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Aug 1

X-Men vol 3 – “Bloodline”

Posted on Friday, August 1, 2014 by Paul in x-axis

After the debacle of last week’s festival of obscurity, we have another decidedly underwhelming story destined straight for the “completists only” pile.  Though “Bloodline” scores over the Wolverine and the X-Men arc on the level of straightforward accessibility, it remains a clumsy affair with a lot of downright odd choices.

The plot is straightforward.  Baby Shogo’s father turns out to be a villain called the Future, recently escaped from jail.  The Future wants Shogo back, in order to raise him as an heir.  He tries to kidnap Shogo from the school, but ends up with Jubilee instead.  He tries to trade Jubilee for the kid, but the X-Men won’t deal.  They beat him.  He dies.  This takes five issues.

Some further complication comes from the involvement of Kymera, the X-Man from the future who stayed in the present at the end of “Battle of the Atom”.  She reveals that in her timeline, the Future did capture Shogo, which was horribly traumatic for both Shogo and Jubilee. Notionally she’s there to prevent this event, though her main influence seems to be to make the X-Men more militant than inspected by convincing them that there’s a bad thing coming.  She also gets to defeat the bad guy at the end by revealing that his secret weapon is keyed to his DNA and so can be shut down by Shogo.  Frankly, it’s far from clear how anything she does led to the Future failing to abduct Shogo and having to settle for Jubilee, but I think we’re meant to take it that she somehow or other made a difference.

But that’s essentially your plot.  The attentive X-books reader will notice a couple of things at once.

For a start, this is yet another story about people travelling in time to change their personal history and alter somebody’s destiny.  In fact, that theme seems to be the only reason why the Future is called the Future – he has no powers, he’s a hyper-competent “evil Batman” type.  But he’s “the Future” because you can’t get away from him, you see.  So… this is basically the same idea that we’re already getting in All-New X-Men and Wolverine and the X-Men, and it’s getting old there.

Then, “Bloodlines” couples this idea with “child’s long-lost father turns out to be a super villain and tries unsuccessfully to get them back as an heir, then dies” – which is the plot of the last three issues of X-Factor.  Three issues, incidentally, being about the right length.  But how on earth did Marvel end up approving essentially the same story to run in two books at once?

It’s fair to note that the story shows warning signs of mid-flow re-writes.  Not only is it a five-parter whose first two chapters are labelled “Part X of 6”, but the second chapter engages in a glaring rewrite of the first.  In the second half of part 1, the Future terrorises the school by, among other things, shooting Primal with a sniper rifle.  The Beast then gets a page-long speech telling us what an extraordinary shot this was; that the shooter “made sure Teon did not receive a fatal wound”; and that its precision was “near surgical” so that Teon would “stay just on this side of death, provided a facility such as this was nearby”.

Then, at the start of chapter 2, Teon is dying from the gunshot wound, “all conventional medical remedies” have been exhausted, and Hank resorts to using Arkea’s DNA to come up with a miracle cure.  This, again, is extraordinary.  The point of the scene in part 1 is plainly to tell us how spectacular a shooter the Future is – but the sniper who the X-Men catch in part 2 is just a grunt, and suddenly the plot has changed so that Teon just received a fatal wound and only some Miracle Science can save him.  And since there’s no way of going back to fix the plot, part 2 just pretends it always happened that way and hopes to brazen it out.

The story’s other key theme, which it hammers repeatedly, is the idea that the X-Men are a family who will do anything to save their own, and that the Future doesn’t get this, which is why he wrongly expects them to do a deal with him.  This is fine up to a point, but the story risks overplaying it.  An oddity of the whole storyline is that nobody has ever really questioned the idea that Jubilee is perfectly entitled to wander off with a baby she happened to find lying around somewhere; this arc doubles down on the point by insisting that Jubilee has a better claim to him than his natural parents.  While there’s obviously a good case to be made that the Future isn’t a fit parent, it’s odd for the story to simply disregard the whole question as if it there was nothing to discuss.

