Marvel vs. the Reset Button

RD and I spent a couple of hours yesterday debating Decimation, Exodus, and their effects on the social metaphors at the heart of the X-Men. (See our previous two posts for details.) The process has brought into sharp relief concerns I've had for a while now regarding the direction of Marvel's two biggest franchises, the X-Men and Spider-Man, under Joe Quesada's editorship.

The direction in question being bass-ackwards.

On the X-Men & the Mutant Decimation

After those last couple of posts, I looked up precisely what Quesada and his writers had said in interviews about Decimation: why the decision had been made to reduce the number of mutants in the world to a mere 200 or so, and what it meant for Marvel storytelling. I found this 2005 conference call with Quesada and Ed Brubaker, one of the X-Men writers at the time.

Brubaker says that, "the Marvel universe will look more like it did in the 1960’s, where there weren’t mutants around every corner. Readers will see in this story that the government will once again begin to change the way they look at mutants." And a little further on, Quesada is apparently directly quoted as wanting to "put the genie back in the bottle" for Marvel's mutants. "He says they’re trying to make their stories matter more by cutting down on mutants, adding that the thing that makes mutants appealing is that they are a minority, and fans can often relate to that aspect."

Unfortunately for Joe Quesada, mutants are not genies. They're toothpaste, and trying to force them back in the tube is never going to work.

Decimation fails on a metaphorical level because Marvel overdid it - 200 mutants in the world are no longer a minority, they're a statistical insignificance. An endangered species and a minority culture are two entirely different things. More importantly, resetting mutant relations to the 1960s goes against everything the Marvel universe is supposed to stand for. Unlike DC, Marvel has always been about reflecting our own world. Heroes and villains duke it out in New York and San Francisco (even Cleveland sometimes!), not Metropolis or Gotham. Relationships between minorities (virtually all minorities, whether based on race, religion, orientation or whatever) and the mainstream have dramatically changed in the last 40 years. Readers identified with a smaller mutant populace in the 60s, in a time when minority populations were smaller in our world as well, and less open about their difference. Not so today. You can't just shove the mutants back into the closet.

Yet for sheer storytelling purposes, Decimation fails for the opposite reason. They under-did it. If the argument is that the X-Men books have too many characters for readers to follow and care about, then why didn't the Decimation depower or drive off stage more actual X-Men? It's like a TV executive saying that a show's ensemble cast is too large, then firing all the non-speaking extras.

Of course, I'd argue killing or depowering surplus X-Men is a mistake anyway. Every character in the franchise is someone's favorite, however strange, gross, or Rob-Liefeld-influenced. I happen to be a Maggot fan. A cast like this are toys in a toybox - if a writer doesn't like some of 'em, or a lot of them even, they can do what Joss Whedon did. Pick a small, manageable team, tell stories about them alone, and ignore the rest.

On the Erasure of Spider-Man's Marriage

When Marvel finally magicked away Spider-Man's marriage at the end of 2007, I was saddened but not really surprised. Quesada, had been arguing for this outcome for years, not just behind the scenes but also with the fans in the message board trenches. He insisted that marriage had turned Peter Parker into an old man, desperately uncool. I thought this was utterly ridiculous. A married Peter, a single Peter, surely they weren't so different? It wasn't until Quesada had implemented his "Brand New Day" that I realized he'd actually had a point.

The single Spidey of BND and beyond feels like a college student again. He's living paycheck to paycheck, constantly wondering where his life is heading (besides full-speed towards a man wearing a fishbowl on his head). He's in a constant state of free fall. The 1987-2007 married Spidey often lived paycheck to paycheck, changed careers a couple of times, and rarely knew where he was headed either (besides full-speed towards a man with a robotic scorpion's tail protruding from his posterior), but at the same time he had a sense of stability. His wife was a source of strength, and a constant variable in the mathematics of responsibility that Peter spends so much of his mental energy deliberating.

Now the marriage never happened. The entire Spidey ballgame has been changed, and in ways more complex than a simple breakup.Amazing Spider-Man writer Dan Slott, in a reply to a previous post on this blog, argued that the retcon changed very little about Peter & MJ's past: "in the current run of ASM, Pete and MJ still had a life together and all of those past stories still happened (though they happened as a 'committed couple living together' and not 'a married couple living together')."

But there is a difference between a couple in a committed partnership and a married husband and wife, or pair of wives, or husbands. You can debate the philosophical and religious significance of marriage - whether it's "just words," whether it truly changes anything about the way we live and love each other - but clearly it means something to a whole lot of human beings, or else we wouldn't be fighting so stringently these days over its definition and eligible parties.

What's more, it clearly means something to the writers and editors at Marvel as well, or they wouldn't have to use the devil and a sweeping retcon to end Spider-Man's marriage. If marriage wasn't that big a deal, a superhero divorce wouldn't be either.

And for the readers, there's a cost beyond that stability in Peter's life, that little bit of hard-won happiness after all his tragedies. Stan Lee took Peter Parker through high school and to college. His successors allowed Peter to graduate, get married, and even try to start a family. Now he seems stuck in amber, a swinging single unlucky-in-love 20-something forever more. After watching Marvel set Peter's emotional clock back 10 years, how can we expect him to ever move forward again?

When I read Amazing Spider-Man today, it doesn't feel like an ongoing chronicle of one man's epic life. With its star no longer allowed to grow and change, it feels like a series of episodic adventures, no matter how smoothly one blends into the next. It feels more like a great Spider-Man animated series (or DC comic) than a flagship Spider-Man book.

In trying to bring Marvel's two biggest franchises back to basics, Joe Quesada hobbled them. He undermined the spirit of evolution that has made readers love and relate to them for years. Our lives, our politics, our relationships, and our communities move on with time. Stan Lee's original brilliance in developing the Marvel Universe was in giving us comic heroes that grew with us.

I'd like them back, please, Joe.

- JC

[What he said. - RD]

a post that requires a new joe quesada tag

I do not read any comics with X-Men in the title. I have not read House of M, any of the Decimation stories, anything by Grant Morrison, or Matt Fraction's latest offering, Dark Avengers/Uncanny X-Men: The Exodus, which JC just reviewed. I like Matt Fraction. I don't blame him in the slightest for doing the best he could with the X-dross that he has been given by years of mismanagement. I blame Joe Quesada. However, this concept of putting the remaining 200 mutants on an island is either the worse metaphor in history or just a really stupid plot development.

JC says the mutants have been talking about their culture since before House of M, and it's been seen as a metaphor for any "minority" (usually gay but sometimes any generic non-privileged) "culture" (that is, the stereotypical behaviors or markers collectively identified by the privileged [or, more accurately, the media] and used when talking about/reporting on the minority in question). (To save time and abuse of quotation marks, I'm going to use the term "gay pride" for people who have chosen to identify themselves and act in ways that have become stereotypical. This is in contrast to those who are gay but not connected to or identified with the stereotypical subculture. No offense is intended.)

