Miss America

Marvel's remembered they have the Miss America name in their properties again, and they've released some preview art of the new title carrier. Naturally, we're all arguing about her clothing:



My own first reaction was "What the hell? Who the fuck designed this outfit?"

Because seriously, another superheroine who walks around with her belly exposed and those look like high heels. I cringed and raged, but now I've calmed down a bit. It's still a bare midriff, but the artist isn't the worst one ever. I hate that every superheroine is perfectly packaged to land as a sex bomb, and male writers expect us to find that empowering.

Of course, the more complex complaints are being overwhelmed by slutshaming and "that doesn't suit America" reactions that go beyond complaining about Marvel's artistic predictability to insulting women who actually dress like this.

This is a style that real women wear. It was popular when I grew up, and Cheryl Lynn and Joe both pointed out how true to life the outfit looks. That doesn't make it practical for crime-fighting, but it does mean that when you make a character judgement about this costume you're making a character judgement about real women so knock off the misogynistic trashtalk.

The other thing is, like Cheryl, I remember that style on women I wanted to be. I know, white girl from hillbilly country but I still took daytrips to NYC and had a TV in the 90s. It's sexy, outspoken, and unapologetic. The hair, the pants, the boots and the top were assumed to go with an attitude that was beautiful.

I think that's what the artist is trying to capture here.

I'm still unsettled, though. The artist interview didn't reassure me. I don't understand this emphasis on being able to "shake it like Shakira, but still kick your ass" over a substantial character hook, it sounds like empty marketing babble. And I'm deeply annoyed that Madelyne was last written as a "dead, out of touch racist" (I didn't read it, but I'm guessing they needed an old Golden Age hero to be a racist and had to use Miss America because all the Golden Age men are still alive) but at least someone's got the mantle and a later writer can do something that ties them both together.

I don't trust a male writer telling me she's a "new vision of American female empowerment" either. Show me.

I can't look at her yet without imagining her solo miniseries with covers by Greg Horn and shuddering.

Still, she is kind of intriguing. Marvel's reviving the Miss America name. A Hispanic woman (and Dragotta drops her name, Chavez, possibly America Chavez if I'm reading that interview right) wearing the flag, in this political climate. "Ego and indestructibility."

That last part would seem to take care of some of the impractical parts of her costume.

She reminds me of Power Girl. Modernized version of an older character, that pose, costume that the worst artists are going to go crazy with, already being judged based on that costume... "Ego and indestructibility."

And the mini also features Angel from New X-men.

Don't let me down, Casey.

He has no right to look this good.

I'd briefly considered ordering the Age of X: Alpha book this week simply because the Magneto costume design is so beautiful looking, and I am a sucker for Magneto. Still, the initial marketing campaign was very off-putting so instead O decided to slot that money towards a Chaykin-written Magneto one-shot. It is currently in the mail, but in the meantime @#$% Yeah Magneto has started posted some of the artwork and already I'm feeling good about my purchase. Check out this splash:



That is Magneto rocking the suit and trenchcoat look after he clears customs with a stolen identity. I'm told this is set when he first gets to the US, after the falling out with Xavier. Now, if I remember my X-men timing properly means that right now Xavier is scoping out Scott so it's within the past fifteen years. Magneto was a teenager in WWII, so he's coming up on 90 right now. That gorgeous man in that picture is around 75 years old.

Not only that, there's panels of him on a date with a much younger woman. I like this, because I'm particularly enamored of Magneto in a romantic setting. My reasons for this are complicated, though.

You know those terrible romance novels where there's an infamous bad guy who is a perfect gentleman to the heroine, so she falls for him? Not really the bodice rippers, mind you, but one of those where the guy treats her like fine porcelain but engages in violent behavior against every other character. It's this weird safe fantasy in love stories where the heroine is special enough that she is immune to the man's violent tendencies or he's somehow redeemed because sexism/chivalry keeps him from acting violently towards a woman.

Magneto romance stories use that setup, but his history acknowledges how completely removed from reality this feeling of safety is. Yeah, there's people like Rogue that he ended it with a bittersweet parting (I remember one where he told his life story in pillow talk to some girl he picked up on the beach and far as I know he just left, betcha this girl in this one-shot ends up okay too) but this guy has had some very bad breakups. Magda wisely realized that someone with that much power who is prone to paranoia and fits of rage is bound to lose it and hurt a loved one (like, y'know, their son) so she left. She leaves the children because she expects him to be so mad he'll kill her and take them. It's heavily implied that Lorna's mother was killed in a plane crash caused by Magneto. He attacks Astra on sight. Hell, even that bromance he had with Xavier ended on a really sour note.

And because they've done this, they've established that he is a bad guy who does bad things even to people he loves, they have a lot of flexibility when it comes to Magneto stories. They can explore his soft side and humanize him without erasing or trivializing his violent side because Magneto is such a huge, established and well-known villain that there's no point in trying to explain away his past or sweep it under the rug. It's there, and the writer has to accept that this is Magneto and he's been a pretty awful person. In the meantime, he's had enough softening and humanizing stories by this point that they don't come off as weird or insincere. Sure Vision and the Scarlet Witch #4 was probably weird when it first came out, but by now we all know just how complex this guy is. He can be the grand world-threatening villain without losing our sympathy, and he can be the melancholy, remorseful father without losing his threatening presence.

Ultimately, this what makes him such a compelling villain. His origin and subsequent actions, all of the alternate universes where he's a good guy, all the side-switching, his love life and his attitude towards his children all mean he has our sympathy. Not only that, we can relate to him. We can see ourselves in the shoes of this guy who just randomly has all of this power and ability but has given into his rage and pessimism to end up being exactly the kind of person who caused all of his pain. We can see him as a cautionary tale, someone to pity, someone to root for and someone to fear.

And we can look at a splash page like that, of him full of hope and cheer having stolen his friend's identity and illegally entered the country, and know that he's going to become a major supervillain but still smile at how happy and roguish he is, and how great he looks in the suit.

Defending Quicksilver (Hang on, this is a long one)

I've been meaning to blog for a while on Quicksilver's mental breakdown, mainly to answer fans who think that there's no fixing House of M, Son of M, and Silent War without a Skrull or possession explanation. Really, there's a number of points in the storyline that a writer can seize on and use to exonerate him without pulling in a new mind-controlling villain into the mix or saying it was an imposter. I don't know if Bendis or Hine put them in there on purpose, but they're there and I think Peter David at least saw a couple.

In the first place, the already accepted explanation for his complete breakdown is a pretty fucking good one. In House of M he's portrayed as a good but extremely foolish man. Bendis is actually sympathetic to the twins. He makes Pietro play the villain not by setting things up to get everything he wants (like he could), but by setting up a place to hide his sister and sacrificing his own happiness. He gives his father the benefit of the doubt and convinces his sister that Magneto could be a good guy if he had nothing to be afraid of. He gives up his own independance and becomes the obediant, adoring son his father has always demanded. The end result? The old man crushes him to death, he gets resurrected by Wanda (which, judging by Hawkeye's odd behavior afterwards, probably has a temporary effect on the brain chemistry) and awakens the next day to discover that his sister has left him, taken his power, and taken the powers of 99% of his species.


Thing is, I have run into fans that don't think this is enough. That's okay, because there's quite a bit more going on here.

I actually like the first issue of Son of M, because they play this up really well. He's dejected, miserable, powerless, blames himself for M-Day, and when he finally looks past himself to realize just how much harm he did when he was trying to help he finds it so painful he throws himself off a building. Hine really manages to put forward just how depression he's in at the beginning, so when Spider-man's tirade puts him over the edge to self-harm it doesn't seem out of nowhere or a sudden attempt to get sympathy for the character. It seems like this is a person who is that depressed, albeit because of his own actions.


