tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-53960832790996123552024-02-07T03:19:41.531+00:00X-MarathonReading the X-Men from #1 to last week. Usually posts Thursdays.Abigail Bradyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13778135648601234140noreply@blogger.comBlogger347125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5396083279099612355.post-30711687394692275852017-01-04T14:56:00.001+00:002017-01-04T14:56:06.884+00:00My first full-length comic, Transrealities #1, is now <a href="https://www.comixology.com/Transrealities/digital-comic/443241?ref=c2VhcmNoL2luZGV4L2Rlc2t0b3Avc2xpZGVyTGlzdC90b3BSZXN1bHRzU2xpZGVy">available on Comixology</a>.Abigail Bradyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13778135648601234140noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5396083279099612355.post-8317392623692130072015-10-09T09:00:00.000+01:002015-10-09T09:00:12.567+01:00X-Factor #77-#78: Life is Lead Weights<i>X-Factor</i> #77-#78 does that thing that X-Factor is doing a lot in this run, of not being as good as it ought to be, as it could be. It brings in two new important ideas, but it fumbles at making a worthwhile story out of them.<br />
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Specifically, a scientist makes a deeply important discovery: locating the X-Gene. It turns from a notional thing thing that theoretically exists because we can observe that mutanthood is hereditary, and we know heredity happens through genes (although, in the real world in the 2010s, it looks like epigenetics plays a much larger part in development than we expected back then). Instead, we know where and what it is. And because you can see it, you can <i>test</i> for it. It then <i>immediately</i> raises the possibility on using this on foetuses. It doesn't mention the a-word exactly, but it does mention the rather less medically feasible but more palatable to its audience prospect of in-utero alteration to remove the X-Gene.<br />
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This isn't coming out of a vacuum, and it's not even being particularly anticipatory. This was published about the same time that the idea of a "gay gene" was first in the news, and the X-Gene in this story is barely even a metaphor. 23 years later, it has become apparent there is not a "gay gene" in that sense. There is no particular allele which causes homosexuality: the strongest factor in sexual orientation in men seems to be birth order. But there are plenty of other spheres where a minority community is facing an externally imposed "cure", i.e. what is basically eugenics. Your basic applicability remains.<br />
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Unfortunately, having all that potential resonance, the actual story that it hangs off this just isn't very good. It's a straightforward runaround where X-Factor have to defend the objectionable but perfectly law-abiding scientist, Doctor Tucker, from the Mutant Liberation Front. They fail, which is unusual, and presents a little grey, but it's all too convenient an escape route. Rahne makes sure the computer is destroyed, in the fight, leading to the only satisfying character moment in the entire story, but even that is underexplored. While we're supposed to imagine this will set back the research significantly, I'm not buying that. Even if Tucker hasn't published, someone else will do soon. The 1990s is Gene Finding time, and people will be finding genes.Abigail Bradyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13778135648601234140noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5396083279099612355.post-88071106966397776312015-03-17T09:00:00.000+00:002015-03-17T09:00:09.415+00:00X-Men #8/Ghost Rider #27-#28: Who ya gonna maul?<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So, this story, which covers the end of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">X-Men </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">#8, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ghost Rider</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> #26, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">X-Men </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">#9 and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ghost Rider </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">#27 is, you can probably guess from the start of that sentence, a crossover. Recently I started using a categorisation scheme for crossovers. No, I've explained it yet. Got to have some mystery, after all. This is a new type, a category I didn’t realise I’d needed. This is category WTF.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We've not met Ghost Rider yet in X-Men, so I shall maintain the conceit that this might be the only corner of the Marvel universe you've really heard of (like, seriously, why would you even be reading this if you aren’t a hardcore Marvel fan, I don’t know?) and introduce him. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ghost Rider </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is a title about a demonic spirit of vengeance that has possessed a biker, called Ghost Rider. He goes from town to town, righting wrongs and doing motorcycle tricks. Originally Ghost Rider's human host was Johnny Blaze, who starred in the series from 1972 to 1983. A relaunch in 1990 saw him replaced with Danny Ketch.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br class="kix-line-break" /></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br class="kix-line-break" /></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ghost Rider has little thematically in common with the X-Men, and the incongruity of this team-up is only multiplied by the identity of the enemy: the alien Brood. You know, nudge nudge, the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">alien</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Brood, making their return to X-Men after a protracted absence, at more or less exactly the same time that </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Alien 3</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> came out. So, we have a literal Hell's Angel teaming up with a group of people who represent the next stage in human evolution, to fight a bunch of body-horror monsters from space. And that's not even what the story is really </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">about</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br class="kix-line-break" /></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br class="kix-line-break" /></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What it's about is Gambit, and his background. We know very little of him. He rescued Storm and has been sort of hanging around ever since, earning the trust of the X-Men through his actions in combat. This works out quite well for him when his wife turns up at the end of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">X-Men </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">#7. She arrives with a problem, specifically that his backstory is unravelling. See, it turns out that Gambit is from the LeBeau crime family (called the Thieves' Guild, presumably because some LeBeau senior had read too much David Eddings), and his wife, Bella Donna, is from their rivals, the Boudreaux clan, also known as the Assassins' Guild (which is, if anything, even less plausible than the Thieves' Guilds because you just wouldn't get enough trade. Real life crime families tend to stick to more reliable flows of income, whether that be drugs, or rent-collection). But in they're not a Romeo-and-Juliet. Instead, it goes for the second most obvious direction you could take that - they were betrothed to each other to seal a peace deal. This all went fine (they did like each other) until Bella Donna's brother objected, forcefully, leading to Gambit having to a) kill him and b) go into exile. This gives Gambit a background that would make him a passable character in a work of adventure fiction even if he hadn't turned out to be a mutant with kinetopyrotic or whatever powers. (There's no indication as to whether Gambit had his powers back then. It makes a point that Bella Donna didn't have hers)</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br class="kix-line-break" /></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br class="kix-line-break" /></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So, Gambit is able to persuade the X-Men, or at least those of them who see the X-Men uniform as blue (so, Cyclops, Wolverine, Beast, Rogue, Psylocke and Jubilee) to accompany him back to New Orleans to sort out whatever is threatening the peace between the two families. They do so by car, with the scripter of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ghost Rider </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">#27 snarking at the plotter for failing to draw the Blackbird. (The credits have only a writer/artist split here, but I reckon I can see an invisible spaceship when it's not there.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br class="kix-line-break" /></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">On arrival they faff around for some time and then try a sneak frontal attack on the Assassins's Guild. There they discover Jean Martine and Michelle, a married couple from Gambit's faction of the New Orleans LARP community, the latest in the line of victims of the Brood-possessed Assassins. This is not the Brood’s usual M.O. - they’re assimilators not killers, but it can't just get the puppets these days, and it's agent has its own agenda. Oops? Anyway, this is nothing compared to its real secret weapon, a Brood-assimilated Ghost Rider.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The X-Men immediately know who Ghost Rider is (although as far as I can tell none of the members of this half of the gang have actually met him before - I guess they have heard tales from Iceman and Angel, who had been in the Champions with him back in the 1970s, and are obviously more rubbish because they see the dress as gold). Ghost Rider's attack separates them, and Gambit and Bella Donna have a long-awaited conversation about Gambit leaving. Gambit ducked off quite precipitously, without even asking Bella Donna to to with him, something that she, unremarkably, holds against him.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Because that’s the type of guy Gambit is. Fuck him. Actually, no, don’t fuck him. Of him and Rogue </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">he’s</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> the most dangerous to touch, because he’ll bugger off the moment you let you inside. That’s why he’s into Rogue so much, he’s never going to have the ugly physical and emotional reality of her to deal with, he can just continue to hit on her without any thought of the consequences. I’ve known people like Gambit. So have you. They are shits. We love them anyway, damn it.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Bella Donna ends up fridged. I know, right? Didn’t see that one coming, did you? Elsewhere, we get some excellent banter (god, dare I call it that? but that’s what it is) between Logan and Hank, and really difficult scenes between Betsy and Scott that I don’t understand what the fuck they were thinking. Scott needs a sustained period of not being written as a monster.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 18.8181819915772px; white-space: pre-wrap;">I'm off to San Francisco tomorrow. I'm there for a week and then I'll be going to Seattle for ECCC. If anyone's there and wants to meet up, drop me a line. I've scheduled posts for while I'm gone.</span></span></div>