Then we have a range of scenes in which the X-Men are presented as tough heroes who break the rules and will do anything for their fellow mutants, even kill to protect them.  This isn’t wholly out of character but it certainly feels as though the book is overly keen to congratulate its heroes for being uncompromising ass kickers who take no prisoners in their defence of mutants.  And again, this suggests nobody is really thinking about the book’s place in the line.  After all, both Scott’s team and Cable’s X-Force are defined in opposition to the regular X-Men, and largely because they’re uncompromising ass kickers who take no prisoners in their defence of mutants.  There really isn’t space for one of the regular X-Men teams to occupy a more muted version of the same territory.  But that seems to be what this book is trying to do.

Alongside all this, though, some of the book’s superficially clunky plotting holds together rather better on closer inspection.  How does the Future get into the school so easily?  It really doesn’t matter, and since he’s so clearly being presented as impossibly good at everything, I’m happy to file that under “I’m sure he has his ways”.  Why did he bother shooting Primal?  No clear explanation is ever given, but if he’d simply stolen Shogo, the X-Men would undoubtedly have come after him; presumably he’s intimidating them to try and lay the ground for a deal to make them back off.

Kymera’s role in the finale is ridiculous at first sight and makes more sense on reflection.  The Future is holed up in a lair surrounded by an evil killer forest, which does things like fire pine trees at the X-Men’s plane.  This is wonderfully ridiculous, even if it might have been more at home in a Jason Aaron story.  But fine, he’s a moustache-twirling villain with an absurd death trap.  Kymera knows that the evil forest is tied to the Future’s DNA and insists on bringing Shogo there so that she can use his own blood to shut it down.  But she doesn’t tell anyone why, for no superficially good reason; and on the face of it she doesn’t actually need Shogo there, because a sample of his blood would seem to do just fine.  (In fact, this is positively established in the previous issue, where the Future gave his men a blood sample in order to activate the forest in the first place.)  But the story ends with the forest killing the Future, so if you’re prepared to assume that this is Shogo controlling it, and Kymera knew he needed to be there for that to happen, and if she’d explained her plan properly everyone else would have pointed out the blood sample thing… then sure, okay, that kind of works.

But it’s a five issue story that can’t justify the length, treading ground that the X-books are beating to death right now, recycling a plot that was done better in another book last month, and generally struggling badly to find a space for itself in the line.

And the less said about the back-up strip – which invites us to get emotional about Psylocke and her virtual boyfriend – the better.

Bring on the comments

  1. FallenAngel says:

    Something seems to go terribly wrong with Brian Wood writing X-Men titles.
    He’s a very talented writer. I usually love his comic work.
    Yet, all of his X-Men work reads as if it was facing bad translation from a foreign language. Obviously, this makes no sense, but that’s the feel I come away from after reading his recent work on X-Men books. “Oh, it isn’t translating very well.” Odd.

  2. Matt Andersen says:

    He was great in Ultimate X-Men though. It had a plot that made sense, characters who could relate to each other, and an obvious badguy whose motivation was clear.

    That’s what’s been so weird about this experiment. He nails all of their voices in Ultimate, but now that he’s writing in main universe canon, its just a mess. He’s using mostly the same characters too–characters he was already writing successfully for years. But then look at how he’s writing Storm since the beginning of this run and its inexplicable

  3. Shawn says:

    Also worth noting, Wood’s continued insistence on ignoring the few distinctive voices that exist in the X-books; Teon, a character whose vocabulary has previously been limited to monosyllabic explanations of his desires (typically ‘fight!’ or ‘mate!’), is suddenly speaking in complete sentences. No reason. Just because.

  4. errant razor says:

    At first, I thoight was a symptom of having to wrap up storylines early to meet crossover deadlines. But so far, he has not completed an rntirely coherent arc on this title in the year+ that he’s been on it. Characterization/power sets are often very off. And plots wrap up in the quickest and/or least logical way

  5. errant razor says:

    I had great hopes for this book. But it’s become entirely skippable. And nobody cares about Shogo. Or Jubilee for that matter.

  6. Kenny says:

    The last part was Brian Wood’s last issue, so I’ll keep the title for a few more issues because Marc Guggenheim is writing next issue.

