29. Pss ff, Pryde.
X-Man #26 (April 1997) by Terry Kavanagh, Pascual Ferry, Jaime Mendoza & Hack Shack
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Thursday, February 28, 2013
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
28. MMMMMMM
And in case you were still unsure about just what is actually happening with Madelyne Pryor here,
he has this exchange with Jean Grey later in the same issue:
X-Man #25 (March 1997) by Terry Kavanagh, Roger Cruz, and Bud LaRosa
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Monday, February 18, 2013
Thursday, February 14, 2013
Tuesday, February 12, 2013
X-Man #21 (1996) by Terry Kavanagh, Roger Crux, and Bud LaRosa
The problem with Nate Grey is not that the character had no purpose. He did have a purpose. The problem was that his purpose was very narrow, and once that purpose was fulfilled the character was left with no place to go.
The Age of Apocalypse is now, even at twenty years' remove, recognized as one of the most popular storylines in Marvel history. How many nineteen-year-old crossovers are still spawning spin-offs? Its popularity marks a high point, if not in sales (which had peaked a couple years previous) then certainly in popularity. After years of grinding along more or less on the fumes left in the tank by the Image exodus, Marvel had a massive hit. It was massive enough to change the direction of the entire line overnight, giving some semblance of impetus to a company that was just beginning to feel the consequences of a series of disastrous business decisions. So it would be strictly false to assert that X-Man had no purpose: the purpose behind X-Man was to be another X-Men spin-off in an era when the franchise could safely support nine ongoing monthly titles. It fulfilled this remit admirably, and the fact that it lasted seventy-five issues on as little premise as it did is pretty astounding, and a testament to just how dominant a franchise the X-Men were during the Clinton years.
And, to be fair, despite the book's well-earned reputation for aimlessness, the book did initially have a reason to exist beside simply being another book with an "X" in the title. That reason was to serve as a bridge between the AoA and its immediate sequel Onslaught. People hate Onslaught, both the character and story, so it isn't often discussed in polite company that Onslaught was indeed the direct sequel to the still-popular AoA, but it certainly was. Not just in terms of the fact that it was an even bigger crossover intended to piggyback on the success of the AoA by launching the kind of multi-month line-wide crossover event that Marvel had shied away from since the late eighties. (Remember: every book was involved, not just a small family of titles or whichever bottom-feeders were free to crossover with the Infinity Crusade that month. This was everything.) It was a direct sequel to AoA because it was directly concerned with the consequences of the AoA, specifically the presence of Nate in the 616.
Only a few people in the Marvel Universe actually remembered the AoA - Nate (obviously), but also fellow refugees Dark Beast, Holocaust, and Sugar Man (remember him?), as well as Bishop. It was hard to ignore Nate's presence once he made it to the regular 616. Within just a few weeks of arriving, he fought Professor X, and this battle effected the Professor's powers in a drastic fashion, enabling him to manifest psychic constructs in the material world. (Yeah, this is pretty stupid, but it gets stupider.) This, coupled with the hidden consequences of mindwiping (ugh) Magneto during the Fatal Attractions crossover (double ugh), led to the creation of the being known as Onslaught, out of the worst impulses of both Xavier and Magneto made tangible through exposure to Nate's power (ugh ugh ugh). (Also: this became the canon origin of Onslaught despite the fact that Onslaught had already had at least enough power to knock the Juggernaut across the state of New Jersey weeks before Xavier ever met Nate Grey. So, uh, yeah. This is terrible.)
The problem with Onslaught (OK, not the only problem with the story or the character but a big problem nonetheless) was that the villain didn't have a consistent motivation. By which I mean: he had every motivation and modus operandi under the sun whenever the writers felt like changing their minds. One moment he's a Magneto-ish mutant supremacist, the next he's an Apocalypse-level genocidal madman - one minute he's a shadowy manipulator testing the strengths and weaknesses of his prey, the next he's just trying to annihilate the planet using brute force. The writers who peppered the line with shadowy cameos in the year leading up to Onslaught - going all the way back to the character's first cameo appearance in X-Men Prime - all seemed to be on different continents regarding the character's motivations, his backstory, even just the most simple question of who he was and how long he'd been alive. The real answer to this question, and an answer that has been corroborated by countless interviews, is that the people writing and editing the book honestly had no idea who Onslaught was when he first appeared. They knew after the AoA was over that they needed something new and big to work towards, so (I believe it was) Scott Lobdell who just threw out the name and ran with it.
