In the recommendations made to Jim after his recent post, mixed in among the thirty thousand odd recommendations of Avengers Academy (which isn’t bad by any means, but seriously, it’s not even in the top dozen things Marvel is putting out these days) were a couple for Uncanny X-Force, which I wanted to echo because UXF manages to be a massively entertaining comic despite having the uber-tired premise of “we’re the X-Men who totally kill baddies,” which should earn it some sort of award for operating under a handicap.
It’s a good comic for two reasons: it has consistently good art, and Rick Remender knows both what he wants to do with the characters and the larger story he wants to tell, which is why he’s selected characters that benefit that story. Wolverine, obviously, but a supporting cast of Psylocke, Fantomex and Deadpool all work well – and then there’s Archangel, and the biggest coup Remender’s managed on UXF is that he’s finally pulled the trigger on Warren Worthington, who was always basically a boring character with wings when he wasn’t being Archangel, by turning him into the next Apocalypse.
Remender rightly saw that Warren was only ever even slightly interesting when he was at war with his evil self, which suggests that the evil self is what was really interesting all along, and thus far that appears to be the case: evil Archangel is much more interesting than good Archangel/Angel ever was, not least because he’s such an atypically pleasant and polite murderous maniac. And best of all, given the most recent issue, it appears that this character shift is going to stick for the next few whiles, if only because as of the events of issue 14 I can’t see a way that they can redeem him any time soon.
Which is good, because the X-Men, as a franchise, should float a character from good to bad or vice versa from time to time: the best villains in the X-books are always those who have sort of a point, and Archangelypse (who, after all, only wants to commit mass genocide so that humanity can eventually survive the coming of the Celestials) fits the bill. Besides, with Emma Frost and Magneto and even the likes of Legion, Scalphunter and Frenzy ending up all in the X-Men’s ranks, it was well past time that one of the X-Men turn bad to balance the scales.
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So other than the current X-Force what would be the other 11 Marvel titles you’d recomend over Avengers Academy?
“Besides, with Emma Frost and Magneto and even the likes of Legion, Scalphunter and Frenzy ending up all in the X-Men’s ranks, it was well past time that one of the X-Men turn bad to balance the scales.”
They have already done so with Bishop, of course, though admittedly that predates the arrival of all the characters you mention bar Frost.
Bishop’s heel turn was totally out of nowhere and destroyed him as a character. Warren’s is based on eveything that’s been established by previous writers, ad makes him more interesting to read.
I’m not sure I’d agree that Bishop’s betrayal came totally out of left field. Civil War had already demonstrated that his desire to create a better future trumped his loyalty to the X-Men.
That’s not to say I don’t agree with the damage done and the superiority of the Angel storyline, though in truth I’ve yet to get round to Uncanny X-Force, so I can’t comment.
Sebastian Shaw is also, apparently, becoming an X-Man, going by the covers of the post-Schism X-books.
I’m a big fan of Evil Beast.
That said, I think the X-men universe is getting to the point where it is facing so many exigent threats – legions of killer sentinels, swarms of alien conquerors, hordes of anti-mutant human agitators – that they really don’t have much choice except to band together.
Magneto and Shaw worked as villains better when Earth was a more quiet place and humans weren’t sure if mutants were an urban myth or just someone else’s problem. But now behind-the-scenes power brokering and self-segregation/conquest seem almost trivial when you’re facing repeated worldwide or extra-planetary enemies.
No matter where you stand on the humans-and-mutants public relations front, repeated threats of global genocide tend to bind even the most disparate of ideological allies. (Unless you’re a Republican, in which case you’re cheering global apocalypse on because it will help win the next election cycle).
I agree – Warren is a great character and incredibly interesting when he’s battling with his evil, Archangel persona – it’s so interesting to see this inner conflict fully played out and I’m very happy Remender has finally done this.
The thing is, I think Warren is an awesome character – evil side or no evil side. See the thing is, out of all the X-Men, Warren’s first instinct when his powers activated was to done a superhero costume, call himself the Avenging Angel and be a hero. Arguably, Warren is the most heroic of the X-Men as a result.
What makes him even more heroic is the fact that his powers are basically just the power of flight/wings! Cyclops has optic blasts that can destroy mountains; Wolverine has a bitchin’ healing factor and unbreakable claws; Storm controls weather; and Warren…flies?! But the fact that Warren, just like the other X-Men, would still readily head into battle and face down more powerful enemies than him, with only his trusty wings, demonstrates how Warren has huge brass testes!
Add to the fact that he has a cool Tony Stark-of-the-X-Men vibe to him, shows that Warren is an awesome character without having the “Archangel-crutch”.