    And frankly, I thought Wood’s last volume of X-Men (from Regenesis to Marvel NOW) was even worse in terms of blandness and incoherency; the “all-female” gimmick ended up making for a more enjoyable team dynamic, although it was an aspect that ended up fading into the background after the Sisterhood Arc.

  7. Cory says:

    Wood’s ideas weren’t entirely bad. I can’t help but feel as if he probably had a promising mandate and some inspired ideas, as well as potential to do well, and then everything got spun on its head. He got drafted into a crossover, he lost a few cast members early on, his artists became inconsistent, and then he had that big scandal. I wouldn’t be surprised if Marvel told him to pack it up and so he just pushed out his final arc, and was done with it.

  8. jpw says:

    Is this perhaps a movie related thing? X-Men time travel in the movie, therefore X-Men is a series about time travel?

  9. Suzene says:

    I think Psylocke’s little “never forget that death is permanent, but your teammates will always have your back” speech was one of the worst things Wood wrote over these seventeen issues, given that Psylocke was giving that lecture to a group mostly comprised of teenagers who have 1)seen dozens of their classmates, none older than fifteen, murdered and their bodies desecrated, 2) blown out their powers, lost limbs, and been eviscerated defending their friends and the X-Men in general, and 3) been abandoned, disregarded, and used as pawns by their teammates on the senior X-Men teams at multiple points in time.

    The New X-Men characters are some of my favorites relatively recent additions, but I was ready for Wood to quit writing them by the time that weird-ass Bling/Mercury subplot flopped. Glad to see Wood gone, might or might not give Guggenheim a shot, since he doesn’t have a great track record either.

  10. Omar Karindu says:

    Is this perhaps a movie related thing? X-Men time travel in the movie, therefore X-Men is a series about time travel?

    More broadly, we’re getting an awful lot of wonky time-travel because that’s supposed to be a big deal after Bendis’s Age of Ultron, and the X-books are where Bendis is right now.

    If he were still on the Avengers titles, you’d be seeing all the Avengers books doing weird time-travel stories instead. As it is, Uncanny Avengers, the X/Avengers fusion comic, has been embroiled in a time-travel story of absurdly tedious length.

    (On that note, what happened to Rick Remender? His X-Force was really good, and his Punisher was demented fun. I suppose he’s just the sort of writer who should never tackle the more straightforward heroes.)

  11. Thom H. says:

    @Omar: For my money, Remender went off the rails about two-thirds of the way into his run on Uncanny X-Force. The Dark Angel Saga was amazing, if a bit long, and every story after that had potential but was way too drawn out.

    He’s redeemed himself a bit with Black Science, but it’s only been one arc so far. Maybe if he confines himself to 6 issue chunks, he’ll maintain the quality. His stories clearly need to be edited for length.

  12. Suzene says:

    @Omar – So far as UA goes, I think a lot of where it went wonky was that Remender’s was put on a book that was ostensibly supposed to heal the AvX rift, but he’s said he has no interest in the “mutants as a minority” metaphor and he’s just not very good at presenting either side of the issue when he does try to tackle it. (Which is a shame, because I thought the “M-word” speech could have had a lot of potential if Remender had deliberately been trying to give the mutant rights movement its own Dan Savage figure, but he just didn’t put that much thought into it.) So the whole business comes out looking pretty lopsided so far as characterization and POV represention goes. And, as Thom H. mentioned, the plots seem to spool out for longer than they really need to. I don’t know if that’s Remender specifically or writing for the trade still being enforced, though, because I feel the same way about just about every book over in the X-Men line too.

  13. Taibak says:

    Suzene: Not to mention that Psylocke has died and been resurrected. And that her twin brother has done that multiple times….

  14. ASV says:

    You all are overlooking the most important development here — Storm finally filed the paperwork to make this an “official” team! They can now reserve meeting rooms and requisition pens and stuff!

