomes Pain, Sack becomes Glass, and Vessel becomes Snow) and of course Marrow eventually comes back to life and joins the X-Men for awhile under Joe Kelly. She's currently doing stuff in recent issues of Marauders and is pointedly NOT an X-Man:  In other subplots, we do have a nice little unity of theme surrounding the Morlocks and the legacy of the Mutant Massacre. Rogue calls Gambit on a payphone and tells him that she's going to Seattle, which he takes as meaning she has pieced together the dark secrets in his head that she absorbed when they kiss. Psylocke notices how nervous Angel is on the way over to the big fight (I guess actually everyone on the Blackbird misses the rest of the issue completely) and notes that the Morlock tunnels are where he lost his wings and got all his angst. And we see that Mr. Sinister, the original mastermind behind the Massacre, and his new protege Threnody are tracking Gambit's movements. He sends her off to follow him to Seattle, where he's apparently heading to rendezvous with Rogue. So-- nothing special, but they underscore the gravity and the long-cast shadow of the Massacre in a way that the very shallow Gene Nation characters don't. So they're a nice touch and on top of the baseball game a decent way to take advantage of the expanded length of this issue. So yeah. The end of the Gene Nation subplot (for now) and some substantial build-up to the mystery of Gambit's past, which will come to a head in UXM #350, a bit after Onslaught is wrapped up. The elephant of the room is that Marrow's plan is really really dumb. So she has a bunch of bombs stuck onto some humans to get revenge for the Mutant Massacre (which was not committed by humans?) and also a bomb stuck onto her own heart and to... save the humans you need to kill her? It's transparently a plot device designed to maneuver Storm into the position of having to kill Marrow without any moral wiggle room and doesn't hold up at all beyond that. I recall reading an interview that Marrow needing to die at the end of this arc was an editorial mandate and you can feel Lobdell contorting the plot to make it fit. This will be a recurring thing with him in the lead-up to Onslaught-- a resistance to the continued darkening of the X-Men's characters. He doesn't see Storm as a killer, he doesn't see Professor X as someone capable of succumbing to temptation (and he has especially nasty words about Mark Waid's resurrection of the very old and quickly abandoned notion of Charles' attraction to Jean), and will wriggle around to write his way around those sorts of beats when they're handed down to him. Which I'm sympathetic to, I guess, but the bomb-heart thing here is just goofy. Another little continuity thing-- at the end of X-Men #44 a hale and hearty Callisto rescues a gravely wounded Colossus. Here, Colossus is fine and is carrying a clearly ailing Callisto, who he says collapsed soon after finding him. It doesn't really connect, and while it's not a huge deal it, like the mysterious Ever cameo and the bomb thing, speaks to a dysfunctional editorial culture and a broader sense of books just sort of muddling along and killing time. There's good work being done on the tertiary X-books during this period, but the tentpole book is floundering and sort of weirdly adrift from the rest of the line, with the Onslaught business being set up in as desultory a fashion as I can imagine. The mounting tension surrounding Gambit's past is a little more engaging and a lot more narratively cohesive but that too will turn out to be kind of a bathetic nothing at the very end of Lobdell's first run. In a few issues the trade will hop tracks over to Nicieza on X-Men which is much more readable but similarly struck by a certain feeling of aimlessness. That being said-- gosh the Joe Mad art still looks pretty, and he can draw a fight scene. I still get why young me was so excited by this issue and for all of its faults it is nicely paced, nicely chunky with incident, and fun to flip through. So we could do worse-- for a standard "we need this book on the shelf every month" mid-90s cape book this is not at all the bottom of the barrel. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 20:53 on Jun 1, 2021 |
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Jun 1, 2021 20:45
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It's a good thing the X-Men follow FAA rules and file flight plans so Threnody could open FlightAware and see Gambit was going to Seattle, and not literally the entire country that's between Westchester and Seattle. Or places further west of Seattle!
