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Nov 6

The X-Axis – 6 November 2011

Posted on Sunday, November 6, 2011 by Paul in x-axis

The “Regenesis” relaunch is now well and truly underway, with three of the regular X-titles starting their new arcs this week, including core title Uncanny X-Men.  Elsewhere… well, there are a few other new titles, and a bunch of more diverse stuff sitting the pile I haven’t read yet.  Busy week.

Avengers Academy #21 – By Marvel’s standards, this deserves some sort of award for restraint.  It is indeed the start of a new direction for the series – relocating to California, adding two new regulars, and expanding the supporting cast dramatically.  But while there’s a big sign on the cover saying “1st Issue of a New Era”, they haven’t renumbered it.  Astonishing.  Has somebody finally figured out that that stunt only works if you use it sparingly?  Seems unlikely.  Maybe it was an oversight.

Regardless, Avengers Academy is worth a passing mention because it’s written by Christos Gage, who’s soon to take over X-Men Legacy.  While it’s never been a big seller, it is one of Marvel’s most consistent team books.  Gage certainly knows how to juggle a large cast and make sure they all have something to do; and the original characters who make up the student body are all nicely rounded personalities with strong individual concepts.  The series has a very well judged blend of classic Marvel tropes and fresh characters to experience them.  Granted, Gage is writing one of the low-end X-books where he’ll be working in the margins of other peoples’ stories, and granted, his Brood arc on Astonishing X-Men was nothing special… but I have hopes for him as a regular writer.

The two new additions to the cast are Lightspeed and what seems to be a new White Tiger.  (Though quite what happened to the last one, who was in the supporting cast of Daredevil only a year or so back, isn’t even touched on – did I miss something?)  The Tiger’s role seems to be as the stroppy, preachy character, and we’ll see how that goes.  As for Lightspeed, I think a lot of writers have struggled to figure out what to do with the Power Pack characters now that they aren’t children any more – which, after all, was their central hook.  While Julie’s shown up in a few stories in recent years, she’s drifted into a role where her lack of direction was the direction, and that’s not a long-term solution.  Here, her role seems to be as the interloper in the group, who’s trying very hard to be nice to everyone, but whose years of experience mean she really isn’t on a level playing field with the others.

As for the broader decision to expand the cast and allow lots of obscure teenage heroes to appear in supporting roles… I have some doubts about that.  It seems like it could lead to the same lack of focus that caused problems in Uncanny X-Men over the last few years, though this issue restricts the wider student body to cameo roles, and the book makes it abundantly clear that the focus remains on the core group.  Regardless, fans  of Marvel’s more traditional team books should love this series, and this is a very good jumping on point.

Heart #1 – A four-issue miniseries about an MMA fighter from Blair Butler and Kevin Mellon.  Since it starts with a flash forward, we know that it’s basically the story of Oren Redmond’s transformation from cubicle worker to low-rung mohawked fighter.  The subtext, judging from the first issue, seems to be to question just how much of an improvement this actually is.

While plenty happens in the first issue – an extended fight sequence and an explanation of how Oren got into MMA in the first place – it does come across more like the first 26 pages of a graphic novel than as an instalment in its own right.  And the plot is pretty unsurprising; there are no dramatic twists, merely a dutiful chronicling of Oren’s gradual transformation.  Then again, it doesn’t feel like there are meant to be great moments of drama.  It seems to have been conceived more as a character study of a typical fighter on the foothills of the MMA circuit, and judged on that level, it’s got a lot going for it.  The character’s voice rings true, the opening fight is well choreographed to get across the key point about Oren getting lucky when he really didn’t deserve to win, and Mellon’s black and white art is both striking and atmospheric.  It’s probably something that will read better in the collection, but it does have plenty to recommend it.