Hine paints a sympathetic portrait of a man becoming a monster, but he doesn't ever call back to the fact that Pietro's a good man. He just has the events unfold and gives us Pietro's view of himself and others during this time. That's actually what ends up ringing false. Pietro is believable in a sickening way when you've been reading him up to this point, but if Son of M #1 was your first exposure to the character you'd think he was always self-centered and short-sighted rather than suffering from an incapacitating bout of depression and that this was him finally getting the results his actions were going to lead to. Crystal's statements, and part of why I hate her so badly in this, suggest that he always had a selfish dark streak and that that was what dissolved the marriage and none of her actions or even her awful uncle screwing them both over. She's an ex-wife who's bad egg of a husband has returned looking for her, and she's strong to tell him off. We're supposed to empathize with her as the virtuous partner. Luna comes off as innocently not knowing how bad her father is. Because we've read Quicksilver, we know he was a real good guy and a good father and husband who tried his best but Hine never lets us see the man Pietro was before M-Day. /He doesn't explain how a good man like Quicksilver be responsible for House of M--leading us to conclude that Pietro was a bad man (or that he has been retconned to be a bad man all along)--or explain how a good man would be driven to stealing those crystals, leading us to conclude that Pietro's nature is supposed to be a selfish bad man being revealed for once because he's lost his power.

It's really skillfully done, the mood and the pacing and the voice all support the story and character, but there is absolutely nothing even acknowledging that he hasn't always been selfish and ruthless. We have to add that ourselves as readers. There are, however, a couple of things in House of M and Son of M together that hint that he's losing it for an external reason.


There's the mood in the first issue of Son of M. There is a great cover where the artist shows everyone as moving superfast while Pietro's standing still, but inside there's a different problem. Pietro's not upset everyone else is moving fast. He's upset that he is moving slow. We know from years of characterization that Quicksilver's powers aren't just running, that he actually perceives and thinks at a greater speed than anyone else. That's why he has a patience problem. He has time to get bored in between words. If he lost all of his powers, everyone else would seem faster like on the cover. He wouldn't be able to keep up with conversations or events, everything would confuse him because it would just be going at a much greater pace than he's used to. Instead, he understands everything that's going on around him, and he perceives himself as going at a snail's pace. He doesn't see other people as going faster, he even asks how they can stand being so slow!


Whether through a stroke of brilliance or a major mistake on Hine's part (*it seems natural to paint someone as being constantly aware of their lost power but really, if he is used to having 5 times as long to process everything, he shouldn't be able to hold a conversation or react at the just slightly too slow speed he's shown reacting at), Pietro's powers are only halfway gone. FYMaximoffs on Tumblr speculated that he hadn't really lost his powers in M-Day, and was just suppressing them out of guilt. Myself, I'd been thinking that Wanda really wanted to depower her brother (thinking it would help him because as much as he loves his powers he's had a lot of social difficulties from them) but messed it up and only got it partly right, fucking his head over even more. The idea he did it himself from the trauma makes more sense, and I prefer it a lot. Whatever caused it, his powers are partially there and causing him to lose his sanity. He's lost his family and he knows it's his fault. He has only one skill, being a superhero, and he can't perform that job anymore. Then Spider-man comes along and tells him (I am not exaggerating) he has no reason to live.

Once he gets to Attilan? Hine actually establishes that someone up there fucks with his mind. This story actually excuses him for his idea to steal the Mists. The Inhumans punish the bad guy and ignore that his brain was fucked with for the umpteenth time when talking about how horrible Pietro is (like they do whenever Maximus fucked with his head, I hate the Inhumans so much), of course, but the writer does put it in there.

And this wasn't Maximus. There is yet another psychic who thinks Pietro's mind is his to mess with so he can achieve his own goals--really, why have we not had a story where someone addresses that psychics (Professor X, Moondragon, Maximus, and now this Videmus dude) don't seem to care about Quicksilver's sanity or rights? Is it the high-speed brain, does it come off as a buzzing that annoys them and they have to stick their hands in there and stop it? Marvel needs an alternate universe where there are no telepaths and as a result all of Magneto's children (and a number of other characters) are in fine mental health. And Magneto needs to see it so he can stop taking his kids to Charles Xavier rather than real therapy.

*Ahem* Back to the original subject, Secret Invasion also establishes a Skrull presence in Attilan. As a result, I look at this and see even more people manipulating Quicksilver in addition to the rogue telepath he connected minds with, the brain moving too fast thing, the depression, the trauma of having been killed by his own father and been brought back to life by a woman with the power to make things go horribly wrong, and then the mental stress of either having a witch use him as a power familiar to focus a spell that changed reality/history and then one that changed the whole multiverse or having to help mentally guild an ultra-powerful reality warping emotionally unbalanced mutant in creating a coherent reality. (Oh, did I mention that I think the Scarlet Witch basically used him as her cat when she cast the House of M and M-Day spells? Well... more on that in the "Ways a clever writer could save Wanda" post I'll probably get to before the next issue of Children's Crusade.)

So that takes care of everything from M-Day to the to the Terrigen Mists. He was losing his sanity and getting desperate, so he tries what he can to get his powers back. What he can try is to expose himself to a dangerous chemical that warps his physical body, has undocumented effects on the human/mutant mind, does nothing to solve his problem of his brain moving faster than his body, and triggers a power that has an even greater detriment to his sanity: Time Travel. Pietro's very first use of time travel is to meet his horrible future self, a future self who tricks him into murdering someone and exposing himself to that drug more. From this point on, he takes it more and more and gets worse and worse until he gets thrown into detox for the Quick and the Dead, goes through withdrawal and his natural powers come back completely. It's pretty obvious that all of his actions from that point onwards were to be attributed to the Mists. I'd argue that the actions leading up to it can be excused as temporary insanity, too, because of the trauma in House of M #7 and the disconnect between his perceptions and his actions.

This brings us to House of M. Nothing can save the character from that, right? Well... Maybe Magneto can.


In House of M #1 Magneto finds Pietro at his sister's bedside and demands to know why he's there. That little question is glossed over but it is the oddest thing for Magneto to say. This is Quicksilver of Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch here. Also known as Pietro "Is my sister going to be alright?" Maximoff. Now, I didn't read Excalibur but if Wanda is ill, why wouldn't he be there? We know as teenagers she used to get sick when she used her powers too much, and he used to take care of her during that. He's been playing nursemaid for her at least since they were 13. The thing to question here is that he hasn't been at her side constantly, rearranging the bedding, bringing her water and chicken soup, reading to her, doing anything that can possibly be done to care for a sick person. The only explanation for that question is that Magneto's already made it clear that he's not supposed to be there, probably to prevent Wanda from accidentally hurting him.

But Pietro's in the room in House of M #1, and this can't be the first time he's been there. And maybe... it's not the first time Pietro's tried to help Wanda control that power. I mean, it wouldn't be the first time he's applied his will to a mystical situation to try and help her (see "Nights of Wundagore", which is either magic or a result of Wanda's power by the Bendis retcon so it applies either way) and they probably couldn't have created a world so intense without having practiced first. Maybe whatever caused Wanda to lose her sanity got passed onto Pietro and amped up the stress level, leading to his own actions in that miniseries. If they go by that hateful idea that those powers cost Wanda her sanity, can you imagine what they did to the guy who's not built to have them? If it's just magic getting out of hand it makes even more sense that he was affected. And if she's being possessed or affected by some external source then that's probably been passed on to him by the opening of the miniseries too.

My point is, for a clever writer (or even just one with eyes) there's no reason to completely retcon out the past few years to save Quicksilver as a heroic character. His actions in Son of M were terrible, but there was major external interference causing it. Any combination of the items I mentioned above could be explored in a scene where someone questions Quicksilver's return to the Avengers and you can use him cleanly afterwards.

Crystal, on the other hand, would benefit greatly from all of us forgetting this miniseries ever happened.

I don't understand Marvel sometimes.

Remember 90s X-men? Remember this guy?