Abigail Bradyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13778135648601234140noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5396083279099612355.post-46057354132758828702015-03-10T09:00:00.000+00:002015-03-10T09:00:10.241+00:00Uncanny X-Men #287/X-Men #8: Bishop's GambitThese two issues are both plotted by Jim Lee, and scripted by Scott Lobdell. Despite this they tie in quite well to each other, and are basically a two-issue story split across the titles.<br />
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The main focus is Bishop. I still don't really see the point of Bishop - I suspect I never will. We see a bit more of his backstory (or, forestory, I suppose I should say), both the immediate events leading up to the hot pursuit of Fitzroy across timezones. His attempt to confront a group of remaining time criminals ends with him getting his mates Malcolm and Randall killed. (Can I just say how lucky is it that the one of them left alive was called "Bishop", by the way, can you imagine the new X-Man being called "Malcolm"? Oh god, I wrote that sentence with the intent to mock it as a bit of a boring name, but then I realised... Malcolm X). The X-Men turn up well after the nick of time. Bishop still thinks something is wrong with them, largely on account of their "don't be evil" policy, what with him coming from a time in the far future, well after their IPO.<br />
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And after their fall. Our flashbacks result in a future timeline like this:<br />
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<li>1992: "now"</li>
<li>the X-Men are betrayed and fall</li>
<li>the emancipation</li>
<li>2060 : XSE formed, based on the X-Men ("thirty years of peace")</li>
<li>2090: Bishop's time (just short of a a century)</li>
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At this point it is still possible to reconcile Bishop's timeline with the future that Rachel Summers comes from. We can read the Great Betrayal as the same incident depicted in <i><a href="http://x-marathon.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/uncanny-x-men-186-188-life-death-and.html">Uncanny X-Men 188</a>.</i></div>
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This moves into a more oblique fragment about the last man to see the X-Men alive: a wizened future bloke called "LeBeau", aka "The Witness". In all my reading, oddly, this is possibly the first time I feel that a surprise has been properly spoiled by my basic foreknowledge. I knew this was Gambit, you see. Or at least, I knew there was a very good chance it was Gambit, because LeBeau is his surname - but this is a name that has not actually been attached to Gambit the character yet. In Claremont's <i>X-Men Forever</i>, he ends up as Remy Picard, instead.</div>
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All a good bit of flashbacking, Bishop comes around in the X-Men's care, has a quick side-meeting with Xavier and is then introduced as the latest member of the X-Men, I guess because Xavier has got a reputation of dickery to maintain. BELIEVE IT OR NOT, the other X-Men are not terribly impressed, a fact that is not changed when Bishop accuses Gambit of being the LeBeau (myth confirmed) and being a future traitor (myth unclear). Everyone vouches for Gambit, which is funny because although he has yet to become the future traitor (and might not yet because of how prophecy works), he is secretly an actual traitor already, as he will later be retconned into organising the Mutant Massacre. Bishop was right!</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhX5PFgHdXWJOpBp2pt6C7F1CaLfOgiFA0HgrYp_5CafwbZMnFJFUnwi9WmuJ_lVxDtxVBwWvq2S4W3qa8_ECakn6n9BiGgUde7oE-UREtB0CI_l2DvYEa6T70KKZWxIccWJzZgLTyYnKQ/s1600/2015-03-03+00.32.18.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhX5PFgHdXWJOpBp2pt6C7F1CaLfOgiFA0HgrYp_5CafwbZMnFJFUnwi9WmuJ_lVxDtxVBwWvq2S4W3qa8_ECakn6n9BiGgUde7oE-UREtB0CI_l2DvYEa6T70KKZWxIccWJzZgLTyYnKQ/s1600/2015-03-03+00.32.18.png" height="320" width="240" /></a>Now, this is the part I guess where it becomes obvious that Jim Lee is plotting this issue because it is literally right at that moment that Jean Grey suggests they all go for their picnic. I've illustrated the picnic with a rare full-page quote, to the right here. I do not need to explain what is wrong with this, do I? Oh? I might as well? Well, it is the most gratuitously sexualised piece of art in X-Men thus far. It explicitly presents the male gaze - Cyclops's eye movements are followed, and he's almost mesmerised by this woman appearing partly-clothed in his view. And it doesn't even make sense in context - a promising everyone argument was interrupted to bring us this sequence.<br />
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Because it's not just this. There's more, including Gambit creepily hitting on Rogue. The way he is behaving here is appalling, he repeatedly violates boundaries that Rogue has tried to set about her not wanting to be touched. This isn't just a "oh, I'm willing to take that risk" thing on Gambit's part. Rogue has only recently got rid of the Carol Danvers within her - and the last thing she wants now is another resident in her cranium. Touching her is dangerous for Gambit but also <i>for her</i>, and it is against her repeatedly expressed wishes. But obviously this is not how we are supposed to read it. Instead, it's supposed to be romantic. Rogue defends him against Bishop (she had her own issues with being trusted, I guess), and spends lots of time preparing food for him at the picnic (4 hours cooking, she says, which is surely a bit try-hard!) But honestly I just want her to be able to get rid of this creep.<br />
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And then Gambit's wife turns up. Of which more later.</div>
Abigail Bradyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13778135648601234140noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5396083279099612355.post-62988326470875006622015-03-05T09:00:00.000+00:002015-10-15T11:05:58.373+01:00Hulk #391/X-Factor #76/Hulk #392: What's Green and Clever?<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0980392); background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.701961); font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; text-decoration: -webkit-letterpress;">There are several types of comics crossovers, and </span><i style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0980392); background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.701961); font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">Incredible Hulk</i><span style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0980392); background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.701961); font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; text-decoration: -webkit-letterpress;"> crossing into </span><i style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0980392); background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.701961); font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">X-Factor</i><span style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0980392); background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.701961); font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; text-decoration: -webkit-letterpress;"> here is a Type C: books written by same person. Peter David isn't much one for Type A or B crossovers, it appears, but he'll do a Type C every so often. In </span><i style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0980392); background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.701961); font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">Incredible Hulk</i><span style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0980392); background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.701961); font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; text-decoration: -webkit-letterpress;">, well, when was the last time we checked in on that? A shocking </span><a href="http://x-marathon.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/incredible-hulk-150.html" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0980392); background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">20 years ago</a><span style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0980392); background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.701961); font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; text-decoration: -webkit-letterpress;">. A lot has changed in </span><i style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0980392); background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.701961); font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">Hulk</i><span style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0980392); background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.701961); font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; text-decoration: -webkit-letterpress;"> since then, by any normal standards, but this is an X-Men review blog, and Hulk here now being the "Doc", who combines Bruce's personality and intelligence with Hulk's physicality, is nothing. In case we've missed it, this is all happily exposited to us (and X-Factor) by Zack Galvin and Val Cooper.</span></span><br />
<div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Hulk and X-Factor clash on opposing sides in a civil conflict in Trans-Sabal, a morally dubious US ally, with Hulk on the side of the rebel Pantheon and X-Factor being brought in by the American government. This a great premise for an X-Men story, but there hadn't been an opportunity to do it between the end of that early situation in the first few issues, where it seemed the X-Men were working for the government, and thr establishment of Val Cooper's X-Factor team.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Incredible Hulk 391 builds towards and ends with a confrontation between Havok and Hulk, which ends badly for both parties. While this is ostensibly a three part story with the X-Factor issue forming the middle chapter, neither Havok nor Hulk appear, them having been blown clean away. Instead, this middle chapter has more general team vs team fight, and a strand where Wolfsbane is captured by brother-and-sister supporters of Farnoq Dahn. This can be omitted if you are just reading Hulk, but probably suffers when read in isolation. Hulk 392 dispenses with any pretence at moral ambiguity, and avoids the need for X-Factor to turn against the government by having Dahn become a moustache-twirling villain who has literally strapped children to missiles and drugged American advisors into compliance.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">He's also strapped Havok to a missile, planning to use his explosive force, which I take with some level of humour, reading this issue in the same day of the Pope's supposed claims that trans people (my default metaphor for the x-men, obviously) are as contrary to the natural order of things as nuclear weapons. Would you believe it, he gets foiled? This would be better if it had the guts to be as incendiary as that missile, but it's going in the right direction.</span></div>