New Mutants #33 – The first “Regenesis” branded issue is a transition story, as the New Mutants decide where they stand on the whole split.  Of course, we already know – Cannonball and Karma gowith Wolverine, and the rest stay behind.  So wisely, the book doesn’t dwell on that, so much as on the New Mutants’ position within Cyclops’ operation, as Abnett and Lanning take the opportunity to give the book a rather more clearly defined role.  While they’re keeping the plot-engine of having the New Mutants chase down the X-Men’s loose ends, the team are now positioned as the group who didn’t wholeheartedly align themselves with either side.  They don’t want to go back to the school, but they don’t embrace Cyclops’ separatist tendencies either.  So the upshot is that while they still run clean-up missions for Cyclops, the New Mutants have left Utopia and set up shop in San Francisco proper.

That’s a good move for the book, I think.  The series has always faced the nagging problem of defining its premise.  In the original run the New Mutants were the X-Men in training.  But by now, they’re the characters who used to be in the original class, and who graduated years ago, and it was only the characters’ shared history that kept them as a unit within the larger population of Utopia.  Now they’re set more clearly apart from the rest of the mutant community, and that should help to sell the idea that this is fundamentally a series about a group of friends caught up in the fringes of mutant politics.  They’re also the mutants who live in the real world, which gives their book a distinct role – yes, technically the same could be said for X-Factor, but it’s hardly emphasised in the same way that Abnett and Lanning seem to be planning here.

David Lopez draws this issue; I’ve loved his work on Mystic, which also finishes this week, and his nice clean lines are a good fit for this series too.  He’s tweaked Cypher’s character design to make him more distinctive (and play up the non-combatant, non-athletic angle), but I think it works.  I’m not so sure about his Warlock; the character doesn’t easily fit into Lopez’s style, and I don’t think he’s cracked the problem yet.  But on the other hand, he’s an artist who can be trusted to pull off a conversation scene viewed without dialogue through a window, and you can’t say that about everyone working at Marvel these days.

It’s an issue rather light on plot, and I’d rather have seen a little bit more done to set up the mission for next issue, but on the whole it’s a successful story.

Six Guns #1 – This five-issue miniseries (though it’s an offbeat Marvel comic in 2011, so perhaps we’d better see that “five” as provisional) is essentially meant to be an update of some of their western characters, relocated to modern-day Texas.  I’m probably not the target audience for this, since the western genre has always left me kind of cold, and something about the premise feels a bit gimmicky to me.  Most of Marvel’s western characters weren’t particularly well defined to start with, and once you transplant them to a different setting, what’s really left besides the name?  Can the western genre meaningfully be transplanted to the modern era, shorn of its frontier context, or do you just end up with a rural version of noir?

Andy Diggle and Davide Gianfelice’s first issue introduces three characters – Tarantula (presumably loosely based on the Phantom Rider villain), Black Rider (whose series ran for several years in the early 1950s), and Tex Dawson (originally the Western Kid, now a Texas Ranger).  Quite what any of them gain from their links to the earlier characters, I don’t know – the source material is thunderously obscure, and it’s hard to imagine that many readers will have more than a passing familiarity with the names, if that.  The first issue certainly sets up a serviceable killing/revenge plot, and visually it’s well handled – Gianfelice can pull off a good car chase, which is notoriously harder than you’d think in comics.

But there’s nothing especially western about it, and it ends up feeling to me more like a fairly typical action/noir comic.  It does that well enough, and fans of the genre may want to check it out, but I don’t think it’s likely to have much broader appeal than that.

Uncanny X-Men #1 – “Brand-new ongoing!” proclaims the cover, as if there had been some sort of break since the final issue of the last series.

In some ways, Kieron Gillen has the bigger challenge in writing this side of the team.  Not only is Wolverine’s splinter faction the more naturally sympathetic, but at first glance the remaining X-Men are simply continuing on the status quo of the last few years, just with slightly fewer people.  One of the key tasks for this first issue was to convince me that that’s not the case, and that the schism has changed things for this book too.