Joseph. He showed after Magneto was "killed" in the whole Onslaught mess, and everyone assumed it was the old man de-aged with bonus amnesia. And for a while he was on the X-men as they milked the whole distrust the stranger who strongly resembles our worst enemy for all it was worth. During this, he got romantically entangled with Rogue, and it worked nicely because it had the positives of the romance with Magneto, where a guy actually treated Rogue like a worthwhile person (fuck you and your bullshit macho entitlement attitude Gambit) without the negatives of him really being a hateful old man and the main villain of the franchise. (Though again, directed at Gambit, when your biggest romantic rival is the main villain of the franchise and that guy actually treats her BETTER than you do, you suck.)



As time went on, Joseph proved he was a genuinely noble soul and real hero in his own right, and the people who thought he was Magneto began to think Magneto could have been a good guy if only the psychic airline had lost his baggage. Then two things happened (and as 90s X-men went I'm not certain which came first): 1) Magneto came back, and 2) We met Mommy.



See, Joseph was just a clone of Magneto, created by his mad scientist ex-girlfriend in order to kill him.

Yes, that's right, Magneto has a good-guy clone-son and an evil mad scientist ex-girlfriend who wants to kill him... and Marvel is not using either of them.



It's weird, too. Astra is a really, really horrible person, but I really like her. She was apparently in the Brotherhood pre-Uncanny X-men #4, but left for ideological reasons or because Magneto wasn't screwing her or because Magneto dumped her or all three. The falling out was apparently over greed, Magneto wants to rule the world and establish his demographic as the one in power, she wants to rule the world and get rich. It was amplified by the sexual tension they had. She is incredibly fixated on how she felt about Magneto and how attractive he still is and how he either turned her down or dumped her, to the point that her preferred method of killing him is to clone him and tell the clone to call her Mommy. Because despite the fact that she knows he's a jackass and she wants to kill him, she still thinks he's one hell of a man.

For his part, he thinks she's a greedy soulless monster who cares nothing for her own people and is sworn to kill her on sight. He has called her deluded, so she may be a stalker-bad-guy rather than an ex, but I don't trust Magneto not to have taken a lover from his early cult when a woman was so readily up for the position. I mean... he was kinda creepy around Wanda sometimes (though not as bad as Xavier with Jean) and she was underage, his daughter, and completely repulsed by him. Astra's good-looking, older, and--even now that she hates his guts--really freaking hot for him. Also, he certainly seems to hate her a lot more passionately than he hates anyone else who's left the Brotherhood.

Also, I love the way they talk. Magneto is very lofty and formal, Astra is disrespectful, flippant, rude, and colloquial. She calls Joseph "Joey", and continually makes comments about how attractive Magneto is, comes on to Nightcrawler, reduces everything to it base level and constantly mutters about the shoddy alien tech that she's stolen and is using to attack him. Oh, and when she doesn't get to kill Magneto or take over the world by taking advantage of human gratitude, she says this:



I can't believe no one wants to use this character. I mean, how many supervillains, crazed parents, or psychotic ex-girlfriend/stalker characters have this much fun playing just one of those roles? She's having the time of her life being all three, and even stops to shake her fists at the heroes at the end!

But sadly, no one seems interested in her or her poor kid. Joseph dissipated after throwing all his power into the magnetic field of the earth to fix damage his old man did, and Astra was apparently "taken care of" off-panel by Apocalypse sometime. Really, they should bring both back, Rogue deserves a better love interest and Magneto certainly deserves more enemies.



That's probably the main reason I like her. There's an ex-wife/ex-girlfriend stereotype that writers love to play with, where the hurt woman dogs the poor innocent guy all over the place. Usually, this woman is very unbalanced and the wrong was completely out of proportion with result. Basically, it's always Carrie Fisher chasing the Blues Brothers all over Chicago so she can kill both because Jake left her at the altar. He's a jerk, but she's going way overboard.

With Magneto? He's responsible for how much horrible misery? Beyond the whole genocidal maniac thing, just look at his personal life. His first wife left him because he killed a whole bunch of people in front of her. He lost his temper and crushed his own son to death once. He is the worst possible scenario of that smooth guy who gets you on his side and then reveals that underneath he is--to quote his daughter--just this horrible person. You can completely side with any woman who says "He treated me like shit and he needs to die" even if she's as objectively awful as Astra.

Maybe that's it. They don't really want that stereotype to be someone that you even slightly side with, and if the guy in question is Magneto you know he did something horrible to her. Personally, I want Marvel to make a thing of this. I want this to be a Magneto problem on multiple fronts. Because not only do we have Astra in limbo, we also have his good-natured selfless wife Magda.

Now, Magda is not established as being anything more than a baseline human, but her two children have radically different powers than their father and it wouldn't be too much for suspension of disbelief if an old lady speedster showed up some day. (Wanda's powers are established as having been fucked with by Cthon, so I'm figuring Pietro's the one displaying the natural X-gene.) Also, no stretch of the imagination to find reasons Magda might think her husband needs to be stopped or even killed for the good of planet, or at least her poor kids.

Beyond that, we have Rogue, who ends up fighting the old man a lot as part of her job description. She generally thinks nicely of him as a lover, even when she knows he's a bastard politically, but her major romantic interest talks like she's a piece of trash he found on the curb so it might be a comparison thing.

Dig even deeper to find Lorna's mother, who is human and dead but that's never stopped anyone in comics. She can show up like Carrie Fisher and launch rockets at him and it shouldn't cause too much confusion. People might not even wonder about the details until it's revealed she's Lorna's mom.



And don't get me wrong, I love Magneto, he is my favorite villain specifically because he can be portrayed so sympathetically, has moments with genuinely good intentions and will organically cross to the good side from time to time. It's just that given the qualities he has displayed as a friend, an ally, a leader, an enemy, and a father, I wouldn't be surprised if every woman he ever slept with ended up trying to kill him or at least severely inconvenience him. At the very least my Dream X-book is that three of these four women team up to attack Magneto.

With Bova as their Jarvis.

Stuck on a moment

Girls Read Comics Too is putting together a Women of Marvel Memorable Moments poll (which is still accepting nominations until Sunday), and the list is pretty good. I want to make that clear before we go on. I like this list, I like this idea, I think you shoudl all go nominate stuff and vote.

But as with all fanlists, there's a couple in there that some fans loved but that make other fans cringe because everyone has different tastes. I'm pretty sure you all know which one I'm talking about:

NO MORE MUTANTS. Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch changed the lives of every person on the planet in House of M

What really got me was the sheer number of people suggesting it in the first post. I'm sure there's a number of Wanda-fans looking at that list and going "Oh HELL no, what's WRONG with people?"

See, House of M and Avengers: Disassembled are two of the absolute worst things to ever come out of Marvel for those of us who like Wanda. It's like Emerald Twilight and Zero Hour for Hal Jordan fans, two books that are fucking based around taking a hero we love and making her fucking crazy for no reason other than someone wants to change the franchise. Wanda Maximoff is the Parallax of the last decade (a comparison I've been on about in chat that I really must elaborate on in the future), and this is basically nominating Scarlet Twilight (No, we won't be going with Crimson or Ruby Twilight, it is going to be Scarlet Twilight) for an award while Scarlet Witch: Rebirth is experiencing shipping delays.

There is something distasteful just about seeing the storyline mentioned and driving home the point that everyone read her losing her mind, every book in the entire Marvel universe was affected, and every fan and writer has had "Womb Crazy Wanda" and the results shoved down their throats for the past six years.

And of course, the first defense of nominating this storyline is, like Zatanna in Identity Crisis (another nomination I complained endless about on Twitter) it was a major decision made by a woman that changed the world. It also underscored the sheer power the character contained, and the weight of their decisions. And in this case, perhaps because I favor the Scarlet Witch over Zatanna as a character, that might actually turn me a bit.

It is also the moment most fresh in fan minds about Wanda, being her last notable appearance prior to Children's Crusade (as an amnesiac guest star she is just a shadow of her true self, and flashback/AU appearances were far under the radar), so that has an effect.

