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In which Goldballs is still a better name than Egg; we continue our progress towards Earth-295; Legion pulls a Stryfe; we’re still pretty shaky on how to pronounce “M’Kraan”; Xavier and Magneto were absolutely and unquestionably doing sex in the 1970s; it’s time time; the Watcher is watching you masturbate; and what happens immediately before the end of the world is often as important as what happens immediately after.
X-PLAINED:
- Balls
- Legion (more) (again)
- Uncanny X-Men 320-321
- X-Men #40
- Establishing stakes
- Slang of the mid-1990s
- Time travel as a dick move
- Issues vs. episodes
- The M’Kraan Crystal (more) (again)
- Hebrew vowels
- Latent time travel abilities
- Charles Xavier’s “first” bar fight
- An exceptional caption
- A very bad narrative choice
- The death of Charles Francis Xavier
- A load-bearing moment in time
- Jahf the Guardian
- Waiting for the end of the world
- The best-drawn kiss in X-Men, ever
- The many Krakoas
- Integrating Legion into Dawn of X
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I wonder if Bobby using “Ripped” to mean “ruined” might be a reference to “getting ripped a new asshole”? A touch tenuous perhaps, but it’s something.
I think I remember rolling my eyes slightly at Cable’s sudden “latent time-travel powers” since that was Rachel’s special gig, and she wasn’t even allowed to keep THAT as unique to her.
I wonder if this is where Legion started to have such excessively godlike powers? Not sure when he moved from the Telepath/Telekinetic/Pyrokinetic triumverate of his debut, to “dozens of personalities/dozens of powers” which somehow fused into this “I can do ANYTHING!” powerset.
And I think we all know the REAL reason that Krakoa is amenable to the mutant cause now is entirely down to the irresistable power of love as embodied by one D Ramsey Esq. The poor landmass didn’t stand a chance against that hairswoop.
I’m afraid I can’t think of any Trnasformers who are golf-carts… quite a few dune-buggies starting with Gen 1 Beachcomber, but no golf carts… that’s a shame.
OK, I did not expect reading along with these comics to confront me with That Scene. Oh my God. Leaving aside the whole, let’s say inadvisability, of it, it’s bizarrely non-consequential. You’d think that if you were going to go to that particular incredibly disturbing place, that would have to become a focus of the story.
What else struck me?
-Well, decompression didn’t have to wait until the 2000s. UXM #320 is basically one big fight scene, and not a very interesting one.
-“Everything we are… everything we can be…we owe to the man who sired David Haller…
…and whatever risks we take this day, we take proudly in his name.”
Wow. Storm really has accepted Charles Xavier as her personal savior, hasn’t she? And since the dialogue is not by Scott Lobdell, that’s another reason to suppose that it was Bob Harras pushing the Charles Xavier=Jesus thing.
-That’s the *focused* totality, Mr. Waid. “Sum totality” is just silly.
-On the other hand, it’s not casually racist. Like expressing surprise at “a British accent in an Asian body.”
But then Bobby says that “A black woman with white hair” is also “not normal,” so I suppose, maybe the point is that mindwiped Bobby Drake is a horribly narrowminded person who can’t imagine that there is anyone in Britain who’s not white. And for a moment, I think, “Actually, that makes sense. We’ve met Bobby’s father. That has to have left some mark on Bobby’s thinking, and if you erase large portions of his experience, maybe there is a side to Bobby Drake that comes out that’s his father’s son…”
But no. XM #41 doubles down on this, and it’s not Bobby’s perspective, but Charles Xavier’s: “An ASIAN telepath with a BRITISH accent?” Has it really never crossed Fabian Nicieza’s mind that there are British people of East Asian descent?
So, yeah, overall this isn’t too terrible, aside from some bad moments. But the bad moments are *really* bad.
Reminds me a little of Brigit Clancy, Dick Grayson’s landlady in Chuck Dixon’s Nightwing run.
A running gag was that we never saw her face for something like the first six issues, she was always carrying boxes, or working on the wiring in the walls, but she had a strong Irish accent (Not quite Claremont-ian, but of that ouevre).
Of course, the “surprise” when she was revealed was that she was actually Asian.
They even had a complicated backstory about her being born in Hong Kong, then moving to Ireland with her adoptive parents at a young age and learning English as her first language from them… when it IS perfectly possible for a person of Asian descent to actually, y’know, just be BORN in Ireland.
Not as bad as this though.
I didn’t even get into the creepiness of describing any woman as “an accent in a body.”
On the Cable time travel abilities thing: during the Excalibur issue that ends up Fatal Attraction, isn’t there a thing where he demonstrates some kind of innate time travel abilities that Captain Britain hijacks to guilt trip Rachel into rescuing him?
What is all that crystallization? That’s coming from the Mkraan crystal? What does the MKraan Cyrstal do exactly?
Ah, yes, “An Ass to Die For.” My favorite James Bond film.
Not that I really want to dwell on That Scene, but a question occurred to me when I first read it that would make it *extremely* consequential if it was ever pursued: maybe Charles Xavier isn’t Legion’s father at all?
Maybe he’s his *own* father?
Yikes.
Forgot to say: “What a Philip K Dick” had me laughing out loud. Bravo. 🙂