The X-Axis – 25 July 2010
This is the weekend of the San Diego Comicon, but to be honest, I usually just wait until the dust has settled and read the round-ups then. However, I see Marvel have announced Generation Hope, an ongoing series which sounds like it’s the latest incarnation of Generation X. I’m not… altogether sold on that title, which makes it sounds like a teenage version of the Alpha Course, but it’s written by Kieron Gillen, so there’s a pretty strong chance it’s going to be great.
The same article also features the horrifying words “four Wolverine titles”, but it turns out that that’s counting the Daken and X-23 books. The two actual Wolverine titles, from the sound of it, are the relaunched Jason Aaron title, and something called Wolverine: The Best There Is, presumably the replacement for Wolverine: Origins. Charlie Huston and Juan Jose Ryp are an interesting choice of creative team and the series might well be decent, but considering how Wolverine: Weapon X stumbled out of the gate, I can’t help wondering if Marvel are massively overestimating what the market will support.
Anyway. Quiet week for X-books, quiet week for major releases generally…
Amazing Spider-Man #638 – The first part of “One Moment in Time”, the story nobody wanted to see! Now, I think the Spider-Man books on the whole have been vastly improved by the revamp of a couple of years past. But the decision to include an in-story explanation for the change in history has created an awkward dilemma. At some point they needed to address the question of what happened instead of Peter marrying Mary Jane, since it’s important to the history of both characters. It’s an open sore in continuity which had to be dealt with sooner or later. It doesn’t follow, however, that anyone particularly wants to read that story. After all, it’s not like “One More Day” was any good.
So by writing this story himself (and drawing the framing sequence) editor-in-chief Joe Quesada isn’t grabbing the glory so much as taking the flak, and I suspect he’s well aware of that. What you actually get in this story is a framing sequence with Peter and Mary Jane talking about old times – in which Peter may be wildly off model, but the acting is frequently great, with Quesada showing that he can still do emotion better than most. That’s followed by what can only be described as a revised version of Amazing Spider-Man Annual #21, the wedding story itself. It’s a modified reprint (including some 14 pages of the original), which basically takes advantage of the “race to the church” structure of the plot to nudge things the other way and send the story off the rails without too much effort.
I don’t recall the solicitations making clear that there would be quite so much reprinted material in this issue, but to be fair, it’s a 42-page story (plus a 2-page back-up) priced at $3.99, so it’s not like they’re charging extra for the reprinted pages. It’s actually more enjoyable than I was expecting – which is to say that I was braced for something as ponderously awful as “One More Day”, while this is passably entertaining with its interpolations of the original issue, and Marcos Martin’s art on the additional sequences. Still, it remains more of a necessary explanation than a story – though that may have been inevitable.
Battlefields #8 – This is the middle chapter of “Motherlands”, the sequel to Garth Ennis’ earlier story about female Russian fighter pilots in World War II. While Ennis loves his war stories, they do tend towards exercises in male bonding. A female protagonist necessarily moves him away from that, and what Ennis seems to be mainly interested in here – aside from a fairly familiar “getting over the death of a loved one” story – is writing a military force which, for a change, isn’t exclusively male. As a character, Anna’s not much different from Ennis’ usual male leads, but then arguably, nor should she be; it’s the relationships with the other characters that change. Ennis isn’t always as convincing doing romantic subplots, but it’s good to see him varying the formula.
Dark Wolverine #88 – The “Dark Reign” stuff is over, the relaunch isn’t for another couple of months… let’s do a crossover with Franken-Castle. If you haven’t been reading Punisher, well, it’s gone completely off the deep end of late. They did a Dark Reign tie-in story where Daken showed up as a guest star, killed the Punisher, and chopped him up, only for a bunch of old horror characters to revive him as Frankenstein. No, really. It’s drifted a bit from the “vigilante who shoots drug dealers” routine.
Now, plainly, Franken-Castle is stark raving mad, though part of the joke is to play it dead straight and commit wholeheartedly to the concept as if it were utterly normal. When he shows up as a guest star in another book, though… you’ve got a bit of a tone clash, let’s say. This issue starts off as a standard Daken story – he’s in Japan looking to replace the Muramasa Blade with another weapon that can kill Wolverine. So presumably that’s going to be the subject of his next arc. And then the Punisher shows up looking to kill him. Cue big fight. It comes off as a grinding gear change. I can’t quite figure out whether the creators think Dark Wolverine is already a crazy romp along the lines of Franken-Castle (it isn’t), but I can’t help feeling Daken really needs to react to Frank as something much, much stranger, instead of making a passing reference and taking it in his stride. Maybe they’re trying to play it straight, but it feels more like a standard Punisher guest appearance that pays lip service to the current direction.
