This is a really good point that I should have made in my original post, thank you! I mean, for me this is actually the part that makes me throw my hands up in frustration because it’s like… after all that they not only insert a Deus ex Machina right at the end, they insert a Deus ex Machina that removes all responsibility from Barry’s hands in a story about him making a big mistake. I think it would have actually been a lot more palatable without her presence, so it was p. shortsighted of me to overlook mentioning it in my rant.
Let's Get X-TREME
Edgy mid-twenties comics blogger Jennifer Giesbrecht here to answer every question you've ever had about comics and also all the ones you didn't. PERSONAL BLOG
you can also find this blog on wordpress TAGS: ASKS / OPINIONS / REVIEWS / RECS / OVERVIEWS / DC / MARVEL teeth in a mouth
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“We’re not like anyone… we’re better.”
I was having a difficult time articulating concisely what exactly puts me off about DC’s new “status quo” flagship romance, so I am sincerely grateful to Geoff Johns for doing my work for me and putting the reason it sucks right there in the script.
The idea that Wonder Woman and Superman deserve to be together because they are simply too powerful for anyone else to handle or understand has been a consistent obsession of DC writers and artists for decades now, but it’s not an obsession that has ever been shared by their audience.
Fan-mounted objections on Wonder Woman’s behalf are pretty easy to understand: it’s clear why turning the company’s headlining female hero into Superman’s new love interest is a really shitty thing to do. The history of Wonder Woman’s sexuality is fairly complex and riddled with a minefield of obvious insecurities on the part of male writers who haven’t the faintest clue how to approach a powerful woman’s sexual expression, turning Diana of Themyscira into what might be history’s most sexless sex-icon. This is one of the worst unnecessary attempts yet to give her a ~rich romantic life~ in ~Man’s World~, and I applaud the fandom as a whole for pointing out how sexist and asinine this whole bullshit plot twist is.
But while the implications on Superman’s end might not be as personally insulting, I sure do find them a lot more disquieting. Let’s break this down:
It’s telling that virtually all adaptations of the Superman mythos to achieve any level of pop-cultural relevance - Lois & Clark, Smallville, the DCAU cartoon, and especially the Donner films - have practically turned (if not Lois and Clark specifically) on the audience’s investment in Superman’s romantic liaison with a human woman.
Why is this?
Okay, look, I’m not gonna dress this one up folks: it’s because without that human connection, Superman is a fucking monster.
Lois Lane is notthere to keep Superman tethered to humanity; she’s there as his proof. The decision to make the Clark Kent persona the character’s “true personality” in the late 1980’s was not an arbitrary one; it was reflective of the changing values of the general comic audience. Modern readers do not reminisce about Golden and Silver age Superman as a “purer” hero - they view him as a dick. The view him as a dick because a strange and alien Nietzchian wet dream just doesn’t play with today’s readership, a fact that DC apparently realizes since their current attempts to replicate Supe’s original incarnation has landed him firmly in the territory of tiresome, sub-Smallville-esque boy angst.
I see a lot of “but what’s so special about Lois Lane???” coupled with some “why should she get to bang the most powerful man in the world???” Which, uh?
First of all, Lois Lane is a great character. She’s also one of the first designated love interests who’s primary attractive quality was her professionalism and intellect (even if that’s often been tangled up with a healthy dose of “working women are such shrews!”).
But second of all… why does she have to be special? Why does she have to be anything more than a beautiful, intelligent woman with a fascinating personality and an awesome job who Superman happened to fall in love with? Why does she even have to be any of those things, let alone an idealized combination of all of them? Why do we have to justify her involvement with Superman as if his dick is a sacred gift that cannot be given to just any lowly, unworthy woman?
Because that’s the most troubling thing about DC’s new “status quo” - this isn’t about the meeting of two equals, it’s about Superman being too alien, too different, too special and too good to be with a human. It’s about him being an inherently elevated outsider; a semi-persecuted God-boy who cannot be understood by humanity despite the fact that he was raised in fucking Kansas. It’s about Diana being judged “worthy” by a panel of male writers.
So while I am disgusted by the artificial fragility Johns has grafted on to Wondy in this story-line I’m a little more unnerved by the creepy “lonely God” power fantasy worming its way back into the core Superman books. Superman’s inexplicable and frankly terrifying power-set works because it’s balanced by his unerring humanity. If we have to wonder what connects him to humanity at all beyond a sense of patronizing responsibility, it stops being a Superhero narrative and turns into something else entirely.