Once the storyline proper actually got underway, Onslaught's first moves were to try and corral the most powerful telepaths in the world to, um, I don't know, some kind of vague power-leeching scheme to give Onslaught the power necessary to remake / conquer / destroy the world. So he went after Franklin Richards (which gave the Fantastic Four reason to be involved), Nate Grey (who had gone to the Avengers for help when he learned that Xavier was actually Onslaught, because he couldn't trust the X-Men), and Xavier himself (by this time, of course, Onslaught had crawled out of Xavier's brain and assumed independent existence. Of course.) The X-Men, meanwhile, had been knocked for a loop by the revelation that Xavier had actually been the "X-Traitor" that they had been looking for since Bishop had joined the team back in 1991/92.
(I will admit that the first few pages of X-Men: Onslaught back in 1996 - the ones that actually revealed that Xavier had been the traitor for whom the team had been looking for four-plus years - were actually pretty thrilling. For anyone reading the books on a month-to-month basis during the nineties, any resolution of a long-running subplot was practically a Biblical revelation, and it's a sign of just how deep in the tank I was that at this point I actually, briefly, entertained the notion that Onslaught wouldn't be so completely terrible. That lasted probably the time it took me to actually finish X-Men: Onslaught, incidentally.)
So, not only was Nate one of the catalysts for Onslaught's creation - he gave physical form to impulses that had been active in Xavier's mind for some time - but his fantastic power was itself a MacGuffin that Onslaught devoted quite a bit of time and energy to capturing. Once Nate was captured, he fulfilled another role. Just a couple paragraphs back I mentioned Onslaught's magical shifting motivation - this is important, because at least some of this was actually intentional. At the very climax of the story, Onslaught confronts the captive Grey in order to sap his memories of the AoA, to see just what a mutant-created utopia would look like - so he can remake the world in that image. Once he scans Grey's memories, however, he sees that the consequences of mutant rule during the AoA were actually worse than human rule. He becomes enraged at this point and decides then and there to just destroy the entire human race. I have always though that, in a sea of shit, this was a nice plot twist (definitely a plot twist that belonged in a better story). It was something, at least.
But after that, Nate Grey's usefulness ceases to exist. He was a major plot point leading from the AoA to Onslaught. The villain was destroyed thanks to the (temporary and monumentally stupid) sacrifice of the Avengers and the Fantastic Four. Everyone blamed mutants for this turn of events, and in fairness it all was kind of their fault. But even if the Marvel heroes went away and got drawn by Rob Liefeld for a few months, they came back drawn by George Perez and Alan Davis, and Mark Waid got to take a second stab at Captain America, so I guess that turned out OK. Oh yeah, we also got the Thunderbolts out of that, so again, not so bad.
Once this story was over, Nate didn't have a purpose. Before Onslaught, he was at least a major player in the X-universe: whenever he met someone for the first time, it was an event. After Onslaught, he knew everybody. He didn't want to join the X-Men, and except for a very brief period at the the of the decade (after "The Shattering", [ugh ugh ugh ugh]), he never did. He wandered off on his own and did a whole fat lot of nothing much. He palled around with Spider-Man a bunch - who remembers that Spider-Man was once supposedly his best friend? Unusual for the X-Books of the era, he always seemed to run into villains who were outside the usually cast of mutants - folks like the Abomination (during his hot "living in a sewer scarred by toxic waste" phase), the Purple Man (I want to say X-Man was actually the first place the Purple Man appeared following his "death" in Emperor Doom), Hybrid (from Rom), the Great Beasts (from Alpha Flight), the Crusader (from Thor, from a long time ago), and Mysterio. He had a couple more crossovers with Cable and Generation X. He just sort of drifted off the radar. He wasn't involved in Operation: Zero Tolerance except as a tangent, and aside from his brief aforementioned appearance in the god-awful Astonishing X-Men limited series, he really didn't do a lot worth talking about until it came time for him to be rebooted.
