412 – Yappin’ and Scrappin’

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I have to agree with our hosts that these issues were good. In fact, for me, reading the Seagle and Kelly mini-era for the first time, along with the podcast – this best the main X-books were in the whole of the ‘90s so far.

That goes for Seagle as well as Kelly now – last time, I was too put off by the Gambitness to appreciate Seagle, but no longer. The Cecilia Reyes issue is, I think it’s fair to say, one of the best single-issue stories ever in the X-line — this is all the stuff that the X-books have been saying they were about for years, but this is not only a fresh take on it – it’s convincing in a way that makes the previous era’s gestures at the mutant metaphor feel like the narrative equivalent of a badly-painted backdrop.

What I like overall here is how free Seagle and especially Kelly are from excessive reverence, how they don’t assume that the reader wants to see the classic characters be all awesome. The depiction of Wolverine is great: how he gets Marrow wrong because he thinks she’s falling into the lazy narrative cliché that, frankly, the reader too has every reason to expect — and then goes into a berserker rage that’s not presented as even a little bit cool, but as the cap on a really bad failure based on approaching this situation based on arrogance – which is the thing, all of Logan’s cool posturing taglines going back to Claremont are entirely compatible with a person who believes his own BS a bit too much. And then on the other hand, we do see a Logan without all the annoying crap in his conversation with Scott, and it’s a way more appealing Logan. Storm, too, is not the right person to be dealing with the situation, and seems alarmingly unaware of that.

Basically, I think that the comics are siding with Sam’s frustrations with the “classic” characters, and they convince me (to be fair, I didn’t take much convincing) that they’re right, that these people and this set-up are in bad need of a shake-up. Which obviously matches the way in which Kelly and Seagle enliven things with interesting new characters: there’s a confidence here that Reyes, Marrow, and Maggott are every bit as worthy of the reader’s attention as the characters who’ve been around for a while.

Critically, none of the new Big Three particularly need to be X-Men for any reason except practical ones (Maggott’s inner life is unclear, but his confidence makes him feel on the page as if he’d be fine without all this crap if it suited him to be elsewhere), and the stories don’t assume that they’re wrong about that.

Contrast the last genuinely successful new character, Bishop, who was built around his reverence for the legendary X-Men. I like Bishop, or did until he ran out of steam, but his entire concept encapsulates the era in which he was created, in which X-books could essentially coin money with inflated sales. These feel like X-books written by people who have noticed that the market has changed, and that it might be good to be a bit less complacent – but without taking the option of just collapsing into nostalgia for the longtime reader.

I’m a bit curious about how positively our hosts are responding, because they’ve spoken a lot in the past about how important the “X-Men as found family” is. So far, this era reads a bit like a critique of the idea that this concept is any kind of healthy found family. Cecilia (is it obvious that I *really* like Cecilia?) seems to be someone who would be better off if she wasn’t forced into this situation.