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Face Front, True Believers! A Marvel Comics Thread

Jeanie

(Fem or Gender Neutral)
Yeah, but that Mini wasn't written by Dan Slott so he's going to chuck that whole dang thing right into the trash. In fact he had Xavier show up just to say that Franklin was never a mutant and that Cerebro has never seen him as one, also don't call us, we'll call you.
 
That seems inconvenient, given that him being a mutant was the central point of the very recent X-Men vs. Fantastic Four miniseries.

I saw the panel posted somewhere out of context (edit: summarized above by Jeanie) , and I think this is supposed to be the next part of that story. I don't think it's a very interesting place to take it, though. That status quo at the end of the mini seems more interesting than this.

I do wonder what behind the scenes wrangling brought it to this point. A good conflict set up in House of X/Dawn of X, a not that well executed mini but that at least set up an interesting potential status quo to be explored, and then . . . they just drop it.

Yeah, but that mini was only enjoyable for Doom anyway

I thought Valeria was fun, too, although that's admittedly basically just an extension of what you're saying.
 
I remember when weird retcons to un-mutant or un-X-Line someone (in the cast of Wanda/Pietro not not not not not being Magneto's children) would get attributed to theories about MCU rights issues, but they're still doing it so for some reason so . . . I guess they just think this is a compelling plotline for some reason?
 

Adrenaline

Post Reader
(He/Him)
Thinking about Maury Povich doing a special series

Franklin Richards... you are NOT a mutant.

*Crowd goes wild*
 
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Zef

Find Your Reason
(He/Him)
RLF5Z4P.gif
 
Everyone who was once considered a mutant should always be one. How dare they not be! Somewhat related, it's not interesting or satisfying to follow a character who once had superpowers now have to deal with losing them. (M-Day poisoned this well for me) Do not like but do not care as much about making characters become less powerful. You can just say they aren't easily solving their problems due to incompetence/foolishness. Ultimately, the important thing is not how good or bad a superhero comic character's powers are; only that they have some. One. Whatever.
 
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I liked that story with Storm . . . and that's pretty much it.

Maybe the secret to telling that story is that the character in questions needs to get a mohawk. (It also helps when they're basically still the protagonist, because if not it tends to just be an excuse to write the character out, either intentionally or just because they have no ideas but also don't want to reverse it.)
 

Octopus Prime

Mysterious Contraption
(He/Him)
I did like the conceit that Franklin still has Undefinably Vast, Godlike Reality Warping Power, it's just that his well is running dry and he kind of wasted it by recreating a multiverse, which was almost immediately completely destroyed by a Cthulhu-lady.

I don't like much else about Franklin and feel like he wastes valuable page-space that could be better spent on Val and Doom
 

gogglebob

The Goggles Do Nothing
(he/him)
Everyone who was once considered a mutant should always be one. How dare they not be! Somewhat related, it's not interesting or satisfying to follow a character who once had superpowers now have to deal with losing them. (M-Day poisoned this well for me) Do not like but do not care as much about making characters become less powerful. You can just say they aren't easily solving their problems due to incompetence/foolishness. Ultimately, the important thing is not how good or bad a superhero comic character's powers are; only that they have some. One. Whatever.

I liked some aspects of M-Day with the more "mundane" mutants who weren't really superheroes, but more "street level" dealing with suddenly not having some power they were very used to having. That said, if you ever want me to stop reading/watching some manner of Superman media, go ahead and de-power him for longer than the span of one fight. I never, ever want to see Clark Kent have "wacky" problems with getting a papercut or whatever as they have to show he's human for a week while the basic moral seems to be that being mortal sucks. I know! I get it! I passed out from stapling my finger once, too! I don't need to be reminded!

Err... anyway. I'm pretty sure there's an interesting story about someone who was born with superpowers in a superpowered family being suddenly "normal", but I'm not holding out hope it will be anything more complicated than, again, "being mortal sucks". And then he'll get his powers back again anyway thanks to... let's say... Moe? Does Disney own Moe now?
 

Jeanie

(Fem or Gender Neutral)
Yeah, I don't have a problem with depowering Franklin, that happens every other year like clockwork, it's the dumb retcon that he was never a mutant that bugs me.

8a66c4be0a53600897ab6bd1c6fbd828fad14309.png
 

gogglebob

The Goggles Do Nothing
(he/him)
I forget which version of Days of Future Past is totally invalid now, but it's totally one of the ones I think I enjoyed!
 

Octopus Prime

Mysterious Contraption
(He/Him)
I’ve often felt like Dan Slotts creative process involves running around his office like an Airplane, yelling “I make comic boooooks!”

Nice to know I’m not far off
 

Jeanie

(Fem or Gender Neutral)
I forget which version of Days of Future Past is totally invalid now, but it's totally one of the ones I think I enjoyed!
Days of Future Present, where the Franklin from the DoFP timeline astral projects himself back in time right before he died. He annoys the FF, messes with the New Mutants, tries to hook up with his old GF Rachel Summers, kidnaps baby Nathan Summers, and causes Ahab and his Hounds to come back and be terrible.

I have an old trade of it because it had some cool Mignola art on the cover.
 

Octopus Prime

Mysterious Contraption
(He/Him)
I have a copy because it was included with a collection of Simonsons FF stories.