But I don't think any of that is the real reason this sticks in our minds, the real reason it won't go away even after Children's Crusade brings her back and M-Day is undone. I think the real reason is the "I've had just about as much of this shit as I can stand" effect.

In the set of stories that would fall under the umbrella of "Scarlet Twilight" (West Coast Avengers: Darker than Scarlet, Avengers: Disassembled, House of M) Wanda has been fucked over severely from all sides. Her kids have been erased from existence, and she's been told by a demon, her fellow Avengers, and now her father and her "therapist" (Yeah, I'm sure Xavier has a degree but the bastard probably mind controlled his teachers into passing him) that not only were they not what they appeared, but they didn't exist. Her trusted Mentor Agatha Harkness has meddled with her memory. The Marvel Authority on Magic, Dr. Strange, contradicted all of his prior statements about Wanda and stated that she has no magic and it's been her freaky powers all along. The Avengers take him at his word, and do nothing to investigate whether or not her behavior was caused by an external force (such as that demon that took away her children). Captain America turns her over to a father who has a history of manipulating and using his children. Her father turns her over to the world's worst therapist. She's removed from her friends (Magneto's reaction to finding Pietro at her side implies he wasn't even allowed to visit), imprisoned, drugged and subjected to invasive telepathic therapy. The X-men, a team created to protect mutants from a society that feels they are too dangerous to live because of their powers, says that she is too dangerous to live because of her powers. Her friends in the Avengers have chosen to discuss this with them. Her father tells her brother that nothing can be done to stop it. (She was watching that.) And to top it off her sense of reality, her memory, and her powers--her very genes--are rebelling against her, tearing her in different directions and have caused her to kill several teammates--including her close friend Clint and her own husband.

Through all this, all she has left is her brother--who cannot obtain an ally to help save her life--who sacrifices his own independence (as well as his relationship to his wife and daughter--both of whom where absent in M-World) to hide her in a world. For this, for giving everything that their father could possibly want to him and finding a way to do this without destroying all their friends, her brother--bringing to life a nightmare she's had since they first met Magneto--becomes a victim of her father's violent temper.

I hate House of M and the effect it had, but I honestly can't make a case that it was Bendis hating on Wanda. She is the most sympathetic character in the story, the most put-upon woman in the universe. She has gone from having a full SUPERHERO family and friends to just having one person left in the universe who is willing to fight to save her life and sanity, and when she almost loses him... she loses it.

"No More Mutants" was a horrible moment. It was sheer rage and misery. It nearly destroyed the Marvel Universe. But unlike the previous two stories (the first of which was just cruel and the second of which made NO sense and totally ignored the resolution of the first), it was a logical continuation of her story. It was born of grief, anger, pain, abandonment, disillusionment horribly out-of-character actions by the rest of the cast, and kneeling in the blood of her twin brother after her father had beaten the life out of him.

It was not a heroic moment, though you could argue that after her experience with her own powers she honestly thought everyone would be better off. It was more of a "Fuck you, I'm leaving" to her father, to the hypocritical X-men, to the New Avengers, to the world, and to whatever cruel deity had given her those awful powers. It was Wanda, after being jerked around by EVERYONE for two crossovers, finally putting her foot down.

It was not a heroic moment. It was not a positive moment. It was, however, a powerful moment.

And while we're all betting on the Phoenix as the final winner, I have to wonder what it means if it wins. Because this moment is the one that classifies the Scarlet Witch as her father's daughter. It is a very Magneto thing to react to being hurt and betrayed by taking it out on an entire species. It is a very Magneto thing to think you are doing good when you act that way. It is a very Magneto action, the sort of action that allows him to be a compelling villain that can be allied with heroes from time to time. But... it is not an action that you can attributed to someone and classify them as a hero. It's defining moment of villainy and in order to use the Scarlet Witch as a hero it will need to be undone somehow. The effects will need to be reversed, and it will likely be attributed to lingering mind control (though sadly not hair-graying mind control because that would have looked pretty cool).

At least, I sincerely hope it will be undone. I liked the X-books better with the expansive attitude of the Morrison era, and the optimism of the 90s or the Silver Age. I don't like this dying race angle. I don't like it all being Wanda's fault. I don't like Wanda as a villain, or in limbo. And honestly? I hope next time we do a poll like this it doesn't even pass the agency rule.

Disappointed before the first issue ships

CBR has a feature up teasing Age of X by showing the files of Henry Gyrich in the alternate universe, profiling several of our heroes. What really strikes me are the relations listings, and how many characters which are not being used by the X-office and haven't been used by the X-office for years are also missing and dead in this X-men alternate universe. (And I'm going to mention specifics soon, so consider this your spoiler warning.)

And it takes me back to how when Janet Van Dyne was taken off the board in the 616 universe, the Ultimate version of the Wasp was killed in Ultimatum. How when Wanda went crazy in Disassembled it was closely followed by Wanda getting killed in Ultimates.

It's very weird to me, because an alternate timeline storyline is a great opportunity to play with characters you don't normally get to play with, to have dead people alive and inactive people active, and make villains into good guys and bystanders into heroes. It's a really cool playground, but time and time again Marvel seems to decide that when something happens in the 616 universe it is reverberated across the multiverse! Hell, in "Ghost Box" Beast outright states that this is the case with M-Day, meaning that we aren't going to get to see an alternate timeline where mutants are the majority except for House of M flashbacks.

I know there's writers who get it, and we had a lot of variety in Hickman's Fantastic Four excursions and that Exiles is all over the fucking place, but it seems to me like ongoing things like the Ultimate Universe and large scale events like Age of X are squandering huge opportunities by having the same cast in a different setting. Don't get me wrong, Magneto, Rogue and Cyclops are awesome but we can read them together ALL THE TIME right now. We can't really read Cyclops and Havok at the moment because Havok is lost in space. We can only read Magneto and the twins in a single bimonthly series now, otherwise we haven't seen them since House of M. We can't read Rogue and Destiny now, ever, because they killed her off so damned long ago and she's just not a character who gets resurrected.

And these are things that would be fresh and unusual because we haven't seen them in the regular universe for so long. I still maintain that one of the greatest X-crossovers in history is Age of Apocalypse, partially because the only character who absolutely had to be absent was Xavier. With that rule in place, we got a lot of odd relationship stuff that we simply could never see the way 616 was set up. We had Nightcrawler and Mystique as a bickering mother-and-son team. We had Magneto as a loving husband and father, with a supportive relationship with his son (I am a bit irked they killed off Wanda in this crossover). We had Rogue as a mother and stepmother. We had Quicksilver and Storm in a romance. We had Cyclops and Havok raised together by Sinister. We had one-off death Blink alive and active, which actually led to the creation of the freaking Marvel Multiverse by being so popular she launched a series based on traveling through alternate universes!

It was a dystopian setting, but it was expansive and varied. Age of X so far strikes me as based on the same scarcity mentality that is driving the mutant plotlines in the regular universe. There was a "Decimination" and now the vast majority of mutants are dead rather than depowered, so it's a worse place where all the same characters are active. I like Mike Carey, but... it seems so small.

First Rant of the Year (That didn't take long)

So this stuff was up on Tumblr...



Yeah, Marvel... We need to have a talk. This thing with Wanda, I know I've complained before but you are seriously out of your heads with this. Right now you are selling a maxiseries to her fans based on the idea of her CHILDREN finding her and getting her back to regular operation but everywhere but INSIDE THAT MAXISERIES you continue to push the idea that she hallucinated her children and lost her sanity. With zero textual clues to suggest that the characters are wrong in this assumption.

Don't get me wrong. I understand that you have to establish certain things in the regular universe in order to set up the premise, which is that everyone but Wanda, Magneto, and Billy think that the kids were just a manifestation of her mental illnessand out of control powers. I understand that this sets up drama.

The problem is that you're dragging this shit out so long, and fixing it completely underground. Disassembled interrupted half of your line and REBOOTED entire franchises. House of M took over the ENTIRE Marvel line and rebooted the OTHER half of your line! And since then, for at least SIX years every MENTION of Wanda has come with a nod to her being tragically insane and everything short of ominous music. You have spent SIX years and your two highest profile crossovers pounding ALL of your readers over the head with the idea that Wanda is BABY CRAZY.

Then, you offer us an option to fix her in Avengers: Children's Crusade.... A special that is entirely self-contained and not reflected in any of the other books published right now. A narrative thread that we have to go out of our way to find (again, there are NO textual clues outside of Children's Crusade and it's single sad prelude that the Avengers are wrong to assume Wanda's irredeemably insane), is being shipped ever OTHER month, and will last 9 issues that will total up to an 18 month storyline. The book itself is oddly out of time, and does not reflect any of the other developments in recent years despite using characters like Steve Rogers--who appears in half the books you publish--without reflecting their current in-story status, and PROMINENTLY featuring characters like Quicksilver and Magneto who are right now appearing in other books with no nod to the emotional build-up to this story (Magneto's heavy concerns involving his children, Pietro's conclusions that these are his nephews) or the fallout from its conclusion.

This, I believe, would be okay if you had made it as high profile an event as the TWO events in which you destroyed Wanda's image as hero, or did not insist on decompressing the living fuck out of this maxiseries along with dragging it out over 18 months WHILE you continued to use those 18 months to push the narrative of Baby Crazy Wanda.

Y'know, your distinguished competition had this problem with a Silver Age character once. They made Hal Jordan crazy evil and stuck to it for ten years and do you know what happened when they changed their minds? They built up to it. We saw Hal EVERYWHERE and we had foreshadowing all over the fucking place that he was coming back and that it wasn't his fault. After the build up they made him good again in a high profile miniseries... that had a compact six-issue storyline, shipped monthly, and led to the reboot of a franchise. And after that mini? We saw Hal everywhere again rebuilding all those bridges his time under mind control had burnt.

See, after you've dedicated so much time and energy to forcing a heroic character into the role of villain, and have enthusiastically sold the character that way to the readers for an extended period of time... You get a lot of readers and future writers who think that character is a villain. If you want to FIX that, you need to make their redemption a Big Fucking Deal, and make it easily seen by all those readers who gave been eating the shit you've been selling for the last six or ten years rather than just the die-hard holdouts who have been waiting for this since you made her nuts. Otherwise, you'll have a lot of confusion and you risk the right dumbass writer connecting with the right dumbass editor a year or two down the road and having this exchange:

"Hey, wasn't she a bad guy?"
"She's been good since that.. Damn, I forget the name if the mini but it was mind control I think."
"I only know how to write her bad. Let's soft retcon it and use her as a villain."

Or:

"Hey, as a kid I read this cool story where she went nuts. Anyone ever resolve it?"
"... I don't remember, I think she jyst came back to the team."
"Okay I got this idea... We'll call it AVENGERS: DISASSEMBLED..."

And even if that seems too farfetched or just like something that happens anyway, you still have characterization creep. Your writers, editors and artists have been not only pushing this shit but they've been consuming it themselves. Future writers, editors and artists are consuming it. Even if they are ASSIGNED Wanda as a hero, they still have the impression of a weak-willed passive woman who cannot tell reality from fantasy. These traits will overtake her as they write, because you have been pushing them endlessly and this is the image they have of her now. This is just like Hal Jordan's inability to feel fear, Quicksilver's mental instability, and Crystal's wandering eye... All flaws never in their original concepts that now serve to completely define those characters to the point of pushing away their relatability unless the writer works their ass off at researching and restoring the original personality. With every reference to Wanda's insanity you are CONTINUING to destroy your second female mutant character and your second female Avenger--one of your few female characters with a solid profeminist Silver Age foundation. This is not only irritating, it is MIND-BOGGLING to me that you'd do this.

There's really only one way you can save her. When Wanda gets back, she needs to be directly involved in rebuilding everything she destroyed (Bringing Hawkeye back was a good idea, but you are really going to need to overturn M-Day through HER actions) and she's going to need to make those Hal Jordan style pop-ins where she teams up with everyone in the Marvel Universe and defends herself against their grievances. If you leave M-Day in effect, if you just have people drop the grumbling without actually interacting with Wanda, all this shit is going to remain and Scarlet Twilight II is just around the horizon.

Also, that quote of hers bugs me on two levels. Continuity-wise that's a Lee quote, long before they ever found Bova and got the story of their birth. That story's set up so that Wanda has to be the older one, that's why Cthon would infuse her with power. (Unless you're planning something odd with Pietro and Oshtur.) Personality-wise, unless she's drugged out of her gourd like in House of M she knows better than to defer to anything Pietro says. That is hardly a quote indicative of her personality, and I'm a bit annoyed at your Polaris one too. It's awfully generic.

That said, the Quicksilver profile is very compassionate look at his actions and leaves open the option that Steve doubts Pietro's Skrull story. A previous one suggested Steve couldn't tell there was lying involved, this one may well have been after Pietro came clean and the "skrull interference" would be the Skrull that was in Attilan during Son of M. That one made me wince, because a) Captain America should be able to tell when someone as neurotic as Quicksilver is lying to him, b) Steve should know Pietro well enough to tell, and c) I was a little worried someone would have Steve on the less likely to forgive side of this one. It gives me some hope we'll see a little interaction between those two characters again, at least.

March looks like a Marvel-heavy month for me.

Okay, one thing really stands out right away in the Marvel Solicitations:

AVENGERS ACADEMY #10 & #11
Written by CHRISTOS GAGE
Pencils by SEAN CHEN (#10) & TOM RANEY (#11)
Covers by MIKE MCKONE
The return of the Wasp? The return of Korvac? It’s two book-shaking issues in one month – and issue #12 guest-stars the Avengers! First it’s a “day in the life” of the students, with special guest instructors Protector and Dr. Strange! Then Thor, Steve Rogers, Iron Man and more assemble as one of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes’ most powerful villains storms the school as Korvac comes back! Enroll in AVENGERS ACADEMY now and find out why ComicBookResources.com calls it “one of my favorite new series to come along in a while.”
32 PGS. (each) /Rated A …$2.99 (each)

But... WHICH Wasp? I'm torn. I'm already dying to have Hank back in wings, but I'm considerably excited at the slim chance this means seeing Jan again. (In the meantime, Gage has said that February's issue #9 will be "pretty Quicksilver-centric". That one is Finesse meeting possible Papa Taskmasker, so it makes sense to have Pietro on hand for damage control.)

I am definitely getting 3 of these Captain America specials, but I'm not sure about this whole... .1 thing.

Is that Dust on the cover of X-men: Legacy? All in all, this whole Age of X thing is appealing to the Age of Apocalypse fan in me, and Carey DOES write the only X-book I still read. Beyond that, Marvel's metaplot "Fear Itself" actually looks intriguing so far. Immonen and Fraction, not a bad team. And according to Gage's twitter this even is primed to tie big into the Avengers Academy developments I've been watching like a hawk.

DC's got me a little less enthusiastic. Batwoman #2 and Jimmy Olsen #1 seem the most interesting to me right now, along with Morrison's Batbooks.

This Generation Lost tease has completely failed to peak my interest, but it's got me annoyed for pretty much the same reasons it has DCW irritated. It's like back when I dropped Daredevil a few years back over a Milla death tease in the solicit. (I wish I could find the post, I think it was on Newsarama, maybe mostly an argument in the comments.) They're letting us know that they hear the concerns, but rather than make an effort to fix anything they're going to just try and play on our anxieties. It's really dismissive and insulting, and just makes me want to leave them alone a few years until they work out their issues.

I might drop the Green Lantern books for this War of the Green Lanterns thing. It's just not grabbing me. Wonder Woman, on the other hand, has me with the cover:



It's good they've realized there's really only one opponent who can match her.

Their suits even match.

I've been really enjoying Brubaker's Captain America run, especially the inclusion of Natasha Romanov, the Black Widow. I've been really fond of reading both her and Sharon Carter through the entire thing, but it's been disappointing that despite the fact that the costumes look like a big setup for a teamup, the two women haven't really spoken two lines to each other. (Maybe in Reborn. I think that was just briefly, though.) Natasha's talked ABOUT Sharon, of course, and they sound like good friends off-panel, but Brubaker didn't take that step to ever really have the two get together and hurt bad guys for an issue or two or five or an entire series based around the concept. And the "Year of Women" sadly went by without a Sharon and Natasha story. Seems Marvel just hadn't gotten around to it... until now.

We're also doing "Captain America And the Secret Avengers" which is primarily focused on Sharon Carter and the Black Widow, both of whom are important characters in Cap's orbit. It'll give them a little more spotlight and screen time than they usually get.

We're also getting a Falcon one-shot and a one-shot with Peggy Carter (by Kathryn Immonen)



Via fyeahwomenofcap, the solicit:

CAPTAIN AMERICA AND THE SECRET AVENGERS #1

Written by KELLY SUE DECONNICK

Pencils & Cover by GREG TOCCHINI

Steve Rogers’ black ops femme fatales go on the hunt for a rogue assassin! The Black Widow & Agent 13 join forces to stop an under-aged assassin from taking her revenge on a killer of a headmistress. Fierce fisticuffs, death-defying duels and good ol’ fashioned espionage ensue as everything comes to a head in the Big Apple where the gals go in guns blazin’ against…teenaged versions of themselves?!

40 PGS./One-Shot/Rated T+…$3.99

Not a big Tocchini fan (really didn't like his going out of his way to show us the downview of female breasts in his Ion run), but I will take him for this special.

I have bigger worries with Thor.

I'm going to level with you all right away, Thor was a tough sell on me from the beginning. While most of the people weighing in on the matter of Idris Elba as Heimdall--including, officially at least, the extremists themselves--refer to the characters in Thor as mere characters or even cultural icons, I'm not going to dance around it. I actually subscribe to a neo-pagan religion. Thor and Heimdall aren't just a name from old dusty poems or creations of Kirby, they're genuine spiritual figure for me. And while they are many different versions of the old myths and legends, and there's a big emphasis on discovering the essence of the Divine by parsing these different legends and seeing what has the most human truth to it, the Marvel version of Thor was a bit too far afield for me. I had the worst trouble getting past the beardless blonde Thor, even after differences like that were explained away by some generational or post-Ragnarok thing I still can't confidently repeat.

I managed to get a good jumping on point with JMS and I've read his run, some miniseries and some Silver Age reprints. I was impressed with the basic characters of Thor, Balder and the Warriors Three (who weren't in the original myths but seem like the sort of people who would have been so I love them) but had trouble getting past the treatment of the goddesses. The Asyniur (and Freya) were a really appealing part of the Norse pantheon. Fewer of their stories have survived, but this was genuinely a group of amazing goddesses that get sadly ignored at times. And in the Thor franchise, they continue to be ignored. I don't think I've seen Skadi or Freya--which is ridiculous because Freya is... Freya. It's insane to dismiss her. Valkyrie seems to be the only Valkyrie flying around.

Frigga's portrayal is what really annoys me. She's been consigned to the background and we never see her handmaidens. In the meantime her signature story, her story of motherly love that ends in the tragic death of Balder, was centered instead on Odin in the Silver Age. It's possible this has been retconned to a Frigga-centered story again but since we never see the Queen of Asgard say more than two lines I haven't seen it mentioned.

Of course there are some canonical goddesses who get speaking roles like Hela. Now, Hela as I originally saw her in my childhood reading was half-black and half-white. (Not racewise, I mean like those dudes in the original series Star Trek racial harmony episode.) Most of the sources describe a duality: half black and half white, half hag and half beautiful woman, half skeleton and half person, or half dead and half alive... either way, she's split down the middle like Two-Face and it's a damned powerful image. Even if they'd just decided black and white, they could still do the Beautiful death goddess but no... THIS was the first time I saw Hela:



I can deal with Kirby's green-clad fully-human-looking goddess (especially since she has such a cool headdress), but this shirtless shit has been the norm since JMS rebooted Thor. Every use of her, especially as a wicked plotter rather than the morally neutral indifferent Death Goddess (because comics writers hate Death Deities), makes me cringe. The Goddess of Death holds secret conspiracy meetings in her nearly nonexistant nightie. Fucking seriously. And Gillen had her running around in a draping halter top! And look what they have on her profile on their official site. (She rules one of the coldest of the 9 realms! WHERE IS THE REST OF HER SHIRT?!) It's a complete surrender of any mature examination of death in favor of Sexy, Sexy Danger.

I've allowed my recent issues to pile up due to the complete massacre of source material that occurred with the Disir. Now I'd always been under the impression they were the spirits of female ancestors who protect your bloodline and fall under the realm of Freya Vanadis, but it seems Straczynski and Gillen had other ideas. Seems they're creepy soul-eaters cursed by Odin who devour divine essence. Freya could not be reached for comment, because I still haven't seen her in any of the Thor comics. (Honestly, it is in-character for a love goddess to run around in a chainmail bikini but instead you ignore Freya and tart up Hela. I do not understand Marvel.)

That said, I have hope for the Thor franchise because I've read two volumes of Walter Simonson and his handling of Sif was nothing but pure joy. Shame JMS decided to toss her into a comatose body for several years.

My point is that eventually I managed to get away from desiring dogmatic adherence to the Eddas in favor of seeking a genuinely respectful portrayal of the gods. I do think for the most part they manage that with most of the gods and some of the criminally underused goddesses. Original characters (rather than twisting a persona into a story they aren't suited for) help a lot. There's some serious missteps, usually with the goddesses, but in general they treat them as an honorable society that's worthy of reverance and manage to capture the same personalities.

As a result, I'm actually rather optimistic about Idris Elba as Heimdall. Not just because I started laughing my ass off when I first heard (though I have been giggling about this impending freakout since April) but because they might be able to pull this off.

Don't get me wrong, I still feel that so-called Chromatic Casting ignores the real problems and probably isn't the way to make up for a history of white-washing in the film industry, but in this case I'm not exactly annoyed. We don't know the full story here and it could actually be part of the plot, (Like JMS having the Asgardians wearing mortal lives after Ragnarok.) If not, well, he's being played by an accomplished actor and so long as he doesn't get the same treatment Gillen gave the Disir I should be happy.

Of course, I might just be falling prey to some white liberal guilt, or prioritizing offense about gender over race, or maybe I just like annoying white supremacists.

Actually, it's probably just the last one. I still crack up whenever I think what their faces must've looked like.

ETA: Comics Alliance issued an apology for "where we suggested their gods were concocted by drunken medievals." Kind nice of them.

Everyone knows why I'm reading Avengers Academy anyway.

Yesterday's Talking Comics With Tim was an interview with Avengers Academy writer Christos Gage. Of course I dove in hoping for information on one of my favorites, and I wasn't disappointed:

O’Shea: With Avengers Academy–while the students are the core of the series, it’s the instructors that offer almost as much interest for me. For example, I love your use of Quicksilver. Was it your idea to have him in the cast, or how did he get added? Are there certain eras of Quicksilver history that appeal to you and fuel your approach to the character?

Gage: I asked for Quicksilver because I thought he fit in perfectly with the theme of the instructors being Avengers who have flawed, checkered pasts. Avengers Academy is meant to be a place of redemption for student and teacher alike. Just as the best counselors for people trying to stay off drugs are recovered addicts, the Avengers Academy teachers are people who’ve been down some tough roads and come back. Quicksilver was a teen villain, then a teen hero. He was raised to be a terrorist and grew to be an Avenger. My favorite point in Quicksilver history is when he first joined the Avengers…he did this incredibly heroic thing in terms of breaking from Magneto, and putting himself out there in front of a world that hates and fears mutants…but the whole time he was constantly backseat driving and second-guessing Captain America, of all people! Now that’s what I call cojones. Quicksilver is so much fun to write because he gets to say all the snarky things I want to say to people who irritate me, but don’t want to get smacked in the mouth for.

