The X-Axis – w/c 11 August 2025
ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #32. By Tim Seeley, Edoardo Audino, KJ Diaz & Clayton Cowles. This is the start of a new arc, and I’ll warn you now that I’m going to spoil the ending, because that’s the real hook for the arc. Up to then, we have a framing sequence of Sean telling the story to Black Tom (nothing wrong with bringing those two together, and this is the natural book for Tom to be used in), and the story itself involving the return of… the Changeling. That’s the Silver Age Changeling, the one who was in a handful of issues from the Factor Three storyline and then got retconned into having replaced Professor X when they wanted to bring him back from the dead at the dawn of the 1970s.
The Changeling is… not a character anyone has really been crying out to see again, which is why he didn’t even get used in the Krakoan era. But presumably he was resurrected off panel – he was an X-Man for one issue (retroactive), after all – and now he’s gone back to mutant radicalism. Tim Seeley does a good job of setting up why Sean would care about this character, reminding us that he debuted as a pawn of Factor Three back in the sixties – and Audino actually makes that wonky costume look pretty fun, giving the guy some presence, even though we really have to stretch to believe that the Tesco Value Mystique is going to get anywhere in a straight fight with Banshee. I mean, Banshee has range attacks that he doesn’t even need to aim with, right?
But the actual point of all this is to bring in Morph at the end – presumably the Exiles version, but who knows. And that does kind of intrigue me, because the Changeling is a character with the rather odd legacy of being the notional template for a much more popular character who bears almost no resemblance to him whatsoever. There’s got to be a story in that, right…?
X-MEN #20. (Annotations here.) We’re back to the single issue format, it seems, and that’s fine by me – it works better for Jed MacKay than longer storylines. With a bit of downtime conversation in the B-plots, this issue is built around a third confrontation between Scott and Agent Lundqvist, which ends up with them coming to blows and going to jail. It’s the first time that Lundqvist has come out more or less ahead – or at least that Scott has failed to bring him down a peg. MacKay has taken an odd approach in building up this character, presenting him as fundamentally outclassed from the word go; I suspect the whole idea is that we’re meant to be underestimating and misreading him to some extent. Diaz does a rather good job of making him smugly satisfied with finally getting a partial win over Scott. The reveal here, if you take it at face value (and Scott doesn’t), is Lundqvist arguing that he isn’t anti-mutant, he’s just anti the really powerful ones who think they’re above the law.
That actually is a plausible reading of his behaviour to date – with hindsight, it’s unfortunate we didn’t get more of him and Scott interacting over “X-Manhunt”, where they actually seem to have had some sort of off-panel understanding – and honestly, it’s probably a more interesting direction for O*N*E. After all, we have Corina Ellis doing the anti-mutant lunatic angle over in Uncanny, so this gives Lundqvist something more his own. And “where do the X-Men get off acting as if they’re above the law” is a completely reasonable motivation for a law enforcement character to have, with a post-Krakoa subtext that you could also tap into. It’s an issue I like more, the more I think about it.
LAURA KINNEY: WOLVERINE #9. (Annotations here.) This is… completely okay, I guess? I don’t really understand why Gabby was kept out of circulation in both this book and NYX for so long, especially if she and Laura are supposed to be in touch. Packing her off to hunt monsters with Xarus in the aftermath of Blood Hunt is at least a reasonable explanation for why she’s not been around and builds off the last story we saw her in, but it runs up against the problem that Xarus is not a very interesting character. Nor is Strega, the new villain, especially memorable. I kind of like Laura’s blatant inability to handle Gabby adventuring with a different partner, and it looks perfectly nice, but it’s all a bit surplus to requirements.
MAGIK #8. (Annotations here.) So this is an odd issue. Magik, Mirage and Liminal are packed off to Las Vegas, supposedly to recover a mystical artefact for the Society of the Eternal Dawn in order that it can be used to free Cal from Liminal’s possession, but in reality in order to deal with the Society’s dissidents on their behalf. So far, so normal. But the issue also features an extended hallucinatory fight scene (and I’m still not entirely sure why these Scarlet Eye dissident guys are dealing in hallucinogenics). It’s wonderfully odd, particularly as Matt Horak’s art normally strikes such a grounded tone even when dealing in magical dimensions; this is where he gets to go nuts. And there’s a subtler level of weirdness as Liminal gaslights his way through the issue blandly denying what other characters have literally just seen him do, and calmly insinuating himself into steering the story even though he’s meant to be Magik and Mirage’s prisoner. In isolation it’s all a little confusing, but the book’s earned the benefit of the doubt on this sort of thing.
