The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1975: The New Mutants #98, February 1991

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(A brief note: according to The Atlantic, the term "latinx" is not exactly a popular one. It is used primarily in academic circles, and since that's where I come from, I'm going to use it. I hope it doesn't offend anyone. I use it exactly to avoid such offense.)

Let's start off my week of Latinx creators with a big one, and currently one of the most valuable comics in my collection. This issue, from featured creator Fabian Nicieza, is the first appearance of the inimitable Merc with a Mouth, Ryan Reynolds' alter ego, Deadpool. Though the credits list Nicieza as a "Scripter," and Rob Liefeld as the story writer, Deadpool's trademark, aside from his violent ways, is his unceasing patter while battling, eating, fucking, whatever. And that comes from a scripter, I would imagine. Rob Liefeld often talks about himself as Deadpool's creator, but comics are words and pictures.

Aside from this, we also have Domino's first appearance, a character played with utter perfection by Zazie Beetz. These introductions, of course, are groundwork for the end of The New Mutants with issue #100, and the beginning of the Liefeld/Nicieza title X-Force. With Liefeld's departure with the other image founders, Mr. Nicieza took over the creative direction of the series until the universe shattering events of The Age of Apocalypse. Mr. Nicieza was a foundational writer for the X-books throughout the 90s and early 2000s, and laid the groundwork for a lot of what has since become canonical in the Marvel Universe.

As with my look at Black creators, I'm interested to see what kind of Latinx representation there is in these comics that feature creators of that ethnic background. I didn't see too much representation in this issue, with the exception, perhaps, of Rictor, who leaves the team in this issue. I couldn't actually find too much info on Rictor's background, but it's telling that after Liefeld leaves the series, Mr. Nicieza returns Rictor to the X-Force fold.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 363: Cable - Blood and Metal #1, October 1992

There was a gap in my comics collecting. I can pinpoint it pretty accurately by my Animal Man collection. I know that the last issue of it I bought was around #14, in 1989. I picked up the hobby again around 1995, when I was living in London, Ontario. So I missed the Image explosion, and I definitely missed the X-titles that followed in its wake, when Marvel Comics was trying desperately to mimic the success of it's former employees.

Thank goodness.

There's a reason why comics from the early 90s are so mercilessly lampooned. They're really bad. And I'm saying this about a comic written by Fabian Nicieza, the man behind some of my favourite Thunderbolts stories, and by John Romita Jr., perhaps one of the most lauded of the Bronze Age/Modern Age comics artists. But, y'know, Cable. He was created, pretty much, by Rob Liefeld, and at this point in his history, he hasn't shed that image, so to speak. He still has giant puffy shoulders, and seems to spend his entire life grimacing over something painful, speaking in Frank Miller-esque bursts of exposition, and basically killing as many people and trying to sound like as much of a badass as possible.

It's hard for me to determine if this comic was good or bad, though. It's obviously picking up from New Mutants/X-Force storylines about which I have no knowledge. So in context, it might actually be a decent piece of superhero storytelling. Out of context, though, it suffers from the cliche of most X-books that one tries to read in a vacuum - it's so bogged down with continuity that the story just doesn't make sense. There's flashbacks, and references to apparently important characters. I half expected a Deadpool appearance, but maybe that's just a result of having spent time on the Internet in the last 2 months or so.

Bottom line, this is a Marvel X-comic from the early 90s. If you read them at the time, you have a nostalgic affection for them, but can't really convince me that they're any good. And if you didn't read them at the time, you probably avoid them like the plague. Like I would, though I don't have that option.

Okay, in an effort to end on a less negative note, Romita's art is always lovely to look at, even when I don't really know what's going on.

There. More tomorrow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 193: The Amazing X-Men #3, May 1995

First things first: to anyone living in Calgary this weekend, Happy Pride! The weather might suck, but I can't imagine it'll damp the spirits too much of the celebrants.

I'll start on today's comic at the end. The final sentence of this issue gave me goosebumps. This issue, from the Nicieza/Kubert team was everything that an X-Men comic should be. Soap opera meets action movie meets light philosophical journey. Sort of like The Matrix. So let me back up and start from the start.

Magneto, on the opening page, asks the most important question, but it's sadly one that can never have an answer. While standing over the grave of Charles Xavier, he asks if Professor X would make the same decision he is wrestling with. But for Xavier, the question is not whether or not he would sacrifice everything to save the world, but whether or not everything should be sacrificed for him to save the world. How does one, even a dead one like Professor X, even begin to deal with that question? And it's also a question that invites X-readers into this conundrum on a very profound level. Long-time readers are invested in Xavier's dream, of his world of freedom and equality. It's virtually impossible to be a fan of the X-Men without having some investment in this ideal, and as such those fans are also well-versed in the fundamental beliefs of Professor X. So Magneto's question at the beginning, and it's slight reversal from the professor's perspective begs an answer not from the man whose grave he stands over, but from the readers sharing the moment: would Professor X sacrifice literally everything to return to life and save the world? It's the question of a delicate balance between a selfless and a selfish act.

