Roquefort Raider
CCF Mod Squad
Modus omnibus in rebus
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Post by Roquefort Raider on May 8, 2018 17:37:32 GMT -5
I would rather she was not Magneto's daughter. We already have Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch for that soapy plot point. Same here, but Marvel has already retconned Pietro and Wanda into not being Magneto’s children! This particular soap,opera makes less and less sense as time goes by. |
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Post by rberman on May 8, 2018 17:43:24 GMT -5
I would rather she was not Magneto's daughter. We already have Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch for that soapy plot point. Same here, but Marvel has already retconned Pietro and Wanda into not being Magneto’s children! Well, that's just great. The confirmation that they were not the children of Whizzer and Miss America was a major plot point in Byrne's Avengers run. |
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Post by Reptisaurus! on May 8, 2018 19:49:50 GMT -5
Does Magneto have any children now?
This arc might be my favorite of the series. I like the doubling down on X-men as school and dig the mutant generation gap. These are Lee/Kirby/Claremont ideas but done on a bigger scale (and, imo, better) than we've seen before.
I like the Astro City comparisson. Sad how rarely we get inferesting worldbuilding in super hero comics.
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Post by rberman on May 9, 2018 6:32:48 GMT -5
New X-Men #135 “Teaching Children about Fractals” (February 2003)
The Story: Xorn now teaches the “special class” at the Xavier Institute. Students include now-familiar faces Beak, Angel, and Martha Johannson. Also Basilisk (an actual cyclops), Ernst (looking like the wizened ESPer child Kiyoko from the manga Akira), and Dummy (a silent gaseous entity in a gimp containment suit). And maybe No-Girl, who may or may not exist at all. Xorn takes them on an overnight camping trip to build a sense of group identity.  Telepathic trouble student Quentin Quire has a series of increasingly inflammatory interactions with Charles Xavier. His new haircut is a garish parody of the old Namor newspaper clipping that he carries around. One day he’s wearing a Jumbo Carnation-inspired nerd outfit with a striped sweater vest and a dress shirt buttoned all the way up; the next day, it’s a “Magneto was right” T-shirt under a blazer. Quentin adamantly opposes Xavier's new plan to admit human students to the school. He assembles a gang of students ( Herman the bio-paraffin man, Tattoo, Radian, and Redneck the human torch) who dress and think like him. After puffing some Kick to enhance their powers, they go to Mutant Town, beat up the guys that killed Jumbo Carnation, and leave their graffiti mark on the wall: An omega over the letter X. Later, the whole team gets tattoos (actual ones, on the arm) of this glyph. Tattoo is revealed to have phasing powers like Sprite, at least when she’s on Kick. “We’re the New X-Men,” proclaims Quentin.  Xavier’s staff debate how to handle Quentin’s growing ambition and influence in the student body, likely aided subtly by his telepathic talents. Logan and Jean counsel against an authoritarian over-reaction that could backfire. Scott and Emma disagree, instead recommending a firmer disciplinary hand. Emma points out that the drug Kick likely plays a role in the problem; therefore the team should direct their energies to cutting off the supply before more students become a danger to themselves and others. She tried Kick herself, purely for research purposes of course: “I felt angelic, and violently insane.” My Two Cents: This story is shaping up very well, and I can’t recall anything else quite like it in the X-Men history. (Granted, I missed most of the stories in the 90s. Correct me if I’m wrong, but when I think of 90s X-Men, I think of giant firearms and alternate reality characters.) We’ve always seen Xavier have mutant students before who turned out well. But at a real school with 150 kids, some will disrupt the community and simply can’t be brought back around. When those kids turn to drugs, things can get ugly quickly, and Morrison presents a very credible scenario for this happening at the Xavier Institute. Xavier feels a realistic pull in two different directions. On the one hand, mutants have special needs, and Xorn’s students are special even among the special. Grouping them makes for efficient provision of services to people with similar circumstances. But there’s a price: segregating “like with like” stifles social cross-pollination, building walls instead of the bridges that naturally develop when dissimilar people rub shoulders and find their common humanity. Thus some mutants consider the Xavier school either a respite from a scary and hostile world or else an elite training ground that reinforces their own awesomeness and lack of empathy for the poor huddled masses outside the gates. So Xavier wants to let some of those masses inside – but will it destroy what makes the school special and successful? Real world organizations wrestle with these same tensions. What are the consequences of putting handicapped students in regular high school classrooms? What are the consequences of not doing so? As Gandalf said, “Even the very wise cannot see all ends.”  