The X-Axis – w/c 5 June 2023
IMMORTAL X-MEN #12. (Annotations here.) The Colossus spotlight issue was always going to be interesting, given his weird status quo as the puppet of a Russian novelist. For the most part, Immortal has been content to leave that as a lurking issue in the background, but the premise suits Kieron Gillen’s style perfectly – in fact, it’s arguably more at home in this book than it was in X-Force. I’m still not sure how far we’re meant to take this narration as literally describing Piotr’s state of mind and how far we should see it as reflecting Scrivener’s, but that’s fine – it’s an interesting tension in itself. A bit more consistency on the ground rules between titles wouldn’t have gone amiss, but this works well. And again, Gillen and Lucas Werneck get plenty of visual interest into a very talky, political story – nearly half of this issue by page count consists of people talking in the Quiet Council chamber, but you wouldn’t know it. What’s surprising me somewhat is how quickly the Council seems to be falling apart after Sins of Sinister, but then maybe that’s in the nature of a system with no checks and balances that concentrated all the power in twelve secretive people. It works up until it doesn’t, at which point it goes really, really wrong, really, really fast.
X-MEN #23. (Annotations here.) One of those stories that exists largely to build up a new threat, in this case the Stark Sentinels. I’m not entirely sold on the concept of these things – the Iron Man iconography feels like it doesn’t have much to do with this book – but I can see the point that if you’re going to do the Sentinels, they need a bit of rehabbing. And borrowing some credibility from Iron Man might not be the worst way to do that. It makes for a decent enough fight scene, at any rate, though I’m not altogether sure it plays to Joshua Cassara’s strengths as an artist. . It’s the opening scene with Mother Righteous and Dr Stasis that works best for me, though, since the relationship between the various Sinister iterations seems like something worth exploring.
X-MEN: BEFORE THE FALL – MUTANT FIRST STRIKE #1. (Annotations here.) The second of the four Before the Fall one-shots is an odd book. The other three all seem like they’re fairly important to the wider storylines. This, on the other hand, feels like a decently executed but ultimately stock X-Men story. The bad guys frame mutants for doing a bad thing, the heroes save the day and win hearts and minds on a small scale, but the wider media narrative remains firmly against them. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it feels more like a routine restatement of the premise than anything else. I think the idea is to tell the story of the mutants losing control of the narrative to Orchis, but the problem is that it’s done in a way that would have fitted equally in the 80s or 90s. Surely in the Krakoan era there ought to be other dimensions to this. Even if you’re not going to have the Krakoans go out there and bribe their own TV shows, a big part of the premise of Krakoa is that the mutants are transforming people’s lives with medicine, they’re embedded in the economy, they’ve got the power and influence they never had in the past… shouldn’t they have at least some strategy for this? Even if the idea is meant to be that they took their eye off the ball and didn’t pay enough attention to their relations with the human world, this doesn’t feel like that story – it just feels like the X-Men playing the hits. It’s nice to see some of the more obscure characters get an outing, mind you. As for the art… well, it’s patchy. Judas Traveller’s control room looks great, some of the Watchdog sequences look good, but the scenes with Thunderbird look really off.
BISHOP: WAR COLLEGE #5. By J Holtham, Sean Damien Hill, Victor Nava & Espen Grundetjern. Well, it didn’t come together in the final issue. This is a weird miniseries in which a bunch of unrelated concepts, all perfectly viable on their own, seem to coexist without really having much to do with one another. Bishop is training a bunch of students and pushing them too hard. They stumble into an Orchis attack on Krakoa and the kids have to rise to the occasion and prove themselves to Bishop. That’s fine… but then Bishop himself gets transported to another world for most of the miniseries, where the story is about (i) a world where only black people are mutants (except in practice it means that all the established mutants are black), and (ii) Tempo trying to recreate her life with her late father. You’d think the idea would be that Bishop learns something that makes him go easier on the kids, and he does meet himself as a more relaxed teacher, but any change doesn’t really come across – and he’s not actually there to see his charges prove themselves individually. If anything it feels like a story where Bishop doesn’t change and winds up making the other world more like him, which is just a bit odd. Our Bishop comes back learning about the importance of defending paradise when it exists… which is what he was doing in issue #1 anyway. The Tempo thread feels disconnected and the black angle underdeveloped. It doesn’t work, I’m afraid.
X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #90. By Steve Orlando, Emilio Laiso & Rachelle Rosenberg. Mostly another issue of Nature Girl fighting the X-Men, up until the point where they finally get the upper hand and she gets yanked off for the big confrontation. We’re kind of repeating the points here, but I think that’s probably the right choice for pacing, and I’m glad that the ending of this storyline isn’t just going to be “the X-Men defeat her”.
