Iambaytor

We got Trials of Mana after several decades, never give up hope.

Maaaaan, fuck that Lion King game.

Package it with the zombie one, might as well just re-release all of them at this point.

Nobody's asking the hard-hitting questions: Did the Mexican sewer rat make the cut or not?

This is such a weird thing, the show was specifically based on one book by one author and this seems to have been written from whole cloth, which is fine I guess but still a bizarre move.

Definitely get on that Cyclops book, read the two volumes of the Iceman solo as well, they're not as good as the Cyclops book and deal with the adult version of the character rather than the kid version but it's an interesting exploration of him trying to find his place in the world dealing with being a mutant and a recently outed gay man in the modern era, the issues with his parents and Lorna are great. But it also features Dakken and I fucking hate that obnoxious asshole so your mileage may vary. It's at very least nice to see a solo book about an openly queer character that's about his sexuality but also about other things. I've not read the season one book but I've been a fervent supporter of Dennis Hopeless since Avengers Arena, so I'd give it a shot. If Hickman makes this work then it's going to be because he turns this into a sort of political fantasy drama on a cosmic scale, lets racist flatscans serve as the backing track and deals with the interpersonal conflicts of the mutants now that they're all in a position of power. It's still more of an Inhumans story and still biting a lot from those last few Ultimate X-men arcs (which I hasten to add were pretty interesting if not great, great character beats but the Ultimate Universe was running on fumes at that point and it was showing) but it creates the potential for making these people interesting again. Along with rote repetition of the greatest hits villains, unending destruction of the mansion, and characters going on a killing spree of leftover characters from another writer's run for cheep feels, I hate how often X-men stories are "Here's a vision of what will/might come to pass", the writer is coming up with an idea and working backward to it. We have enough dystopian future timelines in the X-men universe, the moment that Cable met Bishop we should've put a cap on that and said "no more dystopias, we have enough." We've sign the X-men fight off extermination, I get that the point is that you can't beat bigotry because it's never-ending but this story has been stuck in that rut since the 80s. Age of X-Man was a fucking dial tone but the concept of the X-men and co. having to turn their conflict inward rather than busy themselves trying to oppress/protect humanity was far more interesting than Cyclops' Island of mistfit X-men book. I'm not saying remove it from the story entirely, but it doesn't have to be THE focus. Daredevil is more than Catholic guilt, Spider-man is more than a guy who uses humor to deflect from his existential woes. I mean, look at some of the best best solo books we've seen in recent years: Hawkeye, Vision, Hulk, Scarlet Witch, Thor, Doctor Strange, they took what was best known about the character and set it to the side to explore who else they were in addition to this one-note thing that's already been deeply explored in 30+ years of comics. And I mean, there's plenty of heroes in the Marvel universe who don't have their origin stories widely known who get a pass from the mutant-hating populace, even though the mistreatement of the Inhumans was a plot point in that big story arc a year or so ago but they were far and away treated better than mutants have historically been despite the fact that they're effectively the exact same thing. My biggest pet-peeve with this logical divide is how much of a dick Captain America is when he pops up in these books despite how virtuous he is in everything else, Cap's not a tool of oppression that's literally his entire point. As much as it's tempting to go with protestors and torches and bricks being thrown through windows (especially in the current climate), we've seen that done to death. How does "post-racial" America deal with mutants, how do the X-men handle a world where the vast majority of people are outwardly supportive of mutants while holding up a much more insidious system that oppresses them in more subtle ways. But honestly, do we need to do that anymore? The X-men were a salient commentary on racism and bigotry in an era where you couldn't talk about those things in a publishing medium ostensibly meant for children. We can talk about race, we can talk about queer and trans people now. It's like that infamous panel of Kitty Pryde being asked if she's a Mutie (a fictional slur for a fictional race of human) and she flippantly asking him, a black man, if he's an n-word. I see what they're getting at but it kind of feels like it's talking down to oppressed people for a company's main take on bigotry be in the form of a story about genetic abnormalities that only manifest as bizarre powers and physical deformities. Tell stories about oppressed peoples, not fantasy analogues, we've developed enough as a species to where this kind of ham-fisted symbolism isn't necessary anymore. Don't get rid of it, just dial it back a bunch, bigots are rarely so kind as to be cartoonishly evil generals building armies of giant laser-shooting robots and even when they are there's more to be explored in the systems that allowed those cartoonish overlords to acquire the power they have rather than just focus on the cliche. A good writer can make the old hatred & feared bit work, but a really good writer would realize it's a crutch and tell a better and more nuanced story instead. Ultimately the key to success of these books will be spending time with these characters in the midst of these big plot developments (it's no coincidence that Rogue and Gambit are among the most interesting characters at the moment because they've been off having their own adventures and pointedly staying out of X-man and Cyclops' bullshit.) And yes, read Mutant X. It's a fucking crime there's not an omnibus of that book out there somewhere.

