The X-Axis – 15 November 2009
Well, hello there. I’m Paul O’Brien, the other half of House to Astonish, and it seems to us that there’s not much point in having two blogs for one podcast. So we’re folding them in together. Which means that basically you’ll be getting all the stuff I was doing at If Destroyed, but with a more memorable URL and a more attractive layout. (Well, except that we won’t both have to plug the podcast, obviously.) Oh, and I get to use WordPress instead of Blogger. It’s got a lot more buttons, hasn’t it?
I gather the comments system here has all sorts of exciting moderation options that I could never be bothered figuring out with Haloscan. As near as I can figure out, we’ve currently got it set up so that comments should be appearing automatically unless they get flagged as spam, but, well, who knows? I’ll keep an eye on it.
So let’s get down to business. Not many X-books this week, but there’s a ton of other new releases worth mentioning…
Batman & Robin #6 – I’ve seen quite a few people saying that this was the issue where Philip Tan’s limitations as an artist really leapt out at them. True enough, getting him to follow Frank Quitely invites rather unflattering comparisons, particularly when Quitely is still doing the covers. This issue’s villain is the Flamingo, evidently conceived as a flamboyant, Liberace-style assassin who inexplicably communicates entirely in grunts. And yes, it works much better on Quitely’s cover than it does in the interior, because Tan doesn’t seem entirely sure how to combine those two elements, and ends up drawing a generic raving lunatic in very odd clothes. Something’s also going on with the style, which seems less precise (or scratchy) and more soft focus than even the previous issue. But it’s not that bad, it’s just not up there with the standards set by Quitely on the opening arc. Admittedly, my previous experience of Tan is his hopeless 2003 run on Uncanny X-Men, so perhaps I’m just perpetually surprised that he’s improved so much over the last six years. As for the story, well, Morrison is evidently trying to do some sort of meta-commentary about alternate models for the evolution of the Batman franchise, with Dick and Damian representing thoughtful development, and the Red Hood and Scarlet as thuggish violence; but it does feel a little as though he’s still arguing over the grim-and-gritty developments of the mid-nineties.
Cable #20 – You’ll never guess, but in this issue, Bishop tries to kill Hope, and Cable tries to protect her, and in the end Bishop doesn’t manage to kill Hope, and they escape. Just like in every other issue. I’ll give Duane Swierczynski credit – there’s a point near the end of this issue where I actually thought for a moment he was going to kill Bishop and the story was going to do something different for a change. But then he didn’t, and it didn’t. Cable has become a sorely repetitious comic, where the characters do the same thing every month while hoping for something to turn up. As I’ve said before, the series would really benefit from giving Cable and Hope some sort of goal beyond mere survival: why not let them try and kill (or strand) Bishop, or at least give them some sort of quest to find a way back to the present day? Without any of that, it’s just the same story in a different setting time after time. Fortunately, it looks like we’re finally nearing the end, since Hope’s return to the present day is evidently the focus of the next major crossover. But that seems to have been dictated more by the demands of Marvel’s publishing schedule than the needs of the story. They could have done this more effectively in half the time. This particular issue is a characteristically competent rendition of the usual, and while the art is a bit lacking in atmosphere, it tells the story. It’s okay; it’s just the same thing we always get.
Dark X-Men #1 – This is a five-issue miniseries about Norman Osborn’s fake X-Men team, by Paul Cornell and Leonard Kirk. Thanks to a year of saturation coverage, virtually every story you could possibly tell with “Dark Reign” has been done at least three times by now. So thankfully, Dark X-Men doesn’t much bother with that stuff, and simply focusses on telling a regular story about this wonky and wholly unqualified team of lunatics trying their best to act the part of proper superheroes, by investigating weird mutant-related stuff in California. After all, even Norman’s teams have to go out and do their official job from time to time. With the wider storylines de-emphasised, this turns out to make a surprisingly successful team book. The Dark X-Men aren’t an entirely unsympathetic team – only one of them is an outright bad guy, after all – and the team dynamic of Mystique trying to keep her crew of maniacs on the rails makes for good entertainment. You might have seen in the pre-release publicity that this series also provides the return of a character who’s been out of circulation for the better part of a decade; I wasn’t really looking forward to that, but by the end of the issue, Cornell has more or less managed to sell me on it.
