All-New/Extrordinary/Uncanny X-Men (2013-2019) [Marvel]

The Twilight Mexican

Ex-SeeD-ingly good
AKA
TresDias
All-New X-Men #18 was a Young!Cyclops-centric issue. You see his struggle with all the X-Men going after the Inhumans now, and still trying to cope with who's who and everyone's motivations around him. You get to see the self doubt and explanation of Cyclops' attack being called preemptive genocidal terrorism by the media and the Hitler comparisons made online. AND Young!Scott finally learns that Cyclops died to the Terrigen, so now he's proper mad at Emma for what she did and especially doing so with no regard how the backlash would hit him.

A damn solid issue on Young!Scott looking like he can finally get back to being Cyclops.

No, it's still catering to the dumbest plot point in, well, many years with this whole "Hitclops!" thing and the absurd "Inhuman genocide!" thing.

For the last time, Marvel and everyone else, the Inhumans will survive just fine without the Terrigen Mist. :monster: They don't need it. It doesn't give them life. It doesn't even make them superhuman. They're superhuman from the start; it just mutates them. Karnak was never exposed to the mists, yet he can still lift one ton, is easily one of the world's most dangerous martial artists, and has the inherent ability to identify the weakness in anything.

This plot is stupid, and it makes the Inhumans look terrible.

Also, Young Cyke comes off looking pretty dumb this issue. Hopefully he will actually have the perspective to get over what Emma's ruse meant for him personally and appreciate why she did it.
 

X-SOLDIER

Harbinger O Great Justice
AKA
X
In the current days of the media endlessly piling on slanted as fuck news with a preexisting narrative, I am probably more forgiving of the bullshit Hitclops stuff than I would be otherwise, specifically because it's now been shown as an actual garbage narrative. I'm just glad that they're finally getting around to addressing it after fucking avoiding it for so long.

Young!Cyke does really well in Champions, and I just kinda wanna see him get through all his self-hangups that he's been lugging around since Beast brought him here to shame his older self, and it finally feels like we're gonna get there.





X :neo:
 

The Twilight Mexican

Ex-SeeD-ingly good
AKA
TresDias
I don't see how it was addressed? It's just Cyke reading a vague news headline and then Warren quoting a single line from an article.

There's nothing in there about sources, narrative, why the X-Men who were actually on the scene and know what really happened have been so stupid, etc.
 

Roger

He/him
AKA
Minato
o now he's proper mad at Emma for what she did and especially doing so with no regard how the backlash would hit him.

A damn solid issue on Young!Scott looking like he can finally get back to being Cyclops.

He's declaring he will murder Emma in cold blood. There's nothing Cyclopslike about it.
 

The Twilight Mexican

Ex-SeeD-ingly good
AKA
TresDias
I'm not sure I quite got all that out of it, but yeah, he wants to knock her around some. In a different way from his older counterpart. :monster:
 

X-SOLDIER

Harbinger O Great Justice
AKA
X
I actually want that confrontation, because I think venting his rage at her and her recent training to withstand basically anything in her diamond form is gonna be the only way that Young!Scott will actually get to fully open up about how he feels being in this time and his life being even more time-travel-fucked than Cyclops' was, and all the hatred thrown his way because of circumstances beyond his control but seen as his responsibility. They're both prepared for that confrontation, but also not in different ways that their characters really need right now.

I honestly do see it as a necessary step to finally shedding all of that bullshit that's built up around Cyke the last year or so, and actually letting Young!Scott BE Cyclops now — especially with how fucking awesome he is in Champions.




X :neo:
 

X-SOLDIER

Harbinger O Great Justice
AKA
X
Extermination #5 ended and gave me thhle satisfying conclusion that I was hoping for for the end of the O5's story.




X :neo:
 

The Twilight Mexican

Ex-SeeD-ingly good
AKA
TresDias
I'm glad you enjoyed it. For me, the whole X-line, along with almost everything from Marvel these days, is an absolute train wreck.

"Spider-Geddon" was quite good, though.
 

X-SOLDIER

Harbinger O Great Justice
AKA
X
TBH, I've only really been following the O5 when they showed up in things occasionally ever since their story wrapped in X-Men Blue. The total number of X-Men books I've been reading has been VERY small overall, so I really just wrapped on the O5's story with Extermination, and only just picked up Uncanny once it was clear that that's where Cyclops' revival was coming from, and figured they'd be linked up, so I feel like I have a much smaller and more focused perspective on recent events.

I read the return of Jean since it was connected to the O5, but I dialed back on books, and didn't dig into Red or Black… or many of the other mutant storylines as of late. Well, Mr & Mrs. X is the other one, but insofar as story, that one may as well be a standalone (especially since I was only aware of their wedding because of the book, and had to retroactively go find how it happened).

:monster:





X :neo:
 

The Twilight Mexican

Ex-SeeD-ingly good
AKA
TresDias
I'm about 100 percent sure "X-Men: Disassembled" is the worst X-Men event I've ever read, following up the recent not-quite-as-bad-but-still-awful mini-event "X-Men: Extermination" -- all of which follows the worst two-three years of other Marvel events and regular stories I've experienced in my 30 years as a comics fan.

Since "Secret Wars" ended three years ago, I've been almost constantly dissatisfied as a Marvel reader. "Venom Inc." early last year and then "Spider-Geddon" very recently were genuinely great, and the general direction for Spider-Man of late has itself been good, but I'm extremely hard pressed to think of anything else that fits the bill.

There have been a couple of excellent-to-good individual 12-issue books in Tom King's "The Vision" and Ethan Sacks's "Old Man Hawkeye," but I barely even enjoy Jason Aaron's work on Thor any longer. That book hasn't been working for me since the end of Jane Foster's time with the hammer, and Aaron's Avengers book is plainly terrible.

