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 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! 
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May 21, 2021 19:15
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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 |
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May 22, 2021 22:46
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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.
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May 23, 2021 06:44
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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 |
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May 23, 2021 15:57
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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 |
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May 23, 2021 17:25
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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 |
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May 24, 2021 20:21
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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.
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May 24, 2021 20:29
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If anyone has info on this alleged Sacktion figure please post it.
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May 24, 2021 22:53
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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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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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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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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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 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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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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 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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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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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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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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I had to take a brief break between renovating my house and soon grading finals, but it'll be back soon.
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Jun 20, 2021 08:44
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Where were we? X-Men #43, released in August, 1995, with words by Nicieza and able but workmanlike pencils from the great Paul Smith.  Unlike the somewhat meandering and strangely low-key Gene Nation arc over in Uncanny, Nicieza keeps up the momentum from last month's cliffhanger-- Avalon is falling, AoA-refugee Holocaust is loose, Magneto might be dying, and Scott and Jean are trapped in space. Nicieza loves a baroque plot, and in theory his stories are excessively enamored with continuity and callbacks, but he also knows how to move fast enough and throw enough razzle dazzle at the reader that, for example, you don't really notice until later that you've been reading a long-simmering arc about Hard Air and late-era Alpha Flight D-listers. For the X-franchise his love of minutia-- or let's be kinder, his love of a sense of a truly shared universe-- shines, and in the mid-90s it was largely his efforts, imo, that kept the mutant books readable. This arc is a great example-- almost nothing new is being introduced to the table. We know the Acolytes, we know Colossus, Rusty, and Skids are with them, we know Magneto's status quo, we know Avalon, and despite Fatal Attractions' best efforts we know that these have been fairly dull and mishandled plot elements. But here he introduces some unexpected known quantities-- primarily the little teaser that Genocide is in the 616-- and gets some kind of alchemy out of just mushing these two neglected subplots together in a dynamic way. He's a really underrated writer and after a stint of Lobdell issues his X-Men run is a pleasure. So let's get to it. After a brief but effective prologue showing Xavier in a disconcertingly intense telepathic fugue brought on by the sudden appearance of Amelia Voght, we cut to what's eating him: a somewhat flatly structured but still kind of fun and busy splash page showing the carnage on Avalon.  I kind of actually really dig the flatness, the tableau-like structure here. it reminds me of how in some shonen mangas when a half dozen different good guys are in separate simultaneous with a half dozen bad guys the mangaka will give a little cutaway panel, often a map, just showing where everybody is (I know One Peace does this sometimes). So we see Jean and Scott looking centered and poised, kind of leaning in towards each other with a touch of casual intimacy, we have the Acolytes trying to whale on them, and then, tucked away in the upper right-hand corner, major powerhouse Exodus entangled with major powerhouse Holocaust. It's ingenious misdirection. The Acolytes and the X-Men are fighting because that's what they do, they're both in a confusing and startling situation. But the real problem of course is Holocaust, and while our misunderstanding fight rages the real players in the narrative are practically shunted to the background. It's a chaotic page depicting a chaotic situation-- so I think Smith's almost prim layout here works. Jean patches in Skids telepathically and gets a recap, both to orient her and Scott in this plot and to catch up the reader. Holocaust is running amok, Avalon is crumbling, and two Acolytes are dead-- my dear homeboy Milan and former X-Factor ally Rusty, which pisses Scott off. As one would think it would-- it's a nice character beat, with Scott lashing out at the Acolytes for indirectly causing his death by indoctrinating him, with a lovely continuity callout to his former X-Factor enemy Joanna Cargill nee Frenzy.  