What I think would be interesting is for Warren to somehow control the Archangel side but never be allowed to let it loose. He’d have to resort to being his usual winged-self again, and I can imagine he’d feel totally useless in a fight cos he can’t go all bad-ass and slice and dice using his metallic wings/fletchettes. So I’d love to see Warren deal with that conflict…and how he perhaps could overcome that and make himself more useful in a fight by using gadgets or something. Kinda like Batman of the X-Men…
FF, Amazing Spider-Man, Moon Knight, X-Factor, Uncanny X-Force, Invincible Iron Man, Black Panther, Daredevil, Thunderbolts, Journey Into Mystery, Generation Hope and PunisherMAX. And I’d probably toss New Mutants as a thirteenth in line before I hit Avengers Academy.
As for Uncanny x-force this should have happened
http://devilkais.deviantart.com/gallery/?offset=24#/d3l9kgz
& as for this fine gentleman?
http://devilkais.deviantart.com/gallery/#/d41wvdb
You have no Idea how disguted I am by how these boneheaded hacks are spitting on this Colicos voiced awesomeness & his epic mengeleesque rival! How long this stupid backlash is gonna last against him?
USE HIS FUCKING POTENTIAL ALREADY YA BUNGHOLES! HE HAS MORE CARDS TO PLAY IN TERMS OF STORY TO TELL THAN THE WASHED UP MAGS! This for instance:
http://devilkais.deviantart.com/gallery/#/d47txdm
& as for Bishop, yeah , they took a massive dump on both him & Cable for a fucking Mc Guffin that pissed me off so much I wanted Stryfe to slaughter her & use her skull (& those of Douchelops & the whore hack Morrison shoved down our throat) as a glass to drink his calvados! We could have made Cable an A-lister, the Rummekistan president vs the Monarch of Latveria would have made for a great encounter but NOOOOOOO have more sentinels suckers!
Finally , MGK, since you claim to like him, this is for you
http://devilkais.deviantart.com/gallery/#/d41r73s
& to those who don’t like this guy? QU’ILS AILLENT AU DIABLE.
@MGK: What, no Cosmic Marvel? Or are they between miniseries right now?
“Which is good, because the X-Men, as a franchise, should float a character from good to bad or vice versa from time to time”
Oh trust me, it ‘s not always that good of an idea.I find that quite annoying that heroes like Havok, Polaris , Gambit, Skin, etc get the boot to put guys like Victor fucking Creed who nearly gutted Psylocke numerous times & loved to make Logan’s life a living hell in an x-team! Yeah, next time Sinister shall be the child counsellor,Dark Beast the science teacher, Selene will guard the kindergarten(consider them meat…) & Stryfe will be the new gym teacher…
for me it makes the heroes look stupid to trust & put people that ENJOY murder & torturing innocent people psychologically in the team. They can complain all they want when Venom & Spider-man teaming up but to Peter & Eddie’s credits they a) Always hated each others guts so it was a last resort b) one of them inavoidably breaks the truce, this is how you so a hero villaiin team-up.
Whats been really great about Remenders run on UXF is the rebuilding of Apocalypse as a global threat….w/out actually using apocalypse proper yet.
So when he eventually does show up, expect shit to go down.
“@MGK: What, no Cosmic Marvel? Or are they between miniseries right now?”
I think Annihilators: Earthfall is starting soon.
Moon Knight? Really? Bendis’ attempt to sell a low-tier character by blatantly throwing three of Marvel’s biggest cash cows in the title in ridiculous fashion? Really?
I just look at that book and think it’s practically Bendis admitting he’s a colossal hack who has to rely on Spider-Man, Wolverine and Captain America to get even remotely decent sales.
Well I’ll give you Thunderbolts and Daredevil. And what I’ve seen of Gillen’s stuff is always excellent. But I just can’t stand Fraction’s Iron Man books (not they might not be good, they just totally don’t work for me). The current Spider-Man books are generally..ok. I’m not all “OMD RUINED THE BOOKS FOREVER!!1!”. But the roommate picks up the trades on them and so I’ve tried them out. And there just isn’t anything all that great in them, aside from a few of the new bad guys…
And I’m sorry but Hickman is one of the most over-rated people in comics right now…
@ LurkerWithout
Interesting that you don’t dig Fraction’s IIM. I’ve been loving that series, despite being leery about it when MGK first recommended it, because I thought Fraction’s run on Uncanny was distinctly hit and miss (with hindsight, I think the sheer number of characters in the latter book had a lot to do with it).
What the Celestials are coming AGAIN? Lord, I wish Marvel had never incorporated them into the MU.
@ Fraser
Someone get Jim Starlin on the line, I’ve got an idea for the next cosmic marvel miniseries.
SpaceSquid- When a character raised in a concentration camp decided that concentration camps policed by the same kind of giant robots that policed the one he grew up in are EXACTLY what the people he’s ostensibly protecting require, then he’s made a heel turn.
