Why I Just Dropped X-Force From My Pull List
Aug 28Over the past year, I’ve been nothing but unilaterally positive about the comics coming out of Marvel’s X-Office. “If you had told me that I’d be reading both X-Force and Cable and enjoying them a few years ago, I’d have laughed at you,” is a sentence I’ve uttered more than once. And while I’m still digging Uncanny and Cable quite a bit, I’m not the fan of Warren Ellis’s Astonishing X-Men that I should be and, while I love Mike Carey’s work, I hate Gambit, which makes me doubtful about whether or not I’ll stick with X-Men Legacy.
But what I really want to talk about right now is X-Force; my relationship with it is problematic. It’s a team made up of characters I like doing reprehensible things and, in doing so, painfully reminding me that character development is the largest, weightiest Sisyphan boulder in comics. It’s being written by a creative team that won me over after inheriting New X-Men from a team (Nunzio DeFilipis and Cristina Weir) that I was incredibly smitten with. The art by Mike Choi and Sonia Oback is phenomenal.
X-Force is, unarguably, the best written and best looking comic that features a sixteen year old girl being tortured with a chainsaw that is on stands today. That’s right, folks. X-23, the teenage girl clone of Wolverine, is being held captive and dismembered with a chainsaw.
Are you fucking kidding me?
For a book that is purportedly about a black ops X-Men team, the title has consistently been more invested in traumatizing X-23, a character that Yost and Kyle created. That’s downright fetishistic on a level that makes Chris Claremont’s obsession with Kitty Pryde/Storm/Psylocke seem tame and healthy.
Nerdly Advice, Part The First
Aug 25Welcome, true believers, to the first of what I’m hoping will be several thousand installments of Alert Nerd’s newest feature, Nerdly Advice. This week, I’ve got a pair of lurid queries that I’m going to boldly navigate, dispensing sage wisdom in my wake like a Pez dispenser that has wisdom in it instead of candy.
Tell Me About Your Character('s Problems) – Nerdly Advice
Aug 18Months and months ago, I threw out the idea of an advice column in Grok. It spun out of a conversation I had with a friend where I divulged that I was the hand that held the pen of my high school paper’s advice columnist, Henrietta Hawk (well, a hand that held the pen. Ms. Hawk was actually a small team of people). “OMG,” I was told, “you should write an advice column again.”
Depending on your particular preferences, you may choose to chortle, snort derisively or guffaw here.
In college, a good friend of mine who was involved heavily with the campus radio station coerced me into doing a call-in advice show with him – “Loveline except more funny and less helpful” may have been the way it was pitched to me. I grudgingly agreed to it, only to be saved in a perspicacious twist when said friend was thrown off the air.
Which leads me to this post. The idea I pitched to Grok is now going to make its way to Alert Nerd proper in a (semi)-regular fashion. In fact, starting next Tuesday, I hope to deliver the first installment of Nerdly Advice and continue weekly.
Why? Well I am, by nature, a meddler – mainly to distract me from my own dysfunctions. Indulge me.
What do I need from you? I need questions, quandaries, dark secrets and dilemmas. Except for “who would win in a fight between the Juggernaut and the Blob?” Anything from gaming to dating to home repair to scrapbooking to first aid to comic storage. But since it’s me answering and you asking, try to keep them as nerdy as possible.
For your convenience, you can leave your questions (or your friend’s questions or your friend’s friend’s questions) in the comments below, or you can drop me a line at nerdlyadvice@gmail.com.
Legion of 3 Worlds #5
Jul 23On the heels of our ruminating about Geoff Johns’s penchant for metafiction in big event comics, this week saw the release of Legion of 3 Worlds #5, a comic book in which Superboy Prime, who has always been shorthand for the DC fanboy (though Infinite Crisis made him a disgruntled fanboy railing against the current editorial direction of the publisher), is relegated back to Earth Prime, where he lives in his parents’ basement and makes angry posts on DC’s message boards.
If you are a comics fan who is active online, this doesn’t automatically mean that Geoff Johns is making fun of you. Is some fun being had at the hands of some of the fanbase? Clearly. But Superboy Prime is not every fan, he is the fan that feels entitled to have the story go his way because he is paying to read it. It is a position that this thread on Newsarama validates by throwing a tantrum about how dare the author mock me.
I understand being invested in the hobby. I have friends who work in the comics industry. I have been reading the things since I was a very little kid. I have made friendships and hooked up with girls and had engaging conversations with complete strangers because of my comic book geekiness. But I don’t have a damaging level of investment in entertainment – at least I think I don’t. When I’m confronted with something that I don’t like, I tend to not consume more of it and then rail at the creators because I haven’t enjoyed myself.
If you are this fan, or some fan like him, the advice I give you is this: Whatever story it is that you’re trying to superimpose onto Superman or Stingray or Cyberforce, whatever truth you want to impart to yourself via these characters, tell that story on your own. Make it your own thing and run with it, instead of waiting for someone else to do it for you and becoming petulant when they don’t. It is the ephemera of our geekiness that is important, not the artifacts of it.
In summary: you’re doing it wrong.
Jeff and Matt BS About Comics: Blackest Night #1
Jul 15Blackest Night #1 is in stores today. Ever since its announcement in 2007, we’ve watched the build up across the two main Green Lantern titles (and perhaps every other book writer Geoff Johns has handled). Was it even possible to meet expectations when you’ve had so long to build anticipation for a zombie superhero epic?
Matt and I try to figure out the answer. I dug it (though I have some reservations). He didn’t. This is how it went down, and it’s safe to assume there are major SPOILERS below the picture:
