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rallamajoopIt’s been most of a year now since I made that ‘Why I’m Not Reading Generation Hope’ post. But despite all my best intentions of giving up the flagellation of deceased equines, Marvel have done a stellar job of positioning her to be very difficult to ignore. Watching what they’ve done with her since has been a gradual slide from frustration to resignation to a sort of trainwreck amused fascination with just how far the writers have gone to avoid delving into a single one of the few plot points that I would have found interesting.
Starting with Generation: Hope itself (which wrapped up ages ago, but which I never quite got around to bitching about before), a quick point-form rundown of major events and missed opportunities:
Because lord know there nothing that could exonerate a character of ongoing multiple mind-rape like portraying the first guy to call her on it as even more evil just to make her look good by comparison.
This brings us to X-Sanction, billed as a prelude to Avengers vs X-Men where Cable hunts down the Avengers one by one because he’s got it in his head that if he lets them live, they’re going to somehow prevent Hope from saving the world, leading to yet another apocalypse. I’ve talked already about the many and obvious fundamental problems with that premise, so it’s something of an achievement that the mini ultimately couldn’t live up to even that much. Later reveals over the course of X-Sanction proved that the whole premise was all a hoax; Cable never really wanted to kill the Avengers in the first place, just to capture them and interrogate them about what they want with Hope. The logical problems with this strategy are pretty mind-blowing even before you factor in that minor side issue where - even with a time-travel device at his fingertips - Cable has opted to stage this intervention before the Avengers had got so far as developing any interest in Hope or the slightest idea what he’s on about. Even ‘but my brain was being slowly eaten by my TO infection gone out of control’ is not much of an excuse for that sort of stupidity.
But it’s all alright in the end, because before he can be taken over completely, Hope touches him and instantly heals him of the TO virus altogether, restores his psychic powers and saves his life.
Yeah. I don’t think there’s anything I can add to that.
This combined with the rest of the Gen: Hope marks the point where I officially checked out. Staying invested in Hope’s plotline in the mad hope that someone might still turn this thing around was no longer worth the bother (and besides, One Piece was calling my name).
Which is kind of a shame, really, because for all its many flaws, there were a handful of plot points in AvX that did her more favours than anything in her own series. She calls Cyclops out, quite reasonably, on having kept quiet about her connection to the Phoenix (which everyone else in the universe already seems to know about except her). While all the other characters are busy having a slapfight over whose team is Marvel’s most marketable property, there’s a brief window where she stands out as the only person who’s managed to come up with a sensible plan. There’s even a scene later in the mini where her allies call in Spider-Man to give her a long-overdue lecture on power and responsibility. (I mean, Spider-Man! You couldn’t ask for a better authority on the subject than that!) But when all’s said and done, the best reaction I could summon came down to, “…yeah, call me when you’ve got Deadpool and Cable making out on page, because short of that? DON’T CARE ANYMORE.” From certain angles, that qualifies as several steps down from the worst of my seething frustration.
On which note, it’s time to talk about Avengers vs X-Men, and event announced just about the same time I was telling myself, “Wow, Schism actually wasn’t that bad! Maybe Marvel have been learning from all those mistakes they made back in Civil War!” (If anyone would like to take this opportunity to laugh at me, please do go ahead, I’ll be right here when you’re done.)
(Actually, if you really want an opportunity for a good laugh, then you should forget this post and go read Andrew Wheeler's AvX review series (The unofficial scorecard for Marvel's big summer publishing event), because they are made of solid gold. Wheeler takes on each issue in order, gets his snark on and awards points to either side based on judgement, major achievements, costume choices, and male cast members showing off nice abs or appealing butt-shots. Even if you don't agree with all of his conclusions, you'll definitely enjoy the ride.)
For those of you who were actually lucky enough to avoid it, the premise of AvX can be roughly summarised as: Marvel have realised that nothing sells comics like superheros fighting other superheros, and are now being run by an accountant. What? Oh all right. The premise of AvX is that the Phoenix Force is on its way to earth (again), for reasons involving Hope. The Avengers are worried that it’s going to destroy all life on earth, because the Phoenix is a force of destruction and they’ve already seen it wipe out a planet or two en route. The X-Men think it may be their chance to restart the mutant race, because the Phoenix is a force for rebirth, and c’mon, these are the same people that spent the last few years busting their arses to protect the one mutant girl born since M-Day for the same reason, so it’s pretty safe to say they’re primed to pounce on anything at this point. Naturally, this means they’re going to kill time until it gets there by punching each other.
