This thread's for all of the X-Men comics and spin-offs (X-Force, X-Factor, New Mutants etc.), whether they're decades old or brand new.
- Apart from the main Marvel Universe titles, Ultimate X-Men, X-Men 2099, X-Men "What If?" stories, crossovers, guest appearances in other books, Alternate Universe tales and things like Marvel's manga adaptations are all on-topic here.
- X-Men 'family' books are on-topic (as are their own crossovers, guest appearances etc.) - e.g. Wolverine, Deadpool, Ms. Marvel and Cable.
- Characters and comics that originated in X-Men and its related books but are no longer connected to the franchise are not on-topic, unless you're discussing historical connections and crossovers. If in doubt, check before you write a long post. If this isn't the right place, there's a more general Marvel Comics thread
which covers them.
Technically, Marvel's Infinity Comics (and their predecessors, Infinite Comics) are webcomics, not comic books, but it's fine to talk about their X-Men related stories here.
Discussions that are only about X-Men adaptations in other media (films, video games etc.) are off-topic, but discussing the differences between the adaptations and the original comics is fine - as long as spoilers for the adaptations are tagged.
Please follow the spoiler policy rules
- tag spoilers for the latest issues, for any previews or content leaks, and for off-topic comics. When including spoiler tags, try to write so that tropers can make an informed decision before viewing them (e.g. which series and issue will they spoil?).
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
Oh, bother.
The real issue with Colossus wasn't him being gay but him being made into a steroid abuser.
Also, homophobe creepy stalker Nightcrawler.
And Wolverine trying to kill Scott so he could get with Jean.
Disgusted, but not surprised
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
I honestly didn't know Mark Millar turned Kurt Wagner from open-minded, faithful and friendly Catholic to that. Goddamnit Millar.
Edited by KRider on Apr 23rd 2024 at 12:59:06 PM
he/him
Ever since his 2000AD days and things like Babe Race 2000 and Maniac 5, Millar's always been in a similar style to Morrison and Ellis, but with an instinct to go for shock value, view bigger and bloodier as better, and dig a little less deeply into the characters.
I'm not much of a fan.
Oh, bother.
Oh yeah. Kurt gave Peter shit for being gay. Logan otoh was more accepting though he made it clear he and Peter had Incompatible Orientation.
As for the "creepy stalker" thing, Kurt fell for Dazzler but she ended up falling for Angel instead. Kurt didn't handle that well.
The steroid abuser thing was because Ultimate Colossus unlike his 616 counterpart didn't get Super-Strength as part of the package. He needed to regular dope up on Mutant Growth Hormone or he wouldn't even be able to move in his steel form.
- Blob: Tastes like chicken
What's worse is that it was even foreshadowed in the Ultimates comic.
- Blob: Wasp! Gonna eat you up!
Wanted for example infamously ended with its protagonist fucking the reader in the ass.
Edited by M84 on Apr 23rd 2024 at 4:15:43 PM
Disgusted, but not surprised
Much like The Boys being much better received as a tv series that's mostly free of Garth Ennis' influence, Wanted the movie was much better than the comics in that regard especially Wesley's last scene w/c ended w/ him sniping the main bad guy and asking the audience "What the fuck have you done lately?"
Blob eating Wasp ultimately (no pun intended) happened in Ultimatum w/c then resulted in Hank Pym cannibalizing Blob as revenge. Though that one was written by a very depressed Jeph Loeb.
Edited by KRider on Apr 23rd 2024 at 1:17:58 AM
The Head of the Hydra
Everything wrong with Ultimate Nightcrawler can be summed up with this one page
"I just wanted to say after being in your head, seeing what you really are on the inside, I know you're a monster."
Whoopee taking the character whose entire thing is he has a beautiful soul in spite his monstrous appearance and make him just as ugly inside as he is outside.
"I am Alpharius. This is a lie."
Oh, bother.
With a few characters in Ultimate X-Men Millar was deliberately making them foils to their 616 counterparts. Hence a Nightcrawler who is ugly on the inside too instead of a Nightcrawler who is The Heart of the X-Men.
Same with Ultimate Wolverine. Ultimate Wolverine unlike 616 Wolverine lacked the honor and basic human decency 616 Wolverine maintains to avoid becoming a true monster. Hence the attempt to kill Scott. Though Ultimate Wolverine actually tried to redeem himself after that.
While part of it was obviously for shock value, it did also make readers realize that they couldn't take the characterization of Ultimate counterparts for granted. See also: Ultimate Reed Richards becoming The Maker.
