279 – Giant-Size Special #8

Scattered thoughts:-

-Our hosts made some great observations about how this book is made us of an interesting blend of different tones. I think that might be key to why Generation X is so much more readable than U/XM are at the moment — it’s much less monotonous. There’s a lot of the same tone, and when there are variations, they tend to be the exact same variations.

Plus, there’s a definite sense of pulling out all the stops — of trying extra hard to make this a book where the reader will want to pick up the next issue. In particular, it’s genuinely refreshing from a 2019 perspective to see the confidence with which Lobdell and Bachalo are trying to establish new characters as interesting in their own right, each capable of being somebody’s favorite.

Obviously, Gen X is very much following the New Mutants’ recipe (take 3 cups backgrounds-from-different-parts-of-the-world, add 2 tbsp strong and distinct personalities, mix thoroughly and then put in the oven at Gas Mark Danger).

But it’s *not* quite the New Mutants model. The New Mutants were the readers’ vicarious friends – they loved one another, and we loved them. Went back to check to see if I’d forgotten something about the early issues of New Mutants, and no: the first page of NM #1, revealingly, is the rest of the young cast looking on with smiles while Stevie Hunter washes Xian’s hair. They are best friends from the beginning. In contrast, these young people in Generation X are just that little bit more realistically standoffish — not so inclined to be devoted to one another overnight.

Quite surprised by how taken I am with all of the young characters, especially Angelo. I understand that he now falls into the category of “killed off and has stayed dead,” and so far I have to say that’s a shame. Right now, in fact, I’d say that this is the only thing in this period of the X-books whose erasure in the next century I may end up finding regrettable — something that might count for me as a nugget of lost gold. These young people had potential for better long-term treatment than they seem, generally speaking, to have received. More so than the rather tired main X-cast had at this time, really, at least for me.

-Jubilee calls Paige a “hayseed.” Is this comic from the 1990s or the 1890s?

-OK, so our hosts and their guest gave Jeremy Ratchford a hard time for the accent, and fair enough. But consider what Scott Lobdell thinks Sean should sound like. There is a brief moment where Lobdell makes Sean use “ye” correctly. But it’s all a cruel trick — then Lobdell goes back to getting it wrong. And after that Sean goes all Scottish. And at one point seems to be from the Ozarks?

-Weird from a 2019 perspective to see how much Sean is the “adult lead” of the book, with Emma relegated to a supporting role. It’ll be interesting to see how that reverses over time, as she becomes one of *the* most consistently prominent X-characters, and he fades into the background into safely-killable-off territory by the early 2000s.

-Synch is the “portrait of synchronicity”? Umm, what does that, umm, mean, exactly?

-Jonothon’s design works really well when Bachalo draws him. But I wonder if there’s a touch of what people always say about Warlock — that it’s a great design when drawn by the artist who designed it, but other people have a hard time making it look right.

-Thanks to the podcast, I rewatched the Generation X TV movie for the first time since its original broadcast. (Seeing the 2000 X-Men movie is one of the things that led me to pick up superhero comics again. Oddly enough, seeing Generation X four years earlier hadn’t done that.).

I had forgotten just how bad it was. But there is one element of it that’s better than I had remembered, the sequence with Jubilee’s mother and the government official – all the stuff about the irrelevance of due process, what Jubilee did technically qualifying as “mutant terrorism” and putting her in camp being allegedly in her own interests. It’s like an intrusion from a much better show.

As it is, it feels as if someone was not comfortable going there, and wanted to sell somebody else on this being a more goofy, campy, “comic-booky” thing, in which the characters would face OTT villains like Tresh every week. See also the bit about Jubilee being trained to “fight crime.” There’s a definite sense here that someone knows what show based on a comic is, and it’s about someone who puts on a costume and stops other colorful people who commit crimes with gimmicks. Not that this is the worst thing about it, obviously, but it’s something that marks it as a product of its era.

-One has the sense with the whitewashing of Jubilee that they were literally counting the nonwhite characters, and stopped at the point where it would mean that over half the students weren’t white.

-Saw X-Men: Dark Phoenix on a transatlantic flight just before Christmas, and I don’t know that it deserves the award even for trying.