And it succeeds in that.  With almost all the kids gone (and the few that remain being treated as military cadets), the X-Men seem to have abandoned all pretence that they’re running some sort of refuge where people can live normally.  They’re a little separatist clique who are convinced that somebody’s got to do the hard work of protecting the remaining mutants, even if Wolverine and his bunch can’t be bothered.  And they’re now quite openly going out of their way to take advantage of the way they intimidate ordinary humans – they’re still superheroes, but in part so that they can make a show of force and remind everyone to get off their lawn.

This also means (at long last) a return to a defined team roster, which should go a long way to alleviating the lack of focus which has plagued this book over recent years: Cyclops, Storm, Colossus, Magneto, Emma, Danger, Namor, Magik and Hope.  That’s a team of ridiculously overpowered heavy hitters, and deliberately so.  It’s also a group packed with people with a track record of very dubious judgment, Storm being perhaps the only clear exception.  Most of them are ex-villains and at least one is borderline insane.  Of course, at this stage in the story, they’re not clearly in the wrong, but the nature of the set-up means the story has to at least raise questions about whether they’re going too far.  A bigger difficulty may be making the group sympathetic, given that Cyclops has rarely been a character that people can root for, but Storm, Hope and (to a degree) Colossus ought to be able to serve that role.

There’s also another reason why the schism affects this book, which is actually best focussed in the recap page over in X-Men #20: Utopia’s whole purpose is to represent mutants, yet the mass defection fundamentally undermines Scott’s claim to do so.  He no longer has a clear mandate, and he’s responding to that by doubling down on his most controversial policies.  This cannot end well – but it could be a good story.

The actual story in this first issue – aside from introducing the new team and their redefined relationship with San Francisco – sees Mr Sinister return, to do… well, something… with the Dreaming Celestial.  Sinister’s a tricky character; he started off genuinely mysterious in the late 80s before descending over the course of the following decade into a rather incoherent and arbitrary mess with vague and ill-defined goals.  It doesn’t help that he’s still saddled with the extraordinarily melodramatic name and character design that were originally intended to play into Chris Claremont’s concept of a supervillain as conceived by a child.  On the other hand, what we do know clearly about Sinister is that he’s interested in the direction of evolution (for some reason) and he thinks that mutants play a key part in that, so he ought to be very concerned about many of the same things that bother Cyclops.  Visually, Sinister’s latest overhaul has more than a dash of V for Vendetta about him, particularly in the opening pages where he’s randomly killing tourists with a sword, but whether that’s got any significance remains to be seen.

His actual plan in this story is characteristically obscure, and I suppose one factor here will be how much you trust Gillen to have an actual answer for once.  Granted, the track record of Sinister mysteries making sense is not a good one.  But I do trust Gillen on this, partly because he’s got a solid track record, but also because the cliffhanger elevates the story from random attack to “what the hell” – it’s such an odd cliffhanger that it has to be heading somewhere.

Carlos Pacheco is a great superhero artist – rather more conventional than Chris Bachalo on the sister title, but he really does know how to pull off an action sequence and breathe some life into his characters.  He does a great job with the montage sequences too, since he knows how to do a single panel that suggests a whole scene.  It’s also nice to see some thought being put into the design for Utopia, such as the X-Men’s meeting room; it’s past time the artists agreed on a look for the place beyond “utilitarian”.  The Juggernaut/Colossus design still needs a bit of refinement; there’s something about it that still looks odd to me.  And there’s some stuff with little cubes that isn’t as clear as it might be.  But that final double page spread is excellent, and overall, it’s a very nice looking comic.

Inevitably this is both a darker book than Wolverine and the X-Men, but only up to a point.  There are still some nice moments of comedy in this book, the X-Men have not turned into a paramilitary squad, and Sinister’s plan is completely demented.  It’s got a trickier concept to pull off, but it’s off to a good start.

X-Men #20 – Oh, X-Men Team-Up is still going.  This arc’s guest star: War Machine.  Judging from the cast, it seems this may be one of the places where the B-listers on Cyclops’ side end up – in this case, Psylocke, Jubilee, Warpath and Domino.