I mean, I can't think of a single instance post-Dark Phoenix that Phoenix being involved in a story hasn't sucked but they didn't commit to it with Wolverine at all, the hot claws haven't even come up in quite a while. It was one of the many big ideas that floated through the X-men comics and amounted to nothing, adding to the melange of unimportant important things. I can't comment on the Kid X-men pre-Secret Wars but theirs was the only one post-Secret Wars that actually had a through-line and good character stuff. Not just with the kid X-men, either, because it mined some good character beats out of X-23 and Kid Apocalypse as well, Beast's turn to the occult as an extension of his scientific pursuits and of course all the stuff with Iceman coming out of the closest which was introduced clumsily and stupidly but made for one of the better X-men solo books. Then of course it made me care about Jean and Scott who I've always found to be two of the most boring characters in the X-men canon, it's a shame they seem to be squandering that now that the adult versions of the characters are back in the forefront. I mean Kid-Jean and Old Man Logan's character dynamic was one of the better things in this last run of X-men books and I can't overstate how good that Cyclops solo about him and Corsair is, if you haven't read it you really really need to. They even brought in Jimmy Hudson from the Ultimate Universe (AKA the only good non-Miles Morales-related character the Ultimate Universe had left) and Bloodstorm from the Mutant X book. They later killed them off unceremoniously as part of the bullshit tying up of that story to get back to the status quo, which also involved killing Cable and giving us the lame Kid Cable but the journey to the shitty ending was at least worthwhile. But yeah, I also never cared about the OG X-men, I've pretty soundly been bored by all of them for as long as I've been reading the comics but with the exception of Angel it really breathed some new life into the characters and made me enjoy them. Unfortunately only Iceman's character development seems to have stuck. I haven't read all of the stuff between Infinity and Secret Wars but I read most of it. There was a lot of interesting stuff in there but it was all pretty plot-driven rather than character-driven. The incursions was a really neat moral idea and seeing people bounce off all that was great but it was a lot of big personalities: Namor, Doom, even T'challa is a bit larger-than-life. Captain America brought some humanity to it but he got side-lined pretty early on and Spider-man would've been great at towing this line but unfortunately it was Otto rather than Peter who was under the mask for most of the run. It's an excellent story and the time and care put into it was great, but it was a story involving personalities dealing with big events, not so much people grappling with internal change. It was there, but it wasn't the focus by a long shot. Secret Wars did rule, though. And actually I think Jason Aaron is a good counterpoint to Hickman. His run on the Avengers has been a lot more scattershot and if Marvel doesn't let him see this through it'll be a shitshow, but he's the master of the long game. His Thor run started pretty weak but he has really developed his characters and saw them through to the end, even his shorter Dr. Strange run that started out by ripping off his first Thor story arc really developed and grew the character in really interesting ways and he's doing that within the confines of the Avengers with She-Hulk and Ghost Rider and even Gorilla Man. He's telling big stories but giving them small human stakes and that's the kind of shit the X-men needs. Now, he is awful at events that he didn't have time to build up to because Original Sin is fucking terrible but with say, War of the Realms which he's been working up to for years he really nailed it. Hickman may pull this out, my problem isn't that he's a bad writer I just don't think his strengths are going to work the complement what's been going wrong with the X-men books for so long. I don't even need baseball issues, just give me some human stakes because the dated bigotry metaphor was always fatigued in the greater Marvel universe (people are willing to commit wholesale genocide on one group of superhumans but seem at very begrudgingly tolerant with all the other?) and we no longer live in a climate where you can just straight up call out racism, homophobia, transphobia, or whatever. "We've started a utopian society and using our powers to hold the world at bay from combating us" is a great story but there's nowhere to build from there; you either hold the status quo, which is boring and people will stop caring (see: Inhumans) or you bring it all down around their ears and they have to start over which is what literally everyone has been doing for over a decade now. Save Proteus and Legion and Phoenix and Sentinals and Apocalpyse and Mr. Sinister for special occasions, lets let these characters be relatable again so that when Storm or Cyclops or Wolverine do some insanely big and momentous thing that it actually has some impact. Remember when Wolverine's biggest moment was falling through a bunch of floors of a building and not dying?