There’s also a back-up strip by Duane Sweirczynski and Steve Dillon, billed as part two of “A Girl Named Hope.” (The first part was in Psylocke #1, if you’re wondering.) From what we’ve seen so far, presenting this as some sort of serial is a bit of an overstatement. It’s actually a string of character vignettes, presumably intended to introduce Hope to readers who haven’t been buying Cable. Which would be fine if it was appearing in Uncanny X-Men or Wolverine, but perhaps it’s a bit dubious when it’s used as a sales device in its own right to try and shore up Dark X-Men. Still, the story itself isn’t bad at all – especially because it focusses on Cable and Hope’s relationship rather than getting caught up in the Bishop stuff.
PunisherMax #1 – A relaunch of the Max imprint’s version of the Punisher, this time with Jason Aaron and Steve Dillon. And yes, they’re really calling it PunisherMax. Perhaps the name sounds slightly less stupid to Americans (though I doubt it), but it can’t help reminding me of the trailers that used to run on the Adam & Joe podcast. (“The Adam & Joe podcast now has a new name: PODMAX. The name will never be written down, or spoken out loud, but every time you think of the Adam & Joe Podcast, remember: PODMAX…”)
Anyway, Aaron is working on the basis that his Punisher is a completely separate character from the Marvel Universe version. And he’s taking advantage of that fact, by doing a story that introduces his version of the Kingpin. To be honest, it’s only very loosely based on the original character; he’s kept the name and appearance, but otherwise Aaron is telling a story about a henchman politicking his way to the top. The tone of the story is weirdly inconsistent – it veers between over-the-top gross-out violence and more down-to-earth character moments. Presumably Aaron’s going for black comedy drama, much as Garth Ennis did, but he’s in danger of lurching between the two instead of bringing them together. Still, Steve Dillon can do both , and the story hangs together. It’s a strong first issue, but the comedy sequences could be blended in a little better.
Strange #1 – At first glance, this is an odd time to do a Dr Strange miniseries. The current set-up, from events in New Avengers, is that Strange’s hands have started shaking again, so he can’t do proper magic any more. Consequently he’s been replaced as Sorcerer Supreme by Brother Voodoo, handed his cosmic carriage clock, and packed off into retirement. But in fact, in many ways this makes Strange an easier character to write. The problem with magic is that it’s terribly open-ended, and omnipotent heroes aren’t very interesting, because they have to face horribly contrived threats. In this version, Strange still has tons of mystic knowledge, and some rudimentary mystic ability, but not a great deal else. And so Mark Waid is doing stories with that. The tone is pretty light – this issue, Strange helps to thwart a demonically-possessed baseball team – but it’s a good read, and goes to show that you can do more with the character when he can’t just hand-wave everything away. Artist Emma Rios is working in a slightly manga-tinged version of the Marvel house style (though a Google search suggests her range actually extends way beyond that), and it’s the right approach for a slightly old-fashioned but fun story like this.
Supergod #1 – Warren Ellis’ latest Avatar miniseries sounds like it might be an exercise in controversy-baiting – and the cover, showing a Superman-style figure on a crucifix, certainly wouldn’t dissuade you from that view. In fact, Ellis’ big idea for this series is Voltaire’s claim that if God didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent him. So it’s a story about various government super-soldier projects all trying to produce superhumans to… worship, basically. Well, I call it a story. It’s really more of a lecture, with a series of vignettes that are variations on that basic theme. But it’s not much of a narrative – it’s a whole issue of the usual stuff about how dangerous superhumans would be in the real world, with a bit of religious fervour sprinkled over the top, and a couple of hints about plots to be developed in future issues. Ellis is clearly very pleased with this idea, so it’s a shame he didn’t just allow it to emerge from the story instead of painstakingly explaining it for 20 pages. In its favour, though, the book has some excellent artwork from Garry Gastonny, who has some wonderful character designs, who knows how to make his cities look different from each other, and who generally looks like he’d be right at home doing this sort of thing for a major publisher.
S.W.O.R.D. #1 – Kieron Gillen and Steven Sanders are the creative team for this ongoing series about the intergalactic Earth-protecting agency that Joss Whedon introduced in Astonishing X-Men. Or, more accurately, it’s an ongoing series for commander Abigail Brand and some supporting characters… but S.W.O.R.D. is catchier. And this actually has some potential as an ongoing title. Brand is a relatively undeveloped character, and the organisation’s remit is broad enough to allow stories about virtually anything. Plus, it has a comfortable niche in the Marvel Universe, bridging the gap between the cosmic titles and the earthbound titles.