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Jun 1, 2021 21:31
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As someone who managed to avoid most issues of the time, these write ups are super fascinating. I remember Threnody showing up as a big deal character in whatever issues I read of X-Man. I also remember Marrow showing up again shortly after Onslaught and joining the team, to the point I didn't even realize she got killed before that nonsense. How Wonderful! posted:Colossus meanders off to appear in Warren Ellis' Excalibur in which he behaves truly poorly. And, oh boy, what did I miss here? I'm morbidly curious to know what happened in this run. Saoshyant fucked around with this message at 21:37 on Jun 1, 2021 |
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Jun 1, 2021 21:35
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joe mad has gigantic muscle arms like his characters from carrying this book so hard
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Jun 1, 2021 22:46
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I owned most of these issues so seeing this all brings back memories. Keep u p the good work.
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Jun 1, 2021 23:46
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Saoshyant posted:As someone who managed to avoid most issues of the time, these write ups are super fascinating. It's kind of a weird run and if I wasn't entirely put off Ellis now I'd probably be rereading it for this. But basically the Excalibur team hooks up with a stock Ellis character, a cynical snarky chainsmoking Brit named Pete Wisdom, who soon starts dating Kitty Pryde. They do all sorts of stuff involving black magic and government conspiracies. Anyway Colossus comes galloping in on their lives like "Hey Katya! I'm back! I'm ready to date you now!" and flies into a fury that she's moved on and is seeing somebody else, to the point that iirc he gets thrown in the brig and Nightcrawler has to give him a robust Catholic scolding. It's a very weird issue but it segues into him joining the team for a pretty long stretch.
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Jun 2, 2021 01:02
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oh, it was dumber than that. colossus beat wisdom half to death in an uncontrolled rage, which is kind of silly given colossus' strength. then wisdom severed colossus' spine. to fix this moira basically molded his insides like clay after heating them up with lasers. that part was actually kind of neat.
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Jun 2, 2021 07:36
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As I continue to be ahead of How Wonderful!: I read through Sabertooth Special #1 last night and it was pretty good! Written by Fabian Nicieza and pencils by Gary Frank. It picks up immediately after Uncanny X-Men #328, where we learn Sabertooth is fully healed from having his brain stabbed and is totally ready to murder everyone again. He escapes the mansion in Uncanny and makes his way to NYC and the Special is entirely the X-Men (the original five with a minor assist from Caliban) hunting him down. I won't claim to have read a ton of prior Sabertooth appearances, but this really drives home "Wolverine but way more vicious" in a way I wasn't expecting. He's smart, clever, and will do basically anything to get away, including not killing hostages knowing the X-Men are true to their word. After figuring out his plan is to take the train to the Massachusetts Academy and kill Generation X (I'm glad Sabertooth is a responsible commuter and didn't rent or steal a car), they do ultimately take him down, but not before Beast has some cracked ribs, Archangel's wings get damaged (apparently they can bleed!), and Sabertooth himself dies. Val Cooper takes custody of his body, which gets better and he's forced to be a member of X-Factor which I'm sure will go well for everyone involved! Anyway, it's a solid done in one story that has little to do with Onslaught other than to put a piece where editorial wants it, but there's some good action set pieces, and it tells the story it needs to with minimal fluff.