Bishop has been a villain since Civil War, and no one noticed until he killed almost every one on Earth to “create a better future.”
Jacob: Not to mention that Marvel is charging an extra dollar for that book because their precious golden boy is on it. Meanwhile you’ve got Rucka on Punisher and Waid on DD for $3 an issue, which to me feels like the deal of the century.
Fraction has some excellent work in his catalog, but man, IIM is totally hampered by the awful, awful artwork. I can’t even read the thing.
The thing about Fraction’s Iron Man is that I read the collections and enjoy them. I also tend to completely forget about it when people are fishing for comic recommendations even if I just read a story a few days prior (as happened a couple threads down). It’s certainly a good book but it isn’t memorable enough to be a great one.
I was reading pretty much all the X-Books around the time Morrison was doing New (yes, even X-Treme and Austen’s Uncanny…though I wish I hadn’t with the former and only bought six issues of the later). With Cable & Deadpool replaced with inferior solo books and Exiles gone, X-Factor was the only Post-Decimation X-Book I could really bring myself to care about. Unfortunately that series kept getting sucked into so many crossovers that I had to drop it too.
I just read the last few issues of UXF.
Good: a storyline that’s not decompressed, blends action, horror, X-soap and funny (the bit where Gambit points out that Fantomex’ French accent is fake? snrk.), and that actually manages to make Wolverine sort of interesting, a little, somewhat.
— I want to emphasize the /not decompressed/ part. More happens in most issues of UXF than in entire trades of some other titles. The sequence where they figure out that they need Dark Beast, and then go get him? Five panels, less than a page, and funny to boot. That’s good comics storytelling.
Also, the team has a found-object sort of quality that I find appealing. Also, Fantomex. Like a lot of Grant Morrison’s children, Fantomex is hard to write well. But in Remender’s hands, he’s pretty much pure fun.
Less good: fast-moving plot is somewhat garbled, doesn’t always make sense. We can’t tell anyone else what’s happening to Warren? Really? Dark Bobby Drake’s betrawal: why? Fat Egyptian guy who is obviously Farouk: how did the reporter know he was *Egyptian*? — Okay, that one is minor, but if I’m spotting stuff like this on a casual first read, you know there’s a lot more. Fast is good, but sloppy-fast isn’t.
Remender has chosen characters who are pretty static even by comic book standards — you can’t get much character development out of Deadpool or Deathlok. (Is Deadpool ever a good choice for an ensemble book?) There’s only so much you do with this group.
It’s a very good superhero team comic book. I read one issue and promptly read several more, which is great. But is this really the best Marvel can do these days?
Doug M.
@DistantFred
Yes, because being hunted by giant robots is identical to being protected by them. You may as well say anyone who’s ever been held at gun-point would never want access to guns to keep themselves safe.
There’s plenty one could dislike about Bishop’s handling of that situation, and his extermination of the whole of humanity was certaily a jaw-droppingly stupid idea, but trying to argue Civil War made Bishop into a clear-cut villain is a grotesque oversimplification at best.
@Doug M.:
“Remender has chosen characters who are pretty static even by comic book standards — you can’t get much character development out of Deadpool or Deathlok. (Is Deadpool ever a good choice for an ensemble book?) There’s only so much you do with this group.”
That’s the beauty of UXF — Remender is actually rehabilitating these moribund characters. As MGK mentions above, the endless “Archangel has to battle his dark side” plot is finally coming to a head. Not to mention Remender killed Fantomex’s mother and put him in charge of cloning the new Apocalypse for some mysterious reason. And as for Deadpool, who knew he would be the conscience of the group?
But I may be the wrong person to convince you since I previously went out of my way to avoid these characters. Now, reading UXF, I find them really interesting and nuanced. I think that’s a remarkable trick given that for most of their histories, these characters have been overwrought at best and one-dimensional at worst.
. Like a lot of Grant Morrison’s children, Fantomex is hard to write well.
Not really, just take Diabolik from “à la recherche de la panthère noire, replace his accomplice & love interest by a sentient UFO (kinda like the celestial ship actually). And his Nemesis John Sublime (& the only version worth a spit & was tolerable was the Tieri version in weapon X) is basically a rip-off of Dane , Diabolik’s douche of a brother. Just go with Diabolik ‘s characterisation for Charles Cluster 7 & you get him right
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpOeLUa9zrg
Serioulsy tell me it’s not familiar.
I’d like to second what Radiate said about Warren. There are a lot of aspects to his character that can be explored but often aren’t. The usual knock on Warren is that all he can do is fly, which is his power not his personality. And the best stories are built on who the character is and not what the character can do. Spider-Man for instance is fascinating because of his “great responsibilities” not his “great powers.” That said, I am loving “Uncanny X-Force” and got it specifically because it looked like Remender was going to do something interesting with Warren.