He was briefly rendered interesting by Warren Ellis and Steven Grant during part of the Hail Mary-pass that was the "Counter X" line, an initiative intended to reinvigorate a few of those hapless second-tier X-books that the market just wasn't willing to support anymore. Ellis & Grant's X-Man was, in all fairness, pretty good, bordering even on great in places. But it was basically a complete reboot - not necessarily erasing the previous 62 issues, but sure as hell doing everything they could to run as far away as possible. It was nice looking, too, with art by Ariel Olivetti (before he completely lost the plot), and even a last couple issues drawn by Alfredo Alcatena, if you can believe that. But it was too little, too late - even though the book was actually, legitimately good for the first time after five years of continuous publication, it just wasn't enough to keep it afloat. For years and years they had managed to publish the fictional equivalent of styrofoam between two covers, based solely on the brand recognition of a popular franchise - and of course, actually writing a good comic book was only the very last thing they decided to do before the book was canceled. Go figure.
The character disappeared for the better part of a decade, before reappearing during Dark Reign as an antagonist for Norman Osborne's mercifully short-lived "Dark X-Men" team. He joined the New Mutants for a while, before their book got canceled. For all we know, I believe, he's still living in a walk-up in downtown San Francisco, waiting for someone with fond memories to use him again.
Can we really say that Nate is a worse character, that X-Man was a worse book than US-1? The Human Fly? Team America? NFL Superpro? Honestly, even though these were some pretty terrible books, the fact is that none of them stuck around for too long. US-1, Team America, and Superpro all lasted a year, The Human Fly somehow, miraculously, lasted a year and a half. I'm sure you can think of other similarly terrible books that came and went, or that came and lingered but then finally still ended up leaving. But the interesting thing about the postmortem on these types of books is that even if they were terrible attempts to cash in on (probably already passe) cultural trends - trucking, stuntmen (motorcycle team division), stuntmen (solo division), football (still a perennial) - well, that's what comics does. Mainstream comics have traditionally been a bottom-feeder medium. We take all the crap that pop culture vomits up and we're traditionally the last line in the long ecosystem before an idea is put out to pasture forever. And it's worth noting that even if Team America (sorry, the Thunderiders) or US-1 (sorry, US Ace) were misses, Shang Chi, Luke Cage, Rom, GI Joe and Tomb of Dracula - all attempts to chase a hot fad or fleeting toy line - were definite hits.
The difference is that all of those books, as terrible as they may have been, still had ostensible reasons to exist other than simply being twenty-pages of X-Men-affiliated color and squiggles. People liked Tomb of Dracula because Dracula is cool, they liked Shang Chi because kung-fu was awesome, and it's really only the luck of the draw that as unlikely a candidate for comic book immortality as Rom happened to be a more enduring concept than Team America. Stranger things can happen. (Bill Mantlo wrote both, as well as a large percentage of the licensed titles that came through the door during the period. I guess he was more excited by Dire Wraiths than stunt cyclists.) X-Man had at one point a reason to exist - he was a spin-off from a popular crossover, at a time when anything with an "X" on the cover was a guaranteed seller, and he was specifically designed to be a crucial element of what was destined to be, for better or worse, Marvel's biggest crossover for a decade. (You're thinking to yourself, that can't be true - but think about it for a minute, think about all the titles involved, over the course of all the months of buildup and then the story itself, and all the books that were launched directly out of the story. They didn't do anything as big for almost ten years, when they returned to line-wide crossovers with House of M.)
But after that? Nate had nothing to do. For forty issues, give or take, from the end of Onslaught up through "Counter-X," he basically just dicked around. He had fulfilled his purpose. He was a space on the racks that couldn't be taken by the umpteenth Night Force revival. I almost wonder if there may have been plans at one point to kill Nate during Onslaught - as in, if his book hadn't been that popular, if he was destined to end as a stakes-raising death at the hands of the major villain. Reading the book after Onslaught, it's hard not to come away with the distinct impression that the book was playing for time, trying desperately to find something, anything that could support a plot. It didn't even have the luxury of a simple high concept to keep it afloat - every month that passed was another month separating the book from the Age of Apocalypse, and without that connection it became harder and harder to explain what the character's concept even was. But then, despite everything, his book was popular, so he survived, but for no real reason other than because it sold well enough to justify its existence. Of course they wouldn't have canceled a popular book, but who really bought X-Man because they loved the character, and who bought it because it was another book with "X" in the title?