We finally have the confrontation that seems to have been a long time coming in this issue as well: Magneto versus Apocalypse. I have to remind myself that, from a publication perspective, the stories I've been looking at over the last few weeks only took 3 months to come out, but, as I've noted before, one of the great things about this crossover is that it is so well-wrought as to feel like this reality had been around for ages. The confrontation is a nice parallel, taking place as it does at Xavier's grave, of the climactic confrontations we've often seen between Xavier and Magneto over the course of the X-universe's history. A little more physically-inflected, perhaps, but similar in tone. And, given that Magneto has been depowered, there's also an interesting parallel to Xavier's confinement to a wheelchair. This loss, on the part of both men, stokes a fire in their souls to use everything in their power to do what they believe is right.

I had a conversation with a very good friend and comics scholar recently about my reading of the Age of Apocalypse, and he noted how much he liked some of the revisions of the characters in this reality, even to the point of preferring them to the originals. I have to concur with this assessment, especially in the case of Magneto's son, Quicksilver. In the original universe, Quicksilver is, if you'll forgive the colloquialism, a dick. I've never liked him, never understood the character, never appreciated any of his qualities. But in this iteration of the X-universe, he's noble almost to the point of Cyclops-ian sacrifice. Which, with that goosebump-inducing final sentence, of what it means to be X-Men, returns us to the question Magneto asks at the issue's beginning. How much sacrifice is too much? How many of these individuals are better people as a result of the circumstances of their existence. We, as readers, are torn with regard to Magneto, whom we know will become an apocalyptic villain in his own right if his plan is carried through, and this feeling of being torn carries over to some of the characters who revolve around Magneto and his team. This, I think, is perhaps the most brilliant aspect of this crossover. We know, of course, that things will return to normal, and if they do, there will be very little change in the regular continuity. This is often the case with major crossovers, and actually is a great criticism of them. They offer the illusion of drama. But the Age of Apocalypse offers something that none of the others, that I can think of, do: loss. We lose these characters, these better selves of some of the less-likable people in the X-stable. So while the fictional universe itself will, by and large, be unchanged, the readers are. We continue on through the ongoing drama of the X-Men knowing how things could have been, and, dare I say it, should have been, for some of these fictional individuals.

And that, I think, is as good a place as any to stop for a bit. With the beginning of school this week, and my first proper, full-on lecturing starting, I've prepared some pre-read and written posts for the next week, a break for a bit from the Age of Apocalypse. We leave at the cliffhanger, major characters in the hands of the villains, heroes desperately trying to salvage a plan that seems to be unraveling. And when we return, we'll get a glimpse of the other heroes in the Marvel U, and how this turn of events has effected them. Will they be better selves?

In the interests of fair warning to those who are faint of heart or sensibility, the next week will be looking at the Eros Comix "mangerotica" line from Fantagraphics. It's explicit, lewd, and occasionally off-putting porn and erotica. If it's not to your taste, please give the week a miss. I'll be back to the Age of Apocalypse next Sunday. See you, if only virtually, tomorrow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 179: The Amazing X-Men #2, April 1995

Continuing the saga of the human evacuation from Maine, we are given a rare opportunity to see the X-Men, specifically Quicksilver and Storm, in a story that is typical, in the most positive sense of the word, of the line that the X-stories often tread. While the lives of every human waiting to be airlifted to safety are being threatened, the two make a choice to rescue a single, small, human child, regardless of the fact that their presence at the evacuation site would provide greater safety to the majority. The X-Men function very often as a civil rights metaphor, for all kinds of civil rights, but the sense of the individual is never lost in the sense of the community. One person has no more or less inherent value than any other, a fact that is at the heart of all civil rights movements, and so it is proven whenever we see the merry mutants turning from the larger actions of the cause to the smaller actions of the person. It's a nice touch, and proof once more of Fabian Nicieza's facility as a writer of the X-Men.

I'm interested in tomorrow's comic, as we'll be looking at Factor X, and seeing Apocalypse's operation somewhat from the inside. Scott Summers is often cited as one of the most noble and heroic figures in the Marvel U - it'll be interesting to see if he maintains this nobility even in the face of having been indoctrinated into Apocalypse's upper echelons his whole life. See you tomorrow, then.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 178: The Amazing X-Men #1, March 1995

We step back slightly in time with this issue from the previous couple of days' Weapon X issues and see the Sentinel evacuation from the North American perspective. There's also a nicely succinct panel in which Magneto and the team lay out what each ancillary team is doing, thus giving us a brief breakdown of the action of most of the main crossover titles. It's a deftly handled little summary of the crossover. Fabian Nicieza, who writes this series, fell into a bit of a trap, I think, due to his involvement with Marvel during this period. The comics, and their creators, tried too hard to mimic the successes of the Image crew, a course of action that, rather than enhancing the Marvel U somehow, simply took everything down to the levels of the Liefeld/McFarlane-led Image nonsense. That may seem harsh. I've said before that I was out of the comics scene for most of that era, but the amount of early-90s comics I've read since then seem to support the claim that it was a terrible time for sequential superhero stories.

