X-men!

[stormkeeper_lovedoris]

I'm enjoying two X-men things.

My BFF got me this X-men TV show thing from Japan. It's really good. I'm only about half the way through it, but the plot has me engaged and the characters are fairly true to form. Storm is a little bland and 'perfect' but I guess you can say that about many Storm incarnations. There's this group of baddies called the U-men who are like an anti-mutant hate group, who capture mutants and use their powers against them and other mutants. Freaky!

And I'm still reading Astonishing X-men. I fell a little behind but just picked up issues 55 and 56. It's really good, still. It looks like the current story arc is over now, so I can't say where it will go from here. But it's nice that after 12 years of being the X-man fan who's not into comics that now I can say I am enjoying some.

EDIT - I just found out that X-men creator Stan Lee turns 90 today. Very cool. I admire him for creating so many strong female characters. He was ahead of his time.

Comments

[stormkpr.livejournal.com]

Very cool. By the way, one of the New Mutants - Karma - is a major character in this Astonishing X-men storyline that I'm in to.

[denisia.livejournal.com]

Very cool! I am glad they are still using those characters. I always contemplate going to read Marvel again but I don't know if I am up for the heartbreak, lol. Every time I've liked a series with them they've eventually cancelled it or worse, hired new writers who decimated the characters...

[stormkpr.livejournal.com]

One could spend a lifetime pondering Marvel's errors! That is why this run on Astonishing continues to, well, Astonish me. (sorry)

[denisia.livejournal.com]

Is Astonishing a reboot of the older series? If they haven't killed off Jean it might be worth looking into...

[stormkpr.livejournal.com]

As far as I can tell, it's not a reboot. Unfortunately Jean and Scott are nowhere to be found. I guess they are on a different team or something? Rogue isn't in it either, though she made an appearance at Northstar and Kyle's wedding. The main characters are Wolverine (of course), Gambit, Northstar (and Kyle), a female Shi'ar warrior whose name I forget, Iceman, and Karma.

They rarely interact with any of the other X-men (again, except at Northstar's wedding), which I don't like. Guess I want one big happy team.

P.S.

[stormkpr.livejournal.com]

Cecilia Reyes is in it too. She's pretty cool.

[denisia.livejournal.com]

Aw. That sounds like a bummer, not to have the rest of the team there. :(

I agree with you - one of the things I DID like, and continue to like, about old Marvel is that they realized that the characters didn't live in a vacuum and would in fact bump into each other and need to work together at some points. And as I recall with the X-Men/X-Factor/New Mutants a major part of their strength was their large membership.

[stormkpr.livejournal.com]

I wonder why they like to use the vacuum method. They trot out every character in Marvel for Northstar's wedding but they only do that when there are big occasions. Is it just too hard to juggle too many lead characters?

[denisia.livejournal.com]

Laziness? I'm only half joking there. As I recall, the huge 80s storylines that stretched into a lot of the different series were so complicated that it must have taken a lot of time and effort to keep it all straight for continuity's sake.

[sevarem.livejournal.com]

That's kind of why I swing in and out of Marvel. I usually keep up with what's going on in X-Men, to a point, but sometimes it just makes me sad and/or angry, which is not a fun way to be when reading comics.

ETA: Astonishing is not a reboot. Don't expect to find Scott and Jean though. Jean is still dead and Scott's off being a war criminal. Liu's trying to write a fun and interesting series, so she's not dealing with any of that. Teenage Jean from the past has made a recent appearance in All New X-Men, along with the rest of the original team, and it looks like she'll be sticking around for a while.

Marvel has generally been pretty good about not having the characters exist in a vacuum, but they can only keep juggling so many characters through so many books. Except Wolverine. Even the editors joke that he can exist in 1000 places at once.