Magneto (2014) # 16 Review
The comic opens with a flashback to the events of decimation, when Utopia was established. Somehow, Magneto found out about X-Force and had them go after someone. Despite that, he needed to see the body. Whoever it was, you could be sure they had to be someone twisted for Mags to send out X-Force rather than do it himself.
In the present, Mags is rebuilding Genosha and Briar is helping to foot the bill. She doesn’t have anywhere else to go since she’s helped him out so brazenly, but he’s understandably confused why she did all this for him. Her response is to lower the blinds and kiss him, regardless of the fact he’s thee reason she’s wearing a brace in the first place. Dude has skills.
While Mags is getting busy, some of the other mutants are hiding away from the camp. They came to his island, but don’t want to live under his rule until they see what he’s all about, being a former terrorist and all. Naturally, someone cloaked in the cover of darkness comes and prepares to kill them.
Post-coitus, Mags finds himself dreading that a new beginning often serves as a preamble for disaster. He’s proven right when they stumble upon one of the boys from last night’s corpse. He can tell it was placed there deliberately and the one who did it relished the act of cruelty.
They follow a blood trail and find the others, along with a Nazi Swastika painted in blood on the wall. Whoever started clearly doesn’t intend to stop. It’s made worse when Mags returns to find that the killer had apparently be inside their trailer while they slept and painted it in the bathroom mirror, with a message telling him to keep the furnaces warm as the comic ends.
Okay, review time.
Well, a new plot-line begins and it starts with a murder mystery. I liked how they pointed out the symbol commonly recognized as a swastika existed thousands of years before the Nazis in several different cultures, yet Hitler’s ass managed to taint the entire thing. It goes to show how one very large act of evil can dye everything associated with it in it’s color.
4 out of 5.
Uncanny X-Men #30 Review
Okay, this event is starting to drag out, but I still have a self-proclaimed duty to review it. So here’s my review of Uncanny X-Men #30!
The issue starts out with Maria Hill receiving confirmation that Magik, Malloy, and Cyclops have been killed by missile fire. She doesn’t know whether to be happy or to get ready for war with the rest of the X-Men, but she gets on a plane to go see it for herself. At the same time, Eva is with Charles Xavier and gives him permission to look into her head to see why she’s supposedly angry at Cyclops while, in the present, Beast tells the others he’s dead now right before Storm suggests trying to kill him.
Anyway, the professor finally gives in and looks into her mind as Malloy casts Auto-Revive on himself but can’t do the same for other people, subsequently proving Cyclops point about how SHIELD were dicks and him deciding to end it today. End of World scenario, people. As for Charles, Eva then calls him out for saying one thing and then doing another when he threatens to simply wipe her mind and then send her off.
Emma, in grief, ends up sending out a psychic signal that hurts everyone in the JGS and then calls to Malloy, who is naked for some reason. Really, he can’t conjure up clothing or something? Anyway, she punches him in rage over Cyclops’ death, only for him to kill her too by accident.
So, that’s the last of the NXS staff. As for the students, the Stepford Sisters sense Emma’s death and Hijack decides it’s time to get into the game. Eva appears with Charles Xavier to do just that, once again violating the time stream. As the comic ends, he does his iconic line and hopefully we move into the final part of this arc.
Okay, review time….
Yeah, they’re wasting time at the point. As you may or may not know, Secret Wars is going to reboot the Marvel Universe, so with that on the way they’re killing as much time as possible by doing stupid things like SHIELD getting in a lucky missile strike and Malloy killing Emma. I’m sorry, but my patience for an arc that’s been dragging on for months with little shock value has run out.
3 out of 5, and that’s me being nice.
All New X-Factor #19 Review
Okay, we’re at the end of the battle between the team and the goddess of the underworld. Read my All-New X-Factor #19 review!
At Serval industries, Harrison is speaking with the man whose daughter he had his team go out to bring her corpse back. Whatever reason they were out there, they want out now and Harrison agrees, but he begs them to let his team do what they were asked.
The team, now facing a goddess within a mortal vessel, is given the choice to kneel or die. Polaris has them kneel, so that she could figure out what was going on, but Sunfire screws that up and nearly gets munched until she intervenes and asks why the goddess chose now. The goddess says that in five years there will be a peace accord, and for some reason it has to stop that so it will kill the inhabitants of the old city and borrowed Elena’s body for that. Then she wipes the floor with them and decides to be on her way.