The difference, you stupid bastards, is that gay pride is a chosen way of life. Being a mutant is a quirk of genetics. There is nothing connecting mutants to each other any more than bald people are connected to each other. They may have support groups and wear T-shirts with funny bald jokes on them, but there is no inherent bald culture. There is no inherent gay culture. There is no inherent mutant culture. While I appreciate the dramatic uses of the competing ideologies (let's call it Magneto v. Xavier), no writer should ever have tried to create mutant pride as an exclusionary concept (i.e. Xavier's kids using Magneto's separatist doctrine). The concept of mutant culture is particularly ridiculous in a world where not everyone with extra-human abilities is a mutant.

And then came the de-powering of the mutants, leaving only 200 people (in the world? in the country? wtf?) with powers due to mutant genes. And then they began to be persecuted MORE. Again, not having read the books, I just can't understand how this is a logical storyline. With only 200 (give or take) people in question, they could all be rounded up by secret police in the middle of the night. The teams of really strong superheroes fight back against the secret police, at which point the secret police are like, "Okay, just don't go in there." The Powers That Be battle the mutants in private and turn public opinion against them. They don't use their political power and write laws that affect only 200 people. That's just idiotic.

And now, apparently, the mutants are so persecuted that they have decided to go and live on an island. I get that, sort of; they've been written into a corner and the Dork Avengers are not letting up anytime soon. To spare their allies the pain of guilt by association, they separate themselves entirely and plan to do their world-saving with a little extra travel time. JC lauded this as a chance to build that mutant culture they've been talking about since 2001. It's still pretty stupid; you can't tell me that you wouldn't be safer underground or in a series of secret bases than on an island where you could all be taken out by one well timed bomb.

But either way, 200 people isn't a culture, it's a commune. A group of people who have nothing more in common than the fact that they're been persecuted by the rest of the (country? world? after this many decades with X-teams saving people's asses, how is public opinion really anti-mutant?) are not a community. They haven't chosen to be together because of their common values, opinions, behaviors, or landscaping. They have been exiled to the island, a sort of Survivor in reverse, which does not a community make. The characters are following the story to it's logical conclusion, but it has no basis in the new themes of culture and community.

If this is meant to be a continuation of the gay pride parallel, it's the shittiest, most exclusionary treatment I've ever seen. No federal protections for gay employees? Go live on an island! Not allowed to marry your partner? Get married on the island! Having trouble adopting? Next stop, the island! F*%$ that s@&!, man. Just f*%$ it.

JC wondered if perhaps this was meant to be a reference to the founding of Israel after World War II. The difference there, of course, is that the Jews did have a common culture, obviously, and while they were being offered/commanded to live in this place, they could build on their extended families and strong religious beliefs to build their new life. The mutants, like the bald, have nothing in common beyond their DNA.

I don't plan to read how Fraction treats the x-commune (although if they turn out to be the Others, I will personally apologize for everything bad I ever said about Joe Quesada), but I'm sure JC and those like him who do read Uncanny X-Men are hoping for strong characterization and good dramatic arcs to make up for the utter absurdity of the past several years. It's about time.

- RD

Dark Avengers/Uncanny X-Men: Exodus

The Dark Avengers/Uncanny X-Men: Exodus one-shot (Matt Fraction) establishes yet another new status quo for Marvel's x-tended mutant family, and it might just bring the X-Men's mission statement back into focus in the process.

For years, the X-Men fought to make the world recognize that no matter if you're black, white, blue, have gills, or shoot lasers from your eyes, we're all just people. It was Magneto who tried to divide "homo superior" from the "flatscans," until Grant Morrison's team in New X-Men started using that derogatory term as well, and teaching their students that mutants don't act or think or learn like humans.

Say what?

I get the intended metaphor about cultural/orientation pride, that in the modern age we need not assimilate and act like the majority so that our voices can be heard. The problem is, it doesn't work for the X-Men. There are subsets of mutants who have shared common experiences and developed their own unique cultural identities: Xavier alumni, Morlocks, the Brotherhood, etc. But outside of a small handful of telepaths, why should mutants think or learn differently from anyone else?

The X-Men's core metaphor seemed even more muddled in the Decimation that followed House of M, as the mutant population was severely reduced and rebranded as "endangered."* Aside from a few genetic markers, how are mutants a species? What is the "mutant culture" that they fear is now doomed to die out? With all this focus on survival, a series that had been a provocative exploration of issues of race and identity suddenly and strangely seemed to be more about life in our uncertain age of global terror. Not an unworthy metaphor in its own right, but I wasn't sure it had much to do with the X-Men.

Yet Matt Fraction may just be pulling it all together again. In the wake of proposed anti-mutant legislation, riots, and the imposition of martial law in their city by Norman Osborn, Cyclops has officially divorced the X-Men from the United States altogether. He's established a new mutant sanctuary on an island off the coast of California and issued a statement of intent to the world: here the X-Men will stay, with any and all mutants and their families who will join them.

"We have been, and always shall be, sworn to protect a world that hates and fears us. Only now... we shall all be free."

The idea of an emancipated mutant homeland is not quite new; in the late '90s, Magneto bullied the world into allowing him to run Genosha as his own mutant kingdom. And of course Norman Osborn immediately tries to paint Cyclops' new "Utopia" in the same light, as a militant state of crazy people. But this isn't a former terrorist running a mutant dictatorship, it's the X-Men, trying to save the world like they've always done without any government legislation or angry mob around this time to interfere with how they live at home and off duty.

The idea of the X-Men and their fellow mutants building a new nation seems far more in keeping with the series' base metaphor than the "there are only a few of us left, we can't make powered babies no more, and crazies want to kill us all off" schtick of the last few years. (It's Star Trek IV, and the X-Men are the whales?) Can one small band simultaneously serve as superheroes and Founding Parents? It's going to be fascinating to find out. And in the process, the X-Men might just be inventing that distinct mutant culture they've been so emo about saving from extinction ever since the Decimation.

The sequencing's a little off, sure, but I'm willing to forgive that.

- JC

*Let's not even talk about the fact that Joe Quesada supposedly encouraged the decimation because there were too many mutant characters in the Marvel U, yet only a small fraction of the dozens of current and former X-Men actually lost their powers. And a few of those joined new teams anyway. Huzzawah?

Uncanny X-Men First Class #2

In Uncanny X-Men First Class #2 (Scott Gray) Nightcrawler's Exciting Adventure With the Inhumans comes to a promising if not 100% satisfying conclusion.