  15. Joseph Kerr says:

    “And nobody cares about Shogo. Or Jubilee for that matter.” – that double. Every time I see him (her?) mention, I have to go back and remember “wtf is a Shogo” and why am I supposed to care about it (not to mention what kind of a name is “Shogo” anyway? is it supposed to be African? or Korean or something? because I have honestly no idea). And every time I see Jubiless (not) do anything I need remembering that “she’s a vampire now”, which again, begs to question why and how exactly. Considering she does none of the vampire stuff. And has no vampire weaknesses (and tbh she doesn’t seem to do anything at all). So what kind of vampire is she and what’s the point of it anyway. Ugh.

    PS. I thought that back up story with Psylocke was supposed to be a joke, because it’s not only nearly impossible to take seriously, it also makes her look pretty dumb and also kind of repulsive in a way.

  16. ferris says:

    Omar, we’re also seeing weird time-travel stories in both Avengers and Avengers World right now. Avengers AI had a bit of it too, and there were some Spidey stories a while back. Bendis may have introduced the “broken time” thing in AoU, but it seems like messy time travel is showing up across the entire line as a result.

  17. Mo Walker says:

    Frankly I am surprised the artwork is not being discussed more. It was obvious the artwork was just as patchy as the writing. The entire arc felt like an all-hands-on-deck effort, we gotta push these issues out somehow.

    I had high hopes for this book when it started. I have enjoyed Brian Wood’s work in the past, but his X-Men stuff is hit or miss. Hopefully Brian Wood will fare much better on Moon Knight and his other titles.

  18. Tim O'Neil says:

    Why the hate for UNCANNY AVENGERS? I mean, sure, it’s a bit more of an Avengers book than an X-Men book, but I’m OK with that. He has a good feel for the characters and the plot is strong.

    This is notable because, at least for me, the first arc fizzled with all the excitement of a wet fart. I still hate the new Fruity Pebbles Red Skull (who is a clone, because the real Skull is still dead-ish) who has a magic sliver of Charles Xavier’s brain.

    But now that this arc is over (except for the denouement next issue, I think?) I hope we can look forward to Paul going back over the whole thing for us.

  19. errant razor says:

    I have a lot of distaste for the politics of UA. Fine for Remender to have no interest in the mutant minority metaphor. But when he does bring it up, the points he makes are rather wrong-headed a lot of the time. And the characters he has making them are rather galling.

  20. The original Matt says:

    Uncanny Avengers free standing is great. Where the hell does it fit with any other title, though?

    Also, is it quicker at this point to count the books that aren’t doing time travel? I’m assuming this is all leading up to the Time Runs Out event or whatever it is, but is anyone else a bit over time travel by now?

  21. Uncanny Michael says:

    The entire Apocalypse Twins/Kang arc takes place before Infinity and Battle of the Atom; you can tell because Superior Spider-Man is there and the All-New X-Men are in their classic costumes at the Jean Grey School. It also takes place a few days after Dimension Z as per Cap’s conversation with Wasp.

    I think Uncanny Avengers has been pretty excellent but crippled by high expectations. It also doesn’t have the benefit of a consistent artist who is Esad Ribic. (I’m not even very fond of Daniel Acuna.) It’s hard to follow up Uncanny X-Force with anything and so I think everyone would benefit from separating the two mentally.

    Anyone sticking with Cap knows that it’s just as weird and good as his Punisher and Venom runs, which weren’t for everyone or as good as his team book stuff.

    As you can tell, I do love Remender’s current output. Very excited for AXIS.

  22. wwk5d says:

    “I had high hopes for this book when it started. I have enjoyed Brian Wood’s work in the past, but his X-Men stuff is hit or miss. Hopefully Brian Wood will fare much better on Moon Knight and his other titles.”

    I wouldn’t say I had high hopes, but I was expecting better of him. I’m not his biggest fan, but he has done some enjoyable work in the past, and I was hoping his work here would fall under that category, but it hasn’t. I haven’t read this storyline, and after this review and other comments posted here, I definitely won’t be reading it. Also definitely not sorry to see Wood go.

    They need to cancel some of the superfluous titles like this one. Or at least, the ones that have no point. “An X-team comprised entirely of women” was really pointless. Then again, the majority of the X-men titles these days seem to more or less be based on what characters writer X feels like using, as opposed to having a valid reason for existing.

