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Underground > Comic Books >

New X-Men #138

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22:49 / 26.03.03

No (re: Magneto,) because humans give birth to mutants.

23:05 / 26.03.03

No? huh?

well yes some humans give birth to mutants but it seems like all mutants give birth to more mutants...

23:15 / 26.03.03

Yo, Dummy rocked the costume from the Sex Boutique,
with a crew that included Angel, Basilisk, and Beak,
Cut down in his youth by some flying broken glass,
Lack of Kevlar suits has robbed the Special Class,
Lack of caring in the aftermath, it strikes me kinda funny,
"So much potential wasted.", X coulda been talkin' bout Dummy.
Word

23:43 / 26.03.03

About Cyclpsalu\ypse

It was covered in a mini called The search for Cyclops

The conflict between Cuclops' and Apocalypse' personnas leaves him amnesiac

Cable and PHoenix get together and search for him.
Blaquesmith hires a bounty hunter to kill him.
Caliban and Anais (an Apocalypse worshipper) want to help Apoc.

At the end, Phoneix separates them, and Cable kills Apoc.

So Cyclops was never strong enough to get rid of Ap;oc, only to keep him at bay (which is no small feat)

El Gato Was Right: the t-shirt

03:41 / 27.03.03

Flux, I think you are dead on when you note that Jean and Scott's parallel personalities. I think both of them are repressed in ways that stem from the ability or inability to control their powers. When Jean loses control or manifests anger, out comes the destructive power of the Phoenix. Scott has no biological control of his eye-blasts, they're controlled by some man made mechanism, either his visor.

Their psyches exist to mitigate the natural raging power within their bodies. If those forces are released, Scott and Jean know that people may die.

It's also worth noting that Grant makes use of Scott's glasses -- sort of the universal symbol of repression and nerdhood -- during Emma's seduction. She tries to remove his glasses, trying to get him to give in to his more primal urges. What does Scott do? He tells her no, that his eye-blasts could kill her.

I may be stretching here, but think about how Xavier's teachings also deal with the defiance of primal forces. Xavier teaches that mutants must protect and co-exist with humans. Yet the human race is inferior and nature is snuffing it out on its own. So wouldn't the natural inclination be to help survival of the fittest along, through ambivalence at best?

Maybe that's why he's stepping down? Just a thought.

El Gato Was Right: the t-shirt

03:51 / 27.03.03

And another parallel worth mentioning if no one else has is that Jean went through the whole let's-get-it-on-in-the-astral-plane thing when she and Scott were teenagers. Back in the Claremont days, Mastermind manipulated Jean (to a greater extent than Emma is doing Scott) into believing he was some sort of antebellum swashbuckler, if I remember correctly. Scott caught her in a kiss with Mastermind while she was under his influence.

05:21 / 27.03.03

I would like to see Scott's personality go somewhere other than 'repressed nerd', though. I mean, I get that in the 60s there was a not-so-subtle pubescent metaphor in the whole, 'i can't get close to the girl i like because strange uncontrollable emissions may issue from my body'. But since most guys get over that by the time they're leaving their teens, isn't it kind of ridiculous for the world's most confident superhero to keep complaining that he'll go off if a hot chick plays with his glasses?

I think Scott is basically being a bit of a prick in his dealings with Jean quite apart from anything Emma's doing. As far as I can tell, he's known since breaking up with Apocalypse that his relationship with Jean was effectively over (what did he say, 'i'll always love her, but...'). He's convinced himself that not telling her this is somehow protecting her. But it's a pretty manipulative way to behave, clinging to the security of a relationship when you're not really willing to offer anything, emotionally, to your partner. He's not being "repressed", he's being "a dickhead".

The Natural Way

11:49 / 27.03.03

Flux, c'mon, all that "bullshit" stuff.... This is GM we're talking about - the guy that chucks out utopian, post-human/individual propoganda by the truckload. In the end, Grant's books are always defined by his "evolve! evolve!" agenda, whatever you think of it.

And the X-Men are such a simple, elegant metaphor for his trip.

"Mutant politics/fashion/blah" - he's talking about the ability to adapt to the new. That's why it's so hard to define. It's in constant evolution. And there's loads of evidence of Xavier and crew putting this stuff into practice. Do I really need to dig out examples from the text? I'm fairly sure the "death of humanity" falls into the same bracket that ALL Grant's eschatogical narratives fall into: solve et coagula - or the jump from one state to the next. What Lada said above, etc. And the new world he's foreshadowing? In it Telepathy and sun-heads will be commonplace: ALL the rules change. The fear of difference plagueing the human/mutant race that Xavier and Quentin waffle about will be eroded. Bigger rooms.