Here, Nightcrawler (Kurt Wagner) is put on trial for his interference with the Terrigenesis ritual, whereby human-like Inhuman children are physically mutated and granted super-powers. He makes an impassioned argument that the children are "perfect from birth," and it is wrong for their elders to enforce mutation on them at such an early age. He goes so far as to evoke "another society" with a genetic superiority/inferiority complex--but I'll allow both Nightcrawler and Scott Gray a pass on Godwin's Law as the former is himself German. It's logical, and perhaps even important, for the spectre of Nazism to haunt a German mutant. (And suddenly I'm wondering if anyone ever wrote a scene wherein Nightcrawler and Magneto get into an intense debate/discussion about WWII Germany. I find it hard to imagine Chris Claremont missing out on that idea, but I'm not sure I've yet come across it myself.)

"I know your traditions span centuries," Nightcrawler says, summing up his case, "But a healthy society should always have the capacity for change... I find it tragic that, in a culture where no two beings are alike, you should demand such conformity."

It's a wonderfully eloquent argument, and a bit of a pleasant surprise. After Nightcrawler's swashbuckling antics last issue, I was afraid his very good questions about the Inhuman lifestyle would be brushed aside--that pat statements would be made about judging other people's cultures from the outside, and Kurt would end up apologizing for running off half-cocked. I was glad to see him given his dignity instead, and his arguments given some weight.

If only some. Inevitably the other X-Men show up in Attilan, Nightcrawler's trial is cut short, and a big honking mutant vs. Inhuman fight ensues. In the middle of this, Nightcrawler is confronted by the Inhuman Karnak, who says he was never subjected to the Terrigen mists, and assures Kurt that he is no less valued by his people because of this fact. This may be the start of a decent rebuttal to Kurt's concerns, but sadly the argument never gets pursued any further.

Then again, perhaps the beginnings of a great debate are the most that can be asked of a title set in the Marvel universe's past. Props to Mr. Gray for getting these questions out there, and here's hoping that future writers of the Inhumans pick up that gauntlet.

I'd still like to see more jokes and wacky banter in Uncanny First Class, though. (As much as I've enjoyed the Wolverine-kicked-over-the-horizon gag.)

- JC

Top 5 Marvel Marriages

Marriage is awesome. Even in the Marvel universe, however tragically unhip Quesada will claim it makes a person. To prove this fact, and to celebrate RD's and my impending nuptials this Saturday, I give you:

5. Jessica Jones & Luke Cage: What do Marvel's premiere interracial couple have to say about black men and white women? I have no idea, and honestly, I don't really care. What matters to me is everything they say about men and women, full stop. Bendis writes them as a beautifully normal couple in a crazy world. Their conversations about diaper changes, grocery runs, and raised toilet seats help make the the New Avengers matter. We know these people, and what they're fighting for.

Top mush moment: Jessica's speech at their wedding, from New Avengers Annual #1 (Bendis).

"This world is a scary place. You being an Avenger--it's so... scary. Every day there's some idiot in our face trying to ruin it. And ever since we got together, I just haven't cared. And no goon attacked us at our wedding, so I'm going to take that as a good sign. And even if the worst happens... It's a weird feeling--But I know we can deal with it. Look at that kid over there. Look at her. We made her. And I love watching you be a father. So much so that I'd wear this big poofed-out dress. I just wanted to let you know in my words. This is why I said yes to all this crazy. That's why."

Sorry. Bendis likes to make with the yak-yak. But all that stuff, that's how I feel about RD. I mean, not the stuff about her being an Avenger (that'd rock) or making babies (just yet) or goons attacking (I hope they don't, but we'll deal). But the world-is-crazy-but-who-cares-cause-she's-there? Absolutely.

4. Reed (Mr. Fantastic) Richards & Sue (Invisible Woman) Storm: Do these guys need an explanation?

Top mush moment: Ultimate Fantastic Four #7 (Warren Ellis). In the Ultimate universe, Reed and Sue are in their early twenties, and they've only just acquired their powers. Sue's a genius biologist to match Reed's head for physics. She drags him out of his lab, insisting he let her run some tests on his new physiology...

Reed: "Can we make out afterwards? Only I think I'm getting good at it."
Sue (kissing him): "You started out good at it. You're getting fantastic."

Yes, I realize they're not actually married in the Ultimate universe. But the fact is--and I realize how lame I'm about to sound, but hey, what's the internet for, if not for embarrassing personal admissions (and porn)--the first time I got to make out with RD, I showed her this scene afterwards. Because it was the first time I'd made out with anyone, and RD, kind and compassionate soul that she is, had said something to me not unlike Sue's line above, so I just had to share.

I'm that colossal a dork, and she's marrying me anyway.

3. Bobbi (Mockingbird) Morse & Clint (Ronin nee Hawkeye) Barton: Eight months ago, I barely knew who Mockingbird was. Now, she and Ronin are #3 on this list. See previous posts re: New Avengers: Reunion (Jim McCann) for why.

Top mush: New Avengers: Reunion #4. Once married, now technically divorced, Clint & Bobbi decide to try dating for the first time.

2. Peter (Spider-Man) Parker & Mary Jane Watson: Still married in my mind--not to mention Stan Lee's hi-larious newspaper strip.

Top mush: Honorable mention to Peter & MJ's wedding in Amazing Spider-Man Annual #21 (Jim Shooter & David Michelinie), but I'm actually going to go with Amazing Spider-Man #491 (J. Michael Straczynski). Pete and Mary Jane have been separated for a time (don't ask), Peter just helped Captain America take down Doctor Doom in the middle of a crowded airport (like ya do), and now he's finally got a chance to tell her...

"I can do 'all these things' because you believe in me. Because you give me the strength and will to get them done. Everything's easier when you're there and harder when you're not. Without you, nothing works the way it should. But when you're there, in my life, I feel like I can do anything, MJ. Anything."

I'm mozzarella, I know, but again--approaching the big day that I am, this is how I feel. It's amazing (no pun intended) how one person can turn every problem and struggle on its head, with nothing but their presence.

And the #1 marriage in Marvel comics...

1. Scott (Cyclops) Summers and Jean (Insert Codename Here) Grey!*

It's trendy among some X-writers these days to say that "all Jean ever did was die on Scott," and I think that spectacularly misses the point of this couple. The reason Jean & Scott are the greatest pair in comics, the reason their love story is one of my favorites in all of fiction, is precisely because of all the dying, and replacement by dopplegangers, and alternate-possible-future children showing up, and everything else they've endured. Luke & Jessica, Peter & MJ... they talk about getting through the crazy together, and they live in the Marvel universe too, so they're certainly not exaggerating. But Scott & Jean have been through more than all the other couples on this list combined. Their honeymoon was 12 years long, wandering across an Apocalyptic future Earth, while they raised Scott's son Nathan (The Man Who Would Be Cable) and started a revolution. The mess that is the post-Morrison X-verse is just one more temporary setback. Love like this is unstoppable.