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Q: Can you explain your 'ask' tag, please?
A:
It’s a reference to a quote from a famous article on Progressive Boink: The 40 Worst Rob Liefeld Drawings, wrt to the way the man draws clenched jaws -
“How many teeth are in a mouth? Like a billion, right? I’ll just draw a billion, all the same size and shape.”
Since the name of my blog is “Let’s Get X-TREME”, I thought it was only fair to pay tribute to the most X-TREME guy out there.
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Let’s Get X-TREME: A Quick Note About Barry Allen and the New DCU
Now here is a thing that comes up a lot in discussion in my day to day life. (thanks to my good buddy Joe for being the first to point this out to me).
Let’s talk about the plot of Flashpoint - the “ambitious” AU crossover event that closed the book on the old DCU and rewrote the universe…
Barry didn’t make any of the changes, though. His Really Bad Decision was saving his mother, and then he fixed it. It was Pandora who decided that while he was fixing the timeline she was going to fuck with it. He just ran and looked confused.
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A Quick Note About Barry Allen and the New DCU
Now here is a thing that comes up a lot in discussion in my day to day life. (thanks to my good buddy Joe for being the first to point this out to me).
Let’s talk about the plot of Flashpoint - the “ambitious” AU crossover event that closed the book on the old DCU and rewrote the universe so that the New!52 could be rolled out. It goes a little something like this: Barry Allen wakes up in a drastically different universe than the one he remembers going to sleep in. The heroes are different, the history is different. There is no Superman, Batman isn’t Bruce Wayne and the European Continent has been savaged in an Amazonian-on-Atlantean conflict I still don’t quite understand. The lynchpin of this change?
Yes, the one little burp in time that changed it all was Barry Allen going back in time to save his mother’s life. Barry then has to save the universe he unraveled by piecing it back together the best he can remember it. Oh yeah, and merging and rewriting several timelines for “the greater good” no big, no big.
Let’s ignore the shades of One More Day here. Let’s put aside the ridiculous assertion that the entire reality of the DCU hinges on the life of a single elderly woman who has never been relevant to the lore before this story. Let’s ignore the fact that other DC characters muck around with time inexpertly all over the place (including, uh, Wally West - you know, that other Flash) and have never caused a disastrous hard reboot the way Barry did here.
I want to talk about where I’ve heard this story before:
As you may or may not know, Green Lantern Golden Boy Hal Jordan spent a not-so-brief stint as a super-villain for basically, uh, the entire duration of the 1990’s. He did some pretty awful things during this time, such as: absorbing the Central Battery thereby destroying the Green Lantern Corps and implicitly murdering countless Lanterns who were left stranded in space with nothing to protect them. This also cleared the way for Kyle Rayner to take up the Green Lantern mantle, truly the most unforgivable of Hal’s crimes.
The centerpiece of Hal’s reign as Parallax is the oft overloooked 1994 crossover event Zero Hour: Crisis in Time. Zero Hour was DC’s attempt at a soft reset of the universe (much like the 2006 Infinite Crisis) so that they could fix perceived continuity snares and introduce some new elements to the verse without resorting to a full universe reboot. Needless to say, continuity circa 1994 was just fine and Zero Hour’s changes were quickly forgotten, retconned or ignored by writers and editors alike.
Anyway, the story for Zero Hour goes like this: Hal Jordan - still crazed with grief and dizzy with power after the destruction of his hometown by an evil cyborg Superman clone (this makes more sense in context I promise) - decides that the best solution to his problems and everyone else’s is to muck around in time and rewrite reality so that the universe is a kinder, gentler place. This is generally regarded as being a bad move by basically everyone ever, and he gets as far as actually erasing continuity before he’s stopped. By… an arrow…
(congrats Ollie, this is the only time you will ever be the big hero of a universe ending crossover event. and you didn’t even get to use a trick arrow!!)
I’m not being entirely obstinate here. I know that these two stories are not perfect mirrors of each other, but the parallels are shocking and impossible to ignore once you spot them. And I’m not even saying that this is a bad plot to use if you want to reboot your mangled continuity, because it’s not.