The story here has the X-Men chasing down some second-hand Sentinels that are changing hands in one of the many fictitious eastern European states that must make pub quizzes so troublesome in the Marvel Universe.  Demonstrating a shaky grasp of how these things work, this one is supposed to be somewhere near Romania but has a name ending in -stan, which, uh, no.  Perhaps Americans don’t see a problem with this, but honestly, to me, it rings embarrassingly false.  It’s like having an Arab country bordering Denmark.

Anyhow, if you can leave that aside, and you don’t mind the fact that two rusty old Sentinels are meant to be a major threat in this story even though they were a throwaway background threat in Schism just a couple of months ago, this is serviceable enough.  Will Conrad’s art is really quite good, and he sells the Sentinels rather well; done in the right style, their lumpen designs can be turned to looming advantage, and this is a good illustration.  As usual, Gischler gets the voices of the characters, and it’s nice to see him picking up on the Colossus/Juggernaut idea from Uncanny.  But the villains don’t have much in the way of personality, and the story is merely okay.  It’s fine for what it is, but it’s really a book for completists.

Bring on the comments

  1. Tdubs says:

    It may also be worth mentioning that X-23 joins the cast of Avengers Academy in a couple months. This was a good jumping on point with a decent cliff hanger.

  2. Daibhid Ceannaideach says:

    Six Guns is even more tenuously connected to the Western genre than you think, because Tarantula isn’t based on the Ghost Rider character; she’s a pre-existing character who’s arguably closer to the Spider-Man villain.

  3. Andy Walsh says:

    If they’re going to do a War Machine team-up, shouldn’t the fact that Rhodey was in charge of the Sentinels on the lawn factor pretty heavily into any conflict between him and the X-Men?

  4. Tdubs says:

    @ Andy Walsh

    Even the fictional characters are embarrassed to mention that story line.

    As for Six Guns could the motivation be as simple as Diggle struck magic with a similar set up in the Losers?

  5. maxwell's hammer says:

    Andy: I’ve dropped the book as of this arc, mostly because Girschler’s grasp on the characters (which Paul oddly praised?) doesn’t extend much further beyond “Wolverine likes to fight and says ‘Bub’ a lot!” The subtle intracacies of continuity and Rhodey’s role in it really aren’t Girschler’s strong suit. He works more in the broad-strokes, as if he were writing for episodes of a Saturday morning cartoon version of the characters that would appeal to 9-year olds eating Fruit Loops.

  6. Kenny says:

    You listed Magik twice in the Uncanny X-Men team roster. Did you mean Emma Frost? I haven’t read it yet.

  7. Si says:

    I usually don’t like when writers “fix” characters to return them to some pristine state from decades ago. But I wouldn’t complain at all if the Power Pack got a visit from Nanny and the Orphan Maker or something, to turn them all back into kids. There doesn’t seem to be any point to them being grown up.

  8. wwk5d says:

    Just cancel X-men and be done with it, or cancel Astonishing. There really is no reason for having both of these books, given the direction they have, out now. And with Legacy still around as well…hell, cancel 2 and have the one title left called Astonishing X-men: Legacy…or whatever. With the relaunch, they really need to refocus and streamline all the various X-men titles. We really don’t need 5 X-men titles.

  9. wwk5d says:

    Also, I hope they justify having Storm on Scott’s team as a counterpoint to his views. If anything, she could remind him that going all bad-ass, like she did during the Silvestri era, isn’t always the best route to take.

  10. Zach Adams says:

    Tdubs: Not only is Laura going to be going to the school, but Gage made it sound like she’d be a “full” cast member like White Tiger.

  11. Paul says:

    Thanks, Kenny – I’ve fixed that.

  12. kingderella says:

    im a little lukewarm on uncanny so far. i like the team, and i like the general direction. but i cant say the plot so far is all that intriguing, and i dont think i like this interpretation of sinister.

  13. Zoomy says:

    Thunderbolts also had a “1st issue of the new era” cover recently. Obviously it’s an experiment to see if putting the number 1 on the cover will save the trouble of renumbering.

