The X-Axis – 27 November 2011
Happy Thanksgiving, or whatever it is that Americans say to one another! If you check one post down, you’ll find this week’s podcast, now in association with CBR. It’s also something of an epic since it includes the interviews with Stephen Wacker, Nick Spencer and Kieron Gillen that Al taped at last week’s Thought Bubble convention. I usually leave the hype to Al, but you won’t want to miss this one, True Believers. I gather that’s how it’s done.
Meanwhile, I’ve got two weeks of X-books to catch up on (plus X-23 #16, which I think slipped through the net somewhere)…
Astonishing X-Men #44 – Another Regenesis issue, and another new creative team, as Greg Pak and Mike McKone take over. This is another of the Utopia titles, and quite what its remit is these days, heaven only knows. “Exalted” is a four-issue arc, so for all we know, this could turn out to be the book with rotating creators on each arc.
We start with a few pages of Cyclops brooding about everyone having walked out on him, before Storm shows up early, with a new look, to gratuitously pick a fight with him. (Can you see where this is heading?) Having decided that he’s sufficiently back on form, Storm hauls him off to South America to fight a bunch of Sentinels, whereupon she tries to make a pass at him and he finally twigs to the fact that all is not well here.
The cover, with Cyclops and Storm locked in romantic embrace, is of course a fake-out – though in fairness, since it shows Storm in a version of her mid-1980s costume and hairstyle, there’s a pretty heavy clue there. Because, yes, it’s not our Storm. Effectively this seems to be a Cyclops solo story, with the mystery being why somebody is going around gathering up X-Men from different timelines.
It’s alright. The central mystery is decent, but there are some big problems. The art’s a little stiff at points, and the colouring’s a bit murky. The issue pretty much beats you over the head with the fact that Storm’s acting out of character, but it takes forever for any of the other characters to notice. Mike McKone does a good job of drawing her with different body language from normal, but that also makes it harder to figure out why nobody sees through her until the plot requires it. The fight scene between Cyclops and Storm is the sort of thing Chris Claremont used to do occasionally, but really does feel so undermotivated that you have to wonder why it blows over so swiftly.
Daken: Dark Wolverine #17 – Given their prominence on the cover, somebody evidently thinks a guest appearance by the Runaways might shift a few copies. So it’s only fair to tell you that the cover actually depicts the cliffhanger ending, which is the Runaways’ only appearance in the issue.
That being said… this story does involve the Pride, who were the Runaways’ arch-enemies. It is an essential issue of set-up before we get to the team-up (or fight?) next issue. And it really wouldn’t have made sense for the Runaways to turn up any earlier than they do. But yeah, if I’d bought this issue on the strength of the cover – which was the idea, right? – I wouldn’t be best pleased.
Let’s judge it as an issue of Daken, though. Daken now knows who’s been manipulating him, but he’s so beaten down that he’s not really in much of a position to do anything about it. All this goes to the heart of Rob Williams’ take on Daken as an antihero – ultimately, for him, it’s all about being in control of his life, which means being in control of everyone else. Control is an end in itself for Daken. Which is fine up until he’s outwitted by somebody just like him; and even then, the physical beating bothers him a lot less than the humiliation of losing. It’s not enough for Daken to simply back off and retreat to Madripoor to rebuild; for the sake of his own self-image, he simply has to stay and win. The pay-off, it seems, is Daken’s grudging recognition that he can win or he can be totally self-reliant, but it ain’t gonna be both. All of which is neatly paralleled with Daken’s equally psychopathic (but less murderous) supporting character Donna Kiel, whose control-freak impulses are channelled into a desire to appear professional and to win at all costs.
The art’s a bit sketchy at points, as if the deadlines were catching up on Matteo Buffagni. And I could live without the appearance of a generic teenage hacker, albeit that he’s only there to move the plot along. Suddenly hauling the Pride into the storyline at this late stage seems a strange choice as well, particularly since it’s done in a way that doesn’t altogether make sense – there’s a nagging feeling that somebody really wanted to get the Runaways into this storyline, and wrenched an existing plot point so as to justify them being here. But the central ideas remain strong, the visuals are still perfectly good, and what we see of the Runaways at the end suggests that there could be some fun material in playing them off against Daken.