They get right back up and start hitting back, but Lorna gets taken out by plastic bullets and the goddess decides to just eat their souls. Danger, lacking a soul, proceeds to tear the goddess apart until it runs back to the underworld. If there was any doubt about why you should have a robot on the team, there’s your rebuttal.
Later, Polaris is recovering and the body had been returned. They conclude that it was merely coincidence that the terrorist had plastic bullets, but are curious as to what the goddess meant about being out of time. While Polaris congratulates Danger, she admits that she can’t feel good about it since she doesn’t have a soul and doesn’t feel real.
With Harrison, the couple has finally laid their daughter to rest. They want out, after doing whatever they were there to do, and it seems like Harrison is willing to let them leave. But he promptly kills them both as the comic ends.
Okay, review time….
The battle with the goddess was honestly expected. They’re not going to kill of the team just yet, after all. However, the real meat of the story is what happened in the end. We always knew Harrison was so shady he could shield you from the sun in the summer, but we never thought he could go to outright murder.
Gets a 4 out of 5, the deducted point coming from the art work. While it may normally be like that, I still don’t like it.
Uncanny X-Men #29 Review
Following up from the last issue, Magik visits Doctor Strange in the past, interrupting his…. Private time. I guess even the Sorcerer Supreme is entitled to getting action on the side. Anyway, Magik discusses the problem and asks what he can do about the issue with Malloy. He gives her a suggestion.
With Magneto, Malloy, and Cyclops, Magneto thinks that Cyclops is going too far while Cyclops defends his actions and eventually Malloy sends him off to the school. Magneto then feels he failed Cyclops because he didn’t notice that he had a breakdown and was now endangering them all. Tempus thinks to herself that she can go back in the past to fix all of this, which Celeste calls her out on because she read her mind and knows what happened to her.
To sum up the events of the Eva special, she got lost in time and eventually ended up in the year 2099. There Magik was the Sorceress Supreme and she stayed for seven years, mothered a child and had a husband, before losing control of her powers and ending up at the beginning of Mankind. Morgan Le Fay was there and explained to her that the future she had been to no longer existed, but she ended up trying to get back only to find everything had changed and Stark had become Sorcerer Supreme. He tells her the truth of the matter and then helps her get back to her own time.
Anyway, the rest of the X-Men are divided on the whole time-travel thing while the adults are stuck at the Jean Grey school and learn that Beast essentially screwed up when he told everyone that Malloy was a threat. This is proven when Magik shows up with the Eye of Agamotto, intent on using it to see into him and what he is capable of, when Helicarriers arrive and open fire. The comic ends with the sight of three skeletons burning and Eva arriving in the past to greet Charles Xavier.
Okay, review time…
In truth, I’m more than a little mad. They keep dragging this arc on and, from the looks of it, plan on retconning the entire thing if she prevents his death somehow. That would mean, much like BOTA, the entire thing was a waste of time.
It gets a 3 out of 5.
Uncanny X-Men #28 Review
The story picks up where it left off, with Cyclops offering to buy the man breakfast. Maybe it’s because he’s got some psychic potential and psychics seem to be willing to listen to him more, but Matthew goes willingly. Maria Hill is then panicking because Cyclops, who declared he wants to start a revolution, just got his hands on the current most powerful mutant there is.
Then we get a quick look at the JGS, where Beast is tripping over his furry self in stressing out about this new mutant and the world powers don’t care and blah, blah, blah. I’m not going to lie. As much as I figured I would love hearing the words ‘Cyclops was right’ or the equivalent from the sellouts there, they managed to ruin it because it feels hollow in the grand scheme of things here. It feels forced.
Anyway, Cyclops takes him up a steep plateau for some private time while Magik goes to fetch breakfast (yeah, like that’s going to happen) and he lets Matthew take a peek at his past with the professor. To sum it up, he fought for the professor’s idea and no matter how many times they save the world they were still hated on a genetic level for it. So the professor may have been wrong (which his psychic ghost residue mentions in this week’s Magneto) and they need to take their place.
Matthew then starts to flip out of control and so Cyclops shows him that a number of other mutants went through the same thing and they can help him. He still loses it and Magik pulls Cyclops out, but he won’t abandon him despite Magik telling him they need a plan. She then tells him he gets one more chance and if she doesn’t like what she sees then she’ll act on her own.
He goes back in and tells him that they’re going to help him, train him, and make him better. He doesn’t lie to him and admits that a mutant as powerful as he is will act as a deterrent for people like the Purifiers and while he’s willing to go as far as he needs to, with him they won’t have to. At this point, as the comic ends, Magneto pops up and tells him that he’s going just a bit too far.
