• I've been posting pictures of my dog all day on Twitter in order to provide cuteness in the midst of today's everything. So here's one that will hopefully provide cuteness. Her name is Fern, she is eight months old, a wubbagirl, a Fernmonster, and a medium sized dog. Her hobbies include crunching ice, saying hello to everybody, and destroying anything that's made of paper.

  • Coming in late but I'd recommend AGAINST X-Men and the Mutant Metaphor by Joseph J. Darowski. My uni library had it & I used it for my thesis but a good 75% of the book is just recap of who the X-Men are/the main plotlines in Uncanny. There's a few useful charts at the end of the book where he tallies up gender/race statistics with regards to the X-Men but even then it's a little iffy. Plus, the book's just kind of badly written—it's super doctoral thesis and needed a few more rounds of editing before getting published.

    Seconding Ages of the X-Men, though! I've actually purchased that one and really loved it.

  • I do like how the filmmakers went "quick, what was the best part of Days of Future Past, obviously Quicksilver, MORE QUICKSILVER THEN." I was super pleased about that because man was he my fave. Nightcrawler's the MVP but Quicksilver was runner up (eeeeeeeeeeey).

    Magneto Jr. had 'dead child walking' the moment we see her on the screen. It was telegraphed sooooo hard that (and I know this sounds really bad!) I just didn't really feel sorry when she died, more of a sad and resigned 'pegged it.' Also, I'm pretty sure wooden arrows can't be shot with that level of force at that close a range.

    Also just plus one-ing all the love for the X-Kids, the teenagers were easily the best part of the movie, sorry Xavier/Magneto/Mystique, I'm ready to boot y'all out and hand the inevitable X-Men 4 over to Cyclops/Jean/Storm/Nightcrawler/Jubilee who really deserved to be in it more.

    But man...we gotta talk about the blue elephant in the room, y'all. Hilariously, the worst part of Apocalypse was Apocalypse himself. Wow was that a terrible role that relied a lot on narrative contrivance & not questioning his/the film's logic (what are all his powers? why does he need the pyramid to transfer powers in the first place? if you're going to pick Horsemen why do you pick a man who can control the earth's magnetism, a weather goddess, a deadly psychic assassin......and stabby flying bird man?) It also doesn't help that poor Oscar Isaac seems to have taken a page out of the Eddie Redmayne school of villainy where he's got two modes of communication: being quiet AND SUDDENLY SHOUTING.

  • This isn't her first video on X-Men. She's also done a Loose Canon episode on Nightcrawler (Loose Canon's her series where she explores different interpretations of a figure/event via different canons.)

    Links, yo: https://vimeo.com/140075618

  • This was less of a "new comics week" for me and more of a "catch up on comics because I'm finally done with moving week" but A-Force! Dazzler Thor! That is some super rad character design and I'm so happy.

  • /fistbump from across the internet. :D

  • Hulloooooo! Long time listener blah blah blah. I'm Kates, and I'm helping rep team academia in this joint. I've just finished my Master's thesis on Marvel comics (much to the confusion of my poor thesis committee), so if anybody has any sort of nitpicky academia questions, I'm your girl! I'm from the Deep South and have a tiny bit of an accent but very strong opinions about sweet tea. I write a blog where I talk too much about old Alpha Flight comics and occasionally delve into analyzing horror media (it's katiebeluga @ wordpress).

    My favorite X-Man is Dazzler, but mostly 1970s disco era perpetually broke Dazzler. If she's not wearing roller skates, I'm marginally less interested. My favorite X-Team is whatever bunch of spunky teenagers Marvel has at the moment, with a massive soft spot for the Hellions (they're thw WORST) and 2000s era New Mutants/New X-Men.

  • American South repreSENT! I'm from Jackson, MS over here.

  • I 100% believe that a good chunk of the hype for X-Men Apocalypse is that they're bringing back recognizeable mutants from the cartoons and the 2000s films (Nightcrawler, Storm, Cyclops) as well as the fact that they're bringing back the best part of Days of Future Past (Evan Peters as Quicksilver). I really doubt that there'd be this much hype if it was something like "and featuring Sophie Turner as...Cessily Kincaid!" or another mutant that people have much less nostalgic attachment to.

  • It's interesting that you should post this—a friend of mine recently asked how the first two X-Men movies held up, and the general consensus was "X2 holds up wonderfully, still watch X-Men because Stewart, McKellan and Romijin are having a blast."

    Another thing that's interesting is your take on First Class righting the franchise. At least in my neck of the woods, First Class got a LOT of mixed reviews, partly because of casting choices, character choices, and the film, reviews, & promotion kept on going back and forth on whether it was a clean reboot or a prequel (and also because it had absolutely nothing to do with the SERIES X-Men: First Class, which is really delightful and needs more love).