GIANT-SIZE X-MEN #2. By Jackson Lanzing, Collin Kelly, Adam Kubert, Laura Martin & Clayton Cowles. Well, the House of M issue wasn’t bad, but on the whole I think we have to chalk this mini up as a misfire. I get that we’re trying to do stories about Kamala coming to mutant culture as an outsider, and in theory giving her a tour of X-Men history works with that, but in practice I’m increasingly convinced that this whole direction for the character is misconceived. She’s being dragged away from the neighbourhood hero role that was so central to her, yet she’s also too established a character to fit comfortably into this newcomer role. So none of this really leads up in a satisfying way to her coming out to her parents as a mutant – the strings are too visible.
As for the story itself, it’s basically just a fight between some of the major X-Men and Legion (or the abandoned personalities of Legion, who get packed off to the White Hot Room at the end). Kamala seems to have rounded up these characters… um, somewhere? It’s all terribly arbitrary, and it certainly wasn’t worth having Phoenix show up on Earth for this. There are other books where that would be a much more meaningful deal. Kubert’s art mostly delivers – the page of the two sides of Legion being reunited is genuinely lovely – but the issue as a whole is a bit of a mess.
The back-up strip is by Jed MacKay, Cafu & David Curiel, and basically consists of Mystique and Destiny trailing “Age of Revelation”. There isn’t much more to be said about it than that.
SPIDER-MAN & WOLVERINE #4. By Marc Guggenheim, Gerardo Sandoval, Victor Nava, Brian Reber & Travis Lanham. Because you demanded it: a book whose only selling point is the Kaare Andrews art, with a fill-in artist.
I hope the end of the column wasn’t cut off by mistake, because the one-sentence review for SPIDER-MAN & WOLVERINE is an amazing note to end on.
Re: Giant-Size X-Men 2:
“Kamala seems to have rounded up these characters… um, somewhere?”
I think that the idea is that Kamala told them about Legion right before they sent her back to the present and they all agreed to meet her and remembered their promise years later. (It was years for them, but only moments for Kamala.)
Can someone explain to me how Legion was able to use Kamala as a portal to the White Hot Room? That made no sense. I’m also not sure if she needs Legion’s help to do it or she can do it whenever she wants.
How is Rogue able to remember Kamala if they met in the Age of Apocalypse reality? It’s not like she remembers marrying Magneto and having her kid.
Annoyingly, the meeting between Scott and Jean this issue took place shortly before the Vigil. Which makes the Vigil scene kind of weird. because they’d just seen each other in the flesh a couple of weeks ago.
The Revelation sequence seems to double down on Apocalypse and Mystique being evil- Mystique makes it clear she doesn’t care if tens of millions of humans die and Apocalypse is described as “one who has only ever fathered monsters”.
The Revelation sequence is annoying- it doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already learn in Age of Revelation 0. In fact, I’m wondering if this book was originally supposed to come out before the Vigiil and Age of Revelation 0- Kamala telling her parents she was a mutant was spoiled by the Hellfire Vigil and the Revelation backup just repeats the information from Age of Revelation 0.
Re: Spder-Man and Wolverine 4:
It’s sort of funny that Slott kept insisting that Peter’s Spider-Sense cannot warn him of danger to others but only danger to himself and only Bailey had a Spider-Sense that could warn of danger to others. (This despite scenes where Peter’s Spider-Sense did warn of danger to his friends.) And as soon as Slott is gone from Marvel, we have this issue, where Peter’s Spider-Sense warns him Teresa is trying to kill Wolverine.
it’s funny how Teresa was able to acquire fragments of a Muramasa blade so she could hurt Logan. How many blades did Muramasa make? Because it seems like anyone can get one when the plot requires Logan or Sabretooth to be in danger. It’s getting as bad as pre-Crisis Kryptonite.
Re: Astonishing X-Men 32- It will be interesting to see if they really do turn Changeling evil again. Because there was an Excalibur Special where the ghost of Changeling menaced Megan and readers complained that it wasn’t fair to bring back a character who died heroically as an evil ghost and then Changeling was retconned into one of Merlin’s tricks.
Giant Size X-Men: “Calk this mini up to a misfire,” but mostly of #1 issues, you mean? What point do we get to monthly series of:
X-Men (Aug 2030) #1
X-Men (Sep 2030) #1
etc.
