Is there any underlying reason why Uncanny seems to be a bit of a problem book for writers? Is it pressure due to it being the 'flagship' book for the line? Or something to do higher up with editorial and the like?
I'm literally years behind with the book (I follow via the Panini UK Collector's Editions), but Fraction's, and before him, Brubaker's runs haven't had the most overly positive reviews. From the reviews I read, they weren't necessarily bad, just not as good as you would have expected from writers of that high calibre.
You missed what I thought was the most major plothole- why did the fake body trick work if they apparently were using a lock of Jean's hair to find her body?
isn't jeans body buried in an iceberg? I hear that they are scraping this and going with a formal team after utopia
Poor Greg Pak. The one good comic he's put out in the last four years and no one remembers it enough to recall that not only is Jean Grey's body no longer in its grave, she's technically somewhere "out there", alive and well.
I think Warsong left such a bad taste, nobody recalls what Endsong was like.
Okay, bearing in mind I don't read these comics, and roll my eyes as much as anyone at Land's style.
But the Actress and the Bishop comic is out this week, and it makes me wonder: is Land just a massively misunderstood Brian Bolland fan?
(probly not)
//Oo/\
But wasn't the Endsong just a what if kind of in the end deal?
The story seemed to say that they switched Jean's body with that of another dead Xavier student. So who was it and why don't the x-men care given what happened with Psylocke?
If it makes you feel better - this weeks stand-alone issue is really good. (I read it on lunch in the shop).
I really want a "Dr. Nemesis: My name is really Warren Ellis" book now
Hey!
World War Hulk was good for what it was, and even disregarding that, Greg Pak is cowriting Incredible Herc, which is my favourite Marvel ongoing at the moment. And really really good.
Isn't Madelyne supposed to be a telepath? Shouldn't that have invalidated most of the story on its own?
I am frustrated by lazy resurrections. Didn't Deathstrike die in Messiah Complex or am I missing something in between? For that matter, did they ever bother to explain how Cable came back to life after the Hecatomb thing or do time travel and mysticism in these cases mean its not even worth paying lip service to?
:For that matter, did they ever bother to explain how Cable came back to life after the Hecatomb thing or do time travel and mysticism in these cases mean its not even worth paying lip service to?:
Cable didn't come back to life, he never died in the first place. Last we saw of him, he shouted out a code word, and the island exploded. If Gambit survived, there's no reason Cable couldn't have.
If you remember Cable/Deadpool #42, Gambit at least had the decency to be running away.
Cable, OTOH, was serenely waiting at ground zero, having set Deadpool up with the last working teleporter, remembering the name of someone who had sacrificed herself to stop him doing the martyr routine years beforehand, and listing all the reasons to sacrifice yourself.
You've hit the nail exactly so far as my frustrations with the cast on this book go. It's quite nice to see the dust shaken off of some characters like Dazzler and Northstar, but they're being brought in for what seem to be weak or overly complicated reasons (sometimes both) and then really not given much to do. It's as if Fraction was saddled with the job of reminding the reader which mutants are still around after the move and has to do so again every single issue. Very unsatisfying.
Madelyne was never a telepath. In "From the Ashes" her apparent telepathy was n illusion by Mastermind. In Inferno she had ill-defined mystical powers that may have been tied to a latent psychic talent. She was never portrayed in her original incarnation as having telepathic powers proper.
Madelyne was very clearly a telepath in her appearances in The Twelve (which I believe marked her final appearance until now), in which she hijacked Cable's mind from the astral plane.
She was also a telepath in X-Man, once Nate Grey brought her back from the dead.
And she had telepathy and telekinesis during Inferno, which were explained by her being a clone of Jean Grey (and her powers having been activated by Sinister and/or the Limbo Demons at some point or another)
Yeah, but Steven Grant made a mess of her X-Man-era appearances [including The 12] by claiming that it had been an alternate Jean Grey all along - which didn't explain any of her appearances in Cable or "The Twelve" besides the problems that caused with the X-Man plots themselves.