All snark aside, I feel the majority of arguments I’ve seen on the web over whether the X-Men are obviously the resident Phoenix experts or whether the Avengers obviously voicing perfectly reasonable concerns have been missing the point. The Phoenix is one of the great literal Deus ex Machina of the Marvelverse, and there is no sense in trying to extrapolate its intentions from its previous appearances when the writers have always been willing to retcon, redefine and make shit up on the fly where powers like the Phoenix are concerned, dependent purely on what kind of story they’ve decided they want to tell today. The Avengers’ early attempts to stop it before it reaches the planet fail because obviously the damn thing’s got to reach earth or there’s no story. Iron Man’s Phoenix disrupter weapon does work, not because he’s learned from past mistakes, but because if the Phoenix had been allowed to bond with Hope that early in the mini, they’d have had to cut it short by eight issues. The disrupted Phoenix misses Hope and powers up the five mutants closest to her because… actually I’ll give them credit for that one – it may have been the one true surprise twist of the whole story.
The Phoenix Five proceed to go crazy evil and misuse their powers because… because… aha, no, I’m sorry, I can’t even come up with amusing commentary on this. Is there anything more inevitable in comics than characters going evil while high on ill-gotten absolute power? No, I really don’t think there is. Moving on. The Avengers realise they have to get the Phoenix back to Hope after all, because the joke’s on them, suckers! Hope finally defeats the last of the Phoenix Five in the final issue, gets Phoenix powers for herself and recreates the mutant race, because that’s what her whole damn storyline has been building up to all along. The end.
The real insult of the whole arc is how badly any of it hangs together. What we’ve got at the end of the day more or less amounts to yet another story with no villain; where the X-Men were right all along but because they and the Avengers couldn’t sit down and talk through their options like sensible adults, all both teams together could manage was to delay things and very nearly cause the end of the world into the bargain. Somewhere in the subtext, there appears to be the implication that without the training Hope received from the Avengers while the Phoenix Five were out doing their thing, she would have wound up just as corrupt as them, but you’ve kind of got to want to see it to know it’s there. The question of why the Phoenix Five didn’t just restart the bloody mutant race themselves had to be answered by the authors out on an Internet forum somewhere, because hell if it was addressed on page anywhere. And why was the Phoenix caught destroying whole other sentient species on its way to Earth? Eh, who cares.
Inconvenient details from the established status-quo preceding the mini were treated little better. The whole X-Men split from Schism is apparently forgotten somewhere in the mess, because as of the middle of AvX the two sides are working together again without a word of explanation. Same goes for why the Scarlet Witch is suddenly part of the Avengers again, despite her last appearance being in a comic which made a point of letting her know she wasn’t welcome. And that’s without even getting into the complete absence of logic fans have found while trying to track Wolverine’s assorted costume changes as he pops up in various tie-ins, or why Cap would decide that throwing him out of a plane over the Antarctic was a suitable way of winning an argument, or how Hope would have known he’d be there, or…
Meanwhile, in one of the many tie-ins, AvX did finally get around to answering that last big question hanging over the heads of the Five Lights since they first appeared, namely how and why they showed up at all. (Actually, going a level deeper, we’re yet to hear much explanation for why they’re being treated as mutants at all, when they attained their powers not from a mutant gene carried since birth but instead from some sort of dangerously unstable copy of that gene which appears to have been remotely spliced into their genetics by Hope after her own powers activated, and not stabilised until they’d knelt at her feet and sworn over their free will in exchange for their lives. Traditionally speaking, that’s not how mutants work.) The most charitable explanation for why such an obvious plot hook was being left to lie involved the big reveal being saved for the next big crossover event (AvX), because clearly if anything important happened between big events the suspense would dry up and the writers would run out of ideas overnight. (And they wonder why big events are the only thing that boosts sales anymore. Bleh.)
Getting back to the point, If That Guy In The Tank In Uncanny X-Men was to be believed, there’s intergalactic precedent for a race on the verge of extinction spontaneously generating a new messiah (Hope) capable of calling the Phoenix Force to their planet to give them the power to recreate their race. Prior to the Phoenix’s arrival, the original alien messiah first created five acolytes to aid them (the Five Lights), whose help was supposedly necessary to let them properly control the Phoenix. This, incidentally, seems to be why in the main AvX mini, when Hope was prevented from receiving the Phoenix herself, the five X-Men closest to her were powered up instead.
Naturally, for a plot point so obviously central to the whole concept of AvX, neither this story nor any member of the Five Lights ever got so much as a mention in the mini proper.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you: the best selling comic book event of the year!
As a final insult, when the mutant race is recreated at the conclusion of the story, the new mutant genes go not to the depowered mutants from before the original M-Day catastrophe, but to a completely random collection of other people around the world. Now, it is quite possible I’m taking a comic book event far too seriously in letting myself be offended by this, but inasfar as the whole defining idea behind the X-Men is structured as a metaphor for real-world minorities, shit like this just does not fly. Taking the most obvious analogous real group, can you imagine a story where every gay person in the world woke up straight one day, then a year later, a random bunch of straight people woke up gay? (Actually, in the right hands that could probably make an interesting piece of speculative social commentary, but it’s certainly no happy ending.)