New Mutants #15 – One of those “before we were so rudely interrupted” stories that you sometimes get in the aftermath of a crossover. Zeb Wells and Leonard Kirk bring the title characters back into the series, and pack them off on holiday to get to know one another again. Which is for the best, because Wells is good at the character details, and the team dynamic ought to be the thing that makes this series stand out from the other X-books. Our new villains are, from the look of it, a bunch of soldiers who’ve only just managed to get back to Earth after being teleported to Limbo by Magik a good while ago. They’re partly demonic. They’re a bit mad. And they’re out for revenge. They’re a great idea for a bunch of New Mutants villains, since (a) they’ve sort of got a point about Magik, and (b) the visual of a bunch of half-demon soldiers is enjoyably ludicrous. This should be a fun story. Minor glitch: the story also uses Pixie, but doesn’t seem to have noticed that she and Magik sort of reconciled at the end of the Hellbound miniseries, which undercuts the end of a story that only just finished. Still, plenty to like here.
Welcome to Tranquility: One Foot in the Grave #1 – Gail Simone writes a sequel to her cancelled WildStorm series about a superhero retirement village. I could have sworn the WildStorm universe had had an apocalypse or something, but evidently not in this series, and thank heavens for that. This is actually a direct continuation of an earlier plot, with the mayor having dubiously achieved an acquittal on the murder charge thanks to a lack of direct evidence and his world-famous reputation as a hero. As before, this series works by striking an odd balance between small-town drama and superhero trappings, in a way that’s often explicitly absurd – such as the defence lawyer wearing a cape and mask over his suit. Tranquility takes the utterly bizarre and makes it normal, simply by making sure that everyone’s so bizarre that the baseline of weird shoots up – easier said than done, but Simone can make this sort of thing work. Artist Horacio Domingues seems to be principally emulating the style of the earlier series rather than imposing his own identity, but for a sequel, that may be for the best.
X-Factor #207 – Another book returning to normal after the “Second Coming” crossover (though X-Factor at least continued to feature its core cast). The Baron Mordo subplot is tied up and seemingly brushed aside in the opening pages, in a slightly awkward way, but the issue moves on to start a new arc where the team get hired to retrieve an ancient magical artefact for a client whom we all know is Hela, but they don’t recognise. Given the character who returns to the cast at the end of the issue, I suspect this isn’t quite the random guest appearance it first seems. It’s a bit unfortunate that the cover completely blows Hela’s identity, but then I suppose it doesn’t hugely matter. The tension here isn’t that we don’t recognise Hela, it’s that X-Factor don’t recognise her. Also in this issue: another completely random guest star who you wouldn’t expect to see in this book (but then, as the semi-detached X-book, X-Factor is best placed to make use of the resources of Marvel’s New York City), and some deep and meaningful conversation between Rictor and Shatterstar. There’s something about that relationship that isn’t quite working for me at the moment – I think perhaps it’s a vague sense that Peter David is advancing a carefully thought out argument rather than just writing them as a couple. Then again, Shatterstar’s such an odd character that his romantic subplots probably shouldn’t come naturally to him, and maybe that’s where the slightly stilted feeling comes from.
“Peter may be wildly off model”
Whaddaya mean? He looks just like Joe Quesada!
I found the…event at the end of the issue troubling for all sorts of reasons (chiefly How?, That? and Get Out Of Town!). I remain unconvinced, but more intrigued. Quesada draws a wonderful Mary Jane, though.
//\Oo/\\
I picked up Amazing and promptly put it down. Opening it up and seeing that reprinted / altered story – which at the time felt rushed and drawn more like a Saturday morning cartoon (which I hated) – turned me completely off. I felt ripped off at the time (poorly written and drawn) and was not going to pay for it again in any form.
Over in New Mutants, I’ve always enjoyed Leonard Kirk’s pencils but not so much this time around. The inker perhaps? It’s an improvement over the previous regular artist, but it isn’t up to Kirk’s usual standards.
But X-Factor – LOVED the art. This book has suffered (and suffered and suffered) because of the continuously rotating artists. But this guy – I don’t know if he is a fill in or the newest guy in the long list – but it works. And I’m enjoying the Rictor / Shatterstar relationship. I admit, it’s partly because no male gay relationship that I can recall has been presented this way by Marvel, but at the core (minus all the trappings of the individual character’s stories), we’ve got a hot guy that wants to be monogamous and a hot guy that’s new to it all and wants to sleep around. Most gay men can relate.