Anyone else notice that Fraction appears to be completely incapable of dealing with more than two or three characters at a time during battle scenes? Worse, he doesn't bother to consider how powers or skills might interfere with his desired plot. (Thus you have things like the Sisterhood steamrolling the X-Men in one issue to a laughable explanation, only to be steamrolled in return in the next.)
When the X-Men went after the fleeing Empath, they attacked him one at a time. Storm even quits so that the next X-Man could take his turn. And Empath wasn't such a problem because they lacked a speedster, but rather because the X-Men were written as completely incompetent.
In the last issue, after the X-Women attack the Mastermind sisters, Fraction simply ignores most of the people present. Psylocke and Dazzler appear to be fighting each other in an otherwise empty room. There should be five other people fighting in that same area. Emma and Regan disappear until the last panel of the fight, and Fraction only remembers Storm's presence after the fight is over. Karma and Martinique completely vanish from the book after the pre-fight panels.
The graveyard fight is handled only a little better. Maddie, Spiral, and Chimera conveniently all stand and walk together while Domino shoots at them. By this point, I'm of the mind that Fraction couldn't handle tracking them otherwise.
:Karma and Martinique completely vanish from the book after the pre-fight panels.:
With Karma though, its not just Fraction. Has anyone, other than circa 1988 Chris Claremont, ever let her use her powers to influence the story? I'm struggling to think of a single encounter with a villain since the San Francisco era began, that couldn't have ended instantly just by saying "oh yeah, Karma's here."
"Didn't Deathstrike die in Messiah Complex or am I missing something in between?"
Patrick, keep in mind that she's a cyborg, for her death is like... A computer momentarily rebooting.
And..... The real body of Jean Grey is not in the mansion Graveyard anymore. Too bad Greg Land couldn't remember that he draw X-Men: Phoenix Endsong where the rellocation of the body occured.
The whole run 'til #500 is crap and pointless, I'm afraid.
"The whole run 'til #500 is crap and pointless, I'm afraid."
Don't you mean "since"?
Considering all the above confusion with where Jean's body is, you can see why the Red Queen might want to get a piece of her hair to verify its location rather than rely on a tombstone.
Still doesn't explain why the hair led her to the wrong body though (unless the hair was also a substitute).
This isn't a plot hole. The spell took the Red Queen to the right place (the graveyard), and the X-Men tricked her into occupying the wrong body. That doesn't mean Jean's body wasn't there.
I don't think I agree with that. While I'm no expert on how mystical hair to body tracking works, it seems reasonable to think that it would actually take you to the right body not just to the right graveyard.
Plus, as has been pointed out, the body having been moved from the mansion makes the whole thing a giant plot hole.
First things first, the X-Men could always have dug Jean out of the ice after endsong. They never did it on panel, but that should be the least concern here. The implications of what Scott says to the Red Queen after the dupe implies that the situation was a little more straightforward than it seems:
1. Red Queen uses hair to find the graveyard, As Maddie spent her X-days in Australia, in a period before a lot of the big X-deaths, its understandable when she makes a comment about how amusing it is to build a school next to the graveyard holding its casualties. She's not seen it, and therefore would not have thought to look there minus the hair tracer.
2. Jean's body is there now, out of the ice or otherwise.
3. Once she comes to the graveyard and sees Jean's grave (currently open), the hair is gone. If one was to be charitable, one could assume that the Red Queen saw a coffin coming from/going into Jean's grave and assumed it was Jean. A stupid mistake, but one an overconfident megalomaniacal ghost could be understood to make. She didn't 'detect' the ruse, because she never thought to try. Cheap, but understandable. Of course, that in no way redeems the full circle nature of the story after the fact.
When I read through the arc a second time to see if I had missed 'the big point' of it (Psylocke, perhaps?), the only thing I can possibly come up with is the scene with Emma, unconscious, dealing with whom I presume to be the 'real' phoenix/Jean Grey. "Visions come to prepared spirits," and what not. I can only assume, or perhaps hope, that this scene had some meaning, because otherwise its all a big excuse to bring Psylocke back.