Okay, review time.
Honestly, at this point I just want the arc to end. The only really good thing is that it gets to skip that even bigger nightmare AXIS, but other than the rehashing of Cyclops’ goals we really don’t learn much and the art was clunky…even more than usual. 3 out of 5.
All-New X-Factor #14 Review + Rant
Well, after the family bonding moment last issue why stop now? In my review of All New X-Factor #14 we look into what happens when Wanda pops up to complete the Children of Magneto arc. No, it’s not a real arc but still…. Also, as soon as the review is over I’m going on a minor rant, fair warning.
Anyway, the comic begins with Danger asking Polaris if she wants to have sex. Polaris is promptly confused, but Danger simply wants to experience what it feels like. It’s then that Wanda pops up, with whom Danger has a better chance to score with. Now my feelings on her and what she’s done are plain as the day is blue in the middle of a cloudless summer sky, so I won’t go on a four page rant about it. I don’t really need to given that Polaris points it out and Wanda is only exasperated because she’s still holding it against her, which proves my point as much as Uncanny Avengers did.
Wanda has come to try and reconnect with her, although given the timing that seems a little contrived, but Danger suggest that they go to an old medieval fair and they’re off. There’s also a subplot about some jealous prick, but he’s a nobody and no one cares for shoehorned drama. There’s not really much to go on, Wanda wants to do some sibling bonding since Quicksilver doesn’t socialize well while Danger looks like Doctor Doom in a cloak and then the jealous guy tries to murder his ex-girlfriend in a witch burning that the three promptly stop and do something that’s in all rights illegal if Polaris actually let him die.
After that they go to a bar and Wanda tries to get Polaris to join the sellouts now that Quicksilver quit. Again, contrived timing for her to show up and she even reveals that Havok had Quicksilver join as a spy in a casual manner, which is something you would expect them to keep a secret so it doesn’t get back to the people you’re spying on. I swear Havok sent her and is sitting in a chair with his fingers steepled like Mr. Burns and saying “Excellent” since he knows that’s going to fuck up the team cohesion.
There’s also a minor incident where two of the dumbest robbers in history try to hit a bar that hasn’t even been open long enough to get a decent amount of money and has three super-powered heroines who should have tied them to a pole or something but let them go instead since they have the gun clips, I mean it isn’t like they can buy more or anything.
Okay, review time
There are some things that don’t make sense, like why Danger needs a cloak when she has holographic technology or why they let the bad guys go, but those are minor compared to the fact that Wanda has once again fucked up in a way that has created more shoehorned drama that I don’t like in a comic I do. I mean she couldn’t be satisfied with just getting some character development that may have lightened the immense dislike I had of her, which they sucked at attempting for the record, but she had to fuck over Quicksilver after he just had his and started getting into my good books.
Before I start ranting further, the comic gets a 2 out of 5 for being mediocre with the only plot relevant thing on the last page.
Now, I honestly don’t know whether to blame the writers who make her an unrepentant bitch or the character entirely.
It’s bad enough they made her a goddamn reason for the long-ass Twin Apocalypse and Planet-X part of Uncanny Avengers, which I still peruse and then toss in the garbage like Linkara because fire is too good for it, but they are intent on trying to make her unlikable with the whole Children’s Crusade retcon, which didn’t work either because she’s on a steady supply of bitch pills and Doctor Doom could do better.
Whether there’s a mandate at Marvel saying make her unredeemable or the authors stuck at redemption stories I don’t know, but you’d think at some point they’d just say fuck it all and send her to get some mental help or slap a power dampener on her so she doesn’t go on another genocide kick because of Daddy issues that made it possible for men like Red Skull and the Purifiers to take advantage of the damage left behind on top of the millions who died when their powers went haywire.
Honestly, this is the reason I cheered when Rogue gutted her and then swore when they made her apologize after Wanda finished banging Wonder Man. I think I speak for all of us that a happy ending involves her being depowered and living a humble life out of sight and mind. At this point death is too good for her character so going into comic book limbo would be more fitting.
Uncanny X-Men #25 Review
Okay, after the revelation from the last issue that Charles married Mystique, you’d think that things couldn’t get anymore screwy. So what’s this big secret of Charles? Here’s my review of Uncanny X-Men #25.
It starts with the Charles stating that what he’s done may horrify them, but at least hear him out to the end. While the X-Men were out, he found the signature to a mutant so powerful that he had to find him before Magneto did. It turns out to be Matthew Malloy, the dude from before who is wrecking stuff like there was no tomorrow.
