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Topic: Will this give some ideas to Marvel? (Topic Closed Topic Closed) Post ReplyPost New Topic
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Larry Morris
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Posted: 21 June 2009 at 10:37pm | IP Logged | 1  

I don't ever recall super strength with him.  Might have been able to handle himself in a fight a bit, but not overpower anyone.  I don't think he feeds off mutant powers either.  Perhaps Claremont is augmenting his powers.

Last I heard he was dead.  Got killed in one of the Magneto limited series.  I had seen enough about the first issue to know that he caused Cyclops' powers to go out of control. Didn't know he was taking on the entire team, though.

I guess it kind of makes sense him being the villain.
He had escaped at the end of X Men 3 and I think was the real villain of the story.  Moreso than Magneto.
He was manipulating Magneto.

Just saw Keith's post.  Reads like his powers are being augmented. 

Edited by Larry Morris on 21 June 2009 at 10:38pm
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Arc Carlton
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Posted: 21 June 2009 at 10:50pm | IP Logged | 2  

Good old Fabian Cortez. Frankly I never thought he was that powerful.
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Victor Rodgers
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Posted: 21 June 2009 at 11:00pm | IP Logged | 3  

Maybe this was what he intended the character to be all along.
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Rick Whiting
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Posted: 21 June 2009 at 11:40pm | IP Logged | 4  

Arc, you missed my point. It's not about whether or not Kitty was of legal age or in her twenties during Wheedon's run on the book (I think that she was 18 or 19 during Xtreme X-Men and the Mekanix mini series), it's about writers wanting to show teenage (or former teenage) heroes having sex. It's both pathetic and sad.

I'm also sick and tired of writers rapidly aging teenage characters so that they can write more "adult" stories with them in it.

Edited by Rick Whiting on 21 June 2009 at 11:44pm
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Thanos Kollias
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Posted: 22 June 2009 at 12:47am | IP Logged | 5  

To Claremont's defense, Wolverine DOES have an excuse to be familiar with the "Slim" nickname, which is continuity based and easily explainable, I think.
While under Mesmero's mind control (Uncanny X-Men #111, JB's 3rd issue), Scott was called "Slim Summers". We can easily assume that either Wolverine just kept calling him that from time to time, based on this adventure, or he asked him about it while in Savage Land or on the Japanese ship or in Japan or wherever and found out the true origin.
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Thanos Kollias
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Posted: 22 June 2009 at 1:01am | IP Logged | 6  

Rick, your comment doesn't make much sense. If a character is no longer a teenager, I really don't see a problem with him/her having sex in a comic book (although I prefer it to be implied in a mainstream superhero book).
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John Byrne
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Posted: 22 June 2009 at 4:44am | IP Logged | 7  

I'm also sick and tired of writers rapidly aging teenage characters so that they can write more "adult" stories with them in it.

••

I was eleven years old when I picked up my first Marvel comic, FANTASTIC FOUR 5. I had been reading mostly DC books up to that point, and at DC anyone close to my age was likely to be a "kid partner". The heroes were all grownups, like Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, Flash. They had real, grownup jobs (or lots and lots of money!), and they wore suits and ties. They were, basically, the people I would like to be when I grew up.

Then along came Marvel, and there was Johnny Storm, who was only a handful of years older than me, yet who was clearly not a "kid partner". Sue, his big sister, would treat him like a kid until the day they died, of course, but despite that he was a viable member of the team, on equal footing with Reed, Ben and Sue. And not long after that there came Spider-Man, who was (due to the passing of the years) even closer to my age than Johnny had been. And then came the X-Men, who were all close to my age.

Marvel had its fair share of grownups too, obviously. Reed, Ben, Sue, Tony Stark, Don Blake, Bruce Banner -- but there were a lot more "kids" in lead roles than in the DC titles. And there was something else: in those books with young leads, the villains were always grownups. Whether it was deliberate or not, Stan, Jack, Steve and the rest created the perfect reflection of a teenager's mindset. The teens were the heroes of their own lives, and the grownups were the ones who stood always in the way of their hopes and dreams. There was something subconsciously satisfying about watching Spider-Man beat the snot out of someone twice or three times his age! The villains, even while they were busy being villainous, represented "The Establishment".

Stan and the gang forgot this pretty quick, unfortunately. The characters aged in something very close to real time for the first few years of their existence, and it wasn't long before the only thing that made them "teenagers" was that the writing occasionally said they were. But there is little doubt in my mind that the huge, explosive success of early Marvel was due to this -- to the audience being able to find "themselves" in the books, as they really could not in any other comics of the time.

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Robert Walsh
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Posted: 22 June 2009 at 4:48am | IP Logged | 8  

Comic book aging seems to be a lot like soap opera aging. Kids can turn into adults over-night and it's all down to the stories the writers want to tell with the characters.