Top mush moment: from Uncanny X-Men #296 (Scott Lobdell), the panel below. Flying and kicking ass together towards the end of the "X-Cutioner's Song" 1993 mega-crossover.



"As opposed to Cyclops, Jean Grey has always embraced her mutant abilities. Blessed with the natural talents of telepathy and telekinetics, she felt she couldn't be any happier with her mutant gifts. That was before Scott Summers. Before she'd sacrificed her life on his behalf--only to learn there are greater powers than death in the universe... and the greatest of these is love."


*****


So clearly, committed partnerships rule. I couldn't be happier to be getting a ring if it was green and turned willpower into solid light holograms.**


- JC

*Surprised readers raise their hands. Anyone? No?

**Was that a bit much, honey? [This is why we're not having a ceremony. He would have wanted to write his own vows, and I don't think he could have gotten this post down to 2 minutes. - RD]

details, details

Another reason I don't read a lot of comics is that I don't have the required capacity for minutiae. Now I'm no dummy; I love me some crossword puzzles, and I'd go head-to-head with any other Jeopardy! viewer at 7:30 weekdays (oh, Trebek), but the sheer amount of detail needed to comprehend the vast universes and the characters living therein frankly blows my mind.

Take a look at the X-Men. You've got Uncanny X-Men, Ultimate X-Men, X-Men First Class, Uncanny X-Men First Class, Unspammy X-Spam First Spam, and so on and so forth. Most of those books are in slightly different universes. If you want to read any of the others, you have to separate out which is canon in which book, and then there are the other X-teams and the Canadian teams and the Wolverine teams (that guy is the town bicycle, am I right?) and books with writers who don't write the book anymore but they begged to finish their own damn storylines and they've been going for like 40 years and they've only aged about 10 and GOOD GOD EMMA FROST PUT SOME CLOTHES ON. NO ONE NEEDS TO SEE THAT. EVER.

Just now, I was telling JC how much I like the way he looks in his purple shirt. We're getting married in 3 days, I can do sappy shit like that. He says,

"I don't have a purple shirt."

"Wait, what?" says I.

"I've never had a purple shirt," he says confidently.

Dear readers, I bought JC a purple shirt and two new pairs of pants no more than a month ago, and he wore the purple shirt twice. He agreed that he looks very fine in it. Now he's forgotten it ever existed. (Edit: He found the shirt on the shelf with the tags still on it. We were both wrong.)

AND YET. Mention just a few words to this same man - "House of M" or "Chris Claremont" or, god forbid, "Spider-Man reboot" - and he'll expound for hours, discussing not only the main storyline but all adjoining storylines and interviews with the writers and artists and editors and why he doesn't care for Joe Quesada. (Neither do I, for the record, but only because I blame him for every sucky script I read.) I think that without the capacity to hold these details in his head, he'd simply be flipping the pages for the pretty pictures, so I appreciate the enormous brain power that goes into his comic habit.

It's not easy to be the partner of a comic fan. Every night at the dinner table is an adventure in the vast network of connections between comics, books, TV, and movies that is JC's beautiful mind. I can usually remember my to-do list from one day to the next, but his fully coherent stream of consciousness astounds me. When he starts talking, all I can do is sit back and enjoy the ride. It might not be so frustrating if the babble didn't contain its own inertia, if I could easily redirect him by asking about his day at work or telling a funny story of my own; more often than not, he'll listen more-or-less patiently while I talk, and then pick up where he left off, always adding, "Just one more thing, just let me say this one thing." And then, because I love him, I sigh and let him keep talking. I've learned more about the Marvel Universe in the past two years than I ever thought it was possible for a non-comic-reader to know. And I've loved every minute of it.

He'd better wear that purple shirt tomorrow.

- RD

Magneto Testament

Magneto Testament (Greg Pak) is the first Marvel hardcover I've seen to include a Teacher's Guide in the back. That fact alone says much about the story. It's not just the origin of the X-Men's greatest foe, but a serious holocaust drama, closely modeled on real history and real human lives. And the real beauty, and tragedy, of Testament is that it never needs to be a superhero story at all.

If a person were to pick up this story without ever having read an X-Men story (or having seen the films), they would never guess the protagonist was a mutant. Max Eisenhardt's journey takes him from schooldays in 1930s Nazi Germany, to the Warsaw Ghetto in Poland, and eventually to the infamous concentration camp of Auschwitz. Every horror that befalls Max and his family, every neighbor's sacrifice that sustains them, and every cruelty that dooms them all ring true because of the painstaking work of Testament's creative team.

The tale is deeply grounded in research; Pak's extensive endnotes in the collected edition excavate the story page by page, revealing the actual historical people and events from which even seemingly minor details were drawn. (We all hated compiling bibliographies for our papers in school; who'da thunk they could make a comic book more impressive?) The script is excellent. Pak sketches in the broad strokes of history for context, then pulls his focus in tight the on small and human moments, brought to gut-wrenching life by artist Carmine Di Giandomenico. The whole epic is near-perfectly paced, and deftly balanced between grinding heartbreak and slivers of hope. And for those of us who do know the man Max Eisenhardt will one day become, there's a second story hiding in plain sight.

Pak and Di Giandomenico evoke Max's future with a perfectly simple recurring visual trick: a glint of light reflecting off metal. It's there when Max hurls a heavy javelin in school games, and when he's scrounging for coins in the gutter. It's there on the knife in Max's hand as he watches two Nazis beating a man in an alleyway, as his uncle stops him from getting involved, getting himself killed. Those of us who know his power and his future can't help wonder - perhaps he could have killed those soldiers, perhaps he could've saved that man? And it makes the tale of Max's impotence in that terrible time and place only more potent.

As the background for a loathed and beloved comic book villain, it makes Magneto's place in the X-Men universe all the greater. The horrors he experiences in these pages haunt every Magneto story to come (even the hokey ones), for this is the world he always fears might return, if he can do nothing to stop it. And that fear, in turn, drives him to inflict his own terrors on others. Yet in his long history in the X-Men universe, Magneto has also enjoyed the occasional stint as a hero. Horrid 1980s purple costumes aside, I hope he may yet again and for good. After spending these five issues with young Max, I find myself hoping that Magneto's story might somehow yet wind up in the light. I want his story to find, if not a happy ending, then at least a measure of peace.

Still, it's just as important that Testament can be read as if Max were just an ordinary man, with no special abilities or destiny. The power of any story, no matter how fanciful, comes from our ability to believe. We will believe a man can fly because deep down, we all know what flying feels like, or what it should feel like. We will let a fictional character break our hearts because we've been broken, and we've watched others be broken. We know fictions, even science-fictions, are made for us because someone in the world has felt this way. But there is a special double-edge to a story like Magneto Testament, enriching the fictional life of a comic book villain, even as it pays homage to the struggles of millions of survivors and victims of a real-world genocide.