</div>
Abigail Bradyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13778135648601234140noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5396083279099612355.post-20090379580818134762015-03-03T09:00:00.000+00:002015-03-03T09:00:08.670+00:00X-Factor #74-#75: Geecee Deecee<i>X-Factor</i> #74-#75 continues lacklustre, which by the standards of X-titles in early 1992 is pretty good. We've one ongoing plot to resolve: the question of Who Is The Real Madrox Anyway? This is answered, somewhat unsatisfactorily, by the assumption that the Madrox who had had <a href="http://x-marathon.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/fallen-angels-1-8-original-misfits.html">Fallen Angels</a> happen to him was the real one. This, though is the "wrong" Madrox, the evil one, who is in some kind of complicated conspiracy with Mr. Sinister to discredit mutant-hater or something. Yes, for it's 75th issue, X-Factor has got as overcomplicated as it was when it began! Possibly coming to this contextless after a year was a mistake. ANYWAY. Short post, I know. There'll be another one sooner than a week, I expect.<br />
<br />
I liked the bit where the Washington Memorial gets destroyed, though. I wonder if I should start a list of all the buildings to have been destroyed in the Marvel universe.Abigail Bradyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13778135648601234140noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5396083279099612355.post-31652971287306055332015-02-26T10:00:00.000+00:002015-02-26T10:00:01.842+00:00Uncanny X-Men #284-#286: There Lived a Certain Man in Russia Long Ago<i>Uncanny X-Men </i>#284 is more literate than I was expecting. It opens with a potted summary of the dispute between Japan and Russia over <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sakhalin">Sakhalin</a>. Some Russians, and then Sunfire, and then the X-Men all deal with this threat there, which turns out to be a kind of portal into a pocket universe occupied by human-looking aliens with boring factional disputes which turns out to be in danger of colliding into our world, destroying both (shades of Hickman's <i>Avengers</i>), and in which Colossus is heralded as a Messiah (shades of Whedon's <i>Unstoppable</i>).<br />
<br />
This is all set-up for the real reveal, at the end of #285, where we meet Colossus's brother, Mikhail, who has been stuck in this dimension for some unspecified but long time. He'd been mentioned in <i>Uncanny </i>#99, as having died in a space launch accident. In #286 we find that was a cover-up, to conceal the fact that the Soviet government know that Mikhail was a mutant. This is not really satisfactorily handled, and the only honest emotional beat that's comes near to the issue is Mikhail's surprise at having a sister, and Colossus's genuine inability to explain the horrors to which she has been subject. There's all sorts of fridge logic that you can apply to this, but it's just the first issue of Mikhail's "return", and none of it is harsher than the point that surely we should have had some more significant mention of Mikhail in the last few issues if we're now expected to buy it as a big deal. I imagine half the readership at this point didn't even know he was an existing (of sorts) character.<br />
<br />
The B-plot is the adventures of Bishop. Like it's done before, an X-Men title is here anticipating a successful live-action time travel series. Unfortunately, rather than anticipating something like <i>Terminator 2</i> again, here it brings us <i>Time Trax</i>, a couple of years early. Oh well.Abigail Bradyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13778135648601234140noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5396083279099612355.post-69437142094422327242015-02-19T09:00:00.000+00:002015-02-19T09:00:00.106+00:00X-Men #4-#7: Omega Red<i>X-Men</i>'s second arc, from #4 to #7 is a story immediately following up the business of Team X introduced in Wolverine #48-#50. After a first issue with some characterisation of the team (including an attempt by Gambit to kiss Rogue... Oh, god, that's gone beyond creepy into assaulty please stop), we get some fighting with a Mysterious Enemy from Wolverine's Past story.<br />
<br />
But it turns out that the Weapon X and Team X stuff has given some emotional weight to this. Not very much, admittedly, but it's there. There's a connection, not just to some braggart's past of the sort that featured in his solo, but to something that actually <i>mattered</i> to his life, that time when he teamed up with his archenemy and his dead lover.<br />
<br />
They fought Omega Red back in the day, we're told, and he's back. Omega Red is a post-Cold War creation, one of the first to be retroactively created as a legacy of that. We've had a rather more prominent example of that lately - the Winter Soldier. While the Cold War was active, Marvel Comics seem to have steered away from telling straight red vs blue spy stories, instead choosing to dress them up in allegory. But now, with it over, it's free to tell to the types of stories it thinks ought to have existed, while blatantly foregrounding the fact that it is a relic (a line about "United Germany" here. The contemporaneous story in <i>Uncanny X-Men </i>also deals with a retconned Cold War legacy hero of sorts, Mikhail Rasputin, who has a line about how strange American/Russian/Japanese cooperation is.) Curiously, it asserts that Omega Red "was to be the world's first super soldier", despite his cold war (and thus post-Captain America) origins. For that matter, isn't Wolverine himself a prior example? Eh.<br />
<br />
Omega Red kidnaps Wolverine, to extract from him the location of something called a "carbonadium synthesizer", which makes a sort of Waitrose Essentials adamantium without with Omega Red will die, and so plots to torture the world's most torture-proof man until he gives it up. That works out about as well as you might expect. (Most of the arc is much as you might expect.) We get a fairly entertaining action sequence right at the end with Logan and Besty kicking ass, which is only mildly less objectifying of Psylocke than the gratuitous swimsuit panels in #4 ("I was in the pool", my arse).<br />
<br />
I stopped here for a while. I can see why. It is only grim determination that has made me resume.Abigail Bradyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13778135648601234140noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5396083279099612355.post-9428595763053657472014-10-10T14:45:00.001+01:002014-10-10T14:45:08.023+01:00Uncanny X-Men #282-#283: BishopThe best bit of <i>Uncanny X-Men</i> #282 is, without a doubt, the editorial note on Storm's explanation of #281. It says "Not quite what you saw last issue, but take our word for it! It's what happened!" The sheer cheek in contradicting <i>in a footnote</i> something that happened <i>last issue</i>, which had the <i>same creative team</i>. Such retcon. So editing. Very together. Wow. This gives an indication of the chaos that we know was going on at the X-office at that time - compared to the sheer cheek of this footnote the mere fact that Tarot dies twice - once in #281 and then again #282 is hardly worth mentioning.<br />
<br />
In other inconsistent mortality news, it turns out that Jean Grey <i>is not really dead</i>, she psychically transferred herself to Emma Frost. This is fairly impressive - Emma Frost herself had needed a device to do a similar consciousness transfer back in <a href="http://x-marathon.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/uncanny-x-men-151-152-loss-of-pryde.html">Uncanny #151/#152</a>. It perhaps helps that Frost is dead as well, something else that obviously doesn't stick. Xavier remarks on this in #283, possibly another piece of evidence of pantseat-fixups. But at least that's better than pantseat-mess. Er, perhaps I had better stop with the metaphors.<br />
<br />
Anyway, into this very 1981 situation comes Trevor Fitzroy and Bishop. Fitzroy is a criminal from the future that Time Cop Bishop is chasing. Actually, that's not quite true. It turns out Bishop isn't a Time Cop, he's just in hot pursuit to wherever Fitzroy has gone, and that happens to be the past. What we know about him (and his little squad: he is accompanied by Malcolm and Randall) is limited, but we can see he is part of the Xavier School Enforcers, some kind of future paramilitary off-shoot of the X-Men; and he has an 'M' tattooed (?) around his right eye. He thinks the X-Men are impostors of what he regards as almost mythical founding figures, citing discrepancies such as Archangel's status for his disbelief. Curiously, the answers to these, and further development of Bishop's background is going to wait a long time. It isn't until David's second <i>X-Factor</i> run, in the noughties, that we will see the Summers Rebellion. Bishop ends up being used just as a big man with a gun, which is probably just as well because there's not enough basic narrative coherence here to do an intricate timeline-based plot.Abigail Bradyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13778135648601234140noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5396083279099612355.post-81229157153784888642014-04-10T12:20:00.002+01:002014-04-10T12:20:41.010+01:00Wolverine #48-#50: Shiva Scenario<i>Wolverine</i> #48-#50 is a direct and immediate sequel to the Weapon X storyline in Marvel Comics Presents. It is predominantly set, real or imagined, in two Canadian locations: the Albertan facility that Weapon X was shown to operate in. He arrives at this in #4, more or less as we were expecting, along with keys left in his Lotus. He gets flashbacks, both to the actual events of the miniseries and to a strange buddy cop movie about him and Sabretooth, but doesn't investigate too far into the complex. The flashbacks continue into #49. Some of them are to a strange buddy cop movie starring him and Sabretooth.<br />
<br />
I'm not even really kidding about it being a movie. In a warehouse in Detroit he finds the sets. For the buddy cop movie, for the <a href="http://x-marathon.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/wolverine-10-what-day-is-today-its.html">incident with Silver Fox in #10</a>, and for a variety of other locations. Logan's memories are contradictory. He remembers Sabretooth killing Silver Fox, he remembers the cabin they had; but he also remembers fighting her many decades later.<br />
