Storm: Earth’s Mightiest Mutant #1 annotations
STORM: EARTH’S MIGHTIEST MUTANT #1
“Tea Ceremonies, Masquerades and Funerals”
Writer: Murewa Ayodele
Artist: Federica Mancin
Colour artist: Java Tartaglia
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER: Storm carrying two swords of lightning.
This is a five-issue miniseries, but it’s explicitly the final part of the story from the previous Storm ongoing, so I’m going to treat it as the last part of that.
STORM:
I don’t normally do plot synopses in these posts. But, like the previous volume, this issue jumps about in time quite a bit, and it isn’t especially easy to follow as a result. A lot of that, I think, is actually an art or colouring problem. There’s a basically straightforward narrative here, and the later scenes have flashbacks that fill in the earlier scenes. But the art doesn’t adequately signal a distinction between the main scene and the flashbacks – sometimes the flashbacks have different colour panel borders than the rest of the page, but it’s not especially noticeable and it isn’t even consistent from scene to scene.
So, with that in mind, here’s what actually happened. I’ll use the story page numbers for this purpose.
After being on the wrong side of the Thunder War in the previous volume, the Shinto thunder god Susanoo has decided to commit ritual suicide, and wants Storm to assist. Since he knows she won’t want to, he seizes control of Rage, the Rogue Planet and threatens to crash it into Earth unless she shows up to help. That all happens before the issue starts.
On pages 2-5, continuing into the flashbacks on pages 12, 22 and 25: Storm shows up on Rage and persuades Susanoo to join her in a tea ceremony. She uses the tea to drug him, and she and the other Avengers defeat him. Storm banishes him to a pocket dimension, as he rails about being denied an honourable death.
On pages 7-11, the B-plot: the Scarlet Witch investigates the deaths of a couple in Little Rock, who died when their electronic devices started glitching and their heads exploded.
On pages 12-21, continuing into the flashbacks on pages 22 and 24: Susanoo’s war general Akujin sends monsters to attack Biarritz. Local superhero Death Siren calls Storm for help. Storm and the Basque storm god Sugaar duly arrive to help, but Akujin’s illusions lead her to waste time saving the wrong part of town. Akujin declares that another city will be destroyed every five days until her master is released. Death Siren dies in the battle, and Storm tries to comfort her children.
On pages 22-24: Back at the Storm Sanctuary, Storm reflects on the day’s failures and lashes out in frustration.
On page 26: While Storm sleeps, the Scarlet Witch arrives at the Storm Sanctuary.
See, the actual story is pretty straightforward! There’s no mention of Eternity, so apparently he really is gone after the end of the last series.
Storm refuses to help Susanoo kill himself, citing her vow against taking a life. She seems to agree that she would be willing to kill him if it really were necessary in order to save Earth, but she’s stringing him along at that point. She’s probably more sincere in implying that she’s angry about him threatening innocent lives and refusing to make an effort to redeem himself.
Her solution to the Susanoo problem is to chuck him into a pocket dimension until he cools down – as she did with the thunder gods Sango and Chaac in Storm #9. Despite chucking him into prison, Storm seems to register Susanoo’s request for her help as a gesture of respect and feels guilty about betraying his trust. She regards her failure in Biarritz (brought about in part by that treatment of Susanoo) as a loss of honour.
She doesn’t take issue with Susanoo’s statement that “you are not a god in the same way that I am”, and says that she doesn’t believe that she’s immortal. An obvious question is in quite what respect she is a goddess. I suspect Ayodele’s answer would be that she’s on a par with actual storm gods when it comes to controlling the weather, making her not just powerful but powerful in an iconic and nature-linked way, and a modern iteration of the storm god archetype.
SUPPORTING CAST:
Gateway has a non-speaking appearance in one panel, bringing the Avengers to help subdue Susanoo.
Sugaar. The Basque storm serpent god accompanies Storm to Biarritz, apparently because he was summoned by his own worshippers there rather than because they’re generally hanging out. We saw Sugaar before in Storm #11 among the hostile storm gods, but he seems pretty reasonable here and approves of Storm’s approach to dealing with Susanoo.
As they arrive in Biarritz, Storm tells Sugaar to avoid calling any thunder “so as not to alert our enemies to our arrival”. Given that Sugaar is a 50 metre long serpent who has just emerged from the water in full view of the enemy forces, I can’t see the thunder making much difference.
