Will asks:
You get a vision of the future – DC is going to make you chief writer on Legion of Superheroes. Three years from now. Before that, you have to make your bones in the comic industry, and destiny says you have to do it with Marvel.
Marvel asks you to pitch them a resurrection job on a currently dead title*. Their one rider is that there has to be room for a guest appearance from Wolverine within the first six issues. What’s your pitch?
And he also asks:
Also, as a 90s-raised X-Men geek (who then went back and read a whole load of Captain Britain), I have to wonder: Gambit, Jubilee, Psylocke, Generation X. Any opinions worth posting about?
The answer to your first question is here: Gambit.
I know he’s not popular with some fans, but I like Gambit. He has personality, and that counts for a lot in a genre filled with Heroic Paragon/Grim Avenger/Token Woman/Snarky Second-Stringer teams a-plenty. I like his silly accent (which I like to think he keeps out of preference, since as a truly excellent thief and sneak, he can no doubt switch to the accent of his choice to cover his tracks whenever he likes); it’s fun, like Ben Grimm’s palookaville English is fun. I like that he’s a thief, which is territory not often covered in superhero comics protagonists (you get a lot of mercenaries and guns for hire, but thieves, not so much).
And Gambit has that wonderful combination of silliness and seriousness that has the potential for exquisite rooting-around in the dirty back-corners of the Marvel Universe. Every storyline features a MacGuffin more preposterous than the last. (The Celestial’s Tears! The Cosmic Quintahedron! MODOK clone banks! Et cetera.) Tack on tons of obscure characters now stuck in the world of high-powered superhero crime. (I particularly like the idea of bringing Warren Ellis’s NextWave version of Devil Dinosaur over into proper 616, if only so he can be a crime boss in some city other than New York so there can be a story entitled “Deal With The Devil (Dinosaur).”) Lace heavily with a number of cons, tricks, switches and lies – Gambit’s comic should be a flow of storylines that could be described as “Ocean’s Eleven meets Justice League International, plus lots of weird shit.”
Also: new costume, because the pink body-condom thing he has is truly one of the ugliest fucking costumes in superhero history.
(Jubilee, Psylocke and Gen X can be ground into powder and serve as a MacGuffin. I am not a big X-fan, generally.)
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If you wrote it I would read it. And I’ve swore off all (well most, I don’t count Deadpool) X-Men comics since about 2001 (whenever Morrison took over and please let us not rehash how “great” his run was). I had a brief relapse in 2006 (or whenever it was) for Blood of Apocalypse, because I have a soft spot for him. It’s just to bad they never do anything epic with him.
Me? I bring back District X, a 14-issue noir-ish series set in Mutant Town, Marvel’s criminally underused mutant ghetto in Alphabet City. Think The Wire, only with hideous mutants and about a tenth as deep. Mutant politics, mutant society, the perils of policing mutants, translating the ‘kill all mutants’ prejudice we’ve seen into how a minority deals with a society that seems determined to wipe them out…
Give me three years on the title; that’s all I ask.
New question. Who is Doop impersonating in frame number four?
Reference: http://fullbodytransplant.wordpress.com/2008/12/03/thursday-thirteen-wicked-visual-bliss/
:scratching head:
Exiles was the last X-series I collected with any regularity primarily because of Morph.
Not to mention this series finally made Mojo look like a worthwhile villain instead of something mashed together at the last minute by a desperate writer.
So what would be the Wolverine tie-in? Gambit has to search for all the body parts Wolverine’s left lying around after being chopped off?
I’d give it a chance, provided Rogue wasn’t shoehorned into a personality-draining romance.
And thank you. Well, not for the ground into powder thing – I liked Generation X. But everything else.
a story entitled “Deal With The Devil (Dinosaur).”
You would like my money now????
I must say, that I appreciated the bits of your take on Gambit I did get to see. You always explain him better than I can to others as well.
Zenrage,
Mojo was originally a great villain – and by that, I mean, he worked perfectly in the context of the original Longshot series by Ann Nocenti and Art Adams. He became horrid the moment Chris Claremont tried to shoehorn him into X-Men continuity. It was nice that he salvaged Longhsot from potential obscurity, but Mojo doesn’t make any sense as an X-villain, or really, as a villain for nayone but Longshot.