Even though I like the attitude Fraction has brought to the title, I can't help but agree that the execution has been... disappointing.
So now that we've seen two of Marvel's absolute best writers come onboard in the last few years (Brubaker and Fraction) and fail dramatically, at what point does it become obvious that the problem isn't the writer(s) but the property itself? Seems to me like the X-Men are broken and could do with a change.
(And thanks for bringing back the X-Axis, Paul.)
I don't think anyone has made the set-up work since M-Day, in any of the books, but to be fair, there are problems with Fraction's stories that go beyond that.
What's wrong with how Carey was going? I think he and Peter David have worked...
i actually liked most of the stuff Brubaker wrote...it was all space opera and not traditional X-Men stories, but the characterizations were there, and the team he was writing had good chemistry. And I know the writing has been dodgy in the most recent arc and that the art doesn't directly affect that, but I swear I like all the stuff that Greg Land 'draws' tons less than the stuff he doesn't.
It reminds me of when Kia Asamiya's melodramatic manga style was just compounding how horribly horrible Chuck Austin's writing was. (although bringing in Salvador Larroca didn't really help). I can't help but think that if someone other than Land was the artist, some of this might have seemed a little more coherent.
A good story-telling artist can actually make up the deficiencies of the script. Sometimes.
Shi'ar space opera is pretty standard X-Men stuff, even if it never fails to be unpopular with the core fans. Why they continue to do it occasionally is beyond me. It'll be interesting to see whether or not the X-books even mention the fact that Xavier's greatest love interest just died in War of Kings.
Surprisingly, the Utopia set-up book was really good. It is sort of telling that the X-Men franchise was so broken that it needed to plug into the ongoing crossover jazz to get some momentum - isn't that usually how third-tier books like Ms. Marvel and Moon Knight get their boost? - it's a great set-up nonetheless that actually builds on Messiah Complex and Dark Reign in interesting ways.
Incidentally, what the fuck happened to the gibberish about Magneto and the High Evolutionary from #500? That was some horrible unimaginative plotting.
" Is there any underlying reason why Uncanny seems to be a bit of a problem book for writers? Is it pressure due to it being the 'flagship' book for the line? Or something to do higher up with editorial and the like? "
Actually, it hasn't been the flagship book until recently; before Grant Morrison's New X-Men held that title, then ( ostensibly, given the content within ) Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-Men. In those periods, Uncanny X-Men was largely filler; the only decent story it's hosted in recent memory was Brubaker's Rise and Fall of the Shi'Ar Empire, and that was just an extended space excursion with a cast of Whedon's " leftovers ". So the problems with the current Uncanny don't have anything to do with its troubled recent past.
I'm the only one that thought Dark Avengers/X-Men was a bit rubbish, and mostly relied on the X-Men acting like idiots then?
Could it be as simple as team books are really hard to write well?
When I think of Bendis' Avengers, Brubaker's X-Men and Fraction's X-Men they are all a lot weaker than the individual books that I have really liked from them. And I think Carey's X-men never jelled because he never was able to get to his main develpments in a clear way after assembling his off-beat cast.
With all of these, often the small character moments are right, but the main plot drags and there's never satisfying character movements among multiple characters.
I think that Peter David in X-Factor does it well, Geoff Johns in JSA (the first run especially) and Morrison and Waid in JLA.
I actually think Peter David would be a great choice for a main X-book. He does I think the best job of having many characters doing something while still focusing on his main ones.
And I wouldn't mind seeing what Kurt Busiek or Fabien Niecieza might bring to the X franchise if either were interested.
Oh and Warren, your explanations make a degree of sense, but that's an awful lot of supposition to grant the creative team. If they thought it out as much as you did, they should spell it out a little more. And I still think, that whether the Red Queen was totally familiar with the mansion or not, if she can figure out that Wolverine has a lock of Jean's hair she would have at least poked around in Westchester to see if she could find some clues.