Generation Hope #13 – Marvel’s recent night of the long knives has inevitably led to people wondering how safe Generation Hope can possibly be, considering that it’s outsold by several books which have just been cancelled. Of course, the “Regenesis” promotional push might help, and it’s clearly safe at least for one more storyline.
The new creative team are James Asmus and Ibraim Roberson – both of whom have been around for a while now doing one-off and short-run stories, and are now getting their first assignment on a regular title. Inevitably, there’s something of a shift of tone here. Broadly speaking, the angst is turned up a bit, and the characters are written a little bit more broadly. Laurie’s more of a wimp. Gabriel takes time to explain his troubles. But it’s a mainly a case of Asmus having a slightly more trad-Marvel tone than Kieron Gillen, and also bending over backwards to explain everything to any new readers who might have taken the invitation to jump aboard.
The promo art for this arc has the team with Sebastian Shaw, who was last seen over in Uncanny when Emma Frost wiped his memory and dumped him in the middle of nowhere in the hope that Namor wouldn’t figure out that he was still alive. Naturally, that begs the question of how the other X-Men would fail to stop him on Cerebro, and this issue provides an answer of sorts: she’s told the Stepford Cuckoos to turn a blind eye. Naturally enough, Hope decides he must be a tragic new mutant in need of her help, and charges off to sort things out. Nice enough idea.
It’s a pretty solid first issue; it sets up all the key points, including a bunch of soap opera plots, and it also kicks off the mystery of what on earth Shaw is up to, while getting to a decent cliffhanger. There’s a lot of ground covered in this first issue, and it benefits from good solid artwork, and gorgeous colouring from Jim Charalampidis. It’s maybe lost a bit of subtlety and distinctiveness on its way to becoming a more typical Marvel team book, but it does the job well.
New Mutants #34 – Blink is back, and she seems to be hanging around with a band called Diskhord, who look a bit like Slipknot, but seem to have superpowers. Meanwhile, the New Mutants are meant to be looking for her. But since they don’t actually have much in the way of leads, mainly they’re just moving into their new house and meeting the comic relief retired neighbour.
For those of you who don’t follow the books too closely, best to be clear about this: we’re not talking about the Blink who appeared in Exiles. We’re talking about the regular, Marvel Universe version of Blink, who was brought back during the Necrosha storyline a couple of years back, and hasn’t been seen since. This issue doesn’t really go out of its way to explain who she is or why the team ought to be looking for her – which is odd, since it’s not really a mystery, and Nate Grey even asks, only for the conversation to be interrupted before he can get an answer. Presumably we’re getting to that next issue, particularly as mainstream Blink is something of a blank slate for Abnett and Lanning write however they want – but it still seems an odd choice not to introduce her at all.
Much of the issue is really about the New Mutants settling into their new home, which is given a nice distinctive look by David Lopez’s art. There’s the usual strong interplay between the characters, and a fun little subplot of Amara insanely deciding that she’s going to try and hold down a regular job in addition to storming off to battle evil on a regular basis. Plenty to enjoy here, if a few curious choices.
Wolverine & The X-Men #2 – In this issue: fighting! After last issue’s extended tour of the school, this one is all about the new Hellfire Club’s attack. As they helpfully explain, they’re not actually trying to kill any of the pupils – after all, their schtick is profiteering from anti-mutant sentiment, so it’s not in their interests to succeed in wiping mutants out. But a bit of serious maiming is perfectly acceptable.
It’s pretty clear that the tone of this book is going to be downright crazy. Much like last issue, this is a case of throwing increasingly mad ideas at the page and constantly upping the stakes. And as you might expect, while the Hellfire kids seemed a little out of place in Schism, they’re perfectly at home here, in a comic that tells you point blank that the entire school was built in a fortnight and dares you to disagree.
If I’m being honest, issue #1 was slightly stronger. Chris Bachalo’s always been a hugely inventive artist, and there are some very striking images in this book, but clarity in action sequences has always been his achilles heel, and there are points where it rears its head again here. (What does Husk actually do to the Frankenstein soldiers, for example?) But if you’re willing to embrace its shamelessly nonsensical tendencies – which is usually worth it with Aaron’s stories – this is good fun.
