263 – The Oldest Teens of Them All

I really enjoyed the Wolverine podcast, it is available without a subscription (released episodically and ad supported, rather than bingable and ad free) via various pod cathers/ or as a RSS feed (I personally used Pocketcast)

And as all the episodes are now out for season 1 and 2, the episodic release is no longer an issue.

Season 1 felt like the stronger season, season 2 tried harder to fill in gaps of what’s and whys than was really needed I felt.

But the main thing I took away was how a radio play format could really ramp up the visceral nature of wolverines claws and power set with sound effects and voice acting in a way that I have not seen paralleled in other portrayals.

Some thoughts:-

– When Sam talks about the differences between X-Force’s “side of the coin and the MLF’s” — well, I suppose he had to touch on it, but it’s just a reminder that this comic has never really worked out exactly how it’s negotiating the tensions between (a) the conventions of how violence is handled in superhero comic, (b) its own stylized Awesome! and Cool! use of violence (or rather “violence”) as an aesthetic and (c) its use of language that’s redolent of real-world political violence.

This becomes painfully obvious with “After you kidnapped a government official!” Also the way in which Domino opposes “No slitting any throats, no breaking any faces” to “quick, quiet, and efficient.”

(No, I haven’t forgotten Nicieza talking of a “dirty war” as if that’s somehow an admirable thing in a hard-headed and pragmatic sort of way. I’m never letting that go.)

I’m not saying those internal contradictions couldn’t be productive and interesting, because obviously they could be, but in practice they just aren’t. Instead, raising them as issues just pops the soap bubble for me.

This is part of why the Rictor gun violence story didn’t really work for me. Admittedly, I have idiosyncratic issues about American cultural products that exoticize violence as something that Those People In Other Countries Do. (Much less common nowadays, for sad and obvious reasons, but common in the ‘80s and ‘90s.) One observes that, in condemning the Rictor family as people who sell guns, the story at no point addressed the question of where they got these guns. Guns just sort of exist out there as a fact of nature, and we have the Hallmark movie resolution with the child, that whole “the only solution to this problem lies in healing the human heart” line.

– You can see a related problem – not necessarily a problem, as long as you don’t draw attention to it, but it stands out here – in the whole way in which the Nimrod story treats “military involvement in development of sentient machines” as somehow shocking and unthinkable, and not something that is so obvious that it would be unbelievable if it weren’t the case.

Despite its “tough,” “hard-headed,” and “cynical” trappings, at its heart X-Force is very much a rose-tinted, soft-focus production with an idealized view of the world that makes one of those “Gosh! We have to save this fictional small Central American/Southeast Asian country from the Commies!” Marvel stories from the ‘60s look like a dark and radically self-critical examination of US policy in the Cold War.

On the other hand, that idealized view of the world is one of the things that makes #37 work for me. Best thing in these issues. Blame our hosts for perversely convincing me to like the Externals when they were criticizing them as characters. I really liked the way they were depicted in this: the focus on the idea that, just because you’re immortal, that doesn’t make you awe-inspiring and amazing. You can still basically be a bit crap.

And did I hear our hosts right? The only reason to believe that Sam is not an External and not immortal is because *Selene* said so? As far as I’m concerned, this is all still canon until we are presented with a more reliable source!

– Ah, the bit where Cable says “We’re hurtling towards that terrible future, the awful, terrible future that I myself…know about from the fact that it was past history in this *other* dystopian future, where I’m from.” Oh dear. All the impact of drizzle.

You know what you should do in an X-era in which you’re going to have grim stories about how maybe everything is on the road to Days of Future Past? Keep around the character who’s actually from the DOFP alt-future.

– Of course you were talking about Charles Xavier, Paige. Because in this era, Charles Xavier is at the center of [expletive deleted] everything.

– Mr. Nicieza, just because Peter David is gone doesn’t mean that you should start doing cringey pop culture references.

Tony Hawk, Hawk Talk! 2 of my favourite things 😀
I’m a big skateboarder so that was random to here haha