Technically, there's not that much reading into what's going on in either statements 1 or 3. 2 is the only piece of exposition that isn't at least implied. The Red Queen states #1, and #3 is the only logical conclusion possible without assuming the story itself is broken.
To be fair, though Rich, if my suppositions are on the mark, exactly how else other than the clues I listed does one spell out what happened without being as inane as those little character blurbs? Do we really need one at the end that says: Red Queen, crazy dead wife, currently making a big stupid assumption?
I agree with everyone's comments. This book is horrible.
I don't get the Psylocke stuff at all. Having not read Exiles, how did that end? Did she vanish or was she still out in the multiverse somewhere? Why was she pulled into her old body if she wasn't dead (again)? I thought she couldn't be altered like that since the last Claremont run. And again, they make a fudge of her powers (telepath or telekinetic or both? Just say it outright already!!).
I also find the little captions describing each character just as intrusive as thought bubbles would be ("Mine is the power to summon wind and lightning!" etc). The fact they are kind of sarcastic does nothing to dispell my feeling that the creators really dont respect the characters.
This book needs a permanent cast and sense of purpose, and fast!
The extra insult to Karma's disappearance is that her name box blurb in the same issue says "Underestimated and ignored a lot". Sadly appropriate for a woman who managed to be present for only two panels.
@ Michael: Regardless of Fraction's track record, his plot and scene work in Uncanny is simply terrible. This is simply bad writing, and not the fault of the book or the characters.
The current exiles book is, for the moment at least, politely ignoring the, "Hey, what happened to the old set up and team?" question.
This may or may not be attributable to the creators there having to wait for this storyline to end.
I don't really understand why fans dislike the little character captions so much. They're for new readers who I'm sure appreciate the rather crucial info, given the ridiculously large cast.
As for fans who are already familiar with the characters, just stop reading them. The text is conveniently placed in distinctive silver boxes that your eye can dismiss without much thought. There. Everybody wins.
Jonny: Carey hasn't really addressed the post M-Day set-up. Like most writers, he just kind of ignored it until Legacy, after which he started writing stories about the past instead of the present. To be fair, he was one of the first writers to START addressing the problem, but he hasn't actually managed to solve it.
Peter David has managed to wring a couple of stories out of M-Day, but his book works because it's basically a team book about a bunch of low-level superheroes playing detective, and the fact that they happen to be connected to the X-Men is ultimately peripheral.
I think a huge problem with Uncanny is that all the interesting members of the cast all appear in other books, meaning that no change can really be made to them without intruding on other books that are telling their own stories.
Not to mention that the stories themselves suck and nothing good has come out of M-day at all. The line is broken and is far beyond the need of urgent medical attention. I think the term dead on it's feet very much applies to the X-men these days.
The X-Men's current line editor is Axel Alonso. For better (Milligan/Allred X-Force) or worse (Daniel Way), Alonso's strength is that he can get people on a project and let them go nuts.
Given that the X-Men books have largely been rubbish since Morrison left (although, I hasten to add, a very different kind of rubbish than the pre-Morrison rubbish), I presume the problem starts at a higher-up level than Alonso or his creators are able to address.
Maybe it's because there's a successful movie franchise to be protected and maybe it's because commercial concerns prevent Marvel from shrinking the line to a more manageable and creatively fertile size like they did in 2000.
As a result, the books are in a corner creatively and can't get out, because the line is too fragmented and compartmentalized for the creators to be able to do anything about it.
You can read between the lines that Fraction isn't happy with Land's art, for instance, and you can read between the lines that Carey would like to do something with the characters and concepts he introduced early on during his run but Marvel isn't giving him the opportunity.
That doesn't excuse the fact that UNCANNY X-MEN and X-MEN: LEGACY are dull as dishwater and vacant of any real characters, mind you. Personally, I just hope Fraction, whose work on INVINCIBLE IRON MAN is in a whole nother ball park, has the good sense to get out before it breaks him.
