Detritus of the Mind

So I'm home sick, and I've been catching up on a great new podcast:  Rachel and Miles X-Plain the X-Men .  Their last episode talked about "Deadly Genesis", and it reminded me of one of three things that, no matter what the actual books say, will always be considered 100% true in my nerd-heart.  I'm going in order from when the stories/characters affected were first introduced. Wolverine is a father who outlived his young daughter:   One of the things I always liked was that Wolverine always has a surrogate daughter figure, no matter what era.  This led me to believe that, somewhere in his then-unexplained past, he had a like-aged daughter who died young.  Maybe illness, maybe not, but either way, he outlived a daughter he loved & now he doted on surrogates to make up for that loss.  Now that so much of his past has been revealed I don't think it's likely that will ever apply, but it doesn't change the fact that I find Wolverine's fatherly be...

REVIEW: New Mutants Forever: The Fall of Nova Roma” Chris Claremont (writer); Al Rio (penciller); Bob McLeod (inker); Guru EFX (colorist); Tom Orzechowski (letterer); collected in trade 2011, originally published between 2010 & 2011 (months not given in the trade indicia). Issue 1, “Shadows in the Night”:  The New Mutants are staying the night at the Hellfire Club’s NYC headquarters after the big dance/race with the Hellions in #54 (see below).  While Doug helps Amara determine whether Selene’s claim that they’re related, the others go to Central Park (right outside the club).  While in the park, they are attacked by armed men, and they discover that Amara’s father is one of their targets.  The armed men rush the club, resulting in Rahne & Emma being hurt, and only stop fighting when they are killed en masse.  In the fight, Doug & Amara are kidnapped.  Amara’s father reveals he was trying to warn the Club (Selene in particular) about so...

Most people would list the worst run in any of the X-books to be Chuck Austen’s Uncanny X-Men run, and they’d be right.  But for personal reasons (because I have enough sense to avoid stuff written by a dude who rolled up from Penthouse of all places), I find that Louise Simonson’s run on New Mutants to be far more infuriating and upsetting.  Her run took a book that proved teen books didn’t have to be just soap opera and could literally do anything, and turned it into a generic mishmash.  Worse, it undid a lot of the good that the early days of the book had created. Granted, some of the stuff isn’t on her head.  I really do believe her now that the decision to kill off Doug Ramsey was her trying to call fans’ bluffs.  The dropped ideas at the end of her run thanks to the coming of Liefeld, when there were actual interesting new concepts & plots introduced without explanation, are not her fault in the slightest – in fact, if they worked at all, it’s pr...

In my mind, the Hellions are an integral part of the New Mutants’ history as a team.   They were positioned as their evil counterparts, but thanks to smart development, it was made clear that only a handful were truly “evil” – and one of those, I have my doubts.   They were friends & allies as much as dark mirrors to the heroes, and it was a shame that such an interesting & different relationship wasn’t explored as much (after Claremont left, they basically vanished from comics until it was time to kill them off).   In fact, I would say the biggest strength of the DeFilippis/Weir title is that they really showed how their team of Hellions related with their team of New Mutants and made them even more fleshed-out & interesting than most of the heroes.   Seriously, the Hellions mini was the best thing in their run, since it focused on the characters that were actually compelling (and also Wither). ORIGINAL HELLIONS: If I had to give an honest answer ...

You know how every action has an equal and opposite reaction?   Well, every list of favorite team members has an equal and opposite list of characters I don’t like.   I apologize if it’s a bit heavy with DeFilippis/Weir characters, but remember what I said about it being hit or miss; my absolute favorite characters they handled will be largely addressed next week, when I talk about everyone’s favorite frenemy team, the Hellions. 5. Wither: He has the rare distinction of being one of two Hellions I dislike as well.   He’s one of those characters whose whole schtick is the reason the X-Men franchise has a reputation for wangst; yes, his powers sucked, but that was literally all there was to him – he had destructive powers & he hated them.   He was so absorbed into hating them that he failed to notice when something not crappy (i.e. Mercury was inexplicably smitten with him) was approaching him, and he only went along with Selene because all she cared abou...

