X-Men In General

I mean...I don't think Orchis ever needed to be treated as Grey And Gray.

They're an illegal genocide organization and always were.

You can't really both sides human rights.

They wanted to make it gray but I never believed it.

I've seen this discussed, Duggan is just not an idea man. Compared to the likes of Hickman, Gillen, and Ewing, he's way too simple and it shows it how unbearably straightforward his writing is.

He's also terrible at dialogie having Emma Frost announce herself with literally the line "Hello my muties!"

Edited by slimcoder on May 2nd 2024 at 6:30:40 AM

Bleeding Cool has some leaks for the FCBD X-Men thing and, yup, mutant rights have gone back to fucking start. Gah.

Why does the “House of Ideas” evidently employ such utterly unimaginative people? The recurrence of just a few plots has been a BIG problem with “eternal narratives” for me for many years now, especially the X-Men but others too.

I’ve come to appreciate stories with endings more as I’ve gotten older. I want to see how Krakoa ends, but I’ll probably take a rain check from this thread for a while after unless NYX and the Simone stuff are really good. Huge Simone fan.

It's so annoying. Like, if you're gonna insist on burning things down and starting over every few years, at least try and do something new and different instead of just repeating a status quo that everyone fucking hates with a passion. "Stop trying to make 'mutants are near-extinct and hated' happen. It's never going to happen."

And yeah, Simone's book is the only one of From The Ashes that looks even slightly interesting and is certainly the only one I'm checking out.

Edited by immortaleditor on May 2nd 2024 at 10:53:32 AM

Mc Kay's book will be pretty decent. He's a consistently great writer so X-Men will probably be the strongest book in the line-up next to Simone.

marvel is allergic to letting their characters be happy, they think they can't be interesting if they're not constantly suffering.

thanks Quesada.

Now that you mentioned Quesada, not sure if this is a uniquely American thing but there is indeed an obsession w/ nostalgia and wanting to keep everything the same as before. Quesada's nostalgia was Spider-Man being an unmarried perpetual teen/young adult for one example. Over on DC you have former editor in chief Dan DiDio despising Wally West and Stephanie Brown bec how dare they replace Barry Allen and Barbara Gordon as Flash and Batgirl respectively. Then you have Alex Ross reportedly having a hate boner towards anything outside of the Silver Age. You also see it outside of Marvel and DC w/ Power Rangers ever since Hasbro bought it wanting to stop following the old Super Sentai format of new team, new setting, new variety of toys every season and instead ended it w/ the hopes of rebooting the franchise w/ rumors alleging that it's going to be a rehash of the MMPR team. Not to mention Hasbro rehashing Transformers G1 over and over and over again.

"I mean...I don't think Orchis ever needed to be treated as Grey And Gray." Alternative idea: Show how people slide into fascism. Show people in Orchis who started off not necessarily hating mutants but who wanted to protect humanity, and how they went from that to hunting down mutants to arrest or murder. That happens a lot, where someone "has no problem" with a given community, yet supports more and more extreme measures towards them. So, if they wanted Orchis to be made up entirely of terrible people, then demonstrate how even semi-decent people who just have a few concerns get radicalized into supporting fascism.

"Then you have Alex Ross reportedly having a hate boner towards anything outside of the Silver Age." In fairness, I get the impression that's somewhat exaggerated. He has drawn more modern heroes, as well. He obviously has a huge preference for the Silver Age, but I don't think he necessarily hates everything outside of it. He did that Champions cover showing Ms. Marvel, Spider-Man, and Nova burning their Avengers cards. When Marvel did that whole Generations thing in the aftermath of Civil War II, he drew the poster for it. So I don't think it's hatred for anything outside the Silver Age, just a personal preference for that period.

I think people just tend to get attached to “their” era of a long runner. Even if you enjoy what comes before and after, there’s usually a connection to the era that got you into a franchise.

Doubly so if it’s the era you grew up with, triply if it was the beginning of the franchise

Just ordered X-Men: The Rise of Apocalypse because of an itch I have to read Apocalypse's stories thanks to the 90s cartoon

I have a quick question for someone more knowledgeable than me about comic X-Men history. I recently found out that Grant Morrison’s run introduced an “Extinction Gene” that’s dormant in humans but will apparently activate at some point causing mutants to replace humans in about 4-5 generations or so.

Is it ever explained what that means exactly? Does the E-Gene cause humans to only give birth to mutants after a certain point? Do people become sterile? Do they just die?

If I remember correctly, "the extinction gene" was a genetic flaw in the entire hominid genome that mutants just so happened to lack. One that could cause entire species to be wiped out in response to certain stimuli. The point was that Cassandra Nova believed mutants reaching viable population numbers to survive in the event of complete eradication of non x-gene mutants was that stimuli that would cause the extinction gene to become active. So she started culling mutants in the name of preserving the status quohuman race.

Basically it was a Plot Device, but In-Universe Cassandra Nova believed the "inferior" Neanderthals had died out when the gene "noticed" the superior cromagnan emerging, so that they would not hold back the next "stage" of evolution. What the extinction gene actually is was never adequately explained. That the villain didn't actually understand biology but was using her misinformed beliefs to kill people was the whole point. It's a plot device I'd rather just forget. Trying to come up with a rational explanation for it would probably just end up like "Three Jokers''.