VILLAINS:
Susanoo. His older sister Amaterasu wasn’t happy about him attempting to side with Hadad in the Thunder War, and (at her suggestion) he wants to commit ritual suicide in order to redeem himself. He really, really takes exception to being imprisoned instead – and says that Storm will “soon know the wrath of mistress Death”. Death isn’t directly involved in this story, but the previous run ended with a cliffhanger in which Death was rounding up undead heroes to avenge the death of Oblivion.
Susanoo claims that he sided with Hadad in the Thunder War because he wanted to destroy the universe and start afresh “without suffering and pain”. This seems to tie in with the reference in the B-plot to the rebooting of the universe, though it’s not clear how yet.
Akujin. She describes herself as Susanoo’s “war general”, and leads an assortment of monsters to destroy Biarritz as a demonstration of power, hoping that Storm will be persuaded to free her master rather than suffer further attacks. The narrator rather oddly describes her forces as Ẹbọra Òkúta, which seems to be Yoruba for something like “Stone Devils”, but the creatures immediately around her look more Japanese. If she is using creatures from a different pantheon, it’s not yet clear why. The Ẹbọra Òkúta are lava creatures and easily defeated with rain, so they may be intended to give Storm a seemingly easy win before Akujin breaks her spirit by revealing the illusion. (They can’t be purely illusory, though, because they kill Death Siren.)
This is Akujin’s first appearance in the main timeline, but an alt-future version of her appeared in Rogue Storm as a traitorous member of X-Force who was actually working for the demonic Eēgūn.
The thing in the devices in Little Rock. A random couple get their heads exploded by malfunctioning devices – a TV and a phone. The guy with the phone seems to be trapped inside it afterwards; the woman’s fate is less clear.
The phone just shows error messages before killing him, but the TV shows a man in a spacesuit on a red planet (with grass) explaining that the previous universe was destroyed and replaced with a new “eight” version ten years ago, with a fake history. In the Marvel Universe, this paranoid rambling is in fact true, because the universe was destroyed and replaced with the virtually-identical-unless-you’re-Miles-Morales eighth cosmos in Secret Wars, which did come out 10 years ago. (And applying the “literal sliding timeline” idea, presumably its creation remains in 2015, even though the events have been dragged forward in time.)
After the couple are both dead, the TV shows a host who appears to be addressing the readers at home, and introduces the guest starring Scarlet Witch as if she was a chat show guest.
OTHER CHARACTERS:
Rage, the Rogue Planet. Described as “the cousin of Ego, the Living Planet”, and otherwise simply a planet that Susanoo can control by using his sword. It’s not clear that it’s actually intelligent.
Death Siren. This is her only appearance. She’s the local superhero for Biarritz, which in population terms is a bit like being the local superhero for Bangor, Maine. She looks the part but she’s out of her league here and she knows it. Her kids idolise her and she’s clearly trying to put on a show for them. Sensibly enough, her plan is simply to call in an A-list hero and focus on saving civilians instead of getting in their way. She’s overawed by the thought of meeting a top tier hero like Storm, but gets killed before that can happen. She seems to have some sort of Songbird/Banshee type powers, and while she seems rather panicky for a superhero (in fairness, she’s defending her children), she doesn’t go down without a respectable fight.
The Avengers show up for one panel and don’t get any dialogue. Aside from Storm, the team are Captain Marvel, the Vision, the Black Panther, Iron Man and Captain America (Sam Wilson).
The Scarlet Witch shows up to investigate events in the B-plot, evidently because Storm has unleashed something on Earth.
CONTINUITY REFERENCES:
- Page 1 is a recap page showing incidents from the previous volume. Specifically, Storm defeated Hadad in Storm #12; she saved Rio de Janeiro in Storm #8; and she dealt with a radioactive explosion, and rescued an Orchis sympathiser and his son, in Storm #1. Only one of these incidents is relevant to the plot of the current issue, and they’re shown out of order.
- Susanoo’s “actions against [Storm] and the universe in the Thunder War” were in Storm #7 and #11.
- The “terrible cosmic war that destroyed the old universe” refers to the Secret Wars storyline of 2015.
Ayodele has a way of making the most simple stories hard to understand.
