236 – Baggage of Traumas Past (Fatal Attractions, Part 3)

I love Hama’s Wolverine run so much, I’d love you to do even a one-epsisode speedrun through it. Either way it made me smile when you acknowledged it was a good run. The best Wolverine/Jubilee stuff you’ll find, and long-running convoluted time-travel subplot about Elsie Dee and Albert blew my 10-year-old mind.

Some scattered thoughts:-

– Good God, is Larry Hama better than anyone else writing these books! One particular touch is that he does the Fabian Nicieza thing of providing X-appropriate purple prose that verges on parodying Claremont. But Hama has put some thought into it. It’s disproportionately Charles Xavier that comes up with things like “the personal Ragnorak of a shattered soul”, and it’s part of an overall affected and hypereducated Latinate quality to Xavier’s dialogue — using a character’s voice consistently for characterization, an area in which there have been a number of lapses since Claremont left.

Admittedly, Hama overdoes it a bit: one has the sense of of a Charles Xavier who would ask “Would you possess the capacity to direct me to the aisle assigned to the function of containing raisins, please?”

But he also knows how to drop it strategically: “Aww, Charlie — don’t you think I know that?” The normal vocabulary hits me very hard because of the contrast with Logan’s over-the-top description of where he’s going just before. I don’t think it’s too fanciful to take this as revealing that the over-the-top stuff before was bluster, and was overdone precisely because Logan was talking to Xavier and adopting the same kind of language that Xavier uses.

– reading Lobdell’s dialogue for Spoor seems to confirm it: Scott Lobdell thinks Banshee is Scottish.

– “There are good guys like us, and bad guys”. Rachel, it’s more complex than that. You would know that if you were from a dark alternate future in which you were forced to do terrible things.

– Kitty is oddly legalistic, with her talk of not being a “minor” any more. (I mean, who can forget the moment when they realized that, to their parents, they would always be a minor? “Damn it, Dad, I’ve attained the age of majority!”) Maybe Hama’s Charles Xavier dialogue has rubbed off on her.

But it is, I think, textual evidence to support the idea that Lobdell consciously intends Kitty to have made a sudden age jump to be at least 18, to suit Jubilee replacing her as the “young” X-character, as part of reintegrating Kitty and Excalibur into the X-books. Or rather, integrating “Katherine” into the X-Books – having Xavier call her that was quite a nice touch.

– Still trying not to be too hard on Scott Lobdell, I loved both the Kurt-Scott and Rachel-Jean conversations. The second (the more important for me) makes me quite sad to think that Rachel is shortly to be decisively killed off and will never recover as a character, even when the killing-off turns out not to be decisive after all. Even if I can’t help but be aware that there may be an element here of tying up Rachel’s dangling plot threads before killing her off, Lobdell is tying this one up very effectively.

Kurt-Scott doesn’t have the same power for me, but it’s good stuff. Especially how Scott never says “Remember how once upon a time I was the experienced leader and you were in my team just starting out, and look — now we’re equals, and I know that even if you have doubts about yourself,” but that’s all there in the background.

– And then Lobdell has to spoil it: “You’re having a baby, so you must be getting married.” Well, I suppose that I have to remember that things were different in the Silver Age and that the notion of a couple having a child without being married would not be something that you could get away with in 1963. It would, obviously, be different if this comic were written in, say, the ‘90s.

– Also, I really dislike the whole “I was an atheist, Professor, but you taught me to believe” bit. I find it muddled. An atheist – and definitely a Communist! – is perfectly capable of “believing” in the sense that Colossus means, believing in the value of a cause — there’s no way that the concept would be as alien to him as this needs to be to make sense. Frankly, I think we’re dealing here with a shallow* Christian conception of atheism — it reminds me a *lot* of the default assumption of a minimal religious “faith” as a universal norm that I encountered when I moved to the US in the ‘90s (much less true today), the idea that without it, one would be some sort of alien being that would be unable to have values at all.

Of course, I realize that the X-books were in a bind: Colossus’s past atheist beliefs were tied to a Soviet Union that no longer existed. But I think a tacit retcon was the way to go.

*Before I offend someone, let me note that there are also deep Christian conceptions of atheism, and also that there is no shortage of shallow atheist conceptions of Christian and other religious belief.

-“Gross, messy, and has double consonants!” (Checks pseudonym quickly. Double vowels. Whew!) But I thought Jay’s favorite X-character was Scott Summers?

(Seriously, I did laugh out loud at the idea of “double consonants” possessing some inherently disgusting quality.)