Saturday Splash Page #62

"Denial," in Ultimate X-Men #13, by Chuck Austen (writer), Essad Ribic (penciler), Livesay (inker), J.D. Smith (colorist), Sharpefont (letterer)

Welcome to Ultimate March! The Ultimate Universe was, I believe, pitched as a way to get new readers. Take the known characters, but strip out the decades of continuity and sometimes contradictory backstory. Get them back to a base state, hand them to "hot" creative teams to update the origins and characterizations, make them more "mature", and presumably appealing to readers.

It started with Ultimate Spider-Man, which we'll get to in due course, but for now, let's look at Ultimate X-Men, which started under Mark Millar and Adam Kubert. Some things remained much the same. Millar kept Xavier and Magneto on opposing sides, and kept the sides much the same. Mutants live peacefully among humans, or mutants rule/exterminate humans. This version of Magneto was just a little more openly hateful with his language (probably fairly close to Morrison's "mad old bastard" characterization), while Xavier was more openly dodgy with his telepathy.

Millar changed Weapon X from a program that experimented on mutants to one that mostly took them as-is and used them as expendable weapons. Send them out to kill, maim or steal. If they die, who cares. Don't bother with wiping their minds or implanting false memories, because they're not going to ever leave alive. Later writers, Brian K. Vaughn and Robert Kirkman mostly, spent some time on the emotional and mental trauma teenagers that went through that would carry. Teenagers making bad, rash, and melodramatic romantic decisions, among other things. Between Millar and BKV was Bendis, and other than some arc drawn by David Finch that started with Wolverine getting shot up in a diner, then teaming up with Spider-Man and maybe Daredevil, I couldn't tell you a thing that happened. Maybe some religious cult calling itself the Shi'ar approached Jean about being the current host for the Phoenix?

I feel like I enjoyed Vaughn's run best, maybe the parts with Mr. Sinister and the Fenris oddly enough, but not enough for any of it to stick in the collection. The only issues of the ongoing I still have are this two-parter by Chuck Austen and Essad Ribic about Gambit trying to protect a young girl whose parents were killed by Hammerhead, now a bent cop rather than a mobster.

That last sentence is not one I would have ever expected to type.

I don't know that the idea behind the Ultimate Universe worked. The books suffered the same slow attrition of sales as the regular Marvel Universe, eventually only propped up by the latest introduction of the Ultimate version of a Marvel character. It's Dazzler, but she's an alcoholic punk rocker! I gave up on this book when Kirkman brought in Cable, and it turned out he was Wolverine from the future.

Ah, well. . .

Crap. I was saving that as a post for some day when I was running low on ideas, but now Scipio's gone and put it out there. So exactly what plot threads would I like to see resolved?

Two leap to mind:

Perhaps shockingly, the first thread is courtesy of one Mr. Austen. Yes, you read that right, I want a follow up to a story from Chuck Austen. No, this isn't Un-CalvinPitt. Yes I'm feeling fine. When Austen left, he had School Nurse Annie realize that the X-Men life is entirely too dangerous for her son to be around, and she leaves. This of course left Havok to fall into Polaris' psychotic arms on the rebound, leading to more angst. Ugh. Anyway, as she and her son leave, the kid (who is a powerful telepath/telekinetic, what a surprise!) is talking to his "new friend" who Annie (and us) can't see. I don't have it in front of me, but as they story ends, the kid says something fairly ominous about her getting to meet his friends, or that they'd definitely see the X-Men again, and he gets a decidedly frightening look on his face. I've always wanted to know what was up with that. Since even a few years ago I didn't understand how switching a creative team worked, I naively believed it would be touched on in just a short amount of time. You'd think that fact that Austen made Gambit blind, and Claremont reversed that in about 3 seconds would have wised me up.

So I'm left wondering who the kid's friend was. Shadow King? Malice? The disembodied soul of Apocalypse? Say maybe that's how he came back, he took control of the kid's body! Keep in mind, I'm not asking for Austen to come back and answer this, I'd prefer someone good at making a surprise that makes sense. Or at least someone who isn't terrible. See, told you I wasn't Un-CalvinPitt.

Second thread:

Howard Mackie introduced a cat near the end of his time on Amazing Spider-Man. Peter found the cat (which smelled very bad) outside a night club, and some weird cyber-goons as well. Peter assumed they were after Spider-Man, but they really wanted the cat. The cat apparently recognized the value in having a super-powered protector, and followed Pete home.

What was up with the cat? We never found out. But between an seemingly intelligent cat, and the dog that Paul Jenkins was about to give Peter's neighbor across the alley, the comedy potential was there. The dog could have been a plant from the cyber-goons, designed to figure a way past Peter's defenses to get at Smelly Cat.