Jus' wait and see.

Fuck knows how Grant'll bevel this into established continuity. Pocket universes?

15:55 / 27.03.03

note:

Just re-read the Germ-Free_generation.

Jean manafested her Phoenix while protecting the school from U-men. She later coments to Wolverine that she had all these negative emotions about Scott that simply all burned away...

Seems like she's much father along the path out of self repression than Scott...

19:19 / 27.03.03

Which is why her reaction to Emma and Scott may not be the 'psychic catfight' everyone's expecting; I can't help but think that it would be quite Grant for the discovery to be circumvented by something else happening and then dealt with in a big conversation issues later, rather than being the typical superhero fight story. Like the way 'American Death Camp' comes between Jack's announcement that he fancies Boy and his getting off with her...

19:21 / 27.03.03

Interestingly, though, if Jean and Emma do have a rumble, it will mean that both Moore and Morrison's superhero comics have recently featured a storyline involving a titanic battle between incredibly powerful 'magickal' female superheroes.

20:05 / 27.03.03

I think Jean will just kiss his cheek, smile, wash her hands and walk out after hearing Cyke blather about "confusion". Bang. It ends.

Matthew Fluxington

01:04 / 28.03.03

Xorn's strong enough to dislodge that Cement mixer from the truck!!!

I don't think Xorn did that with his physical, muscular strength - I think he did something with the gravitational pull of his brain to alter the relative weight of the cement mixer. There's a panel just before he does it with a close up on his mask with a twinkling of light around his 'eyes', which I think would indicate that he's using his star-brain to do something.

22:30 / 28.03.03

Jean is older and wiser, now, and has a lot more self control than she used to. Part of what created Dark Phoenix was lack of maturity. The power in a way seems to calm her a bit, these days. A SCARY calm, yes, but calm.

On the other side of the coin, Jean wears her heart on her sleeve like Logan, while Scott represses emotions, like Emma. Jean and Logan both use spiritial practices to keep the inner rage in check, make the passion constructive rather than destructive. For all of Emma's supposed flamboyant sexuality, she seems untouchable, very emotionally detached. She keeps everything inside, like Scott does.

E

01:41 / 29.03.03

Ah... Here's where we have to go into backstory by previous writers.

Back in 1971, Roy Thomas and Neal Adams produced the first (as far as I know) year long story arc in superhero comics: The Kree-Skrull War. Basically, the idea was for Thomas to take 20 years worth of stories up 'til that point and build an epic out of them. One of the things he wanted to do was explain why all these alien empires and Cosmic entities kept coming to this little primitive remote mudball and starting trouble. Why were they so interested in this place? For the answer, Thomas used the evolutionary themes from X-Men, and decided where it was all going. Humanity was going to evolve into godlike beings, eventually. The Supreme Intellegence briefly awakens humanity's full potential in Rick Jones, who stops the Kree and Skrull empires with a thought. Literally. He stops the warring Empires in their tracks.

Cut ahead to X-Men Forever, a limited series from just before the recent revamp. There, Jean has a major experience, seeing and feeling millions of years worth of evolution in a few seconds. In other words, she knows where it's all going, how it ends. So, it's not the end of humanity, but it's transformation that this is all about, it moving to the next level.

As for the Emma/Scott/Jean/Logan mess, there's someone else to consider: Charles Xavier. The recently DIVORCED Charles Xavier, I might add. There's a lot of different relationships in this book, but the most central one is between Charles and Jean. Their relationship has changed from teacher and student to partners. Shawn Hill, in the X-Men newsgroup, wrote a review of the Morrison run so far, and I especially liked one observation: "Morrison had turned functional, complicated, metallic and shiny Cerebro into powerful, intuitive, wet and glistening Cerebra." Sounds like a couple of our cast, doesn't it? Jean is becoming more and more influential, and a balance for Chuck, yin and yang. Quentin suggested Chuck "missed the point". Perhaps Jean can provide what he's been missing.

E

01:42 / 30.03.03

I don't think Xorn did that with his physical, muscular strength - I think he did something with the gravitational pull of his brain to alter the relative weight of the cement mixer. There's a panel just before he does it with a close up on his mask with a twinkling of light around his 'eyes', which I think would indicate that he's using his star-brain to do something.

Yeah; I imagined he can perceive gravitational weakpoints, and the like. Bit like Karnak.

You know, from the Inhumans?

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