#xspoilers

[artbytesslyn]

The immortal wives finally got their wedding

[superherotiger]

Scarlet Witch (2024) Vol. 4 #3

I’m obsessed with the green siblings thank you

[sunsetuniverse]

Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver (2024) #4

[laughingdrawingaces]

GOOD MORNING TO ME!!

[scottcyclopssummers]

I have to say, I absolutely LOVED the third issue of X-Men (2024)! Scott Summers really made an impact with his compelling lines and commanding presence. Here’s what stood out:

We see him stepping up as the leader, managing a team of misfit mutants, many of whom have either been villains or have had morally ambiguous pasts.

He doesn't hold back in calling out Agent Lundqvist and the government.

He mentions being tortured.

After all this time, he finally gets to enjoy his long-awaited sandwich.

The issue also touches on his struggles with PTSD, culminating in a panic attack.

After being sidelined on Krakoa, this issue really gave me the Scott Summers spotlight I’ve been craving. Hoping it won't go sideways.

[samsonet3]

LESBIAN GWENPOOL?

[zyralynn]

Jean Grey Fanart !!! by me The first XMEN but not the last I will draw! #art #xmen #jeangrey #illustration #marvel

[farsight-the-char]

Dumb Fans: "Why do people hate mutants? It makes no sense?" X-men '97, articulating a point X-men has been making for years: "Fear of mutants is fear of replacement, of change, of the "Impure" replacing "the Pure"."

[lexcellence]

When I heard Gerry Duggan get asked on Cerebro, white boy to white boy, about the unfortunate optics of announcing and then immediately murdering the least white team of X-Men in years, I knew we'd be in for some shit. Man, did he deliver - after some evasive waffling about how ORCHIS is meant to be fascist, and how the story's point is to put the collective back of mutantkind even more against the wall than it was any of the last six times something like this has happened.

And, honestly? That's fair! This year's Hellfire Gala is ultimately the first part of a larger story, and history shows it's not going to last forever — hell, does anyone remember what the status quo was immediately before HoXPoX? At least this time most of the characters have implicitly just been sucked into Mother Righteous's magical Poké Ball, rather than outright killed; if anything, that's an improvement. I was fully content to just think "hey, not for me," and get back to ignoring everything beyond Immortal and Sabertooth, secure in the knowledge that certain topics are bound to be handled poorly when almost everyone in the room is white, when Duggan said three words that stopped me in my tracks:

"Keep the faith."

See, that struck me, because for a lot of us, this entire era of comics has been about nothing but faith. I've been reading X-Men, and engaging with fans since I was eight, and I've never seen the kind of collective buy-in from other marginalized readers that I have with Krakoa. X-Twitter (or, I suppose, X-X) has been Blacker, queerer, more disabled, less homogeneous than the fandom has ever been, all of us buying in to the implicit promise that this time things would be different. Sure, the line was headed by a presumably straight white guy, but there were other voices in the room for a change, and it really felt like they were going to be listened to. We thought we'd moved past clunky metaphor, past queerbaitimg and awkward racial gaffes. Storm and Kwannon were getting to do stuff, Arakko was full of amazing characters of color, Cyclops and Wolverine were probably fucking, we were hooked, and we turned out.

It's hard to overemphasize just how wild this was to see in real time. X-Men has always been allegory, sure, but it's traditionally allegory by and for the majority. For years, the readers who might really feel that resonance, those of us who have been hated and feared for the unforgivable crime of being who we are, we were afterthoughts, tolerated at best. We got scraps, "representation" from creators who seemed to be offended by the implication that we would ever want something other than being fetishized tokens. We were, as Hickman so succinctly put it, told that we were less when we knew we were more. And then, out of nowhere, Krakoa made us inescapable.

The two biggest X-Men podcasts, X-Plain the X-Men and Cerebro, are hosted by queer people. X of Words has been rocking the Black, queer experience like no one's business, Mutant Watch has been a joy to listen to and to be on. Not just podcasts, either, in everything from criticism to fanart to cosplay, voices have been elevated that were previously silent. I mean, hell, I've gotten paid to talk about comics, that shit never would have happened four years ago.

All of that was based on faith.

Faith that we were being celebrated, for once, instead of just used. Faith that for whatever growing pains there might be, things were going to be better.

And let's not fuck around here, there were growing pains. In the first year alone we dealt with everything from blatant whitewashing, to queerbaiting — any Sunspot fan can go into detail there, assuming you can get one of us to stop crying for long enough. While that was going on, we watched Bryan Edward Hill (the only non-white writer in that initial wave) put out a book that was, let's face it, at worst aggressively mid, only to be excoriated by certain portions of the fandom, and dropped by the office, while significantly worse books managed to hold fast — er, hold on. Not to say that Fallen Angels was without sin, mind you, the book was packed with enough orientalism to make Chris Claremont blush. But, at the same time, Wolverine's first year ended with him doing what he does best: trying so hard to be Japanese that I had to check to make sure he wasn't Marvel's editor in chief.

Through all of that, we kept the faith.

Things didn't really get much better, of course. Arakko was a fascinating concept, and felt like it damn near doubled Marvel's characters of color. And yeah, the ending of X-Factor was one of the most poorly handled racist messes I've seen this side of… well, any given day on Twitter. Sure, the whitewashing has never stopped, to the point where everything from X-Corp to this week's Hellfire Gala has had to be hastily edited between previews and release. Maybe we keep dealing with stuff like butchered AAVE, even more queerbaiting, Kate Pryde's funeral, the genocide of almost all of those Arraki characters, and whatever the hell was going on with Lost in Way of X. Maybe there's a very real argument to be made that there's something insidious about three straight years of voting to determine if characters like Monet (who, by the by, has been retooled from "basically Superman" to "Black woman with anger powers") deserve the honor of being written by a white man who's stayed writing with his foot in his mouth. I mean, hey! All my white friends in the scene say he's nice, just like Williams, or Howard, or any number of other crusty crackers who are still proud of tripping over the bar Claremont left on the floor in the 80's!