Bleeding Cool’s Weekly Bestseller list is out. Magik 8 came in 5, X-Men 20 came in 7, Giant-Size X-Men cane in 9 and Spider-Man and Wolverine came in 10.
I don’t think that it’s a good sign that Magik outsold X-Men. I think people are starting to get tired of the pace on X-Men. Maybe the problem is the crossovers but this issue didn’t really advance the plot except for revealing that the new head of ONE is a mutant.
“Re: Astonishing X-Men 32- It will be interesting to see if they really do turn Changeling evil again. Because there was an Excalibur Special where the ghost of Changeling menaced Megan and readers complained that it wasn’t fair to bring back a character who died heroically as an evil ghost and then Changeling was retconned into one of Merlin’s tricks.”
I agree. I arched an eyebrow to see the Changeling, complete with goofy purple helmet, resurrected offscreen in the Krakoa era, back as a generic-ish bank robber as part of an anti-capitalist/mutant supremacist plan.
Here’s a guy who died before I was even born, but who died heroically, whose legacy since then was that Excalibur storyline (retconned later) and as part of the X-Humed in She-Hulk, and who’s much better known for his far superior AU version. And the best they can do for his post-rebirth story is “he’s a criminal again?”
There’s potential in him meeting Banshee. Hell, I’d even pay for a Factor Three reunion since I’m the only person alive who thinks the secret head of 4K should be Mutant Master reborn. Free Blob from prison, he just wants to be a good guy these days. Grab Unus. Dig up Ogre from wherever he’s been since he vanished in Thunderbolts. Have them discuss the good old days over drinks and maybe clear the air.
Hopefully, this arc can end with 616-Changeling actually getting a -real- second chance after meeting Morph.
Imagine, people having strong feelings about a character who died in 1968.
Meanwhile, all I really took from the entire Giant-Size Saga was that now Kamala’s family knows she has sparklefists.
I am generally enjoying both Uncanny and X-Men, but the constant interruptions of events is exhausting.
Even if it isn’t Mutant Master who is the Chairman of Factor Three, the Changeling (alongside Blob and Unus) could still show up to try to warn the 3K-Men about falling for a secretive leader who is promoting a mutant nationalist agenda.
At least one of the 3K-Men was already getting skeptical of a non-mutant like Wyre promoting pro-mutant propaganda. “Remember, if 3K starts talking about starting a nuclear war to pave the way for mutant ascendancy, you should be very wary.”
I wonder if Marvel editorial is having the creative teams of some of these X-books purposely stretch mysteries until the “Age of Revelation” to make it very much a copy of AoA (where the books were supposed to end on cliffhangers before reality was rewritten). In the issue of X-Men before the AoR starts, MacKay will reveal the Chairman’s identity, then “see you in four months, everyone”.
Inspired by the talk of Mutant Master…
You know who I keep thinking should be an important part of the X-men, but apparently nobody agrees with me? Lucifer! He put Xavier in a wheelchair and apparently he was too silly, even for the Silver Age. Not even Morrison used him, and he seems like the type of character that would tickle Morrison’s fancy. Sure, he’s dead, but that’s never stopped anyone in comics.
The last time anyone used Lucifer was in a book in 2000. His legacy, such as it was, impacted the West Coast Avengers and later a different Avengers roster but yeah, he failed SO HARD even his own people forgot him.
Once again, Blob and Unus, jobbing for any bad guy with half a plan.
Including Lucifer, Mutant Master, and Nebulon, there were just a slew of second-rate alien masterminds pestering Silver Age Marvel, and they should all come back and form a support group.
Lucifer last appeared in Astonishing X-Men Annual #1 by Matthew Rosenberg in 2018. It was one of the few appearances of the newly resurrected Xavier going by “X”. People seem to forget this story, perhaps because of everyone waiting for Hickman to take over the franchise. Lucifer has a plan to create utopia by controlling the minds of every human (or something), but Lucifer is killed at the end of the story, although he’s been dead before.
Nebulon was great because Steve Gerber got his hands on the character in Defenders.
Changeling and Morph in the Unlimited story are clearly the same guy. So it’ll be about how Changeling adopted this new identity to get a fresh start, and the robbery wasn’t what it seems. Or something.
I just got Psylocke #10 in the mail today and the letters page said it’s the last issue, so….
I thought the Exiles version of Morph was dead.