But…but…X-Babies!
“– So what would be the Wolverine tie-in? Gambit has to search for all the body parts Wolverine’s left lying around after being chopped off? –”
Gambit boinks Jean Grey. Logan finds out. Queue Benny Hill “Yakkity Saks”. Hilarity ensues.
Did someone say X-Babies???
Hot stuff: http://fullbodytransplant.wordpress.com/2008/12/02/high-pitched-squeals/
One of my greatest achievements.
Yes! X-Babies!!!
I always loved the issue where Kitty was stuck babysitting them.
And I always saw Mojo as on par with Batman’s Penguin. He’s not really a villain you should fight so much as a member of the seedy intergalactic underbelly that you occasionally have to deal with. He makes an intriguing political player and a good punching bag, but I never saw him as much of a “behold my brilliant evil plan!” competent adversary.
I can see him as a major information broker with spies across the multi-verse, selling out information on X-men enemies only to turn around and sell out the X-men for a quick buck or higher ratings. Maybe he provokes fights between the Brood and the Shi’ar. Maybe he tries to widen his audience to the Skrull or the Kree as some sort of demented intergalactic “FOX News”. At the least, he adds atmosphere and character to the off-world.
But, for the love of god, no more X-Babies. *sigh*
X-Babies: the Marvel Zombies of the 90s.
Or was it 80s?
Aaaaanyway. I will now shut up about the goddamn X-Babies.
If you wrote a Gambit series, MGK, I would read it. But then, I always liked Gambit. A claim I can’t make too loud, lest I get hissed and booed by the true fans.
This is freaky shit.
The WordPress system has killer cool instant stats to watch, and right now Doop is neck-and-neck with the X-Babies in a life or death race for the domination of MightyGodKing click supremacy.
I love this life so much it makes me leak fluid.
Stolen idea from Fractal Hall, but I would love to see a mini series on Ghost Rider taking on classic horror monsters.
Mentioning M.O.D.O.K. clone banks in the same paragraph as Nextwave discounts that time they got it on in that series. Gambit could kidnap a M.O.D.O.K. baby!
(Jubilee, Psylocke and Gen X can be ground into powder and serve as a MacGuffin. I am not a big X-fan, generally.)
I trust you’re joking, here.
That’s a sentiment that would fit in well amongst the comics writing establishment, (by which I refer not to anything done to those specific characters, but that it’s a common approach to characters a given writer isn’t personally fond of,) but that’s not a good thing.
Hey! I voted for your thing. So in return I request a post about your Canadian coalition-forming good times. Please?
I don’t know…it sounds like NFL Superpro sis ripe for a reboot.
“I bring back District X, a 14-issue noir-ish series set in Mutant Town, Marvel’s criminally underused mutant ghetto in Alphabet City”
That would be interesting to see, given that Peter David blew the whole place up a few months back in X Factor.
“That would be interesting to see, given that Peter David blew the whole place up a few months back in X Factor.”
Yeah…but, then again, that was unavoidable, given the Decimation. It’s very hard to have Mutant Town without actual mutants. The market for ‘Tales of the Middle East Side’, where guntoting valley girls fight Ashkhenazi Jews with cyborg arms, is neither broad nor deep.
My idea is predicated upon them repealing the Decimation, returning to the ‘visible and growing minority of mutants’ idea. Just wait till sales start dropping, they’ll throw anything at the wall to see if it sticks. For now, I can merely plot. And complain on blog comment threads, obviously.
Nice idea. Problem is, already done by FabNic.
“– Yeah…but, then again, that was unavoidable, given the Decimation. It’s very hard to have Mutant Town without actual mutants. The market for ‘Tales of the Middle East Side’, where guntoting valley girls fight Ashkhenazi Jews with cyborg arms, is neither broad nor deep. –”
Isn’t that the plot of West Side Story?
How about Romanti-X, a group of mutant fetishists or groupies, a la Almost Famous’ ‘Band-Aids?’
Since the more rarified the fetish the freaker it becomes a fetish that has only 192 outlets must be pretty freaky indeed. The less “normalized” the mutation the hotter the prospect. Beak (is he still alive? I haven’t read X-men since the Morrison run Lister is so fond of) could have his own groupies and internet shrines!