Which brought a screeching halt to all the fun time travel shenanigans i as reading
 

LBD_Nytetrayn

..and his little cat, too
(He/him)
I liked some aspects of M-Day with the more "mundane" mutants who weren't really superheroes, but more "street level" dealing with suddenly not having some power they were very used to having. That said, if you ever want me to stop reading/watching some manner of Superman media, go ahead and de-power him for longer than the span of one fight. I never, ever want to see Clark Kent have "wacky" problems with getting a papercut or whatever as they have to show he's human for a week while the basic moral seems to be that being mortal sucks. I know! I get it! I passed out from stapling my finger once, too! I don't need to be reminded!

Err... anyway. I'm pretty sure there's an interesting story about someone who was born with superpowers in a superpowered family being suddenly "normal", but I'm not holding out hope it will be anything more complicated than, again, "being mortal sucks". And then he'll get his powers back again anyway thanks to... let's say... Moe? Does Disney own Moe now?
Yes.
 

Octopus Prime

Mysterious Contraption
(He/Him)
Nearly done the Soule run of She-Hulk from a few years ago, and, hey, this is a really fun legal thriller about a giant radioactive lady and her best friend, A Hot Mess Who Dresses Like a Cat.

Any other recommendations for Shulk and/or Hellcat runs? The Slott one is supposed to be good, isn’t it?
 

Jeanie

(Fem or Gender Neutral)
Yeah, it's okay, just has some stuff that may leave a bad taste in your mouth.

As for Hellcat/Patsy Walker, have you read the Kate Leth series?
 
Almost finished with The Age of Apocalypse (just one issue of Amazing X-Men and X-Men:Omega to go) and it's not as good as I remember it being. But also for almost every book the alternate reality versions are an enormous step up from the quality of an average issue. It honestly doesn't quite hold together if you read every issue and kind of heralds how unwieldily the Onslaught event's attempt to do a publishing line wide crossover would be. But unlike Onslaught you get the feeling that basically everyone is really excited to be doing this big AoA experiment and they have a lot of fun ideas even when they don't work.
 

Octopus Prime

Mysterious Contraption
(He/Him)
Yeah, it's okay, just has some stuff that may leave a bad taste in your mouth.

As for Hellcat/Patsy Walker, have you read the Kate Leth series?

Before I even got a quarter of the way through the first issue, I realized the wisdom of your words
 

Kishi

Little Waves
(They/Them)
Staff member
Moderator
Chris Claremont held a Reddit AMA recently. Highlights include a defense of Wolverine's killing Rachel, an unused pitch for a Wolverine memorial story, his reasoning for replacing Xavier with Magneto; and in the "makes you wonder" category, a staunch disavowal of his old work's occasional brushing up against the occult.
 

Octopus Prime

Mysterious Contraption
(He/Him)
The last bit of Empyre landed on MU recently and, like No Surrender before it, this is a gosh darn fun crossover story. One of the good kind that makes no promises about Anything Never Being the Same Again (some of the big status quo changes didn’t even last to the end of the story, and a big focus on great character moments that don’t distract from whatever story was going on in the component books (maybe FF, but not so much as you’d notice).

You do get the sense that Covid really affected the pacing though; a number of the cliffhangers don’t get time to breathe before they’re resolved; it’s a story that’s rich with incident
 

Adrenaline

Post Reader
(He/Him)
I just read Road to Empyre which was mostly just the Incoming one shot from a year ago, which I enjoyed as a snapshot of the whole universe with the through line of a murder investigation. Comics are fun. Ready to read the event itself later this week.
 

Octopus Prime

Mysterious Contraption
(He/Him)
Been reading the Jason Aaron run on Mighty Thor (specifically the parts with Jane-as-Thor that was part of a surprisingly long wind-up to War of the Realms), and I like it very much, but I dislike every time Loki is on the page because he has a nasty looking beard. Conversely, I love every time Loki is on the page because this is him in his Secret Good Guy who Is Acting Like a Bad Guy With Five or Six Nested Schemes That Work Out as a Net Positive thing

He's trying to see precisely how many wrongs it takes to make a right
 
I've been enjoying the post-Age of Apocalypse pre-Onslaught X-Books way more than I expected, since I remember the crossover this is all leading up to being a big factor in my dramatically scaling back how many Marvel comics I read as a kid. I think that basically every X-title in the line more or less works during this era, even books that are now considered to be a punchline like X-Man, shockingly enough. I'm not expecting this to last as Onslaught itself becomes more prominent, but having consistently strong books fall apart during an event half of the time and sometimes never recover is just the way of comics and especially X-Books ever since the Mutant Massacre was too successful and made big crossover events a corporate mandate, I guess.

I've caught up to exactly where Jay and Miles X-plain the X-Men are at this point, and I do agree with them that there are a lot of bad mini-series, though, even if the main titles are solid. Currently having an internal debate over whether to intentially limit my pace to more or less read along with the podcast after being caught up, or to just go past them.

If anything, I've enjoyed this not exactly fan favorite era so much it has weirdly ended up emphasizing for me how much of a disappointment a lot of the current X-line has been by comparison. I loved Powers of X/House of X, and I was excited for both the concepts and creative teams of a lot of the the relaunch titles but a lot of them are falling flat for me in execution outside of the Hickman books, X-Force, Hellions, and sometimes New Mutants. And honestly that's a lot of books to enjoy, but I really wanted to like Marauders, Excalibur, and X-Factor but they just aren't doing it for me so far. They're fine, but I did not expect to be more excited to read an issue of post-AoA X-Factor or whatever more than anythingfrom this current era.
 
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