Oh hell, I can't help myself. I guess one could say someone tried to gene bomb hominids in an attempt to wipe them out, but species in the genome evolved various means to counteract it. Mutants in particular managed to turn the extinction gene into the X-gene, USUALLY making them stronger instead of weaker. If I had to tell the story, that is what I would go with, but it's one of those plot devices I'd rather forget, assuming I'm even remembering it correctly. The only thing I remember for sure is being annoyed with Marvel having no sense of scale. A viable human subspecies population would in no way be enough to trigger anything of significance to modern humans, who are well above such numbers. Maybe some ideological movement at best, but X-Men already has plenty enough of those.

Edited by IndirectActiveTransport on May 4th 2024 at 4:47:00 AM

Morrison never went into a ton of detail about how the Extinction Gene (also known as "Dead-End Syndrome") precisely works and left a lot about it mysterious and unanswered. Maybe they intended to do more with it if their run had gone on longer, but as is, it's more used as a plot point as explains and also as part of the theme of how mutants, sentinels, and post-humans are all supplanting baseline humanity in the same way that homo sapiens seemingly out-competed the various other hominids. By luck, the idea of it being a flaw that mutants/deviants lack actually ties pretty well with the later lore of the Progenitor.

& Thanks for info. I vaguely knew about the “mutants will become the majority” stuff beforehand but didn’t realize it was tied to an extinction gene until recently so that got me curious.

The Futurism & Transhumanism aspect of X-Men is interesting but I think things like this clash a bit with the minority metaphor so I’m never totally sure how to feel about it. Not saying that allegory needs to be an 100% match or you that can’t include other concepts in the story as well, but still.

Edited by CheapMarzipan on May 4th 2024 at 4:57:53 AM

In my experience, X-Men works far better when it's leaning into the cyberpunk/biopunk transhumanism/futurism stuff and treating the "minority metaphor" much more loosely, and it's no coincidence the best runs tend to be ones that do so. Mostly because it prevents a lot of the Unfortunate Implications and awkward questions that get thrown at the series because of bad writers who try and go Anvilicious 1:1 with the metaphor aspect. It needs to always be remembered that mutants aren't literally this or that real world group, they are a fictional subspecies with a fictional role in a fictional society.

The problem is referring to it as "extinction", which is only true if you define mutants as something other than human - if you accept mutants as human beings, then a future where everyone is a mutant is still a future where humanity is alive and well.

Edited by RavenWilder on May 4th 2024 at 3:12:05 AM

The machine conflict is also pretty cool.

The whole vs match in the quest for ultimate evolutionary dominance is pretty baller in visuals and themes.

Superpowers vs Machines.

Yeah, that shit's always really cool. Adding a whole "nature versus technology" angle to the larger conflict was a brilliant move.

There's a bit of back-and-forth on whether the mutants are just homo sapiens with a trait that any other human could potentially have like having a certain hair color or such or if they're a full-blown Human Subspecies that may well be actively overtaking humanity without even trying. Some writers go with the former, some the latter, but the latter has been seemingly getting more popular as time goes since it works better with the whole transhumanist/"subspecies battling for rule of the planet" angle. In either case, mutants are human and so arguably are beings like the robots/AI. They and baseline humans are all part of the same pan-humanity. That's a big part of the point; they're all human in the ways that matter.

Edited by immortaleditor on May 4th 2024 at 3:29:31 AM

Yeah. And the Sentinels are the only ones who get that.

They've always been the only ones who get it.

That's always been funny to me.

Glad to know the "Cyclops is right" meme is still going strong with posts like this

The man is always right like its not even a joke. He is completely right about this, very on the ball.

Edited by slimcoder on May 4th 2024 at 8:22:41 AM

I think there's been a grand total of once in the entire canon where Scott wasn't completely right about everything and that was with the blatantly out-of-character bullshit of him abandoning Madelyne to join X-Factor because of editorial fiat.

Yes, Cyclops was right about the man named "Sinister" not being trust worthy. The man named Sinister who has betrayed everyone present at least once already.

I mean they did need his gene farm for the Resurrections, that's a pretty big incentive for grudgingly tolerating the asshole...

Even in-universe Synch got in on the Cyclops is Right meme while Scott was disguised as Captain Krakoa. It was also the same issue where he exposed Dr Stasis as Club Sinister. The meme also helped Cyclops actually improve Mutant-human relations during his revolutionary/Magneto-lite phase pre-Secret War. You could also say Cyclops going over the Quiet Council's collective heads near the tail end of X of Swords & bring a team of X-Men (kickstarting the Annual Vote-a-Member Era w/c and bringing the X-Men back as an international superhero team (but well-received and welcomed by humans despite Orchis' & other bigots' attempt at bullshit) and also becoming the blueprint for Krakoa to later have an equally well-received global relief effort team to help humans whenever they experience disasters) to Otherworld while Xavier & Magneto smile at Scott's defiance of them is also another example of Cyclops is Right.

That was pretty much the only reason they were forced to have Sinister in Krakoa given his gene bank is extensive enough to include even the likes of J. Jonah Jameson as established long before Krakoa even began. W/c is also another way Hickman used modern Israel as Krakoa's background given modern Israel was forced to include unsavory and oftentimes borderline terrorist groups like Irgun in its early days to be able to survive the Arabs launching a genocidal war as soon as the nation was reformed.

Thinking back about Sinister being akin to the Irgun in relation to Krakoa and Israel respectively, it's appropriate that Irgun eventually became the backbone to what we now know as the Likud party and its leader Benjamin Netanyahu.

Edited by KRider on May 4th 2024 at 9:26:01 AM