Working on an X-Men book may be paying the bills, and I can absolutely understand the appeal of that, especially if you've got a family to support. But on the other hand, it's plain as day that Fraction, at least, is struggling with the material; which means that, on top of not yielding good work, it's probably a very time-consuming and draining experience for him, as well.
So in the long term, doing something else with his time may not be the worst thing for him to consider -- certainly not creatively, and probably not commercially, either.
More Cassanova less Uncanny X-Men.
What is sad is that M-Day is 3-4 years old by now and next to nothing interesting has been done since. You'd think someone would notice the diminishing returns eventually. It's also kind of insulting that Messiah Complex was supposed to be important and here we are more than a year out and the wheels are still spinning in place.
And drawing it out with a lame "trilogy" of Messiah _______ stories is just galling.
I got the impression that the Red Queen was some manifestation of the Phoenix, maybe...? It would certainly go a long way to explaining the obsession.
Of course, the Red Queen / Madelyne Pryor continuity is now such a ball of wax that I don't know why Fraction would want to touch it. Unless he had some interesting take on the idea... which he really doesn't, here.
As for Peter David on a main x-book - I wouldn't hope too much. From what I understand, he's a bit adverse to editorial fiat, and a side book like X-Factor at least has greater avoidance of that (if not entirely, Messiah Complex and all).
Warren,
I hear your point, that some subtlety and some attention by me the reader are good things. (And to make the trick work, necessary for the story. But it is a lot of history to remember. I've been reading long enough to have been around for all the Madeline Pryor stories and I didn't remember she'd never been to the mansion.
Maybe I am getting sloppy as a reader, but my reaction to the big trick wasn't "Oh, that's clever" but "Really? That doesn't make any sense." But i think I'll actually give it another read tonight and with your comments in mind see if it works better for me.
Messiah Complex was the only X-book I brought in singles since Morrison and Milligan left. And the reason was that it was a fun, action story told at a pace that I was comfortable with. It also felt that the characters being used were the ones right for the story and not stupidly limited because 'oh so and so is exclusive to this book'.
I really do not see why they can't merge Astonishing/Legacy/Uncanny and do a weekly comic. It just makes so much sense.
:I really do not see why they can't merge Astonishing/Legacy/Uncanny and do a weekly comic. It just makes so much sense.:
Its somewhat hard to imagine Warren Ellis contributing to a weekly comic.
Also, with the luck we the audience have had of late, every issue would end up drawn by Greg Land.
This week kind of proved my theory about Uncanny: it is only good every 6 or 7 issues. Uncanny #512 was Fraction's strongest issue to date, up there with the annual. A fun done in one story that gave us more pages for $4.
Yet Utopia was 3/4 bad, until the last three pages. The Dark Avengers stole every scene they were in (especially Ares). Silverstri also had 4 people being his "pencil assists" and nine inkers.
Maddie definitely has been to the mansion -- she married Cyclops there. She was also there when Storm bested Cyclops in #201.
I disagree that she was portrayed as a telepath in Inferno. Yes, she demonstrated powers that appeared telekinetic, but their source was not identified. Moreover, they were not telepathic powers -- she never read nor projected thoughts.
I have no idea what powers she displayed in X-Man or anything subsequent to Inferno, because I never read it.
I'd also note that Jean Grey's original grave was at Bard College, not on the mansion grounds; see UXM #175.
The case regarding Maddie's powers in Inferno:
Recall the scenes where Maddie is flirting with Havoc in UXM #339 - 340? She teases him about having telepathic powers, but the matter is left ambiguous. It references back to her courtship with Cyclops where she made offhand comments that Scott took seriously.
Subsequent to that scene she displays, for the first time, her powers at Jean Grey's grave. She conjures images/memories of Scott at Jean's grave, she wields some kind of energy blast to destroy the grave, and she turns Jean's parents into demons. None of these are telepathic powers.
While visiting the Nebraska Orphanage, she sees herself as an infant in the creche. This must be a similar power to that which let her visualize Cyclops at Jean's grave though she was not there to remember the event.