Wolverine: The Best There Is #11 – Lo, there shall come an eighteen page expository monologue.
The staging tries to make it more interesting than that – and granted, some of those pages are narrating Contagion’s otherwise-silent origin flashback – but the bottom line is that it’s still an eighteen page expository monologue. If you want an explanation of Contagion’s scheme, then you get it here. Essentially, he’s been carrying out tests on powerful healers in an attempt to create a virus that can kill everything. Which is apparently going to remake the universe in his image, though whether he means that literally or metaphorically, I neither know nor care.
The usual waste of time, basically.
X-23 #16-17 – Not sure how I missed the previous issue, but let’s cover them both together. Issue #16 is the final part of “Chaos Theory”, and it’s got some nice moments. Somebody needs to sacrifice themselves in order to free Valeria Richards from the evil demon, and X-23 nobly offers herself because she thinks everyone else is less dispensible. That’s a nice touch.
After that, though, it kind of falls apart, as X-23 becomes Captain Universe to fight the demons (all of which is passably logical given their back story), and then, uh, yeah, something happens and she wins. I think it’s supposed to somehow mean that she ultimately triumphs because she still has the capacity for hope, but while you can just about see the metaphor, it really doesn’t make a tremendous amount of sense as a story wrap-up, and ends up feeling a bit contrived and unsatisfying.
Issue #17 begins “Misadventures in Babysitting”, in which Laura kindly agrees to help out the Fantastic Four by taking care of Franklin and Valeria. You can probably imagine how well that goes. In other words, it’s a change of gear for the series, by going for a relatively light issue. That’s fair enough, though I’m not sure about running with the FF as guest stars for two consecutive story arcs. It’s not like they’re such a natural fit.
There’s also a scene at the beginning which brings Hellion back into the cast, picking up on the scenes they had in the early issues of the series. That much is fine, though it’s also the sort of scene that could desperately do with some footnotes – Hellion talks about doing “some bad things after you left” but gives absolutely no indication of what story he’s talking about, or even what actually happened in it and why it’s upset him. For what it’s worth, I assume he’s referring to X-Men Legacy #243, when he shut down Omega Sentinel. But if it’s important enough to be presented as a turning point for the character, surely it’s also important enough to need explaining for the readers of this series?
Sana Takeda is back on art, which means there’s plenty of opportunities to see Laura’s sad face again – which, of course, is how she’s written. I think this issue is either coloured or printed a shade dark for my tastes, but as usual, there’s a nice delicacy to her work, and the comedy with the kids is well done.
X-Factor #227 – Continuing the Bloodbath storyline. I’m starting to get the idea of where this is heading: our villain is apparently engaged in harvesting souls, and the strong implication from earlier stories is that Guido doesn’t have a soul any more. So presumably that’s the story which is going to come to a head here.
Bloodbath himself is a bit one-dimensional as villains go – he’s called Bloodbath, after all – but that’s not a major problem, since he’s really just there as an unusually vicious opponent for the regular cast to bounce off. Peter David seems to have decided to play him as something of a cypher, who’s playing along with the rules of how these stories go, and therefore may intentionally be setting out to serve the role of villain; I wouldn’t be altogether surprised if there’s a reveal coming down the line which puts him in a different perspective. For the moment, at least he’s a credible threat – and given this book’s tendency to split up the cast, there’s actually some weight in the idea that it takes the whole team to beat him.
Leonard Kirk’s art is typically clear and strong, shifting gears easily between the quiet and dynamic moments. It’s the sort of storyline where a lot will depend on how cleverly it’s wrapped up, but thus far, it looks promising.
X-Men #21 – Okay, so the basic story here is that a small Eastern European country has figure out how to build its own Sentinels, it’s threatening to use them against its more powerful neighbours, and the X-Men have to team up with War Machine to restore stability. Meanwhile, Domino’s been captured by the baddies, who seem to think she’s dead, despite relatively little in the way of visible injury – but hey, it’s a T-rated book.
That’s all okay as far as it goes, and Will Conrad’s art is actually very good, in a vaguely Mike Deodato-ish way. It’s also nice to see this book making use of some of the other Utopia residents who don’t make it into the regular cast of Uncanny, since at least it gives them (and this book) something to do.