Here’s where things get tricky:
See, while what Barry did is framed as fairly irresponsible by the narrative of Flashpoint, the guy still comes out of it smelling like roses. I mean, of course he does. DC’s general policy on Barry Allen has been that he shits gold and sweats banana sundaes for years now. That Barry ends up looking okay getting away with something that Hal spent a full decade attempting to atone for isn’t actually the frustrating part here. The frustrating part is that the New 52 is entirely built on a premise that we have already been told is a really bad idea.
I mean, it’s no wonder that fans are still acting like there’s another shoe being held tantalizingly aloft just out of their sight. They are still anxiously and with tentative hope expecting it to drop. I have a friend who thinks it would be the best plot twist if when Wally finally shows up in the new continuity, it’s to tell Barry that he did wrong and they have to fix it. I’ve seen suspicions on countless weblogs and forums that the ~*~mysterious waif~*~ Pandora is going to ultimately reveal the same thing. I’ve had conversations in the comic shops with strangers (multiple strangers!!!) about how “yeah, ha ha. Once we hit week 52, man. When they release all those double issue specials it’ll reveal that this was just an elaborate event all along”.
Not that I subscribe to any of these theories. I’m just trying to illustrate a point here that it’s still kind of hard to buy into this universe rewrite, and it’s not just because Batman’s timeline makes no sense. Flashpoint resolved with a solution that is incredibly difficult to read as “positive” even nearly a year later.
And that’s why I kind of think Barry Allen is a dick.
(Although I do admit that it’s fun examining Barry’s very intimate relationship with the New 52’s reset button from a Watsonian perspective. I mean, of course Barry wouldn’t remember Hal and Oliver as friends. It’s downright spiteful of him, but believable. The second and third generation team rosters also seem to suggest that he had a really hard time keeping everyone’s two-to-five teen sidekicks straight (darn kids get off my lawn). It begins to get a bit troubling, however, when you realize that he remembered most of the top tier female heroes in substantially less powerful positions than they were in the old DCU. And he remembered his own nephew right out of existence!)
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You are your own person, Laura. Go. Make your life. But know that you are not alone.
I love Laura Kinney and her one facial expression.
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RIP legendary comic artist Joe Kubert (September 18, 1926 - August 12 2012)
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Bella Donna is Gambit’s ex-wife, a character who has been written uncharitably throughout the years as well as being direly over-used. There were maybe two or three legitimate stories to milk out of her and Gambit’s past together, but it’s like you can’t have a Gambit solo story without her being dragged into it and re-treading ~old scars~ that we really don’t want or need to do anything new about. She’s never really grown out of being a tertiary character attached to his background either, which yeah, makes her a pretty obnoxious plot tumour at times.
She also represents the New Orleans Thieves/Assassin’s Guild in general which, while not really that bad as a fixture of Gambit’s past, is also the only fucking thing his solo series ever delve into. Gambit’s done a lot of shit and made a lot of enemies. The guy worked for Sinister for years and was a semi-active participant in one of the worst crimes in mutant history and none of this is ever touched on. Fans of the character are just sick of everything to do with the Thieves Guild in general. It’s done, dead. Buried in the water.
In fact, I went and looked up the solicit after I saw this ask and yes, the promise of “no Bella Donna” actually has me passively considering checking this series out. :O
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OKAY TUMBLR ATE MY ORIGINAL AND FAR MORE COMPREHENSIVE VERSION OF THIS POST, SO IMMA BREAK THIS DOWN SHORT AND SWEET:
- if I were given the chance to do this in old continuity, I would have just made her “”original”” backstory from ‘Who is Donna Troy’ canon (although I might have taken out the child racketeering ring part). She would have been an orphan from a rough background who Wonder Woman took under her wing. Since it’s in canon and was really important for a few years so I guess we can’t get rid of it, I would have kept her multi-verse merged memories but… made them just that. Memories, rather than her being a straight up amalgamation of all 52 Donna Troys (because that was stupid). She would have been a blip sort of like Power Girl, but in a very limited capacity. In the hands of a capable writer, a young superhero experiencing memories of lives that are clearly hers but that she’s never lived could be a pretty powerful thing.
- If I were given this chance within the New 52? I’d probably go a similar route wrt to taking a page from ‘Who is Donna Troy’. She’s be a troubled but tough orphan, one of the first people Diana bonds with in the “World of Men”. She develops an interest in Amazonian combat and wants to be taught. Wondy is wary and skeptical of teaching a young girl how to use a sword, but Donna repeatedly proves herself and additionally proves herself to be someone who is not just worthy, but might actually benefit from the experience. It might even be years before she dons the Wonder Girl costume in the pages of the comic, but I’d make her an indispensable member of the supporting cast.