  23. Jeremy says:

    Its funny how you can go back to the X-Axis archive and in 2004 year in review, “There are far too many X-Books!” seems to be the prevailing mentality. We’re still here 10 years later!

  24. Jeremy says:

    Also, put me in the Uncanny Avengers fanclub. Frankly, its the only “X-Book” I think is a legitimately good, exciting comic nowadays. Well, X-Force is coming into its own, so 2 out of a hundred.

  25. Mo Walker says:

    @wwk5d – I was hoping this title would have been a great alternative for individuals who wanted a more traditional X-Men title.

    I second your call for Marvel Comics to prune their X-titles. Marvel did something similar with Spider-Man a few years ago and it reinvigorated the character.

  26. Cory says:

    Dropping the excess titles would be great, but you know what also worked fairly well for Spider-Man? Going three times a month on a core title with a singular creative vision, even if the writers/artists get mixed up every so often. The “schism” was meant to provide two camps with ideological differences… But the writers on both sides have simply moderated the two. Wolverine as the “heroic” side commits more crimes and rebellious acts than Cyclops on the “revolution” side. Creating that single title with the single vision would fix a lot of stuff like this, and the three times monthly releases would feed the market demand for X-Men comics.

  27. Magnus says:

    @ Joseph Kerr – Shogo is a (decently common) Japanese name. The Future is obviously Asian… one of the few things I liked about him (since his powers/history weren’t stereotypically Asian, like being a samurai or something).

    Also, surprised to see a bit of complaining here about Uncanny Avengers. I do agree that his last plot in X-Force went a bit long, and maaaybe his current one in UA as well, but even when it’s going a bit long it’s still pretty dang good. I’d take a “slightly underwhelming” ending in UA #22 over the tripe we got in this Adjectiveless X-Men arc any day.

  28. Neorazak says:

    I see there’s a good reason I haven’t bought an X-Men comic in years and only use websites to sort of see what’s going on in the comics. It’s not good.

  29. Joseph Kerr says:

    @Magnus, thanks for explaining that. I was somewhat confused, since I remembered Jubilee bringing the kid from somewhere in Middle or Eastern Europe (Bulgaria or Romania I think) and it never made much sense to me.

  30. Wire says:

    Poor Jubilee. The first writer to do anything with her in years idiotically turns her into a vampire, then the next writer to do anything with her doubles down on the idiocy and saddles her with a kid that no living soul besides the writer himself gives three craps about.

    On the bright side, though, if Jubilee is the character getting spectacularly mishandled and generally treated like a six week old turd, maybe that means that Polaris will be allowed to exist in some sort of peaceful normalcy for a while.

    Because I like Polaris much more than I’ve ever liked Jubilee, and if it takes Jubilee becoming the repository for all of the X-writers most boneheaded ideas for dear Lorna to get a decade or so of being left alone without any extended mind-control episodes, mental breakdowns, being exiled into outer space, or being inexplicably turned into a psycho-slut, then I’m good with that.

  31. halapeno says:

    Problem with Jubilee is that you can tell Claremont didn’t have “eventual adulthood” in mind at all when he created her. She’s tailor-designed to be a kid character (I mean come on, fireworks for powers).

    Which isn’t a bad thing, until you allow the character to grow up and instead of retiring her (as Claremont tried to do post M-Day, assuming it was his idea) they’ve been doing this shark-jumping nonsense with her. She’s exhausted her original premise. Just recognize that, send her off to college and let her be.

  32. Leo says:

    When i’m having trouble even remembering which titles i’m not reading, then yes there’s far to many x-books for me. Years ago I would read all of them and now i’m barelly reading some of them. So I would support a major trim on the titles and make one weekly book with multiple writers doing their stories within those pages.

    As for the time travel galore, maybe editorial told the writers to get all time travel stories out of their systems while they can, or even to stress how much of a problem time travel stories have become by overdoing it.