Who knows? At this remove, it's impossible to tell why these things linger. Ultimately, it's not as if X-Man is the first book to float without direction solely by virtue of it selling enough to keep it alive - isn't that all the books, if we're honest? But X-Man is such an egregious example for the precise reason that, after participating in a single massive crossover, it had no purpose but to keep alive a trademark and take up space on the rack. That's it. It existed because, for a time, it was more of a bother for X-fans to make the effort to take the book off their standing pull-list of "All X-Men titles and spin-offs", than to simply pay the $2 and continue receiving a book that was read, filed, and almost instantly forgotten. And then, at a certain point, it wasn't too much of a bother, and by then there were too few X-completists left standing after the shit deluge and mass attrition of the late-nineties, and that is when X-Man ceased to be.
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Friday, February 08, 2013
So they're bringing back the Green Team, eh? What a monumentally stupid idea. All you need to know about the Green Team is summed up on this page, from Ambush Bug #3 (August 1985) by Keith Giffen, Robert Loren Fleming, and Bob Oksner. I don't think "ether" was used as a verb until after 2001, but it's fairly appropriate here as well. (The Green Team also show up in 2008's Ambush Bug: Year None, but it's not as funny.)
Thursday, February 07, 2013
It's easy to kick nerds because they've done quite a lot to deserve the disapprobation. They move in herds, respond to any criticism or conflict with clannish fury, are completely blind to how deep their ideological prejudices run, maintain an attitude of general cluelessness with response to issues of gender, race, and sexuality (except for those poor souls who happen to not be straight white males possessed with all the cultural entitlement that entails), have the grating habit of equating personal slights with historical bigotry and oppression, and just generally act as if being obsessed with pop culture ephemera enables them to assume an attitude of pro forma superiority in regards to the world around them. They equate The Big Bang Theory and Birth of a Nation with a straight face and come down like a wrecking ball on anyone who assumes they know anything about Dr. Who if they can't recite chapter-and-verse of BBC lore.
Except . . . well. That's not the whole truth.
A funny thing happened at the dawn of the internet era. Nerds colonized the internet first. Nerds created the internet. (Edited to add: nerds believe they created the internet. That's an integral part of the contemporary nerd creation myth. And, I maintain, if you were working for DARPA or an earlier adopter of BBS software, whatever your pop culture poison, you'd have an uphill battle to prove you weren't, QED, a nerd.) It's still possible to remember a time not that long ago when the internet was something specifically for nerds, and the suggestion that everyone would one day have or need an "electronic mail" account would have seemed as incongruous as suggesting that grown adults would one day spend more money on video games than children (or, more precisely, children's parents).
One of the things the internet did almost immediately was bring together once geographically disparate communities of like-minded enthusiasts. This might seem really basic, but think for a minute about what it was like to be a nerd before the invention of the internet: you might have known people who shared your interests, you might even have had a small local community who gathered at a local comic book or game store, you might have had a regular crew of RPGers who gathered in basements and garages on Friday nights, you might even have gone to monthly sci-fi swap meets in the church basement or - if you were lucky to live in a major media market - gone to sporadic conventions, where you would be brought face-to-face with the heartening truth that there were hundreds (if not thousands!) of people who cared about the same weird little things you cared about. People used to organize their fandom through letter-writing - it was a big deal that comic book letters pages ran full addresses. Conventions were awesome but unless you lived in a big city (and even then maybe only rarely), your chances of running into a quorum of other nerds was pretty slim.
Then people got the internet. And suddenly getting together with other like-minded nerds wasn't a weekly, monthly, or even yearly event - it was every day. It was a rolling, moveable feast of nerd-dom, a place where all the worst excesses of nerdish hyper-specialization were finally given free and unfettered reign after decades of having to be content with "close enough." Suddenly everything became a lot more common - and if this sounds uncomfortably close to Patton Oswald's argument from a couple years back, it's because there was a grain of truth in what he said. This doesn't mean that nerds back in antediluvian times were more "pure" because they had to work harder to achieve their mastery. They did work harder, however, and they fought against a pretty powerful tide of disapproval in order to stake their respective claims to their objects of devotion.