Furthermore, Scott and Jean do not agree as to how to handle unruly students like Quentin. This brings to mind the challenge that comic books face in writing “adult” (in the best meaning of the word) stories. It’s said that married couples tend to fight about three things: sex, money, and children. We’re getting the “sex” part with Scott and Emma’s affair brewing in the background. Money has rarely been raised as a problem for the X-Men, who live under the umbrella of Xavier’s apparently limitless fortune. And children? Super-heroes rarely have either spouses or children in mainstream comics. But boarding students are sort of like children for the school's faculty, so Jean and Scott are giving us a little glimpse of the story opportunities that could be told about how to respond to various crises in the student body. Finally Morrison gives us the long-awaited punch-line for why his run on this comic book (and not the runs before or after him) is called “New X-Men.” It’s not just a new book about the old X-Men; we now have a whole new generation of mutants, and one in particular who fancies himself the leader of the “New X-Men.” He’s even a telepath who’s mostly bald, in parody of Charles Xavier. We rarely see someone like Quentin Quire in comic books: An actual smart person. Not smart as in “Another character calls him a super-genius,” or smart as in “He builds a techie thing that does bleah bleah bleah.” Quentin is smart in the sense that he’s actually shown having intelligent conversations, right there on the page. When Xavier tries to direct the discussion toward irenic topics, Quentin bobs and weaves and jabs back, using the Professor’s own words against him. It takes a smart writer to write a smart conversation, so kudos once again to Grant Morrison.  The precis page calls Quentin and his friends "The Omega Gang," but he never calls himself that. Their school-uniform-chic look intends to recall Alex and his gang of reprobates in "A Clockwork Orange." One of them, Tattoo, has the power to write things on her skin...  ... but more importantly, she has The Vision's power to hurt people by turning intangible and then partially materializing inside them. (Kitty Pryde can't do this; it would hurt her too much.)  It’s not clear to us what Xorn is supposed to do with the “special class” of emotionally traumatized students. Basilisk in particular seems socially and intellectually stunted. Xorn just showed up after a life chained in solitary confinement in a Chinese prison. What qualifications does he have to work with any students, let alone “special” ones? He seems in need of some remediation himself, inasmuch as he walks around all day wearing a “JACK ASS” sign that he doesn’t realize has been placed on his back. Also, we just saw Martha in the regular class with Quentin and the Cuckoos in the previous issue. But now she’s been demoted to the Special Class? What did she do?  I can certainly believe that Emma would be the one to discover the drug Kick on campus and be the one to try it, and I am pleasantly surprised that she would both admit it and be able to dispassionately assess its effects afterward. I also might have thought that Charles and/or Jean would have noticed the sudden change in Emma’s mental state and the level of her telepathic powers, which are set to be magnified 5x by the drug. Mutants are said to have some great rock bands, including The Coming Race, Juggernaut, Cerebrastorm, and Sentinel Bait. We don’t ever get to see them, though. The Kick inhaler is labeled with the X-logo. It’s a logical progression: In a world where the X-Men are now celebrities, their trademarks would be used by bootleggers; that happens with real-world drugs too. Speaking of X, hey look, the mansion is X-shaped again!  We get our only look into the Morrison-era student living quarters, in which at least four students have beds in a single room, barracks style. Unusual for a swanky private school.  Frank Quitely returns to art duties on this arc, after an extended absence from these pages. He gives Quentin Quire an unhinged Tetsuo (from Akira) vibe to match Ernst’s Kiyoko appearance.  