It feels earned because frankly Rusty and Skids were bounced around and backgrounded enough times, it really does feel like they were just opportunistically sucked into whatever faction happened to come along. So there's a note of guilt too that Cargill pounces on. What had the X-Men done for Rusty lately? Throughout we get the clear sense that all of what we're seeing, all of the interpersonal drama and fighting, is just collateral damage in the fight between Exodus and Genocide, who is effortlessly dispatching any Acolytes who manage to get close enough to interrupt their conflict. To hammer it home, Jean gets a psychic bead on just how powerful Exodus is, which startles her. It's obviously not the most innovative or elegant way to build up a character who historically laid a little flat on the page-- "oh actually his power level is EVEN BIGGER than we thought"-- but I think in this context it sells how bad the situation is, and how over their heads everyone is. Last issue was a slasher thriller-- this one is a disaster movie. The ship is sinking and nobody is going to patch it up-- so who escapes? Who survives? That's where the tension is coming from, and so every page of people punching and snarling at each other is an accumulating token of the narrative's suspense. These people need to get moving if they want to live.  As the Acolytes and Summers' put aside their differences to get moving and rescue Skids, Nicieza throws in another nice character moment. Frenzy protests that according to Magneto's teachings, the X-Men are the sworn enemies of the Acolytes. But Scott raises a good point-- most of these people barely know Magneto, who at this point has been comatose for almost two years of publication time. They know him as filtered through two profoundly biased sources-- the manipulative sociopath Fabian Cortez (lately of S.W.O.R.D. infamy, delightfully) and the fanatical Exodus. And that seems to get through to her. Although abetted by the announcement of the station's life-supported functions being terminated, we do shift into an uneasy and frantic alliance between the two groups. It's a compact and economic scene and imo it works wonderfully both to add texture to Frenzy, to do the very Niciezian move of trying to import sensible motivations and psychology onto nonsense plot elements he's inherited, and a great moment for Scott-- a guy who can, in the middle of a fight on an actively exploding space station can still convince an enemy to work with him, if not to like him. As a Cyke fan I've always thought Nicieza got him in a way that was rare in the wilderness years before Claremont and Morrison, so this little scene was a treat for me. Anyway, no sooner do the Acolytes get on board with the escape efforts then Scott and Jean are forced apart, as Jean sets out to rescue Skids. This is also smart. Just as the chaos begins to stabilize a bit, we get the most stable, functional unit in this story-- Scott and Jean-- split apart. Both of them are on the backfoot now, although Nicieza doesn't belabor this. In fact, he gives Jean a kind of bleakly funny line about how this is, after all, not her first burning-space ship rodeo.  Meanwhile things escalate. Colossus loads the still comatose Magneto into one of the last intact escape pods and jettisons out, just in time-- minutes later when Scott and the Acolytes arrive, they barely escape being sucked out into space as they discover that the pod bay is completely gone. They are, it appears, stranded-- casualties of Exodus and Genocide's extremely myopic and destructive battle. It's a fun little contrast-- Scott is leading and saving his enemies by dint of his situational awareness and lucidity, while Exodus, who is nominally framed as a religious leader to the Acolytes, is contributing to their imminent deaths by letting loose in such a way that he's actively endangering them, blowing up huge chunks of the station in a colossal mutant pissing contest. We end with another strong cliffhanger. Jean has rendezvoused with Skids, Scott and the Acolytes are hosed, and they both make similar hail-mary passes to survive. Jean with her telekinetic shield, the Acolytes with Uniscione's Unus-like exoskeleton, each plummet to earth in their respective little bubbles. The last panel shows them in flames, Jean calling out in pain-- a very clear callback to the original Phoenix Saga. I love the visual here. There's something weirdly natal about both groups protected by nothing more than these blobby, wobbly, cauls, and it sells their vulnerability and precarity in a super visceral way.  This is night and day from Lobdell's listless Gene Nation arc, which was running roughly contemporaneously. Whereas Lobdell could barely seem to care about what the stakes were, let alone how urgent they were-- for god's sakes the team takes a break from investigating a mass murder to play baseball-- Nicieza wrings tremendous urgency and suspense out of his ticking clock here. It's a great issue, and a great arc.
