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The Drunken Odyssey

Tag Archives: X-Men

Heroes Never Rust #40: All Will Be Well

07 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Comic Books, Heroes Never Rust

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Grant Morrison, X-Men

Heroes Never Rust #40 by Sean Ironman

All Will Be Well

The riot portion of the “Riot at Xavier’s” storyline has yet to begin. New X-Men #136 ends with Quentin Quire shouting “Riot!” into a bullhorn on Open Day, a day Xavier invited humans to the school. A sort-of Open House. But, except for the bookends, Quentin is absent from the main action of this issue. The middle section focuses on Xorn’s special class at Xavier’s school dealing with an attack from the U-Men while on a camping trip.

New_X-Men_Vol_1_136_Textless

The U-Men (and I know most of you have never heard of them) are my favorite “villain” from Grant Morrison’s run on New X-Men. In X-Men comics, there are a few types of villains: other mutants, aliens, supernatural monsters, robots, and humans. Humans tend to be my favorite and hit me the hardest. Usually, humans are fighting against the X-Men out of fear—fear of becoming extinct, fear of not being the pinnacle of evolution. Humans fight against the X-Men because they can’t fight against nature. All of the X-Men could be killed and it wouldn’t matter. Eventually, humanity will die out and homo superior will remain. But the U-Men are a little different.

The U-Men are humans who wear suits that make them look like astronaut garbage men. They think of being a U-Man as a religion and can’t touch the air until the world has been made perfect. They don’t hate mutants, but they kill them. They, also, don’t care much for humans. As one says on the first page of #136, “For today is the day of the Recycled Man! The third species eternal!” The U-Men are humans who kill mutants and surgically attach mutant body parts to themselves. For example, if a mutant has wings, a U-Man will kill that mutant, cut his or her wings off, and then attach those wings to their own back. The issue opens with one U-Man’s funeral, having died of blood poisoning “when his mutant lung grafts went rotten after a week of agonized waiting.” And what does the U-Man who leads the funeral ceremony say—“Bob wasn’t pure enough to bear his transplants…but we are.” God, I love them. They are so insane, but still understandable. They are humans desperately trying to hold onto some kind of future. Nature didn’t grant them mutant powers, so they’re trying to sneak past the velvet rope into the club by gluing body parts onto themselves, body parts that may kill them. It’s half horror film and half comedy. If I ever get to write anything with the X-Men, I’m bringing back the U-Men. They’re a wonderful twist on the humans hating mutants trope.

The U-Men attack the Special Class, hoping to have more mutant body parts. The Special Class should get its own TV series. Basilisk has some of the best lines:

  • “So, Mister Xorn…I definitely saw you sneaking a peek at No-Girls (A girl with no body) sexy fat butt just a moment previous.”
  • “But we’re supposed to be losers. That’s the point of us.”
  • “I never saw a human fart die in front of me before.”
  • “I got no money. All I got’s a seizure in my brain—sets off a flash that freezes ‘em like roadkill in the lights.”

Xmen basilisk

Xorn leaves the Special Class to fight off the U-Men. I won’t ruin the mystery of Xorn for those who haven’t read ­New X-Men, but this issue is so much better knowing the mystery. His scenes walk this line between sweet and scary. He genuinely wants the Special Class to gain confidence and become a community. “Sometimes the teacher must leave to make room for learning. Beak dreamed of respect. Ernst could find no one to be responsible for. Basilisk had no focus for his energy.” Angel goes off to find Xorn and finds him standing before a burning U-Man van and dead U-Men smashed on the ground. He turns with a finger over his mouth. “This will be our secret. All will be well.” It’s amazingly creepy.

The U-Men are defeated, of course. The Special Class has become a group of friends. Xorn has succeeded. When Quentin takes Professor X hostage at the end and says “Your ‘dream’ has failed the mutant race at every turn, Professor. Humans can’t be reason with,” it’s difficult to argue with him. Humans went from wanting to kill all mutants to wanting to be mutants. They can’t seem to learn just to let mutants live in peace. Maybe the Special Class can become the next generation of X-Men, and show Quentin what’s possible. I doubt it. But at least that would be more interesting than bringing the original X-Men from the past to the present day. But Marvel would never do something like that.

Never.

___________

Sean Ironman

Sean Ironman is an MFA candidate at the University of Central Florida, where he also serves as Managing Editor of The Florida Review and as President of the Graduate Writers’ Association. His art has appeared online at River Teeth. His writing can be read in Breakers: An Anthology of Comics and Redivider.

 

Like a Geek God #19: Beside the Point of Origin

16 Sunday Mar 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Film, Like a Geek God

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Like a Geek God, Mark Pursell, origin stories, X-Men

Like a Geek God #19 by Mark Pursell

Beside the Point of Origin

 Origin stories need to die a slow, painful, fiery death.