As for what the best comics Marvel is putting out right now, the Cosmic comics don’t make that cut. “Guardians of the Galaxy” was great but its successor “The Annihilators” is barely readable due to the terrible art of Tan Eng Huat. The Rocket Raccoon & Groot backup story was enjoyable (thanks to Timothy Green II) but $4 is a rip off for the whole package.
@Saidi, This assumes that Diabolik is easy to write. I’d call that one Not Proven.
Incidentally, Diabolik was based on Fantomas. And then there was the 2001-2 Fox Kids cartoon based on Diabolik. (No, seriously.) So back in his 2002 NXM run, Grant Morrison pulled all this together with the Weapon X/XI/XII program by having Fantomex be “based on Saturday morning cartoons”. Because Fantomas + Weapon X = Fantomex!
Grant Morrison SO CRAZY
Doug M.
But the thing is that Fantomas, as played by the great Jean Marais, is still a bit too villainous, while Fantomex does whatever the hell he does for the kick of it (guess 2 neural systems do need a good adrenaline rush…). And to his credit, He was for me the ONLY character that was likeable in that entire damn run, unlike the wretches that were supposed to be heroes or the Evil fetus that came out of the toilet because… well because, I guess.
@Saidi: Really like how your proof that Magneto isn’t a “mad old terrorist twat” is showing him killing someone.
Anyway, UXF is great. I really like how the basic theme of all the characters is that they’ve all been used as weapons by others at some point or another, or were created to be weapons. So they know what they are and that killing is what they’re best at, but they try to channel that toward something good. So glad Opena is back!
— Well, there was the one issue of UXF (#9?) where Magneto doesn’t want to kill some old Nazi, so he has Wolverine do it for him.
Actually, that was by far the single dumbest and weakest issue of the run. By far. If I were buying it in stores, I might have stopped right there.
Doug M.
@ Munkiman
I did not prove anything , I just gave my honest feelings & let the fictional characters having their fictional revenge whenever mishandled,
but for me Magneto’s bank account in villainy is in the red since… Fatal attractions? read a lot about Erik & he may be at the 7th spot as an x-men villain for me, but I’m not that interewsted in Magnus that much. Hell the cartoons only used as a villain proper for the 2 first seasons & then he became a bit more anti-heroesque.
I hated Planet X (in between other things) especially for killing Jean & the “plan” of Magneto…or Sublime…or that guy looking like sir McKellen after 3 rails of coke:impersonate some chinese prisonner all this time to act later as a nazi buffoon & to fool the x-men on my asteroid on which i spent time & money god knows where it came from. Then I build a fearsome group with a fly woman , a chicken, a piece of cum dumpster jailbait, an old woman who’ll rebel by saying genocide isn’t IN anymore (yep we’re in human traficking now, that’s IN…) & a brain in a jar! Srsly, who needs Frenzy, Exodus, Fourarm, Scanner, Amelia, Unuscione, Chrome or Byron when I have that army & the fearsome Toad (who shall strike their foes with a cunnilingus I guess…)! then I kill Jean in phoenix mode (srsly fuck the phoenix shit! did we really need it back? wasn’t Jean doing well without space chicken?) because the plot said so & then Logan can behead me (& I didn’t defeat them all because…)!MWAHAHAAHAA,Truly I’m a master strategist now where’s my weed?
@ Doug M: Yep I agree. It was like “hey remember that time I ripped that metal through your pores letting you suffer horribly & nearly dying? hey water under bridge old friend” I mean if EVER Mags should have went and murdered somebody, THIS was that moment!
My opinion about Magneto isn’t as evil as his detractors say, but he isn’t as pure-hearted as his supporters say.
UXF #9:
Guys, jesus… how do I explain this… Look, I’m not saying it was a good issue. The decompression was completely self-indulgent.
But yes, the whole point was supposed to be: this obviously is the man Magneto should be murdering. This is the moment he’s waited his whole life for. And he can’t do it. Not because he’s been reformed, or because he’s ethically conflicted. But because he’s weak. Look at how he’s drawn. All the other characters look like heavy metal rock gods. Magneto looks like a ridiculous buffoon, feeble and out of place.
He doesn’t explain his motivation to Logan because he’s ashamed, and while this is in character it’s also a problem with the writing. Remender should have figured out another way to get the point across. Which is that, if Magneto had gone to Argentina himself, he wouldn’t have won. And he knew it.
To put it as tastelessly as I can: it’s kind of like, no matter how old you get you can never beat up your dad.
So, should I take UXF as proof Remender has never read an actual comic about Age of Apocalypse, or any of the characters he writes about?