I still remember watching Angel when he had a son and I was waiting for the kid to magically age into a teenager or adult. It took about half a season.  Same as it ever was.

Another good one is babies born on sit-coms. The following season they will always be played by a five year old.


Edited by Robert Walsh on 22 June 2009 at 4:58am
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Wallace Sellars
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Posted: 22 June 2009 at 5:50am | IP Logged | 9  

Aging characters... It's one of the few things I disliked about AMAZING SPIDER-GIRL.  (I don't mean older Peter Parker, Mary Jane and their contemporaries since the book was sort of an extended What If...? series.)
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John Byrne
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Posted: 22 June 2009 at 7:07am | IP Logged | 10  

Aging characters is a conceit of fairly recent origin. In the past, comic characters who aged in real time were a noticeable exception to the common rule. GASOLINE ALLEY springs to mind.

Sometimes the aging process was very odd. Cookie and Alexander Bumstead grew to teens and young adults, while Alexander's pal Elmo remained the kid who annoyed Dagwood. Junior Tracy grew to an adult, while those around him seemed largely unaffected -- until the 50th Anniversary of the strip gave us, most oddly, the 50th birthday of the title character!

In comics, decades passed with no noticeable aging. Dick Grayson stayed permanently 10 or 12 years old, until the editors decided they wanted to restore Batman to his 'roots', at which point he jumped to college age. Johnny Storm and Peter Parker aged until Stan noticed this was not a good idea, and then the brakes went on. (This did not stop a later writer showing Johnny visiting one of his old girlfriends only to find her married with half a dozen kids!)

In the end it comes down to the general selfishness which came to infect fandom over the past few decades, and which created the pool from which sprang most of the people currently producing the books. They had grown up, gotten married, gotten mortgages -- why shouldn't the characters? (Somewhere along the way, Stan Lee, who was writing the Spider-Man newspaper strip mostly as a soap opera with occasional superheroics, decided it would better serve the strip if Peter and Mary Jane got married. Marvel could have ignored this, but instead they chose to make a stunt out of it -- a stunt that fell completely flat. Hey, look! Spider-Man is getting married! To which civilians -- at whom the stunt was aimed -- responded "Huh? You mean he isn't already? Who cares?")

Aging is never a good idea. Look again at GASOLINE ALLEY. Uncle Walt is surprisingly spry for a man over 100 years old!

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Vinny Valenti
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Posted: 22 June 2009 at 7:35am | IP Logged | 11  

 JB wrote:
If there is any writer who has earned his name above the title, actually or metaphorically, it has to be Chris on any X-title.

I would have to agree with this....but that makes me beside myself at the same time. I have given Claremont's "returns" to the X-books a chance every time, only to find that he is not being consistent with characters' personalities that he was largely responsible for setting forth in the first place. It's "his" X-Men, so it's hard to say that he's "wrong", but still some of the ways he's written these characters in the past decade just do not ring "true" to me. The best example is his (over)use of the soap opera element. That was always a staple of his writing, and in the past I found it to be mostly effective. But lately he was just tossing characters together romantically seemingly with no reason whatsoever.

The worst example is the whole Jean/Logan thing. If it was said that during her time as Phoenix (in whatever version of that continuity), I could buy it as an aspect of her corruption. But he made her (retroactively) attracted to him the very first night they met, thanks to the new story in Classic X-Men#1. That just doesn't sound like the real Jean to me. I would have liked to check out this latest return, as I'm a fan of Tom Grummett, but seeing Jean fantasize about Logan in the very first page lost me right there.

Can a fan say that a writer is getting the characters wrong when they were largely his characters in the first place?

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John Byrne
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Posted: 22 June 2009 at 7:40am | IP Logged | 12  

Can a fan say that a writer is getting the characters wrong when they were largely his characters in the first place?

••

Sure. Take NEXT MEN, which are indisputably my characters (whereas it must be noted that, especially with the X-Men, Chris has to share). If and when JBNM returns, if I portray Jack as a swinging playboy and Tony as an indecisive klutz, I would expect readers to respond with "Huh? What happened?" And if there is no reasonable answer forthcoming -- if there is no in context reason for their dramatic shifts in personality -- then you could most definitely tell me I am getting them wrong!

Here's a thing about Chris that used to make me crazy when we were working together: he is in no way a slave to continuity, not even his own. In another thread I mentioned how important scenes were sometimes lost, because Chris had already done them in his head, so when he came to script the pages he wrote them as something else. I grew to dread the phrase "That's how I felt when I wrote it." It's the same thing with characterization. He will write the characters as suits his stories, not the stories as suits the characters.

And, like I said, given that this is the guy who piloted the X-Books to unprecedented heights, it's hard to argue that it doesn't work for him!

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