So I totally plowed through Superior Spider-Man. It was really excellent. I've just kept going onto Amazing Spider-Man afterwards. I'll probably loop back and get the Agent Venom based on that recommendation. I may just keep going with Spidey until I get caught up. I also need to untangle where the hell I was at with Captain Marvel. I think I did the first two volumes of the DeConnick run.
Awesome! Yeah, I was totally blown away by Superior Spider-Man. It's such a great concept that's executed really, really well.
So I totally plowed through Superior Spider-Man. It was really excellent. I've just kept going onto Amazing Spider-Man afterwards. I'll probably loop back and get the Agent Venom based on that recommendation. I may just keep going with Spidey until I get caught up. I also need to untangle where the hell I was at with Captain Marvel. I think I did the first two volumes of the DeConnick run.
Awesome! Yeah, I was totally blown away by Superior Spider-Man. It's such a great concept that's executed really, really well.
It was a really great contrast and the whole arc is so good in that basically everything Octavius is doing is actually just setting up his downfall down the line. It did a great job of just exploring the themes of what makes you who you are and can someone ever really change even after wiping the slate clean? It also did a good job of raising the stakes for actual Peter, the whole time I was thinking "oh jesus this is going to fuck all of Peter's shit up." And the emotional payoff in that last issue when Octavius puts Parker back into the driver's seat was just...wow.
I guess I should also read all of the Miles Morales stuff but that will take...forever. I pretty religiously followed Ultimate Spider-Man (most of the ultimate universe for that matter) back in the day but got busy shortly after Cataclysm.
I second Spider-Verse. It was a fun read. I also enjoyed the Clone Conspiracy a bit. I bought the giant hard cover trade. I'd recommend that too.
Agent Venom was great (although I stopped before the last 8-10 issues) and I enjoyed Venom Space Knight as well.
I have maybe 4-5 volumes of Miles' Ultimate run and have yet to dig in after reading Ultimate Spidey YEARS ago.
Surprisingly, I do not subscribe to any Spidey comics. I don't know why. Maybe I just want to get trades of them. I know there is some Spider-geddon event coming this year, so I'm in for that I think. I'm not SUPER into the new Venom series, but lately it was pulling me back in, so we will see. I hated the Venomverse stuff. I thought it was just bleh and could've been a lot cooler. The Poisons are just...not interesting and very 90s by design.
Looking to pick up the Age of Apocalypse Omnibus but the damn thing is over $100 CAD. Would it be cheaper to try and hunt down the individual issues?
Do you really need to own them? I'm pretty sure the entire run is on Marvel Comics Unlimited and there's a deal now where the first month is like $0.02 or something ridiculous.
Looking to pick up the Age of Apocalypse Omnibus but the damn thing is over $100 CAD. Would it be cheaper to try and hunt down the individual issues?
Do you really need to own them? I'm pretty sure the entire run is on Marvel Comics Unlimited and there's a deal now where the first month is like $0.02 or something ridiculous.
Yeah I've got an active MU subscription, but I'm also trying to build a collection of 90s comics for nostalgia reasons.
Read the Red Goblin trade yesterday. Meh. I guess I'll spoiler stuff since it is more recent.
I do not care about Osborn's family at all. Yea, I jumped right into the arc with no knowledge, but when I hear Green Goblin and Carnage as one, I want to see cool shit. I feel like there wasn't enough crazy, cool fights/scenes. Maybe because I trucked through it I didn't appreciate it as much? Also, what in the hell. Flash dies from a quick zap from Green Goblin?! I didn't even know he died until the funeral. I feel like that is such a shitty sendoff of one of my favorite Venoms. Like, I am fine with him dying, just make it an obvious and more memorable death.
Red Goblin, Clone Conspiracy, and Spider-Verse. Any other more recent Spidey arcs I should check out? Spider-Island? I currently sub to everything that is Spider-Geddon, so I am in on that already. I have Superior Foes of Spider-Man on my wishlist.
House of X/Powers of X finished up, and most importantly it shipped on time, and used the same two artists for the "event" that were always solicited. And they were actually good artists, not this digital art tracing stuff that feels so lifeless. That's the first time this has happened in at least ten years, more like 20. (does Doomwar count as an event? That shipped on time with one artist).
But as for what Hickman's done, it's well written and intriguing and I'm onboard, but it doesn't feel original. It just feels like him refining previous ideas by previous writers and just having the clout to get the editors to guarantee or whatever to do two/three years of stories before it all has to be reset. Now that's not to say I'm not liking the stuff, I am, and I enjoy the twist with mutantkinds real enemy, but the X-Men have been shit for so, so long just to prop up the Avengers and Inhumans that I don't know how you're actually going to let the X-books integrate with the other series out there without screwing up Hickman's ultimate goal. And I have a strong feeling some of the text pages from the series are red herrings that lead in to other things. Spoilers/hopes for that below:
-the mutant who can control matter that Moira and Xavier talk about in the last issue, it's supposed to hint at Proteus and Xavier actually being his father, interesting, but I have a strong feeling Franklin Richards is going to be that mutant and there might be some small retcons (or big) with Moira possibly helping Franklin be a mutant or when Krakoa all goes south Hickman brings in the FF to try and tie all his big runs together. It's just that he's basically the only mutant who isn't on Krakoa and connecting Hickman's future Franklin to his Phalanx stuff in this series seems like an inevitability.