Charles’ first interaction with him goes poorly, what with the kid having possibly killed his parents and able to sense him trying to tamper with his mind. He nearly kills him for it, with Charles only able to get away by hiding his presence. To Charles, the kid represented his worse fears in that humans would persecute mutants more if he was left unchecked.
Everyone decides to take a break and get their heads together before he went on, with Storm reasoning with Cyclops that Mystique going all over the place may be because he killed Charles. That being said, none of them are letting her get the school, final will be damned. Kitty and Nightcrawler have at tender moment, while Dazzler and Beast chat about how surprising it was that he married Mystique but Dazzler’s going to kill her anyway.
Back at the will reading, Charles admits he considered putting the boy down, but he didn’t have the manpower to do it and had to go with option B. That’s to say he pretended to be a child the kid’s age and earned his trust before placing psychic blocks on him in the same manner he did with Cyclops regarding Vulcan and possibly Jean Grey. So basically he lobotomized him from being a mutant in a way that Magneto would call his ass out on.
This is nothing new to me, but Cyclops naturally has a problem with this and calls him a hypocrite post-mortem, which rubbed some people the wrong way. Then Iceman says the stupidest thing he could and gets blasted for it. It’s really telling with Wolverine being the calm one and Iceman being a dumbass that they are trying to make him look bad now that Wolverine is dead…
Anyway, after Rachel controls her father’s body to calm him down (again, abuse of power when he just had Dark Beast pulling that shit), Charles continues with how later on he proceeded to make sure the blocks were in place until the kid was old enough to see through the illusion and had Charles wipe his memories of everything since he didn’t want to live with the guilt of killing his parents.
Now that he’s snuffed it he wants Wolverine and Cyclops to go and check on him and make sure everything is in order with Rachel there to make sure the blocks are put back up. Once they’re done they’ll get the last of the will and testament, dragging this out for another issue at least. As the comic ends we see Matthew wrecking the city he was in.
Okay, review time…
This wasn’t all it could be cracked up to be. Honestly, the Mystique reveal was more shocking. And they are really derailing Iceman…are we sure the good Iceman won when he tried to freeze the world?
Either way, 3 out of 5.
Uncanny X-Men #23 Review
Well, now that that cop-out of an arc is done , our story picks up in the aftermath by starting the Original Sin tie-in event, The Last Will and Testament of Charles Xavier, in issue number 23 of Uncanny X-men.
The story begins with a couple arguing. I don’t want to get into details because about five panels in the wife or girlfriend is killed in a random Skrull attack. Weren’t they supposed to be near-extinct or something after Secret Invasion? Either way, the windowed guy blows a Skrull’s head up all of a sudden and has no idea what the hell he just did as SHIELD does their damn job.
Okay, first off, this was last year. Unless this was after AvsX he damn well shouldn’t be a mutant and last I checked it’s only been a few months at best. Next, doesn’t SWORD deal with alien threats? Given how Brand is, that Skrull ship shouldn’t have made it into orbit, and even then not before a team of Avengers went to town on it. Out of all the feasible threats, the Skrulls are the last ones who should be involved here, so that’s just lazy writing.
Anyway, we then skip to She-Hulk, who was disbarred in her comic if I recall, still working and being shamed for her many sexual encounters, who receives something important. Three guesses what it is, and the first two don’t count. Madripoor has Dazzler pissed the fuck off for everything Mystique as done, but they know she’s damn well gone so there’s nothing to be done, and in their secret school Cyclops is having another mini-break down as he recalled Xavier’s last moments.
Tempus arrives to ask him how he is, but he in turns asks her about the time travel incident she went through. She tries to deny it, but the Cyclops has children who travel through time and has done it himself plenty of times. He knows when someone has aged years in the span of weeks… that, and the Stepford Sisters told him. Eva… she doesn’t take it well and storms out.
As for the JGS, She-Hulk crash lands in their front yard to see that the school is wrecked, yet again. Honestly, how the hell have they not been shut down? If the administrators who investigated it the first time didn’t get mind-wiped the school would have been. Are any of the teachers actually qualified? Uh… anyway, the point of her visit is that they need to read the will of Charles Xavier.
As Magik returns with the rest, Dazzler runs off to the bathroom, Magik and Emma tell Cyclops not to talk to her and talk to Hijack, while Magneto goes back to his own solo-series to be a bad-ass. Hijack eats some humble pie and Cyclops welcomes him back. Dazzler, on the other hand… well, a therapy session might be in order from the way she’s looking at the scissors…
Back with the dude from the opening, who runs into his dead girlfriend or wife’s sister who wants to talk to him because he’s looking kind of like a bum, he loses control over his powers and kills her and everyone near him. Yeah, this is kinda why no one trusts people with powers in these series.