But let’s take a moment to say something about history and geography. I have some sympathy for Americans writing about Europe, since it’s not like I know a great deal about, say, Ohio. But if I’d decided to write a story there, I’d probably bother myself with at least some superficial research. So, a couple of points. A map in this story shows the said small Eastern European country nestling between Hungary, Romania and Serbia, along with a couple of other fictional Marvel countries.
But if that’s where it is, why the hell is it called “Puternicstan”? I’m not sure I’d buy that as a name for any country anywhere, but a country with “stan” at the end of its name is not going to be in eastern central Europe. It’s the Persian/Sanskrit equivalent of having “land” at the end of the name. It doesn’t go any further west than Kazakhstan. Which is still to the east of Iraq.
And point two, why is a middle aged woman reminiscing about the place having been invaded by two neighbouring countries before the Soviets took over? This one’s maybe a little bit more forgivable, but it’s not as if the Soviets were regularly conquering small satellite states beyond 1945 (as distinct from sending in the tanks to keep existing regimes in line). Yes, there was a history of local conflict in the area before that, but is this character really supposed to be sharing her personal recollection of the Balkan Wars of 1913?
These aren’t really plot problems, but they do seem terribly tone deaf, and they do the story no favours. A shame, since otherwise it’s an entirely serviceable team-up story with good art.
thanks for pointing out which ‘blink’ we’re dealing with. since i haven’t read ‘necrosha’, i assumed that we’re dealing with the AoA/exiles version (they are the same, right?), and that nate and her shared some history. (i don’t actually remember whether blink and nate ever even met in the original AoA, now that i think about it.)
really love the art on x-factor. can kirk and luppachino become the regulars please?
It’s ‘Happy Thanksgiving.’ Or, in the case of this particular year, ‘I can’t believe I’m looking forward to a Lions game.’
And for what it’s worth, I can easily picture a character from southeastern Europe as having an unhealthy sense of nostalgia for the past and a lingering grudge over the various wars. It’s a region where people are still going on about the Battle of Kosovo – and that was over 600 years ago. Hell, one of my professors once encountered some Greek nationalists who are still genuinely angry over the Fourth Crusade.
Yes, but she claims to actually remember it from personal experience, which on the face of it would make her a hundred years old. That’s the problem, not the national history as such.
I think the naming of completely inappropriate countries “____________stan” must just be a joke at Marvel, considering how often it pops up. I just have a very hard time believing writers who’ve made it onto Marvel’s ongoing titles are that stupid.
And let it be noted for the record that I say this as an American – and while I don’t blame Paul for cutting a generous amount of slack about our knowledge of Europe, in point of fact the decently educated of us understand the basic layout of Europe. Give us a blank map and we’ll probably falter in successfully identifying every little country in the southeast, but we’ll not suggest one of them is a “-stan”.
Or hell, maybe I’m wrong. It seems like every so often a statistician pops up some horrifying new nugget of information about my people.
On DAKEN’s cover: yeah, that’s a pet peeve of mine, since I’m one of those people who consider movie previews a necessary evil and stay far away from sneak peaks, etc.
I bought Daken because of the cover, and I was mighty pissed when the Runaways didn’t show up until the last page. That’s the kind of crap you pull with #16, then have #17 carry the story. This is exactly the kind of stuff that Marvel mainly pulls that makes me feel no sympathy when they cancel books or have things fall apart on them, it’s karma.
As far as Astonishing X-Men, I was upset that we had a last page splash reveal occur where we weren’t given any idea about who the character was. Jim Shooter on his blog has written about how comics these days have weak pacing and think just because you have a last page reveal it will work as a cliffhanger, and this issue showed that to be not the case at all.
I wonder if the Pride was jammed into the layout of the Daken arc due to Marvel’s sudden attention to the west coast. The new direction and Moon Knight have the same central idea dealing with a kingpin and I thought the Pride already filled that role.
If you are writing a story here in Ohio just make sure characters are obsessed with the Ohio State Buckeyes football team. The rest will be forgiven.