Two things here, number one that yes, that point in history is absolutely one of the best things about Quicksilver. He'll give even Steve Rogers shit. The prototype for Horrible Boss in his life is none other than MAGNETO, a man he has worked for multiple times (a man who repeatedly showed a willingness to just leave him to die even after they found out they were related, a man who actually killed him once--long after they found out they were related), but that doesn't make him grateful just to be treated like a person. He'll let anyone no matter how good (or how bad, because he was always the guy standing up to Magneto in those Silver Age X-men) know when he thinks they're going in the wrong direction or just not acknowledging him enough. I believe it leads back to sincere trust issues, but even then it really takes some nerve, and I like to read people with some nerve.

The second is the one the part I think a lot of fangirls will take issue with:

Quicksilver was a teen villain, then a teen hero. He was raised to be a terrorist and grew to be an Avenger.

I remember a panel was being passed around on Tumblr a few months back where it states that he was trained by Magneto. Thing is, I absolutely love this idea because as I said yesterday about the children of supervillains, the harder it is to break free of the parent the more heroic it is. I actually like the idea he had a few years to indoctrinate the kids and the twins still sabotaged and then left him. It shows a great deal of strength to begin with that they left this incredibly terrifying person, but when you make it that they left him after several years of training because putting the stuff into practice was too horrible it seems like a feat of Herculean strength. Not only that, every time Pietro and Wanda stood up to him it wasn't because they were shocked by the new revelation of what sort of people they'd fallen in with, it was because they still managed to hold onto their values despite being trapped in the group and cut off from the support network that taught them those values.

I do get the feeling, though, that we're witnessing a slight retcon. I think they are slowly being retconned to join Magneto at a younger age than originally intended. I like this, again, because it emphasizes the character strength it took. I used to use they'd just simplify the Maximoff's origins and have them raised by Magneto all along, but I can't help but notice that losing their mother at birth and being passed from Bova to the Franks to the Maximoffs to the streets (or rather, hillsides) to the grip of Magneto finally to a decent life in the Avengers seems to fit their attitudes somehow. They kept getting bounced from place to place and only had each other. (I would like the Citadel of Science "stasis while waiting for a proper family to adopt" explanation traded for a retcon that their mother was a time-traveling mutant, which would nicely explain why neither twin has powers even approaching their father's and truly simplify their origins--but somehow I doubt Marvel will ever realize that there's a really easy way to explain those powers right under their fucking noses.)

I'm optimistic about Gage in a way I'm not about Heinberg. After how Maximoff twins have been handled since Disassembled I really appreciate that a writer thought about their history so he could concentrate on actually portraying the sort of person the character was originally created to be. I would a hundred times prefer that to an in-depth metastory that continues the cycle of weakness to explain how the cycle started. (You can do your explanations and excuses while you're portraying the character as actively heroic, thank you.) They've been pretty much destroyed from all sides in two consecutive crossovers, and ever since then the plots, flashbacks and expositionary dialogue has only served to underscore them as a woman who couldn't handle her powers or not having the family she wanted and a man who couldn't handle losing his powers or losing the family he had. Even now when the lie storyline presents Quicksilver as someone who couldn't own up to his own deeds and had to take the easy way out, Gage's emphasis on his past as a villain and how he broke free of that mitigates the impression and really makes me expect that his coming clean will be a major revelation that's used to advance the overall story arc in AA. And while I'm waiting for that, and for Wanda to finally get repaired, it's still a relief to see at least one of them handed to a writer who recognizes the strength of will that was present in the Silver Age over the plot-induced madness.

This is without even getting into how the Vision's presence could've averted the whole thing.

I was going through my LibraryThing where I came across something that got old irritations going:



Avengers West Coast Visionaries: John Byrne, Vol 2: Darker Than Scarlet (Prelude to House of M)

I normally adore long, unwieldy titles, but this did not bring me joy. No, it did not.

Prelude to House of M. Who do they think they're fooling?

I don't know if that was a fan or if Marvel retitled it (I've heard they did re-release it), but we all know no one planned this far in advance. We know that the whole shitty Darker Than Scarlet storyline was just to get rid of the husband and kids so they could use Wanda as a sexpot again. It was just a really stupid story that left a really stupid open end that Bendis thought he was oh so clever in catching, even though he missed the storyline afterwards where the whole crazy thing was settled and the children were too. Really it wouldn't piss me off so much that he'd used it as an excuse to break up the Avengers if he'd closed up the loophole at the end but no... He had to leave Wanda crazy so he could do House of M.

House of M wasn't a great story idea. It certainly didn't justify leaving the Scarlet Witch in that state. I don't COMPLETELY hate it (I think Pietro and Wanda are the most sympathetic characters in the mess, followed by Magneto and poor innocent Lorna) because it had nice art and issue 7 was heartfelt, but it was really just 5 issues of getting the band together framed by domestic violence and the X-men being hypocrites. This was never anything more substantial than a way to off the mutants and undo the really awesome stuff Grant Morrison did with mutant culture. It also provided a convenient excuse to completely divorce the X-men from the high ground by having them throw aside everything they've ever fought by suggesting they kill a mutant--who hasn't done anything to THEM--for being too powerful. Honestly, one of the reasons I fucking hate House of M is it has made most of the X-men entirely unreadable to me. (I still give Cyclops a pass for a lot of horrible shit because he was the only dude on that side to say "Wait.." but nobody listens to Cyclops when he doesn't want to murder people) They're a bunch of fucking hypocrites, and will be as long as no one points out that they pretty much caused M-Day by reacting to Wanda exactly as nonpowered humans react to them. There wasn't a single mutant at that fucking meeeting that hasn't lost complete control of their powers at some point in their careers. Professor Xavier ALSO took out the Avengers when he did, and no one--not even Pietro who was for having the government put him under guard--suggested he get executed.

I honestly can sympathize with the Avengers in that series. None of them except Wolverine pushed to kill her. They didn't want Magneto to take her away, they had to bargain to try and get her back. No one could really trust that Pietro wasn't going to freak out the second they tried to explain this, so of course they didn't tell him. I can get through House of M and still like the Avengers, and I even suspect this was on purpose. After all, didn't things end for the Avengers with getting Hawkeye back to life? They got a little reward it seems.

Of course, their actions, going along with the X-men to do a full assault on Magneto and distract him while Dr. Strange snuck in to see Wanda (because... this wouldn't make anyone tighten security around the most important person in the universe to the perpetrator/the only family member the deluded and ridiculously powerful party guests would believe couldn't defend herself?) were pretty stupid, but I think the Avengers overall handled it better. No one wanted to kill her and the Wasp wanted to ask Wanda for her input.

But oh god, the X-men. Every time I look at it I can't help but think they deserved to get slammed on for taking that position in the beginning. Before the beginning, even. Professor Xavier was entrusted to treat a woman who was said to be losing touch with reality. When confronted with memories of her giving birth--an event that even after Darker than Scarlet did happen was still something that happened OUTSIDE of her head--he decides to tell her that the children never existed and to forget that memory. Which is bullshit. The children did exist, they just were a trick from an external force. They weren't a delusion only Wanda saw. They weren't a delusion she caused everyone else to see by telepathy. They were a fucking trick by a fucking demon. All the events happened. The children weren't a result of her breakdown, her breakdown was a result of the children turning out to be a big trick. And as the trigger for her original breakdown was that Agatha Harkness fucked with her memory (and to Byrne's credit, the entire WCA team thought that was stupid and her father and brother knew nothing about it until after she freaked out), naturally the solution to a relapse is to fuck with her memory again. Professor Xavier can only have made her WORSE with his "therapy", but he gets none of the blame for House of M nor for supporting the option of killing her. ("I don't know what else to do, Scott" my ass.) He really should have been the one saying "Now, Emma" in the damned X-meetings, but instead he was breaking the idea gently to Magneto.