What I’m assuming is that this is the 616 version of Morph, who is in fact Changeling trying something new. He looks just like the Exiles Morph because comics.
I just want to point out that the Changeling’s portrayal was the last of that Excalibur special issue’s problems.
Hell, Alan Davis devoted the better part of an issue pointing out every single continuity mistake in it and launching it out of the canon and into the Sun.
*least
Damn this Chromebook’s keyboard.
>>But the actual point of all this is to bring in Morph at the end – presumably the Exiles version, but who knows.
Isn’t the Exiles version of Morph actually Proteus at this point?
For what it’s worth, I’m on record over in a comment on Tom Brevoort’s Substack a while back as wanting to see that Changeling had been resurrected. Seemed it would’ve been the least Xavier could’ve done for him after the whole take his place and pretend it’s Charles who died bit.
@Rob
Jeff Parker separated the two in his short-lived Exiles series.
Thank goodness for Jeff Parker
Off topic: I want to plug two comics I read this week because they were so good:
The Power Fantasy #11 completes the second arc, and it’s a doozy. Wijngaard’s art is beautiful, as usual, and the story really ramps things up a notch. A couple of notches, probably. The trade is out next month for people reading it that way.
Superman: The Kryptonite Spectrum #1 is for anyone who enjoyed the new movie and/or All-Star Superman. Silver Age fun with some off-beat storytelling and a really despicable Luthor.
That’s all!
A couple of interesting tidbits from Breevort’s blog today:
Tom Breevort and Alex Alonso were two of the ones who came up with the idea to bring the Original Five to the present. Here’s how he tries to justify it:
“It grew out of a brainstorming session that myself, Axel Alonso and Sales VP David Gabriel were having at an earlier point, and we hung onto the idea until there was a good time to execute it. Brian had heard about it and wanted to be the one to execute it, and he did. So I liked that run just fine. What I don’t love, and what the people who said this were probably thinking about, is the dozens of scattered X-orbit characters who are either doppelgangers of other popular X-characters or time-displaced descendants and the like. The X-Men world is littered with these, and all of them are just about impossible to explain to a novice, their backstories are so convoluted. So I tend to be judicious about fielding characters of that nature.”
Also, it’s mentioned that Bob Harras never liked New Warriors. There’s two explanations for it. Evan Skolnick claims that it was because the team included Justice and Firestar, two mutant characters he had no control over. Fabian Nicieza has a different explanation:
“I think Bob didn’t like NW for the same reason that he disliked the sidekick characters at DC (and was never overly fond of New Mutants either): he thought they diluted the brand strength of the core characters.”
“Ironic, yes, considering the X-Men’s origins, and contradictory, considering he understood and liked Spider-Man, never wanted us to “age up” the X-characters too quickly, and was an integral driving force to that whole Teen Tony disaster.”
I never realized that Harras was never overly fond of the New Mutants. I thought it was just Illyana he disliked. It’s especially odd since he was editor on X-Factor when Skids and Rictor were created.
I would have guessed that Harras did not like the New Mutants as he kept siding with Liefield and forced Simonson to quit, so that Liefield and Harras could turn the New Mutants into a paramilitary squad. Considering how much Harras and Lee wanted the X-Men to never change (being superheroes operating out of a mansion, guided by Professor X, and fighting Magneto), that was the opposite direction he wanted to see New Mutants. So, in that sense, you could see him not liking the idea of the New Mutants, wanting to change them into something completely different.
The choice of X story to use in Giant-Size #2 was really bizarre, since the collective was an AVENGERS story. Could have gone with Messiah Complex, Second Comimg, AvX…
@Chris V- As I understand it, he sided with Liefeld over Simonson because the New Mutants had lost nearly half their readers during Simonson’s tenure on the title. And Liefeld was considered a “hot” artist at the time and likely to draw in new readers. So it made sense to favor Liefeld over Simonson. What surprised me was that he didn’t like the New Mutants in general.
It doesn’t say he disliked the characters. It says he disliked the New Mutants. Considering he got rid of everything fans had associated with the New Mutants and they became X-Force, I can believe it. It also doesn’t say he disliked X-Force.
Yes, it’s true that Louise Simonson’s run had lost a lot of readers and that Liefield was turning sales around. I still think it shows his feelings about the New Mutants that he greenlighted blowing everything up and starting over with Liefield’s vision.