    I used to write sci-fi stories with a friend and we discussed time travel while we were planning the stories. he always said that once you introduce time travel to a series, how can you put it back in the box? it just becomes a deus ex machina to solve all problems the easy way. how do you stop people from time travelling if they have this ability? currently marvel comics are doing their best to stress this point out. everyone and their grandmothers have access to time travel technologies and they aren’t afraid to abuse them. and i really wonder what the solution to all this will be. I’m pretty sure that if bendis writes it, it will culminate in an issue where everyone discusses the fight that happens between the panels and will end up being usatisfactory

  33. Omar Karindu says:

    I used to write sci-fi stories with a friend and we discussed time travel while we were planning the stories. he always said that once you introduce time travel to a series, how can you put it back in the box? it just becomes a deus ex machina to solve all problems the easy way. how do you stop people from time travelling if they have this ability?

    Most ongoing series seem to get around it by making time travel a marginal element of the setting, which is what the MU did for decades. Doctor Doom and the FF time-travel a bit, Kang uses it as a central gimmick but tends to be defeated by conventional means, and the X-Men have their various alternate future characters. But most of the MU characters don’t go era-hopping unless….well, unless Kang, Doom, or the FF are involved. And time-travel is rarely if ever used as a way to solve the threat of the week.

    If the idea here is that “everyone time-travels to fix things, that doesn’t work,” the problem being solved was invented almost entirely by a few relatively recent Brian Bendis and Jonathan Hickman stories. And coincidentally, they’re the fellows insisting on nasty consequences for all of it.

    Even so, time travel does’t exactly wreck a series. Doctor Who seems to be doing well enough with time travel as a central mechanic. It’s rather unlikely that any “no time travel” rule will stick for long in a shared universe setting, in any case.

  34. M says:

    Jubilee’s mutant powers were fine. Midway between Dazzler and Havok is a useful, yet manageable, power set.

    A big part of the X-books’ problem for the past twenty-some years is being stuffed full of characters who are either useless or make everyone around them superfluous. (Also too many mutants who should’ve been some other type of character like magic, fantasy, or embodied abstraction.)

  35. halapeno says:

    “Jubilee’s mutant powers were fine. Midway between Dazzler and Havok is a useful, yet manageable, power set.”

    To be clear, I wasn’t criticizing her powers. I was pointing out that they’re kid-themed. If I thought they sucked, I’d have said so.

  36. Jeremy says:

    I do like how Kitty progressed into the mentor role of looking after children, both at Westchester and then at the New Xavier school. I thought that was a very natural evolution of her character and it still lets her be close to the action without, IDK, making her a vampire or some other contrived shit. But that’s always been Jubilee’s problem, she always seemed like Not-Kitty Pryde, some young kid to replace the previous version, just one more mutant to look after in a sea of mutants. She’s lucky to be a part of the 90s Jim Lee era/cartoon/video game explosion of X-popularity, lest she fade away into the background entirely.

  37. M says:

    @ halapeno
    “Fireworks” wasn’t Jubilee’s power though, it was how she used it. She emitted explosive plasma balls. Same basic power as Havok or Boom-boom, broadly speaking. Hers could be dialed from sparkler level up to knock down-a-door and on to flatten-a-house. Perfect for a member of a superhero team. Young, inexperienced kid Jubilee was a young inexperienced kid who didn’t want to accidentally hurt or kill anybody. There’s no reason she couldn’t have grown up into as competent an X-man as Kitty or Nightcrawler.

    @Jeremy
    Yeah Jubes was Wolverine’s new girly kid sidekick. There’s no reason but bad writing that she couldn’t have grown like the one before.

    Properly handled, mutant characters like Jubilee, Skin, Sync, Surge, or Mercury can be interesting and ‘believable’, for superhero comics values of believable.

    When everybody is a walking WMD, living force of nature, or nigh-omnipotent omega level mutant it’s hard to have a story that combines a credible threat and a relatable conflict. Two guys with undefined energy or psi powers blasting away at each other with surprisingly little collateral damage over some trivial macguffin until it’s time for the fight scene to suddenly and arbitrarily end gets old real fast. (See the nineties.)

  38. halapeno says:

    “Fireworks” wasn’t Jubilee’s power though, it was how she used it. She emitted explosive plasma balls.”