  14. Tdubs says:

    @ Zach Adams

    I had taken that notion away from Gage’s interviews also. I’m excited for Gage to work with the character since he does good team dynamic instead of Bendis random background speak.

  15. Si says:

    I don’t think you can have too many X-Men books per se. X-Men is just a handy brand name to hang a comic on, so people know it’s about the mutant subset of superheroes. They don’t have to be the same story. Are there too many comics about superheroes that got their powers from industrial accidents? You’d only even notice if Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Hulk, etc all had OH&S-MEN on a banner on the cover, and they all wore a symbol of someone slipping over on their costumes.

    The only problem is if the comics aren’t clearly delineated. In the past X-characters have drifted between teams, they’ve all lived in the same house, and they all did the same stuff. But at the moment, they are very clearly divided up. Hopefully that sticks.

    A clearer argument about the number of X-Men (or Avengers) comics is, are there too many superhero comics out there? You could argue a good case there if you wanted to.

  16. Andy Walsh says:

    @Tdubs
    And that would be fine, except that Lorna was just asking about the Sentinels on the lawn over in Legacy, so they’re not really letting us forget it.

    @maxwell’s hammer
    If I read him as the Iron Man movie version of War Machine, it does make a lot more sense. I suspect that is the approach Gischler is aiming for, for better or worse.

  17. Living Tribunal says:

    Hey, at least Sinister doesn’t look like a drag queen anymore.

  18. Tdubs says:

    @Andy Walsh

    Ha I forgot about that line from Polaris. If only they had someone ask her how she got her magnetic powers back and have her reply with a sorry I mentioned it.

  19. Suzene says:

    I admit, just the indications that Gage has actually been researching the characters he means to write is enough to keep me buying Legacy for now.

  20. Andy Walsh says:

    @Tdubs
    Yeah, I’m curious if PAD will make any reference to Polaris’s status quo and recent (to the characters) stint as a Horseman. On the one hand, he’s not shy about addressing the more convoluted aspects of characters’ histories and it would be topical given Rictor’s recent repowering. On the other hand, I’m not convinced Havok and Polaris are sticking around in X-Factor long enough to warrant opening that can of worms.

  21. Si, books that fall under the same “category” – X-books, Avengers books – tend to be handled by the same editors. So regardless of each respective subset of characters, you are often getting a unified editorial vision in today’s franchise comics.

  22. robniles says:

    Sounds like another arc of Flavorless X-Men I can skip, then. Actually, of all the X-writers to be given ongoing titles, I’m hard-pressed to think of a less compelling one than Gischler; Lobdell, Kyle/Yost, even Kelly had moments I liked, and at least Austen had a certain trainwreck appeal. Even allowing for the book’s lack of direction, Gischler’s…just sort of there.

  23. ZZZ says:

    X-Men did a good job of addressing one of the things that bothered me about Schism – that there’s nothing specifically “anti-mutant” about giant robots – by the simple device of demonstrating that people actually do try to use them for regular warfare (I’m assuming the revolution that Whateveristan wants them for doesn’t involve mutants) but, since next to no one acutally builds THEIR OWN Sentinels, even Sentinels that aren’t intended to go after mutants still have all the mutant hunting software (while it’s obviously possible to build a Sentinel without anti-mutant gear, since most Sentinels are “off the rack” models, getting one without mutant targetting systems would be like getting a car without a radio: theoretically possible, but who’s going to pay MORE to not have the features they don’t plan to use?) and, hey, mistakes happen.

  24. Carey says:

    “That’s a team of ridiculously overpowered heavy hitters, and deliberately so. It’s also a group packed with people with a track record of very dubious judgment, Storm being perhaps the only clear exception. Most of them are ex-villains and at least one is borderline insane. Of course, at this stage in the story, they’re not clearly in the wrong, but the nature of the set-up means the story has to at least raise questions about whether they’re going too far. A bigger difficulty may be making the group sympathetic.”