As far as Blink goes, she showed up in X-Men: To Serve and Protect. Emma feels guilty about her and goes to find her along with Moonstar, Dr. Strange and some others. Dr. Strange cures her of Selene’s influence and they invite her join them but she runs off.
It’s actually not THAT out there, though I doubt the writers put much thought into it. They aren’t countries, but Kurdistan is in eastern Turkey/Northern Iraq and Tatarstan is around the upper Volga. If you’re going to insert whole fictional countries in the Balkans it would be a reasonably plausible alternate history to have them traced to some tribe of Turkic mercenaries settled by the Ottomans in part of their European territories. If the two regions with Finno-Ugric languages can be non-contiguous and have Ukraine, Lithuania and Latvia between them and Romania can be two countries over from the nearest other Romance-speaking country, than an alternate history that produces some turkic-speaking countries in the Balkans really isn’t too much more ridiculous-sounding than most of comics’s fictional countries.
Oh, and Adam, for the record, I have sat in one upper-year university history seminar in Canada where someone insisted that Kazakhstan was in Eastern Europe. To be fair, the only American in the class, like everyone else there, knew he was wrong, but I don’t think the reasonably basic level of knowledge you’re describing is as common as you might think.
The fun part about that little country in Eastern Europe? We get a map of the exact same region in the latest Secret Avengers ( I think? Could also be that comic with Valkyrie looking for the hammers ) and it isn’t on the map there.
Marvel could at least try to keep their countries straight for comics which appear in at the same time. ^^
yeah ethan, I was thinking the same thing. just because all the ‘stans’ are in central asia doesn’t mean there couldn’t be a valid reason for one to be in europe-616.
Yeah, having “-stan” in the name of European countries just doesn’t work.
As much as I want to like WATXM…I really don’t care for the Hellfire Brats. Ugh.
Who knew Daken would actually end up being an interesting character?
It’s weird. I got the feeling that no one noticed Storm was acting out of character because the story was starting after Scott had been abducted and the entire issue was taking place in his head – or in virtual reality – and that all of the X-Men aside from Cyclops and the imposter Storm were illusions or holograms or suchlike under the control of whoever put Scott in that tube.
The only evidence I can think of that supports my read of it over the idea that the beginning of the story was legitimate and that Scott gets captured somewhere along the way – no one commenting on Storm’s new haircut and personality, Storm and Cyclops using their powers in ways they usually don’t – could just as easily be be bad writing as intentional clues that all it not right. People randomly changing appearance without comment (didn’t Storm have the Mohawk in the Africa arc in Astonishing?) and using their powers in ways that the writer thinks make sense when they actually don’t (it wouldn’t be the first time that Storm’s used her wind powers as effectively telekinesis, or that Scott’s powers have conveniently forgotten that they’re always on, and therefore either generate no push back on his body or should ALWAYS be pushing his head back) are pretty common in X-Men writing.
Of course, it all was taking place in Scott’s head, you’d think at least he would have noticed something was up sooner, although, again, that’s pretty standard in X-Book writing: it’s not like suddenly thinking you’re living in the 1700s or that your worst fear or long-dead loved one just randomly appeared during a fight against someone you know has illusion generating or shapeshifting powers exactly makes snese. People alway seeom unusually credulous of illusions in X-Books.
I imagine we’ll find out next issue, at least.
“Lo, there shall come an eighteen page expository monologue.”
This line made me laugh so hard it’s actually kind of embarassing.
Speaking as an OSU grad, and longtime Columbus resident, and self-published comic writer (with a book set in a suburb of Columbus and another on the way set in the city itself) I wants as few mentions of the Buckeyes as possible. There’s way more to life here then some dumb sports team. I liken them an annoyance/environmental risk of living here like tornadoes or mosquitoes.
Ethan: In fairness to your classmate, strictly speaking Kazakhstan straddles the continental divide between Europe and Asia. It’s geographically eligible for membership of the Council of Europe. But it’s mostly in Asia, and it’s certainly not Eastern European in the same sense as Hungary or Poland. If you’re going by continental landmass, those countries are really in central Europe.
“I think the naming of completely inappropriate countries “____________stan” must just be a joke at Marvel, considering how often it pops up. I just have a very hard time believing writers who’ve made it onto Marvel’s ongoing titles are that stupid.”