Edited by M84 on Apr 23rd 2024 at 4:42:11 PM
Disgusted, but not surprised
You Give Me Fever
I always forget The Boys is a television show and wonder why it is getting so much praise.
I think with Ultimate Marvel people read the Spider-Man book and expected the rest to be like that(I think you could apply that statement to the entirety of Brian Michael Bendis's career, but I digress). By comparison, the large majority of it came off as bland or everyone is an asshole. I think X-Men got hit especially hard by both of those sentiments.
Disagree with me, but I think Ultimate kind of struggled with whether it wanted to be an "updated" counterpart to 616 for newer readers to jump on or an alternate universe where knowing 616 already was expected. I know it is possible to succeed on both fronts at once, but neither premise is really appealing to me to begin with. I prefer my alternate continuities to be more standalone unless it is an alternate universe story where counterparts interacting is the entire point.
That's why he wants you to have the money. Not so you can buy 14 Cadillacs but so you can help build up the wastes
𐀀𐀩𐀯𐀂𐀰𐀅𐀡𐀄
Granted Kurt tends to suffer from being a really good looking guy that happens to be blue most of the time.
Oh, bother.
Ultimate Spider-Man was a bit more consistent with 616's characterizations. Flash Thompson otoh stayed a jerk unlike his 616 counterpart who developed past being a bully. Oddly enough, it's Flash's friend and fellow bully Kong who gets the development into a better person.
One of the other cases where the Ultimate counterpart was a worse person than the 616 counterpart was Jean De Wolff who turned out to be a Dirty Cop working for the Kingpin and strongly implied to be his lover.
Ultimate Eddie Brock was also much more of an unrepentant asshole who quickly embraced being a cannibalistic monster as Venom. His introduction initially portrays him as a decent guy, but it's quickly shown why his college dorm roommate hates him.
Edited by M84 on Apr 23rd 2024 at 5:06:08 PM
Disgusted, but not surprised
The Head of the Hydra
Man I hate Ultimate Storm.
Like I have a friend who is a gigantic Ultimate Spidey man, so I discussed with her about the setting and she tells me other than Kitty like none of the women have any personality.
Which means Storm especially getting hit with the de-age stick has none of her defining traits like her wisdom, class, nobility. Plus her outfit sucks, it has no personality. Both her and Jean wear the same tight pants and small top look.
Oh, bother.
Ultimate Storm actually still managed to come across as one of the only X-Men with her head on straight. Which I guess says more about the rest of the X-Men.
Disgusted, but not surprised
On another forum I frequent, there's a user who hates X-Men: Evolution and its version of Storm in particular because they feel her being an adult while most of the popular X-Men character got an Age Lift meant she was stuck in boring den mother role.
I don't exactly agree with that perspective but considering how X-Men: Apocalypse's Storm was also much younger than the character is usually depicted as and was much more disliked, I wonder if Storm is one of those characters where you just can't depict her as a teenager because so much of what makes her interesting comes from her being an adult. It doesn't help that she was introduced as an adult, unlike Scott, Jean and Kitty who were introduced as teenagers.
Storm's always had this regal aura around her in the comics that gave her the feel that she's the personification of Mother Nature. Not even being Bound and Gagged while wearing skimpy clothes in X-Women was able to prevent her from having that aura especially from how Chris Claremont wrote that particular scene.
Oh, bother.
Like I said, she somehow still retained some of that even in Ultimate X-Men. But as I said before, that's probably because the rest of the X-Men were just that shitty.
Speaking of awful Ultimate counterparts, there's Ultimate Longshot and Ultimate Deadpool.
Ultimate Longshot was nothing like his heroic 616 counterpart, being a murderer who was also a mutant supremacist.
Ultimate Deadpool meanwhile was more akin to 616's Donald Pierce, right down to being a bigot who hated Mutants so much he turned himself into a cyborg and led a bunch of other cyborgs to kill Mutants.
Disgusted, but not surprised
he/him
Given that Ororo's father was American and the family only moved to Cairo from NYC after she was born, have we had an alternate version who grew up in America yet?
Given how much "nature goddess" has become part of her character, an Ororo who grew up in the heart of NYC would be interesting. And would be likely to join the X-Men along with the original American recruits, I guess?
At least Shattered Dimensions managed to re-rail Ultimate Deadpool's characterization back towards 616 Deadpool, even though it ultimately wasn't canon to Earth-1610 after all.