    I’ve yet to hear this comparison in an Uncanny X-Men review, but to me the Extinction X-Men have been re-posited to become the Authority, including Ellis’ original conception that their looking out for humanity may not be a good thing (in a Judge Dredd stylee).

    In all honesty, I preferred Gillan’s first issue of Uncanny over Arron’s Wolverine and the… as the later, for all that I’ve felt a return to the school and making the comics more relatable on an everyday level (as opposed to a metatextual one- “Hey Kids, bigotry’s bad” gets a bit dull after a while) was necessary, read like far too many X-Men comics of the past. Gillan’s first issue actually struck me as trying something different.

    Unfortunately, my ongoing malaise with the X-Men books and their characters (which has really been there since Morrison left, although I continued reading Whedon’s run until its end) is still there, so am unlikely to continue with either. But if I were, it would have been Uncanny.

    May check out New Mutants number 1 though, after your review.

  25. Brian says:

    Oh, please no. I just noticed that… ugh… Lifeguard is on the X-Men “Street Team.” I pray this means she’ll be run over by a garbage truck. I’d nearly forgotten about her. I wonder if she still looks like a cross between Pam Anderson and Woodstock from the Peanuts strip.

  26. The original Matt says:

    In regards to the subset branding of comics (and off topic slightly), has anyone else been thinking that Fantastic Four should have been brought into the Avengers family in the last few years? Or is it just me?

  27. AndyD says:

    “this one is supposed to be somewhere near Romania but has a name ending in -stan, which, uh, no. Perhaps Americans don’t see a problem with this, but honestly, to me, it rings embarrassingly false”

    This has become a pulp-culture given. From Mission Impossible to the X-Men, the planet outside the US-Borders is kind of a mythical fairyland, especially in Eastern Europe, where as a writer you don´t even have to invest 20 second on Google. Just put a few oxen on a dirt road and your readers knows all they need.

    On the other hand, they don´t even bother to get a city like San Francisco right, as Brian Hibbs showed in an amusing rant on his website. I guess Marvel has more reference material how the Shi´ar homeworld looks then the city outside their editorial winds. (If they have windows *g)

  28. Brian says:

    @ The original Matt: I would never want to see that happen. The Fantastic Four is too big (figuratively speaking) to be folded into the Avengers. It needs to stand apart and just be the Fantastic Four.

  29. arseface says:

    Which one of the Uncanny cast is borderline insane? I assume you mean Colossus now he has the voice of Cytorrak in his head. But it could also be Magik, since she’s the very definition of “damaged goods”. Magento certainly has been insane in the past although he’s seemingly the most rational he’s ever been at the moment. You could describe Namor as insane at a push, although I’d define him as chronically belligerent instead.

  30. ZZZ says:

    Namor is insane, but he’s managing it. If he spends too much time out of water or underwater, he goes nuts and tries to take over the world, but as long as he splits his time between land and sea, he’s okay (if a jerk). So in a way he’s like someone who’s fine as long as their on their meds.

  31. Jacob says:

    I’m kind of liking Namor a lot recently, since the whole ‘be on the Illuminati/evil illuminati at the same time but fail to tell members of either side about it.’

    There’s something wonderfully dickish about it, but not in a paranoid Batman way more in that he just doesn’t care.

    It’s nice that he can go have a chat with Doctor Doom as tenuous friends then zoom across the globe and go have a chat with the X-Men as friends.

    This may be the first time I’ve ever felt like this but; Damn I wish Aquaman was a lot more like Namor.

  32. Billy Bissette says:

    Wait, Jubilee stayed with Cyclops?

    Sigh. I always liked Jubilee. With all her changes, she might have gone to Wolverine’s school at staff, rather than being deaged and demoted to student status again.

    Heck, in a staff position (not necessarily a teacher, just not a student), she’d have some story potential, being that (despite her personality) she isn’t exactly a shining example of hope for new mutants.