And it’s not just the flashing back. People had to ask Ayodele on twitter whether Storm was tricked into destroying the city by the illusions or if the illusions just prevented her from saving the right part of town. (Ayodele explained that it was the latter.)
Ayodele originally claimed that this was an ongoing series and not a limited series. It’s possible he was fibbing in an attempt to increase sales. But if he didn’t know. then that could explain why parts of this issue seem decompressed- the five page interlude which served to bring Wanda into the story lasted too long. That could cause problems later on if Ayodele is forced to rush to an ending.
So the Storm series is coming to an end in four issues. And Storm’s tenure in the Avengers looks like it’s coming to an end with MacKay’s run next month- the previews for Armageddon have Wolverine but not Storm aiding the Avengers against the Red Hulk. So it looks like Brevoort’s attempts to use Storm outside the X-Teams are coming to an end. Brevoort said that he didn’t want to put Storm on Scott’s or Rogue’s team since her fans don’t want her to be subservient to Scott or Rogue. But making her an instructor at Graymatter Lane in X-Men United solves that problem by putting her in a position of authority without appearing subordinate.
I think Marvel is being vague because Brevoort originally greenlighted the Storm series to return while it was one of the best-selling X-titles. Soon after, sales plummeted and Marvel probably said that Storm’s sales were too bad to return. The series probably got a five-issue mini to finish (starting with a new #1), and if sales pick up in those five issues, Marvel will extend the book. If so, this is a really bad way to start, continuing the plot from the prior series (Ayodele was most likely writing this with the idea that Storm was getting the Uncanny, X-Men, Wolverine treatment coming off of AoR). Any new readers who are willing to try the #1 issue are going to be beyond lost and never look back. Yeah, I’d expect that this is going to end up a limited series.
I’m sad that this roster of the Avengers is probably being disbanded. I would have loved a more character focused run with this team.
Again, this is a comedy book, right? An evil cellphone killed a guy on the toilet by making his eyes pop out like a Tex Avery wolf. With non-sound sound effects to boot.
My current guess is that Ayodele’s run will be revealed to be a fever dream or something similar.
It is by far the most reasonable and logical explanation.
Hmm. How does Namor feel about getting demoted from the position of “Mightiest Mutant”? That’s what Marvel used to call him back in the ’90s when he had his own series. Must’ve let himself go since then.
“Brevoort said that he didn’t want to put Storm on Scott’s or Rogue’s team since her fans don’t want her to be subservient to Scott or Rogue.”
I don’t see a problem with that. It’s not out of the ordinary for a leader to actually choose to step down and step back into a follower role.
That is not how Storm has been written since Al Ewing’s X-Men Red, though; she has somehow become not “a leader”, but some form of avatar of awesomeness (or just ego, if you ask me).
She is now putting Eternity in its place, being sought by gods in order to save them, and word has it that she is about to discover some form of ice cream topping that is also a superior furniture varnish.
No doubt after we learn that she is the true power and ultimate origin of the Phoenix Force. Of Galactus. Of the Ultimate Universe. Chuck Norris. Mysterium. Baseball. And Sliced Bread.
Truly, Earth-616 is just way too small to the current levels of awesomeness of Ororo Monroe.
Or something.
I just had a flashback to a bit that Paul wrote in his review of Uncanny X-Men 449 (2004).
“There’s an utterly hideous sequence of Storm containing a bomb by “generating pressures higher than on the surface of Jupiter.” The hell with that. The knack of doing these scenes is to have the characters use their powers in some clever and unexpected way to solve the problem, not to elevate them to God status and declare them the winner.”
I really want to enjoy this more than I do. I love the ambition, and those little moments, in this issue everything with the tea ceremony and Death Siren.
But the structure just makes it too much work to follow… Different colour tones for timelines would help, or just give me a text box. I miss text boxes with settings.
Could we get a chronological edit on Unlimited at some point, like we did House and Powers? Thanks for doing that with each issue Al!
I still enjoy it, I just feel I could enjoy it more.
@Luis Dantas In this week’s issue of Avengers, Storm was part of a group of people that created the first Universe.
@Luis That is not how Storm has been written since Al Ewing’s X-Men Red, though; she has somehow become not “a leader”, but some form of avatar of awesomeness (or just ego, if you ask me).
