221 – Better Than LEGO

Having found the time to listen to the podcast, a few scattered thoughts:

– I really do wish the Fabian Nicieza who is writing this book would give the Fabian Nicieza who is writing X-Men a few tips.

– But that’s a little unfair. Our hosts are right, though (at least from my perspective) – this is easily the best X-book at the moment. (I don’t think Excalibur counts as an X-book at this point.) I think the problem is, at least in part, that the two “real” X-Men books are trapped by Claremont. There’s that terrible sense of lifelessness about them, of doing things solely because this is what the X-Men are supposed to be like.

Meanwhile, this is recognizably an X-book in the Claremont tradition – sprawling plotlines and an interest in character combined with traditional superheroics – but it’s not constrained by the need to *replicate* Chris Claremont in the way that the two real X-books are.

-The “You never asked” bit with Shatterstar nicely underlines this, as a reference to Logan-turning-out-to-speak-Japanese. It speaks to all the ways in which the existence of a character like Shatterstar is a product, among other things, of the turn in Claremont/Byrne UXM to Wolverine being top character, and the way in which that’s intertwined with taking a new and more admiring attitude to his stabbiness. Shatterstar’s growing on me in general.

– On the other hand, Feral, for me, remains an annoying and pointless collection of mannerisms, and I can’t wait for her to be gone. And Siryn is a blank space where a personality should be, just a hilarious version of a dialect and a hair color. She has no defining traits beyond “She’s Irish.

In general, I think there are a few too many characters here for the story to serve. Which makes the amount of dialogue and panel space that Feral gets very irritating to me. She’s not worth writing about even if you have the space!

– Our hosts, in criticizing the Externals and their old-people self-regard, talked me into liking them. There’s something that works about the collection of twentysomething “new adults” having as their adversaries these people who embody the concept of the old who refuse to get out of the way, in that heightened, super-literal way, that superhero comics can get away with. You can see Jack Kirby coming up with this as an idea, if the concept of (this era of) X-Force were presented to him.

Note that Vampire: The Masquerade came out this year. See also all the “change of generation” rhetoric surrounding the election of Clinton the next year. This feels right for the early ‘90s to me in a way that contrasts strikingly with how the main X-Men books can’t seem to let go of the Cold War.

(While we’re on it — goddamn millennials! Stop calling things “radical”! Stop trying to turn the ‘90s into the ‘80s! How many things does your generation have to destroy? Wasn’t Toys R’Us enough? Let us aging members of Gen X clutch our alternative rock, goatees, and overdeveloped pride in our sense of knowing irony to our hearts in peace, damn you. Do you have any idea how important it was to us that we weren’t the ‘80s? It’s the only thing that makes up for the fact that we can’t believe that we never noticed how few people there were on Buffy the Vampire Slayer who weren’t white.)

– This also makes the Externals function as a mirror of Cable, who obviously is defined by being really old, but still taking up a lot of space, not only physically but also in how he tends to dominate scenes in which he’s in. That makes the second story feel like a natural continuation of the first story: having resolved their relationship with Cable and become his true heirs in a generational-succession sort of way (all very coming-of-age narrative), X-Force then confront people who won’t allow them to be adults and try to force them into the role of children.

– Mind you, I can’t bring myself to say that this does anything to salvage the single worst flaw of the second story for me, which is the ridiculous moral “dilemma” that it chooses to make the basis of its plot. “If Ah don’t keep a promise extracted from me under duress, that I made because it was the only way to save my friend’s life, does that make me as bad as Gideon?” No, Sam, it really doesn’t, and no-one who’s older than about five would ever think otherwise. The “victory” of finding a narrow literal interpretation that gets Sam out of this “dilemma” has the impact of a light breeze, because the premise is so dumb. I do hope that Sam Guthrie has no career plans to go into contract law.

– There’s something about the moment when Professor informs everyone in the first story that while they’ve been wasting time fighting, they haven’t bothered to notics that the station that they’ve been fighting on has been suffering (rather strangely defined) damage that is now irretrievable, that feels in hindsight like a metaphor for what was happening in the North American comics market at this time.