<br />
We know less about Wolverine at the end of this arc than we did at the beginning. We can't trust what we thought we did know. Neither can Logan. His few fragments have been shattered. He hopes the cabin was real - his <i>first love</i> was real, but if the evidence is simply <i>not</i> finding the set where it had been faked, ouch.<br />
<br />
There's fighting. In his stealth-free recon Wolverine alerted Hines and the Professor to activate the "Shiva Project", which turns out to be a giant robot pretending to be Shiva the Destroyer. Not quite sure why that is, but hey. Shiva has a list of targets to elimate in order: Wolverine, Sabretooth, Fox, Kestrel, Vole, Mastodon and Wildcat. While that is happening, Silver Fox, who is leader of HYDRA, goes after Hines and the Professor, as revenge for the same thing happening to her. Eventually Fox kills the Professor, who sets the robot on the next target, Sabretooth.<br />
<br />
This is all very puzzling. Silver Fox really <i>did</i> survive #10, which cheapens it and the Wolverine/Sabretooth feud. And if all these are false memories of Wolverine, why doesn't he remember them? What happened to make him break that conditioning in the first place? To make him leave that "Team X" (name still not yet given) and end up in Canadia working for Department H? Is there any larger sense to be made here or what?Abigail Bradyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13778135648601234140noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5396083279099612355.post-27723414072516040972014-04-07T14:13:00.000+01:002014-04-07T14:13:18.794+01:00A Comic by me and PippaI've been quite ill for the last week and a half (improving now), so forgot to link to the <a href="http://wegeekedthis.com/the-intersectionality-issue-extras/">comic me and Pippa Ashton did</a> for Geeked Magazine. It didn't quite make it into <a href="http://issuu.com/geekedmagazine/docs/issue_6">the magazine itself</a>, which is well worth reading, being about intersectionalinity, innit. We hope to do more in the future.Abigail Bradyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13778135648601234140noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5396083279099612355.post-16729708017202719752014-04-07T14:01:00.003+01:002014-04-07T14:01:37.043+01:00Marvel Comics Presents #72-#84: Weapon XBy 1991, <i>Marvel Comics Presents</i> had been headlined by Wolverine Team-Up stories for ages. The story that starts in #72, by Barry Windsor-Smith (I think he's the first person to auter the X-Men) is a rather different take. It is the story of How The Wolverine Got His Claws, finally.<br />
<br />
Although this is a highly-serialised story (twelve parts), the trade paperback collection I am reading does not indicate the gaps. Structurally these group into four bits. There is a prologue, with Logan having been sacked from the Canadian army; he then gets used as a prop in a story in an unethical medical experiment. About half-way through, Logan escapes. Rather than the story following him, it becomes a slasher, instead, as our characters (Hines, the Professor, and Doctor Cornelius) are hunted down and killed; Logan then escapes. And finally, it's revealed that some of that was a simulation. Logan was loosed rather than escaping, and the trio are alive.<br />
<br />
The beats were familiar, but some of the details of this story were surprising to me. We know that at this stage Wolverine's claws have no bone substrate, but the idea that they just sort of <i>happened</i> because of excess adamantium, and the housings designed to stop him hurting himself (or rather to stop him healing after them popping) is a bit silly. Given the lack of artifice in creating them, having them be coatings of bone claws make more sense! Further, the idea that the staff of Weapon X didn't know that Logan was a mutant also is a bit odd. But... presumably the shadowy figure that the Professor reports to does know that?<br />
<br />
Much of this story is lies, of course. Apart from the bits it itself admits to (the escape), we know from later material that very little of this will stand. But that doesn't matter a bit. It's moody, it's tense, it's pacy, it's violent, it sets the stage for more Wolverine material and a thousand other inferior 1990s imitators.<br />
<br />
This is not really Wolverine's origin story. It's not even pretending to be. What his birth name is, and what his childhood like isn't Wolverine's origin story, either. What led him to the state where he doesn't know if he has a mother, that matters. Why Sabretooth has a grudge against him, that matters. It'll be a while yet before we get to those, it's telling that those were left till last - it's not because they were least interesting, but because you could tell other stories revealing apparently quite profound bits of Logan's life while still retaining the Man of Mystery element.<br />
<br />
But, as I say, that's later. Much later. If I ever get to it. For now, I want to know, what effect is this going to have on the Wolverine of 1991?Abigail Bradyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13778135648601234140noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5396083279099612355.post-6254582275480638712014-03-27T13:03:00.004+00:002014-03-27T14:12:18.304+00:00Uncanny X-Men #281: Telepath Fight<i>Uncanny X-Men </i>#281 is the first "core" post-Claremont book we're looking at. In <i>X-Force</i> and <i>X-Factor</i> we have seen very different takes on what you can do in an X-book - grim mercenary fantasies and powered detectivey stuff. This is the first time we see what someone else (in this case Whilce Portacio scripted by John Byrne and Jim Lee, apparently, although who knows what relation that bears to who did what) will do in Claremont's sandbox.<br />
<br />
And it definitely his sandbox: rather than introduce anything new, it's business as usual, as we get the Hellfire Club, Sentinels, Emma Frost and the Hellions, the Reavers and Senator Kelly. It's practically a roll-call, and as such very reassuring - the X-Men are back as they were in the early 1980s, complete with mutants conspiring to build and set giant robots on other mutants for no clearly defined reason.<br />
<br />
The element that <i>wasn't</i> present there, of course, is Jean Grey, what with her dying in 1980, before Emma was anything more than a cardboard cutout. That Jean/Emma dynamic starts to come alive here, for a moment. Until Jean Grey gets killed off in the last few pages. Well, that didn't last long, did it? Ironic that Claremont wanted to keep her dead and then the moment he leaves the book, they kill her off again.<br />
<br />
Special shout-out to the names of some of the Hellions to die in this issue. "Beef" and "Bevatron". You don't get names like those any more. Thank god. These characters were both introduced over in New Warriors, which apparently exists now but I'm not going to cover...Abigail Bradyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13778135648601234140noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5396083279099612355.post-52086594253871847472014-03-25T09:00:00.000+00:002014-03-25T09:00:04.178+00:00X-Factor #72-#73: Multiple Man, Multiple Man, Exploring the Possibilities that a Multiple Man Presents<i>X-Factor</i> #72-#73 is a bit more like it. It's a twist on a murder mystery with the main question not being the identity of the killer, but the victim. Madrox was shot dead at the end of the last issue, but then... turns up alive. It was a dupe, you see. Coming at this from 2014 and with my background my immediate question is "is there even an original?" This is the first dupe that has died, apparently. The surviving Madrox was expecting to be able to reabsorb it, but finds he is unable to. The patch-and-merge problem is not possible to solve with a corpse, and so he finds an entire set of memories gone. Including the identity of the murderer, presumably.<br />
<br />
But then another Madrox turns up, also claiming to be the original. He says he pre-dates the events of the Muir Island Saga. This one is at least partly co-original, if more unofficial; they can (to the X-Factor Madrox's surprise) both create dupes. We never get quite to the point that they realise there isn't a difference between them, other than the path they take, I am sure that will come.
<br />
<br />
#73 touches on a social issue that hasn't really been covered by X-Men comics before: the issue of preferred nomenclature. We've had a few terms thrown around as abuse before, such as "mutie" and "genejoke", but "mutant" itself has been treated as a neutral term. But such terms tend towards the abusive. "Mutant", like "homosexual", has a more than a whiff of clinicalism around it, too. You would expect mutants as a group to come up with some term of their own, that they'd try to promote.
<br />
<br />
This is not what happens in #73. Guido is a bit annoyed with his television interviewer, and so makes up out of whole cloth the idea that "mutant" is considered deprecated by mutants and that the term "genetically challenged" is considered better. One problem is: he really did pull that term right out of his ass. Other mutants are puzzled and push back against him. The other problem is that, although this is modelled on "physically challenged", the majority of new coinages of the form "[something]ly challenged" terms are either gags or imagined usages. Folically challenged, vertically challenged, the list goes on. It is hard to read this as anything other than a joke against people campaigning for a right to their own identity.<br />
<br />
Abigail Bradyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13778135648601234140noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5396083279099612355.post-87292816469857811452014-03-20T18:47:00.002+00:002014-03-20T18:47:34.990+00:00Everyone Should Try ItFurther to the last post, pretend rubbish space boyfriend Hazel Robinson has made her <a href="http://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2014/03/everyone-should-try-it/">epic Young Avengers post</a>. Read it. 'nuff said.Abigail Bradyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13778135648601234140noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5396083279099612355.post-89571953087437829642014-03-20T09:00:00.000+00:002014-03-20T09:00:03.231+00:00X-Factor #71: or, a gonzo con report<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://scontent-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-frc3/t1.0-9/1509277_10152269093188104_272179770_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://scontent-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-frc3/t1.0-9/1509277_10152269093188104_272179770_n.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sadly there weren't any Oubliette<br />