Even taking Marvel’s own definitions, those people aren’t mutants. They weren’t born with the mutant gene; they’ve had it artificially spliced into their genomes by a known, external event. I’m pretty sure the official name for that used to be ‘mutate’. By those standards, Deadpool is as much a mutant as any of them. The ‘real’ mutants are the however-many-million ex-mutants out there in the Marvel universe, doubtless still struggling to put their lives back together after having a major part of their identities ripped away. It’s all built on some sort of sick idea that the survival of a minority group is important because it’s important that someone with those characteristics exists, rather than because every goddamn member of that minority group is a person with their own intrinsic value as a goddamn human being. You cannot just shift their identities onto another random bunch of people and say, ‘eh, same diff, right?’ To do so is to miss the entire point.
It’d be nice to say that with all that bullshit dealt with at least things are looking up for future, but the post-AvX Marvel NOW! line up doesn’t inspire much confidence. Daniel Way is finally off Deadpool’s solo title, but he’s still writing him in a team book (and lord knows how that will work, considering his stated preference for letting Deadpool talk to voices in his head rather than other people) so his influence will likely drag on for a while yet, and it’s a little soon to know whether the new guy will be much better. Meanwhile, the one ongoing title featuring Deadpool and written by an author who really gets him (Uncanny X-Force) is coming to an end with issue #38. And because Marvel are clearly just messing with me at this point, Cable is set to appear in an X-Force title in the near future… only not until Deadpool’s off the team, and the one author I trust to write him doesn’t have any projects lined up featuring either of them.
I think it’s safe to say this is a good time for me to check any remaining hope I had of either of my favourite Marvel characters appearing in any book worth reading in the foreseeable future and go invest in something else. :/ Which is sort of a shame, because I do still want to stay in the fandom at least long enough to take my remaining WIPs somewhere conclusion-y, but that’s never easy when canon won’t cooperate, and Homestuck, One Piece and Teen Wolf are all conspiring to be very distracting lately.
Ah well. Guess we’ll see.
But seriously, even if you read no other part of this post, you should go check out Andrew Wheeler's unofficial scorecard of Avengers vs X-Men reviews, because even if nothing else good has come out of the whole event, they alone would just about make it worthwhile.
Starting with Generation: Hope itself (which wrapped up ages ago, but which I never quite got around to bitching about before), a quick point-form rundown of major events and missed opportunities:
- Oya, the one member of the Five Lights who I thought had an interesting powerset is the first to leave the cast. She’s over in Wolverine and the X-Men now, a much better book.
- Perhaps psychically divining my core complaint from my original post, the writers begin to edge away from portraying Hope as a relatively normal, well-balanced teenager, completely at home in 20th century society. Hope’s new characterisation develops her into an incompetent borderline sociopath with a messiah complex and miserable leadership skills. For some incomprehensible reason, sales figures suggest this has done little to sell her to a disinterested readership.
- The trainwreck of a plot point that is Hope’s creepy mind-control powers continues to pile up. No longer limited herself to the odd subconscious nudge, Hope progresses to manipulating the Lights deliberately and openly, and, finally, right in front of the adult X-Men for little more reason than to prove a point. The X-Men respond to this nightmare developing under their noses by doing sweet fuck-all.
- As all this develops, I find myself reluctantly beginning to question whether I ought to give Zero, the team’s Akira-rip-off, a second chance. Hard as it is to get past his shamelessly derivative origins, at least he has a power that is visually interesting and unusual, and he is the first of the Lights to openly foment rebellion against Hope, which I am all in favour of.
- Naturally, Marvel reward my newfound affection for his character by revealing him to have been evil all along, granting Hope the opportunity to save the day by killing him.
- The Lights forgive her all her flaws and welcome her back with open arms after she apologises for dragging them all around by the solar plexus and explains that, like, it’s not like she can help it and, like, they’d all totally be dead if it wasn’t for her anyway!
- No really. You can’t make this shit up (unless Marvel is paying you to do so, evidently).
Because lord know there nothing that could exonerate a character of ongoing multiple mind-rape like portraying the first guy to call her on it as even more evil just to make her look good by comparison.
This brings us to X-Sanction, billed as a prelude to Avengers vs X-Men where Cable hunts down the Avengers one by one because he’s got it in his head that if he lets them live, they’re going to somehow prevent Hope from saving the world, leading to yet another apocalypse. I’ve talked already about the many and obvious fundamental problems with that premise, so it’s something of an achievement that the mini ultimately couldn’t live up to even that much. Later reveals over the course of X-Sanction proved that the whole premise was all a hoax; Cable never really wanted to kill the Avengers in the first place, just to capture them and interrogate them about what they want with Hope. The logical problems with this strategy are pretty mind-blowing even before you factor in that minor side issue where - even with a time-travel device at his fingertips - Cable has opted to stage this intervention before the Avengers had got so far as developing any interest in Hope or the slightest idea what he’s on about. Even ‘but my brain was being slowly eaten by my TO infection gone out of control’ is not much of an excuse for that sort of stupidity.