The art in Spider-Man’s main story was Paolo Rivera, not Marcos Martin. Martin is doing the backups with Stan Lee.
I got the impression the US government sent them there, not Magik.
Generation Hope just proves that Marvel have no idea what to do with the X-Men brand. It’s been watered down and chipped away for years now and rather than try to tighten things up they’re making things worse with more comics and awful story lines. Vampires? A series about a bunch of characters nobody cares about?
The funny thing is that they have a model of how to fix this kind of brand with the Avengers. The Avengers were on a similar downward spiral to the point that nobody really cared about them anymore either. But rather than water everything down with more comics or let Chuck Austen advance his crappy story lines they blew everything up, both in-story and creatively, and made it about one team, one book and one direction.
Now, you can say Bendis isn’t a great writer and the New Avengers weren’t actually the Avengers and you’d get no argument from me. But it worked in terms of giving the team and the line a direction and the fact that the sales were there and grew out of those changes and choices speaks volume. They built up an audience who wanted more and as such expanded into the Might Avengers, Avengers Initiative, etc. as time went on and the market continues to support these multiple Avengers titles in a way it never would have before the Bendis revamp.
Compare that to the string of random story lines and books coming out of the X-Men now. I’d hate to see Carey’s book canceled and I like some of the things Fraction has done but so many of the characters and story lines are all over the place. Much of that is due to the fact that Axel Alonso isn’t fit to edit a coloring book but the overall direction of the line is still “keep throwing crap out there and hope something sticks.” It’s funny because not only has this proved not to work but Marvel has shown there’s a better way to go about this process with another one of their own properties.
Also on New Mutants: I don’t think Pixie shrugging off of Ilyana too off-base. The end of Hellbound had the two showing a grudging respect for each other based on the fact that they were both X-Men. They weren’t VBFF or anything.
Jeremy speaks truth. Marvel are twats. Although, when the Avengers line kept expanding I started losing interest. No, that’s not fair. It was in constant event mode after Civil War, and THAT’S why I lost interest. Oh fuck, scratch that. House of M. I completely blocked that garbled piece of horse shit from my mind. House of bloody M… Though it was after Civil War that it was Initiative, build up to SI, SI:I, SI, DR… you get the idea. But the absolute truth is, reread the first arc. It’s one team. One direction. It set out it’s stall in the first arc. New team. A plot to build from (jailbreak), and the “what’s going on here” stuff, which turned out to be skrulls. Now, I liked that. What I don’t think worked is that Bendis can’t seem to manage an ensemble cast. But that’s not what we are talking about here. Blow the fucking X-men up. Drastically reduce the cast. Get some shit hot talent working on it with a serious long term plan in mind. In fact, for all we know that is what Marvel intends to do. Guess they have to fix the fucking M-Day shit first. How that ever seemed like a good idea I’ll never know.
EIC”Hey, you know this entire line of comics we have about mutants? You know, the ones that protect mutants. Investigate the emergence of new mutants? Fight evil mutants? Wouldn’t it be great if magically there were no more mutants?!?!?”
Bemused writer”So… um… what are the cast of these 20 odd books going to do? And why do they still get to be mutants?”
EIC”Yeah. No more mutants. That’s a great idea, me! You. Go write stuff”
Bemused writer”Well, I have no fucking idea what to do. Guess I’ll just continue on my own ideas. Hmmm… suppose I better have the characters say ‘hey, remember when there was a shitload more mutants?’ in maybe panel 3, but aside from that, I’ll just continue with my own stories.”
Sounds like a promising direction for a comic series about fucking mutants, doesn’t it? Bloody fucking twats. That aside, I reread the Mutant Massacre the other day and it was great. Wish Marvel still had a fucking clue…
An x-23 ongoing? Haven’t read anything about this, but if it’s by her usual creative team it should be good. The 2 minis are great.
I had been enjoying Spider-Man a LOT lately, but I think it’s taken a real downturn since the beginning of the Lizard arc, which sucks because these are all the payoff arcs for a year of stories. I also can’t help but think Slott as the sole writer with Martin, Ramos and Caselli as rotating artists is going to be awesome. (Just announced at SDCC for anyone who doesn’t know.) Slott was my favorite of the “web-heads.” He just writes exactly the Spider-Man I want to read.
I’m going to miss the choir, but Slott’s a good choice. Ramos coming back is an interesting move: I’m not entirely fond of his cartoony figures, but there is no-one better at building and staging the world inside the comics panel. He is the king of the Z-axis.