Beak is alive, depowered, and a member of the New Warriors. He goes by Blackwing these days. Or Barney, when he’s slumming with the flatscans.
Believe it or not, there are two new cards in Vs. System that feature Beak.
His character card, and a plot twist called Beak Saves the Day.
The plot twist will actually see massive play too, it is way overpowered.
Ok, since I haven’t actually picked up an x-men comic since House of M (aside from Whedon’s collected run, which doesn’t help), does “Beak is depowered” mean that he doesn’t have feathers anymore? Is looking like a plucked chicken a “mutant power”? Did the big scarlet reset button make depowered mutants structurally human?
The big scarlet reset button worked however the writer du jour wants it to work. I consider this excusable because, hey, chaos magic. Unpredictable and inconsistent pretty much by definition.
So when Chamber lost his powers, he was left with no heart, lungs or lower jaw (but, presumably, was standing right next to an artificial heart, because he survived and later got rebuilt by a cult of Apocalypse-worshippers), but when Beak lost his powers he was turned into a generic blond pretty-boy.
He doesn’t have feathers, he can’t fly, he doesn’t have a beak. He doesn’t have much of a personality now, either.
“He doesn’t have feathers, he can’t fly, he doesn’t have a beak. He doesn’t have much of a personality now, either.”
Yes, that’s one of my main problems with Decimation (to hijack MGK’s thread still further). A lot of mutants have powers in lieu of characterisation: without being ‘the guy with feathers’ or ‘the rock guy’, they’re really not that interesting on their own.
Of course, part of the point of Decimation was to dramatically thin out the supporting cast. But if, like me, you think having a wide range of characters is to your net benefit (because you have a whole universe to play with, with its own rules and boundaries), all the Decimation has done is removed much of what made the Marvel Universe interesting.
I mean: Mutant Town would have had its own state representatives! The local congressmen would have competed for ‘the mutant vote’: fat, paunchy humans speaking about their empathy for mutants, turning a blind eye to Magneto’s activities to curry political favour. Isn’t there even a glimmer of interest in that?
I liked Gambit for a while, but everything they did to the character made him less interesting. The whole “Thieves’ Guild/Assassin’s Guild” conflict? Made him worse. The Mister Sinister connection? Made him worse. Making him secretly guilt-riddled and conflicted about helping kill the Morlocks? Made him worse.
He’s a fun supporting character with a line in snappy patter and such a bad case of the girl-crazies that he tries to seduce a woman who literally can’t be touched without going into a coma. Trying to layer “depth” on that is like frosting cake with concrete.
(Oh, and my pre-Decimation idea was for a mini-series involving a struggling band that decides to reinvent themselves as “mutantcore”, only to find that a lot of bad stuff can go down when your fans can punch through battleship steel.)
I thought there was no such thing as Chaos Magic?
Eh, whatever. Maybe Gambit can go and steal back all those de-powered mutants’ personalities.
Wasn’t there a mutant punk band at some point? Or am I conflating that with the “Jumbo Carnation” mutant fashion designer?
Wouldn’t a human “mutantcore” band be the ultimate sell out? “Never Mind the X-Men here’s the Gene Pistols” (Or, maybe, “The Bamf”
“Wasn’t there a mutant punk band at some point? Or am I conflating that with the “Jumbo Carnation” mutant fashion designer?”
Grant Morrison mentioned ‘Juggernauts’ as a mutant rock band. And, groan, ‘Sentinel Bait’.
But I agree, it’s an interesting idea. I think it ties in nicely with Morrison’s ‘U-Man’ idea — the idea of ‘mutant chic’, mutants as the ultimate symbol of subculture cool. It’s such an obvious idea, flowing naturally out of the premise.
“The Bamf”, most definitely.
MGK, write that.
“His character card, and a plot twist called Beak Saves the Day.
The plot twist will actually see massive play too, it is way overpowered.”
Gee, thanks Tony Bedard. No, really
Re: Chamber – I thought his power was keeping him alive after he blew half his body apart, again?
Coren: Originally, yes. Then should be worm food Wanda stepped in, turned most mutants human and he almost died. Then the Apocalypse cult made him all better but with blue lips, he joined the New Warriors…it’s a real clusterfuck. No wonder I don’t bother with the X-Men anymore.