It’s a good introductory issue. Henry Gyrich is brought in to provide an internal sparring partner for Brand, we get a cheerfully bizarre parade of the sort of stuff S.W.O.R.D. has to deal with (alien diplomats demanding “temples of pain”), and there’s a story about Brand’s embarrassing brother showing up with a bounty-hunter in tow. Since this book is written by somebody British, you can probably guess which bounty-hunter. And a couple of subplots are set up for members of the supporting cast. As Hank points out near the end, these are pleasingly traditional challenges, rather than the catastrophic upheavals that most Marvel titles seem to go for these days. Quite right too; it’s only issue #1.
The dialogue is great. I’m not so wild about the art; it’s generally solid, but Sanders goes overboard with Brand charging around, and his Beast is so far off model that he appears to have turned into a donkey. Mind you, he does a decent line in robot bounty-hunters. There’s also a back-up strip illustrated by Gillen’s Phonogram partner Jamie McKelvie; it’s basically an extension of the Lockheed subplot from the main story, but X-Men fans may wish to note that it does finally offer an explanation of why nobody’s been able to recover Kitty Pryde yet.
Uncanny X-Men: First Class #5 – Um… well, a bunch of aliens invade Earth and the X-Men fight them. Yeah, that’s basically it. It’s good to see a First Class issue creating its own villains rather than relying on the parade of guest stars that seems to have become the norm in these books, and in fairness, Scott Gray and Nelson DeCastro do a fine job of building them up as a threat. And they’re villains with great character designs, too. But it’s still a very familiar story. Then again, that’s fine, if you think the First Class books are there to provide a lead-in for younger readers; by that standard, if any book should be doing the X-Men in generic action stories where they fight bad guys, this is the one.
X-Babies #2 – Well, this is turning into a very strange series. The plot is straightforward enough. The new management at Mojoworld have replaced the X-Babies with even cutesier versions. The brats have escaped, but now find themselves hounded by a string of impossibly saccharine and irritating characters extracted from Star Comics, Marvel’s short-lived mid-eighties imprint for younger readers. The Star imprint is so obscure that it’s hard to imagine there’s much of a built-in audience for this. The motive, presumably, is some sort of warped corporate synergy: there’s a Star Comics trade paperback due out at the end of the month. This issue even includes a reprint of Planet Terry #1, encouraging readers to pick up the trade to find out what happened next. (The answer, if you’re wondering, is that the book got cancelled at issue #12 without resolving the plot.) But the main story seems to have no affection for the characters at all – they’re openly portrayed as hatefully twee, boringly worthy, generally loathsome relics of a justly-forgotten past. To be fair, I wouldn’t be surprised if the final issue reveals that these are supposed to be cutesy doppelgangers of the Star characters, much like the imposter X-Babies from issue #1. But still, if the aim of this series is to promote the Star trade paperback – and I can’t imagine what else it could be – you’d have thought they’d be trying to convince us that these were lost classics, instead of encouraging us to throw the characters down the deepest available well.
X-Force #21 – Rather confusingly billed as the second part of “Necrosha”, though it’s the third to appear. So presumably the New Mutants and Legacy chapters don’t count. For the most part, this is a fairly dispiriting read. Zombie mutants are still attacking Utopia, and X-Force fight them, and… yeah, that’s basically the story. Actually, that’s not quite fair – there’s also various people trying to wake up Elixir so that he can resolve their respective subplots. But basically it’s an extended fight scene along much the lines you’d expect. Artist Clayton Crain gets through most of the issue without drawing more than a handful of intelligible backgrounds, seemingly content as usual to turn down the lights and hope for the best. Naturally, the result is that the action appears to take place in an unspecified fogbank somewhere, with the occasional girder lying around. To be fair, there’s a couple of decent moments in here (there’s a rather nice panel of Archangel shielding the team from a fire, which makes effective use of light and shade), but a lot of it is just murky and inexpressive. Now, having said all that, the story does start to get my attention near the end, when it finally gets to the point, and Selene attempts to resurrect the entire population of Genosha, thus restoring mutantkind… ish. That’s got some potential, and evidently this is going to be more than just a whole storyline of “and then vengeful techno-zombies attacked.” So if we’re getting that obligatory stuff out of the way before moving on to the more interesting bit of the story… fair enough, I guess.