The Mac Gargan Scorpion mini-series sounds good, too. Paul Tobin on New Spider-Girl should please fans of his Marvel Adventures work, although I read the piece on Marvel.com and hated every word of it. Carnage was always rubbish, so I can’t say I care to see him return.
I expect we’ll see more of Carlie Cooper and the League of Egregious Females, now that The Gauntlet is over. I think Spidey needs more female friends, and the series definitely needs better female characters, but as long as the tonker is dragging the plonker, any woman coming into the series will automatically become a potential love interest.
What I’m saying is, Need More Lesbians.
Risked a look at Newsarama. Cripes. New Action Figurepalooza. Ug-lee.
//\Oo/\\
Spider-Mn has improved since the relaunch, but two things about it still stick in my craw.
First, the previous reinvigoration of the title under JMS was essentially derailed by crossover events to justify a soft reboot so that Joe Quesada and the writers couyld get their unmarried Peter Parker back.
Second, little to nothing that makes the relaunch good has felt like it needed OMD’s soft reboot to make it work. Quite to the contrary, the dreariest element of the book to date has been the parade of thinly-drawn comedy love interests, the one element of the book that couldn’t be done before the soft reboot took place. It’s especially painful when the writers make it obvious that their idea of a single twentysomething is drawn entirely from old episodes of Friends.
It’s shame Marvel couldn’t just put good writers and artists on the title without indulging the EiC’s stuck-in-the-70s notions. Quesada’s “genies” all seem to be things that took his favorite comics away from the status quo they had in his adolescence. It’s the same thing that led to the idiocy of the Decimation as an editorial edict , and even earlier led Quesada to jam Iron Man into his Disco Age armor for contrived plot reasons when JQ was “merely” a writer.
Quesada is a great Editor-in-Chief the other 99% of the time, when he’s not playing to his own nostalgia, but on the occasions when is, he’s perfectly willing to dictate the retro direction of entire franchises.
I don’t understand why, instead of doing OMD/BMD, they didn’t just take the simple route of doing a story where Peter and MJ’s marriage discover that their marriage was never legal to begin with. Then just have them break up for whatever reason before they can legalize it. Problem solved, and no need to refer to Peter as “divorced” which was a concern of Quesada’s.
One thing the new iteration will have it its favour, no matter one’s opinion of the story engine, the artists or the writer, is continuity. Not “Peter Parker already faked photos to make money and get himself out of a jam” continuity, but a tighter sense of character placement and plot development.
Characters will be less likely to fall off the grid for months at a time, it’ll be easier to develop and follow through on plot threads, and so on.
And yeah: I, too, wondered about the legalities of being married by one of Mary Jane’s “uncles.”
(and as far as derailment: the new paradigm isn’t the superfranchise, but the microfranchise. Every superhero has a family, again. Jeepers, even Pepper Potts and General Ross have secret identities. I confidently expect, I dunno, Barney Bushkin to be the new Scarlet Spider)
//\Oo/\\
I never read the original wedding issue, so I have no idea how much of the OMIT flashbacks were in the original story and how much has been revised, but…just how long did Spider-Man lay under that guy in the alley? When he responded to the sound of gunshots he remarked that it was early in the morning, and it looked like the sun wasn’t even up yet, and then he’s there until almost 1pm…so 6, 7 hours?
So Spider-Man lay unconscious for half a morning underneath another guy in an alley, and no one noticed them there despite the fact that the place should have been crawling with cops responding to the gunfire?
And this is the story Quesada was dying to tell, huh?
I think I’ve worked out the problem with Daken.
He’s essentially an R rated character forced to exist in a pg-ish world. So a character that’s essentially all about the sensual in regards to sex and violence is effectively cut off from both those things, so he’s never able to really be written the way he probably should be.
As I understand it, U.S. law contains the commonsensical provision thata couplke that thinks themselves married in good faith doesn’t instantly lose marital status if a relatively minor legal irregularity in the license or ceremony is discovered.
I can also tell you that you can be married by a relative: I’ve known at least two people with family members in various Protestant churches who had a grandfather or uncle as an officiating minister at a wedding.
And Matthew, given that the recent “Peter Parker, Unemployed” bit was caused by Peter faking photos and being caught out for it….well, you’ve picked a perhaps unintentionally hilarious example.
I have two problems with Spider-Man minus Mary Jane. First, the way they went about it, as if making everyone forget they were married made the reader forget they were married. No matter how many girls he dates, I will always know that he is married to Mary Jane. Only readers who come on in the next decade – never having seen the two married – will know any different. I would have rather an excuse – as given above by Brian – have happened because at least there would have been a true resolution to that relationship and readers who had invested a lot into accepting and caring them as a couple, could have close that door. This ‘forget’ solution just leaves it open for me.