In XFA #36, N'astirh refers to Maddie's powers as "dream awakened."
In UXM #241 as Middie confronts Sinister, she again displays energy projection which may be telekinetic or may be demonic.
As Sinister prattles on to Maddie about her origin, we see her first contact with Phoenix upon the death of Jean Grey/Phoenix.
In her speach at the end of UXM #241 she says "I abjure life 'Father' [Sinister] and give myself over whole and unreservedly to the fire." This suggests to me that she is embracing a demonic power, rather than her own latent mutant powers. The notion of "giving oneself over" has undertones of corruption from outside. Moreover, the power is described as "the Fire" which implies a demonic origin, not a mutant or telepathic one.
In XFA #37 she displays additional energy projection powers. N'astirh states that he "awoke" those powers, and that she was "A being filled with unrealized and mature power."
On several occasions she snatches Nathan Christopher from Jean, displaying what appear to be telekinetic powers.
Later Maddie states, "I have been given power. I am power."
Maddie conjures a demonic altar to sacrifice Nathan Christopher -- a power that appears demonic, not telepathic.
Here's the strongest evidence of telepathic powers: Nathan Christopher is about to be sacrificed and calls out to Jean. Maddie says, "I heard that! You reached out to her." But it's clear here that it's Nathan Christopher who has the telepathic powers. Maddie overhears because she is the genetic clone of the recipient of the message. There's an argument that some latent telepathy contributed to her receptivity; but this is not clearly stated, and is not necessary to explain the event.
Now we come to the meat of the question. At the end of UXM #242, Maddie captures Jean with what appears to be an energy lasso. The scene is continued in XFA #39 where Maddie and Jean have a psychic tête à tête. Maddie commands demons, manipulates the demon controlled X-Men, and generally displays demonic powers.
Interestingly, she states that her "latent powers" were awakened by watching Storm defeat Cyclops in UXM #201. She further states that she "influenced" the outcome. Nowhere else does it explain how she came to this conclusion. This is pretty contrary to some of the things said about her powers earlier. She might have been mislead by N'astirh, or it might imply that some nascent psychic powers were activated making her sensitive to demonic power.
She places Longshot and Dazzler in spotlights. Apparently a magical power. She tries to draw out the darkness in Archangel's soul. Perhaps a telepathic manipulation, but similarly attributable to a demonic power.
Archangel severs Maddie's energy leash on Jean with his wings, demonstrating that the leash was not psychic in nature, but some variety of energy manipulation that can be disrupted by metal wings. The backlash zaps Wolverine and "clears his head."
Maddie throws up a force field around herself and Jean. Psylocke describes it as "telekinetic" in nature.
Then there is the tête à tête with Jean. Maddie appears to be forcing her way into Jean's mind, but Phoenix appears immediately and connects the two women. Clearly there is some psychic affinity that Maddie has, but again she does not independently display telepathic powers.
Everything in XFA #39 takes place within Jean's mind on the astral plane. Any powers Maddie displays there do indicate a latent psychic power, but do not demonstrate telepathy. Indeed, we've seen non-psychics like Cyclops demonstrate powers on the Astral plane (in his battle with Wynguard over Phoenix). SO this does not prove Maddie is a telepath.
I think the evidence supports this theory:
Maddie (through Inferno), being a clone of Jean, has an affinity for psychic sensitivity. She also has an affinity for demonic power (similar to Magik and the Scarlet Witch). Her powers as they were awakened and shaped by Sinister and N'astirh, were largely demonic, and took on characteristics of telekinesis. She never had telepathic powers. The only evidence to contradict this is her discussion of watching Cyclops and Storm fight, and influencing the outcome. I give this statement little or no credibility since none of the leadup to Inferno gives us any explanation of how she could have figured this out.