cosplayers for me to fold my arms at.</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
As I write this, I'm still vaguely recovering from London Super Comic Con, the weekend of the 14/15 March. Con-going is a very different experience now I have comics mates. On the Saturday a bunch of us cosplayed as the Young Avengers and ran around accosting others for pictures. It was a lovely experience, and <a href="http://piratemoggy.tumblr.com/post/79741004795/we-totally-done-a-cosplay-at-lscc-thank-you-to">some of the results are here.</a> I highly recommend it, especially as a group.<br />
<br />
I don't know if I'll ever write about Young Avengers for the blog. I feel it's the sort of thing I should cover (I'm planning to broaden out in the 2000s and cover lots of general Avengers stuff - particularly the crossovers - because of interlinking - I mean how on earth can I write about Decimation without having done House of M, and how can I do Utopia without Dark Reign and Secret Invasion?), but it'll be a long way down the line if I ever do, and I doubt I'll have anything to add beyond what Hazel will say in her highly-anticipated mega-post (she was playing the role of my stupid space boyfriend on Saturday, being Noh-Varr to my Kate Bishop; the other of us is Clara, doing a highly-excellent Wiccan.)<br />
<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">*like*</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I had to skip out early on the Saturday evening to get to my friend
Steve's 40th birthday party, which was kind of a shame because I was
enjoying the pub, but it was a fun enough day, apart from the bit where a
small child misgendered me and I froze and had to sit down and have a
little cry. It was pointed out there were plenty of people being perfectly pleasant at us and me, and the Other Kate even asked me specifically for a solo photo. In other words, the play was fine.<br />
<br />
After the con closed on the Sunday there was further pubbage and then karaoke. It went a bit wrong, as karaoke tends to. I was left with a strong conviction that the food was nice, that several songs I had previously thought were OK were problematic (this is what happens when you get several socially aware creator-types in a room together), and that I had paid my share of the bill. After the karaoke we went back to the pub, and then back to Al Ewing's hotel, where the bar was still open. I didn't get home until Monday afternoon, after having spent the night (well, the brief couple of hours before it got light again) on Kieron Gillen's sofa. That's the real reason I can't write about<i> </i>Young <i></i><i></i>Avengers right now, of course. It's too close. Not that that's an ethical judgement, it's just that saying the things I need to say about it would feel too close to exposing myself. Maybe I'll do that down the line. For now, I'm glad I'm in 1991.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuPs0j_igMibORQbJxfl1dih8CZh_2vPGkoBgxVY9m_3d5pq82zzKlE87NKf8UO9d7Q2yk4IIRhSHlePSa8J6961dmIUz0h0HYyGXqf07FIUh_DfK1Y5F0RDi-hvvbfBBb7wXEuvyAZf4/s1600/x+factor+71.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuPs0j_igMibORQbJxfl1dih8CZh_2vPGkoBgxVY9m_3d5pq82zzKlE87NKf8UO9d7Q2yk4IIRhSHlePSa8J6961dmIUz0h0HYyGXqf07FIUh_DfK1Y5F0RDi-hvvbfBBb7wXEuvyAZf4/s1600/x+factor+71.jpg" height="320" width="209" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Peter David totally signed my comic!</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Usually I systematically do the rounds at cons but it was a lot more haphazard, especially on the Saturday (apparently the last Seb and James saw of us was the three of us shouting "THERE'S A WICCAN!" and vanishing at high speed in high heels, which sounds about right.) The Sunday was a bit calmer and I managed to hit some tables and catch up with an artist and chat about Secret Project 10. And I got this comic I am not writing about now (<i>X-Factor</i> #71) signed by its writer, Peter David. As I have <a href="http://x-marathon.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/best-wishes-to-peter-david.html">written before</a>, I have been a fan of Peter David's work for oh just a couple of decades, and it was properly terrifying going up to him, even though I had been assured he was nice. And I've really looking forward to reading this particular issue of this comic throughout the latter stages of the Claremont era. Much as I was dreading <i>X-Force</i>, Peter David's <i>X-Factor</i>, that was going to make it worthwhile.<br />
<br />
I've been writing this post for an hour now, and I still haven't read the issue. It's sitting in my scanner. This is new. I've never been too nervous to read a comic before. What if it sucks? There's nothing for it. There's only so many cups of tea I can make. There's only so many games of 2048 I can play. (That bit's not true, I expect I could do that FOREVER.) I'm going to have to sit down and get cracking. You know what, I'll liveblog this, page by page.<br />
<br />
<hr />
<br />
Page 1: One big panel of Guido saying "excuse me, you got any grey poupon?" to an unspecified person. I'm not quite sure what grey poupon is. Googling tells me that it is a brand of mustard known in the United States. But what sort of brand? High-end, low-end? This is important. It's owned by Kraft, so I'm guessing not exactly gourmet.<br />
<br />
The credits box reminds me that I don't talk about artists enough. This issue is pencilled by Larry Stroman and inked by Al Milgrom. Now that I've started to draw faces a bit I am starting to actually <i>look</i> at the strokes in comic art properly in a technical sense rather than just the overall aesthetic, a mental breakthrough like that week in 2004 when I suddenly started hearing individual parts in music.<br />
<br />
Guido's face here is drawn very stylised, with a radiator grill for a mouth, his pink face and hand amid a sea of purple that represents his shirt but extends far beyond the area that is plausibly cloth. Is that the background? What's going on here. We'll see on...<br />
<br />
Page 2:<br />
<br />
But before I get to page 2 I am interrupted by a twitter notification. Charlotte, who is another of our little Young Avengers collective, is replying about my suggestion that she use a MUD client for talking to MicroMUSE. I try and log into the MUD myself, with my own client, just to check that it can work. It does. I muse (see what I did there) for a bit about the energy I was feeling when I wrote that versus the energy I have for comics now. It's similar, but I'm in a better, more driven and more capable place, now. MUDs and comics are at once almost opposite ends of the cultural spectrum, but they share commonalities. MUDs are basically the ultimate in indie games - back in the 1990s everyone was making their own MUDs, and only a few ever were commercialised. Everyone can make their own comics and even the biggest event book at Marvel or DC still has a bit of an artisan feel to it, because it's predominantly the work of a handful of people.<br />
<br />
MUD writing was fun, but I was never able to achieve the intellectual conversation I wanted out of them, and I drifted away from them in around 2003/2004, about the time I got into Wikipedia. I am still proud of the body of work I produced for the <a href="http://cryosphere.net/">Cryosphere</a>, and it pains me that it is so inaccessible. And one day the worldbuilding (my spin on a mashup of 2300 AD and Warren Ellis's <i>Ministry of Space</i>, something that I never got around to reading until 2005)<i> </i>is going to emerge in a comic, probably the one about the <a href="https://abigailbrady.wordpress.com/the-debriefing/">stupid space captain</a>. I try to persuade Charlotte to log in to the Cryosphere, but she is resistant. Fair enough, one MUD at a time.<br />
<br />
The first panel of page 2 answers my question about Guido. He is being drawn huge and that colour fill really was supposed to be his shirt. He's with Lorna Dane and another chap, and they are having a bit of a back and forth in a style that is instantly familiar, because David is still writing those characters just like that.<br />
<br />
Lorna is worried about the guy they are bringing in to head this new X-Factor. This would be the new incarnation of Freedom Force that #70 trailed, then, but that link is implied, so far.<br />
<br />
Page 3:<br />
<br />
Four-panel page, the most we've had so far, with only a tiny bit of dialogue on each page really, compared to say, Claremont. You can tell who says each line even without the attribution of the speech bubbles. The second and fourth panels are head-shots of Lorna Dane (Polaris) from unusual angles - one showing her chin and jaw, and the other a profile from below.<br />
<br />
Lorna is worried about Alex Summers (Havok) being the team leader. Not because he's her ex, but because she doesn't know what she is, they've been mind-controlled and that so much, what's even <i>is </i>the state of affairs of their relationship? <br />
<br />
Page 4: <br />
<br />
Guido hits on Lorna in that way he does. Eew.<br />
<br />
Page 5:<br />
<br />
And the other person at the table is named as Madrox (in case you couldn't tell before from the knocking and duplicating). Jamie Madrox is the main character in the 00s David's X-Factor. Will he arrive as well-constructed as Guido has?<br />
<br />
Something is going on with the jars. Particularly the mayo. <br />
<br />
Page 6:<br />
<br />
And now Val Cooper is in Genosha, recruiting Havok. He'd ended up rebuilding Genosha after the X-Tinction Agenda crossover. In having Cooper the linkage with the new Freedom Force is made explicit. Alex is a hard sell. Cooper probably isn't helping by denigrating something he really believes in rather than trying to<br />
<br />
Page 7-8:<br />
<br />
Wolfsbane (Rahne Sinclair) saves Havok from a falling girder. Our first action scene. Val uses it as a mind-game. Did she set it up?<br />
<br />
Page 9-10<br />
<br />
Change of scene, and we're with Quicksilver. Quicksilver who has of course, deep Young Avengers connections, being the template for Speed (Tommy). He's looking for the X-Factor HQ in Washington (not New York!), and being impatient.<br />
<br />
Page 11/13<br />
<br />
Alex's brother Scott Summers arrives, with Professor Charles Xavier, to persuade Alex personally. Alex is a very reluctant leader here. More recently, he is reluctantly persuaded to lead the Uncanny Avengers team, in the wake of Xavier's death and Cyclops's rebellion; they argue that he would be a good example for human/mutant relations, something that apparently will stick with him.<br />
<br />
Page 14-15<br />
<br />
Back at the HQ. Pietro has arrived and is in a bit of a state. Lorna is surprised to see him not on the West Coast with the Avengers; has she not heard of his power?<br />
<br />