And the fact that they had to fight against a society that was pretty much antipathetic to their interests and diversions made them all stubborn. Stubborn as mules. There weren't many positive portrayals of "nerds" in the media. Being a nerd - loving Star Trek or Dungeons & Dragons or Lord of the Rings to distraction - was a hard road to hoe, because back in the day there was no shortage of people who were more than happy to judge you, and judge you harshly, based on how you chose to spend your surplus time. Being a nerd meant being, by definition, in opposition to the dominant cultural paradigm, however you chose to define it. These are cultural stereotypes partly because they're true - if you don't care about watching the game, if you can't get a date to the prom and prefer staying at home playing games with your friends to being humiliated, well - chances are good that you're going to be judged harshly by your peers for doing so. And pity the poor soul who holds on to these things after high school.
The problem is that at some point the subculture that sprang up in explicit opposition to the dominant paradigm became a part of that very same cultural paradigm. And this was due at least in part to the fact that nerds had managed to organize themselves online into a frighteningly powerful demographic. Perhaps not as powerful as they believe(d) themselves to be, but still: for an entertainment industry that had built its entire business model on interacting with a primarily passive audience, the advent of such a vocal and organized demographic - a segment with a strong willingness to spend whatever disposable income it had on movie tickets, tchotchkes, and VHS tapes - must have seemed miraculous. Despite the relatively small size of the nerd population, their organization and enthusiasm enabled them to remake large swathes of pop culture in their distorted image. But this created its own problems: once Hollywood figured out that all that "nerd stuff" could be extremely popular with non-nerd audiences, stuff that had never before been popular with anyone but cultish devotees was suddenly popular with your mom's friends at work. So even though this was exactly what nerds had said they wanted all along, it was slightly disorienting to wake up and realize that you were sharing Tolkien and Spider-Man and Battlestar: Galactica with the same dudes who used to kick sand in your face at the beach.
Still, there's nothing new here: this is the standard genealogy of the contemporary nerd. Nerds come to the cultural table with a monstrous sense of entitlement borne out of the lingering racial memory of having spent decades in the pop culture wilderness, and now that all of the major Hollywood cash-cow franchises are firmly in the grips of nerds, they are denied entrance to the promised land because they'd rather sit outside than have to share it with jocks.
But there again, I'm having a hard time passing on from all this hard-earned cultural baggage, all these Manichean divisions between the sheep and the goats that dictate the way nerds view the world. How much of these myths is simply inherited prejudice?
Some of it is bullshit, of course. But some of it is also true, and what is consistently overlooked in the discourse over nerds is that the die-hard clannishness and insular behavior - a behavior that goes hand in hand with all the sexism, racism, homophobia, and general tin-eared unwillingness to observe the dignity of any demographic other than their own - that follows nerds like a cloud of Mephistophelian flies is a symptom of some very real pain. That's why the video clip above, from Portlandia subverts the usual disgusting rhetoric over the "Fake Nerd Girl" trope. Sure, it's got a "Fake Nerd Girl" in it, but she's not necessarily fake because she's pretending she likes Star Trek because she thinks Han Solo is hot or whatever nerd stereotype to which she's supposedly conforming. The point is that her claiming to be a nerd is absurd, not because she doesn't "deserve" to be a nerd, but because being a nerd isn't a good thing. Being a nerd is an insult. It's not a badge of honor that you wear because the culture bestows upon you for conduct above and beyond the call of duty in the preservation of Firefly lore. If you are an attractive person who can pass for "normal," why would you want to pretend to be anything but?
If you were called a nerd when you were a kid, it's very likely that there was something going wrong in your life that made a refuge in the foggy depths of pop culture preferably to whatever crappy reality you were actually living. Because, here's the thing, it's not like "nerd culture" was ever really "underground." D&D had a run as a faddish party game in the early 80s. I can't remember a time when Star Trek wasn't readily available in syndication during my childhood. Dr. Who and Monty Python were PBS staples. And tons of normal people watched and did these things. My parents loved - still love - sci-fi and fantasy, but were never "nerds." They loved outdoorsy sports - skiing, hiking, golf, surfing, etc. My dad was even a bit of a jock in high school, played football and everything. That didn't stop him from reading Tolkien. (Well, I don't know, I should qualify that by saying they liked Babylon 5 and I could never get into it, so maybe they are bigger nerds than me.) But the people who held on to these artifacts like they were life rafts on a sinking ship were people who, by the large, needed these artifacts to keep afloat.
