Week of March 16, 2016:
In which the parts of Extraordinary X-Men are greater than their sum; All-New X-Men is the new New Mutants; you should totally come see us at Norwescon and Emerald City Comic Con; and yes, we are aware that it should be Luis Buñuel, but it’s been a long week.
REVIEWED:
*Pick of the Week (12:18)
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Bobby casually mentions his dad this week, which made me wonder, wouldn’t the time-displaced X-Men be all screwed up about their parents/friends from the past being pretty much dead? I mean, the parents that exist in this time stream lived through years of the older versions’ lives that the All-News will never even experience.
I’m totally with you on EXM. It had so many things that should’ve made me happy. Sugar Man! Time travel! X-students! And yet . . . I wasn’t all that enthralled. It didn’t click. I hate Ramos’ art, so that hurts. I hate the whole Legacy Virus/No More Mutants rehash, so that hurts. But even beyond that, the writing doesn’t work for me. Though the Illyana/Sapna/Strange story was great. I loved it.
ANXM is great. I loved the Idie stuff here. There’s some good stuff with Hank. Angel gets to be cool, which is incredibly rare. Also, Bagley. Bagley! He’s so good! Any book he works on is automatically worth reading.
Every so often (and it is quite often) there are missteps in EXM – the portrayal of Storm in Kurt’s mindscape, the overly long opening arc, etc. – but I still enjoy the book. Lemire might still ultimately disappoint me, but for now at least this books feels like an X-Men book to me. With caveats and lots of room for improvement, but… but it’s the X-Men. In a way no x-book has felt in a long, long time.
Now, there have been good x-books – Spurrier’s Legacy or his X-Force were probably the best, but some others were pretty good too – but those were, how do I put it, fringe titles? Either concerning solo characters (like Legacy or Magneto), or splinter groups (X-Force, Bendis’s and now Bunn’s Uncanny, even All-New). For a long time there even wasn’t an actual core X-Men team – not really. There was an amorphous mass of Jean Grey Institute’s teaching staff, and some books with them, but either they weren’t the focus of those books (Wolverine and the X-Men, which was mainly about the students), or the books in question were tertiary titles with regular rotation in the writer’s seat and no direction whatsoever (X-Men, Amazing, Astonishing in the latter half of the run). They were fun, at times. Sometimes they were even good. But they felt like filler. Fluff published only to fill out the x-line. (Oh, by the way, I’m all for the reduction of the number of x-titles post-Secret Wars.)
So. To sum up. Extraordinary X-Men is full of potential. And mistakes. Lemire can still right the ship. Or sink it. But just for giving me a core X-Men team as the focus of the book, and for introducing the premises of what I think will be some ongoing plotlines, which makes me hope there are long-term plans in place, I quite like EXM.
Though here’s hoping the x-kids will revert back to being x-kids at the end of this story…
When you hit the 90’s in the comics, the NEW rename should be “Jyy & Mylz”.
Apocalypse Wars? But that’s a Judge Dredd event (give or take a tense). It’s in an Anthrax song and everything! Poor form, Marvel.
May we who do not live in/are unable to travel to the Pacific Northwest (as I assume you have not received your invitation to Cheyenne Comic-Con yet) send a S.A.S.E. for our Corbeau? Or is this further incentive to make the pilgrimage?
What’s exactly your reference to Buñuel? I missed it.
https://xplainthexmen.com/2016/01/93-the-discreet-charm-of-the-brood/
Ah thanks! Awesome comics could be done inspired by Don Luis’ movies, indeed (well, Charles Burns is not so far).
I notice one of your recurring complaints when reading EXM is that you get frustrated that things keep getting set up but then get shelved. Then when I think about it, one of your biggest talking points way back in the day when you started covering Claremont is how he would always be setting things up and then not doing anything with them for ages for the sake of the long game. Is there a fundamental difference between how Claremont and how Lemire go about this or do you think this is as a reader, the difference between being able to binge read Claremont stories, whereas with Lemire’s run, you are limited by the monthly/bi-monthly publication schedule? Is long-game story-telling practical with Marvel’s current business model in which series rarely get to 50 issues before getting re-launched and their creative teams juggled around?