Second, none of the main stories I’ve read and enjoyed would have been prevented by a married Peter Parker. For it being such a big reason for Quesada to make him single, him being single hasn’t resulted in any revolutionary stories that hinged on him being single.
@Jeremy Henderson
I think the timing issue is secondary to the fact that the story Quesada was dying to tell explained that Spider-Man couldn’t marry MJ because he was sleeping under another man.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
I don’t understand why OMIT is being published, given the Marvel editorial stance three years ago that “It’s magic. We don’t have to explain it.”
“As I understand it, U.S. law contains the commonsensical provision thata couplke that thinks themselves married in good faith doesn’t instantly lose marital status if a relatively minor legal irregularity in the license or ceremony is discovered.”
Fair enough, but they could have simply taken a creative liberty on that front.
I just think “Marriage gets negated by some completely made-up legal technicality.” would have played a lot better than “Peter makes deal with the devil, marriage goes away, memories are fuddled, and continuity becomes hazy.”
Has it ever been properly explained how Harry Osborn came back to life? Or are Marvel just expecting us to buy that he “went and lived in Europe for a while”?
I’d agree that OMIT is an old wound that shouldn’t be revisited. That it took them this long to come back to it and Quesada himself took charge shows what a balls of a story OMD actually was.
Slott taking over as sole writer is interesting considering Marvel will be dropping the ‘Amazing’ output by one-third each month. The books had fairly stable sales, so it is odd that they would want to reduce any easy cash intake from readers. Plus in the past Slott has always seemed maxed out trying to get out 2 books a month, so there could be scheduling concerns. Maybe it is Marvel’s way of quietly reducing, say in a year or so, the line back down to one ‘Amazing’ a month.
They addressed Harry’s return over a year ago during the Molten Man issues. Norman got Mysterio to help fake that he actually died using a fake body. Other than that, yeah, it was goblin formula, move to Europe again.
Ah right, thanks Dave. I’m horribly behind on Spider-Man and was just wondering if they had ever addressed that point.
I demand to be allowed to write the story of Harry Osborn and his wacky adventures in Oswestry.
//\oo/\\
Jeremy, regarding cutting back on the number of x-books I don’t think it is fair to compare the X-Men books to the Avengers. The Avengers were basically at rock bottom when Bendis took over. There was just one Avengers book and it was not selling. For many years now there have been tons of x-books and they still sell. Maybe not as well as they once did but if you look at the number of x-books published each month I don’t think that Marvel would want to take the hit that result if you canceled all of them but one.
Having said that it does appear that the spinoff mini’s may have reached a point where they are not worth releasing. The numbers on the recent Pixie mini were fairly dire and I do think that the line would benefit from fewer titles being released. I’m guessing that people don’t buy the one-shots and mini’s anymore because there are so darn many of them. They stopped being special many years ago and maybe if Marvel stopped doing them for a few years people would get interested in them again.
Blow the fucking X-men up. Drastically reduce the cast. Get some shit hot talent working on it with a serious long term plan in mind.
Hey, yeah! Sounds like a great idea! Like, you could just cut the cast down to five or six core characters – say, Cyclops, Beast, Wolverine, Emma Frost, the Professor and Jean Grey – pair them with a critically-acclaimed writer with a knack for long-term plotting and a love of weird high-concept stuff, and seriously dig into the book’s core concepts for a good long run. That’s a recipe for success Marvel would HAVE to recognize! OH NO WAAAAAAAAAIT
Second, little to nothing that makes the relaunch good has felt like it needed OMD’s soft reboot to make it work.
Second, none of the main stories I’ve read and enjoyed would have been prevented by a married Peter Parker.
My thoughts exactly. I picked up an issue in which some woman at work is flirting with Peter, and he worries about it because he’s in a steady relationship with the Black Cat. This is different from being in a steady relationship with MJ how, exactly?
I think that’s what annoyed me the most about the whole thing. The ridiculously dishonest claim that the reason the Spider-Man franchise was in a rut was not because of the shoehorned events or just bad writing, like “The Other” or Mark Millar torpedoing the secret identity for a cheap cliffhanger, but because the character was married. Obviously. Because a drunk Norman Osborn fathering children with Gwen Stacy has everything to do with Pete and MJ’s marriage.
Idiots.
@Blair
It’s true comparing the X-books now and the Avengers books 6-7 years isn’t completely accurate as the X-books of today are certainly healthier sales wise. I guess my problem is that I hate seeing that they’re continuing make things worse with another X-men ongoing, one-shots, etc. rather than pull back and come up with a plan. The fact that these extra products are so diabolically lame (vampires vs mutants) means they haven’t figured anything out and are just hoping something catches on.