Unfortunately, it seems like Donna’s been passed over in the new continuity in favour of Cassandra, just like poor Wally was for the sake of Bart.
Why can’t we just have all the Teen Titans, DC? Why can’t we just have them all?
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THE SIX STUPIDEST THINGS IN X-MEN THAT MY GENERATION UNQUESTIONINGLY ACCEPTS Pt. 1
Re-reading the classic X-Men stories of my youth now that I’m all grown is a strange experience, let me tell you. The mythos looked so epic, so mysterious, so cool back in the halcyon days of fourth grade. Now it just looks like a convoluted, editor-driven series of story-telling mishaps that the X-Books are only now just recovering from and even then it’s baby steps, my friends. The endless waltz of teeny, tiny one-steps forward and back.
The way I’ve coped with my shattered nostalgia is by making a list of things that probably looked like a good idea when they were written, but just seem stupid now.
It was difficult narrowing this list down to six, but I decided to only touch on the popular characters otherwise I’d be writing this list until the day I died.
6. BTW Psylocke is a Ninja Now
Okay, this one is obvious and has long been the subject of much ire within the fan community so I’m not going to waste your time treading the old ground of what a dumb and frankly problematic-on-an-axis-of-race-issues move taking Psylocke’s brain and sticking it in an Asian Ninja was. Other people have done so more eloquently and with less apathy for the character than I could muster. I want to talk about what a bad decision this was just from the standpoint of good writing. I mean - don’t get me wrong. Psylocke sucked and probably needed the dramatic adjustment. Just reading through the character’s wiki page is almost a comedy of errors; a virtually endless slog of character re-inventions that just. Didn’t. Stick. Plucking Betsy out of her body and sticking her in a new one didn’t “”“”work”“”” because it was a good idea; it “”“”worked”“”” (as in “it made the image of the character popular among fans) because they had created an entirely new character and that freed them, mercifully, from the mess they’d made of Betsy trying to get fans to at least pretend to be enthusiastic about her. Yes, Revanche - the tragic, telekenitic ninja with the cool psi-blades and the sketchy past - probably sounded like an amazing character at the time. Pity we couldn’t have had her on the team instead.
See, the problem with Psylocke is that I can’t tell you a thing about her personality. I cannot think of a few concise buzzwords to sum her up on any level beyond the most superficial and this is a problem that the brain-switch subplot only magnified. If you’re going to dramatically change a character that isn’t working, the best way to do it is to find something interesting pre-built into the concept and tweak it. I’ll give you an example:
Jamie Madrox, the Multiple Man. What does he do? Well, he’s a guy who makes more of the same guy. Woo hoo. This was not a character that X-writers would touch with a ten foot pole except as background fodder until Peter David was handed X-Factor and a wrapped gift-basket of z-grade nobodies. Here is the tweak that made Jamie interesting: how about instead of just making copies of himself, he makes full genetic duplicates with their own minds and motivations. From this simple re-imagining of a character’s powers spirals out a whole mess of psychological depths and philosophical questions and good story telling opportunities. From this simple re-imagining you’ve now got a character who - despite remaining incredibly obscure - can hold down his own monthly team book. He can hold it down for six years.
So, that Psylocke: what did she have going for her in the first place?
I mean, besides being a telepathic-precog-secret agent-legacy-hero-blinded-and-forced-into-an-unwitting-alliance-with-a-supervilla-
Hold up there, I see some keywords popping out at me in this mess already!
Did you say that she was, for a time, a blind precog. Woah, that’s a load of Oracle tropes thrown out the window without consideration. Hell, even the precog attribute is something we hadn’t seen explored meaningfully in X-Men lore at that point. Her position on the team was almost certainly an attempt to fill the telepath-shaped void that Jean Grey’s absence created, however there’s always been a distinct flavour to Betsy’s powers that distinguish her from the ever widening roster of mutant psychics. The most important of these being that her mind powers were all mind. She didn’t muck around in telekinesis: she was physically weak but capable of getting deep inside someone’s head and mucking it up. There’s a lovely synchronicity between this and her background as a S.T.R.I.K.E. agent that was never really explored to its full extent. There’s been some attempts recently to cast her as a psychic surgeon of sorts lately, although I wouldn’t call the idea anything approaching developed.
