Excellent review, spoon !

I've said it in the past: I admire Claremont for trying something new. By that time, the X-Men had safely secured their position as Marvel's #1 super-hero team, and although they evolved over time (some members leaving, some members joining) the title could have been described as "comfortable". What crises we met were dramatically interesting, but not world-changing. Another writer might have decided to just ride the wave of the mag's popularity and change as little as possible for fear of breaking the spell.

But with the Mutant Massacre and its aftermath, the X-Men simply dumped their earlier, successful formula and tried something new. That took guts, really, and for that I can but tip my hat at the writer.

Unfortunately, the experiment, as far as I'm concerned, was a failure. One that would be corrected only by going back to the way things had been, and that turned out (alas!) to also be the end of my interest for the X-books, as their earlier evolution was stopped and they remained trapped in amber (more or less espousing their Saturday morning cartoon personalities) until Grant Morrison came aboard, many years later.



I had liked Betsy as a supporting character in the New Mutants annual published earlier, and was glad to see her join the team... However, I really, really disliked her armoured look and her tougher and meaner attitude. She had been quite unique in her earlier gentleness (and gentleness does not prevent one from being courageous). The only point I thought should have been adressed immediately is that her bionic eyes were spy cameras operated my Mojo; that's not the kind of plot that should be left hanging.

The brutality of the Mutant Massacre and the X-Men being thrashed was very effective storytelling; where the story failed, here, (again as far as I'm concerned) is that there's only so much pain, despair and feeling of helplessness a reader can take. Once the dust settles, our heroes are supposed to pick themselves up, get the bad guys and set their lives in order (even if it means, for lack of manpower, calling the Avengers, the Fantastic Four or the rest of X-Factor). What we got instead is a lot of hand wringing and tooth gnashing : "Oh nose! Nightcrawler is in a coma! Kitty is going to remain intangible and will vanish forever! Colossus is paralyzed! What we need to do is hide so deep in a hole that we're ready to murder friends to keep our hiding place secret, and recruit three second stringers whom we'll next pretend were always the stars of the series"... The departure from the earlier series was too abrupt, especially since it's not only the main cast that dropped from sight: it was also the very rich supporting cast that had been a large part of the book's appeal.

He did that a lot, didn't he?

Fair enough, but personally I liked none of them. (Well, not true. I always loved Rogue after she joined the team). Storm and Wolverine were turning into self-caricatures, Psylocke was still pretty lightweight, Dazzler only ever interested me during the soap opera period of her own comic and Longshot, who had been a favourite of mine in his own limited series, was a character Claremont never got. Longshot was used simply as another acrobat, but that's not what the core of the guy is; his special power is not to be agile, it's to be lucky. Not as in "wow, I jumped from a bridge and managed to catch this flagpole", but "wow, I jumped from a bridge and fell into a lorry carrying feather pillows". There were very few times during Longshot's stint as an X-man when one of his stunts ellicited a response in the "what are the odds?" category. Also, his having good luck meant others were getting bad luck, which is not something we spent a lot of time on (if at all) in the X-books. Plus, he was conveniently amnesiac, while his own story arc was left unresolved. In other words... I didn't much care for the replacements for Kitty, Kurt and Peter!


And let's not even get into the bondage stuff!



Yes, that made no sense whatsoever. Really, really none.

Cool shot of Sabretooth by Bret Blevins though, with his foot really looking like the leg of a cat.

I kept reading the book out of habit for the next several years, but found it interesting again only after the Siege Perilous thing was over, when the supporting cast started reappearing.

I want to add that those Adams X-Men probably did increase sales and certainly got a lot of buzz from the fan community. It's cancellation was partly due to the speculation that had started around that time and the affidavit return scandal. Adam's books like this and GL/GA were heavily speculated.

Well, after seeing The Long Halloween maligned by tons of people on this forum, I finally read it.



I really liked it a lot. Not the greatest Batman story I've ever read, but I'm glad I disregarded the criticism and gave it a chance. Honestly, the last "long form" Batman story I read was Court of Owls, and I found this to be much more engaging and better paced. I liked the round-robin villains, and how it all revolved around the Roman and the other Gotham gangsters.

Star Trek: The Next Generation – Forgiveness
script: David Brin, art: Scott Hampton (2001)

Generally – with a few notable exceptions – I’ve been pretty uninterested in Star Trek comics, but I noticed this on the shelf while browsing in the library recently and decided to check it out, mainly because the story is by Brin, whose SF prose I’ve always enjoyed.
And – it’s a pretty solid story that would have made a rather good episode of TNG. It’s set in the time of the Dominion War, when the Enterprise was jetting around on various missions to put out fires in the Alpha Quadrant while the bulk of Star Fleet is on the front line so to speak.
The story starts in the mid-21st century, where a brilliant physicist named Colin Blakeney has just completed what appears to be the first functional transporter. He’s dealing with opposition from a multinational company that controls all terrestrial transportation of passengers and goods, as well as many skeptics who claim that the device will kill people and create soulless copies. When Blakeney decides to finally test it on a human subject, himself, he’s jumped by a mysterious assailant and they both fall into the beam and disappear.

(I *really* don't like the Enterprise-E)
'Back' in the 24th century, the Enterprise is conveying an ambassador to the Palami system, where the local intelligent race has been quarantined by the Federation for about a century because they released some kind of biologically-engineered virus that rather gruesomely killed all non-Palami species on their home planet. The Palami, however, have petitioned the Federation for removal of the quarantine restriction. While on the way there, they Geordi detects a transporter beam on a direct course for the Palami system’s sun and realizes that there is a salvageable life pattern inside it. When he confines the beam and materializes it, a flustered Blakeney appears and passes out from the shock. Like I said, it’s a rather engaging story with some intriguing SF concepts thrown in (one can expect no less from Brin), even though there’s some questionable use of the holodeck that strains credulity even in the context of the suspension of disbelief I’m always willing to grant to Star Trek (and it comes close to what I consider the problem of the holodeck as a storytelling crutch, which I’ve ranted about elsewhere at greater length).

The art, by the way, was not to my liking. I generally like Hampton’s work (e.g., I think it’s brilliant in another collaboration with Brin that was published about two years after this one and about which I wrote at this forum a few years ago), but it was pretty unremarkable here. I think one of the problems is that he was hampered by the need to capture the likenesses of the TNG crew and the the Enterprise interiors. However, even the parts of the story that aren’t limited by these constraints, like the scenes from the past and/or in the holodeck, mostly look rather plain and unremarkable.

I had long wondered about this. It seemed so beyond what Heck does, and raised my curiosity of why he wouldn't draw like that regularly. It makes sense that it was really mostly Palmer, because it seems closer to his style.