Hell, Emma actually prevented the peaceful resolution of House of M by stopping them from recruiting Captain America. Despite the fact that he's probably the only person in the group who could have talked down Wanda (and, after the reveal, Pietro), Emma vetoed him because he was too old. So in the big fight scene, when they find out who's idea this all is and they need someone with a clear head around to take control, Steve Rogers is not there. Instead we have a bunch of idiots who let the person who knows the least about any of the players--someone those jackasses really should have been looking after in case she might decide to get hurt or do something really stupid--decides to activate Magneto, the biggest most violent temper on the board. All change of a peaceful resolution disappears, and the mutants of the universe get fucked over because they didn't have Jean Grey at the meeting telling them they were a bunch of assholes for coming up with this.

That said, I did notice that Dr. Doom came out okay during the whole mess. So maybe they did mean to fix Wanda and blame Doom for both her breakdown and Pietro's really bad idea (Seriously, he was helping her focus her powers and unless he was under the same mindfuck I don't see how they'll explain how he let Reed Richards and Sue Storm are dead while Dr. Doom is still in power slip by), or maybe it was a really fucking big oversight and Heinberg caught it. It doesn't solve my problem with X-men, but it does make me optimistic for the Maximoff twins.

Can you be prettier when you cry?

What the fuck, filmmakers?

Actually, it was the lack of acting she hated. "I remember when I was dying in Silver Surfer...The director was like, 'It looks too real. It looks too painful. Can you be prettier when you cry? Cry pretty, Jessica.' He was like 'Don't do that thin with your face. Just make it flat. We can CGI the tears in.'" And I'm like, But there's no connection to a human being. And then it all got me thinking: Am I not good enough? Are my instincts and my emotions not good enough? Do people hate them so much that they don't want me to be a person? Am I not allowed to be a person in my work?

--Jessica Alba in Elle

So, I found this little nugget buried in my feeds, linked from Comic Alliance, through Moviefone, to Jessicaalba.net and I can't help but notice not one of these websites commented on the importance of this quote. Moviefone acknowledged that it was a valid complaint, but was too busy making jokes at her expense.

And you know what, sure, Jessica Alba has never displayed a lot of acting talent. She's easy to take potshots at. But she is telling us exactly where that Fantastic Four sequel went wrong, and where Catwoman and Elektra and other incredibly shitty takes on superheroines went wrong. This is where supporting characters like Lois Lane in Superman Returns went wrong too. From the start, from the very point where they decide "Let's cast that girl based on her appearance--then make sure to change her hair and eye color", and the writing when they don't give them worthwhile parts, and the directing where they say "We need your pain to be attractive so just be flat because that's prettier" -- They don't treat female characters like people. The makers of these films aren't considering those the parts of people. Even when they DO hire an oscar winner, they don't write for her or direct her like they're writing for or directing a person. They're writing for and directing pinups. They think all they need someone who looks hot on the poster and a computer can do the rest. Then when it doesn't work, they say women don't work. After they made it not work.

When you figure all the lead woman in your film can be is window dressing, and you don't pick the best actress (and instead chose the sexpot who's natural looks you're going to cover with appearance and alter with CGI anyway), and you don't write a strong part for her (because you didn't pick a good actress who can carry it, or you'd rather write the men, or you don't feel comfortable with a heroic woman), and you don't encourage the actress to give her best in the role (because strong emotions aren't pretty, because you didn't pick a good actress to begin with so why bother), and you go as far to as to cut down on the humanity of a moment in order to make it more sexually palatable, then your movie sucks. This is why your movies suck, Hollywood. Not because your lead is female, not because your actress sucks (that's actually your fault because you morons hired the sucky actress and are actively trying to make her suck more), but because you've decided your lead isn't a human being. It's not female action heroes who suck, Hollywood, it's you.

Assholes.

(And by the way, if you comment anything to the effect of "Jessica Alba is just a bad actress trying to excuse her bad acting" that makes you an idiot who missed what I'm mad about. And an asshole too.)

That's all we really need to know.

Update to My Sentry Rant

A slight update to my post a few days ago.

It seems that outraged fans have pestered poor Mike Carey, the writer that's been handling Rogue the most, to the point that he answered them. On Facebook. (But we have a quote!)

Mike Carey: Wow. I need another cup of coffee.

Okay, guys, I'm going to comment here in a fairly circumspect way. I've responded to some of you in one-to-one message threads, and I'm going to ask you not to come back to me on this, because there won't be anything I can add.

As everybody knows, I try not to do ret-cons - and as I type that, my nose just ... grew by about a foot and a half. What I try not to do is "type 2" invasive ret-cons that erase things that are commonly supposed to have happened. I'm shameless about type 1 ret-cons, where stuff happened but you just didn't know about it until now. The whole of the Professor X incarnation of Legacy was made up of stories of that kind.

This is a type 1: it happened, because Rogue says on-panel that it happened. It was behind the scenes, invisible, and the chronology isn't clear, but it happened. Is it surprising? I think so. In terms of Rogue's behaviour in relationships, her sexual morality insofar as we can infer it, her personal history up to this point, this revelation is hard - on the face of it - to reconcile.

But as someone says above (sorry, thread is too long to find the reference again quickly) what we know is minimal, and we can fill in an infinite number of stories around these few details. There are ways it could have happened that would make sense. I won't be the one who tells the story of how it actually did happen, but I'm accepting that it happened and the story is there to be told.

Characters in a shared fictional space are created by a kind of consensus. Someone dreams them up and puts them onto the stage, but a whole lot of someone elses then fill in the blanks. When you get contradictions, or apparent contradictions, fans build their own conception of the character from the parts they like most or believe in most.

This is a dangerous and frivolous analogy, but look at the Bible. I'm an atheist, but I'm happy to acknowledge that there's a core of teachings in the Bible that vast numbers of people base their lives on - but crucially, it tends to be a different core for each of them. You take what makes sense to you, and you view the rest with some mixture of tolerance and caution.

I think you have to do the same with shared universes.

I hate that that's on Facebook so I can't exactly verify it, but I have no reason to distrust All Things Fangirl in this matter. It's good in that we won't see it referenced, but bad in that it stays in continuity and we won't ever see Rogue think about it, so if some weird writer comes along who likes the Sentry and this retcon... Well, it'll just seem even more out of left field.

I do just want to point out again that the problem isn't that Rogue's been with a guy other than Gambit, or that Rogue's been with a guy, or even that it's that jerk the Sentry. It's just that, as Carey notes, it doesn't suit her to have a romance that she actually went all the way with that she's never thought once about. Too much of her history is wrapped up in it. Especially with someone with implied immunity. If it had been a retcon involving a regular X-man she sees all the time (okay, not Kurt, that one would be way too creepy) and it was a temporary power loss... Or a villain like Magneto (it's pretty obvious why they wouldn't be together, and their breakup has been dealt with)... But yeah, this? Is stupid and infuriating.

Also, I've been reminded the same writer who wrote this piece of shit funeral special also wrote the Civil War special where that blockhead reporter told Captain America he was out of touch because he didn't watch American Idol or know what Myspace was. And the narrative in that book didn't say she was an idiot, it took Ed Brubaker to have Bucky say (without naming her) she was an idiot in Young Avengers Presents: Patriot.

Just like this funeral special didn't say that Cyclops and Johnny Storm were fucking gossips who should shut their fucking yaps or that Rogue was more upset about recent X-men events than about this guy we never saw her meet. Come to think of it, Cyclops? That's probably the most credible source for gossip you have on the X-men shy of Nightcrawler, and probably the very last person AFTER Nightcrawler to blab a secret.

So, to recap, according to Paul Jenkins the Sentry was an inspiration, a great guy, the best friend to everyone in the Marvel Universe, and the lover if it was impressive despite terrorizing and keeping his poor wife prisoner... and Steve Rogers was out of touch with the American People so he was wrong during Civil War.

Yeah.