The impression I always got from these annotations is that Ewing at least was writing her as the latter. She kept putting herself in positions of responsibility because she was so obviously the best person for them, and the people she was responsible for kept dying because she flaked out on them just like with the Morlocks back in the day. Somehow, that aspect of it seems to have been ignored, and people just remember that she was leading all the factions simultaneously.
But I wasn’t actually reading the books, so ICBW.
@Moo- Agreed. Cap, Thor and Iron Man have all been part of Avengers teams led by people like Hawkeye or Wasp. There’s no reason a good writer couldn’t do something similar with Storm.
@Michael- I thought they already did that with Storm. Wasn’t she following Kitty’s leadership in X-Men Gold?
Or is X-Men Gold the reason why Brevoort thinks Storm fans don’t want her in a follower role? Did her fans complain about her taking orders from Kitty? I wasn’t reading, so I have no idea.
@Moo- Yes. Storm’s fans complained about her taking orders from Kitty. This thread is one example:
https://comicvine.gamespot.com/forums/storm-7317/im-so-tired-of-having-to-read-kitty-centered-books-2052281/
““Brevoort said that he didn’t want to put Storm on Scott’s or Rogue’s team since her fans don’t want her to be subservient to Scott or Rogue.”
I don’t see a problem with that. It’s not out of the ordinary for a leader to actually choose to step down and step back into a follower role.”
Aside from which, who HASN’T led the X-Men at this point? If former team leaders never went back to being team members, they wouldn’t be able to field a squad. All of the All-New group (except Colossus, maybe?) have led X-teams. Weren’t Rogue and Gambit team leaders during Claremont’s first return? Psylocke briefly in the Outback era. Jubilee led a team at one point, right? Half of the New Mutants have been team leaders. Et cetera.
By “fans”, I assume Brevoort was referring to Storm’s hardcore fans. If so, then who cares what they think? As far as I’m concerned, the hardcore fans of *any* character need to be outright ignored. And hardcore fans are very easy to pick out among a crowd of regular fans. Like lousy poker players, they have numerous tells, such as:
1. Complaining that the character isn’t depicted as being powerful enough.
2. Complaining when the character experiences doubt or anything else that makes them appear fallible.
3. Complaining when bad things happen to them. 4. Complaining when good things aren’t happening to them.
5. Complaining when they feel that the character isn’t getting enough “screen time”.
6. Complaining when another character in the same book appears to be favored by the writer over the character that they like.
That’s just off the top of my head. I’m sure some of you could come up with more.
It’s kind of Chris Claremont’s fault, I think, since he got to write a fan-fiction series called X-Treme X-Men where he made sure that all his pet characters were powered up to absurd levels. Storm was the team leader, and we saw how Claremont brought the Storm fanboy mentality with him when he returned to Uncanny X-Men for his third run with that excerpted quote above. Then, we had Sage. The Fury is supposed to be nigh-unbeatable, yet Sage is able to destroy it with little trouble.
I should be more understanding of everyone getting tired of Storm being written as so perfect because I had the same annoyance with the way Claremont kept trying to convince everyone that “Tessa” was really the coolest character ever. I was so busy being annoyed with Sage, that I didn’t notice Claremont had also started overpowering Storm.
“it isn’t especially easy to follow as a result”
That wouldn’t be so big a criticism if it was at least WORTH following. Reading this synopsis I barely even remember who most of the (returning) characters are.
OK, just to clarify something, Brevoort did not explicitly mention fans. According to Bleeding Cool. what he and MacKay said was this:
https://bleedingcool.com/comics/storm-joins-marvels-avengers-from-august-will-she-lead-them/
TOM:She ended up being a difficult character at first because as we laid out the 3 X-Men books, we kinda realized that if you put her on any of those teams, she takes over the team. She’s got such a gravity to her as a character that if she’s standing next to Rogue or she’s standing next to Cyclops or Kitty, I’m sorry, they’re not in charge anymore. It’s her.
JED:When we were putting together thoughts for X-Men, one problem kept coming up—Storm needed to have a presence in a book befitting her status, but it would be weird for her to be on an X-Men team if she wasn’t the leader.