Saddest of all, though, is having difficulty even coming up with an X-Men book outside of "Rogue & Gambit" or "Mr. & Mrs. X" that I've enjoyed in years. "X-Men: Disassembled" is something of a culmination of all the problems I've been having with Marvel lately, and perfectly encapsulates examples of them. Everything I could describe as being wrong with the writing in Marvel comics these past three years somehow manages to make its way into these ten issues -- ten issues, by the way, that manage to pull off the dubious paradoxical achievement of simultaneously being too bloated while also lacking nearly any substance to speak of.

For a major event that comes during an era of the X-Men that was billed with the promise that your back issues matter as one of its selling points, there is almost complete disregard for continuity in "X-Men: Disassembled." There are completely untelegraphed face-heel turns. Out-of-character behavior on an immense scale. Inconsistent behavior (yes, this is a separate matter from the out-of-character behavior just listed, as I'm referring to characters behaving inconsistently within the confines of this event alone and even within individual issues of the event).

Within "X-Men: Disassembled," everything from where battles are taking place between the end to one issue and the beginning of the next (in an underground laboratory or in a city street on the surface) to character power levels are inconsistent -- e.g. a hero who has been mostly ineffective throughout the first nine issues becomes a nearly unstoppable force of havoc in the final issue after being brainwashed; meanwhile, the main villain makes far more powerful displays early in the event than toward the end despite supposedly receiving a massive upgrade at the end of issue #9.

Unexplained motivations of antagonists abound in this event, as do unexplained plot elements central to the main plot threads -- along with abruptly abandoned plot points that were initially set up as central to the event. Plot-induced stupidity reigns constantly. Momentary arbitrary rules (e.g. [X]'s powers aren't working right now, but they will again in a couple of pages), seemingly conceived on the fly, are played completely straight.

Lacking the slightest hint of self-awareness or irony, these happenings (I dare not call them "developments," for nothing in the storytelling here is gestated or earned) simply move the plot along from moment to moment, scene to scene, toward its mandated outcome with no consideration extended to how cohesive those story beats are or whether they can be said to lend themselves to one another. Certainly not a coherent story, there can barely even be said to be connective plot tissue here. What we have is mostly a series of repeated messy crowd action vignettes featuring essentially interchangeable characters repeat battle phrases while marching assembly line-style through a repeating of past events' highlights.

"X-Men: Disassembled" is much like the recent disastrous "Infinity Wars" event in all these respects; yet it is somehow even worse, for it has led to my saying this: I'm pretty sure I'm done with all of Marvel's comics.

I had been considering this decision for a while, thanks to my stated ongoing dissatisfaction with Marvel these past three years, but had intended to at least see things through the upcoming line-wide all-hands-on-deck event "The War of the Realms," which Jason Aaron has been building up to for several years. Now, though, I'm not so sure.

Somewhere along the line they left me behind or maybe I outgrew them. "Secret Wars" and the developments leading into it had been everything I had waited my entire life as a comics fan for. Not only that, "Secret Wars" offered Marvel so many opportunities for a creative fresh start, and they have squandered it all beyond recovery.

There were opportunities there to put the genie back in the bottle on Marvel's overabundance of alternate universes, the overuse of time travel, the baggage of Marvel Earth's pre-history being bound up in the activities of the race of space gods known as the Celestials -- and instead of embracing these opportunities, Marvel immediately doubled or even tripled down on all of the problematic artifacts of its decades-long history that even decades-long readers such as myself have felt hinders their ability to steer a tightly edited line of fiction on a consistent basis.

Thank God for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It's looking to be all I have left of the modern myths that captured my heart and imagination since the days of my earliest memories.
 

The Twilight Mexican

Ex-SeeD-ingly good
AKA
TresDias
@X-SOLDIER
Funny you should ask. :monster: I was literally just bitching to Tenny, lith and Force about something X-Men editor Jordan White said this morning:

Jordan D. White said:
I know fans HATE when I say Cyclops is only around 27 years old… but that’s the official status. There are lots of arguments I have heard about why that is wrong, from it being impossible to have that many things happen in such a short time, to pointing out how much time has been said to pass, to just talking about his character and how he acts. Thankfully, the Marvel Universe does not have to obey the laws of physics or even (sometimes) logic.

Hank McCoy (just a year or two older than Cyclops) turned 30 in an issue back in 1993. LoL

I actually did go ahead and get caught up on the post-"Dissassembled" books in anticipation of Hickman coming aboard. Hopefully he can right this ship and save the franchise from the ongoing stream of inept writing and editing it seems plagued by.

Nonsense like this and what an awful run Matthew Rosenberg has been doing with the X-Men have me not regretting my decision to step back from these books.
 

Roger

He/him
AKA
Minato
Beast and Cyclops being the 30+ year olds they are uniformly portrayed as will never be as important as Spider-Man staying in his midtwenties, make your peace with it.
 

X-SOLDIER

Harbinger O Great Justice
AKA
X
I haven't even been paying attention to anything other than just Uncanny (TBH, I'm really just playing the "what's happening to Cyclops" game with comics), but have been keeping an eye out for that specifically to see what it's gonna do, and if it'll be worth diving in on more again.

I will miss the Rogue & Gambit comic though.




X :neo:
 

The Twilight Mexican

Ex-SeeD-ingly good
AKA
TresDias
Beast and Cyclops being the 30+ year olds they are uniformly portrayed as will never be as important as Spider-Man staying in his midtwenties, make your peace with it.
Pete's age could do with some acknowledgement too. You're right, though, that his age relative to theirs is why they aren't allowed to age properly -- and even get the clock wound back.
 
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