Week of 10/5/2016:
In which Jay pulls no punches; Miles mourns a loss; and Death of X lives up to the hype.
REVIEWED:
- Uncanny X-Men #14 (00:50)
- All-New Wolverine #13 (02:24)
- Death of X #1 (05:21)
Pick of the Week: Deadman: Dark Mansion of Forbidden Love #1 (10:40)
Filmed at Books With Pictures in Portland, OR.
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UXM was OK. I did actually like the verbal confrontation between Magneto and Exodus, but I grew up on ’90s X-Men comics. For anyone else? I think this issue is meaningless. I do want to say: What the shit was Monet wearing? What was that? Who the hell thought THAT was a good thing for her to wear? It’s just stupid. And yeah, Land sucks.
Wolverine is great. There’s still some great humour, via Gabby, but it’s there to ease readers into the tension and darkness of the arc. And this is looking dark. By the way, though: Nik Virella is a woman.
Death of X is meg. The Inhuman side is actually good. But the X-Men side is bad. And the killing of Madrox pissed me off. First off, he’d been given a happy ending, settling down on his farm with Layla. But nope! Let’s just drag him out to murder him off! And there’s something mean-spirited about the narration going out of its way to declare that it’s the real Madrox. Of course, Madrox is still the easiest character ever to bring back: Just have him show up and say the one who died was a dupe.
Is this the first glimpse of “Jay and Miles Review the X-Men” becoming “Jay and Miles Review All The Comics (or at least the ones they want to talk about)”?
Cos I’m down with that.
This isn’t the first time we’ve pulled something from outside of the X-list. We are creatures of whim.
Madrox is the easiest character to revive, just say it was a dupe that thought he was the original. Didn’t they do that with the Legacy Virus and who know how many times before?
He didn’t even have the M mark so it’s even easier for the next writer to say it was an old dupe!
To raise the stakes (and avoid this question), Madrox said he was the original.
Obviously, Madrox has had dupes who have thought they were the original before so that’s easy enough, but I would hope they find a less obvious way to do it. I suspect he’s not the only character who will eventually need to come back, after all.
Batting .300 is good, but I think you meant batting 1.000.
Yes, I do. It’s been a loooooooong week. =P
I have very mixed feelings on the Death of X art. I agree that the backgrounds are well done as are the colors, but the characters look really amateurish to me. It looks like fan art.
I liked Death of X. The art felt very Keven Maguire-ish. (One of my favorite styles.)
“Pretty hardcore”…? o_O
PAAHAAHAAHAAHAAHAA!
Only PRETTY hardcore, huh?
I think those of us who have been listening for any length of time know better. 😉
Y’know.
Just a little bit.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If your fandom level is just “pretty hardcore” I’d hate to see the truly rabid ones…
I’m getting more and more tired of the Inhumans-Mutants conflict. It feels like an editorial mandate uncomfortably underlined. Is there anyone reading who wants fewer mutants and more Inhumans in the Marvel universe? I get the need for the film universe to have its own powered-person generating mechanism, but forcing the same change on the comics just feels like petty corporate politics. Especially as it undermines Marvel’s best social metaphor on two fronts.
On the one hand, the Inhumans don’t serve the same function, as so far they don’t face the same level of prejudice when they emerge. They have fascinating metaphorical angles of their own, like Moon Girl essentially trying to fight puberty, but we lose a lot of the X-Men’s politics of difference. Inhumans replacing mutants on that level draws uncomfortable parallels to those trying to argue (increasingly obviously wrongly) that we live in a post racial society.
On the other hand, when mutants are a tiny population constantly fighting extinction, it makes it a lot harder to tell stories that effectively parallel minority issues today, which in the real world tend to have a lot more to do with increasingly large and visible minority populations stepping up and fighting for their place at the table. It traps the X-Men in a world where lynchings are common and hardly anyone seems to protest incredibly blatant hate speech. As bad as things obviously still are, I like to think our society had advanced a little past this.
This has been an issue for me ever since Decimation, really. I want to see Storm & company taking on racist cops, protecting peaceful mutant protesters, and helping the politician campaigning against the mutant-phobic demagogue. Not spending all their time hiding from a cloud made of editorial fiat, and fighting characters someone at the top of Marvel wants to convince me I should like better because they might show up in an Avengers movie sometime.
Oh, and Miles, I am totally with you in the spoiler! Not ok. Especially when the other major player in the ending that’s been taken away isn’t even here to react!
The one reason I’m excited about IvX is that it’ll presumably mean an end to the current Terrigen poison story. Hopefully, the X-franchise does move in a direction that more directly reflects the minority metaphor. Use the Morrison era as a guide. A lot of books, at the time, started to really make use of the Mutant-As-Minority angle, and it made for great stories.
Death of X. I have to say it was quite a letdown for me. I like the art (for some weird reason it reminds me of some Morrison-Quitely New X-Men issues back in the early 2000s, maybe was the colors or the layouts, I dunno, don’t ask me why) But, plotwise? A whole issue to tell me what EVERYONE already knows for almost a year? (Spoiler alert: Terrigent Mist is killing mutants, Gasp!). And, yeah, to show me Inhumans fighting Hydra, which was pretty fine, but it could have been told in another book. Maybe I’m alone here, but I would’ve liked this book to be a little more X-Men-based than to be equally shared with the “others”. Don’t get me wrong, I loved to see Cyclops and Emma again (two of my top five X-Men character of all time), and yes, I did feel a little something there when Madrox died, but–hey, everyone knows how death works in comics. The truth is I was expecting way too much from it, that could be the reason I felt cheated when I finished reading it. But let’s see how it goes… Maybe in the final issue we come to know Cyclops wasn’t dead all this time after all or we get some other twist like that–that’s gonna be a good revelation to justify this long wait.
Hi! Really enjoyed the review, just wanted to let you know that Nicole “Nik” Virella is the artist for All New Wolverine, in the reviewed the artist was addressed as a “He”, I manly only know this fact because I met Nik at NYCC over the weekend
Keep u the great work!!
Meeting Mile at NYCC was also great!!
Thanks for the heads up! A number of people wrote to let us know when we posted the review, and we’ll make sure to get that right next time–we really appreciate the corrections on stuff like this.
Got to watch this late.
I’m totally with Miles on this. I’m still trying to figure out how Jamie wound up on Muir Isle in the first place, given where we last saw him.
And I’m also totally on board with the pick of the week. Granted, I’ll read just about anything with Deadman in it, but it’s really good.
Muir Island is a Madrox spawn point.