Now., some people assumed at the time that they were talking about the fan reaction. since Storm has taken orders from Kitty before in X-Men Gold. Brevoort seemed to be aware of that, since he mentioned Kitty and in another interview he mentioned Stevie Hunter being a congressman, which happened in X-Men Gold. And MacKay has an encyclopediac knowledge of Marvel Comics, so he presumably knows about X-Men Gold. But it’s possible that they just thought X-Men Gold didn’t work in some way. Of course, the book had plenty of problems that had nothing to do with whoever was leader, like the artist sneaking in anti-Semitic messages.
But yes, either Brevoort is giving Storm fans too much power or he’s saying we can’t do something we did before.
@Daibhid C: The central contradiction in Ewing’s Red is that even when Storm’s wrong, she’s right. In that sense it’s very much the template for Ayodele’s interpretation of the character, he just took it a few steps forward.
@Michael: That seems like an odd fixation if true, considering Storm was also a supporting character in Taylor’s X-Men Red around the same time and no one seemed to mind there.
To add on to what Diana said about Ewing’s Red, Thor is incredibly capable in Ewing’s The Immortal Thor but he’s also capable of being wrong. In the past, we see that he tried to murder Utgard-Loki while he was sleeping. In the present, he allows the Enchantress to guilt him into trying to resurrect Iric but it turns out to be a trick and Iric remains dead while Magni is brought to the present where the Enchantress plans to kill him and steal his power.
Ewing’s Storm wasn’t allowed to be wrong in the same way that Ewing’s Thor is allowed to be wrong.
As I recall it, in early 2017 Ororo was leading the limbo-based team of the “Extraordinary X-Men” and found herself in conflict with the Inhumans (the 6-issue “Inhumans vs X-Men” series). That led to X-Men Prime, a one-shot published roughly at the same time as IvX #6, where she tells Kitty that she (Ororo) is holding the X-Men back and therefore Kitty is needed as the new leader.
That leads to the 36-issue run of X-Men: Gold, from April 2017 to September 2018, where Ororo is indeed being led by Kitty. For about four or five months Ororo was in both the Red team led by Jean (starting with #4) and the Gold team led by Kitty. The Gold team disbanded around the time of X-Men: Red #8, and the Red team with its #11.
Then Ororo and pretty much everyone else became part of the plot of late 2018’s “Uncanny X-Men” Vol 5 (the Rosenberg run), issues #1-10. She became part of “Age of X-Man” and returned to the 616 reality in Uncanny #22. Then came HoxPoX, where apparently she regarded herself as about as rightful a leader as Scott. Then she became a supporting character in the first volume of Marauders, where Kitty was arguably the main character. Then came a role in the “Children of the Vault” storyline in the Scott-led X-Men by Hickman and a few appearances in Giant Size X-Men (also by Hickman) where she somehow acquires and heals from a technovirus from the Children of the Vault in what amounts to eminently forgettable stories.
Somehow at that point she began being called “goddess” again, leading to X of Swords, where she decided to become abusive with T’Challa for no reason beyond flaunting her own ego. There were plenty of Black Panther plots where Ororo took part during the surrounding years, but apparently no one in the X-Offices could be made to acknowledge or care.
Which I guess leads to her egotrip as regent of Arakko and then X-Men: Red’s run as Great Non-White Outsider and finally the ultimater ultimate Ororo of Ayodele’s run, who never saw a feeling of superiority that she could not embrace and revel into.
It is actually funny. I mean, it can’t very well be anything else…
“She’s got such a gravity to her as a character that if she’s standing next to Rogue or she’s standing next to Cyclops or Kitty, I’m sorry, they’re not in charge anymore. It’s her.”
Okay, see the problem here? What Brevoort is describing here is a dilemma. Instead of attempting to solve the dilemma, it appears as though he threw his hands up in the air and gave up. “Welp. Can’t have Storm not be a leader anymore, I guess.” and that’s crap.
You *can* have Storm convincingly and successfully step back into a follower role. You just have to figure out a way to sell it.
And you can sell almost any idea, no matter how bad it sounds. It’s all in the execution. In another thread, I mentioned how, completely of nowhere, Morrison revealed that Xavier had a bald, evil twin sister.
Imagine he hadn’t done that. So, imagine there was never a Cassandra Nova, and I came along and posted, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if Xavier had an evil twin sister? And totally bald too, like he is!” Every one of you would probably think it was one of the dumbest suggestions you’ve ever read. But it worked because Morrison was able to sell it.