- JC

Uncanny X-Men First Class #1

Scott Gray's new Uncanny X-Men First Class is perfectly uncanny so far, but could still use some more of that First Class magic.

This new take on an old series brings the fan-favorite 70s X-Men line-up back to the funnybooks: Cyclops, Storm, Wolverine, Colossus, Nightcrawler, and Banshee. Phoenix is featured on the rocking cover, but so far has only merited one tiny cameo scene. The first issue taps all the classic Claremontian story beats: hateful-fearful mobs of New Yorkers forcing an X-Man to question the mission; giant robot fights in the Danger Room; cheesy boastful mid-action dialogue; Wolverine picking a fight; Colossus being all sensitive and noble and stuff; random men hitting on Storm.

It also has a solid story of its own to tell about Nightcrawler visiting Attilan, city of the Inhumans, a place where nearly everyone is just as unique in appearance as himself and no one gets called a freak. Of course he begins to wonder - would he be happier here? Is he really obligated to put up with the world's crap? But there may be a serpent in this garden, because he finds that children are being mutated against their will!

Well, not really. Most anyone who's read an Inhumans story before will be aware that the ceremony Nightcrawler interrupts is a perfectly natural part of Attilan culture. Human-looking children walk into the Terrigen Mists when they come of age, and they come out with funky new powers and often with a wild new alien appearance. If you go in a cute blonde and walk out a tall purple baldie with fewer fingers than you started with, well, them's the breaks. I think it's supposed to be a puberty-sucks-sometimes metaphor. That Stan Lee, such a subtle guy.

Actually, Nightcrawler kind of has a point. It IS pretty creepy. But I'm not expecting Marvel to let one X-Man overturn the crux of Inhumans culture; it wouldn't really be PC to their fictional society. Also, the series is set in the past. But we'll see how that plays out next issue.

The problem with UXFC #1 is that it's all a bit po-faced. That's also true of the original Uncanny era during which this book is set, of course; when I read the old 70s X-Men comics, most of the humour I find now is probably not of the intentional variety. The fact that everyone takes everything so seriously is what makes it hilarious. (That, and the way they all spend nine-tenths of their day expositing madly in their head.) But I've been spoiled by Jeff Parker's original X-Men: First Class, Bendis' New Avengers, and Brian Vaughan's and Joss Whedon's Runaways. When I read a modern team-book, I want more banter, playfulness, and just plain off-the-wall wackiness. I want the characters to take each other just as seriously, to treat each other just as politely, as my friends and co-workers treat each other.

I've said it before; I think the First Class line works best by having fun with the X-Men characters in a way most of the other mutant books haven't allowed for many an emo year. And I believe Scott Gray is capable of bringing the comedy; his Wolverine short in the Uncanny X-Men First Class Giant-Size was great. Hopefully as UXFC goes on, he'll find more of a balance.

- JC

Astonishing X-Men #30

The Astonishing X-Men save the world (maybe) by phoning a friend with a space gun in the literally explosive conclusion to the "Ghost Boxes" story arc. And sadly, it's not nearly as ridiculous as it sounds.

Writer Warren Ellis, since taking over Astonishing from Joss Whedon, has had the X-Men's alpha team investigating a covert conflict between mutants from a parallel reality and artificial pseudo-mutants created in this one. (Still not that ridiculous. No, really. It's all about the hard sci-fi execution; Ellis is a master of semi-plausible technobabble.) By this issue, they've tracked the pseudo-mutants back to their creator: former teammate Forge, who has apparently fallen off the sanity wagon again. Having found an open gateway to the other mutants' parallel reality, he's been using his mutants to fight against the alternates, who he insists are scoping our reality out for conquest. He's gone so far as to build another gateway himself, and is preparing to send a whole army of his Nutrasweet X-Men through to the parallel world to wipe out the potential invaders. So Hank "Beast" McCoy calls his girlfriend Abigail Brand, a S.W.O.R.D. agent who lives on a space station and defends Earth against alien invasions for a living, and has her blast a superlaser through the interdimensional gateway just in case.

"Just in case," are pretty close to Hank's own words. They can't take the chance, he says, that Forge might be wrong. So rather than risk another invasion - and how many of those have the X-Men fought off in the last six months, let alone the rest of Marvel's heroes? - they shoot a space gun down the rabbit hole. A space gun, Hank explains, that will "turn to foam" every living being and building in a ten-mile radius around whatever's on the other side. Essentially, Hank's lady friend dropped an atomic bomb on the X-Men's problems. On the possibility of future problems, really.

The metaphor for current world events and military tactics is so obvious it's practically a Looney Tunes anvil chorus. In the age of terror, with modern technology and weaponry, we don't wait for the invasions any more. We commit terrible acts from afar in the hopes of preventing or forestalling even more terrible acts in the future. We make the hard choices, blah blah blah preemptive-strike cakes.

But this is NOT the X-Men's metaphor. Comic book superheroes in general, for all the problems they solve by fisticuffs, have been telling us for years that killing bad guys is unnecessary. That it's better to face the same rogues again and again than to give up on the possibility of human redemption. Because by killing the bad guys, we become no better than them. Because killing begets killing, and the cycle can only stop if we stop it. Because some rogues will see the light and become heroes called Rogue. They're ancient, tired, cliched ideals, but I still believe in them. That's why I'm a comic book fan. I like my superheroes old school, Gandhis who punch people really hard.

I'm not saying every superhero has to be a Gandhi, but the X-Men always have been. The X-Men are symbols of hope and evolution. They embody the idea that you don't have to get bitten by a radioactive plot device to be a Punching Gandhi, you might just have been born that way. Maybe you're a freak and nobody likes you because secretly you're that awesome. Awesome enough to love the world that hates and fears you, even if you have to punch it sometimes. Or at least, that's how it used to work.

Ever since Grant Morrison's New X-Men, the X-Men have been increasingly isolated from the world, finding less in common with the rest of humanity. They've been making darker choices. They've abandoned Xavier's dream of peaceful coexistance with humanity in favor of a war to survive. And that saddens me, because there are plenty of other superheroes out there to explore war-on-terror metaphors and issues of idealism vs. expediency. (The Punisher, for instance, or Ellis' own creations over in The Authority.) I'm not saying there shouldn't be X-Men stories about these things, but they shouldn't be at the center of the X-Men's ongoing mission. Marvel's mutants have a message of their own, a really special and important one.

If the X-Men are going to make these terribly dark, hard, "modern" choices, then they need to be earned. I should be convinced that there was no better way, rather than feeling like they took an easy out at the expense of ten square miles of possibly innocent alien civilians. Someday, I'd really like to see the X-Men acting like heroes again, not nuking other people's realities because they took the crazy guy's word for it.