But first, a history lesson.

xmen

The modern era of superhero cinema began in 2000 with a long-awaited celluloid re-imagining of the X-Men franchise.  This should have been a portent of great things to come: Bryan Singer’s foray into comic book action brimmed with mood, tension, and a fair approximation of the franchise’s psychological complexity (Halle Berry’s tone-deaf turn as Storm notwithstanding).

Xmen 1

It took years and millions to finally get an X-Men movie project off the ground.  No, really.  Imagine that for a hot second.  Imagine an executive/financial landscape in good ol’ Hollywood that viewed a superhero movie not as the nominally-expensive cash grab it currently represents but instead as a black hole investment, unlikely to reap much from its sowing.  That was the landscape all through the ‘80s and ‘90s, a time when not only X-Men but Spider-Man and multiple other Marvel and DC properties languished in the most fiery of development hells.   The story might have been different if Tim Burton’s unparalleled 1989 Batman had launched a film franchise that was both critically and commercially viable, but Burton’s own 1992 follow-up, Batman Returns, was largely misunderstood by viewers, and the subsequent movies (1995’s Batman Forever and 1997’s Batman and Robin, both barely more than odious) did little to instill hope among Hollywood suits that comic-book adaptations would result in desired profit margins.

Untitled

However, against all odds, X-Men did eventually achieve liftoff, and did so with enough panache and box office returns that it not only set the stage for sequels of its own, but also a reinvigorated cinematic landscape where suddenly, superhero projects gathering dust in the slush pile turned into diamonds-in-the-rough, potential moneymakers desperately in need of a greenlight and a quick turnaround.  In rapid succession, we got X-Men 2, Spider-Man, Hulk, Daredevil, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and the Blade franchise, all within a period of roughly three years.  By the mid-Aughties, however, this sputtering pilot light of life among superhero cinema looked in danger of going out just as quickly as it had been lit.  For every Hellboy, there was a Catwoman; for every Unbreakable, a Daredevil.  Then, Christopher Nolan singlehandedly reoriented the genre with his dark, archetypal take on Batman’s origination, Batman Begins.

And with it, cast the immediate future of the superhero movie into a paradoxical pit of both financial viability and critical darkness.

Untitled

Batman Begins isn’t responsible for superhero cinema’s fixation on the origin story.  Every noteworthy hero film that came before it in the early Aughties was also an origin story of sorts, even X-Men.  And standing alone, there was nothing particularly egregious about Nolan’s decision to tackle Bruce Wayne’s complicated past.  It’s only when you consider the decade of superhero movies that has passed in the interim that you see how unforgivingly Begins’s success molded the movies that came after it.  The contemporary cultural juggernaut known by the innocuous-sounding title of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) is thoroughly and utterly marred by this.  2008’s Iron Man also chose a “hero begins” route, recasting Tony Stark as a modern, motormouthed, military-industrial apologist.  Iron Man is notable as the opening salvo in Hollywood’s MCU onslaught, beginning a decade-long project to release individual hero movies for all of the classic Avengers teammates and then, finally, a climactic film where they would all work together in a team (perhaps you’ve seen it? It was written and directed by a little-known auteur named Joss Whedon). It’s also notable because it’s one of the few movies in the MCU that is actually good, but that’s an argument for another time.  Iron Man’s runaway success—again, very merited, given its high quality—gave birth to Thor, Incredible Hulk, and Captain America: origin stories, one and all.  Soon even non-franchise superhero tales, like Chronicle, went the “origin story” route.  The origin story became such a fixture in the forefront of pop culture preoccupation that it bled into our TV shows (Bates Motel, Hannibal, Sherlock).  Somewhere along the way, the idea of the origin story became entangled with the idea of the franchise reboot; less than a decade apart, we have two very different Spider-Man movies, both origin stories.

So what’s the problem?  This panoply of origin stories has been financially viable for Marvel Studios, and critics have been suspiciously kind to the entries in the MCU, even the ones that are insignificant fluff at best (here’s looking at you, Thor).

Untitled

Why should we be concerned? What’s got my little geek heart all aflame?