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Jun 2, 2021 13:19
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 Uncanny X-Men #326, published in November, 1995. This is another victim of the confusing structure of the Road to Onslaught trades, as it follows up directly from an issue of X-Men that the trade places later. That's why #325 has Gambit rushing off to intercept Rogue, and this one has him back already, moping on the roof about being unable to outrun his past.  We get a rather nice, bittersweet scene between Gambit and Storm. He tries to console her about what went down with Marrow, and she worries that a person's fundamental nature can never change-- precisely the last thing Gambit wants to hear at that point. But there's another current X-Mansion resident whose presence is raising questions about the mutability of nature. Somebody that Gambit has history with.  Sabretooth, who is not doing so hot in his little holo-habitat. He's being tended to by Boom-Boom of X-Force. After she leaves Gambit cuts the holo-program and decides to swoop in and interrogate/fight Sabretooth, who is now recovered enough to talk in choppy sentences and vaguely remember faces and names. Sabretooth is bombarded with holographic images of each of his victims, including, improbably, his monocle-wearing pediatrician. I am unsure how Gambit has all these, given how mysterious Sabretooth's origins still were at this point. In any case, he has had a very very blood-soaked journey indeed, and Gambit is eager to rub it in-- in part engaging in some revenge, in part twisting the knife in himself. If Sabretooth can't change, why should he believe that he can?   Ultimately Storm intervenes, orders Gambit to leave, and places Sabretooth back into a... very small, cramped looking cage, which feels not meaningfully less cruel than what Gambit was doing. The other plot in this issue follows Beast, who has just delivered a lecture on the Legacy Virus at a WHO conference. Having cooled down from his fight with Trish, he's apparently come around to her side-- that the world at large deserves full transparency about an urgently dangerous virus. He has a little bit of staged sleight of hand with Xavier, who objects to the framing of the Virus as a major issue by citing how few cases have been recorded (he cites eight, nine counting Moira, who was, at this point, just a human).  The back and forth continues-- Renee Majcomb, a Genoshan from the Cable series, accuses Xavier of ignoring the deaths of hundreds of Genoshan mutates, and Val Cooper delivers a weirdly callous rejoinder which boils down to "well, that's Genosha, we live in a real country." In a cutaway to the current Excalibur team, we find out that yeah, this is all staged to help allay the public's fears, which feels iffy. Moira, who was in on the plan, muses that the Legacy Virus might not even be a virus at all, but rather, a designer gene. Ok Moira. I don't know what that means in this context and I promise you that neither does Scott Lobdell. Afterwards Hank and Xavier meet up and have a conversation about the ethics of their stunt and of the whole X-Men endeavor in general. Xavier's mind drifts to the predicament of Sabretooth, a formerly vicious murderer who is now a child-like prisoner under his care. There is a lot of roundabout Lobdellian talk about morality and responsibility and human nature and eventually Beast scampers off into the night. The gist is that while Xavier acknowledges that he could simply rewrite Sabretooth's mind with his powers and cure him of his violent streak, he can't. Just as Sabretooth has the agency to stop himself from being a maniac, but he won't. Is this a satisfying line of argumentation? I don't really think it's very compelling, but it is nice to see characters trying to talk through this really somewhat bananas subplot. Sabretooth first showed up at the mansion for help after the events of his first mini-series, and was only lobotomized sometime afterwards. So it is a very strange situation, but it's so comic-booky and peculiar that I find it hard to take seriously Beast and Xavier's very very broad bromides about it. Still... for the time, this is a nicely structured issue. Instead of the grab-bag approach of a few issues prior, Lobdell wisely narrows in on two subplots, each of which eventually thread together around the vexed figure of Sabretooth-- Xavier and Hank ambivalently resolving that Creed has free will, Gambit violently insisting that he does not. Free will, evil, and the burdens of history will soon come to be very salient stuff for both Xavier and Gambit so this issue does actually feel like Lobdell had a rough roadmap about where he wanted to take these characters. Any sign of Onslaught? Not as such, but we do see Xavier beginning to feel frustrated about the limits of what he'll allow himself to do with his powers, so we could say that this is a rather important bit of build-up, if we wanted to give it the benefit of the doubt.
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Jun 2, 2021 21:26
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when and why did sabretooth kill a franciscan monk??
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Jun 2, 2021 21:45
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Blockhouse posted:when and why did sabretooth kill a franciscan monk?? Well every year he tracks down Wolverine on his birthday and makes his life suck, maybe for his own birthday he picks someone at random to kill.
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Jun 2, 2021 21:48
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E: Shameful DP.
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Jun 2, 2021 21:48
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Is that her nipple in the top middle frame? She REALLY likes storms I guess?