- JC

Uncanny X-Men First Class Giant-Size

Uncanny X-Men First Class Giant-Size, despite its unweildy title, is a fresh start for a classic era of X-Men adventure. It takes the First Class brand of X-Men action, with its done-in-one (or two at the most) plots, goofy comic-strip backups, and smiling mutants, and applies it to the team of the '70s. And it took three writers (Scott Gray, Roger Langridge, Jeff Parker) and five artists (Dennis Calero, Sean Galloway, Craig Rousseau, Cameron Stewart, David Williams) to do it.

Cyclops is the last of the original X-Men at Xavier's school (though Jean Grey promises to reappear as Phoenix in the next issue), and Wolverine, Nightcrawler, Storm, Colossus, and Banshee have just joined the team. It's a little unclear whether Sunfire and Thunderbird are still running around the mansion as well, off-panel, or if this issue is set after they've gone, but such continuity-cop details aren't really important to the story.

And there's a great story here. Or six of them, depending on your point of view.

A framing tale shows Cyclops struggling a bit with the fact that the New Team isn't the same as the Old Team. They didn't come to Charles Xavier as Gifted Youngsters, and they don't behave like students. When they're brought to live in a swank mansion with a cool Danger Room full of holograms and robots, they're not interested in running through a carefully strategized training exercise. They want to break stuff. That anarchistic spirit is a big part of why we fans love them, but it makes sense that Cyclops of all people would need a little time to adjust to that, which is something we don't see much in the original '70s stories. This is precisely why I love the First Class tales: they find all the cracks we'd forgotten were in the classic stories, and exploit them in the most fun way possible.

(I contrast this with some of the current continuity X-books, which find the cracks in classic stories and exploits them in the angstiest way possible. Oh, look, it's another Machiavellian shame in Professor X's past! How ever will the X-whoevers react?)

And as Cyclops tries to get to know his new team, Moira McTaggert offers him a set of taped "interviews" she conducted with the new X-Men, each describing an adventure they had in their teens, as they were first coming to terms with their mutant gifts. It's a blatant ploy to make the adult X-Men just as accessible and hip to younger readers as the original teenaged First Class, but the vignettes are clever and engaging enough to make it work. My personal favorites were Banshee's tale - in the form of an Irish folk song written by a friend of Banshee and performed in my head by Flogging Molly - and "Wolverine: Agent of S.N.I.K.T.." Since Wolverine can't remember his past, the idea of a "young Wolverine" tale is patently ridiculous. Wolverine himself knows that better than anyone, and thus gives us some glorious hogwash, lampooning everything from other Marvel heroes to spy fiction to Arthur Miller in the process.

It's not a perfect comic. The characterization in the framing story errs a little on the side of caricature in places. Colossus, for instance, is portrayed as provincial, naive, and comic book Russian enough to start planting crops in the school lawn, saying, "If we don't farm, how will we eat?" (It's funnier if I choose to see this as a fear that without home-grown veggies, his new life in America will mean all McDonald's all the time.) But there's far more entertainment packed into UXFCGS than even six initials should allow, well worth the cover price. Particularly when the cover in question is the Skottie Young masterpiece seen above.

- JC

Standout Scenes

I can only think of three occasions on which I've bought a comic for a single scene. It's not uncommon for a standout scene to sway my decision to purchase a book, to prove to me that the writer or the story has something special to offer. (The "you cut down the tree, but you still miss its shade" scene in the first issue of Brett Matthews' Lone Ranger, for instance.) But to buy a single issue of a comic, without picking up the larger storyline of which it is a part, simply because of one scene so good that I needed to have that in my library, that's only happened to me thrice.

The three scenes in question:

1) X-Men #59 (Scott Lobdell) - Jean Grey-Summers finds her husband Scott hiding out in a movie theater, watching Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Many readers think of Scott Summers merely as Cyclops, humorless general of Xavier's army; it's great to see him in a quieter moment, to recognize he has hobbies and passions that have nothing to do with the X-Men or the mutant cause.

2) Marvel Knights 4 #4 (Roberto Aguire-Sacasa) - Reed Richards talks a jumper down off a ledge. When Reed makes a promise to the jumper, and assures him that not even Dr. Doom or Galactcus could keep Reed from fulfilling it, we know this is no exaggeration; Richards is as honest as his legs get long.

And lately, 3) Ultimate Fantastic Four #58 (Joe Pokaski) - A flashback shows how Reed Richards and Ben Grimm became friends. We know their unlikely bond is going to carry them through the direst of circumstances, including the failed experiment that traps Grimm beneath the Thing's rocky hide.

None of these scenes has anything to do with super-powers (unless you count Reed taking a giant stretchy step up to a ledge) or saving the world. They're simple stories, well told: a wife learning something new about her husband, the compassion of a stranger, two boys each finding a brother in the last person they'd have expected. None of these moments would be out of place in a stage play, yet they're all the more meaningful for being set against the colorful, hyperbolic backdrop of comic book super-heroics.

- JC

[He's not mentioning how big a part simple comic scenes like these have played elsewhere in his life, like when he had to show me a panel of Reed and Sue talking about kissing after our first make-out session. I'm not even joking. - RD]

Marvel Gender Benders

So I've been catching up on Mike Carey's X-Men: Legacy this week ("Sins of the Father" in trade paperback, the "Original Sin" crossover with Wolverine: Origins in hardcover), and just learned that there is now a female clone of X-Men arch-foe Mr. Sinister running around the universe called, wait for it, Miss Sinister.

Really, Marvel? Really?

She boasts Mr. Sinister's trademark pasty complexion/red forehead diamond, but displays none of his mystique (no pun intended) or scientific prowess. Where Mr. Sinister was a grand manipulator, playing a mad game of destiny dominoes to suit some vaguely Darwinist agenda - a cloning here, a misfit massacre over there - his feminine successor seems so far to be little more than a third-rate telepath in thrall to the Hellfire Club's Sebastian Shaw.

Of course, she's hardly unique; these trans-gendered villains are popping up all over the place. Spider-Man has recently been targeted by a new Kraven the Hunter, who happens to be the 12-year-old daughter of the original. Another old X-Men villain, the illusionist Mastermind, has two daughters running around, both having inherited his powers and squabbling over his name. Daredevil is sparring with a Lady Bullseye, and Thor's trickster-god brother Loki has actually become a woman himself.

Some of these characters feature in some very well-told stories. But looking at the trend on the whole, I can't help but wonder what message Marvel thinks it's sending by replacing a bunch of aging male villains with female proxies. Do they think this is fine feminism, to show sisters doing it for themselves just like the boys did it before them, with the boys' borrowed identities? If Marvel has a Femme Fatale quota to fill, wouldn't they get more points by creating some villainesses that are actually unique, with their own abilities and backstories? Or do they think the fans won't get excited about a new villian if she doesn't have some familiar hook, a connection to what's gone before?