I think, somewhere along the line—because X-Men, Batman Begins, and Iron Man told origin stories that succeeded both critically and commercially—that the origin story came to be thought of as something that has an intrinsic cinematic value to moviegoers, that the archetype itself is some sort of lodestone that, if only picked up, yields magic.  The truth, as should be obvious to anyone who bothers to look beyond the immediate surface of things, is that those movies, particularly X-Men and Iron Man, are extremely well-constructed.  They succeed as movies first, origin stories second.  The script and the direction don’t rely on the basic components of an origin story to do their work for them.  The writers and actors and directors have fleshed out the characters, spent time creating opportunities for viewer investment at all possible moments, and made sure that their story works not just as a lackadaisical illumination of how X character got from Point A to Badass, but as a narrative experience in and of itself.  Take, for example, the first Mad Max movie, which wasn’t even necessarily conceived as the beginning of a franchise but whose tale of a vengeance-seeking policeman was executed with such muscular vision and cinematic poise that it unintentionally birthed a franchise.

With each passing year and each new superhero origin story, however, it’s become clear that subsequent writers and directors can ape the general look and feel of an origin story but not the substance of its best examples.  There’s also the matter of not really having to do much work when writing an origin story (theoretically) because they all follow a distinct pattern: hero has problem, hero gets power, hero has to figure power out.  You can knock out an origin story screenplay without moving much beyond first-thought, and, as Hollywood has discovered, people will go in droves to see the resulting movie.  From a financial standpoint, origin stories have become a no-brainer investment: minimum effort resulting in maxiumum profit.   What this has created is an atmosphere of origin-obsessed superhero movies that have long ago abandoned complex, fresh storytelling in favor of the rote.  This problem reached its apotheosis with 2013’s Man of Steel.  We’ve actually seen a LOT of Superman in the last few decades (Lois and Clark, Smallville, Superman Returns), so it’s not exactly like we needed a brand-new reboot, but reboot it they did, and with as little narrative acumen as a direct-to-video knock-off.

Archetypal stories and figures move in glacier-like cycles through the attention span of pop culture.  Slasher flicks gave way to torture porn gave way to found footage, to use horror as an example.  Vampires gave way to zombies gave way to whatever monster will capture the zeitgeist of the popular imagination next. The obsession with the origin story is weirdly appropriate for the Information Age and the social media generation, where everyone is the star of their own Facebook reality show and builds their own “super” origin story out of their life narrative.  We powerless mortals no longer identify with the hapless humans who help the superheroes: we see ourselves as the superheroes, misunderstood and put upon but ascending to a great destiny, while pop music assures us that we were “Born This Way”, that we’re a “Firework”, that we’re never less than “Fucking Perfect.”  It’s the delusional opposite of Generation X disaffection, which at least had the virtue of cynicism.  Who can say whether the Men with Suits have articulated this connection, but they perceive enough about the way social psychology works to know that the contemporary moviegoing audience spits out $$$ when certain buttons are pressed, and they press them with gusto.  The good news is that the origin story is quickly turning into a fallow field, in need of crop rotation.  There are only so many heroes to make movies about, only so many ways to depict a brave-but-reluctant soul’s rise to power.  Now that everyone from Tony Stark to Peter Parker has had the murky origins of their heroism fracked and stripped of every possible vein of crude, superhero movies will eventually be forced to turn to other types of stories, new chapters, new problems.  To be honest, this will probably be the death of the superhero boom; Millennials will care little for Captain America’s middle-aged struggle with morality because it doesn’t say anything to them about the movie of their lives, and the dollars will stop flowing in a Mississippi-like torrent to the glass eyries of Los Angeles.  That’s good; it’s necessary.  We need to let the superhero lie dormant for a while.  It’s only out of a period of dormancy that a given archetype returns to cinema with vim and vigor.  Think Batman 1989.  Think X-Men 2000.  I’m personally looking forward to ten years without capes and noble martyrdom.  Maybe by 2020, I’ll be ready for some more.

 ___________

Mark Pursell in Orange

 

Mark Pursell (Episode 75) is a lifelong geek and lover of words.  His publishing credits include Nimrod International Journal, The New Orleans Review, and The Florida Review, where he also served as poetry editor.  His work can most recently be seen in the first volume of the 15 Views of Orlando anthology from Burrow Press.  He currently teaches storytelling and narrative design for video games at Full Sail University in Winter Park, Florida.

Heroes Never Rust #1: Gambit

07 Wednesday Aug 2013

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Comic Books, Heroes Never Rust

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Tags

comic books, Gambit, Heroes Never Rust, Sabretooth, sean ironman, X-Men

Heroes Never Rust #1 by Sean Ironman

Gambit

The first comic book I remember reading is X-Men (second series) #33 written by Fabian Nicieza with art by Andy Kubert. I was ten years old and had read comics before, but X-Men #33 was the first to have an impact on me, enough of an impact to remember it nearly panel by panel almost twenty years later. My parents had seen the issue at Waldenbooks on a trip to the Coral Square Mall. I immediately stopped playing with action figures on my bedroom floor and read it.