X-Men Forever #11 – The last issue of Chris Claremont’s alternate-history series ended by teasing that the differences from the Marvel Universe went even further than he’d previously suggested. But naturally, we don’t pick up on that subplot straight away. Instead, it’s off to Russia, where Colossus has taken up a position as an official superhero of the Russian government. From the look of it, this is going to be a device to bring Magik into the cast (the eighties ended with her turned into a child and packed off back to Siberia, so that’s where the series picks her up). A nice straightforward globe-trotting lead story, and a bunch of cutaways advancing a score of subplots… yes, it’s eighties-style Claremont. But that’s what he does best. Tom Grummett is on form, too. He does a great job with the Crimson Dynamo armour, and I like his patriotic redesign of Colossus’ costume – yes, it has vague echoes of Judge Dredd, but maybe that’s no bad thing.
If Destroyed’s abandoned? Noooooo- Actually, it is much prettier here and hurts my eyes less to read.
Re: Cable #20
Telling the story from the perspective of Emil seemed a very bad choice to me as well (he comes of as omniscient, telling events he can’t possibly know). It was already troubling me in the previous issues.
How did Bishop take control of the Acanti? Has he developed telepathic abilities? Are we supposed to believe his focus on killing Hope is so strong he overwhelmed the Acanti when it linked with his brain?
At least the end is near…
The only bit of SWORD I wasn’t iffy on was the guest star. I thought the writing was ok, but Beast was actually quite annoying, even beyond the purview of being a hopelessly romantic and optimistic foil to Brand that was intended. And yes, he’s being drawn as some bizarre roided-up Aardvark or something now.
I’ll be sticking with it as long as the guest star does, but if it doesn’t grab me by then I have no problem with dropping it.
“but it does feel a little as though he’s still arguing over the grim-and-gritty developments of the mid-nineties.”
Well, some people (I’m looking at you, Geoff Johns) are still trotting that adolescent crap out as if it’s a good thing, so I for one am glad Grant’s giving them the required smack on the back of the head. Although I wish he didn’t have to.
I thought Sander’s Beast in SWORD was going for a Pink Panther look with the shape of his head. Once I made that feline connection in my head, I was fine with it.
Quick suggestion now that Paul’s posting here as well: a label or author tag that tell us who has written a post (unless you plan to start off every post with an intro).
Two things if you’re moving over here:
1) I second Chad’s commment. I know WordPress allows for a “Posted by (Al or Paul) on” rather than just “Posted on”. Could you please turn that on? [Making X-Axis a category rather than a tag would probably help too]
2) Could there be a comments link at the bottom? Reading the whole post then scrolling back up to get to the comments is back-asswards.
> I’ll be sticking with it as long as the guest star does, but if it doesn’t grab me by then I have no problem with dropping it.
If you mean the hopelessly, HOPELESSLY off-model freelance peacekeeping agent (seriously, he’s got one of the most distinctive head designs in comics – unlike Beast, who doesn’t have a head design period – how do you screw that up?), that’s him apparently. AIUI, there’s no plans for him to reappear.
Well he’ll be in the next issue at least, yes? Beyond that, well, as I said, unless the main cast suddenly gets more interesting, I’ll be off.
I don’t mind the redesign. It looks fairly good and there’s no concrete reason for it to be identical story-wise.
I’ll see if I can figure out how you turn that feature on.
Hmm. Unless it’s VERY well hidden in the WordPress options, this may involve manually editing the theme.
And indeed it does. Should be working now, though.
Yes, the ending of Cable #20 literally killed the whole story. Bishop attempts to blow the nuke before Cable and Hope leave – so Emil takes the nuke, and then detonates it himself! But Bishop jumps into an Acanti that’s RIGHT there within the explosion! And then follows the ships! While the next arc seems to actually focus on something else, it’s sad that Marvel had to extend this keep this series so that there’d be enough time for all the storylines to play out.
Here I come to overthink pointless crap again. That being my primary skill.
Didn’t the “Endangered Species” backups go out of their way to make a point that even DEAD mutants had their mutant genes supressed by Wanda’s spell? So shouldn’t the vast majority of the risen dead on Genosha be powerless, and therefore much less of a threat?
I swear, don’t actually spend a lot of time thinking about this. This is just how my brain works.
I just read Endangered Species for the first time in trade a couple weeks ago. Indeed it did make that point. Dead mutants were no longer mutants.
