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I have to say that the X Men franchise has been going on for decades. Maybe not as many as the Superman franchise has, but it still has quite a number to it.
One thing I am certain of is that the franchise seems to be subverting Status Quo Is God in recent years. Magneto and Professor Xavier seem to be fading into the background, with Cyclops and Wolverine taking their places. A lot of villains associated to the X-Men have been killed off and have actually stayed dead so far.
All this gives me the general impression that the franchise is trying to reinvent itself. Do you think that's what's going on here?
Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 29th 2023 at 10:02:23 AM
I'm talking about here. I know elsewhere there's more outward praise.
Again, I like the plots and the ideas. I just wished it had stronger character focus to back it up.
Can you imagine how much more impactful all those death scenes in Ho X#4 would be if we had another issue or two to flesh out the characters (not the humans, the actual main characters,) beforehand?
Edited by kkhohoho on Sep 8th 2019 at 1:53:40 PM
Not as angry as the name would suggest.
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It was impactful. In part because of how it happened and the framing behind it.
Except none of that matters if the characters aren't fleshed out enough to give a damn. I like having a good plot as much as anyone, but especially in something like X-Men, the characters are what are most important. And so far, that's what Hickman's been least concerned with.
Not as angry as the name would suggest.
Honestly, I still think it works really well without character drama, and while others have expressed opinions to the contrary, I do think that superhero comics CAN rely on previous characterization when necessary. This isn’t a reboot, after all.
Hickman clearly has a lot he wants to do, so I don’t blame him if he doesn’t want to spin his wheels on stuff that’s already been done before.
Oh God! Natural light!
It’s not like these are new characters Hickman had to introduce. We’ve had the last few decades to get pretty well acquainted with Cyclops, Jean Grey, Wolverine, and Nightcrawler. I don’t think HOXPOX is any worse off for not telling me what romantic drama the X-Men are up to now that they all live on Krakoa, or for not diving into, I don’t know, how Wolverine feels about being alive again. The story is cool and interesting as it is. It’s tight. No fat.
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But what if someone hasn't been acquainted with them? What if they haven't read an X-Men comics in years, or if they've never read X-Men comics and they felt like jumping on the bandwagon? Are you really going to tell them to read decades of X-Men comics just to get acquainted with the cast?
Not as angry as the name would suggest.
Decades, no, but I do think that requiring a series introduce new readers to all the characters can be something of an albatross around its neck, particularly when Hickman clearly had a lot he wants to do.
Oh God! Natural light!
If this is your first story in about the X-Men, though, I think I would recommend other stories first.
Exactly. It’s assumed that you know the bare necessities about say, Wolverine or Cyclops. You don’t need to know that Logan and Scott were both recently dead or replaced by versions of themselves at different ages. Like, I didn’t know jack about Monet, but it didn’t affect my enjoyment of the story. If this was going to be a story about A DEEP DIVE INTO THE EMOTIONAL TURMOIL OF SCOTT SUMMERS then maybe I’d want the earlier issues to have explained all of that, but it’s fine that they don’t because this isn’t a story about Cyclops’s inner life. It’s a story about mutants, humans, and machines fighting for dominance and I’m okay with that.
Yeah, I think that's why it's attracting a lot of new readers, too. I went to my local comic book store yesterday and the clerk there said that they've had a lot of people asking about the book, people who told them that they hadn't read comics in years.
They also said that they usually sell out of HOX/POX the day they come out, which is kind of wild. I think the first issues are already on their third printings.
(It helps that HOX/POX is acting like a weekly series, so you only have to wait a week before either getting answers or getting another part of the story. If this had been monthly, I'm not sure there would be the same enthusiasm.)
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Probably because the weekly release lends itself to water cooler talk and speculation. Much like how you and your friends would talk about last night's episode of Westworld or Lost.
@JWR is it shown on panel that Mystique planted a flower? I see silhouettes of plants behind Omega Sentinel and Dr. Gregor; is that the evidence?
And yeah, I've been talking about this to friends who've only rarely read X-Men. And random people are telling me on various forums.
Edited by flawlessvoid on Sep 9th 2019 at 6:51:01 AM
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Yep. Which leads me to think that Magneto and Xavier (among others) are about to pay ORCHIS a less than cordial visit .
Edited by JWR on Sep 9th 2019 at 5:24:46 AM
I wonder how much of the excitement has to do with how the MCU is finally allowed to have mutants after being burnt off by who knows how many subpar Fox movies...
Admittedly, I myself haven't seriously read any X-Books until HOX/POX because there's that nagging feeling of "eh, everyone keeps saying it's the same thing again and again." Ask me about Inhumans vs. X-Men and I'll tell you point blank "nah man, I was crazy rooting for the mutants." I have read a lot of Spider-Man/Deadpool, but I doubt that counts since Wade is apparently not a true mutant (*grumble grumble grumble*).
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I mean, I don't think it's by coincidence that the X-Men have felt rudderless and samey for most of the 2010s when Disney and Fox were disputing the rights. Nor is it a coincidence that once Marvel had secured the rights to the X-Men, they brought back Jonathan Hickman to lay a proper foundation and roadmap for them.
The problem with that theory is that Marvel has been putting big name writers on the X-Men for years — Jason Aaron, Brian Michael Bendis, Jeff Lemire, etc — in the hopes that they could revitalize the X-Men, but it hasn't really worked. Now, there could be plenty of other factors (editorial mandating that the X-Men stay in their own corner of the Marvel Universe, mandating a war with the Inhumans, etc), but you can't say that Marvel hasn't been trying to revitalize the X-Men, just that it hasn't been working until now.
Hell, when did the X-Men first start becoming rudderless? After Whedon's Astonishing X-Men? After Decimation? Because that was all either before the MCU was a thing or when the MCU was just starting out.
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Hard to pinpoint where it started, but Marvel's attempt to make the Inhumans diet X-Men was a big indicator. This isn't to say that there was nothing good in between Astonishing X-Men and now, but rather that the X-Men took a backseat in terms of prominence.
Shoveling the Inhumans in our faces put me off X-Men for a long while.
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Interesting that one of the major things they did after that was basically gassing mutants, isn't it? Man, they didn't even bother in being subtle.
Wake me up at your own risk.
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I hope that we put a LONG moratorium on events involving the extinction of mutants.
I mean, that’s kinda the stuff that’s being done in HOXPOX, but it’s cool so I don’t care. But yeah, once HOXPOX is over and the titles are relaunched, I hope other avenues get explored.
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No, I mean I hope we don't enter another period where the only time that the X-Men are only making headlines for being wiped out for a fourth time in a row.
Mixed? I've been hearing almost nothing but praise for this story thus far.