Except for Marc Guggenheim who had Wolverine refer to World War I German soldiers as “Nazis” back in his ‘Logan Dies’ storyline.
I just read a 1960s Supergirl story where lions escape from Piccadilly Circus. Misunderstandings about Europe were so much better in the Silver Age.
As an old man, i will own up to having a hard time keeping all the “new” eastern european countries straight. I had the poorntiming of being an undergrad during the end of the USSR and suddenly having to learn the names of the former soviet republics.
Re: james. Imagine if they chose to set a story in columbus and had them talk about the blue jackets instead of the buckeyes, 🙂 (BGSU grad school)
Ethan, I wish I worked at Marvel just so I could award you a No-Prize for that explanation of Puternicstan (after re-instituting it; I think they stopped a while back), as well as some sort of Mr. Congeniality prize for bothering to come up with it.
But it’s still really odd how often this “European-stan” mistake, if it indeed is a mistake, occurs.
@Nick: Wolverine calling WWI Germans “Nazis” doesn’t strike me, honestly, as anything more than one of those simple errors where you’re thinking one thing and you write another. I could see myself accidentally writing that and just not catching it in the second draft. The editor, however, needs a quick wrap across the knuckles.
“Wolverine calling WWI Germans “Nazis” doesn’t strike me, honestly, as anything more than one of those simple errors where you’re thinking one thing and you write another.”
I’m reminded of the old major’s line in Fawlty Towers: “You mustn’t call them niggers! These people are Wogs!”
I’d say they’d have been better off having Hellion just refer to ‘recently’ rather than ‘since you left’. The whole continuity of how the Wolverine family fits with the wider X-verse is already bamboozling.
Try fitting the Uncanny Breaking Point arc in it somewhere, taking into account how Kitty starts Goes To Hell in her containment suit and is still in it when Wolverine goes off on his own to get revenge, but is then suit-free when they all go to get him back from the wilderness.
This is Earth-616. OF COURSE there were Nazis in WWI. You think time travel don’t go backwards?
Likewise, a Soviet invasion in the region might be an anachronism in real life, but on Earth-616 that just means the Crimson Dynamo slipped the leash for a particularly eventful weekend. I’m pretty sure that guy actually has invaded Ohio.
Seriously, though: Puternicstan (according to a brief Google scan, “puternic” is Romanian for “strong,” but it just sounds really fake as a country name). From what I’m told, they don’t teach geography in American schools anymore (at least not as class everyone has to take). They did when I was in elementary school, but even then they didn’t bother to teach what the names of countries meant. I’d be willing to bet good money that between Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikstan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, a LOT of people just think of “-stan” as shorthand for “former Soviet Republic” or assume it’s a Russian word. And if you ask how Pakistan fits into that, they’d either shrug and write it off as a coincidence or possibly admit that they’d forgotten about it and do some actual research.
Obviously what’s happened is that there were these three Eastern European conquerors who were around at the same time, and they were all named Stanley. Everyone kept confusing them at the kinging conferences and soforth, so people took to calling them King Stanley the Tall, King Stanley the Shifty, and King Stanley the Strong. But the latter was informal type who didn’t go in for titles, being mainly in the kinging business for the hunting and beheadings. So he just called himself Strong Stan. And they named the country after him, because he never got around to giving it one himself. And to this day, the country’s called Puternicstan.
But they’re thinking of changing it because the Italian deligates keep calling it Putanastan.
The old lady *could* be talking about very early childhood memories of the war between the shortlived Hungarian Soviet Republic and Romania in 1919 … but that would make her very old.
More likely she is referring, at least with regard to one of the cases, to the border reshuffling that went on between the Axis satellite states in 1940-41, when Hungary temporarily regained parts of Transylvania from Romania. Puternicstan was probably annexed by Hungary during this period, with nobody really minding because the world was busy fighting a war.
Hey … there was something called a No-Prize once, wasn’t there? 🙂
@Magnus While we’re coming up with No-Prize style explanations, the map discrepancy can be hand-waved by the fact that Puternicstan is apparently not currently an independent country, but rather a contested region. As such, it would not necessarily be drawn on a country-level political map but would be highlighted on a mission briefing map.
