I did want to take a moment here to mention that this week David Brothers closed down his long-running site 4thLetter. I wanted to say in public: The work David has done at 4thLetter is probably the best argument for writing on the internet as a learning process. David’s best writing was always…
i’ve basically just hit the threshold where i’m legitimately contemplating adding carol danvers to tumblr saviour because i’m just so disgusted with how desperate her fanbase is getting in attempting to bury Monica Rambeau’s existence.
It’s not like Marvel…
After re-reading the Roger Stern Avengers run lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about Monica Rambeau and her invisibility in regards to the Captain Marvel legacy, so this was an interesting read to me.
Rachel and Miles X-Plain the X-Men, Episode 31 – Chekhov’s Raygun
Rachel and Miles X-Plain the X-Men, Episode 31 – Chekhov’s Raygun
In which there is a whole, whole lot going on; we continue to have no use for Michael Rossi; Wolverine should be an advice columnist; Forge makes bold fashion choices; the health of a timeline is directly tied to the awesomeness of Storm’s hair; and the X-Men get their first dark-future refugee.
X-Plained:
- Dire Wraiths
- ROM
- Tailoring
- Uncanny X-Men #182-188
- Just much story can be shoehorned into seven issues
- A dubious Silent Hill metaphor
- The people in Rogue’s head
- Inexorable momentum
- Several profoundly uncomfortable conversations
- Parallel narrative in comics
- Being friends with Wolverine
- Casual enmity
- Forge
- Miles’s X-doppelganger
- Tiny shorts
- Chekhov’s Raygun
- Rachel Summers (again)
- Timeline disambiguation
- Rachel disambiguation
- “Lifedeath: A Love Story”
- Feelings
- Storm, powers, and identity
- X-Men Mad-Libs
- Hound marks
- X-Men: The End
Next Week: THE DEMON BEAR SAGA!
You can find a visual companion to the episode – as well as links to recommended reading and the winners of the stealth / plainclothes cosplay contest – on our blog.
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X-Plain the X-Men has now reached the point where I was reading these issues as they came out. This is a strange, wonderful nostalgia point for me.
First, maybe the head of the police union would like me to stop pointing altogether for the safety of the community. If that were truly his concern, that my pointing constitutes gang activity, then his outrage would have been sparked long, long ago. Because as the internet has documented in great detail, I point. I point a lot. Lots of people point. The President. Bill Clinton. Stephen Colbert. Babies. It is the earliest form of human communication.* I’m not going to stop pointing.
That option doesn’t make sense.
One skeptic is Christopher Priest, a former Marvel staffer who in the 1980s became the publisher’s first black editor (under his former name, Jim Owsley) and has written a “Falcon” miniseries and “Captain America and the Falcon” series.
“It feels like a stunt,” he told Hero Complex in an email interview. “It would have felt like a stunt had I done it.” He added that Wilson, as he understands him, wouldn’t become Captain America – and that for the story to work it needs to feel different from Rhodes’ stints as Iron Man.
“Putting the black sidekick in the suit, when everyone knows sooner or later you’re going to switch things back to normal, comes off as patently offensive,” Priest said.
Adding that he’d be “delighted” to be wrong about the Cap change being a stunt, Priest laid out what his former employer is facing: “Marvel’s challenge is to deliver something so affirming and positive that the work overcomes that cynicism. I assure you, Black America will be watching: Does this have real depth, or is it just surfacey costume-switching?”
And he had some other advice for Marvel: “Hire some actual black people.”
The same story also credits Marvel with “mainstream comics’ first same-sex wedding in ‘Astonishing X-Men,’” which might come as a surprise to both Archie Comics and DC.