-the big Sinister rumor writing the Crazy Days and Nights type tidbits from a few issues back about the guy who is "best there is at what he does and the married woman with a kid," it wants to make it seem like it's Wolverine/Jean, which is just vomit inducing and I'll ramble about that later but I almost think that rumor is more about Gambit and Rogue's marriage. Gambit used to always steal that line from Wolverine back when he first showed up, and I think they adopted a kid in their recent Mr. and Mrs. X series? Although the whole make more mutants thing is creepy and cult like on top of resurrecting dead mutants (but hey, Synch is back!)
-I've seen rumors that Xavier is actually Sinister, which is why you never seen him without the helmet on, that's a nice out for Hickman at the end of the run to sort of placate this cult mentality among everyone with the memory backups Or maybe he's even a Brood, I sort of like that callback to when Cyclops was exposed as infected during the Claremont/Smith era. I also get a sense with the mind backups it's a way to have Xavier exert control over the more questioning characters, and reminds me a bit of Steven Seagle's 90's Alpha Flight where the team was constantly being brainwashed into compliance after every mission, a bit like Doll House was I guess, I never saw that TV show.
-And carrying on a bit from above, the Red King seems to all but be confirmed to be Kitty if the Marauders solicits are any indication, although a part of me wants it to be Cyclops in secret just because I have this longshot idea that Emma still has "Cyclops" in her mind from when he died in Death of X, this non-Xavier backup that she's redownloading into whatever Xavier has and because Cyclops apparently becomes defacto leader during wartime, it just seems like a lot of things are on the table far away from each other but Hickman's shown that like Morrison there's a lot more callbacks to continuity than you'd expect from pretty much a relaunch of the past 8 years.
-Finally, for the love of God, no more love triangle/rectangle with Jean/Logan/Emma/Scott. Ideally, yes, it should be Scott and Emma, but you do that and of course they'll have Logan pounce on Jean and it would just be this shitty wish fulfillment for Wolverine fans who already get everything with the Marty Stu of a character in the comics AND the films and it's like, come on. I'd be fine with Jean being with anyone but Wolverine, and there's always the out of it being clones of the real mutants (like the real characters never died and were just in pods below Krakoa so we're just seeing fakes of everyone), but just no more Logan/Jean stuff.
Now, I wouldn't mind seeing Scott and Jean get back together now that she's no longer on the path to godhood because of the Phoenix, that would actually be a nice thing to compare Scott's brief time with the force and Jean's near lifelong connection, how it warps people and if there still is love between them. And their reunited kiss I posted in the Awesome Moments thread really did make me smile for the first time in awhile reading an X-Men book, so yeah, let them get back together and be a lasting couple which is hard to find these days. I don't know, just rambling I guess, mutant island nation cults and their hedonistic ways kinda grind my gears.
Anyway, I'm going to be getting X-Men and Marauders out of the relaunch, and hopefully they don't just kill the linewide relaunch by glutting the shelves oh who am I kidding this is Marvel. But for the time being, good job Hickman, 8/10.
House of X/Powers of X finished up, and most importantly it shipped on time, and used the same two artists for the "event" that were always solicited. And they were actually good artists, not this digital art tracing stuff that feels so lifeless. That's the first time this has happened in at least ten years, more like 20. (does Doomwar count as an event? That shipped on time with one artist).
But as for what Hickman's done, it's well written and intriguing and I'm onboard, but it doesn't feel original. It just feels like him refining previous ideas by previous writers and just having the clout to get the editors to guarantee or whatever to do two/three years of stories before it all has to be reset. Now that's not to say I'm not liking the stuff, I am, and I enjoy the twist with mutantkinds real enemy, but the X-Men have been shit for so, so long just to prop up the Avengers and Inhumans that I don't know how you're actually going to let the X-books integrate with the other series out there without screwing up Hickman's ultimate goal. And I have a strong feeling some of the text pages from the series are red herrings that lead in to other things. Spoilers/hopes for that below:
-the mutant who can control matter that Moira and Xavier talk about in the last issue, it's supposed to hint at Proteus and Xavier actually being his father, interesting, but I have a strong feeling Franklin Richards is going to be that mutant and there might be some small retcons (or big) with Moira possibly helping Franklin be a mutant or when Krakoa all goes south Hickman brings in the FF to try and tie all his big runs together. It's just that he's basically the only mutant who isn't on Krakoa and connecting Hickman's future Franklin to his Phalanx stuff in this series seems like an inevitability.
-the big Sinister rumor writing the Crazy Days and Nights type tidbits from a few issues back about the guy who is "best there is at what he does and the married woman with a kid," it wants to make it seem like it's Wolverine/Jean, which is just vomit inducing and I'll ramble about that later but I almost think that rumor is more about Gambit and Rogue's marriage. Gambit used to always steal that line from Wolverine back when he first showed up, and I think they adopted a kid in their recent Mr. and Mrs. X series? Although the whole make more mutants thing is creepy and cult like on top of resurrecting dead mutants (but hey, Synch is back!)
-I've seen rumors that Xavier is actually Sinister, which is why you never seen him without the helmet on, that's a nice out for Hickman at the end of the run to sort of placate this cult mentality among everyone with the memory backups Or maybe he's even a Brood, I sort of like that callback to when Cyclops was exposed as infected during the Claremont/Smith era. I also get a sense with the mind backups it's a way to have Xavier exert control over the more questioning characters, and reminds me a bit of Steven Seagle's 90's Alpha Flight where the team was constantly being brainwashed into compliance after every mission, a bit like Doll House was I guess, I never saw that TV show.