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Jun 20, 2021 19:41
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I want to pause a minute and go back over X-Men #43 because it occurred to me-- this is actually kind of an issue that puts on the... on the road to Onslaught.... after many many issues that just seemed to be putting us on the road to nonsense (tomato, tomahto). Because it shows us two critical components of the ultimate Onslaught "resolution"-- a Magneto who is alive but mentally pliable and damaged, and an increasingly fraught, frazzled, and desperate Charles Xavier. I am not actually sure to what extent the final canonical "nature of Onslaught" was hammered in stone at this point-- the "half and half" thing was, IIRC, wedged in over the objections of Mark Waid, who wanted Onslaught to completely be a product of Xavier's own repression and anger-- but in retrospect this is the first issue in awhile that feels like it is pointing flashing arrows to the actual Onslaught event, even if Nicieza did not (necessarily?) intend it or have all the pieces spread out in front of him. I'll dig into this a bit more once we have this whole Avalon arc behind us. Speaking of which: X-Men #44, released in September 1995 by Nicieza and Andy Kubert  I think of Andy Kubert as the epitome of the "X-Men style" of the early 90s, even moreso than pacesetter Jim Lee, just because he stuck around so long (and probably because he drew so many of the issues I had as a kid). He's angular and kind of... Expressionistic in a weird way (imo).... but still has a coherent sense of anatomy and scale that distinguishes him a bit from the Image-iste pack. He's a long long way from Paul Smith, especially as a mid-arc swap, but I like his work and I'm happy to see it here. Still-- his figures lack that softness and warmth of Paul Smith's, a quality that lent the previous two issues part of their tenseness and horror. Smith's figures look vulnerable-- you don't want them to be caught in the middle of a fight or trapped on a crashing space station because they look, you know, capable of being harmed, of being torn or rent. By placing these very creaturely looking characters in the midst of sci-fi action havok we got a creepy frisson of danger and risk (akin to Smith's great, great work on the original Brood Saga). We lose that with Kubert, whose human forms all look like very impressive action figures. Our horror story turns into an action story. Which I think is ok, but not really as interesting. We have plenty of X-Men action stories. That being said-- a lot of those action stories are bad action stories so we do have something to look forward to: Nicieza keeps the momentum and high stakes at a simmer and Nicieza sells it all expertly. So even if we're left with a conclusion that dials back the novelty a bit, it's still an extremely competent and fun comic book. Which for the Big Two in 1995 is not nothing. But first a quibble. You'll remember in UXM #325, which came out one month after this, that the plot is kicked off when a post-Acolytes Colossus appears at the mansion carrying a wounded and helpless Callisto, who then wakes up and points everybody (back) to the Gene Nation schlemiels. That doesn't line up with what we see here-- in fact we get the opposite, as we begin with a very vulnerable, very open Colossus being found and rescued by a Callisto literally shrouded in armor:  Indulge me a second and let's look at this page. Colossus' pose is very interesting. For one thing, the way Kubert renders the snow he's buried in as just blank space creates the effect of his body being shattered or dismembered. Chunks of his arms gone, the palm of his hand.... his entire crotch. It's an effect of terrible violence as well as one of rather on-the-nose emasculation. That bears out. His pose is what in a Jim Lee or Marc Silvestri comic might read as "damsely." He's splayed, he's exposed, with tears in the fabric over his pectoral muscles, one hand almost coquettishly poised on the cusp of his groin, lips parted. He's lying there like a big metal hybrid of Witchblade and St. Sebastian-- not a pose we're used to seeing Colossus in, for all of the lushness and softness Claremont imbued him with. Callisto, already familiar to readers as a hard, punky character, is looming over him, completely covered in androgynous battle armor, clutching in both hands a kind of sci-fi battlestaff pulsing with purple energy. It's not subtle, and even though at this point this character is not revealed as Callisto, the spectre of the late Claremont era, which teased a thwarted post-Siege Perilous sexual tension between the two after Piotr is remolded as an artist, fleshly and sensitive, hovers over this entire issue. I think it's very cool. Of course they then immediately fight for one hectic double splash, which ends with Colossus being almost effortlessly conked out by an energy blast. Once again, he takes the submissive position, while also being glossed as stubborn and rigid. The lady's trying to save his life and all he can do is lash out and bellow about Magneto-- his conversion into Acolyte metastasized as a tragic inability to think or compromise. She's saving him from his heel turn by reminding him of his softness, as I read it. Which is maybe imposing too much on Nicieza, but the reading is possible which interests me a lot more than Lobdell's method of having characters just bloviate. Meanwhile Xavier is still trying to make psychic contact with Scott and Jean, but is having an extraordinarily difficult time with it:  It turns out that there is some kind of traumatic psychic interference futzing with his ability to skim over the world's thoughts. We can surmise that this is Genocide although a footnote reminds us that he also currently doesn't have access to Cerebro, which was destroyed during the Phalanx Covenent. Amelia Voght, his ex-lover and former Acolyte seems skeptical that just bashing his mind against the wall will result in anything. She seems jaundiced in general-- she'd already given up on his dream, but now, standing there in his living room, seems equally worn down from chasing Magneto's. There's a theme in this issue about the fragility of macho stubborness and inability to admit when something's not working versus the strengths of suppleness and adaptability. The metal man is twisted and crumpled as a result of his inability to bend-- and, in another perhaps unintentional hint of what's to come, Professor X keeps tilting into this form of psychic self-mutilation rather than admit that he's over his head. But what's the alternative? Well: We discover via Bishop that Jean and Skids have landed more or less safe and sound and are currently being tended to by Psylocke, but Cyclops is totally off the grid. So cut to Scott in the Australian Outback with a gaggle of Acolytes. Look, cards on the table, I love Scott Summers. He's my favorite comic book character and while I do not own a lot of comic book related knick-knacks and trinkets I am proud to have him on my desk grimacing and clenching.  This is in part a new-found love, based on the critic Jay Edidin's reading of him as if not textually trans and neuroatypical than at least kind of a spiritual beacon to him as a trans and neuroatypical writer. It was one of those lightbulb moments where another writer's passion for a character totally illuminated that character for me. And I think so much of Edidin's reading of Scott makes sense-- he fills a narratively kind of isometric role oftentimes with Mr. Fantastic and Captain America but he's really, really not like Mr. Fantastic and Captain America. He's boyish, slight-- under the pencil of writers like Paul Smith more like the pre-serum Steve Rogers than the buff demigod we're more used to looking at. He's nebbishy and neurotic, he's prone to becoming bewildered and overwhelmed when he can't exercise his preference for rules and rituals, he's terrified of his powers' innate dangerous jouissance. In some lights he's a failure of masculinity, he's a travesty of the male Team Leader archetype. But that's where his strength is-- his ability to see beyond and around the narrative possibilities of that archetype. Reed Richards, for all his intentions to "solve everything" would never cook up a Krakoa or a Utopia. Mr. Fantastic would never hatch a Phoenix Egg. Scott is at odds with his own genre, experiencing what I might call a sort of narrative dysphoria, and like many trans people who learn how to segue their sense of unease and disidentification into a purer and stronger new mode of subjectivity, the best Cyclops stories see him reckoning with his shortcomings within the conventional superhero story and figuring out a way to turn them into a different kind of story more suited to his abilities. So you know, I'm sure Fabian Nicieza as much as I love him did not sit down in 1995 and crack his knuckles and say "ok let's queer this poo poo up" but if you are, like me, prowling around the canon with a magnifying glass trying to eke out queer readings of the X-Men by hook or by crook this is a very fun arc indeed. Because hot off the heels of seeing the failures of Colossus and Xavier as men insistent on hewing to their old methods in the face of repeated failure, we find Scott leading a group of folks who were trying to kill him 20 short pages ago, putting aside the fighting and the misunderstandings to just get everybody home safe. It's a drastic turnaround and a very very neat narrative jolt.  