It can always be argued that all of Inferno was a psychic manipulation by Maddie, but that makes it hard to believe. C'mon, was she really causing all of Manhattan to hallucinate a demon invasion? And wouldn't someone like Dr. Strange see through that if it were true? (In What If? #6, Strange treats the Inferno as a real event, not a psychic illusion). And Rechel Grey would probably have been able to see through a psychic illusion as well.
I think the evidnece is that Maddie's powers, while psychic in part, were largely demonic, and not "telepathic" in any significant sense.
Done.
I was not intending to say that she'd never been to the mansion, only that the vast majority of her "X-time" was spent elsewhere. Also, when she had been there, it was well before the 'huge somber graveyard was put in next to the basketball court or wherever.
Warren --
I was responding to someone else's comment that she had never been there.
I was also under the mistaken belief that the graveyard predated Maddie's marriage to Cyclops. But now that I think about it, there were only three deaths before that. Thunderbird was returned to his home, Jean buried at Bard, and who cares what happened to Changeling? Given that, there probably was no graveyard at the Mansion during Maddie's first life.
The more I read Fraction's X-Men, with or without Land's art, the more he kind of seems like Land in writer form. I don't like how he suddenly aged Pixie five years mentally and physically (the latter I'll leave to the writer) and plenty other things I can't be bothered listing. On the other hand, I do like how he's developed the rift between Scott and Emma, and that he's brung in more synch with other X titles (finally addressing X-Force).
Julian Kuleck> Of course, the Red Queen / Madelyne Pryor continuity is now such a ball of wax that I don't know why Fraction would want to touch it. Unless he had some interesting take on the idea... which he really doesn't, here.
But he also dragged up the Psylocke/Kwannon stuff, which was cauterised a decade ago, for no apparent reason and without having an interesting take on THAT idea.
And continuity porn is the last preserve of a floundering writer...
I wonder if the problem isn't simply that the X-books are essentially stuck bridging big even storylines. Dark Reign was coming up, so Fraction had a few months to kill where nothing huge could happen.
The stuff in #500 will doubtless set up a big X-book event where Magneto comes back with some scheme or other, so that has to be backburnered until everyone's ready...and probably can't happen until the Dark Avengers/X-Men crossover arc finishes.
It's a mess, really.
The other problem I see at Marvel these days which seems to have hurt the X-books in particular is an increasing tendency to think in terms of idealized status quo for a title rather than asking about specific stories spinning from it.
No one seemed to have an actual bunch of stories that required the end of Spider-Man's marriage, but the marriage wasn't part of what writers think of as the character's default status and so had to go. What we've gotten since then are basically standard Spider-Man stories whose quality and plot points rarely seem like they'd have been wildly out of place in the "married" era.
Similarly, but far more damagingly, the X-books were perceived as working "best" when there was a small number of named mutants and that only. So that was made the literal status quo with House of M/Decimation/The 198. Trouble is, no one thought about what the nxt story would be; it was apparently considered as a magically perfect status quo that would, by its very nature, make any plot anyone came up with a good X-Men story.
Oddly enough, we actually know whgat happened to Changeling. Hilarious voodoo badguy the Black Talon made him a zombie along with other dead X-characters in the "X-Humed." She-Hulk fought them in Louisiana.
After the Talon was beaten, Changeling and the others were then buried in a New Orleans cemetery with their mouths full of salt so as to prevent their rezombification in the future.
Well, in terms of making the DeciMation work as a story, they cut the legs out from under themselves in one very specific way:
They refused to depower virtually any characters of significance who were in active use. And THEN they wrote out or repowered even those few characters who they did push the button on.
What we should have got after M-Day, rather than human-piloted Sentinels that no-one wanted to write, was a status quo where at least half the active roster was depowered, and then they had to deal with that in a way that didn't involve just putting them on a bus. Rather than the ludicrous compromise where almost all the X-Men - and, apparently, Acolytes - kept their powers and nearly no-one else did.
Oh, I agree as to why it didn't work in the details, but my understanding is that the Decimation was essentially an editorial fiat because the X-Men "work better" when mutants aren't a sizable demographic in the Marvel Universe.
