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In which friends don’t let friends drink sparkling wine at the Hellfire Club; Cyclops is a Silent Hill protagonist; Fantomex is a cool dude; John Sublime has his grubby little fingers in everything; and three men do a lot of things to avoid going to therapy.
X-PLAINED:
- What happened to the World
- Weapon XVI
- New X-Men #142-145
- Fantomex (more) (again)
- The Weapon Plus program
- A large number of things men will do instead of going to therapy
- How to murder a nice, romantic mood
- The Hellfire Club, the rest of the time
- Jake Danials Whisky
- A drinking contest
- The Mysteries of Harris Burdick
- The World
- Weapon XV
- A series of B&Es
- Advanced Idea Mechanics (A.I.M.)
- Car cops
- Weapon XV’s feelings
- Weapon Plus’s secret space headquarters
- Education at the Xavier School
- Gender-swapped superheroes and heirs to superheroes
NEXT EPISODE: Magneto, unmasked!
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Australian magpies have their babies in the spring, and swoop from behind to protect them, even though most people completely ignore them. Though I remember them swooping my dog, who would leap and try to bite them in return. Good times.
It’s rare that they actually peck people, but it’s been known to happen sometimes. I’ve heard that people in Canberra stick fake eyes on their bike helmets so the magpies don’t know which direction to attack from.
I remember back when IO9 was good. One article suggested that Psylocke’s exercise class would look like the video to Call On Me by Eric Prydz. I miss that site. Nowhere else I’ve found hits a good mix of nerd news with some actual science.
I don’t think I’ve ever like Bachalo’s stuff more than this. I was not a huge fan of his Generation X work — I think he’s brilliant, but his style and out-of-panel doodles kept distracting me. But it works here, as The World is supposed to look crazy; it’s a different style, of course, but I was reminded of Sienkiewicz’s Paris/Beirut mindscapes in New Mutants #27. (I also liked Bacholo’s Generation Next issues, probably for the same reason.) And the drinking scenes are great.
I think the story goes off the rails a bit when it leaves The World — the Super-Sentinels idea seems to belong in a different book, and it’s jettisoned so quickly that I suspect Morrison agreed.. I wonder if they had scribbled the idea down early on in the run, or were so in love with the “faux French” joke, and, realizing they were running out of story, just shoehorned it in.
One thing I hope you get to next episode: Explaining how Sublime’s base is also Asteroid M, and whose grand plan it was to maneuver the X-Men to it. The upcoming revelation by Wolverine and Jean is quickly eclipsed by the reveal of Xorn/Magneto, and things are happening so fast afterward that I don’t think it’s ever explained.
You described Fantomex as cis and my brain bumped against that. I kind of feel like Fantomex’s gender, like everything else about him, is sci-fi weirdness. He seems to identify as male but his nervous system seems to identify as female. I don’t know if that counts as genderqueer in a human sense, but it feels like it could be meaningful, especially given that he was created by a genderqueer author.