He didn’t say let’s get back to basics and move New Mutants back where it was under Claremont, as he was agreed to do with Jim Lee on X-Men. I see that going along with Nicieza’s comment about “brand dilution”. If the X-Men are going to be back to, basically, students learning to be superheroes under Professor X and living in the mansion, then there’s no purpose in the New Mutants. So, turning them into Liefield’s paramilitary squad removes the New Mutants from Claremont’s intention, and they are now their own thing, which was not “the New Mutants” (as the longtime fans thought of the concept).
So Brevoort is flooding the shelves with four overlapping Age of Apocalypse projects in the same month. Great.
@Chris V- Nicieza said that Harras disliked the New Warriors, the New Mutants and the DC sidekicks which is ironic because he was one of the “geniuses” behind Teen Tony. I took that to mean that Harras disliked teenage superheroes in general.
As for Harras wanting to return the X-Men to their classic status quo but not the New Mutants, I figured that was just “wanting everything the way they were when I was in high college and college” syndrome. Harras turned 22 in 1981, so it makes sense that his idea of a classic X-Men status quo is the X-Men in the mansion with Professor X in a wheelchair fighting Magneto. There were no New Mutants in Harras’s youth.
@Uncanny X-Drew: “I am generally enjoying both Uncanny and X-Men, but the constant interruptions of events is exhausting.”
Constant interruptions? There have been two events so far. I wouldn’t call that constant. Though I would agree those have been the weakest issues of both X-Men and Uncanny.
The X-Men may have returned to taking direction from Professor X again under Harras, but they were hardly depicted as “students learning to be superheroes.” They weren’t even depicted like that during the Claremont heyday. They subscribed to Xavier’s vision for mutantkind so it made sense to have him set the direction (and they were living in his house, after all).
As far as the New Mutants are concerned, they could’ve easily decided to have them return to the mansion as well. It wouldn’t have been any less purposeful than it was the first time around. They didn’t do that, obviously, but not specifically because Harras didn’t grow up with those characters and never warmed to them. Before they even came up with the X-Force concept, the in-house attitude towards the New Mutants was that the concept had run its course– at least as far as the characters involved were concerned. They’d been around for years and they weren’t “new mutants” anymore. So, they evolved them into something else instead.
On a side note, with regards to the New Mutants, I recall Harras criticizing the fact that there was an alien on the team (Warlock), which I assume is why he was killed off. He didn’t seem to mind Shatterstar, though, so it seems Harras was perfectly fine with aliens being in a mutant book as long as they weren’t too weird looking.
Scott: “Please, sir. Can’t we do more than constantly fight Magneto?”
Xavier: “You live under my roof, you follow my rules.”
Scott: “I can’t wait to move out of here and not have to listen to you anymore…”
Xavier: “You’re thirty years old. I wish you would move out. Oh, and tell Logan to keep his elbows off the dinner table.”
@Moo- It’s not clear if it was Harras’s idea to kill off Warlock. There were rumors that Warlock was killed off so that Adam Warlock could have the Warlock name back and rumors that Frankie Raye was killed off so that Richard Ryder could have the Nova name back. (FWIW, Marz has said Frankie was killed off because she remorselessly helped Galactus prey on inhabited worlds for so long.)
Regarding Shatterstar- remember the Benjamin Russell mess? Where Jeph Loeb seemed to be trying to retcon Shatterstar into an insane asylum patient and then his last issue was retwrriten by the editors and it became completely nonsensical? It’s possible Harras suggested turning Shatterstar into a mutant instead of an inhabitant of the Mojoverse. No one has ever explained what went on with that mess.
“Lucifer last appeared in Astonishing X-Men Annual #1 by Matthew Rosenberg in 2018. It was one of the few appearances of the newly resurrected Xavier going by “X”. People seem to forget this story, perhaps because of everyone waiting for Hickman to take over the franchise.”
I’ve worked very hard to erase the pre-Krakoa Rosenberg run from my brain. It still makes me angry.
Shatterstar’s eventual origin story is the purest form of comic nonsensium, involving as it does time travel, cloning, and essentially becoming his own grandfather. I feel like the less said about it, the better.
@Michael- Anything’s possible, but that rumor sounds bogus to me. If it was a matter of wanting the name “Warlock” to be held exclusively by Adam Warlock, they didn’t need to kill off the poor bastard just to achieve that. They could have simply had him take a new name.