I enjoyed Hickman's run fine especially on the heels of revisiting the super mediocre-to-bad Bendis run, but it wasn't what I would call a character book, which it didn't have to be because most of the characters in it had their own solo books so their characters were established on the sidelines. X-men doesn't have that, we'll have a few X-solo books that I will be honestly surprised if they even acknowledge any of this because X-men book exists in its own pocket universe so that the mansion can explode 8 times a year. I'm not arguing the man's bona fides, I'm just saying that the last thing the X-men need at this point is something big and mythical, big and mythical is all they've been since Wolverine died and it's meaningless at this point. Say what you will about the X-kids but Jean, Scott, Bobby, and Hank are all better characters for those stories.

They absolutely did, though. Like almost verbatim, the miracle medicines and Mutant Utopia, I'm pretty certain that whole speech Magneto gave was paraphrasing the one Kitty Pryde gave. World Building is great but it's pointless without character, I read his Avengers run and while it was great having all the action figures in the bathtub at once while you dream up a high sci-fi overstory I can't think of a lot of character beats that resonate with me from that period. There's nothing in Age of X #1 that feels like I haven't seen it before, in fact it all seems super done at this point. It's even kind of a ripoff on the previous X-men story arc. And you can bet all this shit's gonna be scrubbed from continuity in 5 years max. Cyclops just undertook a powerful personal journey, coming to terms with the villain he had become in recent years, now he's back to mad-dogging the Fantastic Four. People love the X-men because they're relatable human characters, not otherwordly god-beings, that's the Inhumans' bag. I don't think this will be bad but it's going to be another cacophany in the noise of epic X-men stories of the 21st century, regardless of how big-thinking and well written it is. You have to earn big stories and X-men hasn't earned one since the 00s.

They did this exact thing in Ultimate X-Men like 10 years ago

This is going to make or break their "We can make anything a hit" claim. It's far more obscure than even Inhumans was and lacks the fun anarchic spirit of Guardians of the Galaxy, it doesn't even have the simple down-to-Earth conceptual charm of Shang Chi. I wish them luck here, they'll need it.

Everything is a big deal now, I think the X-Mansion has blown up like three times in as many years. Apocalypse and Sinister and Proteus and Phoenix and a cavalcade of big bads have been slotted in and out like crazy. Aside from the solo books, only the kid X-men managed to capture what made the series good to begin with. Everybody wants to right their own Dark Phoenix saga when they take on the X-men, not seeming to realize that that story hit as well as it did because it was the culmination of 20 years of much smaller scale stories. Hickman's an event guy and that has its place but what X-men needs is somebody to pump the fucking brakes, just let them exist in the world for a year or two before putting them back in mortal peril and on the run again.

I know he's your boy but I feel like X-men at this point is just noise, when there's earth shattering changes every six issues there's really nothing to anchor to anymore.

God, I skipped out on Die because it had such a shitty title. Swinging back around, I guess. And American Carnage sounds a lot like a differwnt book called Incognegro, which I think is a perios piece.

I'm not married to D&D, it's just the one that most people know. RPGs are not cheap or easy to get into.

I dropped some cash on the most recent addition of Gamma World (the post-apocalyptic version of D&D) and Amber and I have made characters but we're the only people we know who are interested, she doesn't know the setting, and I've never played, let alone DMed so there's a bit of a learning curve there.

I imagine once you've successfully made a critically acclaimed sequel to Blade Runner, you fear nothing.

So is this a ground-up remake because I don't think an HD port of a janky-ass (but charming) PS2 game is going to be well-received by the populace at large.

There's not even a good Quicksilver sequence in this one, is there?

I get that, but the references seem a lot more esoteric than usual. I got Steamed Hams, this confuses me.

I don't understand this at all.

Apparently they were filming this in North Carolina due to a government grant and the state legislature fucked it up and cut their funding, so they're cancelling it.

I have two problems with this: 1. Pattinson has been using his post-Twilight visibility to really do some interesting things as an actor and getting attached to a major franchise can really get in the way of that. 2. I've come to learn that the arms race to get the perfect super hero body is probably extremely harmful to the actors getting them and as a scrawny little Brit in concerned what getting a Batman physique will do for his health down the line.

Episode 2 will be packaged with Half-Life 2: Episode 3