#im not being anti romy more like....critical of it?? idk i like the romy in my head more than canon romy

[celestial-ringleader]

So I read Rogue and Gambit #1 and I have some thoughts

I haven’t been keeping up with modern X-Men comics since I read (and was subsequently disappointed by) Excalibur and only chose to read select few comics if they seemed good or had characters I was interested in seeing. So far it has not been great trying to find any decent storylines since they’re all bland to me and play into the whole “Krakoa is great” shit with no real depth. With all that being said, when I saw that they were making another volume of Rogue and Gambit but set in Krakoa-era, I had some hope it could be pretty okay.

Until I saw the preview pages.

Usually I don’t like it when fans judge an entire run based on its first book because the plot hasn’t had a chance to really carry on and we as an audience haven’t gotten the chance to see the character development yet, to me to judge an entire run based on its first book is just not a good way to examine media, especially a comic book. However with this first issue of R&G...it’s not a promising look for the series.

Obviously I went into this wanting to read for Remy, and since this is a series where he plays a prominent role (I mean he’s in the title for fucks sake) I wanted to see him actually do stuff instead of just standing in the background for ten pages. And yeah, while he did do stuff in this comic it unfortunately led me to be even more disappointed.

This comic opens up with him drunkenly fighting off members of the Thieves Guild after being ghosted by Rogue because in her words “something came up” and not elaborating much further. After that, his entire purpose in this comic is to be the incompetent husband who gets into antics and everything he says is played off as him being dumb or not understanding; in fact the entire time Destiny was there, she spent any interaction she had with Remy criticizing the fuck out of him and claiming that his suspicions of her are baseless and dumb. And as much as I like Irene, him being suspicious of her just appearing out of nowhere and telling Rogue and him to go seek out Eden because she had a vision makes a lot of sense. He’s always been the type to be skeptical of other people’s intentions and not taking anything at face value. But despite that, not even Rogue thought to maybe...idk...trust her husband’s gut instincts a little bit???

And while this comic is meant to be a lighthearted one focusing on Rogue and Remy’s married life, it has only shown how dysfunctional their relationship is. Apparently after all this time has passed, neither of them had talked about a very basic topic of 1) how to make time for one another and 2) how to respect one another’s time away from each other. And when this is brought up when Rogue says they’re not going to talk about it while Remy’s drunk, Remy proceeds to say “We haven’t had this conversation sober.” which is something serious and very telling about the apparent lack of communication.

Unfortunately this scene is followed by something comedic which just makes it even more alarming. I mean there was an implication that Remy gets into situations like this so often that it’s an “old habit”.

I’m trying to keep an open mind about this comic, for all I know this could all be intentional and then lead to something pretty cool to read, but right now this doesn’t seem like a promising start. Neither of the leads are written particularly well, Rogue is written as being uncaring about Remy and doesn’t try to defend him after being the butt of the joke so often; not just in this book, but in most modern x-books.

This book is not awful but it’s definitely not making my anxiousness about this run any better. I’ll wait on making any hard and fast claims about this comic until like the third or fourth issue, but until then consider me skeptical and a little annoyed. Maybe it’s because I’m just really not a fan of romy, but even this feels like we’re being given crumbs and expected to just eat it up because “something something nostalgia”.

Anyways this got long and I’m tired so hopefully me screaming into the aether at least makes sense kjfbvkdjv