Is the sole ‘dead is dead’ character not brought back lately still Gwen Stacy?*
Not counting her mid 90s clone who moved to the mid west.
*Alternate timeline Uncle Ben was brought back by Peter David a couple of years ago.
I suppose the easiest way to handwave Endangered Species is to say that since Selene is considerably older and more experienced at magic than Wanda, she can repower those dead mutants…
I’m surprised to see how S.W.O.R.D. #1 is being received here. I thought it was the best first issue Marvel’s done in years. It was hilarious, it was exciting, the characters were all so fun, and upon reaching the end of the main story I can’t tell you how disappointed I was that I’d have to wait for the next one. The art, I thought, was one of the best things about it. Every single character in every single panel had just so much personality in their movements and their expressions. Even when someone’s just in the back of the frame, they’ve got so much energy. The Beast design was so funny to look at, I didn’t care for a second how different from the other books he looked. As far as I’m concerned, the other books should change him to look like this because it’s such a fun design.
The one thing I disliked about the comic is actually something that no one here’s brought up: the back-up wasn’t good. It was all exposition and posturing. There must have been a better way to explain what Lockheed’s problem is than that.
“{PLANET TERRY] got cancelled at issue #12 without resolving the plot”
Must…hold…TONGUE*
Seriously, though, I remember the way it ended in the UK reprint comic: Terry’s parents just turn up out of the blue, in the very last panel of a story that didn’t really seem to be going that way.
The collections they’re doing for Star Comics seem…a little misconcieved, as well: rather than digests of six issues of one series, they’ve gone for TPB-sized collctions of a couple of issues from each. Seems like a miscue to me.
I haven’t read AAAAAny comics this week. BOO. Am drawing one now, though, and hoping that somebodys will buy it. IT IS AWESOME YOU GUYS.
Also, am hoping that SWORD will contain both SWEARING and TRAINERS.
//\Oo/\\
Well, if by some bizarre miracle the TPBs sell well enough to make it to the end, I suppose they’ll commission a proper ending.
Which member of the Dark X-Men is an outright bad guy? I haven’t read many Dark Reign things but based on the Wikipedia article I’m seeing a number of possible candidates.
I’m also finding myself surprised that Dark X-Men actually seems like an interesting concept. The “Evil X-Men” thing has been done to death but a bunch of (Mystique excepted) third-string morally ambiguous mutants on a government-run PR-stunt team is actually a kind of good concept and I find myself rooting around for possible additional members (Sebastian Shaw and resurrected members of X-Statix spring to mind).
Well, I presume Paul meant Dark Beast, who’s pretty unambiguous about such things – but I think Mystique has to qualify too, surely.
>a bunch of (Mystique excepted) third-string morally ambiguous mutants on a government-run PR-stunt team is actually a kind of good concept<
You mean like Freedom Force?
I totally approve of this move from If Destroyed, especially since Paul’s taking on more reviews than usual these days and branching out further from the X-books. It makes reading the X-Axis reviews that much more interesting.
Ah, I miss the old X-Axis.
Re: Cable 21
Ah, the shorts about Hope and Cable are pretty good. What I don’t understand is why they didn’t go the character route story on the main book ages ago.
This book would actually have greatly benefited from a slow, more character driven pace. I presume the final of this story is Hope in the present and whoever she is revealed. Doesn’t some of that hinge on readers knowing and caring about her?
Anyway, that being said, I appreciate the consistency of the book. At least I know what I’m getting.
— Regarding Batman and Robin #6, it may be worth recalling that the Flamingo was set up in a throwaway line of dialogue as a man whose family was killed by criminals as well. The idea may have been to take the Red Hood and Scarlet as thuggish parodies of B and R, and then give them their own villain who was an even more ridiculous parody of their media-friendly ultraviolence. His dress is more flamboyant, you see, but he’s also so much more thuggish he just grunts!
Morrison seems to lampshade this with Jason ludcirously dubbing the Flamingo his archnemesis and claiming victory as he’s led away in cuffs. The problem being that Jason and Sasha haven’t developed enough in this arc to support their own parody-of-a-parody, so the whole thing sort of collapses into the archness of Morrison’s script and the murk of Tan’s art.
And really, if we’re meant to buy Dick and Damien as real successors, this sort of meta-meta-subversion doesn’t much help, does it?