-And carrying on a bit from above, the Red King seems to all but be confirmed to be Kitty if the Marauders solicits are any indication, although a part of me wants it to be Cyclops in secret just because I have this longshot idea that Emma still has "Cyclops" in her mind from when he died in Death of X, this non-Xavier backup that she's redownloading into whatever Xavier has and because Cyclops apparently becomes defacto leader during wartime, it just seems like a lot of things are on the table far away from each other but Hickman's shown that like Morrison there's a lot more callbacks to continuity than you'd expect from pretty much a relaunch of the past 8 years.
-Finally, for the love of God, no more love triangle/rectangle with Jean/Logan/Emma/Scott. Ideally, yes, it should be Scott and Emma, but you do that and of course they'll have Logan pounce on Jean and it would just be this shitty wish fulfillment for Wolverine fans who already get everything with the Marty Stu of a character in the comics AND the films and it's like, come on. I'd be fine with Jean being with anyone but Wolverine, and there's always the out of it being clones of the real mutants (like the real characters never died and were just in pods below Krakoa so we're just seeing fakes of everyone), but just no more Logan/Jean stuff.
Now, I wouldn't mind seeing Scott and Jean get back together now that she's no longer on the path to godhood because of the Phoenix, that would actually be a nice thing to compare Scott's brief time with the force and Jean's near lifelong connection, how it warps people and if there still is love between them. And their reunited kiss I posted in the Awesome Moments thread really did make me smile for the first time in awhile reading an X-Men book, so yeah, let them get back together and be a lasting couple which is hard to find these days. I don't know, just rambling I guess, mutant island nation cults and their hedonistic ways kinda grind my gears.
Anyway, I'm going to be getting X-Men and Marauders out of the relaunch, and hopefully they don't just kill the linewide relaunch by glutting the shelves oh who am I kidding this is Marvel. But for the time being, good job Hickman, 8/10.
It's going to be New Mutants and Excalibur for me (so we can pool resources)
My take on some of your points:
the mutant who can control matter that Moira and Xavier talk about in the last issue, it's supposed to hint at Proteus and Xavier actually being his father, interesting, but I have a strong feeling Franklin Richards is going to be that mutant and there might be some small retcons (or big) with Moira possibly helping Franklin be a mutant or when Krakoa all goes south Hickman brings in the FF to try and tie all his big runs together. It's just that he's basically the only mutant who isn't on Krakoa and connecting Hickman's future Franklin to his Phalanx stuff in this series seems like an inevitability.
I thought it was Moira working out that they needed a very powerful mutant for the resurrection process and figured out candidates for both Xavier and herself:
- Joe MacTaggert for herself (this is the only timeline where she had any contact with him and the only with Proteus)
- Gaby Haller for Xavier (unclear how much Xavier knows that this is planned or not).
-the big Sinister rumor writing the Crazy Days and Nights type tidbits from a few issues back about the guy who is "best there is at what he does and the married woman with a kid," it wants to make it seem like it's Wolverine/Jean, which is just vomit inducing and I'll ramble about that later but I almost think that rumor is more about Gambit and Rogue's marriage. Gambit used to always steal that line from Wolverine back when he first showed up, and I think they adopted a kid in their recent Mr. and Mrs. X series? Although the whole make more mutants thing is creepy and cult like on top of resurrecting dead mutants (but hey, Synch is back!)
Rogue and Gambit did not adopt a kid, it was the kid of Xavier and Lilandra and they protected her for a while, but she was being raised by Cerise IIRC.
Also really happy that Synch is back btw.
Married woman with a kid... Jean did not have a kid... maybe Maddie? Which would be an interesting twist, I think.
-I've seen rumors that Xavier is actually Sinister, which is why you never seen him without the helmet on, that's a nice out for Hickman at the end of the run to sort of placate this cult mentality among everyone with the memory backups Or maybe he's even a Brood, I sort of like that callback to when Cyclops was exposed as infected during the Claremont/Smith era. I also get a sense with the mind backups it's a way to have Xavier exert control over the more questioning characters, and reminds me a bit of Steven Seagle's 90's Alpha Flight where the team was constantly being brainwashed into compliance after every mission, a bit like Doll House was I guess, I never saw that TV show.
There are a lot of people there that are strong enough to prevent Xavier from controlling them though. Jean probably first and foremost. I'm fully buying that the mutant finally had enough.
X-Men #1 was good, usual Hickman setup issue, Cyclops is the cipher for the audience and essentially the long-time X-Men reader adapting to what has happened around him, although there's a bit of a redundancy with the villains (the Orchis leader is like a warped version of Scott being blind but made whole by science so that's why he's all posthumanity first), and a clear Black Swan type character from New Avengers is introduced right away for Hickman to play his big thunks off of. I really like Yu's art normally, but he doesn't seem as energetic here as he was on previous X-Men runs (the run sucked but I loved his 2nd Claremont run/Eve of Extinction issues). He needs action and you really don't get that here even in the action scenes because all the shots are either static Cyclops posing while blasting or Storm lightning bolt or Magneto already ripping something away. Plus there's just too much bulky characters in panels too small that just feel like wasting talent.