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Post by rberman on May 10, 2018 5:39:36 GMT -5
New X-Men #136 “When X is not X” (March 2003)
The Story: Remember that time when Martha Johannson caused John Sublime, leader of the U-Men, to throw himself off a skyscraper? It turns out the U-Men are still around without him, cutting up mutant bodies and surgically grafting their mutant parts onto themselves. Quentin Quire and his gang of “New X-Men” inhale some Kick drug and murder a squad of U-Men on patrol. Another squad of U-Men has come to the Xavier Institute. They happen upon members of Xorn’s Special Class, who were camping in the woods. Angel and Beak have sneaked away, and Angel is coercing Beak into sex on a hillside when they and the campfire students come under attack from the U-Men.  When Xorn leaves the students alone to deal with the U-Man attack, each of the students find a way to contribute to the crisis. Beak shows both leadership and resourcefulness, improvising a patch for Dummy’s leaking containment suit out of a condom. Also, ruthlessness: he smashes a U-Man’s head with a large rock. Not in a prisoner-taking mood, are we? Ernst takes responsibility for Martha Johannson’s brain-jar. Basilisk uses his eye-beam to disable a U-Man.  The Xavier Institute hosts opening ceremonies in anticipation of its Open Day the following day, when regular Homo sapiens will be admitted to the school. Xavier, having spent his whole life facing anti-mutant protests from humans, steels himself for the possibility that Quentin Quire and others like him may stage anti-human protests instead. It’s worse than he thinks; that night, the New X-Men gang whacks him with a baseball bat and declares that they are seizing control of the school as the first step in their plan to exterminate the human race. Well, that escalated quickly! We also see that Scott Summers and Emma Frost are continuing their telepathic affair. Is Jean Grey-Summers is apparently still in Mumbai with Logan? We don’t see either of them this issue.  My Two Cents: “We’re losers. That’s why they put us on Xorn’s Special Class,” says Basilisk. Xorn’s qualifications to teach special needs kids remain inscrutable, but I do like the idea that just as some mutants are going to be delinquent druggie problem kids like Quentin Quire, some mutants are going to have powers but also intellectual disabilities that require additional support: Physical therapy, speech therapy, psychological therapy, etc. In the real world, multidisciplinary teams work together to provide such kids what they need to try to keep pace with their peers. The challenge is to give them special help without making “special” feel like ‘inferior.” The art here looks like Beak smashes the U-Man's brains in with a large rock, though the dialogue says otherwise. I don't know whether that indicates Beak's naïveté about what that rock would do to a human head, or whether the dialogue was changed so that Beak is not a killer.  There’s also some further discussion of another student, No-Girl, who is allegedly part of the Special Class class, but may not exist. The telepath Martha says she does exist, and will go on a date with Basilisk if he helps out. Basilisk begins to call No-Girl “my fiancée.” (He actually says “fiancé,” which is the masculine form, but I regard that as a script/letterer error rather than a character error.) At the end of the story, Xorn claims to have been able to discern the existence of No-Girl. The eventual punch line (not in this issue) is that No-Girl is just Martha being silly with her telepathy, and eventually everybody calls Martha “No-Girl.”  The U-Men are played mostly for laughs, a group of bumblers who squabble over each other's corpses and complain a lot.  The story of Quentin Quire is turning into a desegregation metaphor, but Morrison has turned the tables, so that the mutants are now the bigots who won’t allow the “inferiors” into their school. Instead of skinheads, we have Quentin’s weird haircut that other kids have begun to adopt. Instead of swastikas, we have the Ω-X symbol. Symbols can have great power when they become linked to something that generates strong emotions; they involuntarily evoke those emotions long after the “foundational event” which established that symbol has passed. Thus the TV show “The Man in the High Castle” had to apologetically end an advertising campaign in the London Underground. The show is set in an alternate world controlled by Nazis, and the advertisements thus featured swastikas. But it didn’t matter that the show depicts Nazis as villains; the mere sight of swastikas all over the Underground was very upsetting to those who lived through the days when it really did seem like Nazis were going to conquer the world. So, another busy issue! After I wrote all this, I had to double-check that everything I just said really happened in only one issue. Morrison keeps both the Special Class plot thread and the Quentin Quire skinhead plot thread spinning nicely. Frank Quitely is on art.
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Post by wildfire2099 on May 10, 2018 6:22:07 GMT -5
I didn't realize it was Morrison who did the early Quentin Quire stuff.. I have to read that at some point.