Were you short? Fat? Gangly? Pimple-faced? Ugly? Disabled? Mentally ill? Developmentally disabled? Abused? A "late bloomer" who still looked like a kid well into high school? Did you wear Coke-bottle glasses long before glasses were hip? Did you come from a broken home? Were you poor? Did you spend your time shuttling between mom and her boyfriend and flop-sweat weekend dad? Were you a minority? Did you dress in hand-me-downs? Were you gay? Bi? Trans? Were you just a little bit different enough to be called a "fag" regardless of whether or not you were? Did you, in other words, have some kind of shitty situation in your life that made fixating on some piece of pop culture ephemera and being able to call it yours - to take possession of something in a world in which you had no control and even less agency - preferable to "reality"? If you didn't, consider yourself lucky.
But that's what being a nerd means. And that doesn't excuse any bad behavior - it doesn't excuse demonizing girls and women who just want to play video games or read The Hunger Games or watch Dr. Who - it doesn't excuse turning a blind eye towards or actively participating in the kind of blatant homophobia that many nerds were themselves on the receiving end of - it doesn't excuse acting like all of pop culture is their personal sandbox - it doesn't excuse pretending that "nerd prejudice" is anything resembling actual bigotry, or that the word "nerd" is in any way comparable to "nigger" or "fag" or "chink" or "homo" or "spic" or whatever. But it also doesn't pay to forget that what we call nerd culture was itself something born out of a great deal of pain. You may want to protest and say, "well, that doesn't apply to me, I came by my nerdiness the honest way, I'm not traumatized or anything!" Well, lucky you. But the next time you're hanging out in the game store, ask yourself why it is that the weird kid in the dirty T-shirt who you would swear suffers from some form of Asperger's is so damned defensive about the minutiae of Magic: The Gathering rules that he has Gatherer set as his homepage. Ask yourself why the unfashionable girl with braces and greasy hair wears a different anime T-shirt to school every day. Ask yourself why all these people felt the need to band together in the first place, and why that sense of community - real or imagined - remains so strong in the minds of so many.
Not all nerds are broken people. That would be an easily-disproved exaggeration. But enough of them have been, historically, that the pain lingers in cultural memory. If you're reading these words right now, you've probably been a nerd at some point. What's your poison - comic books? Star Wars? Punk rock? If you have something like that in your life - even if it doesn't fulfill the same need that it once did - chances are good that at some point you did need it to fill a hole. I know I did. And then I spent years digging myself out of that hole, growing up so I could become a functioning adult who didn't need to cling to nerdishness like a totem against the darkness. I think that's how it is for a lot of nerds, actually, even though I can't prove it any more than anecdotally - at some point you realize you don't need that stuff like you used to. But even if you don't need it, you still like it, so you keep it around because you enjoy it. It can be a powerful crutch and a shield, but it can also just be fun. If you can't "outgrow" it, if you still need it and cling to it and live it, well - there but for the grace of God go I, you know?
So does this mean that everyone should just try to "grow up" and not be a nerd anymore? No, I don't know. All I know is that I spent years running from the label because it's an insult. To see other people turning around and turning a name I regarded as a curse into a fashion accessory - well, it doesn't make me mad so much as sad. I don't understand it. I don't hate "Fake Geek Girls" - more power to anyone who enjoys anything, ever. And shame on anyone who makes anyone feel bad for liking what they like. That's the point, really: nerds who turn on other nerds in judgement are simply reenacting the scene of their own primal trauma. It's stupid and offensive, but again, it's mostly just sad.
But look at the dude in that video up above. He seems like a perfectly nice guy who for whatever reason just doesn't fit in with the world around him. He's a little overweight, he's got some weird Steampunk goggle things on his hat, just the fact that he wears a hat at all, he cultivates questionable facial hair, he swallows his words and seems painfully shy on camera - he's pretty much your stereotypical nerd. I don't know him, I don't know what his life is like or what he does for a living - for all I know he could be working for Microsoft and pulling down six figures a year. But he's a nerd, so my sympathy goes to him, because even if you couldn't tell it from seeing me on the street, I've been there. I've lived that. And if you haven't? Well, good on you. But, if we're talking about "real" nerds vs. "fake" nerds, it boils down to this: real nerds know that being a nerd isn't so awesome. Sometimes it's what you do because you can't do anything else. And there's nothing at all funny about that.
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