DEADPOOL: BADDER BLOOD #1. By Rob Liefeld and Chad Bowers. This is a sequel to Deadpool: Bad Blood (which I haven’t read and came out when Deadpool wasn’t in the X-office), which established that Deadpool’s childhood best friend also signed up for Department H and wound up as an uncontrollable super-soldier with the improbable name of Thumper. Deadpool feels responsible for the guy. He finds out that Thumper is now making a move into supervillainy, and sets out to cut him off. I was braced for another haywire stream of consciousness, like the last few stories that Liefeld contributed to the X-office, but this is actually fairly straightforward and coherent. Bowers’ script helps to keep it together, but it does feel generally more focussed than I was expecting. That’s not to say it’ll appeal much beyond Liefeld’s core audience. It’s still pretty slight, and it could actually use a bit more manic energy. But it does exceed expectations.
Hell, fictional eugenics is a core aspect of the Miracleman status quo Gaiman inherited from Moore, and which he continues to explore.
I literally laughed out loud the first time I read the name “Mister Sinister” in print. It was just before the Mutant Massacre storyline got underway. Marvel promoted the storyline in an issue of Marvel Age (their in-house fanzine publication) and Claremont dropped his name somewhere in that interview. Even though I was a teenager at the time, and even by the standards of the ’80s, that name sounded bloody ridiculous to me. It sounded like the name of a villain from an episode of Scooby Doo.
There was no accompanying illustration of this “Mister Sinister” in the article so I had to use my imagination and, with nothing else to go on but his name, I imagined a guy wearing a trenchcoat and a fedora with a slight hunch in his posture who twiddled his fingers a lot and grinned maniacally.
Needless to say, when he finally appeared in the comic, he was far from what I expected, but I couldn’t possibly have anticipated “If Colossus were a Vegas showgirl”.
So, yes, I’ve always found him to be extremely silly.
Sinister’s creator, Chris Claremont, expanded on his relationship with the Nazis in Excalibur vol 3 #7. He worked in Auschwitz alongside Mengele, where the guards nicknamed him “Nosferatu” because of his appearance. Their were rumors he smuggled inmates to safety. Magneto became a soderkommando to investigate and found that he was actually killing them in his experiments. Magneto said he hunted Nazis in hope of finding him. https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Excalibur_Vol_3_7
My post from the other day didn’t show up but I did go in and try to read that Zodiac mini.
Too much hypervilence for me, but I did like seeing Paste Pot Pete, even in his awful red and yellow Trapster costume.
Thanks neutrino, I didn’t realize Claremont wrote Sinister as having ties to the Nazis. I’m fine with the notion that nazi-allied Sinister has been cloned away/ was never the true Sinister/was wished to the corn field.
@Moo: “Mister Sinister” is a silly name, but I’ve heard/read/said it so much, it’s lost some of its goofiness. See also: “Silver Surfer,” “Amazo,” “Blue Beetle,” and “Ant-Man.”
Re eugenics and the mutant gene: I might be the only one, but I’m down for X-Ethics, a comic in which several mutant characters and assorted guests debate political policy and philosophy as they apply to the Krakoan era and beyond. There’s enough juice there for a 5 issue mini, but if sales are strong enough it could be upgraded to an ongoing.
@Mike – Actually, I don’t recall any of those other names you listed sounding particularly silly to me at any point. Not even when I first read them.
Mister Sinister comes off as someone trying really, really hard to seem scary. It’s right on par with Austin Powers’ “Dr. Evil”, but Dr. Evil was intentionally silly.
But I agree that we get used to names. I mean, a male character going by “Banshee” is akin to a male character going by “Vixen” or “Harpy”, but we’re all pretty used to Sean going by that name.
Yeah, “Banshee” for a male character is just stupid. Thanks, Stan Lee, for preventing the character from being a woman.
Maybe it’s just me, but I find many super-hero & -villain names stupid. A “Robin” is a small nonthreatening bird.“Psylocke” is a nonsense term (yes, I know about its origins, I still think it’s dumb). “Cable” being the name of a type of tv. I’ve always thought “Angel” sounds wimpy, even though “Archangel” sounds cool. I think “Green Lantern” is an ugly mouthful, and doesn’t makes sense unless you know about the power battery. I could go on…
@Mike – You know, the Banshee thing may or may not not have been Stan’s fault. Roy Thomas has actually given two entirely separate and conflicting accounts as to why Banshee was a male character.
I’m familiar with the version of the story you’re referring to. That was from an interview conducted with Thomas somewhere in the early ’00’s, I believe. He intended for Banshee to be a woman, but Stan felt readers wouldn’t be able to take a female villain seriously (or something like that).
But back in 1981, Thomas gave an interview to comics historian, Peter Sanderson, for a publication called “The X-Men Chronicles” by Fantagraphics Books (there were two volumes published, and if you can manage to get your hands on either of them from a flea market or something of the like, do yourself a favor and snag them.)
Anyway, in that interview, Thomas took the full blame for the Banshee thing. He said he always intended for the character to be a male and that he was envisioning a sort of leprechaun-type character (but not an actual leprechaun) and decided to call him Banshee even while being fully aware that banshees are supposed to be male. He framed it as something of a brain fart moment on his part. Stan’s name never even came up.
Obviously, those two explanations are irreconcilable, and I still don’t know which version of the story to believe. On one hand, back in 1981, the creation of the Banshee would have been much fresher in Thomas’s mind than it was in the early 00’s and on that view, it could be seen as a more reliable account.