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Post by rberman on May 10, 2018 15:25:52 GMT -5
I didn't realize it was Morrison who did the early Quentin Quire stuff.. I have to read that at some point. There's a Morrison X-Men omnibus now. I generally like large omnibuses for taking up less space on my shelf with multiple bindings, though it makes them more difficult to take non-distorted pictures of. I have this particular run collected in three trade volumes; I think it was also in six smaller trade volumes as well. Some of the pages are coming out of one of my trades, though. |
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Post by rberman on May 11, 2018 6:40:26 GMT -5
New X-Men #137 “Riot at Xavier’s” (April 2003)
The cover calls this issue "Part Three" of Riot at Xavier's, but only this issue has that for the interior title.  The Story: The Xavier Institute’s first human students are arriving to discover the titular riot. Well, it’s more a hostage situation than people running around breaking stuff, which shows how little the “rioters” understand about how things work. Quentin Quire and his New X-Men gang have Charles Xavier captive in a thought-proof helmet. Outside, some other students are peacefully but embarrassingly protesting the arrival of the human students. Wolverine tries to talk some sense into Quire and gets telepathically immobilized for his trouble. Emma Frost points out the students' poor planning and lack of vision.  An explosion inside the mansion punctures Dummy’s containment suit, dissipating (and killing?) his gaseous form. Beast informs Quentin that Jumbo Carnation’s death was actually from an overdose of the power-enhancing drug Kick, not from assault by humans as originally thought, but Quentin is too deranged (and high on Kick) to care that his whole crusade is based on a false premise. Cyclops, Beast, and Emma Frost have a scuffle with the students, not going full-strength, and trying to talk them down rather than wipe them out.  As Herman the Paraffin Man (previously set alight by Redneck) terrorizes a departing busload of civilians, down in the mansion basement Sophie Cuckoo takes matters into her own hands, puffing Kick (power amplification: x5) and donning Cerebra (power amplification: x10) in hopes it will give her the strength to compete with the Omega-class telepath Quentin Quire. She succeeds, but at great personal cost.   My Two Cents: The X-Men are hampered by the crowd of human spectators watching their every move as they try to defuse this situation involving students and minors. That gives the battle an unusually slow tempo, as the teachers alternate between shows of force and pleading with the students to simply stand down. Quentin is a tragic figure, alternating between grandiose declarations of world domination, confessions that he has no idea what he’s doing, and pathetic hopes that he can get a girl, preferably one of the Cuckoos, to give him the time of day. In just four issues, Grant Morrison has given us a way more interesting villain than 90% of the X-Men rogues’ gallery for the last fifty years. Every kid wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt and spouting off about bringing down the system should read this storyline.  Wolverine is growing a soul patch in this storyline. It doesn’t suit him, though I’m all for the notion that he shouldn’t be shoehorned forever into the cowl-shaped hair that John Byrne gave him. 
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Post by wildfire2099 on May 11, 2018 6:50:29 GMT -5
Herman is flammable? that's kinda crazy! I definitely give Morrison credit for giving us more interesting character designs, that's for sure  |
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Post by rberman on May 11, 2018 7:25:14 GMT -5
Herman is flammable? that's kinda crazy! I definitely give Morrison credit for giving us more interesting character designs, that's for sure Yes, it's actually a good example of teamwork on Quentin Quire's squad, since Redneck has flame powers. Herman is such a jock, and his moronic enthusiasm makes for some great comic relief in contrast to frighteningly brilliant Quentin. |
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Post by Cheswick on May 11, 2018 8:20:00 GMT -5
I didn't realize it was Morrison who did the early Quentin Quire stuff.. I have to read that at some point. One of the things I find notable about Morrison's run is the number of characters he created for it. His 42 issue stint featured more than 60 new characters. Quentin and the Cuckoos being my favorites among them. It's too bad many later writers didn't seem to get Quentin IMO. |
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Post by rberman on May 11, 2018 8:48:56 GMT -5
I didn't realize it was Morrison who did the early Quentin Quire stuff.. I have to read that at some point. One of the things I find notable about Morrison's run is the number of characters he created for it. His 42 issue stint featured more than 60 new characters. Quentin and the Cuckoos being my favorites among them. It's too bad many later writers didn't seem to get Quentin IMO. My chief regret with Quentin is that we didn't meet him earlier as we did Beak. He would have been more human and tragic if we had seen him as a normal student, Xavier's prize pupil. Instead, we don't meet him until the day that he goes off the rails. Perhaps Morrison had not conceived him early enough to introduce him back during the Cassandra Nova arc, and then during the Fantomex story it was too late to work him in since there was no B-plot. In fact, I'd have to say that my biggest complaint with Morrison is his lack of B-plots, which results in some pretty decompressed, story-lite issues, especially in the upcoming issues. That's not to say that I don't enjoy his work, though. As for new characters, yes, there have been a lot, some of whom are yet to come. By my recollection we have: Cassandra Nova Negasonic Teenage Warhead Xorn Jun Ao Beak Angel Half a dozen Shi'ar Superguardians Martha Johannson John Sublime Fantomex Private Animal E.V.A. The Huntsman (Weapon XII) Dust Officer Foster (I think he's new?) 5 Stepford Cuckoos Quentin Quire Jumbo Carnation Basilisk Ernst Dummy Herman Redneck Radian Tattoo Slick Ultimaton (Weapon XV) Skylark Rover Tito The 'crawler hybrids |