But it’s all alright in the end, because before he can be taken over completely, Hope touches him and instantly heals him of the TO virus altogether, restores his psychic powers and saves his life.
Yeah. I don’t think there’s anything I can add to that.
This combined with the rest of the Gen: Hope marks the point where I officially checked out. Staying invested in Hope’s plotline in the mad hope that someone might still turn this thing around was no longer worth the bother (and besides, One Piece was calling my name).
Which is kind of a shame, really, because for all its many flaws, there were a handful of plot points in AvX that did her more favours than anything in her own series. She calls Cyclops out, quite reasonably, on having kept quiet about her connection to the Phoenix (which everyone else in the universe already seems to know about except her). While all the other characters are busy having a slapfight over whose team is Marvel’s most marketable property, there’s a brief window where she stands out as the only person who’s managed to come up with a sensible plan. There’s even a scene later in the mini where her allies call in Spider-Man to give her a long-overdue lecture on power and responsibility. (I mean, Spider-Man! You couldn’t ask for a better authority on the subject than that!) But when all’s said and done, the best reaction I could summon came down to, “…yeah, call me when you’ve got Deadpool and Cable making out on page, because short of that? DON’T CARE ANYMORE.” From certain angles, that qualifies as several steps down from the worst of my seething frustration.
On which note, it’s time to talk about Avengers vs X-Men, and event announced just about the same time I was telling myself, “Wow, Schism actually wasn’t that bad! Maybe Marvel have been learning from all those mistakes they made back in Civil War!” (If anyone would like to take this opportunity to laugh at me, please do go ahead, I’ll be right here when you’re done.)
(Actually, if you really want an opportunity for a good laugh, then you should forget this post and go read Andrew Wheeler's AvX review series (The unofficial scorecard for Marvel's big summer publishing event), because they are made of solid gold. Wheeler takes on each issue in order, gets his snark on and awards points to either side based on judgement, major achievements, costume choices, and male cast members showing off nice abs or appealing butt-shots. Even if you don't agree with all of his conclusions, you'll definitely enjoy the ride.)
For those of you who were actually lucky enough to avoid it, the premise of AvX can be roughly summarised as: Marvel have realised that nothing sells comics like superheros fighting other superheros, and are now being run by an accountant. What? Oh all right. The premise of AvX is that the Phoenix Force is on its way to earth (again), for reasons involving Hope. The Avengers are worried that it’s going to destroy all life on earth, because the Phoenix is a force of destruction and they’ve already seen it wipe out a planet or two en route. The X-Men think it may be their chance to restart the mutant race, because the Phoenix is a force for rebirth, and c’mon, these are the same people that spent the last few years busting their arses to protect the one mutant girl born since M-Day for the same reason, so it’s pretty safe to say they’re primed to pounce on anything at this point. Naturally, this means they’re going to kill time until it gets there by punching each other.
All snark aside, I feel the majority of arguments I’ve seen on the web over whether the X-Men are obviously the resident Phoenix experts or whether the Avengers obviously voicing perfectly reasonable concerns have been missing the point. The Phoenix is one of the great literal Deus ex Machina of the Marvelverse, and there is no sense in trying to extrapolate its intentions from its previous appearances when the writers have always been willing to retcon, redefine and make shit up on the fly where powers like the Phoenix are concerned, dependent purely on what kind of story they’ve decided they want to tell today. The Avengers’ early attempts to stop it before it reaches the planet fail because obviously the damn thing’s got to reach earth or there’s no story. Iron Man’s Phoenix disrupter weapon does work, not because he’s learned from past mistakes, but because if the Phoenix had been allowed to bond with Hope that early in the mini, they’d have had to cut it short by eight issues. The disrupted Phoenix misses Hope and powers up the five mutants closest to her because… actually I’ll give them credit for that one – it may have been the one true surprise twist of the whole story.
The Phoenix Five proceed to go crazy evil and misuse their powers because… because… aha, no, I’m sorry, I can’t even come up with amusing commentary on this. Is there anything more inevitable in comics than characters going evil while high on ill-gotten absolute power? No, I really don’t think there is. Moving on. The Avengers realise they have to get the Phoenix back to Hope after all, because the joke’s on them, suckers! Hope finally defeats the last of the Phoenix Five in the final issue, gets Phoenix powers for herself and recreates the mutant race, because that’s what her whole damn storyline has been building up to all along. The end.
The real insult of the whole arc is how badly any of it hangs together. What we’ve got at the end of the day more or less amounts to yet another story with no villain; where the X-Men were right all along but because they and the Avengers couldn’t sit down and talk through their options like sensible adults, all both teams together could manage was to delay things and very nearly cause the end of the world into the bargain. Somewhere in the subtext, there appears to be the implication that without the training Hope received from the Avengers while the Phoenix Five were out doing their thing, she would have wound up just as corrupt as them, but you’ve kind of got to want to see it to know it’s there. The question of why the Phoenix Five didn’t just restart the bloody mutant race themselves had to be answered by the authors out on an Internet forum somewhere, because hell if it was addressed on page anywhere. And why was the Phoenix caught destroying whole other sentient species on its way to Earth? Eh, who cares.