My point here is that there were options open to the writers at the time beyond turning Psylocke into an entirely new character. And you know what? If they wanted a sexy ninja on the team that badly, they just should have made a new character who was a sexy ninja and put her on the goddamn team.
5. “But Rogue should be able to FLY! And have SUPER STRENGTH!!!! That’s how it was in that cartoon I liked when I was a kid!!!!”
Rogue with Ms. Marvel’s power set - and, indeed, the fact that Rogue was capable of absorbing a person as completely as she did Carol - was not a bad idea but man, that shit stuck around for too fucking long. That shit stuck around long enough that it became a millstone around the character’s neck. It stuck around so long that even seasoned readers associated it with her over her actual mutant powers. It stuck around so long that it gave the writers an excuse to basically put Rogue’s character development on hold for like, fifteen goddamn years.
Because see, Rogue’s power being deadly and uncontrollable is a great metaphor for budding sexuality and growing up being ~scary~, especially for young women and especially for a character like Rogue who had a vivacious personality and a penchant for badboys. But the problem with metaphors for teenage experience is that they just don’t work when you’re asking us to believe that a character is adult enough to be leading her own team. The uncontrollable nature of Rogue’s powers grounded her in girlhood for about six years too long. When she finally did grow up, the various dilemmas that seemed so dire and melodramatic back in the wind-swept panels of Jim Lee’s most classic work began to feel exhaustive and trite, especially when Rogue herself had finally outgrown any soul-searching on the matter and instead settled into a state of long-suffering irritation over it.
When the writers finally did attempt to retool her powers, their first instinct seemed to be making the problem of her being untouchable even worse, going so far as to have her contract a virus that caused her skin to kill at even the briefest contact. It wasn’t until well into Carey’s run - in fucking 2009 - that Rogue finally lost all her previous bells and whistles and no longer drains people against her will. Wow.
And you know what? Character development moves on. It moves on brilliantly. Rogue carried the adjective-less X-Title/Legacy for years! She’s getting put on an Avengers team! She’s still a formidable combatant! Who would have thought!
“Yeah, okay Jenn”, I’m sure you’re saying at this point, “That’s a fair point but why can’t she do all that while still being able to fly and have super strength?”
I liked it when Rogue was a bruiser as well. There was something really gratifying to me when I was a kid that one of the strongest X-Men was a sassy but sweet-mouthed Southern Belle. There was a nice contrast between her vulnerable personality and her invulnerable power-set. It’s what we’re used to. But it was, as I said in the first paragraph, an excuse to let the larger narrative arc of her actual power-set sit in hibernation indefinitely. It let her participate in action-oriented story arcs without the writers having to think about how her absorption powers would work on the battlefield. It gave them an easy out because even though Rogue’s powers were “unusable”, she still had powers she could use. Lazy, lazy, lazy.
Additionally, the long-term mishandling of Rogue’s arc also nearly ruined another character in a two-for-one deal of “characters I love in a pairing I ship getting ruined by their proximity to one another”. Let’s talk about that asshole .
4. “For now, Gambit walks on the side of angels.”
Does this look like a man you can trust?
I’m just saying, I wouldn’t let that motherfucker in my house okay? I wouldn’t let him in, but he’d get in anyway because this is not a trustworthy man. Sure, there is something to be said about characters who defy the expectations of the visual tropes they appear to slot into, but Gambit was not one of these characters. Gambit is a character who should have turned out to be just as crooked as he looked.
And oh, I don’t mean forever. I like the character a lot (this is an under-statement). I love who the character is now: humbled, world-weary and made honest by his mistakes, a street-wise mentor figure, dedicated to the dream quite sincerely because he’s someone who never believed he deserved it. What a great direction for the character! Would it be even better if it had been earned????
For those of you who don’t know the story here, Gambit was originally created to be a villain… ish. He saved Storm’s life, joined the X-Men, carved himself a nice little niche in the core 90’s lineup (even earning himself a spot in the animated series) and then a time-traveler named Bishop showed up and almost spoiled it by telling everyone that very soon, Gambit was going to get the X-Men all killed by way of nefarious (but?? possibly?? coerced??) betrayal. Okay, the time traveler from the future bit is a little hokey (but that’s X-Men for you; kids from apocalyptic futures are always jumping back and forth across time and space), but otherwise this is a solid plot. More importantly, it was a plot that had been in the works in one form or the other since Gambit’s inception.