— Depowering Strange in this way makes some sense as a “back to forumla” approach. In the Ditko stories, villains could menace Doc by pulling out a pistol and shooting him. (It nearly happens in the first ever story, and then again with the, er, unmemorable Mister Rasputin, who just shoots Strange when he’s magically outclassed.)
A lot of Strange’s problems as a protagonist stem from the post-Ditko stories where the series totally collapsed into psychedelia and man-becoming-the-divine. Those made for good stories, especially in their time, but left his powers hopelessly ill-defined in the name of cosmic allegory.
If Marvel considers this a problem — and Joe Quesada and others have made statements to the effect that Doc is “too powerful” — depowering him and replacing him elsewhere with Brother, ahem, Doctor Voodoo are ways to create those limits. Voodoo has established tropes and can be deployed the way Neil Gaiman and the Hellblazer writers similarly invoke “real” occultism to produce the illusion of a vaguely rule-driven sort of magic.
And a depowered Strange can, as in Ditko’s stories, wind up with a relatively limited standard set of abilities that he uses cleverly rather than the ability to mutter some Lovecraftian names and instantly do (or inexplicably fail to do) whatever the plot requires.
Both Polaris and Magneto have used alien technology to duplicate and/or jumpstart their old powers post M-Day, and if memory serves, Warlock and Magus could do pretty much anything the plot required them to do, so – while I would tend to agree that the writers probably just forgot or ignored Endangered Specias – they could just go with the excuse that the Techno-Organic Virus is just mimicking the dead mutants old powers.
In regards to S.W.O.R.D., it kind of bothered me that it felt exactly like an episode of Babylon 5, and that every non-human had the same head shape (Sydren and the Drenx look like they could be the same species and they’re clearly not meant to be, although considering how many aliens look human, it’s fair enough that two non-humanlike species might resemble each other) and Brand’s brother looks more like a refugee from furryporn than a character I can take seriously. But I could get past all that and get into the series as long as the Beast’s nonstop blathering is played as first day jitters or a trait that Brand actually does find charming even though she pretends otherwise, and not as an uncharacteristic obliviousness to what’s going on around him. He’s always been talkative, but he seemed to just be blathering counterproductively.
Selene’s magic + T-O virus > Wanda’s magic.
Seriously, though, if you want a back door out of M day, couldn’t we just simply turn around and say “Wanda’s magic has been stretched to breaking point now and mutants are regaining their power ever so slowly” Slipping thru the cracks, if you will.
Well, the interesting way out of M-Day is for somebody to figure out that it might be worth killing Wanda and seeing what happens. Maybe everything just goes back to normal if she’s not around to keep things in place. There’s potentially an interesting Magneto story in there, at any rate.
Some people have interpreted Jason’s “arch-nemesis” line to be him referring to Dick, with Jason setting himself up to be the Joker to Dick’s Batman. What with all The Killing Joke callbacks in this issue.
Paul – The heroes getting together and discussing offing Wanda was how we got into the mess of M-day and Wolverine Origins. Let’s not have anymore talk of killing her off or who knows WHERE we’ll end up?!?!?
I have to say, this new site is easier on the eyes.
I think I have to sample the new Max Punisher. Aaron seems to be one of the newer writers who shows at least some promise. And Dillon on the art is nice too. This is more suited to him. I really like his art, but he is wasted on straight superhero stuff. Caught a glimpse on his Cable back-up, and this isn´t just his thing.
“Sydren and the Drenx look like they could be the same species and they’re clearly not meant to be”
When two aliens look close to identical, you should feel free to read something from that.
KG
Alternate timeline Uncle Ben was brought back by Peter David a couple of years ago.
That’s right – back during the same “Friendly Neighborhood Spider-man” run where David was doing stuff like Zombie-from-Hell Mysterio and a storyline with a throwaway character from a decade-old crossover with Spiderman 2099. I tend to think of that as David hitting his X-treme X-Men Period.
I really liked Beast’s design in SWORD; hell, I want him to look beastier and beastier. I could do without the ominous reference to a possible Second Coming of Kitty Pryde in the back-up, though. God, I’m sick of Kitty Pryde.
Cable needs to be put down. This book’s premise was working maybe ten issues or so ago; now it is old, old, old, old, old, and I am so, so sick of it. It is the Gilligan’s Island of superhero comics.
Supergod reads like an extended blog post with pictures. I have this vague memory of a time when Ellis wrote actual narratives, about stuff other than whatever he happened to find on the internet. Was that real? Did I dream that?