But anyway nuggets of story are dropped, you see that Cyclops basically has his own house on the Blue Area of the Moon that is where his team lives, and it seems like Vulcan is going to get the primary Hickman rehab spot as he's more likable here than anytime Brubaker wrote him.
I am still worried about a disgusting Jean/Wolverine relationship because they have lil' Cable call Jean mom and she seems all in on him being her kid (weird), which leads to that Sinister rumor, and I don't even know how that's actually Cable Cable, and you're shown a blueprint of the headquarters/home and everyone has their own rooms (weird) and Jean's room is right in between Cyclops and Wolverine's (ewwwwww). I mean there's just little to no sense of Scott and Jean being together not just here but in House of X too and it's just odd, like at best it comes across like a weird Sheldon and Blossom relationship from Big Bang Theory which you never want to be compared to.
There's still things I don't get about how Hickman is writing Cyclops, like the weird deference to Storm when he's the better leader or at most they're valid equals, as well as Cyclops now deferring to Magneto (who is Superman levels popular on Krakoa) which is the real odd thing which makes me wonder how deep the cult thing is running, but Hickman is often smart enough to not leave loose ends like this open without a purpose. Hopefully. Like really dude I've wanted to see what you can do with the character since Avengers and Secret Wars hit me with the razzle dazzle.
Ideally this first arc should have been double shipped so some questions can be answered considering how House of X was more setup than anticipated, and that really helped alleviate Hickman's Avengers run with the near weekly shipping between it and New Avengers, but Marauders is out next week at least. 7/10, and you do get more pages for the price bump that are mostly actual pages and not just blueprints or text pages.
Marauders #1 was better than X-Men I think because it's not trying to be as coy about the grand scheme of things. In movie terms, instead of trying to aim for 2001 Space Odyssey big thunks it's sticking with Pirates of the Carribbean 1 vibes. Essentially it's Kitty being unable to teleport to Krakoa via the portals (hence her broken nose) and sails there in a stolen yacht instead, and then because of feeling weird/unwanted on Krakoa proper she decides with her crew to go around and make sure the Krakoa portals in other countries are free from interference for mutants to use as they please since some countries are blocking them off.
There's some weird stuff like trying to make Kitty go by Kate now, which is just dumb, and I think the big reason Kitty can't use the portal is because on Krakoa she might find Moira's lair or maybe she'll be one of the X-Men to wonder how cultish this all feels, but I do appreciate the continued Emma/Kitty relationship and I like how Pyro, recently resurrected as a guinea pig for the whole revival system, doesn't want to be on the island because he feels used (and Lockheed being his fire starts is pretty clever). Storm feels like she might not be a permanent cast member but that'd be fine, as it seems like the book didn't have as much Emma as it should have. Art is fine, would have been nice to have Dauterman draw the inside but in terms of modern Marvel comics this at least looks consistent and passable with panels and layouts.
So a good read, feels like it has a real purpose compared to some of the other titles being launched, the B-movie fun fest compared to X-Men's oscar bait. 8/10.
The Wolverine/Jean/Cyclops stuff is maybe one of the best things they've done with that relationship (provided it's actually happening) and really isn't gross at all.
The Krakoan plants are now growing in Otherworld. Morgana le Fey sees them as a threat so all human mages that use otherworld magic are cut off from the magic until they get rid of the source. The mutants can't enter the gate, but Apocalypse figured out that it's leading to Otherworld and they need something from Otherworld to pass the gate (cue Betsy getting Brian).
Betsy and Kwannon are awkwardly avoiding each other. Nobody told Betsy that Jamie was back alive (guess they really needed a stand-in for Proteus if needed).
Also Apocalypse is now a sorcerer apparently (I guess Celestial Tech is Advanced Enough Technology to fit). He has a new name, but I can't type it here. The characters of it basically look like his belt.
Jubilee still has Shogo, so the death squads have been called off.
Goldballs uses the codename "Egg" now.
Otherworld/Camelot, the whole what's what and who rules is kinda messed up from what I know, but I guess there could have been multiple retcons and changes. No Roma/Merlyn/Saturnyne, just Morgana in charge.
Nice setup for the rest of the series. Mostly focused on Betsy finding her bearing again now she's her old self (like her new Captain Britain costume better than her old one) and on Apocalypse (or whatever he's calling himself now.
Short version of all the New X-Men titles, ranked best to worst (all in my opinion of course):
1. New Mutants: The (no longer really) kids go into space to get Cannonball and his family and show them Krakoa. It has the best art, characters have good interaction and it's just fun people having space adventures. Most of these know each other for years now and are very close. Chamber and Mondo take the roles of Magma and Warlock in the original line-up (assuming that Canonball appears later as a member), but they fit in with the team.
2. Excalibur: Glad to have the ... I don't want to say old, because that is blond/precognitive Betsy.. 80s X-Men Betsy Braddock (?) back again. War between the magic of Otherworlds and the mutants of Krakoa starts. Betsy in actual armour again is nice to see. I'm interested in Apocalypse new role. The rest of the cast did not do much yet, but I always liked the 80s Captain Britain mythos, so this ranked high for me.
3. Regular X-Men: It's a series of standalones and mostly setup so far. I'm liking what I read, but wonder if there is going to be more of a structure to it.