@The Other Michael – There was a terrible movie called Timerider from the ’80s where the lead character travels back to 1877 and the upshot of it is, because he slept with a cerain woman, he winds up being his own great, great grandfather. I’d wondered if PAD had seen the film when he did the Shatterstar grandfather thing.
On the other hand, there’s an awesome movie called Predestination based on Robert Heinlein’s “All You Zombies…”.
I’m pretty sure David was influenced by the Heinlein short story when he wrote the Shatterstar origin.
That would’ve also been after the episode of Futurama in which Fry becomes his own grandfather.
The grandfather paradox and its variants is pretty much as old as time travel stories. I doubt Peter David was inspired by any single story so much as the zeitgeist. Though the tongue in cheek nature of his one might owe something to Futurama I suppose.
I personally am very much in favour of the Longshot retcon, it’s hilarious.
“Constant interruptions? There have been two events so far. I wouldn’t call that constant.”
***Wow, the attitude toward crossovers sure has gotten more forgiving. The series is up to issue 20, and two crossovers in that time isn’t considered excessive? That’s more than one per year. The fact that a series can’t go one full year without being interrupted by a crossover is obnoxious to me.
But I guess it’s been the norm for so long now, everyone just goes with it.
Si-That’s not the “grandfather paradox”. The grandfather paradox is a temporal paradox where a person goes back in time and kills their own grandfather, but then if they were never born, how did they go back in time and kill their grandfather? They couldn’t, so therefore, they must still be alive, except if they are still alive, then they are going to go back in time and kill their grandfather. So, how are they alive to go back in time to kill their grandfather? It creates a closed loop. For the time traveller, their timeline can never progress beyond the point where they go back in time and kill their grandfather.
The “I’m not my own -parent” hypothesis isn’t a paradox, it’s just an example of predestination. You must be born in order to go back in time so that you can be born. In this instance, there is no temporal paradox faced by the time traveller, as they can continue on forward with their own life after going back in time and fulfilling their destiny.
While the “grandfather paradox” may be something thought up early in the history of the time travel subgenre, I believe that Heinlein was the initiator of the latter. Although, “All You Zombies…” is even more radical than “I’m my own grandfather”, but I don’t want to give the plot away.
No-Prize: in the OG continuity , Arize created Longshot purely from his own imagination , and Longshot eventually fathered Shatterstar , a hybrid of himself (synthezoid) with a mutant (Dazzler) . Now , after Shatterstar was born , he was sent to Earth as a foundling , where he was raised as a human named Benjamin Russell , whose mutant powers (now apparently retconned to be harmonic resonance manipulation to explain BOTH his vibratory shockwave and space-time tele-chrono-portation portals LOL) manifested at puberty turning him comatose . His spirit was then extracted from his body by Spiral (future version of Rita Ricochet) and brought to Future MojoWorld (era of Mojo V) in order to be placed in an adult clone body (there are supposedly NO child-age synthezoids, where an amnesiac BR became the Shatterstar became the protege/FWB of gladiratorix Gringrave , joined the rebellion against Mojo V, and who ultimately joined Cable’s X-Force. Now why did Spiral bother to do all of this for Shatterstar and Benjamin Russell, and why was she apparently secretly In Love with both of them (in her own words , they meant more than all the proverbial world to her) ? Because her younger self Richochet Rita was actually Benjamin Russell’s Japanese-style Childhood Friend Girl Next Door who was either secretly in love with him her whole life or actually became his childhood sweetheart first girlfriend before he became comatose at puberty . This explains why , in his own words , Shatterstar only felt “whole” for the first time is a long time , when his spirit was merged together by his biological father Longshot in Benjamin Russell’s body ! And this is why Arize is was able to derive Longshot so quickly from Shatterstar , because when he analyzed Shatterstar genetic samples , he saw that Shatterstar was half mixed with the blueprints for Longshot that he already planned but had not yet executed. It’s like when Gambit had OG Essex (presumably before he suicided in order to become Engima) restore his full brainstem in order to regain his full Omega-level potential , and Essex recognized his OWN handiwork (actually that of his Diamond-suite clone Sinister) in the surgery which was already done to Gambit’s brainstem .
“But I guess it’s been the norm for so long now, everyone just goes with it.”
I dropped all the x-books I was reading because of X-Manhunt and it looks like I won’t be back until Brevoort’s gone.
@Moo: I still want to know why it seems like Claremont chose to riff on Starlin’s 1970s material when he named Warlock and Magus. He was definitely around at Marvel back then, so he couldn’t have been unaware of it all.