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Page 15 (right) is odd. It is out of place. It is perhaps funny if you know the context, but what is essentially a launch of a comic it is a terrible mis-step. I suspect I only understand it because it came up in a CBR column. What appears to be going on here is they're trying to shut down the "Lockjaw is a sentient being and an Inhuman who was just really quite badly mutated by the Terrigen mists" concept. That I probably need to explain what Lockjaw and Terrigen <i>is</i>, because they've never really come up before, demonstrates the lack of relevancy to this issue.<br />
<br />
But in context, it's Quicksilver in a bit of an addled state, so it manages to get away with it very slightly. His power, in case you are wondering from the page, is killing him.<br />
<br />
Page 16<br />
<br />
Alex and Rahne on the plane to the US. Looking forward to the future and considering their team-mates.<br />
<br />
Page 17-19<br />
<br />
Pietro clarifies exactly what he means. Using his power is ageing him. He is being blackmailed, of sorts (well, taunted anonymously by postcard with no specific demands, but eh.) This smells a bit.<br />
<br />
We get the punchline on the mayo jar (not the mustard jar, oddly... I'd have made it the mustard). They've all used their powers to try and open it, and in the end Val Cooper manages it by "rap[ping] it a few times."<br />
<br />
Page 20-22<br />
<br />
EXCEPT it turns out that Madrox made a fake jar with remote control lock as a practical joke. This is not the 2005 Madrox, is it? The animosity between Multiple Man and Quicksilver starts as... a series of practical jokes??? I did not see that coming.<br />
<br />
And then someone shoots him. Who? We just don't know.<br />
<br />
<hr />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoVBTBVf8UCDgL3Oeq7Z0hLYETwZIDwHACNqbOQbC6oWdx18HziZeAqha-pyrC5AhUbRxTj5ZWQFbpufRbmuIodKU3ii3qLSSPWKoU0UXQfxTMEqBK3G6iy48dp8KMb04yBJb7vBRuzY4/s1600/unnamed.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoVBTBVf8UCDgL3Oeq7Z0hLYETwZIDwHACNqbOQbC6oWdx18HziZeAqha-pyrC5AhUbRxTj5ZWQFbpufRbmuIodKU3ii3qLSSPWKoU0UXQfxTMEqBK3G6iy48dp8KMb04yBJb7vBRuzY4/s1600/unnamed.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Steve links the portals. Don't ask.</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I can't quite call this a disappointment. I am going to keep reading, for sure. We can see the pieces, even though it's in fragments. But it's not a story, nor even really the start of one. And there's no sign of David being about to provide us with a fresh new look at mutants, at what that can be a metaphor for. Can he do that? Absolutely, we can tell that from his work on the Hulk. Is he going to? We shall see...<br />
<br />
Now, it's getting on for 3.30pm and I've been writing about this comic for several hours. I didn't really have lunch because it would have felt like procrastinating. I'm heading into town for... comics, and then to Steve's house to ninja-decorate everywhere with tiny cakes for his birthday.<br />
<br />
<br />
<hr />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Did I mention I'd started drawing? I did the pencils<br />
in about half an hour, then inked and shaded it while<br />
Clara and Hazel discussed Sarah Ditton's recent article,<br />
which now, god help me, I am reading.<br />
Let me assure you, I am not doing it for the boys.</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I'm back in the house at about 9.30pm and am now frying lamb and potatoes. I was unexpectedly diverted via the pub, which Hazel summoned a few of us to at short notice, and which I'm now not able to go back to before they leave. I hope, with all my heart, that we cheered her up a bit.Abigail Bradyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13778135648601234140noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5396083279099612355.post-4187897896715719102014-03-18T09:00:00.000+00:002014-03-24T23:14:36.863+00:00X-Force #1-#4: Cable Cable Cable Eggs and Cable<i>X-Force</i> launched before <i>X-Men</i> vol 2 but I'm doing them out of order BECAUSE. What have we got here? Rob Liefeld drawing whatever he likes and then Fabian Nicieza desperately trying to make it make sense. I'm sure this <i>could </i>work as an arrangement, but here it's not. It produces a generic terrorist fighty comic with bad, if exciting, art that was inexplicably popular. It's exactly what I expected it to be.<br />
<br />
Well, except for #4, which is a strange SIDEWAYS COMIC. Now, there had been the odd sideways splash page in #1 and #2 so seeing that I was supposed to turn the page when immediately opening #4 was not The Most Surprising Thing In The World Ever, but then seeing it continue for the rest of the issue was actually quite exciting!<br />
<br />
Since I haven't got anything else to say about these issues, how about some art by the amazing Hazel Robinson. We were at the comics pub quiz a couple of weeks ago, and there were bonus points available for drawing Sandman in the style of Rob Liefeld. And, well....<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p>Rare Sandman movie concept art found at comics quiz (they made us do it) <a href="http://t.co/Hz8HTQ6oZF">pic.twitter.com/Hz8HTQ6oZF</a></p>— Hazel Robinson (@piratemoggy) <a href="https://twitter.com/piratemoggy/statuses/441680898787123200">March 6, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>Abigail Bradyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13778135648601234140noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5396083279099612355.post-59473239116023979192014-03-13T09:00:00.001+00:002014-03-13T09:00:04.289+00:00X-Men #1-#3: Mic Drop According to the Guinness Book of Records, <i>X-Men</i> #1 is the highest-selling comic of all time. This was not a surprise, the X-Men were very popular and the comics speculation boom was in full bloom. This mass speculative was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of why things like <i>Action Comics</i> #1 were going for large sums. At the time they were seen as ephemeral, and so therefore when we come to 1991 surviving examples are rare. 1991's hot comics were being printed in their millions and purchased by a buying public that knew how to handle them properly. 23 years later, they're still not rare. They never will be, not in our lifetimes.<br />
<br />
This is one of the least interesting things about this arc, though. It's Chris Claremont's last, for now. By now he had ceased plotting the books, and was doing dialogue, frustratedly. Some sniping is possibly apparent here in the "invisible spaceship" that is mentioned in the text.<br />
<br />
Given its massive potential audience, what does it do? Does it take advantage of this to tell a compelling story while introducing the concept of the X-Men to a larger audience, like #1s try to do these days? Does it buggery. Yes, we've returned to the X-Men's default status quo, but within that we get a continuity-dense story resting on Magneto's brief time as a baby in 1977.<br />
<br />
Today we would call that foolhardy, but in 1991 the book continued to sell, and would pick up readers. Was it a lost opportunity to get even more? Or is it that the modern rhetoric that comics are too hard to get in to does not really explain anything?<br />
<br />
The story plays with the idea that the post-1977 Magneto is a different person to the pre-1977 one, because of a genetic alteration by Moira MacTaggert. She used him as an experimental testbed for a treatment for <a href="http://x-marathon.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/x-men-125-128-proteus.html">Proteus</a>, her son. What she found was that the use of Magneto's powers made him mad, and what she did was a little tweak to his make-up to make this not a problem. Magneto's new group of Acolytes have found a variance, and Magneto is really quite pissed off at it. Crucial to the storyline's resolution, though, is the fact that this, if it ever worked, wore off (as his attempt at doing the same thing to Cyclops's team of X-Men also wears off, during their fight with Storm's team). Every decision Magneto has made has been his own, even the good ones.<br />
<br />
The Magneto in this doesn't quite join up with the last time we'd seen him, in <i>Uncanny </i>#275. There, he looked like he was about to <i>do </i>something, here he's withdrawn and has to be drawn into action by the Acolytes. His interaction with Rogue carries on straight from that, though.<br />
<br />
<i>X-Men</i> #1 is at once an odd comic to be the biggest-selling of all time, and yet also an obvious candidate. It had a superstar artist and writer, and is a #1 from the X-franchise. It's not great but neither is it interestingly flawed. It is the end of one era and the start of another (it will continue in publication until issue #275, making it I think the second longest-surviving bronze age comic series after Hellblazer). It is a perfect representation of what was going wrong and right with comics in the early 1990s. I have five.Abigail Bradyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13778135648601234140noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5396083279099612355.post-24884825340512468192014-03-11T09:00:00.000+00:002014-03-11T09:00:09.909+00:00Uncanny X-Men #278-#280/X-Factor #69-#70: Muir Island Saga<i>Uncanny X-Men</i> #278-#280 and <i>X-Factor</i> #69-#70 constitute the "Muir Island Saga", which is a mess in a completely different way than I was expecting. I imagined it as overly long and tedious, with terrible gender politics.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.philipsandifer.com/">TARDIS Eruditorum</a> (an excellent Doctor Who blog, and one of the reasons I am writing this one) has a concept of "narrative collapse", a threat that falls outside the usual bounds of problemspace and attacks the premise of the show. It's not just your usual end of world scenario or possible death of the protagonist, it's stuff like the Daleks getting time travel, or an evil Doctor from the future putting the show on trial.<br />
<br />
The threat in the Muir Island Saga is big - we have a culmination of a Claremont plot that has been in the offing since 1979. The Shadow King, a kind of body-less super-Xavier, has been able to subvert the minds of the X-Men on Muir Island, and an initial raid by the main team had very marginal results. And in a mirror of Second Genesis, the start of this era of X-Men, Xavier has to go back into the series's history to find the original X-Men and rescue his next batch from being captured on a perilous mission to an island. But despite that this is all bit business as usual.<br />
<br />
The narrative has collapsed, though, in another sense. This story broke X-Men, and made it impossible to tell stories in the old model. After 16 years on the title, Chris Claremont leaves. His last sole writing credit is #278, and Fabian Nicieza is credited for bringing it to a conclusion in #280.<br />
<br />