Unfortunately, editorial decided that Gambit was waaaay too popular a character to waste by throwing him away in a mere double cross, so Scott Lobdell was left to come up with an alternate answer to the question of “Who betrays the X-Men?”
What did we get instead?
Well, honey, when a Mutant Terrorist and a Deceptive but Generally Well-Meaning Old Professor love each other very much sometimes things get really complicated and their consciousness merge and… uh… ???
Onslaught wasn’t just a stupid decision in terms of delivering a satisfying answer to the whole hanging Bishop plot thread, it was also a stupid decision in terms of giving Marvel an excuse to let fucking Rob Liefeld draw Captain America. The Onslaught arc placed Prof. X as the “X-Traitor” - a revelation that doesn’t even make sense given what we know because how would history forget the X-Men being killed by a giant reality-altering monster villain who killed like, all of the Avengers?? And what would future-Gambit (who Bishop was partly raised by) gain by keeping this a secret? I mean, even if the traitor hadn’t been Gambit, there’s some logic in him not exposing the identity of a person who had been a close friend of his. That’s a very personal betrayal. Onslaught was….. Onslaught wasn’t even actually Professor X. Certainly no one behaved like Professor X had betrayed them directly. Hell, the Onslaught arc is barely a footnote on the man’s wikipedia page.
But this is not a rant about Onslaught.
This is a rant about how Gambit should have betrayed the X-Men and having him remain un-questionably loyal even through the most turbulent arcs of the 90’s was a poor character choice that continues to cripple his characterization to this day.
The Onslaught reveal came in issue #54 of adjective-less X-Men. Not even ten issues earlier in X-Men #45, we are privy to a conversation between Gambit and Mr. Sinister that strongly suggests that Gambit is soon going to betray the team. This tells us that the decision was made relatively quickly and it shows, because after Onslaught, the X-Writers had no idea what to do with the character. This is where his romance with Rogue went from deliciously chunky but oddly endearing schlock to an endless (and honestly tiring) re-treading of relationship barriers that didn’t even make sense anymore. This is where he got left in Antarctica for a few months and was… possessed by a… green mist/ghost lady??? (over ten years later and I still don’t understand that subplot). He had a mostly passable but not great solo series that… didn’t really do anything to make the Thieves Guild stuff more compelling.
Furthermore, every single high point the X-writers have tried to hit with Gambit in the past fourteen years have essentially been attempts to re-capture and actualize the essence and potential that the traitor arc had. Gambit’s trial in Antarctica (in which the X-Men find out that he had a generous hand in Morlock Massacre and kick him off the team) was almost an apology to the fans for not following through on the promise of darkness inherent in the character. Gambit signing up with Apocalypse (however good his intentions may have been) and becoming the Horseman of Death for a brief period of time was a literal traitor arc that suffered both from awful writing (was it Milligan or Austen on the book at the time? TRICK QUESTION WHO CARES THEY WERE BOTH AWFUL) but also from “too little too late” syndrome. Most recent AU re-tellings of the X-Men mythos such as Ultimate X-Men and X-Men: Evolution seem to have gotten the memo and just cut out the middleman, introducing Gambit as a villain (or at least as a morally grey character with no clear allegiances) upfront.
Long story short, there is a reason that writers don’t like to use Gambit and there is a reason he’s become a joke to the fans and no, it’s not because he’s a prime example of the ~extreme 90’s~ and people smartened up eventually. There are more ~extreme~ characters with way dumber shticks who have been in constant use and who writers have made honest attempts to salvage over this guy (C A B L E). Gambit is a character who never achieved narrative catharsis. His character was never taken to the logical end point of any of his development and the chance has long since passed to put it right. Gambit is a character tailor-made for a long, bloody redemption arc and while elements of this trope have always been present in stories concerning him, the writers never really worked to break the reader’s trust in him or give the readers a good reason to believe that he needed redemption. He was already a reformed scoundrel when he met Storm, but the writers played a long-game of hot and cold with the fans over where his loyalties lied that ended in a place diametrically opposed to how the character had been written up until that point.
Also Onslaught is just about the dumbest thing I have ever read in Superhero comics, and I read that one JT Krull abomination where Roy Harper used a dead cat as a weapon.
NEXT TIME: Join me as I talk about Scott Summers. I talk about Scott Summers for a very… long…. time……..