Strange made me sad. Dr. Strange is down; is it necessary to kick him in the groin while we’re at it?
On the subject of the X-Babies, Paul: in the past I’ve taken you at your word when you’ve written that they were originally meant to be a satire of Marvel’s marketing, but I recently read in an interview with Art Adams (in THE ART OF ART ADAMS, or whatever the collection is called) that at least in so far as the artist recalls, Chris Claremont himself was interested in the merchandising possibilities of cute little baby X-Men. So if you’re just working off your own assumptions about the stories C.C. told back then, you may be giving him too much credit. The concept may have been forthright rather than subversive.
It depends which X-Babies you mean. There’s an earlier annual (also drawn by Adams) where the joke is simply that Mojo turns the X-Men into toddlers and the New Mutants have to save the day instead. But the later story which introduces the X-Babies as separate characters couldn’t be much more blatant. Claremont even shows up on panel to complain about the milking of the franchise.
[…] to deliver this week’s essential purchase.” Paul O’Brien, House To Astonish: “The dialogue is great.” Greg Comics Should Be Good: “I certainly hope that it smashes sales records and Gillen gets […]
i always find it funny that selene is constantly referred to as the one resurrecting the dead mutants when all she’s been doing is giving orders–eliphas is the one who actually resurrects them.
i’m tired of the T-O virus being used as some kind of deus ex machina for other writers to abuse; it was much more fun in the old days when warlock, magus and the technarch were unknowns with awesome levels of power. warlock had the ability to clean up infected limbo demons during inferno, but louise simonson’s infamous lame run on the new mutants virtually ignored all of that.
“Supergod reads like an extended blog post with pictures. I have this vague memory of a time when Ellis wrote actual narratives, about stuff other than whatever he happened to find on the internet. Was that real? Did I dream that?”
Couldn’t agree more. The more he puts out, the less I love the stuff I used to love of his, it’s a shame.
On the Kitty Pryde thing, for me, when I started reading X-Men, it was the 90s so I have no affection for her. This was when you couldn’t get Excalibur from the newsagents and I didn’t live near a dedicated comic shop so I just knew her as the smug girl that turns up occasionally and bitches about things. I just don’t have any interest in the character, I can’t be the only one.
I have to admit though, aside from the occasional forray, I mostly only keep up with the X books from X Axis. Thanks for that BTW.
I only realized that Kitty is my favorite character when Whedon wrote her out in Astonishing #25. The first comics I ever bought were published in July 1989; X-Factor #42, Uncanny #246, and Classic X-Men #35. I had no idea that Classic was a reprint title, but it was definitely my favorite. It was a better jumping on point for a 12 year old than either of the other titles. Uncanny was about to descend into an extended storyline where the team was lost and fragmented, and there were lots of intertwined subplots featuring little-known secondary characters. X-Factor was good, but frankly, the impending Judgment War over the next few months doesn’t hold a candle to the Dark Phoenix Saga (just beginning in the pages of Classic).
So the introduction to Kitty Pryde was my introduction to comics. Some of my early purchases included the From the Ashes TPB and the seminal “God Loves, Man Kills.” In GL,MK Kitty is the most heroic of any of the X-Men. She amazed me with her courage in the finale.
Kitty Pryde was one year older than me. (And she was Jewish, another trait we had in common). While I always wanted to be Cylcops (c’mon Phoenix was hot!), I identified most closely with Kitty. She was also Claremont’s favorite character, so he lavished more attention on her. She was in middle school, she was smart & cute, and her powers still left her relatively normal. She was definitely the easiest character for me to relate to.
I didn’t read Excalibur because it wasn’t on my newstand consistently. I never liked the comedy tone, and the Cross Time Caper was an impenetrable jumping on point. So I missed Kitty for a long time.
I stopped reading Comics in 1994 and didn’t start up again until 2006. I was delighted to see her back in Astonishing. But even then, I didn’t realize how much she was my favorite character until Whedon “killed” her off.
Now I get my Kitty Pryde fix from X-Men Forever, and I have every expectation that Claremeont will use her well. (Though the idea that the addition of Wolverine’s claw makes her the “most formidable” X-Man is patently absurd). I’m also hoping to see her return in the “mainstream” titles. The current setup has the makings for a great storyline bringing her back.
There: more information about me than you wanted.
“the smug girl that turns up occasionally and bitches about things”
Yes, yes, yes. That should be her overly-cute Matt Fraction tagline.