Well, I say conclusion. The story, much to my surprise given that it was called a "saga", moves along at quite a place (in fact, I spent quite some time hunting for the other issues of it in comic shops, before I realised that there really were only 5). Lots happens, and it doesn't stop. In the last few pages of the fourth issue (Uncanny #280), I started wondering what was going on. There was not much time and there was still a lot to go. It felt an awfully lot like getting to the twenty-minutes-from-the-end mark of Bakshi's The Lord of the Rings. And then it does the same thing, wrapping it up in no time at all, they just use Psylocke as a get-out-of-possession-free card with most of the action explained in captions or dialogue.<br />
<br />
Still, there's issue #70 of X-Factor, written by Peter David, which is billed as an epilogue, but is much more integral to the narrative than that might imply. He spends a lot of time on the main emotional storyline to be left dangling, whether Legion, who had been used as a tool by the Shadow King, can be saved and what Xavier is willing to do to save him. This is a good bit.<br />
<br />
The other main salvage operation he does regards Mystique, Val Cooper and Rogue. This is a bit of a misfire. The core reveal that Val Cooper could not kill Mystique, even when mind-controlled, is fine, and the revelation of the substitution of Mystique for Cooper also works (indeed, this blog had thought that was obvious already). Where it goes wrong is the idea that Mystique would submit herself to a psychic procedure to make her truly believe that she was Cooper - and to leave the key to her identity in the hands of Nick Fury. This is not Mystique, she's more tricksy than that. Her reunion with Rogue also rings false, not so much in the affection involved but the specific dialogue.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, David sets up his run on <i>X-Factor</i>, by having Val Cooper mention that the government wanted a new iteration of Freedom Force, although not necessarily under that name.<br />
<br />
Not only this is not the last we've seen of Chris Claremont. In fact, due to some odd publishing history, it's not even the last of him we've seen this week. Stay tuned!Abigail Bradyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13778135648601234140noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5396083279099612355.post-3710072317008267412014-03-06T09:00:00.000+00:002014-03-06T09:00:02.017+00:00X-Factor #65-#68: The End is Nigh<i>X-Factor</i> #65-#68 is a postscript to an era. All the X-Men reunited as One Big Team after the <i>X-Tinction Agenda</i> saga, but the titles are proving resistant to actually doing anything with this yet. While the X-Men proper are in <i>Uncanny</i> dealing with the Xavier situation, the remaining five original mutants remain in New York, having one last adventure as X-Factor.<br />
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X-Factor - this iteration of it anyway - had to end like this. The original premise was the five of them reunited again to fight mutant problems in New York City. Along the way they lost their original shtick of being fake mutant hunters and in its place acquired a fuck-off massive spaceship in the city.<br />
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Now that the X-Men are gathering again, now that the construction crews in Westchester are readying their pencils and inks, we have no place for Ship. Fortunately Ship came with its own kill switch. It came by way of Apocalypse, and X-Factor have never satisfactorily understood it. It is this vulnerable to a large storyline involving him. But it has to be a big story - perhaps his biggest - if we are to have such a big status quo change as a result.
The way it sort of manages that is by throwing crossovers at the page. First Avengers (briefly) and then, more substantially, the Inhumans.<br />
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Ah, the Inhumans. Again, a major part of the Marvel cosmogony that we are only talking about as we get to the 1990s. If they have crossed over with the X-Men before it had been in other pages. Our exposition on them comes courtesy of Beast, who would have worked with them before (perhaps fought them) during his time on the Avengers. Beast's time on the Avengers has been somewhat of an ignored point as far as this series goes - but then, X-Factor has always been a contradiction. A team of renegade outlaws funded by a well-connected millionaire, and staffed by said millionaire, a respected former member of the most important superhero team, an accountant, and a woman who had been brought back from the dead by the collective efforts of not just the Avengers and the Fantastic Four. They've had their losses - Angel in particular, but this is a team of winners who have been befallen by circumstances, not the bunch of misfits that X-Men wants to be.<br />
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The Inhumans are what the X-Men tend towards. Whereas Cyclops acts like the king of the mutants (with Jean his Red Queen), the Inhumans are explicitly led by their monarch, Black Bolt or, to give him his full name, Blackagar Boltagon (that never gets old). Like the mutants the Inhumans are humans plus: in the case of the mutants this arises spontaneously (or so we think). For the Inhumans it is a combination of long-ago genetic manipulation by the Kree, combined with activation by the terrigen mist. There are other differences. The Inhumans are a race, a distinct group, as opposed to the distributed minority that the mutants form. The Inhumans have a royal family formed by blood, whereas the X-Men are the ultimate in found family.<br />
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In this story, the X-Men are trying to make a transition to blood family. This is in the form of Baby X, Nathan Christopher, the son son of Cyclops (in truth) and Marvel Girl (in spirit if not in literal truth). If he is raised to adulthood without major trauma they have succeeded. But also at that point the X-Men is if not over them certainly then this generation of characters are no longer usable in the same way. This is something the X-books are still not ready to do, even in 2014, although they are perhaps the closest of all of Marvel's line to allowing it.<br />
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Scott's eventual assumption of the role he had pretended to take in the X-Terminators is many years down the line, but we can see the seed of it here, as Baby X, who had been terminally infected by Apocalypse, is taken into the future to survive. Coming to it over twenty years later, we know he'll become Cable, and he'll raise another child in the future in turn, who will return as a messiah. None of this is planned yet (well, perhaps Cable=Baby X), but the story is very forward-looking. The last dialogue spoken in #68 (other than by the Watcher), is by Scott, to Charlotte Jones:
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<blockquote>
You're wrong, sergeant. It hurts. It always will. More than I could put words to. But the <i>dream</i> that bound us all together - X-Factor and before us the X-Men - was based on <i>hope</i>.</blockquote>
(their emphasis)
Hope is coming.Abigail Bradyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13778135648601234140noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5396083279099612355.post-12895241499971320512014-03-04T19:42:00.001+00:002014-03-04T19:42:26.065+00:00X-Marathon, now on tumblrHello! I'm making this post to tell people reading this at the original blogspot location that we are now automatically mirrored to <a href="http://x-marathon.tumblr.com/">X-Marathon</a> on tumblr. I suppose people on tumblr will also see this (assuming the plumbing is working properly now, which is the real reason why I'm making the post), in which case hello! I see we have a few followers already, presumably from tags?Abigail Bradyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13778135648601234140noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5396083279099612355.post-89019740946596505992014-03-04T09:00:00.000+00:002014-03-04T09:00:02.320+00:00Uncanny X-Men #274-#277: All Hail the Chiefs<i>Uncanny X-Men</i> #274 is, I think, the first issue to be narrated by Magneto. Having rescued Rogue in <a href="http://x-marathon.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/uncanny-x-men-269-roguesplit.html">#269</a>, he's gone to the Savage Land with her for a team-up with Ka-Zar and a show-down with Zaladane, who is using her magnetic powers in a way that might threaten the Earth. He encounters the mess of a <a href="http://x-marathon.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/x-men-62-63-ka-zar-vs-magneto.html">much earlier expedition of his to the area</a>, in the form of the Savage Land Mutates. Zaladane has also come to the attention of Nick Fury and SHIELD. Unusually they team up, despite the reservation of Colonel Semyanov, whose son was killed when Magneto <a href="http://x-marathon.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/uncanny-x-men-150-i-magneto.html">destroyed the Leningrad</a><br />
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Magneto is introspective and moody in a way we've never quite seen before. The flashback to the firing squad is particularly effective - and will form a centrepoint of Pak's <i>Magneto: Testament</i> miniseries 17 years from now. He disassociates himself from his earlier "insane" actions, comparing them to Zaladane's now, but also is unable to apologise or take responsibility for them - the Leningrad did nuke him, yes, but he was blackmailing the world with demands to be made dictator. Another new wrinkle is Rogue's claim that Magneto hates <i>Russians</i> for the death of his daughter Anya, which is compared to Semyanov's vendetta. It unfolds unsurprisingly, Semyanov sells Magneto out to Zaladane, and then Fury/Magneto/Rogue win anyway. What is Magneto like in victory, though? Not, it turns out, magnanimous. Indeed, he declares his period of reform over: he needs to protect mutants (but without being a cackler himself), and says that a "kindler, gentler Magneto" cannot save them. He vamooses, presumably to take up villainry once more.<br />
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This arc introduces the idea of Rogneto. In a fairly creepy way, it has to be said, Magneto is perving on a Rogue who is not her usual self and clearly lacking in judgement (why are they killing people she asks, aren't they supposed to be the good guys? Uh No.) <small>Thankfully the matter is dropped and then never referenced again.</small><br />
<small> </small>
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In our other plot, for some convoluted reason the X-Men (Storm, Wolverine, Banshee Jubilee, Forge and Gambit) were teleported away from Earth by Lila Cheney to the eternal Shi'ar civil war. Deathbird is empress right now, and the rebels the Starjammers (Corsair, who just happens to be Cyclops's dad) are fighting to reinstate her sister Lilandra to her rightful place on the throne. If I were them I'd be trying to undermine the entire system of Imperial rule, but perhaps they are expecting plum ministerial positions under the new regime... at least until she gets turfed out again.) The war is not going well for Deathbird, largely because Lilandra's consort is a highly powerful telepath: Charles Xavier, who also happens to be the founder of the X-Men! But Xavier is possibly secretly evil and doing a bit of genocide on the side. Except then it turns out he is a Skrull, and so are the rest of the Starjammers! And they've got the real Xavier kidnapped! And then they free the real Xavier! And then they defeat the Skrulls! And then Lilandra and Deathbird actually do the "our division caused us to be weak against our enemies, let's make up" dance.<br />
