Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men

X-Discussion: October 2024

X-discussion time!

A reminder about our ground rules:

  1. Keep your posts at least tangentially comics-related, please!
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  3. Spoilers are okay, but please mark anything from the last three months like:
    ***SPOILER***
    Jay turned out not to be the father of Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch!
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11 comments

  1. The panel up top is from the Halloween-themed backup story from Classic X-Men #28, this one by Ann Nocenti and John Bolton. I love those stories! Sometimes you get a quiet character study, sometimes it’s a Halloween party with a secret murderer like the story in that panel, and sometimes Storm goes swimming in the Savage Land and ends up being a pirate riding a giant, flying fox in another dimension for a while before returning to the main plot.

    Fall, though! I think my favorite autumnal X-Men story is Uncanny X-Men #308, the one where the team plays football, Jean and Scott get engaged, and the team sits down for Thanksgiving dinner. We’ve talked about that one in a couple of episodes, but I keep coming back to it. I think I’m due for a re-read.

    Questions for anyone who wants to answer: What’s your favorite X-related backup story?

    And/or: what’s your favorite autumn-vibes comic?

    1. My favorite backup story has to be Tribute the 3rd in, I believe, X-Factor Annual #6.

      Peter David, at the height of his skill, writing a touching tribute to Mystique and Destiny. Granted, the queerness of those characters was completely absent, but it was pitch perfect otherwise.

    2. Not really a fall based story but it came out in fall so I associate it with that and it has vampire jubilee! But patsy walker aka hellcat 11. Hellcat and black cat have some fun and jubes shows up!

  2. I think my favourite back up story is the one where Jean invites Storm around. Ororo takes off all her clothes, Jean reads her mind and Storm floods the apartment.

    My favourite autumnal story is the same as Miles – UXM 308. I brought it when it came out – I can’t have been very old. In my version, there was a blank speech bubble from Jean just after she proposes to Scott. I assume from context that she says something like “I got fed up of waiting” because Scott replies “waiting? I asked you way back in…”.

    1. That annoyed me at the time. At least they showed the corrected panel in the letter pages of UXM #309.

  3. Wow! October already.

    I’m not going to go into spoilers, but is anyone else underwhelmed by the current “From the Ashes” era?

    I don’t think any of it is bad. I’m enjoying most of the books so far. It just reminds me of the post Age of Apocalypse era. Returning to a semi-classic status quo after such an amazing era is always hard to adjust to. The titles inevitably feel like they’re missing a certain ingredient to make them “pop.”

    Still, I know it’s still early days and it’s probably just going to take a little time for things to really get rolling.

    Also, I appreciate the direction Kitty is going in Exceptional X-Men. I was afraid Marvel was going to sweep that under the rug.

    1. I’m honestly having a similar feeling. Some of it is even the inertia of getting myself to care enough to pick up some of the books. The art style and what I see they’re about just aren’t getting me. I’m not saying they’re bad…just “not for me.” (After all, as Jay and Miles remind us, every story is someone’s favorite). Even Exceptional left me like very much “I don’t dislike this, but I don’t need issue 2.”

      I will say NYX is the exception for me – it’s the premise that most catches me (the idea of addressing it as a diaspora) and I’ve been enjoying the occasional Unlimited story (the current Beast one in particular).

      All in all, this reminds me of the post-Morrison comedown with Whedon (I’m in the minority where that run turned me off so much a few issues in that I stopped reading X-Men for almost ten years). I don’t think I’ll stop for 10 years, but I do hope we get a swing back to something more my style sooner than later.

      1. NYX has been a pleasant surprise. I also think the new Storm series has promise, based off the first issue. It isn’t the strongest art I’ve seem, but I’m at least looking forward to #2.

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