The X-Axis – w/c 21 October 2024
X-MEN: FROM THE ASHES INFINITY COMIC #20. By Alex Paknadel, Diógenes Neves, Arthur Hesli & Clayton Cowles. Part 2 of the Lifeguard story, now featuring some other Australian mutants who are even more obscure than she is. (Ugly John is a one-off New X-Men character, and the guy who turns brittle is from a single Weapon X: The Draft one-shot in 2002.) It looks like we’re going with the premise that after her time on Krakoa, Lifeguard’s powers are attempting to defend her from all normal humans. I can see the angle in that, and it’s one of those cases where it helps to have a pre-established character with handy plot-device powers. Mind you, Lifeguard’s power is supposed to be that she develops whatever powers she needs to save human lives in the vicinity, so it’s not entirely clear how we get from there to here… but maybe we’re going with prolonged isolation from humans making her reorient around mutants or something? At any rate, it’s all presumably a metaphor for her trying to reassimilate into a society whose racism is more visible to her than it was in the past. I’m still not quite sold on it, but it’s the sort of thing I’m glad to see the Infinity Comics trying.
X-MEN #6. (Annotations here.) So we’re starting to draw together the threads from the various single issue stories to date – which means a scene where the cast literally compare notes and draw the threads together, but this feels like the time to be doing it. Meanwhile, Idie decides to go off on a frolic of her own and talk to a local mutant girl without involving Scott. This is the subtler side of the story, since it doesn’t spell out quite so directly why she’s looking to Magik rather than the rest of the team, but the dynamics between those two characters work nicely. Guest artist Netho Diaz seems a good fit for Ryan Stegman’s style, though I can’t help thinking some of these character designs need tweaking – Idie’s hair just looks odd. Beast gets some nice moments too, lamenting the fact that he’s trying to be the cutting edge scientist while missing any memory of the last few years. Quietly solid.
X-FACTOR #3. (Annotations here.) This series has tone problems – we’re lurching from a fairly straight issue about Polaris and the slightly suspect Mutant Underground to a comedy story about a parody billionaire and his AI, and they don’t feel like they belong in the same book. When you’ve got characters who are written relatively normally interacting with very broad parody characters like Rodger Broderick and Ethan Farthing, it just feels off. I’ve liked a lot of Mark Russell’s writing in the past, but this is clunking a bit, honestly. Issue #2 felt like it was setting up something a bit more rounded, and the Mutant Underground story seemed promising, but with this issue we’re back to going after barn-door targets in a rather obvious way.
DAZZLER #2. By Jason Loo, Rafael Loureiro, Java Tartaglia & Ariana Maher. Dazzler’s world tour brings her to the UK, and Jason Loo’s grasp of the place is about on a par with Betsy Braddock: Captain Britain, if you’re being generous. Having heard of the Radio 1 live Lounge, and figuring that a Graham Norton type character must be a bigot because he’s on the telly, does not count as localised knowledge. What’s the actual point of doing a world tour format if it’s just going to be America with different accents? That aside: I want to like this book more than I do. There’s nothing wrong with the basic idea of Dazzler going on tour as a mutant celebrity, and I like the idea of writing actual song lyrics for her in theory. In practice, though, the songs are very on the nose, and the book is a pretty basic plot interspersed with things that we’re meant to vigorously agree with. One of those books which is trying to be something I’d have enjoyed, but doesn’t actually pull it off.
From the Ashes 20 is the first time we’ve really had dialogue from Grizzly since his resurrection and it was annoying:
“Grizzly needs some dialogue. Maybe we should have him address how he feels about being forced to kill those innocent people under Tyler’s control. Or maybe we should have him talk about how he feels about being killed by Cable’s son and resurrected by Cable’s daughter.”
“Nah, let’ s just reveal that he’s gay.”
I don’t know if this is the first time Grizzly has been revealed as or hinted to be gay. But what’s interesting about him isn’t his sexuality. It’s that he was mind controlled by Cable’s son into killing people, died and was brought back by Hope. But instead of getting into how he feels about all that, Paknadel uses the dialogue to reveal he’s gay. It’s possible to have representation without ignoring everything that makes a character interesting.
In the solicits for Exceptional X-Men 5, the kids learn what Kitty did after Krakoa fell and become disillusioned, with Melee leaving. What Kitty did after Krakoa was wrong- and almost killing Firestar without checking if she was undercover first was definitely one of the dumbest things Kitty has ever done. But for the kids to hold Kitty’s past against her but not hold Emma’s past against her is just ridiculous. Kitty’s actions don’t compare to Emma killing three goons just for failing her, or blowing up a blimp filled with Inhumans inn the name of revenge. (And Emma actually mistreated Angelica and Jimmy, who were her STUDENTS. so you’d think they would have more misgivings about Emma.)
I have to disagree. There was never anything interesting about Grizzly. Making Grizzly gay doesn’t make him interesting either. I feel there is a joke there in that Grizzly is the name of a subspecies of bear.
Really, leaving Grizzly with absolutely no dialogue would have made him as interesting as anything this story could have done with him.
Let’s not write him off just yet. I think a story where Grizzly goes on a cocaine-fueled rampage could be a lot of fun.
OK. Agreed.
Since Ugly John debuts and dies in the opening issue of Grant Morrison’s run, I’d say he’s the most memorable mutant in the quite big category of ‘introduced only to be killed off within the same issue’.
Maybe the flat technicolor Morlock girl (…Tommy?) killed off in the prelude to Mutant Massacre could claim first place. Maybe not.
@Krzysiek
Actually, Tommy wins that contest because Ugly John survived the issue in which he made his first appearance. He died in the following issue.