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At the end, Storm infodumps enough of the disasters to have happened to the X-Men since Xavier left, and he learns of the rise of the Shadow King. Xavier agrees to come back with them, setting the stage for our next arc, Claremont's penultimate hurrah.<br />
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I believe this is the first intrusion of the Skrulls into the X-verse; certainly it's the first time I've written about them on the blog (apart from a passing reference to John the Skrull). The Skrulls are a race of alien shape-shifters originally introduced as villains in <i>Fantastic Four</i> #2. In that very first story a small advance party are brainwashed into thinking themselves cows. They go on to be frequent antagonists in Marvel: a Super-Skrull, Kl'rt, who combines the powers of the Fantastic Four, is introduced in <i>FF</i> #18 (it's this job that Xavin out of Runaways is training for), and fight the Kree, another alien race, in the pages of <i>Avengers</i>; and their latest invasion of Earth was the topic of the <i>Secret Invasion</i> crossover.<br />
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All these alien races were made up independently: the Skrulls in those very early days of the Marvel Silver Age; the Kree a bit later, in <i>FF</i> #65, and then the Shi'ar in the 1970s in these very pages. These, then are the Big Three Marvel Alien Species. Rather than anyone having sat down and worked this out, this is worldbuilding through crossover, things in a shared universe being patched together to form a galactic quilt. But that's just a larger-scale version of a continuity that allows Doctor Strange and Iron Man to co-exist; throw everything at a particularly sticky wall and watch it not going anywhere. Because... indeed, it's not going anywhere. It's rare for cosmic dynastic stories to have a point: it's just The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire on repeat. If I wanted that, I'd just read <i>Foundation</i> again.<br />
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<br />Abigail Bradyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13778135648601234140noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5396083279099612355.post-18758839979439555702014-02-27T09:00:00.000+00:002014-02-27T09:00:03.660+00:00New Mutants #98-#100: No New MutantsFor all that I waffle about comics, I don’t talk about comic art much, which is a habit I am trying to break. So, let's talk about the art of this final arc of New Mutants. As I have been reading more of this era I am starting to appreciate what artists like Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld (who is the guilty party for <i>New Mutants </i>#98-#100) were trying to do.<br />
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Before you start up the flamethrowers, let me clarify. Yes, they did not have the anatomy and often ended up drawing ridiculous contorted poses, but the generation of artists before that were not trying those poses at all. They are doing stuff with perspective and angles and dynamism and action and composition and people coming at you from the weird directions and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but whatever happens it’s always new and different. If we treat panels as shots in a film, they are an exciting wave of cinematographers. (And that’s precisely how they were treating the panels.) They were very raw but I can see why people got so into them. They (well, most of them) got better at it, too, and them and the next wave, of people who have refined their techniques are responsible for lots of great comics art today.<br />
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What else do we have here? Well, the cover for New Mutants #98 promises us three new characters! Excite! These are a rather more heavily built Spider-Man lookalike called Deadpool, someone with a domino pattern on her face called... Domino. And some chap called Gideon, who, with a name like that, is clearly going to be a major player in the future.<br />
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Deadpool has been sent by a Mr. Tolliver to assassinate Cable (who I will note he addresses as Nathan - I don't know whether that is a new thing or not though, due to not having been bothered to read the intermediate issues of New Mutants). Deadpool is immediately a mercenary with a mouth on him, something that I think it's worth pointing out was a novelty at a time given the prevalence of the taciturn grim villain/anti-hero. The fight is truncated by the arrival of Domino, an old friend of Cable, who has the pouches to prove it. They send Deadpool back to Tolliver by mail.<br />
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Domino sticks around to help Cable recruit: the team has lost Warlock and Wolsfbane due to the recent crossover. All previous New Mutants (Rusty, Skids, Xi'an, Amara, and Dani) are ruled out due to alignment or in some cases their faint hint of rubbishness. While he's off headhunting John Proudstar from the Mass Acad, other students are evaporating (not literally - it's good to clarify that in a superhero comic), as Rictor goes off back to Genosha and Sunspot inherits his father's business, due to Gideon's machinations. (Gideon, by the way, turns out to be an old family friend of the da Costas.) He just lets them fuck off, which annoys some of his team but not enough for them to fuck off too.<br />
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#100 introduces another couple of characters: Feral, an escaped Morlock who I am forever confusing with Wolfsbane, and Shatterstar from the Mojoverse. Cable and the New Mutants protect these folks from their respective enemies and accepts their assistance in return for same. At the end we get a few pages of cutaway to Stryfe, leader of the Mutant Liberation Front, who is on the last page dramatically revealed (I presume, it's oddly structured otherwise) to look quite a lot like Cable, What a mystery!<br />
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Although clearly these issues are going to be important, they're also quite shit, The plot is paper-thin, the characterisation subtle (in the sense, barely there, rather than that it's clever), and coming back to this series after a few issues doesn't make me worry about having missed anything good. The end of the New Mutants is effectively arbitrary: it's already been X-Force for a while, but it's at this issue - apparently for no other reason than that they've finally got to issue #100, that they make a symbolic break, by leaving the basement of the mansion, and taking on the new name.<br />
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Incidentally Cannonball and Boom Boom clearly have a quick one in the woods between pages 33 and 34. <a href="http://x-marathon.blogspot.co.uk/p/x-men-shag-diagram.html">And by that I don't mean a pint.</a>Abigail Bradyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13778135648601234140noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5396083279099612355.post-28926724799306374482014-02-25T09:00:00.000+00:002014-02-25T09:00:02.947+00:00Uncanny X-Men #273: Together Again for the First TimeThe opening splash in <i>Uncanny X-Men</i> #273 is the happiest this project has made me. The X-Men! All in the same room! As a team! With captions! We have here Storm, Cannonball, Banshee, Boom-Boom, Jubilee, Cable, Wolverine, Psylocke, Beast, Archangel, Rictor, Gambit, Iceman, Sunspot, Forge, Cyclops and Jean Grey.<br />
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Well, I say as a team. In reality they are having a massive argument about what to do next, whether they should press on from their victory in Genosha to take out other threats. Cable is keen on that, Cyclops and Storm (by the way did I mention she's an adult again now?) less so.<br />
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Cyclops and Storm discuss where to base the X-Men, since the security basement of the mansion is a bit cramped. Storm agrees that moving to Australia was probably a mistake, but declines the offer of using X-Factor's Ship. Jean decides to use Cerebro to track down other friendly mutants (Longshot, Dazzler, Rogue, for example), but no, she hasn't got her telepathy back, and she is owned by the Shadow King, whose storyline is looming.<br />
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Apart from the SRS BSNS, there's lots of fun bits of new characters interaction. Wolverine and Gambit get some banter; while Iceman and Boom-Boom have a competition as to who is more immature (my vote is for Bobby). And Psylocke gets one of the best lines ever, in response to being asked whether she had told her brother (Captain Britain) of recent events yet. "And say what? Hullo twin, guess who this is. Back from the dead, just like you! Remember last time we met and you couldn't believe I had purple hair. Well, the hair's still purple."<br />
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<i>Uncanny</i> has stopped being a slog, if only for an issue or two. Onwards! But not long now until the end...Abigail Bradyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13778135648601234140noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5396083279099612355.post-51986519901060698182014-02-20T16:39:00.002+00:002014-02-20T16:39:29.507+00:00posting frequency and general updateIncidentally, no, you are not mistaken, it is a Thursday. We're going to be upping the posting frequency now, to 2 a week: Tuesdays and Thursdays. This is because I am feeling quite comfortable with the one a week rate and want to get a bit further ahead, but also because I am going to have a lot more time on my hands soon, having resigned from my job. I'm going to spend a month off (by which I mean writing posts and possibly an Android game) before properly jobhunting.<br />
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Comics-making has been going well, but there's nothing really I can show anyone yet. Well, apart from <a href="http://cryosphere.net/~morwen/lost-in-bitstrips/">Lost in Bitstrips</a>.<br />
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Oh, and I got a <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/sci-tech/2014/02/facebook-introduces-choice-50-genders-why-cant-we-write-our-own">piece in the New Statesman</a>, that was nice. But that's nothing at all to do with comics!Abigail Bradyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13778135648601234140noreply@blogger.com0