I was over at Zia Comics again earlier this month, after getting my car serviced and going to the Downtown Mall to get lunch at the Rad Retrocade. (It’s an interesting décor having a burger surrounded by TV’s and video games.) When I got that X-Force volume a couple of months ago, I’d noted a few other X-Men and New Mutants trades that I was interested in. I got a New Mutants trade last time. This time I got a small X-Men trade. I probably picked this up because a nice picture of Magik was on the cover. Let’s hit the highlights of this volume right off the bat.
So here we have Namor seducing a humanoid cephalopod queen.
Thankfully, they leave the worst of it to your imagination, but unfortunately, not all of it.
Here, noble Namor tells Hope that he’s not interested in her, because she’s too young for him and a redhead.
This is a joke. Welcome to the Modern Era of the X-Men.
Here’s most of the point of the story: a lecture on pronouns and gender fluidity. Are you laughing yet?
I was relatively nice in reviewing Batman:Hush and New Mutants Classic #6. I was genuinely disappointed in those, but more-or-less still got what I thought I was going to get (great artwork and characters I liked, respectively). This time, I’m angry.
It’s crappy decompressed storytelling and smarmy Whedon-esqe dialogue, without the cleverness or great characterization of Joss Whedon’s writing. And, of course, The Agenda is promoted. In that, the comic is of it’s era. I was not expecting the gross out above, nor how much gray area the X-Men would be operating in. There’s no idealism here. The X-Men look like superheroes, but it’s a facade.
There’s two stories in this volume and the X-Men coordinate with the Avengers in both. At the beginning of the Tabula Rasa story, we have Captain America praising the X-Men. Cap doesn’t know here that the dangerous incident was actually caused by a former X-Man and another X-Man could have stopped it, but didn’t want to kill another mutant to do so.
By the end of the second story, here’s Captain America questioning the X-Men’s motivations. It’s like they’re only really interested keeping mutants safe.
This aligns with Magneto’s ethics. He is okay with saving a mutant at the price of a mass murder of humans because of how few mutants there are.
Cyclops also gets blackmailed over running a secret assassination team.
I’m not really talking about the stories themselves, because they’re sort of irrelevant and not that interesting. The X-Men in this are the Extinction Team. It’s made up of some the most powerful mutants to combat extinction-level events. Cyclops is way too eager to engage in combat as shown in the above page.
I’d thought this story was part of the Krakoa Era when I first started reading this, where mutants were attempting to start a homeland on an island. No, this is the Utopia Era, where mutants were attempting to start a homeland on an island. Didn’t we already do this with Genosha in the 90’s, where mutants were attempting to start a homeland on an island?
A homeland for a small group of special people who employ an assassination squad to help them remain safe there? Does this sound like anything in the real world you know of? Perhaps if the mutants had a super PAC that purchased US Congressmen to do their bidding, it might sound more familiar.
The obvious problem with any of these Homeland Eras was that they did it wrong. It should have been Magneto and the “evil” and “neutral” mutants, along with a few X-Men who agreed with their mission, inhabiting an island and declaring a new mutant homeland. They’d be protectors of mutantkind in the world and providing some benefit for humankind in general. In the background, they’re running assassinations and not so nice stuff, not to mention running psyops on the X-Men to make them look like threats to the world. In this scenario, the X-Men would be true “outlaw” superheroes and the bad mutants would appear legitimate.
Several years ago (12-17), I wrote up an X-Men MCU proposal. Boy, has everyone’s perception of Disney changed since I wrote that! “They could integrate them into the Marvel Universe without retconning anything or doing a goofy multi-universe.” So much for that. I made the case that mutants needed to be rethought out a bit.
A bunch of people born with superpowers would be celebrities, recruited by companies, the military, and government agencies in our world. They’d be followed like royalty . . . unless there was a good reason to think they were all just dangerous.
I’m sure there’s an analogy with Newtypes from Mobile Suit Gundam to be made. (I just watched and enjoyed the new GQuuuuux show.) Repeated attempts to exterminate humanity by Newtypes in various series and movies should have resulted in a severe backlash, though “good” Newtypes did help avert the catastrophes.
Did you like anything about this, dude? Here’s where I’d like to praise the Greg Land artwork in the first story, but frankly he’s not that good here. The picture of Storm above is likely the best sample. He’s a long way from his great Sojourn artwork (where he was probably tracing models from naughty magazines, but it was still great).
I did kind of like Namor speaking the third person. He also answers reader questions on a reprint of a letters page. He’s kind of a joke, though. I was intrigued a bit by the development of Colossus’ power being combined with the power of the Juggernaut. I don’t feel like I really got to see him truly smash things. Magik is in this, but without the New Mutants, it all feels very superficial. She’s just there because she’s a useful teleporter. Unit, the second story villain, is pretty disturbingly powerful and psychotic (and annoyingly pleasant).
Okay, no more X-Men books from the Twenty-first century. Let’s just focus on X-Men from the 80’s and 90’s from now on.
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