That’s what you do when you’re desperate, not when you have a plan. Whether you can or will compare the two, the Bendis re-launch had a plan. The people in charge of the x-books today do not. And if the creators can’t even put in any effort to their work why should I or anyone care what they’re tossing out there or support their pathetic efforts?
Oh, God. What I want to type now is just so unbelievably filthy. I can’t do it. 🙂
*strength and honour*
Right. Okay. Pete is enjoying a “beneficial friendship” *raise eyebrow* with Black Cat, in which his mask stays on. Remember: Felicia no longer remembers Spider-Man’s true face or name. They aren’t exactly…relating so much as…exercising.
(one could argue that this is a more healthy, uh, stab at the relationship that in its original iteration, because there isn’t an undercurrent of White Knightery to Peter’s involvement. You’d have to accept that this version of the Black Cat is more interesting than the original conception of the character, which of course would be your prerogative.)
I mean, it almost seems churlish to say that having MJ around would change the tone and tenor of the last one hundred issues, because it’s so obvious. Setting aside the more literal interpretation – that you couldn’t do any of the romantic subplots with MJ around – which would take out every female character except Lily Hollister and Aunt May Parker (and Betty, and Glory, and Marla, etc.) – having Mary Jane there (and you know, I quit after Sins Past, but I don’t really remember her being there all that much, post-Byrne-reboot. Hell, the only Spidey comic I read was the Fraction annual, and look how that turned out!)…
I’ll start again.
Having Mary Jane around changes everything – for them both. If Peter has MJ to rely on/take for granted, then you don’t get the resonance of having Carlie Cooper there as a forensic/police contact for Spidey one minute, and a friend/foil/potential love interest the next.
(I honestly think Carlie as love interest and likely new girlfriend is a bad idea, both for her and Peter. She should be Kim Pine, you know? Not Knives Chau.)
The relationship between Peter and Harry and Harry and Lily might have played out differently, too – if only via some slightly old-fash’-sexist “female intuition” on MJ’s part.
The Gauntlet, too – it’s hard to be brought low when you have someone to bring you fish paste sandwiches and a colouring book in bed.
(Men marry their mothers, apparently, so what that says about Aunt May, that reformed flapper, I don’t know!)
Plus, you know, there’s been just a few too many places in the last umpty months where the temptation would have been too great to put Mary Jane in harm’s way.
But the fact is, this has been a story about an increasingly isolated Peter Parker. And you can’t do a story like that with a Peter Parker who has someone to come home to – not unless you want to do the worst kind of kitchen-sink drama.
So, you know, you *could* put Mary Jane into any of the stories from the last cycle of books, but ultimately, you might not like the results.
I guess we’ll see what happens when and if Peter finally finds somebody.
(and here it is: Norman wasn’t drunk: he was sad over Harry’s LSD-lapse. Also, a nineteen year-old girl in GoGo boots was willing to “beneficially friend” him. No drugs, no hocus-pocus; only bad judgement. Of all my many problems with that technicolour abortion of a story, Norman sleeping with Gwen wasn’t even in my top ten)
//\Oo/\\
Matthew, I think you may have missed my point.
M&S…
Ahh yes. The Morrison run. Twas bloody brilliant, wasn’t it?
Kelvin, don’t leave it there, mate!
I mean, I know what you mean: Quesada, etc., say that Peter had been written into a corner with the marriage, we say that it’s the revealed identity, the Other, Iron Daddy, Uncle Skrull-Jarvis, etc., etc..
The two positions are not mutually exclusive, though, and I can see a situation where they used the marriage as a scapegoat for *all* the things they felt were wrong with the character.
And…and you know what? In the years leading up to where I left Spidey, Peter was broken. They couldn’t keep Mary Jane in the comic. They couldn’t make that relationship work, and they couldn’t move the characters past it. They needed that reset button to fix all the bad superhero stuff they’d done to the character, but I can’t honestly blame them for using it to cut the marriage cord, as well. I don’t want to say that the ends justified the means, but…maybe?
I am glad I skipped One More Day, though.
//\Oo/\\
I have to disagree that the Gauntlet thing really worked much as advertised: it happened by the time of the relatively recent Vulture storyline, but prior to that it was hardly the tale of an increasingly isolated or even an especially worn down superhero. (If anything Peter grew *closer* to supporting cast members like Carlie during some of the arcs, e.g. the Mysterio three-parter.)