    You’re taking me a bit too literally. My point is that her powers are BASED on the idea of fireworks (I’m quite aware she doesn’t produce them in the literal sense). I’m referring to the theme of the character as she was originally envisioned. A spunky mallrat teenager with fireworks (themed) powers.

  39. Billy says:

    @halapeno

    The point is that she could develop her power as she grew, if writers had cared to do so. She started as a kid sidekick with no fashion sense and “sparklers” as a power, but she was in a great position to grow into a full-fledged adult with “adult” abilities.

    Particularly when you consider how Claremont loved to expand the abilities and power sets of any characters that caught his attention at the moment.

    Imagine what Jubilee would be like now if Claremont ever gave her the attention and power boosts that he gave his favorites. She’d be at least Havoc’s equal on power level. She’d have some other uses to her powers, like being able to create creatures out of plasma or something. She’d probably have some new ability. She’d be related to at least three different X-Men. She’d either be openly bisexual or having the idea teased, and she’d have spent at least some few years dressing in an outfit akin to “ninja” Psylocke. She’d have beaten someone like Wolverine or Sabretooth in a fair no-power hand-to-hand fight at least once.

  40. halapeno says:

    “The point is that she could develop her power as she grew, if writers had cared to do so.”

    No, that isn’t the point. Look, you can ramp her powers up onto the stratosphere but so what? How does that make her a better or more viable character?

    The problem with Jubilee is that she’s lost/outgrown what set her apart from the other X-Men back when she was at the peak of her popularity. Back then, she had a clearly defined role to play in the series. She was the kid amongst the adult X-Men. She brought something to the dynamic. Take that away from her and what do you have? Just another energy channeler of which the X-Men are in no short supply of.

    What do we need an adult Jubilee for? Do you see what I mean? She was a popular character back when she was a brat. Now she’s not. This is what I’m saying. She’s way past her “best before” date and pointing to her powers et and saying “Look, she’s effective” doesn’t make any difference on that front. Kitty outgrew her kid role as well, but Kitty grew up on the team and developed clearly defined relationships with Logan, Ororo, Kurt, and obviously Peter.

    Who does Jubilee have a clearly defined relationship apart from Wolverine? The senior X-Men I mean. Nobody. She was an adjunct to Wolverine and got kicked over to Gen X while she was still a kid. So now she’s all grown up and, go figure, nobody can seem to figure out what to do with her that isn’t entirely stupid.

    And just maybe that’s because there isn’t anything worthwhile to do with her apart from putting her out to pasture (which they should have stuck to, all things considered). She’s the comic book equivalent of a former child star who, as an adult, is caught up in doing stupid has-been stunts like celebrity boxing.

    She’s outlived what made her appealing back in the day. She has nothing to offer except more plasma powers. Time to let go.

  41. Magnus says:

    If the X-Men had followed Claremont’s original concept of having a rotating cast, with the older characters eventually dying/retiring/etc., Jubilee would’ve worked great as a “replacement” adult character with the generic “blaster” energy powers every team needs. Over the years, I’m sure she would’ve made her own relationships (while Billy said it somewhat tongue-in-cheek, I agree that she’d probably have gotten characterization through random hookups and such).

    Of course, since that never happened, she does really become superfluous as an adult character.

  42. M says:

    @ Magnus
    Yes, my whole point is not that Jubilee is or ever was awesome!!!, just that her suckitude wasn’t inherent. She’s one example of a character that had decent potential if anyone had bothered with developing them.

    Heart of gold, plucky spirit, limitless supply of flash bangs and concussion grenades, not the worst person to have in your paramilitary strike force cum outlaw family.

  43. halapeno says:

    “She’s one example of a character that had decent potential.”

    Now that Rocket Raccoon is a movie star, I think the same could be said of any Marvel character.

  44. Jim M says:

    The funny thing about Jubilee is that she stopped aging while Kitty continued to age.
    Remember Kitty was still 14 when Jubilee first showed up before Excalibur started. It was about 2 years (real time) before her (Kitty’s) 15th birthday.
    And lets not even bring up Franklin. 😉

  45. Chris says:

    And Kitty was pining over adult characters.

    And appearing naked in front of them.

    creepy.

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