On the other hand, I suppose it’s possible that back in 1981, for whatever reason, Thomas wasn’t willing to point a finger at Stan so he decided to take the rap for it instead and fed Sanderson a bullshit story.
Whoops. The passage in the fourth paragraph above should have read: “…banshees are supposed to be female” (not male, as written)
The vast majority of comic book names are pretty silly when you actually stop and think about them.
Same with Transformer names.
We just sort of roll with the idea that some people wake up and seriously want to be called Red Bee or Batman.
@The Other Michael – For sure. I think there’s degrees of silliness, though. I also think that our perception of the characters themselves might sometimes influence our reactions to their names. I mean the name “Batman” you’re absolutely right is inherently silly but… y’know, the character is cool, and knowing why he chose that particular name and motif makes the name just sound even more badass as opposed to silly.
But I hadn’t seen Mister Sinister yet when I first read his name, nor did I know the first thing about him. I suppose that had Claremont and Silvestri managed to present a truly terrifying character both visually and in terms of how he was written, then maybe I’d have been able to cut his name some slack. But the whole “Mysterious guy who evidently gets dressed in the dark” rollout of the character didn’t really do it for me.
I think the name “Mister Sinister” is on par with “Doctor Doom” for seriousness.
Conversely, I hate it now when a comic book movie has to take the time to make fun of someone’s name like Dr Octopus and the like.
@Moo: I’ve never heard the other possible origin of Banshee’s name (“brain fart”). I prefer the Stan Lee one, but either could be true.
@The Other Michael: Whoa, whoa, whoa! Transformer names are inherently silly? What about “Bumblebee?” Or “Rodimus Prime?” Or “Springer?” Or “Ramjet,” a jet that flies into things really hard?
OMG, you’re right.
To me, there are almost as many awesome Transformer names as there are stupid ones. Optimus Prime, Megatron, Shockwave, Soundwave, Ravage, Buzzsaw, Frenzy, Rumble, Prowl, Ironhide, Jetfire, Devestator, Skywarp, Omega Supreme…
Pipes…
I said “almost.”
The issue isn’t how silly the names sound out of context, but how they’re presented and delivered in context.
I’m not a wrestling fan, but wrestlers have really dumb names. However, all the wrestlers and announcers are also actors, and they deliver those names with precisely the right tone to pull the names off.
Marvel films are often cringy about this. Think of how long they went without giving Wanda a code name, and then had to come up with this really stupid coven backstory to justify calling her the Scarlet Witch.
“Slag” is the funniest Transformer name (if you’re British).
@The Other Michael: Whoa, whoa, whoa! Transformer names are inherently silly? What about “Bumblebee?” Or “Rodimus Prime?” Or “Springer?” Or “Ramjet,” a jet that flies into things really hard?
Those are mostly dumb names, but a ramjet is an actual type of jet engine used in a number of fighter planes and missiles.
I think the name “Mister Sinister” is on par with “Doctor Doom” for seriousness.
With “Doctor Doom,” at least, we get the fun hamminess of his third-person monologuing.
I think Doom and Sinister work because of what Josie calls “delivery”: the characters are written very much like the kinds of people who’d call themselves that, and they’re written for entertainment.
Conversely, I hate it now when a comic book movie has to take the time to make fun of someone’s name like Dr Octopus and the like.
That one was especially interesting, since the canonical explanation in the comics is that it was a name others gave him to make fun of him behind his back, well before he became a supervillain.
I still think “Green Goblin” is probably the worst name for a major villain I’ve seen. “Goblin” would be OK, if not terribly menacing or thematically appropriate for a spider-themed hero, but why a “green” goblin?
I think they pretty much had to make Norman Osborn a psychotic, since the name and motif fit very poorly with his original characterization as an unscrupulous businessman trying to build a secret life as a crimelord.
@Omar Karindu: I had no idea a ramjet is a real thing. All I know is the character in the cartoon turned into a jet, and tried to ram things.
The names “Green Goblin” and “Dr. Doom” might have played into Stan’s tendency to make names alliterative so he could remember them. I never thought “Green Goblin” was a goofy name because there are so many “Color Thing” names in super-hero fiction.
I don’t like most insect names because insects are tiny and we step on them. “Ant-Man” is dumb because an ant is a nuisance, not a force to be reckoned with(although I like “The Wasp” because wasps sting). Sure, they can become an infestation, and there are ant whose bite can hurt, but your average ant is not a threat.
You know, it just occurred to me that Bruce Wayne was rather fortunate that the incident with the bats happened to him as a child. If it were me trying to instill fear into criminals using what terrified me as a child, I’d be the vigilante known as “Auntie Maggie” and I’d have a hair-lip.
I’m loving all the Mr. Sinister talk.
Back in the late ’90s (maybe early ’00s) I had a letter printed in one of the X-books complaining that characters had lapsed into just calling him “Sinister” and they really should address him by his full name. I’m paraphrasing of course, but whoever answered letters at the time (probably an assistant editor) apologized and agreed that Mr. Sinister deserved more respect (or something like that). So you might be able to blame me for stopping Marvel from trying to make Mr. Sinister’s name sound a little less silly. Sorry about that!