Really, “The Gauntlet” was an odd case of the editors and writers telling us there was a metaplot in interviews, and not really giving us that metaplot until just before the “Grim Hunt” arc when it was realized Peter needed to be isolated for that one. But mainly it was a convenient label for revamping the old villains with three late arcs that set up the rather…questionable “Grim Hunt” story.
When the character isolation that happened actually did happen, it wasn’t the result of the villains’ scheme so much as the result of Peter bizarrely deciding to exonerate JJJ with faked evidence that was so shoddy it was immediately spotted as fakery.
As to the idea that MJ being around keeps other supporting cast members away…really? Carlie comes in a friend of Lily and Harry, so if Lily’s there, she’s there. MJ’s also friends with Harry, so he and Lily are still there. Pete still neeeds income, so JJJ et al. are still there.
The characters you lose are Vin and Michelle Gonzalez, who’ve ended up being used in the sort of roles usually reserved for Jonah. Michelle’s an especially irritating character anyway, and the writers have had to backpedal from the one big plot turn they hung on her, the incredibly poorly executed “false romance” subplot.
As to the rest of your response, you seem to be assuming that the writers would misuse MJ as hostage bait or an “intuitive” woman, which says less about the character’s presence in the books than about your rating of those writers’ talents. (I do wonder if we’d have seen MJ, not May, get the Mr. Negative treatment for cheap melodrama purposes; that would’ve made the Gauntlet’s ostensible metaplot quite workable, come to think of it.)
Given how poorly they’ve been writing the other women in the book, you may be right…but at least we’d have fewer badly-written female characters in the title than we do now.
You’re also probably right that MJ would’ve changed the tone of the book more generally, but considering that the tone has largely been sitcom cliches, having to write a proper, ongoing relationship might or might not have helped some of the tonal problems. We don’t know, so that’s not worth arguing about as far as I can see.
I think the problem we can all agree on, and have agreed on in the past, is that no one at Marvel seems to have especially good ideas for writing Peter Parker well. They don’t write him or his supporting cast well in a marriage, and they don’t write him or his supporting cast terribly well as a twentysomething single. The costumed stuff has been better than it has in years; the civilian side of the book has been…well, I can only mention the uncanny resemblance to mediocre sitcoms so many times even when it’s accurate, hm?
Yes, that’s a bit more like it. I was not happy with the way they tried to blame bad stories on the marriage, even if said stories had no connection to the marriage, and would have been bad stories if Spidey had been single. It was, as you say, a scapegoat for doing away with a particular point they didn’t like.
There’s also something a bit creepy and obsessive about making so much of an effort to do away with MJ, when they could, you know, just ignore the character?
What is their excuse for bad stories now the marriage didn’t happen?
Well, Carlie’s the only one left who Peter can get anything out of – as Spidey, she provides a contact in the NYPD, and as Peter, she provides the last remaining bit of emotional support, with Harry apparently lost to sybaritic ennui and Aunt May off on honeymoon/psychic poisoning.
MJ being there would totally keep the other cast members away, because Carlie, certainly, and Norah – definitely – were introduced to be potential love interests. Norah, especially, would be unusable in her current incarnation.
(which, hey, not such a bad thing?)
Carlie, too…any common ground she discovers with Peter would be seen as a threat to his relationship with Mary Jane, surely?
I’ll admit I’m reaching for an overarching theme, maybe, but I don’t have such a problem with Peter’s photofraud. He does have previous (1st Sandman/clone stories), and while you’d think that someone at Frontline would have heard of the lasso tool, I don’t think it’s out of the realms of possibility that such a thing might be rushed through editorial hands and onto the front page. I’m trying to think of a real-world example…?
And Mary Jane would’ve been Target No. 1, no fear. Kaine comes to the flat, Ana Kraven comes to the flat, Norman Osborn and Venom come to the flat. It would be impossible to avoid putting the former Mrs P. in harm’s way.
And…I hate to say it…but what sitcom relationships have ever really survived the band o’gold? Monica & Chandler?
//\oo/\\
What is their excuse for bad stories now the marriage didn’t happen?
A Pigeon did it.
//\Oo/\\
They needed that reset button to fix all the bad superhero stuff they’d done to the character, but I can’t honestly blame them for using it to cut the marriage cord, as well.
But thet didn’t fix any of that stuff! It’s official Marvel policy that all the bad superhero stuff still happened post-OMD. “The Other”? Still happened. “Sins Past”? Still happened (much to JMS’s irritation). Spidey revealing his true identity on national TV? Still happened (and everyone remembers it happened, they just don’t remember who he was).