Edited by TrashJack on Apr 23rd 2024 at 8:28:03 AM
I'm fine with Storm being a bit of a den mother, being the Team Mom has been a trait of hers for a long time, but she definitely shouldn't be the only adult of the team, since that results in her being reduced to a "oh you guys" Women Are Wiser type who has no personality beyond telling everyone to quit having fun. She works best when she's the "you need to eat healthier, my dear" mom to Logan's "if you fall and die, I'm not cleaning it up" dad.
And yeah, the OG Ultimate universe had a massive problem with making almost everyone except Spider-Man and his cast into huge assholes with no real personality beyond being disgusting assholes. It's just one example of how Bendis' Ultimate Spider-Man was easily the strongest book of the setting; you would read that book, where almost everyone is given at least some degree of nuanced characterization, than go to something like Ultimates or Ultimate X-Men and see everyone reduced to one-note douchebags making cruel bigoted jokes. That's not to say Bendis didn't also sometimes hit characters with the Adaptational Villany stick - as shown by Deadpool mentioned above and Elektra - but even in those cases, they were generally written with more nuance and interesting personality than characters in other Ultimate books.
Oh, bother.
I mean, in Ultimate X-Men the rest of the female X-Men weren't that mature either. It's not a Women Are Wiser situation. Ultimate Jean Grey was pretty awful.
Edited by M84 on Apr 23rd 2024 at 10:38:48 PM
Disgusted, but not surprised
Surrounded by weirdoes
She decided to mind swap Wolverine with some random guy on a whim, after all.
Wake me up at your own risk.
The Head of the Hydra
She also gets mad at Peter for thinking about her naked, ignoring that she put the idea in his head and she's still reading his mind.
Like it never crosses her to just stop reading his mind if she doesn't want to see his thoughts.
"I am Alpharius. This is a lie."
To be frank, psychics in general tend to be huge fucking assholes or at the very least, very problematic in this franchise. Not just in Ultimate but 616 and a lot of other canons too. They constantly read peoples' minds without consent, brainwash them into doing harmful or humiliating things, torture or embarrass them with visions, and all sorts of other bullshit, and it's frequently treated like a joke.
Emma's being casually mind-raping people at the slightest provocation for decades despite ostensibly being reformed. Teen Jean notoriously invaded Teen Bobby's mind and forcibly outed him in a way that at best made her seem like a space alien who never interacted with humans before, at worst was read by a lot of people as her making him gay. Xavier's notorious for mind-wiping people in early issues, something later stories initially tried to downplay and later turned into a flaw of his. Let's not even start on people like Cassandra Nova and Shadow King. Psylocke and - hilariously enough - Fantomex are pretty much the only psychics who doesn't seem to mostly use their powers to fuck with other people in extremely violating and twisted ways.
I'd go as far as to say that psychics are probably responsible for 90% of the accusations anti-mutant folks make about mutants being dangerous. They certainly seem to have a much higher rate of abusing their powers than other kinds of mutants.
Unholy Spawn of Professor Xavier and Magneto
Came over here because someone mentioned the discussion about Millar on the thread for X-Men '97. Two things I wanted to post.
First off, while Millar had done a lot of edgelord shit during his time on Ultimate X-Men, Ultimate!Nightcrawler being a homophobe was during Robert Kirkman's run and Ultimate!Colossus being a steriod user was after him, so those aren't not on Millar.
Secondly, switching to Old Man Logan, where was it ever said that it was Klum who was the Mysterio that pulled that stunt? I mean, the costume
is a classic-colored version of what Beck wore
in his brief stint as an undead being during Civil War (2006).
Edited by Anicomicgeek on Apr 23rd 2024 at 3:32:11 PM
Troper Wall — DeviantArt
Okay so I just looked it up, and it would appear you are right and I was mistaken. The Marvel Wiki lists the Mysterio from Old Man Logan as being Quentin, not Francis.
Mark Millar's need to be edgy is no surprise considering he created Ultimate X-Men and he rewrote things there such as racelifting Magneto from a German Jewish Holocaust Survivor to a White Canadian Richard Spencer prototype, turning Blob into a cannibal whose hobby is catfishing people who he can eat and putting Wanda & Pietro into an incestuous relationship. He also made Colossus gay there thinking a muscular Manly Gay would be edgy, w/c it probably was back in the 2000s outside of Japan but thankfully people in general have progressed to see that being Manly Gay is not a thing to be afraid nor disgusted of. And it's also no surprise that prior to working for Marvel, he was a writer for British comic 2000 AD where he picked up the edginess.
Edited by KRider on Apr 23rd 2024 at 12:44:20 PM