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Jun 3, 2021 11:36
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Let's jump back to July for X-Men #42, written by Fabian Nicieza and penciled by Paul Smith. Nicieza is.. I'll be blunt-- a much better writer than Scott Lobdell in almost every way. But he has an undeniable weakness for baroque continuity and has a tendency to trust readers to keep a mental index of dozens of minor characters. So this little arc is right up his alley, as we find out what the Acolytes have been up to.  The Acolytes were the group of mutant Magneto-worshippers assembled in X-Men #1-3 and following Fatal Attractions left in the care of Exodus, a powerful psychic mutant with pink skin who was also I guess a medieval knight. There are lots of very minor characters running around but it works because this is kind of a horror/thriller story. We see these C-list characters, get to know them a little, and then see them placed in danger with the knowledge that very few of them are important enough to to not be disposable. It's a fun story. Paul Smith of course was an absolute classic artist for an absolutely classic stretch of Claremont's run. He's iconic. As we'll see his art doesn't sing as much here, I think largely because of some fairly brutal digital coloring. Anyway we open with Exodus in a celebratory mood-- the Acolytes have hauled in AoA reject Holocaust, who they found floating in a big chunk of ice in space. Exodus' hunch that this is an omen of good tidings only deepens when the Acolyte Milan, an "electropath," concludes that Holocaust is not only from Earth, he's also a mutant.  Milan is a little freaked out by Exodus' passion, as is Colossus.  For his doubts he's left to babysit Holocaust, and winds up getting blasted with traumatic mental images of the Age of Apocalypse. As he tries to run to tell people, Holocaust stirs, drags him in, and kills him. For what it's worth, I'm a Milan fan. I might be the world's only Milan fan. But he's very funny in a Cable two-parter shortly before this, where he mostly runs around trying to stay out of danger and grumbling about how useless his power is for a mission centered around fighting Omega Red. I'm sure he's alive again but for now let's have a moment of silence for our boy Milan.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83yh_MNLgk4 Elsewhere in Avalon former X-Factor kids Rusty and Skids are having second thoughts about joining the Acolytes as well. This tracks. Their joining up never made a ton of sense to me-- Nicieza's reasoning is that they were in an emotionally vulnerable spot after being brainwashed by Stryfe during X-Cutioner's Song, which is borne out by the issues around that time. They were basically still in a daze in X-Force #25 when they first take Exodus up on his offer. So it's nice to see them talking this subplot out in a rational way. However Scanner, another Acolyte, phases into their bedroom (where they're both in various stages of casual undress) to ask them to go check up on Milan. In another nice beat, Skids and Rusty recognize this as weird and inappropriate behavior, phasing into a couples' bedroom without knocking. This is mingled with a suspicion that they're being spied on or bugged-- after all, they were interrupted just as they were beginning to articulate doubts about the Acolytes' mission. There's really a sense of the Acolyte true believers drifting into dangerous territory to the increasing ill-ease of the rest that Nicieza sets up briskly and efficiently.  This is an effectively paces and structured page muted by the dodgy coloring. Paul Smith deserved better.  And with that Holocaust bursts loose.  You may be more familiar with his AoA design, which was reflected when the 616 Holocaust showed up in Rick Remender's Uncanny X-Force. He has a big bulky containment suit so as we'll see him roaming around nude is a big problem.  Holocaust is confused and believes he's still in the Age of Apocalypse, calling out for Dark Beast and trying to resume old beef with a very nonplussed Exodus. We get the consequences of this in another lovely and exciting page let down by the colors.  The blast rips through the station and causes drastic structural damage. As Avalon begins to plummet, Amelia Voght teleports to Earth to hastily grab Scott Summers and Jean Grey to come help, and we leave off with an image of Colossus cradling the comatose body of Magneto amidst the carnage. It's an effective, creepy issue that very deftly conveys the claustrophobia and creeping paranoia of an Avalon without Magneto in charge. Compared to the meandering Lobdell issues this is a real breath of fresh air.  And in the midst of all that Nicieza still makes run for subplots! These are mostly to establish cross-continuity between X-Men and Uncanny. On one two page interlude, Storm interrupts Xavier watching a news report on Juggernaut's Hoboken Hijinx to inform him about the disco massacre, while Beast keeps an eye on the unconscious Cain Marko. In another, quite effective scene, we see someone who very much appears to be Gambit skulking around in Florida breaking into a church:  Only to be interrupted by Iceman, who reveals that this burglar is Rogue, manifesting Gambit's whole look for to-be-explained reasons.