Indeed our first look at him in this issue is using his powers for something other than fighting and attacking, a conspicuously rare thing in 90s X-comics. He's not using them for basketball or baseball either, but leveraging them as a means of providing nourishment. This is a big thing for Scott, whose big Marvel Neurosis for a long time was feeling burdened with a gaze that killed, an inability to see his powers as anything but a loaded gun he didn't want to be charged with. So saving people, feeding people, nourishing people with his eyes-- turning them into an apparatus of care-- is very very cool to me, even if Nicieza doesn't play it as a big moment necessarily. I want to go off the deep end again and point out that the Outback is a significant place in X-Men history--- the Claremont team spent #229-250 there in an era I personally find very thrilling and well put together, an era in which they all kind of accidentally break down the conventions of the superhero team and meander around trying (and mostly failing) to build something different. It's really great. But notably, Scott was not there for it-- however, his neglected wife Maddie was. So this issue finds him in a space that has some big emotional baggage. It's a reminder of the period in which he was not with his team, in which they formed bonds and rivalries and romances without him, as well as, probably, his most stark moral failure, notably his abysmal treatment of Madelyn Pryor. Again, Nicieza doesn't make a big deal out of this, but I think it's kind of haunting the entire issue. Back to it, we see some schisms emerging in the Acolytes. Frenzy and Uniscione are happy to put aside their differences and follow the guy who seems to have any idea of what he's doing, while the Kleinstock brothers, two beefy guys with the ability to fuse into each other, are having none of it. This is notable in particular for Frenzy, Joanna Cargill, who as a member of the Alliance of Evil was a recurring if not major X-Factor enemy during the Original Five era. Next we see a little bit more of the juxtaposition between Scott's leadership style and whatever it was that the Acolytes were accustomed to. Scanner, a woman who can turn into a kind of electronic ghost and fly around, has been sent forth on a recon mission which leaves her exhausted. There's some back and forth over whether Scott is pushing them too hard, but he insists that he knows the team's limits.  I think an objection could be raised that like-- how the gently caress does he know these peoples' limits? He's been working with them for like a day and has fought them maybe... I don't know.... three times? But Nicieza's point, I think, is that he is challenging them but not breaking their backs. They'd labored for a long time until complete dogshit leadership after all. Fabian Cortez was a psychopath who could bolster their powers as a kind of crutch, while Exodus was so powerful and so zealous that as we saw in the past two issues the rest of the group was kind of just vestigial. They're being asked to be resourceful for the first time in awhile and it isn't fun. Nicieza seems pretty intent on drawing a sharp contrast between the maladaptive leadership the Acolytes were used to and Cyclops' way-- one which can adapt and evolve.  Meanwhile Xavier is not doing so hot. We learn that he's slept eight hours over the past four days, the kind of overexertion that will eventually (the story will insist) lead to Onslaught. But he's also learning to bend. He reveals to Voight that he knows that her natural state is the psychic mist he can turn into, and asks her to help him turn into a being of psychic energy so he can... I guess find Cyclops better. It doesn't make a ton of sense and is a classic Nicieza bit of "I'll make up a maguffin to get to the character beat I want," which he at least does a lot better than Lobdell. Xavier is yielding, he's asking for help, and he's literally willing to compromise his integrity to do so. Narratively, Scott is rubbing off on the rest of the book.  However it doesn't work, because of the interference of whatever powerful psychic entity was screwing around earlier. That's ok though, because ring ring, Cyclops and the Acolytes have made it to the abandoned village that was previously the X-Men's hideout, and have accessed their old comm systems. They're safe and the Acolytes are willing to turn themselves in in exchange for rescue. There's a little stinger about the base having been in recent use-- I honestly do not remember if this pans out at all. I know there was a 1993 Wolverine arc (Wolverine #72-74) where he and Jubilee go back and poke around and fight some Sentinels, but I'm not sure if this is just a nod to that or what. Amelia Voight turns back into a mist and leaves, unable to commit to helping the X-Men full-time, while Callisto schleps Colossus to an old Arctic Magneto base where robots patch him up. She reveals herself and makes Colossus a stirring offer that turns out to not have anything at all to do with Uncanny #325 so OH WELL.  