4. X-Force: Read it, but didn't like it. The whole
killing Xavier to introduce drama, while we just had a series that established that death no longer means anything to the X-Men, forcing writers to come up with different stakes, just feels so backwards.
It might go somewhere, but I won't be there for the rest of the trip.
5. Fallen Angels: Psylocke (now Kwannon, not Elisabeth Braddock) does not feel at home on Krakoa and grabs some other misfits (X-23 and young Cable) to stop some evil guy outside Krakoa. I gave it a browse, so might miss a lot, but it just felt needlessly dark and depressing. Laura had grown beyond this in her previous series.
Unranked: Marauders, did not manage to pick this up, but it seems like a high-ranking title from what I've seen/heard and my tastes. Kitty &co as pirates/...(what's the nautical version of the Underground Railroad?).
After X-Men #2 my expectations have been lowered. Outside of the tease Cyclops gives which feels like Hickman's being too cute ("for simplicity's sake I love a single person," just rip the band aid off and make it Emma and the world goes back to normal), the family relationship thing didn't click the way it should have and Kid Cable is annoying, and Hickman really needs to dial back the literal black/white character scheme with quasi death cult magic people he always introduces in his stories, this is the third series he's done it with (Avengers, East of West, X-Men, could make an argument he did it with FF too with the costumes and stuff), and it's becoming a schtick now. It's enjoyable but it doesn't feel like big plan HIckman, it's Hickman copying Hickman and getting by because 90% of everything at Marvel (and DC) is crap right now.
I'm hoping Marauders stays B-movie fun, and I might pick up New Mutants if it's going to be the book where people start wondering what the hell really is Krakoa, especially if Cannonball is all "dudes wtf I just wanna be with my family."
After both series feeling a bit of a lull with issue 2, X-Men and Marauders bounced back a bit with issue #3. X-Men was nice to see restrained bitchiness from Emma and Jean again, and Horticulture is an interesting side-side-enemy to introduce who will likely have some macguffin in Hickman's third act in a year or two.
It was a good issue but again, with Hickman a matter of consistency in issues is needed to make some of his big brain thunks work out, and he had that with F4/FF and Avengers, but now we're getting delays (X-Men #4 isn't even on the checklist at the end of the issue), and the flagship being the "game demo" method that's sort of being in place is gonna feel lost. And with the restablishment of Krakoa being a leech to mutants, I'm starting to wonder if Hickman has read One Piece because it's starting to feel like Krakoa/Xavier is very similar to Whole Cake Island and Big Mom (and that's kind of funny because One Piece feels at points like it's a mashup of a Final Fantasy game and Claremont's 20-year Uncanny run with how it's able to do whatever it wants because it was the #1 comic).
Marauders wasn't as big of a drop from #1 to #2, and #3 establishes something I only vaguely remember happening off panel years ago but it's again a nice play of using resurrections to buy leverage on people, mainly the villains. And I do like the little things like the US Krakoa portal being guarded to keep people away, and the humans having pro and anti-mutie cults, that's a nice throw away Morrison era thing to pepper into an issue. And Kitty not wanting to be called Kitty will still always be dumb please let someone on the team point that out and get meta please.
A few issues later, and I'm not digging X-Men anymore. It's seriously reaching cult levels that I expected someone to stand out in calling bullshit on, but with issue #7 we've got Kurt leaning into false idol territory which feels like shock value and the creepy Scarlet Witch story Exodus was telling the kids is even making me, someone who doesn't like Wanda or how Marvel rehabbed her in the laziest worthless way, feel it's going too far. And I don't read New Mutants so I don't know what's going on with Sam but with what happens in issue #7, of all the mutants he feels like he shouldn't really be buying what Krakoa is selling since he's been in space, especially when it comes to his sister. Stupid things like the hedonism/thruple teasing or foreshadowing is just white noise to the growing unease of the whole situation right now that I don't think Hickman has a real grasp of the Krakoa angle yet. He seems more invested in the tech/Nimrod angle which is his strength, and the other stuff is more what he's working around via editorial mandates for the whole line. Because right now I'm completely on Mystique's side in this whole thing.
What really turned me off is the Giant Size Jean Grey & Emma Frost issue, which wasted Dauterman's art to just copy the Morrison/Quitley silent issue from New X-Men. Hickman is Hickman. He's not Morrison, or Mike Carey, he has shown he has the talent to do his own thing, he doesn't need to be the cover band for other groups when he's already a platinum selling artist.
The best X-book right now is X-Men/Fantastic Four specifically because it's pointing out how messed the mutants have become, Sue is best mama bear, Dodson art, and adding Doom to the mix really works. Ben Grimm said it best in the first issue that after Genosha, maybe it's not the best idea to put all the mutants back on one island, his godson included.
Marauders is still good but I'm starting to reach the point where if I give up the main book, I might as well give it up too because it's still being too tied to the line.
On a plus side, 2020 Force Works #1 was good! I was down on Rosenburg after how poorly his Uncanny X-Men runt turned out to be, but here it's just too fast paced to get lost in padding. I'm not reading any of the current Iron Man stuff, as it just sounds dumb and rehashed, but Force Works being SHIELD assigned to take out rogue AI robots and Deathloks is a perfect setup for a small team, and unlike Omega Flight Rosenberg remembers Rhodey, Walker, and Bobbi were on a team together and the latter two have a solid history of interacting together:
Plus the art has a light touch of Pepe Laraz to it. Granted, they make Walker a bit more headstrong like he was in Avengers West Coast compared to how he grew in Thunderbolts by being a warden/leader, but they haven't just completely butchered him for the sake of making him the evil redneck who everyone one-ups. So this was a recommend, and at only three issues feels like it really can't screw the pooch. Hopefully.