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Post by Cheswick on May 11, 2018 9:43:40 GMT -5
One of the things I find notable about Morrison's run is the number of characters he created for it. His 42 issue stint featured more than 60 new characters. Quentin and the Cuckoos being my favorites among them. It's too bad many later writers didn't seem to get Quentin IMO. My chief regret with Quentin is that we didn't meet him earlier as we did Beak. He would have been more human and tragic if we had seen him as a normal student, Xavier's prize pupil. Instead, we don't meet him until the day that he goes off the rails. Perhaps Morrison had not conceived him early enough to introduce him back during the Cassandra Nova arc, and then during the Fantomex story it was too late to work him in since there was no B-plot. In fact, I'd have to say that my biggest complaint with Morrison is his lack of B-plots, which results in some pretty decompressed, story-lite issues, especially in the upcoming issues. That's not to say that I don't enjoy his work, though. As for new characters, yes, there have been a lot, some of whom are yet to come. By my recollection we have: Cassandra Nova Negasonic Teenage Warhead Xorn Jun Ao Beak Angel Half a dozen Shi'ar Superguardians Martha Johannson John Sublime Fantomex Private Animal E.V.A. The Huntsman (Weapon XII) Dust Officer Foster (I think he's new?) 5 Stepford Cuckoos Quentin Quire Jumbo Carnation Basilisk Ernst Dummy Herman Redneck Radian Tattoo Slick Ultimaton (Weapon XV) Skylark Rover Tito The 'crawler hybrids The Superguardians he created are Mammoth, Stuff, Squorm, Monstra, Cosmo, Arc, G-Type, Neosaurus. Plutona, Blimp, Schism and Fader. The students he created--other than the ones you listed--are Eosimias*, Pako*, Crater*, Stalwart*, Choir*, Imp*, Polymer*, Mentat*, Keratin*, Contact*, Spike, Butterfly, Skywalker, Cephlopod*, Longneck*and Forearm*. The future characters--other than Skylark and Rover--are Corona, Maker, Mer-Max, Bumbleboy, Brian, Koo-Koo, Beak II and Apollyon. There was also "Toad-In-Waiting" on Genosha and Ugly John.
*-These students were not named in story, but their names were later provided by Morrison to the Official Handbook editors for the Xavier Institute entry.
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Post by rberman on May 11, 2018 11:15:52 GMT -5
My chief regret with Quentin is that we didn't meet him earlier as we did Beak. He would have been more human and tragic if we had seen him as a normal student, Xavier's prize pupil. Instead, we don't meet him until the day that he goes off the rails. Perhaps Morrison had not conceived him early enough to introduce him back during the Cassandra Nova arc, and then during the Fantomex story it was too late to work him in since there was no B-plot. In fact, I'd have to say that my biggest complaint with Morrison is his lack of B-plots, which results in some pretty decompressed, story-lite issues, especially in the upcoming issues. That's not to say that I don't enjoy his work, though. As for new characters, yes, there have been a lot, some of whom are yet to come. By my recollection we have: Cassandra Nova Negasonic Teenage Warhead Xorn Jun Ao Beak Angel Half a dozen Shi'ar Superguardians Martha Johannson John Sublime Fantomex Private Animal E.V.A. The Huntsman (Weapon XII) Dust Officer Foster (I think he's new?) 5 Stepford Cuckoos Quentin Quire Jumbo Carnation Basilisk Ernst Dummy Herman Redneck Radian Tattoo Slick Ultimaton (Weapon XV) Skylark Rover Tito The 'crawler hybrids The Superguardians he created are Mammoth, Stuff, Squorm, Monstra, Cosmo, Arc, G-Type, Neosaurus. Plutona, Blimp, Schism and Fader. The students he created--other than the ones you listed--are Eosimias*, Pako*, Crater*, Stalwart*, Choir*, Imp*, Polymer*, Mentat*, Keratin*, Contact*, Spike, Butterfly, Skywalker, Cephlopod*, Longneck*and Forearm*. The future characters--other than Skylark and Rover--are Corona, Maker, Mer-Max, Bumbleboy, Brian, Koo-Koo, Beak II and Apollyon. There was also "Toad-In-Waiting" on Genosha and Ugly John.
*-These students were not named in story, but their names were later provided by Morrison to the Official Handbook editors for the Xavier Institute entry.
Right. Beak II is named Tito. Mer-Max was named; forgot about him! And poor Ugly John. As for some of the others, I'll save them for my discussion of those issues in a couple of weeks. Spike was named and seen talking with Quentin in one scene. I wonder which of the several series artists worked most with Morrison to construct the visual appearance of the different Mutants. Herman and Martha win my award for "most interesting visuals." |
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Post by rberman on May 11, 2018 11:20:49 GMT -5
Something else I just noticed about this issue: The lettering is in regular uppercase and lowercase, not the usual Comic Sans Serif Uppercase! Looking back, I see that this actually started in issue #131, "Some Angels Falling." It's the same letterers. Two question that come to mind:
1) What prompted the change in lettering, which breaks with long comic book tradition?
2) What exactly is "Richard Starkings' Comicraft"?
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