Was it just a lark? Did he just like the same link between the names that Starlin noticed? Was he trying to highlight some thematic parallels, since the Technarch Warlock is trying to avoid either being destroyed by his father or effectively becoming him?
@The Other Michael: It’s all the odder since the simple solution would be to just go with the hints about Shatterstar being the future son of Longshot and Dazzler.
But the X-books were philosophically opposed to “simple and elegant” back then, and Harras supposedly insisted on stretching out the mysteries ad infinitum out of a belief that it helped keep the readers coming back.
It doesn’t help that, in terms of writing style and plotting methods, 90s Scott Lobdell seems like a distant precursor to J.J. Abrams. (And very much a contemporary of Chris Carter.)
Prior to the mess Simonson created, Claremont had already lost the plot on New Mutants, IMO. With Charles out of the picture and the X-Men anywhere but at the mansion, there wasn’t anything for the NM concept to bounce off of.
Magneto as headmaster was a story dud. Regressing their powers was basically useless since they hadn’t actually progressed that far to begin with. Xuân had already left the team. Claremont was clearly stretched thin, and his focus was elsewhere.
Of course, Simonson was only worse. And I didn’t know until now that Harras had it out for the team, but he was just the nail in the coffin.
The NM concept could have lived on for a long time, if there had actually been a school and/or teachers to train them. Or maybe if they’d been more involved in the Mutant Massacre. Instead, they were just left behind to fall apart on their own.
“Lucifer! He put Xavier in a wheelchair and apparently he was too silly, even for the Silver Age.”
I don’t think he particularly had more or less potential than any of a dozen other villains, he just ended up wandering around multiple characters’ books while a lot of focus was put on his possession gimmick, and never again seemed as dramatic a threat as the person who did that to Xavier should.
In fairness, Luifer really only showed up two times after his X-Men run. Archie Goodwin tried to reinvent him as a tempter, living up tot he codename, in Iron man v.1 #20. But that story was more about the Stark Industries security guard that Lucifer manipulated with promises of power. Then Stevel Engelhart brought Lucifer back for a couple issues of Captain America where he did little of interest before his hosts died.
The only time he was seen after that was in a one-panel flashback in Engelhart’s West Coast Avengers about a decade later, wherein Lucifer was reported as having been killed off by his own people following the Captain America story.
And that was it for him until his inexplicable revivals in a prose novel and then the annual story by Rosenberg.
I once had an idea that Lucifer and the Arcane/Quist could work if they were reimagined a bit. Since we’ve seen Lucifer and Dominus possess human hosts, perhaps they could be redefined as an alien race that exists entirely on the psychic plane, and has always just been taking over other lifeforms.
It’d explain why their machines are so clunky and fragile — Dominus always had to be operated by robots that could easily be tricked into smashing into each other — and why their supposed “empire” seems to go unmentioned by the likes of the Kree, Skrulls, and Shi’ar.
And it would make more sense of Lucifer attacking Xavier, specifically, since telepaths would be the first line of defense against them.
Of course, the idea flounders once you realize that none of this actually makes them interesting as antagonists. Maybe they find the thoughts of other sapient beings painful. Then they could be defeated by Shatterstar, since he’s apparently his own grandfather and therefore lacks the delta brainwave.
>Chris V> The “I’m not my own -parent” hypothesis isn’t a paradox, it’s just an example of predestination. You must be born in order to go back in time so that you can be born. In this instance, there is no temporal paradox faced by the time traveller, as they can continue on forward with their own life after going back in time and fulfilling their destiny.
If there’s no paradox, where did those genes come from?
@SanityOrMadness: Exactly. It’s still a paradox, specifically the “bootstrap paradox,” since something in a stable time loop ends up having no origin point and thus no causality.
“Prior to the mess Simonson created, Claremont had already lost the plot on New Mutants, IMO. With Charles out of the picture and the X-Men anywhere but at the mansion, there wasn’t anything for the NM concept to bounce off of.
Magneto as headmaster was a story dud. Regressing their powers was basically useless since they hadn’t actually progressed that far to begin with. Xuân had already left the team. Claremont was clearly stretched thin, and his focus was elsewhere.”
I liked that era from the time Charles is written out until Claremont leaves. A lot of good issues and strong character work. It was anything but a dud.
For the record, Xian hadn’t left the team yet, her last issue where she left was also Claremont’s last issue on the series.