Tell me your thoughts. I'd love to know what others are making of all this. In the meantime, I'll be over here trying to guess who Marvel will boobify next. Victoria Von Doom? The Queenpin? Magneta*?

- JC

*In fanfic she would be called Magenta and she would spend all her time hanging with her BFF Rouge.

X-Men:First Class: Finals

Jeff's Parker's four-part X-Men: First Class: Finals miniseries bids a fond farewell to a classic Marvel flashback, fills in a long-neglected gap in X-history, and neatly sets up Scott Gray's upcoming Uncanny X-Men First Class. In the days just before Wolverine, Storm, etc. burst onto the mutant scene in "Giant Size X-Men #1," the original five X-Men are preparing to leave Xavier's School with college degrees and head out into the real world. But wouldn't you know it? Some mysterious adversary is forcing them to confront old foes (all from Parker's series) one last time.

Along the way, Parker drops in answers to questions fans have been asking since the 60s and 70s. Presumably. I wasn't born then. We find out why the X-Men switched to more individualized uniforms, why Professor Xavier went from running a school for "The Strangest Teens of All!" to overseeing a pseudo-military team of adult mutants from around the world, and even how a classy girl like Jean could possibly have designed the suspendered nightmare that was Angel's first attempt at a unique costume.

And in the end, we learn that the bad guy bombarding the team with Parker's greatest hits is none other than Jean Grey, and I discover a facet of my favorite relationship in comics that I'd never quite caught on to before. I'd always seen Scott and Jean primarily as two straight-arrows, wanting nothing more than to do right and take care of their great big X-Men family. Less important, I thought, were the very different ways they experienced and dealt with power. Scott's struggle was with a physical handicap, Jean's with a metaphysical question of how much power she can use before it must corrupt her.

Finals showed that both Scott and Jean's power struggles are ultimately emotional. Here we learn that as Jean's telepathic abilities grew, her subconscious fears and traumatic memories began to manifest as what Xavier called "ambient dreams," forcing themselves on those around her. The Professor explains, "As a mentally enhanced mutant, it's important that her mind be disciplined. Objective," meaning that Jean's power demands a figurative clarity of vision, just as Scott's does a literal one. And for Jean, just as much as for Scott, power has always been overshadowed by childhood pain. Scott lost his parents in the plane crash which also deprived him of the ability to control his optic blasts; Jean first experienced telepathy in the moment her friend was killed in a car crash. One lost a family, the other a best friend, and they found both again in one another - making their continual efforts at control a little less burdensome.

And those who say Scott Summers wasn't "a real grown up" or "free" or "truly happy" until Emma Frost came along can suck it.

The first 3 Finals issues also feature a back-up story by Parker, irresistably drawn by Colleen Coover: "Scott & Jean Are On a Date!" Honestly, they had me at the title, but you have to love a Marvel series that manages to work a playful newspaper-style comic strip into its continuity, and in the oh-so-angsty X-verse to boot.

- JC

Astonishing X-Men

The X-Men have long been my favorite characters in comics. Yet I've had a hard time really appreciating the main X-books since about 2001, when Grant Morrison began his run on New X-Men. The plots were needlessly convoluted and the characters seemed to be alienated from each other, but the biggest reason for my dislike came down to his treatment of just two characters: Scott Summers and Jean Grey. Morrison took Cyclops, the X-Men's ultimate idealistic boy scout, and turned him into a wimp-ass wannabe bad boy. He took Jean, who had emerged from the shadow of the Phoenix entity in the 1990s to become a truly formidable leader, rebonded her to the Phoenix, and reduced her to the fanboy distortion of "that chick who dies a lot." And in the process, he tore apart their marriage, which I would still argue is the greatest love story in comics.

Now, I'm not saying there haven't been great X-Men stories told since Morrison's reign. But without Scott Summers and Jean Grey at the center of them - with Scott instead shacked up with Emma Frost, with whom he had a psychic affair before Jean's death - they just haven't been my X-Men.

Which kind of makes Joss Whedon's run on Astonishing X-Men live up to its name all the more. I've just finished reading it all, start to finish, for the second time, and I still don't hate it.
Joss immediately sets right a lot of what Morrison muddled. He puts the X-Men back in spandex, gets them back in the game of reaching out to the human community by being superheroes rather than holing up in the mansion and teaching mutant kids how much better they are than humans. He gives Cyclops his idealism back, and shows us the X-Men actually enjoying each others' company again (even as they wind up in fist-fights every other page). They're a family. An endlessly squabbling family that expects the world of one another, but what family doesn't?

What's more, the Whedon issues of Astonishing X-Men offer some of the finest visual storytelling in comics. The "camera angles," the intercutting between parallel scenes, the characters' body language and blocking, it's all brilliant. The scene where Colossus returns from the dead is a perfect example: the guards' bullets pass through Kitty Pryde and ping off something in the shadows; Colossus steps out; Kitty freezes, Colossus running right through her to take down the guards, but the view remains locked on Kitty and the shock on her face. It's perfect. I'd love to get my hands on some of the scripts, and really pick apart how much of this was planned by Whedon and how much was the genius of artist John Cassaday.

But the really weird part? When Joss is writing them, I don't even hate Scott & Emma as a couple. Don't get me wrong; I still hate how it started and the revisionist writers who try to suggest Scott & Jean were never good for one another. (Joss has Emma suggest it, but Scott clearly isn't buying in.) But Joss emphasizes two people with ridiculous cases of survivor's guilt - for different reasons, from different pasts - coming together, each seeing the other very differently from how they see themselves, and trying to be better together. It's almost kinda cool. I still want Jean to come back, I still want to see her and Scott put back together, but I don't have to hate the Scott/Emma relationship as a step along Scott's journey.

- JC

X-Men: The Complete Onslaught Epic

Marvel recently published a four-volume graphic novel set of the massive 1990s Onslaught Epic (Scott Lobdell & Mark Waid, various), and there's a really cool idea there, buried under everything that can go wrong with a crossover.

The basic germ of it all is the idea that Professor X's pent up frustration (caused by human bigotry and furthured by mutant stupidity that made the situation worse) actually creates a psychic entity. Onslaught, as it is called, is a powerful being who tries to take every dark thought Xavier has ever had and go conqure the world with them.

For complicated plot reasons, there are elements of Magneto in Onslaught. The idea was that Xavier used his abilities to shut down Magneto's mind after some of the villain's crazier antics, during which a dark part of Magneto's psyche was absorbed into Xavier's mind. It was this act of crossing the line and controlling his friend's thoughts that brought Onslaught into being. This is one of the ways in which a really interesting idea begins to fall apart; Xavier didn't need a part of Magneto to have his own dark side - the story is stronger if Onslaught is born purely of Prof. X's own frustrations.