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Jun 6, 2021 00:54
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After the pretty dull Gene Nation stuff, switching to a chaotic fight on a collapsing space station was a breath of fresh air. I've read ahead to the end of this little arc and I think Nicieza really does a good job writing Scott and Jean both as a couple who are very in sync and as individual characters. It's some solid character work. Going back an issue I think it's funny that Lobdell didn't want to have Xavier turn out to be Onslaught but he wrote him publicly downplaying and sowing confusion about a deadly virus he knows is real and spreading fast, which to me seems super evil.
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Jun 6, 2021 13:52
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Lobdell's moral maxims are often confused, much as he likes to have characters pontificate on them. It feels like he's trying to hit a Silver/Bronze Age iconicism where you have characters like Spider-Man or Storm mulling over extremely simple, fundamental ethical questions, but he often fails to ground those questions in the stakes of his stories and returns to the scene of the characters saying "Will I? Should I? Must I?" repeatedly when he reaches a loose end in the plot.
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Jun 6, 2021 17:52
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Android Blues posted:Lobdell's moral maxims are often confused, much as he likes to have characters pontificate on them. It feels like he's trying to hit a Silver/Bronze Age iconicism where you have characters like Spider-Man or Storm mulling over extremely simple, fundamental ethical questions, but he often fails to ground those questions in the stakes of his stories and returns to the scene of the characters saying "Will I? Should I? Must I?" repeatedly when he reaches a loose end in the plot. Yeah this is very true. He likes writing scenes of moral import and gravitas, where characters are torn between two imperfect solutions. I think on the mechanical level it's even a scene he's good at... the problem is that he can never come up with compelling ethical binds because he's such a bad plotter. How can we care about what decision his characters make about the plot when the writer self-evidently has not yet decided what the plot is? He's the Andrew Lloyd Webber of comics. He wants to have a diva hit the high notes and that's fine, but he just gives no shits about what gets her to that aria and it shows. It's a mess and I think Nicieza and later on Mark Waid truly do their best with a bad situation.
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Jun 6, 2021 19:01
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Fun issue, but that is a terribly composed cover.
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Jun 6, 2021 21:10
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As I've been reading through this event following the read order above, which is the order presented in the trades by Marvel, it's abundantly clear that the trades are not in the right order. Uncanny X-Men dot net has a useful diagram that gives an idea of how things should be read (top down). The covers all have Phase or Impact 1 or 2 listed on them with the "Phase" books are the most important parts of the main narrative while the "Impact" ones are side stories based on the events happening elsewhere. In any case, the trades have these in weird orders so some 2 books show up before 1 books and big events that happened in other books aren't actually presented yet. A big one is Onslaught dropping a big EMP in the middle of NYC which they don't show until after characters are reacting to it. This sort of thing happens a number of times in the trade order. It's also kind of funny to see things that are just straight editing issues. In Cable, Cable has to save X-Man by overusing his powers, letting the TO virus start taking over. In Cable, we see the effects of this, with his arm growing longer and spikier, and that side of his head growing some metal extensions - this isn't shown anywhere else. In another bit, the combined X-Men, Avengers, and F4 save Xavier from Onslaught's body, which triggers a physical change in Onslaught. In the next issue (which definitely takes place *after* this since it explicitly references Xavier being saved), he's back to his initial form. Also I caught an editor's note that was supposed to refer to X-Man, but said X-Men. Also whatever the hell happened here:  "Uh hey Bob? Uh we need to change these word bubbles?" "So loving do it. Just like get a pen. Just change the word bubbles. Why I gotta tell everyone what to do? You'd think I was the editor or something!" I also get the idea that in their scrambling to figure out exactly what Onslaught was, they never had anyone just like do a master drawing of how he looks. Most artists do a pretty good job of keeping on model, but no one seems to really have an idea what his head/helmet is supposed to look like. It ranges from basically just Magneto's helmet over a hidden face to him having a face where the opening was to a Magneto-like helmet, but much more distorted and sinister. (If I don't need to use spoiler tags for a bad 25 year old crossover, let me know.)