@ Andy: Of course! The -stan name, though, is rather more complicated to explain … but last I heard the guy in Marvel’s Historic Accuracy Research dep. mumble something about “strong linguistic ties to Kazakhstan heralding back to the Mongol incursions”. He was a bit annoyed that no one had spotted the obvious reference.
Okay, better stop now.
P.S. Thanks for a wonderful podcast, BTW, guys – well worthy of being the first (NOT renumbered) podcast in a new, expanded publication of House To Astonish.
@ Christopher
Well, not that you’ve pointed out how obvious it was, how could we miss that? lol
I’m quite fascinated by the fact that somebody evidently went to the trouble of identifying a genuine Romanian word but still failed to figure out that a country that spoke Romanian was likely to have a name that sounded a bit more like “Romania”.
I can’t be too surprised at Marvel’s geography difficulties. After all, Utopia apparently moves between the San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean on a routine basis (Writing places it in the Pacific… And the Marvel-verse’s international waters are different from the real worlds… But art routinely has people looking out at Utopia from Fisherman’s Wharf, which looks into the Bay and is definitely NOT international waters).
An early X-Men story featured a South American republic with typical Kirby mittel-european villagers and architecture. I’m sure nobody minded. except maybe Roy Thomas who was still teaching English at the time.
Santo Marco. That’s an odd issue; it really does read as though Kirby thought the story was set in Europe and then for some reason Lee scripted it as South America.
This geography discussion reminds me of Jeph Loeb’s dramatic “Odessa, Russia” caption in an issue of Hulk.
And Dubai, Saudi Arabia.
“That’s an odd issue; it really does read as though Kirby thought the story was set in Europe and then for some reason Lee scripted it as South America.”
Entirely plausible, I’d say.
Remember when Mark Millar got to do all those inaccurate captaions for his Proteus storyline in Ultimate X-men about 10 years ago? (actually holy shit I still can’t beleive that book is that old now). Lands End, Scotland I recally being a hilarious example.
Not so much the Russia represented entirly by giant piles of snow.
The most egregious example I can think of was in an early issue of Chuck Austen’s X-Men, where he placed Cassidy Keep in Scotland. Cassidy Keep, owned by the extremely Irish Banshee.
Years ago, a brilliant geography student, whom we’ll call Lester Von Lost, came to an American university where he tried to devise a revolutionary map of Europe to allow him to find his mother’s long lost homeland. Another student, whom we’ll call Seed Stephens, tried to tell him that his map was wildly incaccurate, but Lester arrogantly persevered and was horribly disfigured in the resultant cartographical catastrophe.
Embittered, Von Lost returned to eastern Europe, built himself the most advanced high-tech atlas in the world, dubbed himself Lt. Lost, and conquered a small chunk of Romania, renaming it “Puternicstan.” He then decreed that his land had a long and storied history, killing anyone who refused to reminisce about repelled foreign invasions whether they actually happened or not. He was so vicious about this that his people continued to do it even after they deposed him and, like, bought a bunch of Sentinels.
So it’s not that Marvel’s writers and editors think “Puternicstan” is a good name for a country, it’s Lt. Lost’s faulty grasp of geography to blame.
Also, this happened pretty recently, which is why it’s not reflected by the map in Secret Avengers (which refers to Steve Rogers as “former Captain America” and therefore clearly happened before Fear Itself).
This just reminds me of the episode of the podcast where Paul and Al discuss the mysterious fictional Marvel Universe country known as “the Netherlands.”
@sam – Just a conspiracy of cartographers?
Sam, what’s the issue with the Netherlands?
You kind of had to be there.
I believe the joke was spawned by the odd fact that the Netherlands has its own entry in the Official Handbook, but I honestly don’t remember much else about it, other than that it was an hilarious bit.
There was just something about the way Al said “Nether-lands.”
@ZZZ I just about died reading that. Well done, sir.
Well, the only slight problem with the country the Netherlands is that there is no country called the Netherlands. There is a region of Holland called the Netherlands, however.
@ Donnacha DeLong
It’s the other way around 😉
#pedantryfail
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