Inconvenient details from the established status-quo preceding the mini were treated little better. The whole X-Men split from Schism is apparently forgotten somewhere in the mess, because as of the middle of AvX the two sides are working together again without a word of explanation. Same goes for why the Scarlet Witch is suddenly part of the Avengers again, despite her last appearance being in a comic which made a point of letting her know she wasn’t welcome. And that’s without even getting into the complete absence of logic fans have found while trying to track Wolverine’s assorted costume changes as he pops up in various tie-ins, or why Cap would decide that throwing him out of a plane over the Antarctic was a suitable way of winning an argument, or how Hope would have known he’d be there, or…
Meanwhile, in one of the many tie-ins, AvX did finally get around to answering that last big question hanging over the heads of the Five Lights since they first appeared, namely how and why they showed up at all. (Actually, going a level deeper, we’re yet to hear much explanation for why they’re being treated as mutants at all, when they attained their powers not from a mutant gene carried since birth but instead from some sort of dangerously unstable copy of that gene which appears to have been remotely spliced into their genetics by Hope after her own powers activated, and not stabilised until they’d knelt at her feet and sworn over their free will in exchange for their lives. Traditionally speaking, that’s not how mutants work.) The most charitable explanation for why such an obvious plot hook was being left to lie involved the big reveal being saved for the next big crossover event (AvX), because clearly if anything important happened between big events the suspense would dry up and the writers would run out of ideas overnight. (And they wonder why big events are the only thing that boosts sales anymore. Bleh.)
Getting back to the point, If That Guy In The Tank In Uncanny X-Men was to be believed, there’s intergalactic precedent for a race on the verge of extinction spontaneously generating a new messiah (Hope) capable of calling the Phoenix Force to their planet to give them the power to recreate their race. Prior to the Phoenix’s arrival, the original alien messiah first created five acolytes to aid them (the Five Lights), whose help was supposedly necessary to let them properly control the Phoenix. This, incidentally, seems to be why in the main AvX mini, when Hope was prevented from receiving the Phoenix herself, the five X-Men closest to her were powered up instead.
Naturally, for a plot point so obviously central to the whole concept of AvX, neither this story nor any member of the Five Lights ever got so much as a mention in the mini proper.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you: the best selling comic book event of the year!
As a final insult, when the mutant race is recreated at the conclusion of the story, the new mutant genes go not to the depowered mutants from before the original M-Day catastrophe, but to a completely random collection of other people around the world. Now, it is quite possible I’m taking a comic book event far too seriously in letting myself be offended by this, but inasfar as the whole defining idea behind the X-Men is structured as a metaphor for real-world minorities, shit like this just does not fly. Taking the most obvious analogous real group, can you imagine a story where every gay person in the world woke up straight one day, then a year later, a random bunch of straight people woke up gay? (Actually, in the right hands that could probably make an interesting piece of speculative social commentary, but it’s certainly no happy ending.)
Even taking Marvel’s own definitions, those people aren’t mutants. They weren’t born with the mutant gene; they’ve had it artificially spliced into their genomes by a known, external event. I’m pretty sure the official name for that used to be ‘mutate’. By those standards, Deadpool is as much a mutant as any of them. The ‘real’ mutants are the however-many-million ex-mutants out there in the Marvel universe, doubtless still struggling to put their lives back together after having a major part of their identities ripped away. It’s all built on some sort of sick idea that the survival of a minority group is important because it’s important that someone with those characteristics exists, rather than because every goddamn member of that minority group is a person with their own intrinsic value as a goddamn human being. You cannot just shift their identities onto another random bunch of people and say, ‘eh, same diff, right?’ To do so is to miss the entire point.
It’d be nice to say that with all that bullshit dealt with at least things are looking up for future, but the post-AvX Marvel NOW! line up doesn’t inspire much confidence. Daniel Way is finally off Deadpool’s solo title, but he’s still writing him in a team book (and lord knows how that will work, considering his stated preference for letting Deadpool talk to voices in his head rather than other people) so his influence will likely drag on for a while yet, and it’s a little soon to know whether the new guy will be much better. Meanwhile, the one ongoing title featuring Deadpool and written by an author who really gets him (Uncanny X-Force) is coming to an end with issue #38. And because Marvel are clearly just messing with me at this point, Cable is set to appear in an X-Force title in the near future… only not until Deadpool’s off the team, and the one author I trust to write him doesn’t have any projects lined up featuring either of them.
I think it’s safe to say this is a good time for me to check any remaining hope I had of either of my favourite Marvel characters appearing in any book worth reading in the foreseeable future and go invest in something else. :/ Which is sort of a shame, because I do still want to stay in the fandom at least long enough to take my remaining WIPs somewhere conclusion-y, but that’s never easy when canon won’t cooperate, and Homestuck, One Piece and Teen Wolf are all conspiring to be very distracting lately.