The issue focused on Remy LeBeau, aka Gambit, who became a favorite of mine after reading it. It takes place in the present-day at the X-Mansion, the headquarters of the X-Men, and in Paris many years before Gambit joined the X-Men, back when he was with the Thieves Guild. Rogue, Gambit’s love interest in the present-day, talks to the villain Sabretooth, who has been imprisoned by the X-Men in an attempt for rehabilitation. She orders Sabretooth to talk about a past encounter with Gambit. (This must have been setup in a previous issue that I had not read.  I’ve heard people complain about this kind of thing before, but not knowing what had happened in past issues was never a problem for me. It just made me want to track down what I had not read on the next trip to the store.)

As it turned out, Sabretooth and Gambit both tried to steal a necklace from an attractive French woman many years before. Sabretooth, in all his rough and tumble ways, attacked the woman. Gambit, at seventeen years old, protected her and used his charisma to get the woman to fall in love with him, to trust him. This was something superheroes just didn’t do in my ten-year-old mind. Gambit sleeps with the woman and steals the necklace before she wakes. To get it back, Sabretooth captures both the woman and Gambit’s step-brother, Henrí, who was in town.

The final showdown occurs on a rooftop. Gambit hands over the necklace, but Sabretooth, because he’s a psychopath, drops both the woman and Henrí off the roof. Gambit can only save one. He chooses his brother, and the woman falls to her death. (Which is made much sadder when I read the Gambit mini-series that had been released around the same time that opened with Henrí’s death.) Her final words were that she loved Gambit and would have gladly given him the necklace if he had just asked for it.

xm-33-015

Back in the present-day, Gambit goes to look for Rogue, and they discuss their relationship. Rogue doesn’t think Gambit is capable of love, and she leaves.

The issue was thoroughly depressing. There were no fights to save the world, no returning from the dead. My take on it is that Gambit wanted to love the French girl—he was acting while with her, but not just to get the necklace. I think that he wanted to love her, but wasn’t capable. In the issue, he briefly discussed with Henrí his arranged marriage. This was a man who wanted love in his life, but couldn’t have it. He was an orphan taken in by the Thieves Guild and was forced to marry a woman from an opposing guild, the Assassins Guild. And in the present day, he still wanted to love.

Many superheroes have tragic beginnings, Spider-man for example. But the death of Uncle Ben in Spider-man allowed Peter Parker to become a superhero. Spider-man became a superhero to make amends. But this woman’s death didn’t have any effect on Gambit being a superhero. He didn’t become an X-Man because of it. It was just something that had happened. He continued being a thief. It was so human, so real, to see Gambit not be able to just flip a switch and turn his life around, make everything better. Rogue walked away from him in the end. This was no villain he could punch in the face until he wins the fight. This was no person to push out of the way of falling rubble. It was a hurt man unable to escape his past no matter how much good he had done as an X-Man.

This is what I love about superheroes. When I opened that issue, which featured Gambit and Sabretooth in mid-battle on the cover, I wanted to see Gambit and Sabretooth fight, Gambit win, and then everyone be happy in the end. That’s what I saw on the X-Men cartoon show on Saturday mornings. Even though I couldn’t understand all the issues at ten years old, I still knew it was deep, important. I read the issue again and again.

rogue

Today, many superhero comics are geared toward adults. They feature huge city destroying battles with millions of people dying, profanity, and sex. Many deconstruct the superhero concept. While, all of that has its place—and I read and enjoy just as much of those comics as every other comic book reader—I think what’s important to make a comic book mature lies in the psychology of the characters. Characters that can’t be figured out immediately. An adult could have enjoyed that X-Men issue just as much as I did at ten. The sex in the issue was off panel. I don’t even remember at ten if I knew if Gambit had sex with the French woman or if he just slept over. It wasn’t sexual. I know my mom wouldn’t have gotten it for me if it did.

I’m always hearing that a big problem facing the comics industry is that kids don’t read comics, that comics are made for adults and even if a kid wanted to read a comic, they couldn’t find one suitable. I think that’s been changing over the last couple of years. But I don’t think it’s an issue of comics either being made for kids (When I was a kid I didn’t want to read books for kids.) or backing away from adult topics. It just falls on using the psychology of the characters to create a mature book. Why did Marvel Comics become so huge in the sixties? They created characters that were like real people, people who happened to fight crime. The issue shouldn’t be whether to have adult comics or kids comics, but to have comics with complex characters where both adults and children could enjoy.

___________

Sean Ironman

Sean Ironman is an MFA candidate at the University of Central Florida, where he also serves as Managing Editor of The Florida Review and as President of the Graduate Writers’ Association. His art has appeared online at River Teeth. His writing can be read in Breakers: An Anthology of Comics and Redivider.

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