Looking back on my history with the X-books, I realized that pretty much both of the seminal gateways to the world of the X-Men were bound to the New Mutants.   The very first comic I picked up was Uncanny #281, that atrocious issue where the Hellions (among many other established characters) were killed off by the failed villain team the Upstarts.   Later, when I discovered the franchise’s golden age in the 80s, it was through the storyline where Kulan Gath turned New York into a fantasy land thanks to Classic X-Men; in that story, most of the New Mutants were his minions, while Warlock was among the handful of heroes fighting to free the city.   Probably not the best place for a newbie to come into the X-books in either case, but these two initial intros were what led to my fascination with the New Mutants. But being fond of something for its place as an early introduction is one thing; my love of New Mutants is more than nostalgia.   During Chris Claremont’...

So I recently happened across the Legion Abstract, where author Matthew E had this exchange with a commenter named Jip: JIP: An optimistic far future is what the Legion was originally founded on. Since that vision is no longer in style, it has been a MAJOR [his emphasis]  challenge to plot and write stories. MATTHEW E: It can still be done, though. Nothing wrong with swimming against the tide. This begs a question that's been on my mind lately, for a long list of reasons both pop cultural & personal: Since when is optimism considered "tricky"?  Since when is a story with an overall optimistic tone considered a hard sell?  And why are you considered naïve at best if you don't subscribe to that attitude? This is something that extends to everything from movies to comics to what amounts to an expected worldview.  Apparently, if you aren't horribly cynical, there's something wrong with you; you cannot be savvy and optimistic at the same time.  I make a...

Yep, it's another response to the latest episode of Major Spoilers' Top Five, this time addressing dated things you can't help but love, even if they don't hold up in the light of the modern day.  I've spoken before about how I find nostalgia to be somewhat poisonous, but that is because I don't look back at things & think "This sucked! Why did I like this?" to "What about this still appeals to me, even though my tastes have changed?"  All of these things are stuff that I loved unironically & without any meta-knowledge as a kid but now have to approach with weird to define mental caveats.  So here are my Top Five Dated Things I Still Love 5. Cadbury Crème Eggs:   Ah, every dentist's favorite Easter treat.  I used to inhale these things as a kid, but some time in the last decade they just became unbearably sweet to me.  The flavored varieties like the chocolate cream & the dearly-missed orange cream weren't as much of an...

Hello, everyone.  I'm just putting a quick note to discuss soem of the semi-regular stuff that's being cycled in & out of Detritus before I get to an end-of-year summary.  First, though, let me wish everyone a Merry Christmas, Happy Belated Hanukkah, Happy New Years, and Happy Anything Else I Missed.  Here's hoping 2013 isn't too painful. Anyway, I'd like to update everyone on a column being bumped and another being started.  I won't give up on them permanently, but I've decided to put the Omnicommentaries on the shelf for a while.  I find myself tending too much towards the negative; reading these with adult eyes is making me see stuff that flew right over my younger self's head but now drives me bonkers.  I don't want to be mean, but I feel like some of the elements in those early Legionnaires issues (Saturn Girl & Live Wire's Lifetime-tastic romance, a "beach" issue with a gruesome mood-killing plot hole, Chris Gardner...

Non-starter villains fascinate me.  Lately, they seem to be epidemic in comics, but I chalk that up to the current wave of nostalgia for the pre-collapse 90s.  That was when you got some real prize specimens of the non-starter species.  In the very first X-Men comic I read, I got a whole team of 'em. Remember the Upstarts?  The gaggle of new villains that largely existed to slaughter whole supporting teams so the Gamesmaster could reward them with... something or other?  Yeah, they mostly sucked.  But like most things I encounter, they didn't have to.  In fact, the initial plans that were trickled out before the "reveal" of their purpose actually showed they had a decent foundation. Y'see, the original plan was that Selene, one of my favorite creepy X-baddies, would have been the ringleader instead of the super-vague Gamesmaster.  The Upstart kids indicated a few times that they were expecting immortality as their prize, while Selene gloa...