Ah well. Guess we’ll see.
But seriously, even if you read no other part of this post, you should go check out Andrew Wheeler's unofficial scorecard of Avengers vs X-Men reviews, because even if nothing else good has come out of the whole event, they alone would just about make it worthwhile.
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no subject
Date: 2012-10-20 04:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-21 02:05 am (UTC)At least now the whole M-day thing is finally over and Marvel have got to have noticed she's not exactly popular with the readers, she'll hopefully be allowed to fade back into obscurity for a while.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-21 02:06 am (UTC)Cable is set to appear in an X-Force title in the near future… only not until Deadpool’s off the team
No hope for a new Cable/Deadpool title then?? *hearthurts*
no subject
Date: 2012-10-21 07:05 am (UTC)No hope for a new Cable/Deadpool title then?? *hearthurts*
Basically zero, as far as I can see. On the upside, at least they won't be able to screw it up like they did those two Deadpool & Cable issues (the first was okay, despite suffering from all the worst damage Way has done poor Wade; for the the second I could not even get past the preview pages). But I'd be a lot less disappointed if Uncanny X-Force hadn't gone and got my hopes up that there was at least one writer at Marvel who I'd trust to do a new C&DP team-up some sort of justice (Remender really does write a wonderful Deadpool). Naturally, Cable's only appearing in a new X-Force title once both Deadpool and Rick Remender are no longer involved with that team. *throws up hands*
Frankly though, even Deadpool's fared better than Cable has lately. C&DP was pretty close to being the one light spot in the whole history of his characterisation, but now they're doing their level best to forget it ever happened.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-21 03:56 pm (UTC)I haven't picked up Uncanny X-Force (that Civil War/Hope/other mega thing put me off Marvel a bit) but I may have to if DP is actually DP.
C&DP was pretty close to being the one light spot in the whole history of his characterisation, but now they're doing their level best to forget it ever happened. <-- Completely mindboggling. I think I heard that C&DP weren't the best selling title out there but they had a pretty devoted few following them which should count for something. Maybe one day a fan will infiltrate Marvel and write loads of C/DP titles with lots of slashy subtext *is a dreamer*
Isn't Marvel doing a DC and starting over again??
no subject
Date: 2012-10-21 04:37 pm (UTC)Yup. Pretty much the truth. But it sold just enough comics in its early days that they still seem to think it's a winning formula. Ugh.
I haven't picked up Uncanny X-Force (that Civil War/Hope/other mega thing put me off Marvel a bit) but I may have to if DP is actually DP.
I really would recommend it! It does take a few issues for the writer to get the hang of his Deadpool voice (he cracks some terrible one liners in the first couple of issues), and it still makes me a little sad that no-one else on the team really seems to like Deadpool at all, but once he gets it down he gets his character voice just about perfect. No white boxes in sight! (I can only dream he might be allowed to take over writing for Deadpool someday.)
Completely mindboggling. I think I heard that C&DP weren't the best selling title out there but they had a pretty devoted few following them which should count for something.
I don't know, it seems Marvel are just way too fond of playing Cable as the mysterious, uncommunicative arsehole loner character. That's pretty much the whole reason why they destroyed Providence and yanked him out of Cable&Deadpool to send running around with Hope in the first place. Which is a crying shame when Nicieza did such a good job making the events of C&DP into what felt like the perfectly natural next step for him as a character. All anyone else has done with him since is regress him back to his worst old habits and fall back on a lot of waffling about prophesy that they basically just made up on the spot. They seem to be way happier leaning on that to sell books than trying to recapture the C&DP market, unfortunately.
From what I've heard, C&DP was never a particularly high selling book, but its numbers were remarkably consistent, which is almost more valuable the way the market works these days (with all titles constantly in a neverending downward slide, only ever propped up by crossover events and relaunches. Knowing this explains far too much about the way Marvel run things lately.)
Maybe one day a fan will infiltrate Marvel and write loads of C/DP titles with lots of slashy subtext *is a dreamer*
don't look at me they're still not returning my callsIsn't Marvel doing a DC and starting over again??
Nah, nothing that drastic. They're just shuffling some creative teams, launching a few new titles, and renumbering some other ones to start from #1 again. And they're trying to make it sound like a big deal to get them new readers. They do the same thing every year.
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Date: 2012-10-21 05:41 pm (UTC)I don't know, it seems Marvel are just way too fond of playing Cable as the mysterious, uncommunicative arsehole loner character. Isn't that the whole point of having Wolverine around?? One almighty jackarse is good enough >:|
I think F.N is just one of those rare creatures that actually care for the characters they write for. I was so thrilled when he did a stint writing Action Comics; there was a lot of squealing going on.