Unfortunately, JMS took over three issues later, and there was no resolution. Now I would be willing to give this assignment back to the original writer. I have at least that much trust in Mackie.

Things I Think About #18

Someday, I'll learn to trust my instincts. I mean, I should have figured that out by now. Back in high school they always told us that on a multiple-choice test, if you aren't sure, go with your first instinct, doubting yourself wouldn't get do you much good. So what does that have to do with today's post?

Chuck Austen.

There's an interview on the Comic Book Resources website with Mr. Austen. I've known about it for a few days, and carefully ignored it. My mind kept telling me, "It'll just make you mad. He'll say something unkind about Stacy X, and you'll be pissed off for a week." Today, I stopped listening and went ahead and read it.

It was much worse than if he'd insulted Stacy. At least then I would have just been angry with him, which is a familiar feeling to me when it comes to ol' Chucky. It's worse because he actually came off as sympathetic, which I'm sure was part of the design of the interview. I mean the number of times the fact he has a wife and kids was brought up, and that his wife told him to stop reading all the insults on the Internet, clearly meant to pull on the heart strings.

And damned if it didn't work. A little.

I still don't believe his "everyone wants to be with someone, for one reason or another" explains Stacy's behavior, but I do understand to a certain extent, what he was going for.

I do have to give him credit for being aware of his rep with the fans, and joking about it. The part where he talks about how he and Geoff Johns most definitely aren't friends, and that Geoff hates him, was at least a little amusing.

See, this is the danger of the blogosphereI would have never known about this otherwise. And now I feel sympathy for my sworn enemy (one of them anyway). Sigh. Ruined a perfectly good Sunday.

Requiem for a Fallen Character

I mentioned last week that I saw a favorite character of mine in Generation M #2. Stacy X showed up, having lost her powers, and was now just another aging(?) 'lady of the evening'. I've had a hard time figuring out what I wanted to post about related to her, and who I'm mad at. It's not Paul Jenkins, though I wish he would have picked a different mutant, and just left me wondering about her. But I had pretty much figured Stacy wasn't one of the few who got to retain her powers (Iceman probably stole her spot. Worthless bastard). I'm not mad at Bendis, or even Quesada, well I am, but not for this. No, it's Chuck Austen who decided Stacy wasn't good enough to be on a book he was writing, and dumped her so he could write "Paige Guthrie and Archangel are in luvvvvv", without Stacy's interest in Archangel to get in the way. Before you suggest I'm being bitter, or paranoid, Chamber was still interested in Paige and he vanished at roughly the same time as Stacy, so take from that what you will.

But this isn't about how much Chuck Austen sucks, or how badly I want to him smack him in the face with a tire iron. Repeatedly. It's about Stacy.

She showed up in Uncanny X-Men #399, courtesy of Joe Casey, as one of the ladies at the X-Ranch, a brothel owned in part by Archangel's company. This apparently not being an example of human/mutant equality, the team goes to shut it down, and instead fails to stop the Church of Humanity from destroying it and killing everyone but Stacy. They described her power as 'phermone control', I thought of it as 'control over biochemical processes', just sounds more scientific. Make you vomit, make you pass out, susceptible to suggestion, and so on. A little limited by her need to make physical contact, but at least she wasn't another telepath. With nowhere to go she sticks with the team, and experiences the problems you would expect having to adjust to a life where you may get boulders thrown at your jet by the Juggernaut fairly often. It isn't clear how much she bought into Xavier's ideas, and she was still 'working', while she was on the X-Men. Wolverine seemed to want to help her, Nightcrawler seemed to grow used to her, and she had a few nice conversations with the nurse, Annie. On the flip side, Iceman disliked her, she chewed out Paige Guthrie, after sensing her interest in Archangel, and in general had trouble fitting in, though Chuck Austen portraying her as a complete slut might have something to do with that. Thanks Chuck, you miserable. . .

I'm probably in the minority, but I thought she had lots of potential. I could have seen her developing something gradually with Nightcrawler (that whole clergy thing never fit with him. He's too much of a swashbuckler to take a vow of celibacy). Logan could have helped her fit in. Or maybe, she never buys into the philosophy. She just stays because she does have some friends, some connections here. Or hell, maybe down the line she leaves anyway, but the way it happened, so forced, so arbitrary, just, ugh. I could see her leaving because she gets that humans will only accept mutants when it's convenient for them, when mutants can be useful, in Stacy's case, providing pleasure. But at the very least, she would have made a bigger deal out of it than just leaving a videotape for Archangel. She had a theatrical streak to her, which is part of why I think she and Kurt could have gotten along well.

Stacy, I hope things turn around for you somewhere down the line. I would have liked for you to have gotten better than this. Hopefully your appearence in X3 will turn out all right.