And you can sell Storm stepping down from leadership. You just have to make sure of two things: 1. It’s her idea and her choice. 2. You present her with a believable reason for doing so.
Maybe she still wants to be an X-Man, but instead of scheduling training sessions, or giving performance reviews, or planning missions or whatever else it is that leaders are expected to do in between missions, she’s decided she’d like to devote more attention to her personal life.
But then you have to follow through on that idea. It wouldn’t be enough to have her just declare this. You’d have to give her scenes where she’s seen doing exactly that. Meeting people outside of “work”. Dating. Maybe running a small business on the side. Yoga. Anything.
It probably sounds mundane, but I think it needs to be. Especially when it comes to her. To me, Storm’s biggest problem isn’t that she’s too powerful. Yes, that’s a big problem, but the bigger one (and it’s one she’s always had) is that she’s just not relatable enough.
[…] EARTH’S MIGHTIEST MUTANT #1. (Annotations here.) It’s never a good sign when the writer seems to have found out that the book was a five-issue […]
@Moo: Or, alternatively, put Storm in a book that doesn’t *have* a team per se. Maybe a book where young mutants need guidance from someone wiser and more experienced (e.g. a situation that doesn’t require giant lightning bolts and can therefore present her in terms other than power levels). Maybe a book starring two other women Ororo has complicated relationships with.
Too bad FtA didn’t have any books like that, huh.
It is consistent with the art in Sorcerer Supreme, but I hate the Cloak of Levitation becoming the peplum skirt of levitation.
Ok, sure.
Marvel still employs editors right?
It’s such a shame, because Storm is an incredible character in her own right and I believe could easily sustain a *coherent* longer term book. Just call it “Storm and the X-Men” (We’ve done the same with Wolverine…) and have her as focal point with the rest of the x-supporting cast rotating, and supporting sales. Easy!
Regarding Brevoort’s quote, I have a harder time picturing Cyclops in a non-leadership role than Storm, actually. Cyclops’ whole deal is that he’s the uncool straight man who wrangles a bunch of misfits together into a functioning team.
@yrzhe – I also find it more difficult to picture Cyclops in a follower role but for a different reason (the X-Men don’t really work as “misfits” anymore. Not the longstanding characters anyway. Misfits suggest people who don’t fit in anywhere. A group of characters can start out that way, but once they
become close enough with one another to begin regarding each other as almost family– once they begin regarding their base of operations as “home”, they’re not really misfits anymore. They’ve found a place that they fit and people that they fit in with).
The reason it’s difficult for me to see Cyclops as a follower is because to me, Cyclops is a guy who’s never more comfortable– never more at ease then when he’s calling out plays on the battlefield. That’s his happy place. Outside of that context, he’s utterly hopeless. He sucks at everything else. He’d be a terrible follower. That’s how I see him.
I think Scott and Ororo could effectively co-lead a team together provided they both want to and they’re willing to defer to each other’s strengths. They’re both strong leaders, but when it comes to sheer tactics, I have to give the point to Scott. However, when it comes to people management, this is where Ororo shines and Scott falls flat on his face. If you’re in the X-Men and a Sentinel is attacking, you turn to Scott. But if you’re having a problem of a personal nature, you turn to Ororo. And if she’s not available, then you go to anyone other than Scott. Scott is the last person you should turn to for counsel.
So, I’d probably arrange a set-up where, on the field of battle, Scott takes charge. But if someone on the team is being insubordinate, or if someone appears to be off their game for some reason, this is where Ororo comes in. Discipline and counsel.
@yrzhe: A talented writer could make a meal out of that, though – demote Scott for some reason, and actually *tell* that story of him struggling in a non-leadership position, not being at his best, trying to adapt, etc. It would at least give him something fresh to do.
Yeah, have some Zoomer member of the team take grrat offense to Scott raising his voice at him and deciding to file a complaint to HR. Scott gets demoted and prohibited from leading again until he attends a leadership seminar and passes an exam.
I don’t think it makes much sense to compare Scott with Ororo. She is really much more comparable to Wolverine.
While both Ororo and Scott (let alone Wolverine) suffer from inconsistent characterization along their decades of publication, it is much worse for Ororo and much less of a problem for Scott.