Maybe they should have an overhaul of the people in charge instead of dicking with beloved characters. That would probably bring a few readers in.
don't look at me they're still not returning my callsLOLMaybe if DC had done the same (just some reshuffling) people would be happier. A lot of really great characters got thrown to the way side and a few great titles (Superman/Batman) seem to be floating in the ether. It's also extremely confusing trying to follow about 5 different Batman titles that are all set at different points in his life :/
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Date: 2012-10-22 06:33 am (UTC)X-Force is an incredibly serious business sort of team though, and they seem to have hired Deadpool for his willingness to commit murder and value as an advance scout who's more or less indestructible no matter how much trouble he gets himself into. Not for his sense of humour. Wolverine's leading the team - he's go no trouble taking things seriously.
Isn't that the whole point of having Wolverine around?? One almighty jackarse is good enough >:|
Oh hell no. Wolverine doesn't do mysterious, he gave up being a loner around the time he wound up on every Marvel team at once, and he has about as much patience with mystical future predestination time travel mumbo-jumbo as the rest of us. Heck, he's happily running a school full of kids right now. Wolverine is a positively lovely guy compared to the role Marvel want Cable to play for them. (And on a tangent, do you realise you've just compared Wolverine to both Deadpool and Cable here? XD They're all completely different characters, I swear!)
I think F.N is just one of those rare creatures that actually care for the characters they write for.
Ha, well, he did create Deadpool, and he wrote for Cable through most of his formative years, so it's only reasonable he'd be more attached to the both of them than most other writers (and would actually know their bleeding backstories, unlike some people). What I really respect about his approach to C&DP personally is how much respect he paid to what other people had done with them since he wrote for them last. Like working in Agency X (from Deadpool's last series), and how he approached Cable from the perspective of saying, okay, so he's achieved his life goal (defeating Apocalypse), recently got himself a huge power up and been left kind of casting around trying to figure out what to do with himself - where does he go from there? No retcons, no rewriting-his-goal-to-not-be-so-complete-after-all, he actually let the character move on. I'm still bitter about Marvel letting all that go to waste. :/
When did he write for Action Comics, out of curiousity?
Maybe if DC had done the same (just some reshuffling) people would be happier.
Oh, they've tried that before - Marvel's not the only culprit there. DC was trying for something even bigger.
If you want a real insight into what's going on behind the DC reboot, I'd recommend going back through a few years of the sales charts analysis over at Comics Beat (http://comicsbeat.com/category/sales-charts/) - they paint a very illuminating picture. Western Comic sales have been in a serious decline for years now - I was quite serious when I mentioned that renumbering stunts or huge crossover events are about the only thing that increases sales anymore.* The rest of the time, everything settles back into a gradual (or not-so-gradual) decline. Even events don't boost sales as much or for as long as they used to (whadya know, looks like 'event fatigue' is a real thing for readers). DC's relaunch was self-evidently a desperation move to try and get themselves enough publicity to draw in new readers, but it was handled so badly that results were somewhat mixed. Even the writers don't seem to know how much has been reset and how much of the old status quo still applies half the time, let alone the poor audience trying to keep track of it all. DC did succeed in boosting the sales of most of their most recognisable titles (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, etc) and spin-off characters (this is why there are 5 different bat-titles - they sell). On the other hand, everything surrounding lesser known characters isn't attracting much audience at all anymore. Hence why they've already cancelled so many of the 'New 52' titles.
*Of course, there are still a handful of titles out there which do consistently well based solely on having a good writer at the helm with a firm grasp of how to keep their audience's attention. Unfortunately, this sort of thing only seems to confuse the people making the long-term decisions.
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Date: 2012-10-22 01:38 pm (UTC)Wolverine/Cable: I guess Wolvies arseiness comes from being abrasive (from what I've read in the comics I've seen him in) and he can be somewhat of a nice guy too so...yeah, considering the way you've described Cable it was the wrong comparison :P
X-Force isn't a more traditional superhero team then? :P
No retcons, no rewriting-his-goal-to-not-be-so-complete-after-all, he actually let the character move on. <-- I think this is what seperates the ok writers from the great ones; you see it all over, writers incapable of letting their characters develop in any sort of natural manner. Instead they keep them as they are and in the end that inability to progress actually becomes apart of the characterisation instead of a fault with the writers.
Totally not a dig at Smallville.When did he write for Action Comics, out of curiousity? It must have been a few years ago now, back when everything was a 'One Year Later' storyline; he and Busiek co-wrote Back in Action. He and Busiek worked briefly on Superman too, I believe and quite a few other DC titles.
DC's relaunch was self-evidently a desperation move to try and get themselves enough publicity to draw in new readers, but it was handled so badly that results were somewhat mixed. It probably didn't occur to them that while yes, they do need new readers they also need to keep the ones they've got :/
I never really understood how events like Crisis could bring in new blood. I got into comics because of Smallville and was muddling along trying to catch up with years worth of material when all of a sudden this big crossover interwove all the titles making it so you couldn't understand what was going on with Superman at that point unless you'd read a certain issue of Blue Beetle only to discover you'd need to read another title to have any vague idea of what was going on. As someone with little money (who lives in England where the local comic shop was always at least a month behind) it was extremely difficult so in the end I gave up. It wasn't inviting at all.