  33. Paul C says:

    Avengers Academy has got to be one of my favourite books. It’s immense credit to Gage and the various artists that is has been just so consistently good.

  34. DP says:

    I was a little dismayed that Avengers Academy was expanding the cast.

    For me, one of the big problems in recent comic book history seems to be the desire to create huge armies of superheroes instead of families; no character gets as much development time and everything seems impersonal.

    It’s also a bit tricky for villains. When the X-Men or Avengers deploy 40+ active members each (even post Schism!) and we have superteams in squads, platoons and company level… what hope do the poor villains have?

    None at all, I guess, which is why all the action these days seems to be Civil Wars, Schisms, and Dark teams … and most of the supervillains seem to have semi-reformed and be serving in the X-Men or Thunderbolts.

    I guess this is why the big Avengers threat is down down to the coalition of `normal’ agents (AIM + The Hand + Hammer + Hydra). There are no real supervillains left on Earth that can stand up to her the vast hero battalions…strength.

  35. ZZZ says:

    @Brian

    It just occured to me that the last horrible stage of Lifeguard’s horrible life story before she mercifully dropped off the face of the Earth was discovering she was some kind of Shi’ar royalty.

    Considering that one of the students at Wolverine’s new school is the son of the current leader of the Shi’ar Empire – who happens not to be Shi’ar – (even though I could swear that just a few months ago comic-book-time Gladiator was shocked to discover another member of his race was still alive, but whatever) I have a sinking suspicion that Lifeguard was scraped off the bottom of the discarded ideas barrel in anticipation of some ill-advised Shi’ar succession nonsense.

  36. Aaron Thall says:

    Is it me, or should Lifeguard’s only superpower be to run very slowly when wearing a swimsuit?

    What? You can’t tell me you didn’t think of it, too.

  37. wwk5d says:

    @DP

    Didn’t Bendis try to do the same thing in Avengers a while back by having the Hood round up a few dozen villains under his leadership? Yeah, the idea and execution of that had me cracking up…I mean, the Hood? Ok…

    If they’re going to keep 5 X-men titles, then they should at last break up the group into smaller teams and focus on smaller casts in each title…if only.

  38. ZZZ says:

    Sadly, given the nature of her actual powers, she actually could end up doing that.

    It would require awfully strange circumstances, but she’s one of the few characters who actually could get super slow motion running. (Others include Darwin and, as long as someone else present had it, Taskmaster, Rogue, Mimic and the Super Adaptoid)

  39. The original Matt says:

    “Didn’t Bendis try to do the same thing in Avengers a while back by having the Hood round up a few dozen villains under his leadership? Yeah, the idea and execution of that had me cracking up…I mean, the Hood? Ok…”

    I actually liked that. The Hood is ambitious beyond his means. Aside from trying to be Godfather of D-list villians he has made deals with demons, gods, other crap super villians and (although I’m not up to those trades yet) I believe he is also going after the infinity gems? He’s crap. He knows he is crap. And he has been presented as an annoying thorn in the side of the avengers while they’ve been trying to do more important stuff, like stop skrull invasions and takedown dick chen… Norman Osbourne.

  40. Jacob says:

    @ZZZ You forgot the Six Million Dollar Man the king of super slow motion running.

  41. ZZZ says:

    @Jacob

    Your post made me realize that I need to flip through an issue of Dynamite’s Bionic Man comic the next time I’m in the store to see if there’s a “Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch” sound effect whenever he runs.

  42. Jacob says:

    Totally didn’t know about the Bionic Man comic, took a look at the preview pages and no “ch-ch-ch-ch-ch”s in them but there’s a massive “KRAKK” when some dude gets his neck broken. 🙂

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  44. autos says:

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  45. Thanks for your reply soulsizzle. I have just been playing around with it, and it turns out that the elements were causing the problem. I have no idea why this is happening, as html elements are an in-built feature of wordpress. Perhaps it’s my host that’s causing the problem… Great tutorial anyway. It’s the only decent alternative example I have been able to find. Keep up the good work,nonshatter x

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