I knew Grizzly was gay, somehow, so it must have been established before the issue in question. That said, I’d forgotten the character exists until about 30 seconds ago, reading the above synopsis.
How weird is it that Grizzly’s first appearance was drawn by Mike Mignola? “I like drawing this big red guy, but he’d look better with sawed-off horns and asymmetrical arms…”
I’m realizing that what the world really needed is a Gillen/McKelvie Dazzler with some strong Phonogram vibes
Did Kieran ever do much with Dazzler during his X tenures?
I know you’re reading this, Kieran, so any stories would be appreciated.
Last saw Grizzly in the “what if the X-Men animated series did Krakoa Era” series. It was implied he was gay; the rest of Rogue’s Maruders were Iceman, Northstar, Rictor and Shatterstar. The joke was Gambit didn’t need to be jealous of Rogue spending time with these particular men.
I have this partial memory of there being a Gillen Dazzler story in one of those anthology specials, something about terrorists on a plane flight maybe? The half-arsed effort I made on Google only turned up a pitch for a miniseries that was never taken up, so I’m probably wrong.
What I’d like to see is someone doing a Dazzler story about how she eats music and creates flash and dazzle. Like a metaphor for Black Eyed Peas.
@Si : good catch ! This was 2009’s X-MEN: MANIFEST DESTINY #5, whose third story (“Dazzler: Solo”) was indeed written by Gillen & drawn by Sara Pichelli with Christina Strain on colors.
It might be some of Gillen’s earliest Marvel work – it was published right at the start of the San Francisco/Fraction run, a good year before SWORD v1 & the post-JMS THOR fill-ins and two before GENERATION HOPE & JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY.
On Breevort’s blog, Tom Galloway asked Tom Breevort if Changeling was ever brought back. Breevort responded that “The status quo that we picked up from the end of the Krakoa era, Tom, indicated that absolutely anybody whom we might want to say was resurrected could have been ” but that ” these days Changeling is really incarnated as Morph—so it’s probably more likely that we’ll see the latter again rather than the former. “
@Michael: I suppose that’s not… *technically* wrong, in that it’s entirely possible Changeling might’ve become like his AoA counterpart if he’d stuck around.
Of course, then you have the problem of his name being used by Benjamin Deeds, but when was the last time anyone spared a thought for that generation of students
Well, Goldballs/Egg and Tempus have been put on the White Hot Bus with the rest of the Five (the Four, since Hope is all over the place) this year.
Benjamin ‘are we really supposed to call him Morph?’ Deeds was part of the core cast of the short-lived Generation X vol 2 written by Christina Strain and that ended in 2018.
Triage’s last appearance that amounted to anything was… probably the No More Humans OGN by Mike Carey? Triage didn’t do much there, but he was plot-relevant. That was in 2014.
And that just leaves Hijack, who was relevant in…
…was Hijack ever relevant, even in Bendis’s run?
Aurora will be showing up in the new Hellverine series.
Ben Percy said of Deadpool and Wolverine- “It’s also a reckoning between the past, present, and future — as it pays homage to and reinvents a very famous X-Men storyline. ”
I wonder which storyline Percy is thinking of? Days of Future Past?
@Diana, Kryzsiek- yeah, no one thinks of Benjamin Deeds as the “real” Morph. Just like everyone thinks of David as the “real” Prodigy. I imagine that causes David some problems with his students, though:
“Why should we trust your judgement. professor? Didn’t you get your powers by being tricked by Mephisto?”
“For the last time, that wasn’t me! That was the OTHER Prodigy!”
Lanzing and Kelly are working on another unannounced book that will run in tandem with NYX.
Ah, probably West-Coast NYX.
Hang on, Ugly John is back? And no one made a big thing about it? No month of Ugly Variant Covers? Disappointing.
But welcome back, Ugly John! Don’t be too hard on Cyclops.
Ugly John even got a proper first name, and it’s not John. He was last seen collapsed on a beach, three fountains of blood pouring from a gunshot wound, saying it wasn’t a serious injury. Which was either him being extremely stoic, extremely macho, or an editor hamfistedly fixed the story so a named character wouldn’t die in an Unlimited strip.
I like Ugly John. He has that normal guy in a crazy world vibe. I hope he gets the Glob Herman treatment, rising to the B lists just on merit of being in the background of every mutant group scene ever.
I really, really want Marvel to publish a comic titled “West Coast NYX”.
So we put together a team comprised of:
Prodigy from the Slingers
Pyro II (Simon Lasker)
Thunderbird III (Neal Shaara)
Morph (Ben Deeds)
Cipher (Alisa Tager)
And call them something like the Bad X-Cuses…
I’m sorry.
I’m trying to be a better person than this. I really, really am.
But by the goddesses, do I *hate* this Dazzler comic.
It just falls completely flat, and reminds me of some of the worst moments of the Iceman solos (specifically circa his coming out).
There are no perspectives, no identifiable individual standpoints, no conflict, no ambiguity, no tension, no nuance. Nothing
Krakoa was a separatist mutant supremacist project, and Orchis flamed anti-mutant sentiment to a near paranoid point of absolute excess, sparking a widespread populist movement in the process…
…but then the plot suddenly needs Dazzler to be a Dua Lipa + Lady Gaga + Taylor Swift stand in, so she’s the biggest pop star on the charts, across both sides of the Atlantic.
*What*?
This is such a horribly preachy, unidimensional, undynamic, and boring series so far that it suddenly makes every argument about Marvel purposefully leaning in towards LGBTQIA+ and other minority publics weirdly crystal clear – in all their brutal cynicism.