They needed the reset button because Joey Q wanted Spidey to not be married, and for no other reason.
“Ahh yes. The Morrison run. Twas bloody brilliant, wasn’t it?”
A lingering, misplaced sense of good will from “New X-Men” is probably the only reason I’ve been reading the post-M-Day X-Men as long as I have.
Yeah, sorry, but the Morrison run was extremely successful. It was “long-term”, had a plan, and most importantly, got the X-men out of their late 90s slump.
I think they’re trying to do that with Fraction, except he’s nowhere close. At least Morrison wrote the characters with some semblance of familiarity, or at least human familiarity. I wouldn’t want to hang out with any of Fraction’s characters for too long. I’d be backing away slowly while smiling.
I wouldn’t want to hang out with any of Fraction’s characters for too long.
Well, it doesn’t help that half the time they’re grinning dementedly at you while striking poses from a glamor mag.
Re: the Grant Morrison years. Wasn’t the plan that the X-men were to be hated and feared again as humanity realised that they were at the end of their lifespan and mutants were in the ascendancy? A good spin on the old version wherein mutants were feared as the minority, now fearing them as the majority
@Grant Flynn: Some nice resonance with the old “mutants as a metaphor for ethnic minorities” theme, that, with traditionally-defined whites here in the US freaking out more and more as a larger and larger percentage of the population has become non-white.
More than anything, though, the Morrison years were great because (1) the book felt like it was actually about something, (2) he managed to keep the cast down to a manageable enough size so none of the key characters were neglected, (3) he managed to do so while providing a decent “cast of thousands”-esque backdrop to make it feel like mutants were an actual people and Xavier’s school was an actual place. That last one was huge for me – I rarely got a sense of mutants as anything other than a way to fill out the ranks of third-rate team books before Morrison came along, and rarely got the sense that there were ordinary mutant civilians walking around, minding their own business, trying to live their lives without getting recruited by one X-team or another for some imminent race war. Without that, it never really felt like the X-Men were really fighting for anything meaningful – because there were never any plain old everyday mutants to fight for; everyone seemed to belong to some superteam already.
M-Day took a giant wrecking ball to that, so much so that I doubt anything other than a full-scale re-Wandaing (“Oops, changed my mind… more mutants!”) can set things back on track at this point. Fraction has clearly tried to do the Morrison-style “background mutants” thing, but it ends up failing in every way that Morrison succeeds – the hundred-odd mutants penned up in Utopia feel like a claustrophobic camp of shell-shocked veterans rather than a glimpse at a bustling subculture. The decision to move everyone first to San Francisco, and then to an island fortress, has made the book’s world small and claustrophobic, and X-Men is a book that is, at its best, big, expansive, and global.
I could go on all day about the dozens of ways Morrison got it right, and the hundreds of ways Marvel has gotten it wrong ever since, but it tires me. When I heard about the vampire shit I knew this was probably the beginning of the end.
Am I really the only one who hated Morrison’s New X-Men?
I didn’t particularly enjoy Assault on Weapon Plus and Here Comes Tomorrow much at all, but the rest was rather good.
I can’t believe there was ever a time I found myself buying three X-Men comics (NxM, Cable/SoldierX/Muties)
//\Oo/\\
“Am I really the only one who hated Morrison’s New X-Men?”
YES!
“Am I really the only one who hated Morrison’s New X-Men?”
NO!
Heh, although to be completely honest, I don’t think I’d go as far as to say I hated it. There were a few bits I sorta quite liked. But mostly it left me a bit meh.
Same here. Not hated, but I didn’t enjoy it that much. The fact that it did have some decent long-term plotting was the one thing I can appreciate about it.
Being one of the people who can’t appreciate Quitely’s art as anything other than ugly didn’t help. The art in general didn’t help. Jimenez was the only one I liked.
Count me in the “underwhelmed by Morrison’s run” bunch. I hate the way Quitely draws people, and some of the other art on that run was just awful (Kordey?). The characters seemed off, and the plots just weren’t that interesting to me. It was better than Chuck Austin, but what isn’t? I’d have much rather have seen what Seagle and Kelly could have done if they’d stayed on the books.
JUMBO CARNATION.
THAT IS ALL.
//\Oo/\\
I suppose hated is rather a strong term, but I can’t for the life of me remember a single thing about the Morrison run that I actually liked. It wasn’t illegible, but I can’t understand why people look back at it with half crazed nostalgia. I can understand the similar reactions to late 70s-early 80s Claremont, but I just don’t see Morrison as the second coming thereof (in terms of quality at least, and perhaps avoiding ending a sentence on a preposition).