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In which you should use drugs only with caution; a famous shirt makes its debut; Wolverine is the new Mary Worth; and you were never Quentin Quire’s age (unless you were).
X-PLAINED:
- What Quentin Quire’s been up to since discorporating
- New X-Men #135-138
- The Special Class
- Basilisk
- Ernst
- Dummy
- No Girl
- Whether the Xavier School should admit human students
- Quentin’s new look
- Kick (more) (again)
- The Omega Gang
- That one t-shirt
- How to punch up your Power Point presentation
- A somewhat fraught camping trip
- The Special Class vs. U-Men
- A secret
- Some kind of weird affair
- A riot, of sorts
- Wolverine’s unfortunate soul patch
- What actually happened to Jumbo Carnation
- Telepathic deconstruction
- The Cuckoos vs. Emma Frost
- A somewhat mysterious secondary mutation
- Denouement
- The subsequent evolution of Quentin Quire
- What’s happening to xplainthexmen.com when the show ends
- The telepathy-telekinesis overlap
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What was that quote about Emma? Nasty jokes and meanness? It sounds like something Granny Weatherwax would say about someone. Has Morrison ever mentioned Terry Pratchett?
Yes, it would be trademark.
Riot @ Xavier’s is SO good! 🤌🏻
Er,, anyone know where I can get some Kick?
(Dave Chappelle meme of him being a crackhead)
I always thought:
I liked Quintain in this, but then they ruined this character by having him associated him wtih neon pink , and mentally created neon pink weapons.
On fashion: There are some elements of the Omega Gang look that were prevalent in the early 2000s — capris were a thing — but the rolled-up shirts and cropped pants/boots look are also reminiscent of some photos I’ve seen of brownshirts in 1930s Germany. (That said, punks and skinheads may look similar to the casual observer, but they can tell each other apart easily.)
But the outfit design isn’t the only story element that feels this way in retrospect. Quentin’s “I’m only playing Devil’s advocate” line could easily have come from a gamergate troll or a manosphere grifter. I find him far more right-wing-flavored than do the hosts, or the author of the “You Were Never My Age” essay.
I agree that it’s a terrific arc, though, probably my favorite of Morrison’s run, in that it captures the gulf of understanding between generations, and how both the old and the young can be spectacularly wrong at the same time. (The books revisit the theme in the Planet X arc.) And Xorn’s interaction with the special class is terrific.
It does require a lot of suspension of disbelief, in that the Omega Gang have to be viewed as a legitimate threat while at the same time being totally dismissible. It should have been easy to establish the Omega Gang as the murderers or quickly thwart the riot; Quentin could perhaps resist mind probes, but Redneck? (This problem of mysteries-vs.-telepaths comes up again in “Murder at the Mansion,” and Morrison never really figures out an acceptable solution to it.)
An aside on Quentin: I’m not sure if Morrison is a gamer, and I know he likes names with Q,
but I’d always been struck by Quentin’s initials. “QQ” is old-text shorthand for crying, of course, but in online game chats it’s also a taunt — “less QQ, more pew-pew” — delivered to a whiner who is complaining about some unfairness (often wholly imagined) to the detriment of all.
See, my take on the Q is that by the early to mid 90s, Q was definitely being linked with Queer (e.g. Duke University Press’s Series Q was early 90s). And we’re dealing with reclaiming something that was weaponized against you – as the word “queer” is one of the greatest examples of reclaiming a slur. There’s definitely something VERY queer about Quentin Quire and it does feel like a potential engagement exactly with assimilationism vs. separatism that was really coming out of the wake of protease inhibitors allowing cis white gays a degree of safety post-genocide. Oddly, there’s basically a similar story done in Season 4 of Queer as Folk like two years later (it’s very ridiculous, but basically after a hate crime, a group of angry gays form The Pink Posse, go to straight areas, make out, and then beat up guys who say slurs at them).
This is probably my favorite part of the Morrison run. It’s almost a case where I actually don’t mind that Quitely didn’t do everything because I love the effect of when he’s on the book, it almost feels like the precursor to the Red highlights in upcoming titles during early Krakoa: really underlining how key this story is.
And yes, had the EXACT same though as Jay re: QQ’s line to Xavier and the Democrats….
And there’s no way Emma can be 27 purely from the logistics of “Headmistress at one of the most prestigious prep schools in teh country”
I assume Morrison wanted Emma younger to pair better with Scott. In Claremont’s original run, Emma was a parallel with Xavier. In Generation X, she pairs with Banshee. In New X-Men, she pairs with Scott. There’s a progression of de-aging that seems to occur with the people she’s paired with.
Is anyone else bothered that Claremont invented a mutant power-enhancing drug with Rave., then, one year later, Morrison invented Kick? I get that Morrison was doing their own thing (and was probably indifferent to current continuity unless it was directly relevant) and Claremont isn’t the best at sharing his toys, but it still seems like a missed opportunity to build on established continuity rather than creating parallel continuity so close in time.
Beyond the creative quirks of both Claremont and Morrison, I can understand why Morrison would want to keep Kick distinct from Rave, simply b/c of their plans to eventually reveal it to be a form of Sublime (or something)? Claremont might wish to use Rave without having a sentient bacteria behind the whole thing.
But you’re right, it’s still a missed opportunity. It’s not uncommon for there to be variant forms of the same street drug with different names or have last-year’s favorite drug be replaced quickly with the Hot New Thing. Perhaps Sublime saw the popularity of Rave and decided to modify it to become Kick. Even having a cop or Beast mention Rave while investigating the Kick inhalers would have helped world-building without hurting Morrison’s storyline at all; it could’ve been resolved in a single panel. An editor should’ve stepped in here.
On Emma’s age: “I’m only 27 …” is maybe Morrison’s least believable line of dialogue in New X-Men. Apart of the nonsense of running a prep school at that age, she wouldn’t even want to be 27; twentysomethings aren’t respected by society the way Emma wants to be respected.
She probably was de-aged for the Cyclops affair — assuming Morrison knew or cared about her older characterizations, which is a stretch — but even that is unnecessary. The story itself positions her as older and more sophisticated than Scott, and as other commenters have noted, the relationship problem the characters find themselves in is very much a mid-to-late-30s sort of crisis.
I would also take a ‘Wolverine Was Wrong’ shirt XD
I thought you two would find this funny
https://photos.app.goo.gl/TxSNYfkKmGNdUss69