262 – Science Fiction Double Feature

Moderately scattered thoughts:-

-I checked, and unfortunately, Bishop is clear in UXM #311 that his story is about drawing on energy released by snow as it melts. So, I’m afraid that this is another thing that I’m filing under Scott Lobdell being too lazy to think things through. Our hosts supplied the easy fix — make it about kinetic energy.

-Similarly, I like the character work on Bishop proposing that he and Jubilee split up, and her terror at the thought. But, umm, I hate to have to say it, but isn’t there a rather gaping hole in Bishop’s thinking that they have to split up because he’s short on energy? What exactly is that Jubilee can do, again?

But I can say nice things about Lobdell this week! Well, eventually.

-The caption when Yukio is introduced says “The clothes are the same.” They’re really not. Back in UXM #172-3, Yukio didn’t dress like this at all.

Our hosts commented on the unplanned shift between Romita jr. and Madureira as permanent artists. Mostly, I’d be a defender of JRjr. I think Miles was right to draw attention to how good he can be at communicating weight and solidity. Plus, I have a soft spot for artists who are *really* into fashion.

But sometimes, one’s strengths are one’s weaknesses. And Romita’s love of fashion betrays him here. He also makes Yukio look a little too pretty. It’s one of those moments when one sees something that works really well only when a different person messes it up — I acquired a whole new appreciation for how Paul Smith tells a love story between Storm and Yukio without ever depicting Yukio as primarily an object of desire for the (in most cases, straight male) viewer.

There’s an additional problem. Both language and art misread the original Storm-Yukio relationship in UXM #172-3. It’s not that Storm met Yukio and decided to dress like her — Storm’s black leather and mohawk don’t bear a particularly close resemblance to Yukio’s clothing in that story. It’s that Storm met Yukio and was inspired by Yukio’s outlook to find out who *Storm* wanted to be. Since that’s obviously more resonant in terms of a coming-out narrative, rewriting it is awkward. Again, this is Lobdell using the past in a lazy fashion, without really engaging with it.

-What’s amusing, though, is that Madureira clearly did go back and look at Paul Smith’s Yukio and model the way he was going to have her dress on that. This means that Yukio manages to change her outfit in the couple of seconds between being confronted with the Phalanx at the end of #312 and leaping out a window at the beginning of #313.

-Yukio’s language has also completely changed. The way Scott Lobdell writes Yukio suggests that he only has one way to write devil-may-care, and he’s already been using it on Jubilee for years.

However (this is where I start to say nice things), it’s arguably better than Claremont’s version of Yukio’s language in some ways, which suffered from the fact that it was, well, Chris Claremont writing a Japanese person. And, for Claremont, no Japanese person could ever speak in a manner that really suggested that they had a sense of fun.

So it’s refreshing to have someone write Yukio who’s free from Claremont’s view that all Japanese dialogue has to stay somewhere in the neighborhood of terrible stereotype.

-And I’ll even take back what I just said about it Lobdell’s version of Yukio’s voice being a bit close to Jubilee’s. Because that’s doing something. And by juxtaposing Yukio, for whom the bravado isn’t just bravado, but a genuine reflection of who she is, with Jubilee, he underlines that, in Jubilee’s case, this is a facade that is crumbling under the weight of unbearable and horrific trauma.

Overall.Lobdell remains at his best when writing Jubilee. It’s like the one thing that he’s both genuinely interested in and sensitive about. In fact, I’m going to say something that’s a bit shocking to me – I think Lobdell’s Jubilee is in some ways not only in dialgue with Claremont’s Kitty Pryde, but might even be a more morally sensitive character. (It is obviously, no accident that our hosts compared the two.)

Kitty tends to be pulled into specific roles for the teenaged reader. She’s a point of identification, the person who has happen to them the fantasy of “What if I left my boring family in the Chicago suburbs and got to be an X-Man?” She also has an element of being a fantasy girlfriend for the reader (although, granted, Claremont did get around to making that not just the straight male reader). (This might be why straight male creators who grew up with ‘80s Kitty are *so* keen on getting her back with Peter.) On both counts, Kitty tends to be a bit of a wish-fulfilment fantasy.

Now, Kitty is a brilliant wish-fulfillment fantasy, one of the greatest characters that Claremont ever created. She works tremendously well.

But that doesn’t mean that there’s not stuff in what the reader is encouraged to do there that it’s interesting to yank out and subject to scrutiny. Part of the wish-fulfillment aspect of Kitty is that one has to suppress mortality and psychological trauma. It’s not, I think, an accident that Kitty’s power consists in large part of invulnerability.

Of course, this suppression of trauma isn’t total – no character goes through years in an action genre without being in danger fairly often. It’s a matter of degree. And in terms of stories which foreground this sort of thing, Claremont did eventually get round to a science-fiction version of confronting Kitty with real mortality. But it’s notable how he used that to move her into the consequence-free comic world of his Excalibur — Kitty is a character that he protects.

And Lobdell is really interested in not doing that *at all* with Jubilee, but the reverse — bringing to the reader’s attention that for any teenager that one views as an actual person, being around the X-Men would be utterly traumatizing. (I suspect that this might have something to do with the aging of superhero-comics readership.)

Jubilee “thought it would be a trip.” Which is to say, she thought that it would be like it was for Kitty.

This makes me at least somewhat optimistic about Generation X (which I’ve never read), especially that Lobdell seems to be taking these themes as a mission statement for that book.

-Bobby. For God’s sake, I don’t care how we’re reading your sexuality. You are *not* allowed to use the expression “über-babe.”

-“As if the entire complex has suddenly …. died.” Scott Lobdell must be *terrified* of blackouts.

-“It is a scream that is torn from somewhere beyond the center of Bobby Drake’s soul.” So, that would be towards the back of his soul, then?

-The title of 312 is “Romp.” ???

-Madureira draws some very big arms. Sometimes this works as a stylistic cartoon-y feature (Bishop looming behind Xavier), sometimes (tiny-headed Beast) it doesn’t.