#i'm pretty sure the x-men fans were mostly upset about polaris and nightcrawler

[duhragonball]

duvete replied to your post “I was going to say that my favorite thing about the Chuck Austen run...”

Can't wait until you get into late X-Men Chuck Austen works!

I’m at about the halfway mark, and I’m just... wow.   

I mean, usually when I dislike a writer, it’s because their stories are boring or confusing.    A lot of comics writers just sort of mark time instead of telling stories.   Others try to use shock value and plot twists and secrets as a substitute for drama.   Generally, though, I assume good faith with even the worst writers.  I like to think they’re doing the best they can, and they’re personally pleased with their work, even if I’m not. 

The weird thing about Austen is that he seems to have the ability to tell a decent story, and then he just goes bonkers and starts ruining it.   It’s like a Jekyll and Hyde thing. 

The stuff with Juggernaut making friends with Sammy and joining the X-Men is pretty good.  He didn’t just slap it together or anything; he set it up with a story about Black Tom turning on Juggernaut, and tied it into the subplot about Sammy joining the X-Men’s school.  It really works.    The issue where Northstar befriends an exploding kid is kind of a weaker version of the Juggie/Sammy friendship, but it works too.  

But then Austen starts doing all this insane stuff.   I’d heard about the conspiracy to install Nightcrawler as the Pope, and I was like “Yeah, that sounds really stupid.”  But the script is actually dumber than the plot itself?  I mean, Nightcrawler becoming a priest was kind of a sketchy idea to begin with, but making it all a supervillain plot just makes it even sillier, and then on top of that the X-Men go to fight the bad guys responsible for the whole thing and everyone starts shouting Bible verses at each other.  That was the part I was unprepared for.  I can deal with absurd plotting, but now all off Kurt’s dialogue is just copypasted from somewhere else, so we don’t even really get into the character’s head to see how all of this affected him. 

Also, it’s really frustrating how there’s a whole story arc to explain why Nightcrawler’s been acting so strangely lately, but so many other characters are acting strangely too, and it never gets addressed.   Like Iceman’s been a huge creep all the time.  His jokes aren’t funny, a lot of what he says is rude or hateful, and other characters even point this out to him, so we know it’s intentional.  So when Kurt acts weird it’s supposed to be a clue that he’s been brainwashed by bad guys, but when Iceman acts weird it serves no purpose at all. 

One of the last issues I read was the one where Havok and Polaris almost get married, and he gets cold feet and she absolutely flips her shit.  Same problem as Iceman: she was acting really, really odd for a really long time leading up to this, and no one seemed to notice or care until she became a threat.   Then they subdue her and... that’s it.   I guess you could chalk her behavior up to the trauma of surviving the Genosha massacre, but Austen doesn’t even try to connect the dots.   It’s like he thinks Lorna was always a deranged maniac and the audience will take that as a given.   

I get the sense that Austen just has no clue how to write women.   He seems to do okay in short bursts, but his long game always seems to involve pairing every woman off with another woman to be enemies with.   Stacy X vs. Husk, Polaris vs. Annie Ghazikhanian.  Later, when Chuck wrote Action Comics, he tried to re-start the Lois Lane vs. Lana Lang feud, but fortunately he got fired before that plan got off the ground.  The worst thing about these “rivalries” of his was that they were so pitifully one-sided, with Stacy X or Polaris just screaming obscenities at Husk and Annie, who sort of passively accept all this abuse.  Then he just wrote Stacy and Lorna out of the book like it’s no big deal.  Again, if Kurt was being brainwashed, shouldn’t someone check them for the same thing?   My fear going into the tail end of Austen’s run is that he’ll have no choice but to pit Annie and Husk against each other now that he’s run off half of his female cast.

The stuff with Archangel is really bothersome too.   Warren got a healing factor off some sort, and his blood can heal other people too.  He even revives a bunch of dead mutants.   I’m not sure where that’s supposed to be going, but Austen’s spent a ton of time on it.    I really have no idea what Warren’s character arc is supposed to be in all of this.  I thought he was the leader of this squad of X-Men, but Austen keeps insisting that Nightcrawler is, only he’s been sharing the responsibility with Warren all this time.  Between Warren’s messianic powers and Nightcrawler screaming Bible verses, I assume Austen’s trying to go for some religious theme, but he never seems to come to the point.  What’s he trying to say, exactly? 

I really, really don’t like anything Austen does with Husk.  Years ago, when I only heard about this run, I assumed that maybe Austen didn’t realize how young Paige Guthrie was supposed to be.   I think she was like fifteen in her first appearance in 1994, and no one at Marvel was really sure how much older she was supposed to be in 2003.  But now, Austen seems to be embracing the idea of Warren getting involved with an underaged girl.  Other characters joke about it, but nobody ever stops and says “What the hell is wrong with you, Warren?”   or “You’re almost thirty, Warren,” or “You have the right to remain silent, Warren.”

Anyway, this whole run feels like watching a train wreck in slow motion.  Every so often, I’ll read a page or even a couple of panels that suggests Austen could have done this right, which only makes the stuff he does wrong feel more horrifying.  So actually, it feels like watching a train wreck in slow motion, and the guy driving the train keeps making eye contact with me as if to say that he meant to do this. 

I think that’s what’s going to haunt me about this run.  Not just that it was bad, but that it started out kinda sorta okay, and got really bad, and I’ll never understand why.   On the bright side, reading his work makes the Grant Morrison run look even better by comparison, so that’s something.