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maybe i'll finish this later

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Cowboy Booster .. again !

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Further adventures in How Queer is Booster Gold: A Visual Journey Through Time, featuring commentary by the esteemed historian @sl-walker and litigation expert @daraoakwise

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Just wanted to share some shockingly good news in these difficult times. The full article is really worth reading. [Find it here]

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“the problem is its never gonna be what all the fans want” imo the problem is the majority of fans have bad fucking taste like. if you write a story with the intent to keep editing it in line with what fans want you’re gonna end up with a shitty story. obviously you can take in criticism from early access but once you publish the thing you shouldn’t constantly be retconning characterization wtf. good god

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me in five years when i still don’t have my life together:

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My thing with Charles also is that sometimes he's less of a character and more of a narrative device to Make Things Happen. Like when he telepathically teaches a bunch of children and then sends them to their deaths to find his original students on pre-Hickman Krakoa, that wasn't done because people were thinking long and hard about what that implies about Charles, it was done because they wanted conflict with a new Summers brother and wanted to introduce Darwin and explain why they hadn't been seen before now but had a history with Charles. When he sends a young girl into a white supremacist BDSM cult, it's because we want to introduce a cool mysterious spy character in Sage, not because we're thinking too hard about why the fuck he's doing that. Like, sometimes when he does awful things, it feels like we're actually sitting down and thinking about why he's doing that, like his attitude towards Scott in Claremont X-Men, like joining the Illuminati, etc, but when it comes to the child soldier thing, it's because young characters in superhero comics is a staple of the genre and you need an older character to facilitate that. It's not because he's an evil weirdo using kids for his own ends, it's because you are reading superhero comics with a legacy of young sidekick characters going back to Bucky and Robin, and he is the narrative reason why these kids are all together in the same room.

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X-Manhunt, 2nd week thoughts;

X-Men #13 was disappointing! I was really looking forward to a proper interaction between clone Beast and Charles but we didn't get that? Having Charles and Quentin Quire be the ones to duke it out makes sense from a power scaling level, but it's probably the least interesting option. Charles and Hank, Charles and Scott, Charles and Juggernaut, hell, Charles and Kwannon would have all been more interesting options that could have really dug into his relationships with those characters. Fuck, Magneto was there! They had so many options for Charles vs someone else, either beating them psychically or being more manipulative, and the least interesting choice was taken. As an event issue, it was fine, I don't think it was bad at all, it just should have been more interesting and thought-provoking and analytical about it's characters that I know it can be than it was.

X-Factor #8 was actually really fun? I was very pleasantly suprised by how good I thought this issue was. I loved Hank being the sole voice of reason during the fight, I loved the fight between Scott and Alex, how emotional Scott was, I loved Charles reaching out to Joanna who is close to Storm, this panel really cracks me up.

Warren's characterisation is easily the weak point. While I can buy him lashing out after being traumatised by almost dying again and everything else that has happened to him as of late, Hank is one of his old friends, and I don't think he'd attack him the way he did. Particularly as Hank as I said was being the voice of reason, not wanting to fight anyone? But I do like the power upgrades. I like that he has some kind of soul sword? I'm easily pleased by a cool sword.

Overall thoughts; there's a big lack of synergy between these titles and Charles' personality and actions, which is becoming increasingly distracting. While I don't think it's a bad artistic choice for Charles to seem different from Scott's perspective vs Alex's vs Storm's vs Rogue's, having him pingpong between sadly begging for help to save his dead daughter to committing psychic torture on a former student with no middle ground to not even being lucid, hallucinating through fights makes things feel less like a purposeful choice to show the different ways different characters percieve Charles, and more like nobody talked to each other about what the audience was meant to take away from Charles' character over the course of this event. Obviously, he's a complicated man, and I would expect that complexity from an event where he's the main cause and effect, but this instead feels muddled, confused and uncertain. We've gotten some great issues from it like Storm, but we've also gotten some lesser ones like Uncanny X-Men, and that disparity is a problem for the reading experience.

Also, I hope he's in a wheelchair by the end of this event. I'll break his legs myself if I have to. Able bodied Charles Xavier is scary and I don't like it!

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My thing with Charles also is that sometimes he's less of a character and more of a narrative device to Make Things Happen. Like when he telepathically teaches a bunch of children and then sends them to their deaths to find his original students on pre-Hickman Krakoa, that wasn't done because people were thinking long and hard about what that implies about Charles, it was done because they wanted conflict with a new Summers brother and wanted to introduce Darwin and explain why they hadn't been seen before now but had a history with Charles. When he sends a young girl into a white supremacist BDSM cult, it's because we want to introduce a cool mysterious spy character in Sage, not because we're thinking too hard about why the fuck he's doing that. Like, sometimes when he does awful things, it feels like we're actually sitting down and thinking about why he's doing that, like his attitude towards Scott in Claremont X-Men, like joining the Illuminati, etc, but when it comes to the child soldier thing, it's because young characters in superhero comics is a staple of the genre and you need an older character to facilitate that. It's not because he's an evil weirdo using kids for his own ends, it's because you are reading superhero comics with a legacy of young sidekick characters going back to Bucky and Robin, and he is the narrative reason why these kids are all together in the same room.

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I think one of my most controversial X-Men opinions that I do think a fair amount of the people he's taken in over the years were ultimately better off with Charles than not. Obviously, there are exceptions like Storm, Sage, Hank McCoy, etc, but I genuinely think that a lot of other characters would be worst off without him which is what makes his position in their lives so complicated. He has undoubtedly hurt them in many ways, put incredible expectations and responsibilities on people too young and fragile to handle it, but like, is Scott's life better left alone in an orphanage where Sinister is free to manipulate him however he wants without intervention? I don't think so! Is Jean better off without any teaching or guidance to deal with her powers that are massive and overwhelming to a young girl, already chosen for cosmic significance? Probably not! He is simultaneously a figure of great trauma and a figure of great refuge and those concepts I think are always at war in the minds of most of his students.

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My thing with Charles also is that sometimes he's less of a character and more of a narrative device to Make Things Happen. Like when he telepathically teaches a bunch of children and then sends them to their deaths to find his original students on pre-Hickman Krakoa, that wasn't done because people were thinking long and hard about what that implies about Charles, it was done because they wanted conflict with a new Summers brother and wanted to introduce Darwin and explain why they hadn't been seen before now but had a history with Charles. When he sends a young girl into a white supremacist BDSM cult, it's because we want to introduce a cool mysterious spy character in Sage, not because we're thinking too hard about why the fuck he's doing that. Like, sometimes when he does awful things, it feels like we're actually sitting down and thinking about why he's doing that, like his attitude towards Scott in Claremont X-Men, like joining the Illuminati, etc, but when it comes to the child soldier thing, it's because young characters in superhero comics is a staple of the genre and you need an older character to facilitate that. It's not because he's an evil weirdo using kids for his own ends, it's because you are reading superhero comics with a legacy of young sidekick characters going back to Bucky and Robin, and he is the narrative reason why these kids are all together in the same room.

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"Luciano Vecchio" the ARTIST YOU ARE!!!🤩😭

He draws the best Charles I've ever seen.😭😍🤩

Look at these eyeliners.😁

Rise of the Powers of X #5 & Storm (2024) #6