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It was a really great contrast and the whole arc is so good in that basically everything Octavius is doing is actually just setting up his downfall down the line. It did a great job of just exploring the themes of what makes you who you are and can someone ever really change even after wiping the slate clean? It also did a good job of raising the stakes for actual Peter, the whole time I was thinking "oh jesus this is going to fuck all of Peter's shit up." And the emotional payoff in that last issue when Octavius puts Parker back into the driver's seat was just...wow.
I guess I should also read all of the Miles Morales stuff but that will take...forever. I pretty religiously followed Ultimate Spider-Man (most of the ultimate universe for that matter) back in the day but got busy shortly after Cataclysm.
Agent Venom was great (although I stopped before the last 8-10 issues) and I enjoyed Venom Space Knight as well.
I have maybe 4-5 volumes of Miles' Ultimate run and have yet to dig in after reading Ultimate Spidey YEARS ago.
Surprisingly, I do not subscribe to any Spidey comics. I don't know why. Maybe I just want to get trades of them. I know there is some Spider-geddon event coming this year, so I'm in for that I think. I'm not SUPER into the new Venom series, but lately it was pulling me back in, so we will see. I hated the Venomverse stuff. I thought it was just bleh and could've been a lot cooler. The Poisons are just...not interesting and very 90s by design.
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Yeah I've got an active MU subscription, but I'm also trying to build a collection of 90s comics for nostalgia reasons.
Do... Re... Mi... So... Fa.... Do... Re.... Do...
Forget it...
Red Goblin, Clone Conspiracy, and Spider-Verse. Any other more recent Spidey arcs I should check out? Spider-Island? I currently sub to everything that is Spider-Geddon, so I am in on that already. I have Superior Foes of Spider-Man on my wishlist.
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But as for what Hickman's done, it's well written and intriguing and I'm onboard, but it doesn't feel original. It just feels like him refining previous ideas by previous writers and just having the clout to get the editors to guarantee or whatever to do two/three years of stories before it all has to be reset. Now that's not to say I'm not liking the stuff, I am, and I enjoy the twist with mutantkinds real enemy, but the X-Men have been shit for so, so long just to prop up the Avengers and Inhumans that I don't know how you're actually going to let the X-books integrate with the other series out there without screwing up Hickman's ultimate goal. And I have a strong feeling some of the text pages from the series are red herrings that lead in to other things. Spoilers/hopes for that below:
-the mutant who can control matter that Moira and Xavier talk about in the last issue, it's supposed to hint at Proteus and Xavier actually being his father, interesting, but I have a strong feeling Franklin Richards is going to be that mutant and there might be some small retcons (or big) with Moira possibly helping Franklin be a mutant or when Krakoa all goes south Hickman brings in the FF to try and tie all his big runs together. It's just that he's basically the only mutant who isn't on Krakoa and connecting Hickman's future Franklin to his Phalanx stuff in this series seems like an inevitability.
-the big Sinister rumor writing the Crazy Days and Nights type tidbits from a few issues back about the guy who is "best there is at what he does and the married woman with a kid," it wants to make it seem like it's Wolverine/Jean, which is just vomit inducing and I'll ramble about that later but I almost think that rumor is more about Gambit and Rogue's marriage. Gambit used to always steal that line from Wolverine back when he first showed up, and I think they adopted a kid in their recent Mr. and Mrs. X series? Although the whole make more mutants thing is creepy and cult like on top of resurrecting dead mutants (but hey, Synch is back!)
-I've seen rumors that Xavier is actually Sinister, which is why you never seen him without the helmet on, that's a nice out for Hickman at the end of the run to sort of placate this cult mentality among everyone with the memory backups Or maybe he's even a Brood, I sort of like that callback to when Cyclops was exposed as infected during the Claremont/Smith era. I also get a sense with the mind backups it's a way to have Xavier exert control over the more questioning characters, and reminds me a bit of Steven Seagle's 90's Alpha Flight where the team was constantly being brainwashed into compliance after every mission, a bit like Doll House was I guess, I never saw that TV show.
-And carrying on a bit from above, the Red King seems to all but be confirmed to be Kitty if the Marauders solicits are any indication, although a part of me wants it to be Cyclops in secret just because I have this longshot idea that Emma still has "Cyclops" in her mind from when he died in Death of X, this non-Xavier backup that she's redownloading into whatever Xavier has and because Cyclops apparently becomes defacto leader during wartime, it just seems like a lot of things are on the table far away from each other but Hickman's shown that like Morrison there's a lot more callbacks to continuity than you'd expect from pretty much a relaunch of the past 8 years.
-Finally, for the love of God, no more love triangle/rectangle with Jean/Logan/Emma/Scott. Ideally, yes, it should be Scott and Emma, but you do that and of course they'll have Logan pounce on Jean and it would just be this shitty wish fulfillment for Wolverine fans who already get everything with the Marty Stu of a character in the comics AND the films and it's like, come on. I'd be fine with Jean being with anyone but Wolverine, and there's always the out of it being clones of the real mutants (like the real characters never died and were just in pods below Krakoa so we're just seeing fakes of everyone), but just no more Logan/Jean stuff.