Scott has been everything from Wolverine’s doormat to Xavier’s killer to Emma’s accomplice, but there is still a core personality well established there for him to gravitate back to. He is determined, capable, well equipped to deal with enormous stresses. Relatable.
Meanwhile, Ororo is all over the place – which may be one reason why Ewing and now Ayodele end up giving her generic roles and use Mary Sueing and overpowering in lieu of characterization. Not because she is a promising character, but because she is no longer allowed to attempt to become one. She can neither stop being present in Avengers and Black Panther plots nor acknowledge those in her solo and X-Men appearances. Which means that she can’t grow, can’t learn, can’t follow her own plots to any form of logical consequence. She has become something of a vague showcase that can neither be well defined nor allowed to actually go somewhere.
“I don’t think it makes much sense to compare Scott with Ororo”
Who’s comparing them?
“Who’s comparing them?”
Brevoort was.
I’ll defend Storm fans on the X-Men Gold complaints. X-Men Gold was Marc Guggenheim’s fanfiction about how Kitty is the best X-Man ever and can do anything and everything, and everyone else was either dumbed down or made to job in order to make Kitty look good. Storm fainted or passed out like she was X-Men TAS Jean.
The fact that there are unreasonable fans who think Storm should be written as all-powerful and infallible all the time doesn’t discount the legitimate complaints about X-Men Gold, which was just a terrible book. Ironically, the worst stans want Storm to be written the exact way Kitty was written in Gold. It at least makes more sense with Storm since she’s always been one of the more powerful X-Men.
The X-Men were written as obnoxious and entitled in X-Men: Gold. It was like Guggenheim wanted to write a story about why baseline humans might have legitimate issues with mutants.
Kitty set up the mansion in Central Park. You know, that’s kind of a legitimate complaint made by people that a public park was being set up as the headquarters for a “superhero” team. As soon as people were upset though, instead of realizing why placing the mansion in a popular public park was a bad idea, Kitty started throwing out, “Anti-mutant! Anti-mutant!”.
Then, there was the story where Kitty was forcing a mutant with dangerous powers into a crowded hospital. A Black doctor told Kitty his legitimate concerns about a mutant who could easily destroy the hospital filled with sick patients. He didn’t say he didn’t want to treat mutants. Instead of contemplating that there was a serious issue being presented to her, Kitty responded, “Anti-mutant! Anti-mutant!”.
@Woodswalked –
“Who’s comparing them?”
Brevoort was.”
No, what I meant was who appears to be suggesting that Cyclops and Storm are comparably similar? Luis’s next sentence was “She’s really much more comparable to Wolverine.”
@Moo: I said a *talented* writer.
@Diana – What, you didn’t like my HR/leadership seminar idea? Talented writers *wish* they could come up with stuff like that.
You did, Moo. Feb 8th, 5:31
“You did, Moo. Feb 8th, 5:31”
You’re time-stamp “busting” me? Did you get bit by a radioactive CCTV camera?
Anyway, you said “She is really much more comparable to Wolverine.” When someone says “This is more comparable to that” you’re saying that they’re more comparatively similar. But I wasn’t saying Scott and Ororo are similar. I was drawing a contrast in their leadership abilities. Why is that “pointless”?
Cyclops and Storm’s leadership abilities have often been debated. It was a thing in the ‘90s stories to make a deal about how Scott was the X-Men’s greatest leader, not Ororo.
While the mutton chops do make the comparisons with Ororo apt, Wolverine isn’t often acknowledged for his leadership skills in the same way as Storm (and Cyclops). It’s true that Logan has been used in a leadership position more frequently since the 21st century started, but there was a long period where Logan would refuse to take up a leadership position, even preferring to allow the less experienced teenager, Kitty Pryde, lead the team so that he didn’t have to take up that role.
“Scott is the last person you should turn to for counsel.”
Matt Murdock has to be up there. Down there. Whatever.
Aside from legal counsel. I imagine he’s halfway competent at that, at least.
Hmmm, anti-red-tinted-sunglasses bias.
Shameful.
@Jason – Nah. There’s no anti-red-tinted sunglasses bias going on here.
Also, Wonder Man and Speed Demon are two other guys you shouldn’t seek counsel from.