Side note: it's also interesting that current X-comics have no problem showing that Xavier is no saint; practically every storyline is revealing some horrible secret he's kept from the X-Men. But back in the '90s if a writer wanted to make an evil being come out of Professor X, they had to get Magneto into his head first. Visually, Magneto's dark taint on Xavier's psyche was represented as a little demon on the psychic plane. Now that's just overkill.

The real problem is that once Onslaught arrives and begins his takeover of the Marvel Universe, the story becomes a really generic crossover. For some poorly developed reasons, Onslaught unleashes Sentinals across the Marvel world, and the middle two volumes of the epic - which doesn't include every issue of the storyline, just those that the compilers thought were important - is full of Marvel characters randomly fighting Sentinals. Spider-Man fights them. Hulk fights them. The heroic Green Goblin, who didn't even last very long, fights them as well. The Fantastic Four fight them. And then someone got the brilliant idea to turn the storyline into a launching pad for another convoluted plotline called Heroes Reborn.

What should have been a story about the X-Men and the frustration of their founder and Xavier's dream falling apart became a story about every hero ever bravely sacrificing himself in a lot of sound and fury. All so Marvel could temporarily reboot all the Avengers and Fantastic Four comics and have really popular artists draw new versions of the characters' origins.

I doubt that's what the Onslaught story was initially meant to be. The final volume in the epic has pages from the story pitch that outlined Onslaught's motivation and plan, and it bears little resemblance to the current story. Originally, the dark entity's goal was to force the entire human race into one giant telepathic hive mind, which would not only destroy free will but also original thought. I suspect some editor saw that as too convoluted. Instead Onslaught decides that humans have no right to live for the way they've treated mutants, and mutants have no right to live for failing to stand up for themselves. Onslaught becomes a bog-standard nihilist, which is simply boring. I prefer villains who have motivation, not those who are simply destrutctive because they're insane.

I would love to see an Ultimate version of this storyline that's closer to the original, with Xavier's frustration at small-mindedness and intolerance becoming a force that the X-Men have to fight. The idea that the world's most powerful psychic, no matter how benevolent he seems, must have within him the temptation to force everyone to think as he does still seems very much worth exploring.

All that said, it was great hanging out with the '90s X-Men for a bit. I miss that family dynamic. These days they're all so mired in angst all the time, and we rarely get to see them just goofing off as friends do, getting Beast stuck in the bathtub or making the pancakes go ka-blooey.

- JC

Wolverine & the X-Men: Hindsight Part 1

Wolverine is the Gary Stu of the Marvel U. Everyone knows this. It's rare to see a month go by that he's not starring in at least 10 different comics. It's almost equally rare to see a month where some comic book writer isn't cracking this joke: "Gee, Logan, how do you find time to be an X-Men, an Avenger, run 3-4 solo ops, hang out with the Power Pack kiddies, kill folk with X-Force, and get your photo taken drinking milk (it does a body good)?"

The ridiculousness of Wolverine's situation was probably exacerbated by the X-Men films. I loved the first two as much as most comic fans, but they were never really about the X-Men as a team. They reinforced the idea that Logan was the only mutant really worth anyone's interest, both in the public consciousness and almost certainly in the eyes of Marvel marketing. They were, as a friend of mine pointed out, "Wolverine & Friends!"

And now we have a new animated series with almost that very title, that manages to take the Merry Marvel Marching Mary Sue to new depths. The show opens with Wolverine about to leave the X-Mansion for a sweet jaunt on his motorbike. On his way out the door he:

a) thoroughly trounces Shadowcat, Colossus, and Nightcrawler in the Danger Room - actually, from the Danger Room control room.

b) passes by Cyclops and Jean Grey, who just happen to be having an argument about him. (This is also poor Jean's only line of dialogue, before the mysterious explosion that causes Jean and Professor X to vanish so that Cyclops can become the brooding loner and Wolverine can become the one man who can put the band back together.)

c) has a heart-to-heart with Rogue so she can tell him, "It's not a home when you're not around!"

Then we cut to one year later, so we can watch Wolverine save an adorable big-eyed little mixed-race child and her kindly parents from a fire, and then from the government-sponsored mutantphobe soldiers who want to lock them up for thinking he might be all right, razors in his hands or not. Beast tags along in a purely sidekick capacity.

This isn't X-Men. It's Everybody Loves Logan.

I fell in love with the X-Men because of their family dynamic, because they were a group of fascinating people who came together to share their strengths and their troubles and make each other and the world better. Watching them all follow Wolverine around because only he has the hearts, the brains, and the courage to lead them down the yellow spandex road is just not that interesting to me. It's a little nauseating.

- JC

Marvel vs. DC

I like my stories to be, like, interesting, which is why I'm not into DC Comics.

I grew up watching classic comic movies, like Batman and Superman, but even then I was disappointed in the static characterizations they tended to have. Also, really lame "secret" identities. Bruce Wayne's chiseled jaw was pretty distinct, even under a cowl, but a pair of glasses? Really? That's all you could come up with? And then you're photographed all the time in the newspaper you work for and they STILL don't know it's you? Are they putting stupid in the Metropolis water supply? And these guys are totally badass, why are they keeping it a secret? Bruce is a billionaire; if he came out, he'd just be seen as eccentric and he'd be asked to throw benefit parties in costume. Superman is freaking SUPERMAN. What's the point of hiding?

I used to watch the X-Men after school and I really dug it. For one thing, it was easier to play on the playground - you got your Cyclops (the bossy kid) and your Jean Grey (the prissy girl) and your Wolverine (the slightly aggressive kid who grinned a lot) and your Jubilee (whoever was wearing a yellow raincoat that day). Seriously, try to play Superman and you get a lot of fights over who's Clark and who's Lois and everyone else sort of stands around shouting for help and then you get in trouble with the teachers. For another thing, they were a family. Not just a team or an ensemble, but they had relationships like we understood - Scott and Jean were a couple, Logan and Jubilee had this parent/kid thing going on, it wasn't the vague unresolved tension between Clark and Lois. And they weren't really hiding who they were. They were mutants, and sometimes they got crap for it, but everyone knew that they were different.

But it was Spider-Man (JC forced me to correct this from "Spiderman," which is WHAT STAN LEE CALLED HIM I HAVE SEEN THE PAGE SCANS) who got me into real comics, because Bendis, as previously stated, rocks. I read Ultimate Spidey #1 through #115 in three days as JC bagged and alphabetized his collection last spring break. Peter is, above all else, a relationships man - and Bendis makes that very personal. Then I had to read some New Avengers, some Ultimate X-Men, Pulse, Runaways, Y the Last Man, Power Pack, Buffy season 8... yeah.

I haven't bothered to get into the subtleties of recent DC canon, though JC assures me they've gotten more complex, because I can't shake that childhood impression of super powers in the form of men. I like to read about men who just so happen to be super.

- RD