Now, I wouldn't mind seeing Scott and Jean get back together now that she's no longer on the path to godhood because of the Phoenix, that would actually be a nice thing to compare Scott's brief time with the force and Jean's near lifelong connection, how it warps people and if there still is love between them. And their reunited kiss I posted in the Awesome Moments thread really did make me smile for the first time in awhile reading an X-Men book, so yeah, let them get back together and be a lasting couple which is hard to find these days. I don't know, just rambling I guess, mutant island nation cults and their hedonistic ways kinda grind my gears.
Anyway, I'm going to be getting X-Men and Marauders out of the relaunch, and hopefully they don't just kill the linewide relaunch by glutting the shelves oh who am I kidding this is Marvel. But for the time being, good job Hickman, 8/10.
It's going to be New Mutants and Excalibur for me (so we can pool resources)
My take on some of your points:
I thought it was Moira working out that they needed a very powerful mutant for the resurrection process and figured out candidates for both Xavier and herself:
- Joe MacTaggert for herself (this is the only timeline where she had any contact with him and the only with Proteus)
- Gaby Haller for Xavier (unclear how much Xavier knows that this is planned or not).
-the big Sinister rumor writing the Crazy Days and Nights type tidbits from a few issues back about the guy who is "best there is at what he does and the married woman with a kid," it wants to make it seem like it's Wolverine/Jean, which is just vomit inducing and I'll ramble about that later but I almost think that rumor is more about Gambit and Rogue's marriage. Gambit used to always steal that line from Wolverine back when he first showed up, and I think they adopted a kid in their recent Mr. and Mrs. X series? Although the whole make more mutants thing is creepy and cult like on top of resurrecting dead mutants (but hey, Synch is back!)
Rogue and Gambit did not adopt a kid, it was the kid of Xavier and Lilandra and they protected her for a while, but she was being raised by Cerise IIRC.
Also really happy that Synch is back btw.
Married woman with a kid... Jean did not have a kid... maybe Maddie? Which would be an interesting twist, I think.
-I've seen rumors that Xavier is actually Sinister, which is why you never seen him without the helmet on, that's a nice out for Hickman at the end of the run to sort of placate this cult mentality among everyone with the memory backups Or maybe he's even a Brood, I sort of like that callback to when Cyclops was exposed as infected during the Claremont/Smith era. I also get a sense with the mind backups it's a way to have Xavier exert control over the more questioning characters, and reminds me a bit of Steven Seagle's 90's Alpha Flight where the team was constantly being brainwashed into compliance after every mission, a bit like Doll House was I guess, I never saw that TV show.
There are a lot of people there that are strong enough to prevent Xavier from controlling them though. Jean probably first and foremost. I'm fully buying that the mutant finally had enough.
But anyway nuggets of story are dropped, you see that Cyclops basically has his own house on the Blue Area of the Moon that is where his team lives, and it seems like Vulcan is going to get the primary Hickman rehab spot as he's more likable here than anytime Brubaker wrote him.
I am still worried about a disgusting Jean/Wolverine relationship because they have lil' Cable call Jean mom and she seems all in on him being her kid (weird), which leads to that Sinister rumor, and I don't even know how that's actually Cable Cable, and you're shown a blueprint of the headquarters/home and everyone has their own rooms (weird) and Jean's room is right in between Cyclops and Wolverine's (ewwwwww). I mean there's just little to no sense of Scott and Jean being together not just here but in House of X too and it's just odd, like at best it comes across like a weird Sheldon and Blossom relationship from Big Bang Theory which you never want to be compared to.
There's still things I don't get about how Hickman is writing Cyclops, like the weird deference to Storm when he's the better leader or at most they're valid equals, as well as Cyclops now deferring to Magneto (who is Superman levels popular on Krakoa) which is the real odd thing which makes me wonder how deep the cult thing is running, but Hickman is often smart enough to not leave loose ends like this open without a purpose. Hopefully. Like really dude I've wanted to see what you can do with the character since Avengers and Secret Wars hit me with the razzle dazzle.
Ideally this first arc should have been double shipped so some questions can be answered considering how House of X was more setup than anticipated, and that really helped alleviate Hickman's Avengers run with the near weekly shipping between it and New Avengers, but Marauders is out next week at least. 7/10, and you do get more pages for the price bump that are mostly actual pages and not just blueprints or text pages.
There's some weird stuff like trying to make Kitty go by Kate now, which is just dumb, and I think the big reason Kitty can't use the portal is because on Krakoa she might find Moira's lair or maybe she'll be one of the X-Men to wonder how cultish this all feels, but I do appreciate the continued Emma/Kitty relationship and I like how Pyro, recently resurrected as a guinea pig for the whole revival system, doesn't want to be on the island because he feels used (and Lockheed being his fire starts is pretty clever). Storm feels like she might not be a permanent cast member but that'd be fine, as it seems like the book didn't have as much Emma as it should have. Art is fine, would have been nice to have Dauterman draw the inside but in terms of modern Marvel comics this at least looks consistent and passable with panels and layouts.
So a good read, feels like it has a real purpose compared to some of the other titles being launched, the B-movie fun fest compared to X-Men's oscar bait. 8/10.
Betsy and Kwannon are awkwardly avoiding each other. Nobody told Betsy that Jamie was back alive (guess they really needed a stand-in for Proteus if needed).