I can't comment on the decline in readership but I can sort of get why it would lead to a desperate bid to boost sales. However, seeing as (as you pointed out to me) there have been consistencies in certain areas that the PTB either skip over or ignore it's hard to feel any form of sympathy for what comes off feeling like a half arsed effort. Maybe they should turn all the characters into vampires and make them sparkle, that might bring people in X|
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Date: 2012-10-23 03:21 am (UTC)Oh, they don't in and of themselves. Big events are a way to force people who were already reading one title to start buying several others as well just to be able to follow what's going on. There's also the fact they're marketed as 'the events that matter' or 'the event that will redefine the [Marvel/DC] universe' in attempt to generate extra interest. And they do bring in huge sales boosts - at least in the short term.
The flip-side of the problem - as you point out - is that they're also nearly impossible for a casual reader to make sense of, and that does harm the product in ways that I don't think the PTB fully allow for. In addition, marketing these major crossover events as 'the events that matter!' or 'if you buy only one comic this year make it this one!' is that people will eventually believe you, leaving you with an audience who now only buy big events and nothing else. So the publishers start producing even more big events... and you can see how the problem snowballs.
The original Crisis event back in the 80's was used as a hard-reboot point to let authors ditch the last 50 or so years of gnarled continuity (and trust me, when some of these titles had been running since the 1930's, there was merit to this idea) and start fresh, creating a point where new readers could start from scratch without needing to worry about trying to get into a story mid-stream. In theory, DC's recent reboot was supposed to do the same thing. Only that's not so easy anymore, because DC's best selling titles before the reboot were some of the ones that were dependent on the last ten years of canon - Batman had recently introduced a new Robin (and had four more previous Robins and three Batgirls running around), Green Lantern had spent years introducing Lantern Corps of other colours, etc. DC didn't want to mess with their winning formula on those titles, so they didn't. But they still wanted to reboot properties like Superman, which weren't doing so well. And they never quite made up their minds about whether they were ready to retcon away their last few big (incomprehensible) events either. The result? Continuity is more of a mess than it's ever been before. No wonder they couldn't bring in any new readers.
Sad to say it, but most tricks publishers use these days to sell more comics revolve around trying to sell more comics to the few fans they've still got, which is why they're so big on crossover events, special collecters' editions and ramping up the publishing schedule. Anything that works will be duplicated as many times as they can get away with, which is why there are now half a dozen different books out there with 'Avengers' or 'Batman' on the cover. Anything that doesn't generally gets cancelled fairly quickly. Trouble is, none of this is good for generating long term interest.
Honestly, if you want to get right to the root of the problem, it's largely a cost vs competition issue. The so-called 'golden age' of comics was back around the 1940s, before we had TV or video games or the Internet to compete for people's attention. Making that worse, comics have only gotten more expensive over the years as print quality has gotten prettier. These days, they're asking people to spend a lot of money for a few pages of story a month, when people could just as easily go to their TVs or computers for free entertainment. Which is a shame, really, because comics as a medium have a lot going for them, and I think there's a lot to recommend the sprawling, interconnected superhero universes of Marvel and DC. But they seem to be constantly in panic-mode these days, and the decisions they're making make a lot more short term sense than they do long term.
Sorry for all the tl;dr here, obviously this is a subject I have a lot of interest in.
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Date: 2012-10-25 12:00 am (UTC)Sorry for all the tl;dr here, obviously this is a subject I have a lot of interest in. LOL rather obvious indeed, it's also obvious that you have a great amount of care/passion for the industry so thank you for taking the time to share it with me :)
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Date: 2012-10-21 09:14 am (UTC)Can you suggest what might be worth jumping back into? Because honestly Marvel and their never ending stupid events and just making crap up (to hell with cannon and History!) is what killed my love and interest in comics in the first place.
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Date: 2012-10-21 10:37 am (UTC)Can you suggest what might be worth jumping back into?
Well, obviously everyone's mileage is going to vary (never got into X-Factor myself, though I've enjoyed a lot of Peter David's earlier work), but I can let you know what I've enjoyed over the last few years since getting into Marvel myself. I don't have much that's ongoing to recommend - not when just about everything is about to get relaunched under this Marvel NOW! thing coming up - but I'd be happy to write up some recs of various stuff that's finished or finishing already.
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Date: 2012-10-22 03:42 am (UTC)So true. And yet it seems that is all Marvel and DC want to do. Then retcon everything again every 5 to 10 years.
'but I'd be happy to write up some recs of various stuff that's finished or finishing already.'
Thanks, any help would be appreciated. I don't know what dragged be back to comics but I am so nervous about restarting. I loved these characters, and it was hard to leave them behind the first time.
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Date: 2012-10-23 04:06 am (UTC)