Since that was the case, it was never really about doing a story where mutants lose their powers; it was about going back to the 1960s and 1970s where the only mutants who showed up were people with codenames and powers who came along in small groups or as individuals.
Basically, the details weren't considered when the editorial directive was sent down, and in fact the nature of the directive meant that by definition any character who was part of the fight scenes was going to be spared (or, as with Lorna, have the Decimation arbitrarily reversed).
Yeah, Joe Q's infamous "genies". I believe you without hesitation on that being the motivation - it's pretty much the only plausible explanation as to why the writers were allowed to shove it as far under the carpet as they could do.
I was just saying that, if they'd followed through on it at least moderately logically, M-Day could have been made to work. Not permanently, but as a fairly long-term (say, three years or so) arc with a relatively strict focus - although the sheer number of X-Books would always have made it tricky to pull off (in the same way that all-too-many SI stories were about little green men and nothing else, and about half the MU titles currently have a title character dedicated to bringing down Norman Osborn when there's no possible way they would be allowed to in their low-selling book).
Omar- Logically that is how it should have worked, but too many readers just wouldn't be interested in reading their favourite characters become 'useless'; and writers wouldn't be interested in writing their favourite characters as 'useless'.
If there was perhaps some passing explanation why which mutants kept their powers and others didn't people would feel a lot better. Even if it was something silly across a couple of brief pages.
Could be something simply retared, but I'm sure they could think of something.
I'm trying to be optimistic now anyway... It was several years ago, the crappy miniseries are behind us, and the concept of mutants as an ostracised race and endangered species feels a lot stronger.
There was a 'passing explanation' of why all of the big names retained their abilities. I forget where exactly it was stated, but the idea was something along the lines of 'anyone who was in the big fight at the end of House of M was protected,' and I seem to remember Dr. Strange or someone of that nature being involved, although I may be mistaken on that last bit.
As for everyone who wasn't there, the reason was nonexistant.
I was under the impression it was a combination of "anyone present at the climax of HOM" + "Cause we felt like it" and "Can't depower an A-list character".
Well, yes, but I thought 'the reason was nonexistant' was mildly more polite.
That explanation for who kept their powers post-HOM doesn't wash, considering there were people in the fracas who lost their powers.
The de facto explanation should just be that Wanda judged who the world "needed" for its own safety, which is why the X-teams remain, and then tack on the usual blathering about the nature of her chaos magic being unpredictable, resulting in stragglers like Beautiful Dreamer and (lol) Sugar Man.
A mess indeed. And what was the point of putting Psylocke back in her original body only swap it back at the last second? No rhyme or reason to any of that.
As for Maddie, wasn't it explained in Inferno that her powers at the time were purely due to the fact that she was the carrier of the Phoenix force? N'Astirh and Sy'm's meddling awoke it from it's dormant state, and gave her access to it. But they didn't know about it, which is why N'Astirh continued to be surprised about Maddie's power levels.
In this Sisterhood arc I find it appaling how nothing was explained about maddie's reappearance and that no X-Man, including Scott, seemed to care or wonder either. In interviews they said it wasn't really Maddie, but the story certainly doesn't seem to agree: only conclusion at the end is that it was Maddie, somehow, with new powers, somehow, who did things for motivations that made no sense and was defeated in a way that shouldn't have made a difference. Brilliant. Really.
The more I think about it, the more this whole arc just seems like Fanfic to me. In terms of ideas as well as execution.
In theory, Maddie should've had Jean Grey's powers since she was an exact genetic duplicate of Jean...and Jean had geneticaqlly-based psi abilities.
In practice....well, it never did make much sense.
Sugar man? They keep only 198 mutants and one of them they decide should be the fucking sugar man? That right there says none of this has been thought out...
I always saw it as Maddie having the potential to be as powerful as Jean, what with having her DNA and a portion of the Phoenix force, but it was all twisted by Sy'm and N'astrah. In effect, she was a demonic telepath/telekinetic.
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