Also Apocalypse is now a sorcerer apparently (I guess Celestial Tech is Advanced Enough Technology to fit). He has a new name, but I can't type it here. The characters of it basically look like his belt.
Jubilee still has Shogo, so the death squads have been called off.
Goldballs uses the codename "Egg" now.
Otherworld/Camelot, the whole what's what and who rules is kinda messed up from what I know, but I guess there could have been multiple retcons and changes. No Roma/Merlyn/Saturnyne, just Morgana in charge.
Nice setup for the rest of the series. Mostly focused on Betsy finding her bearing again now she's her old self (like her new Captain Britain costume better than her old one) and on Apocalypse (or whatever he's calling himself now.
Cover has Rictor, but he's not in the comic.
1. New Mutants: The (no longer really) kids go into space to get Cannonball and his family and show them Krakoa. It has the best art, characters have good interaction and it's just fun people having space adventures. Most of these know each other for years now and are very close. Chamber and Mondo take the roles of Magma and Warlock in the original line-up (assuming that Canonball appears later as a member), but they fit in with the team.
2. Excalibur: Glad to have the ... I don't want to say old, because that is blond/precognitive Betsy.. 80s X-Men Betsy Braddock (?) back again. War between the magic of Otherworlds and the mutants of Krakoa starts. Betsy in actual armour again is nice to see. I'm interested in Apocalypse new role. The rest of the cast did not do much yet, but I always liked the 80s Captain Britain mythos, so this ranked high for me.
3. Regular X-Men: It's a series of standalones and mostly setup so far. I'm liking what I read, but wonder if there is going to be more of a structure to it.
4. X-Force: Read it, but didn't like it. The whole
5. Fallen Angels: Psylocke (now Kwannon, not Elisabeth Braddock) does not feel at home on Krakoa and grabs some other misfits (X-23 and young Cable) to stop some evil guy outside Krakoa. I gave it a browse, so might miss a lot, but it just felt needlessly dark and depressing. Laura had grown beyond this in her previous series.
Unranked: Marauders, did not manage to pick this up, but it seems like a high-ranking title from what I've seen/heard and my tastes. Kitty &co as pirates/...(what's the nautical version of the Underground Railroad?).
I'm hoping Marauders stays B-movie fun, and I might pick up New Mutants if it's going to be the book where people start wondering what the hell really is Krakoa, especially if Cannonball is all "dudes wtf I just wanna be with my family."
I dunno though, I am enjoying his x-men stuff so far (if only by comparison to the other recent x books)
It was a good issue but again, with Hickman a matter of consistency in issues is needed to make some of his big brain thunks work out, and he had that with F4/FF and Avengers, but now we're getting delays (X-Men #4 isn't even on the checklist at the end of the issue), and the flagship being the "game demo" method that's sort of being in place is gonna feel lost. And with the restablishment of Krakoa being a leech to mutants, I'm starting to wonder if Hickman has read One Piece because it's starting to feel like Krakoa/Xavier is very similar to Whole Cake Island and Big Mom (and that's kind of funny because One Piece feels at points like it's a mashup of a Final Fantasy game and Claremont's 20-year Uncanny run with how it's able to do whatever it wants because it was the #1 comic).
Marauders wasn't as big of a drop from #1 to #2, and #3 establishes something I only vaguely remember happening off panel years ago but it's again a nice play of using resurrections to buy leverage on people, mainly the villains. And I do like the little things like the US Krakoa portal being guarded to keep people away, and the humans having pro and anti-mutie cults, that's a nice throw away Morrison era thing to pepper into an issue. And Kitty not wanting to be called Kitty will still always be dumb please let someone on the team point that out and get meta please.
What really turned me off is the Giant Size Jean Grey & Emma Frost issue, which wasted Dauterman's art to just copy the Morrison/Quitley silent issue from New X-Men. Hickman is Hickman. He's not Morrison, or Mike Carey, he has shown he has the talent to do his own thing, he doesn't need to be the cover band for other groups when he's already a platinum selling artist.
The best X-book right now is X-Men/Fantastic Four specifically because it's pointing out how messed the mutants have become, Sue is best mama bear, Dodson art, and adding Doom to the mix really works. Ben Grimm said it best in the first issue that after Genosha, maybe it's not the best idea to put all the mutants back on one island, his godson included.
Marauders is still good but I'm starting to reach the point where if I give up the main book, I might as well give it up too because it's still being too tied to the line.
On a plus side, 2020 Force Works #1 was good! I was down on Rosenburg after how poorly his Uncanny X-Men runt turned out to be, but here it's just too fast paced to get lost in padding. I'm not reading any of the current Iron Man stuff, as it just sounds dumb and rehashed, but Force Works being SHIELD assigned to take out rogue AI robots and Deathloks is a perfect setup for a small team, and unlike Omega Flight Rosenberg remembers Rhodey, Walker, and Bobbi were on a team together and the latter two have a solid history of interacting together:
Plus the art has a light touch of Pepe Laraz to it. Granted, they make Walker a bit more headstrong like he was in Avengers West Coast compared to how he grew in Thunderbolts by being a warden/leader, but they haven't just completely butchered him for the sake of making him the evil redneck who everyone one-ups. So this was a recommend, and at only three issues feels like it really can't screw the pooch. Hopefully.