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Jun 8, 2021 13:06
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Maybe I'll switch to that reading list since Road to Onslaught truly is just a bunch of completely enrelated 1995-1996 X-Men issues for the most part.
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Jun 8, 2021 14:30
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Yeah, having gotten through all that, there's basically nothing too important or even particularly interesting other than arguably setting some unimportant parts of the stage (like Sabertooth ending up in X-Factor, Psylocke getting a red face marking, and Wolverine losing his nose). It is a bit interesting now that I'm getting into the other Marvel stuff to see the different creators. There's a Todd Dezago and Mike Weiringo issue of Sensational Spider-Man that's actually pretty fun! There's Mark Waid trying to do anything interesting at all in Avengers! There's Tom Defalco writing Tom Defalco comics! There's some Peter David Hulk where he does the Peter David event comic thing where he begrudgingly writes the event while keeping to his own story!
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Jun 8, 2021 14:45
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So if y’all are skipping the rest of the run up to Onslaught could someone please explain wtf happened to wolverine and his nose? Also, didn’t he have like no hands or hook hands at some point? I had completely noped out on modern comics by this point in my youth and started reading older and older stuff, but was aware from seeing the covers that things were getting weird.
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Jun 8, 2021 21:15
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Bulgaroctonus posted:So if y’all are skipping the rest of the run up to Onslaught could someone please explain wtf happened to wolverine and his nose? Also, didn’t he have like no hands or hook hands at some point? I had completely noped out on modern comics by this point in my youth and started reading older and older stuff, but was aware from seeing the covers that things were getting weird. In the run-up to Onslaught, Genesis, Cable's son who declared himself Apocalypse's successor, needs his own Four Horsemen, so he captures Wolverine after killing Cyber and harvesting his adamantium skin. He tries to redo the adamantium bonding on Wolverine's bones, but Wolverine rejects it, the pain and trauma of it turning him even more feral and animalistic which, for some reason, meant he stopped having a nose. His nose eventually grew back.
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Jun 8, 2021 21:22
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Bulgaroctonus posted:So if y’all are skipping the rest of the run up to Onslaught could someone please explain wtf happened to wolverine and his nose? Also, didn’t he have like no hands or hook hands at some point? I had completely noped out on modern comics by this point in my youth and started reading older and older stuff, but was aware from seeing the covers that things were getting weird. One-handed Wolverine is the Age of Apocalypse version. Nothing weird about that one. On the other hand the nose is because the removal of the adamantium made his healing factor start working in overdrive and somehow lead to him "devolving"?
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Jun 8, 2021 21:25
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Endless Mike posted:I don't know anything about hook hands, but as far as his nose: he had his adamantium forcibly removed by Magneto back during the Fatal Attractions crossover. It was then revealed that he had bone claws, and then his healing factor became even more powerful (since he was no longer constantly repairing the damage caused by having metal bones). For some reason this also makes him a bit more feral, and he was angry that Sabertooth was living in the mansion so he decided to live outside in the woods surrounding the mansion. But how did he smell?
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Jun 8, 2021 23:34
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Like sweat and Jack Daniels.
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Jun 8, 2021 23:47
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Cheap cigars and Miller High Life
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Jun 9, 2021 04:08
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Thanks for the replies, that all sounds dumb as poo poo. : ) Also, dude’s Canadian wouldn’t he drink Labatts or Molson? Or Canadian Club? I don’t know how Canadians drink, maybe he wants someone to bring him a fuckin’ Puppers?
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Jun 9, 2021 05:01
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