It really is kind of jarring how poorly this leads into #325. Here, a strong and determined Callisto is dead-set on enlisting the X-Men to save the world. In #325, she's unconscious and helpless and needs help preventing Marrow from eating a bomb or whatever. So-- a bit of a let down made even more stark by the Road to Onslaught TBP's weird structure. But let's not let Lobdell spoil this moment because this was a really, really lovely little arc. We got some much needed development for the Acolytes (there was also some charming work done on them over in Cable, RIP Milan), saw some tight, character focused action with a novel premise and a refreshingly non-fight-based resolution, and some very nice art. We're left with the hook of where the hell Magneto wound up in all of this, which will be returned to soon, for better or worse, kicking off the disastrous Joseph subplot, but again, let's just enjoy the warm glow. These were good issues and if you ever see them languishing in the quarter bin I think they're worth picking up. Next: Gambit! Rogue! And the start of a two-issue rock block of Mr. Sinister! How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 16:41 on Jun 23, 2021 |
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Jun 23, 2021 16:38
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Sounds like those could have been nice to have in the Road to Onslaught TPBS since they sound like they certainly set us on a road to Onslaught, but sadly they had to make room for execrably stupid Terry Kavanagh X-Men Unlimited inventory stories.
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Jun 23, 2021 19:33
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Ok, X-Men #45, October 1995. This is another double-sized anniversary issue, like Uncanny #325. The thing about these double-sized issues is that they really, really play up the differences between Lobdell and Nicieza. Lobdell is about stringing together a handful of high-impact moments, whether on the level of a page or a scene or even a single panel. For better or worse he's a very splash-friendly writer, because, like Jeph Loeb on one end of the scale or, to be honest, I'd even say people like Walt Simonson or even Kirby on the other, I feel like he understands the basic tempo of the 22-page superhero comics as a series of accelerations leading to jawdropping, suspended moments of spectacle, followed by another acceleration. Obviously some of the people I've named are better at this style of story-telling than others (hint: it's the two that actually know how to draw as well as write) but whatever, it's a perfectly valid way of approaching the very peculiar form of the single superhero comic book issue. The point being, it makes his books read very fast-- even his down-time issues, which can tend towards the talky, because even the more overstuffed word bubbles are about building momentum and then delivering little pops of catharsis. Nicieza is different, and if his writing has never really synched up with the times in such a way to be "stylish," I think his brand of narrative hyper-density in the mid and late 90s could certainly be seen as informing the way that some writers began to approach the form in the aughts and beyond-- I guess people normally cite Morrison for this kind of thing, but let's be honest, Morrison is doing something quite different. People like Si Spurrier, Al Ewing, Kieren Gillen-- every panel matters, every scene demands the reader's attention, and as a result reading a single issue is less like slurping down a bowl of soup soup and more like thoughtfully chewing on a big portabella. Which is to say I've put off writing this entry because this issue feels long. It is saying a lot, which is discouraging because in keeping with the loosey-goosey 90s approach to continuity and long-term planning, a lot of what it's saying is fraught with meaning that never pays off, really. As is to be expected with... pretty much any pre-Gillen appearance of Mr. Sinister. It is also Fabian Nicieza's last issue of the title, a kind of ignominious end to a run that never really saw him given the respect or breathing rooming I think he deserved. He was brought in with issue #12 following the departure of Jim Lee as writer/co-plotter (with Lobdell)-- a sensible pick, since he'd also successfully segued X-Force into stability post-Liefeld-- and chugged along in the interim during a very very thankless