And dammit, we kept the faith!

Even before the issue dropped, the Fall of X has had a lot of us wary. After all, all of the promotion leading up to it has been white guys saying the minority allegory has had it too good for too long, which, whatever, press copy. We all know they've gotta sell books — they, in this case, being the almost exclusively white, almost exclusively male creative teams attached to all of the books in the line. Sure, as Duggan said, the 616 has a fascism problem, but it’s hard not to see this as a deliberate step back from the almost double digit number of non-white creators these past few years — almost as if Marvel has realized they can make space for a fourth ongoing by their favorite white boy if they just throw out a Voices special every couple of months as a containment zone for the darkies. And, hey, considering how good ol’ C.B. got his foot in the door, I can’t even fake surprise. At this point, it’s a minor miracle any time a person of color is tapped for anything that’s expected to last beyond one issue.

In this issue, as a reward for keeping the faith, we got to see something astounding, something that'd bring a tear to the eye of even the most cynical reader — a team that was only half white. My god. And sure, their brutal murder in favor of a team with Kate "Hard-Arrr" Pryde and the Kingpin(????) was only a pit-stop between the resurrection of the suddenly ashy Ms. Marvel and Lourdes Chantel being killed off for the sake of a white woman's angst yet afuckinggain, but ain't that the dream that Malcolm Ten or whoever died for?

The Krakoan era, ultimately, has been the same as every other. Empty promises by white men who show us time and again that there was never any point in expecting anything better. Any meaning we've found, everything of worth, has been what we've made for ourselves.

We've spent years keeping the faith, Gerry, while you and yours have continued to let us down. What the hell do we have to show for it?

[cherikarchive]

[sunsetuniverse]

Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver (2024) #4

NO 💥💥 BAD DAD 💥 💥 💥

NOT MY MAGNETO

[laughingdrawingaces]

I actually need rogue to be this happy at all times just what she deserves

uncanny X-Men (2024) #1 and #2

[soviet-supersoldier]

Well.... Wolverine Revenge #3 sure was... something. I think the best way to describe what I read was disappointing. Even though I knew the way the fight was going to end up, the whole thing was so completely unsatisfying and fast-paced it wasn't even funny. About the only thing I can't complain about is the artwork. I have to wait a few more days for my Red Band issue to come in the mail, but from what I read in the regular issue, I don't think we're going to get treated to anything better than what we got.

The whole thing started off fine enough, I can't find too much to complain about on the first two pages. It's what happens after this that makes my blood boil.

The first thing is once again, Hickman doesn't seem to understand Arkady’s powers at all. OMEGA RED DOESN'T SPREAD DISEASES!!!! Seriously. His death factor should not be this hard to understand. Did the man ever read a comic featuring Omega Red before he included him, or did he only ever read about the Omega Clan?

The second thing is the snapping of Arkady’s Carbonadium coil. It's so annoying to see that trope continually used when people fight Arkady. His coils are INDESTRUCTIBLE. It may not be quite the same as adamantium, but Carbonadium should NEVER snap like this. It bothers me to no end that writers will do this because they can't seem to comprehend what "indestructible" means when it comes to Carbonadium. Unbreakable means unbreakable. You can't destroy it. It doesn't matter if you have adamantium or not. An indestructible object still can't break another indestructible object no matter how hard you try.

The way the fight ends here too is soooo unsatisfying. We learn in just a few pages that the area is experiencing nuclear fallout every 20 minutes. You're telling me that Arkady can survive that but not survive being strangled?? Ok. Whatever. It's clear Hickman doesn't understand Arkady has a healing factor just as powerful as Logan’s (if not stronger, since he can steal Logan’s life energy, which the writer seems completely unaware of) and that this should be something that is easily survivable for someone like him (he's literally been shown to survive far worse). But they won't have that happen. Instead, my guess is they're going to have Sabretooth return in a later issue because we were never shown his death, and the title card doesn't say that Creed died, only that he got "depowered." I imagine the Omega Clan will be with him, serving as Arkady’s replacement in the series.

All that this tells me though is that Logan couldn't finish the job with Sabretooth despite being shown to have been given an extremely convoluted way to beat him, and yet none of the same consideration was given on how he could have logically beat Omega Red without ignoring every single one of his abilities?? This was so one-sided and really unfair to those of us who actually expected and wanted a better fight that actually had some real back-and-forth before the final blow. And the fact that Omega Red was taken out by such a simple attack makes it even worse.

I don't like ranting about this, but this story was so disappointing on so many levels. It doesn't hold up to criticism at all, and the deaths all come off as incredibly cheap and unearned. I was hoping for a real fight. Instead, what I got was a one-sided "conflict" that ignored everything about Omega Red and his abilities to make it work.

But hey, at least the art was good. I'm sure die-hard Wolverine fans who don't care about getting a logical win will love seeing such a ridiculous "battle."

[scottcyclopssummers]

"Worried? I have two wildly dangerous women with enormous swords looking out for me. When I was 13, I thought this was what heaven looked like" - Scott Summers

X-Men #2 Preview

[vitinwatbender]

Queen. Icon. Mother. Daughter of the House of M. Mistress of Magnetism. POLARIS.

[samsonet3]

KARMA HAS A VIETNAMESE NAME NOW!!!