Stuff We Like This Week: August 28 Edition
Aug 28
In an effort to combat our occasional…okay, okay, near-constant negativity, we give you a regular feature full of nothing but love — Stuff We Like This Week. Appearing every Friday, SWLTW will recap the things that have set our little nerdly hearts aflame within the past seven days.
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.
Stuff We Like This Week: August 21 Edition
Aug 21
In an effort to combat our occasional…okay, okay, near-constant negativity, we give you a regular feature full of nothing but love — Stuff We Like This Week. Appearing every Friday, SWLTW will recap the things that have set our little nerdly hearts aflame within the past seven days.