period. Per Nicieza: quote:"I never wanted to leave that title, and never felt my firing was justified. ... I don't recall being given a reason, and I also don't recall asking for one. ... Considering it was a Top 10 selling title at the time, I felt it was a wholly unjustified decision" quote:RV: What do you consider your seminal work? The one book you feel most readers probably immediately associate with the name Fabian Nicieza. Tell me about that work, and how you feel about it today. So there's a lot of bathos. Nicieza is laying crumbs that he will never get to follow up on, and the plots that are seeded here are eventually dropped or fumbled by other writers. But on a moment to moment level it works. He respects the issues that have come before him, does some great work with Rogue and Bobby. It's a weird teaser of hypothetical good X-Men issues that never got written. After this we have 5 issues in which Lobdell is writing both titles, and then Mark Waid comes in with #51, where he will stay until #55, a brief and tumultuous run distinguished by editorial mandates and creative clashes. Lobdell would then plot and co-write both titles through to 1998, assisted by perpetual journeymen Ralph Macchio and Ben Raab. Oh well. Nobody ever said the Onslaught era was actually good I guess. But on its own...this is a good issue. We begin with another gatefold cover, drawn by Andy Kubert:  This is a nice pinup but also a crisp hint to the distinction between this and #325. While the Uncanny anniversary issue was a big team vs. team fight with a jam-packed cover, this is just four characters-- Iceman, Rogue, and Gambit, with Sinister kind of looming in the background. Which is about accurate. This issue is not a subtle character study, but it is a character study, and wisely hones in on these three particular X-Men and the complicated tensions that have been building up between them. Bobby and Rogue are still on their field trip, heading inexorably to Seattle, where Rogue hopes to follow a mysterious lead from her brief absorptive contact with Gambit. We open with her freaking out and attacking Bobby, who it appears has become a bit of a nudzh in the car. It's really just a pretense for Kuburt to draw some cool shots of their powers, and to reiterate that something is wrong with Rogue-- something that is making her erratic, and which she wants to get to the bottom of. Significantly, we also get to see Kubert kind of experimenting with new ways to show Bobby's powers-- a pay-off to the long simmering subplot about Emma Frost tapping into his potential, as well as a nod to his more spiky and powerful AoA incarnation.  In particular I think this page, in which he becomes a kind of wedge-shaped ice pillar in order to rise up and talk to a hovering Rogue, is effective and strange without downplaying the humanity of the scene.  Meanwhile Gambit is already in Seattle, hoping to pre-empt Rogue from discovering whatever it is she's trying to discover (again, this will all pay off... sort of... in UXM #350, although at this point it's very unclear to what extent that reveal has been pinned down). His thought captions are, weirdly, arranged like scattered playing cards. It makes him read like a lunatic, and I don't know how much that's intentional. He's certainly shown to be kind of riding the ragged edge of a panic attack, or something. He's looking and acting rough. Interestingly, while Rogue and Gambit are extravagantly freaking out and brooding in their own ways, perpetual underdog Bobby is shown to be quietly assuming a calming and bolstering influence. He defuses a situation in which Rogue almost absorbs some college kids out of boredom and frustration, and prevents a bar from collapsing when everybody else is just barging around. It's an interesting way to move past the melodrama surrounding him and Emma Frost and his untapped potential. While Lobdell seems to have wanted to keep mining the tension between Bobby and Emma and his neuroses, Nicieza seems to be saying-- yes, he's already there, not in showy or flashy ways, but he's using his powers confidently and creatively to solve problems. He just needed an occasion to rise to. I like it and I like the way it inflects the impulse-- an impulse I share-- to read pre-out Iceman stories as still reflective of a queer story or at least a story about a queer guy. It makes sense in that reading-- his normal X-Men milieu, his life at the mansion, was safe-- it didn't challenge him, it didn't give him any need to break out of his cozy role as the emotionally stunted prankster. It didn't make him ask hard questions about himself. But now he's growing a little bit, he's kind of just instinctively falling into newer, more sophisticated ways of acting and thinking. It really does work I think. Anyway, the straights are at it again, fighting each other, flying through ceilings and charging up their cards with explosive kinetic energy, mon ami. Bobby and Gambit are left earthbound as Rogue flies off-- so at least two of the pieces to get this story moving forward are together, while Rogue, now separated from her grounding influence, is flying around just careening towards the story's endgoal. Again-- just simple, sensible storytelling, reasonable decisions about who is in a scene with who and what and why people are doing, which is a huge breath of fresh air. In a one page cutaway we find Graydon Creed being encouraged to run for president in 1996 by a sinister guy named Clay who... as far as I can tell never shows up again. Oh well! I suppose we can just enjoy the sensible storytelling when we can get it. Anyway, Rogue follows her gut memories to an abandoned theater, where Gambit correctly predicts she'll be. Something very bad happened here, and while Rogue has not yet pieced it together, Gambit is terrified that she will. They all rendezvous and Rogue and Gambit have an actually pretty candid conversation about trust and intimacy while Iceman, I don't know, meanders around off panel. Since this is a 1995 X-Men comic, this soon descends into Rogue punching all sorts of things and inadvertently collapsing large chunks of theater around Gambit, giving Andy Kubert an opportunity to punctuate the relationship drama with pictures of flipping around and lunging and dodging and stuff.  Basically, the gist is-- Gambit is scared that his secret coming out will ruin not only his relationship with Rogue, but his entire second chance with the X-Men, his opportunity to reinvent himself as a hero. Rogue is scared of finding out his secret to, which exists in friction with her anger at him for so closely holding onto a secret, this huge wedge in their relationship. Essentially she makes the very reasonable point-- they can't have a relationship with this huge "I have a terrible secret and I'll never tell you" hanging over it. Intimacy issues aside, they can't begin to move forward without trust. It's an entirely sound way for a character respond to being in a will-they-won't-they thing with a brooding 90s Secrets guy. Gambit responds by doubling down and being a huge weirdo.  Ladies, don't let men taste your sadness unless they're willing to open up. Anyway, after dithering-- it's really made clear that Gambit is being kind of a hypocrite but is also deeply afraid of revealing himself, so it kind of holds together-- he takes his glove off and offers to let Rogue absorb his memories again, to have access to all of his mind.  And she walks away. She gives a brief speech about her place in the X-Men, the version of herself that she saw as being made for Gambit, and decides to just leave it all behind for awhile, flying off. And in fact she will be gone from the main X-Men team for a bit-- aside from a guest appearance in X-Man #11 in January 1996, she's gone from comics entirely until X-Men #52, which shows her off doing her own thing, and then isn't really "with" the X-Men again until #55. So that's actually a pretty good, impactful gap, as far as dramatic team exits go. Bobby goes home, Gambit decides to linger in Seattle for a few days, recovering from getting beaten up and getting his head cleared. There's a brief scene of him coughing which... I imagine in 1995 would have set of Legacy Virus alarm bells? I did not read this in real time and in 1995 was not super tapped into fan culture, so maybe somebody else can chip in here. Anyway out of the shadows steps Mr. Sinister in full feather-cape mode, and we learn that he's central to whatever terrible backstory Gambit is hiding. Is he vague? Yes. Is he sinister?  Oh yes. So there we have it. A tight, structurally sound melodrama issue with nice art and good character moments. Gambit and Rogue both come off as impulsive and immature here-- Gambit much moreso-- but you know what, it works. They're both people with a poo poo ton of baggage that has, at this point, never really been resolved, so it's good to remember that these are really flawed characters who have a lot of emotional impediments between themselves and a healthy relationship. It all just makes sense and works. But you know... all good things must end and in X-Men #46 we have Lobdell doing the X-Babies so maybe just unbookmark this thread and go look at QCS or something and save yourselves the heartache. But next is X-Men Annual #95 featuring more Mr. Sinister, the late great John Paul Leon, and J.M. DeMatteis!
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Jul 7, 2021 16:17
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