But Nicieza is a pretty good writer. His work here is well-wrought, and when he starts to write Thunderbolts after Kurt Busiek's tenure, he really tells some excellent superhero narratives. He's not one of the superstar writers, but that's fine. He's a writer who obviously loves the genre within which he works (which is not to say lesser writers love it any less) and who's got a good handle on how a superhero story can, and should, be told.

This issue, as far as its place in the crossover, is a bit of a set-up comic. There's a training sequence, a pep talk from Magneto, and a revelation of villains on the last page. Not much else, narratively or character-wise, happens. But we're continuing with this series tomorrow, at which point I expect things to kick into high gear, as only a 90s superhero comic can. See you then.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 164: X-Men #41, February 1995

And the "Legion Quest" concludes. I wish I'd been following comics when this was published, as I'm curious as to how much Professor X's death was a foregone conclusion. They certainly advertise the fact of his death a lot in the comics I've read over the last couple of days, so I get the suspicion that it was no secret. This initial story was really just a way of moving things into the "Age of Apocalypse," so it doesn't really stand by itself. If we want to look at it novelistically, which I think is a good way of considering the AoA, for all that it's played with action and pathos, these first 6 issues are prologue. X-Men: Alpha, the comic I'll be reading tomorrow, is the beginning of Chapter 1 proper. This raises something that I touch on in my initial thoughts on Mark Waid's Flash that will be up later today, the problem of how we can read, from an academic point of view, ongoing serialized comics. One can pick up and read a Shakespearean play, or a Cormac McCarthy novel, and have a finite work to critique, but how does one do that with something like the X-Men. A crossover like AoA offers a way of separating out a finite story. This prologue we've just finished links the story back to its serialized roots, a factor in these kinds of works of fiction that we can never, and should never, discount completely, but also offers a very succinct and simply told sequitur that moves us into a self-contained portion of the ongoing serial.

Not that I'm going to attempt an academic reading of the "Age of Apocalypse," but I recognize the potential this sort of crossover offers for just such a reading.

That rambled a bit. Tired morning. We'll broach chapter 1 tomorrow, and see what the Age has to offer us. See you then.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 161: X-Men #40, January 1995

How does Legion get his hair to do that? I feel like he and Wolverine must go to the same barber shop.

I had made a deal with myself after yesterday's drubbing of the first part of this story to try to find the good in this second part. And I really did try. But then there was this utterly, ridiculously racist moment in the series, made all the more deplorable when considered from the perspective of a racist comment happening in a freaking X-Men comic!

Having been time-displaced by Legion, Iceman, Storm, Bishop, and Psylocke are suffering a very specific form of amnesia, in that they remember who they are, but not what they are or where they come from. While trying to suss this out, at one point Iceman, a.k.a. Bobby Drake, brings up the fact that they all woke up in "funky aerobic outfits," but then extends the strangeness of their outfits to the fact that their group includes "a British accent in an Asian body...a black woman with white hair," to which he adds the commentary "guys, that's not normal."

Um.

Fabian Nicieza, who wrote this issue, often gets coupled with Scott Lobdell (who, I think, masterminded the whole AoA crossover) as amongst the worst X-writers in the title's history. As I noted yesterday, the nineties were not a kind era to superhero comics. There's a couple of moments in this issue where the Liefeld-ness of it all comes through. Archangel (or Angel, or whatever he goes by at this point) has the constant grimace on his face, as do most other characters in the issue. Only old school Professor X and pre-evil Magneto have anything resembling human expressions. But Nicieza's dialogue is generally not bad. His run on Thunderbolts in the mid-2000s was very enjoyable. And, unless my memory deceives me, far less problematically normative. Now, I get that I come from a background that is predisposed to notice things like this, and I'd like to clearly state that I'm not accusing Fabian Nicieza of being racist. What I think this demonstrates rather nicely is, hopefully, the advances we've made in our use and understanding of language over the past 20 years. Iceman's use of the word "normal" just doesn't hold water (frozen or liquid) anymore. It didn't then either, let's be honest, but I think the word "normal" has undergone a significant shift in meaning, from denoting things that are all the same because of their homogeneity to things that are all the same because of their heterogeneity. I'll just leave that there as a talking point.

As for the story itself, it seems to be moving quite slowly. Chances are there was a need to pad things a bit in order that the AoA get coordinated properly, so I can forgive that. There's one really effective moment at the very end of the comic, in which Lilandra, the Shi'ar ruler, appears as a giant hologram in the sky above the present day X-Men, and warns them that Legion's actions in the past are affecting the fabric of reality.

(As an aside, I wonder how many times the term "fabric of reality" has been used in superhero comics to point out the seriousness of a storyline.)

This moment rather nicely offers a sense of scale and perspective, and is a testament to Andy Kubert's pencilling. I'll go on record as saying that his is not a style of art that I'm overly fond of, but he's really very good at what he does.

There was a bit of positivity in there, right? *Sigh* Okay, I'll try again tomorrow. See you then.