She-Hulk then asks if Xavier’s really dead. We can’t blame her since the X-Men come back more than anyone else in Marvel. But since we saw him chilling with Nightcrawler in the afterlife, let’s say he is. The comic ends with She-Hulk needing to have Cyclops there to read the will as well.
Okay, review time…
The art work takes a hit more than normal this issue since it hurt my damn eyes to look at, and since this is the opening of the plot I won’t get on the about that, but the continuity errors are annoying to say the least.
3 out of 5 at best.
Magneto #5 Review
A short and late review is better than no review at all as I cover Magneto Issue #5.
The comic begins Magneto pondering that there was comfort in basic activities, living an ordinary life. But because he’s the Master of Magnetism he doesn’t find any comfort in it like the flock of sheep normal people are, merely that he’s wearing a mask at present and the people around him will become causalities once he takes it off. That’s why he likes small towns, less people die when he goes on the war path… at least that would be the case if he believed that he can be redeemed, but in truth it gives him a chance to recover away from prying eyes.
Except there’s one nosy lady who gets involved in his business and he corners her in an alleyway. She, Briar Raleigh, claims to be a friend who wants to help him and knows about his mountain base. Since she knows that eventually he’s going to go berserk on people again and it’s only a matter of time, she wants to keep him busy by giving him targets to go after that she knows he would want. She even knows his favorite Brandy, so she’s been stalking him for some time.
Briar reveals she has information on even the SHIELD Taskforce assembled to take him down and the Marauders. She tells him that she knows he’s going to war again, and she won’t stop him. She just wants to make sure that only the ones he’s targeting are the causalities, rather than innocent people like she was.
As the comic ends we get a flashback to the aftermath of one of Magneto’s rampages in what looks like Seattle, where Briar’s family was killed and her leg was damaged. He sees her as a shepard of the flock of people, and muses should he let her live.
Okay, review time…
So, like the other chapters we deal with the aftermath of Magneto’s rampages, only this time we have someone who was crippled by him. It’s interesting to see that Briar should hate this man with a passion, but instead she’s helping him out. She’s figured that he’s going to keep being who he is and the only thing she can do is to help minimize the number of people who have suffered for it by giving him a guiding hand.
She doesn’t like him, but it seems like she isn’t letting her personal feelings get in the way of something she deems important. And then she apparently has decent detective skills to get all that information, so she’s got my respect.
Despite lacking action, I give the issue a solid 5 out of 5.
All-New X-Factor #8 Review
Well, that was interesting last time. Now it’s time to see what’s going to happen to Doug after he was desiccated by the pie-loving young woman. This is my review of X-Factor #8.
The story picks up where it left off with Cypher a dried out husk of himself and the rest of the team stunned at how pie-girl is so disconnected from what she did it was like she didn’t know it was wrong. Danger breaks the tension by asking what sort of pie, which gets the ball rolling with Warlock ready to murder her as her father gets the door open with men and guns at the ready.
Polaris pretty much drags him inside, locks the rest out, and force him to admit he’s told his daughter a huge-ass lie. Turns out he’s kept her so locked out of the real world that she believes the majority of people in the world have powers and the few who didn’t worked with her father. Wow, I’m more amazed at the fact he managed to pull that sort of lie off for years than anything else.
Anyway , the police show up and they need her to fix Cypher, but like most mutants who didn’t get training she has very little idea on how to reverse her power but can try if she can get some water. Danger and Warlock clear a path while they make for the kitchen so she can try and reverse it while her father tells her he was just trying to protect her… to be fair, as far as bigots go he’s nowhere near the worst in having a mutant kid.
Rahne’s father straight-up beat and tried to kill her. Not saying its right, but it could have been worse.
In the kitchen she explains she normally drains moisture out of things, which she learned by killing her first kitten by accident, and her father started home-schooling her. She’s going to get as much moisture in her as she can and then put that into him the same way she took it out. Her father points out that it could possibly kill her and Gambit jacks him up and demands to know how could he rail against mutants knowing his daughter was one.
He states he didn’t know when she was born and that she was god’s punishment on him. Gambit points out that maybe the big man was trying to tell him something, but he reasons that maybe god was a dick and just wanted him to hate him as well. Mission accomplished there, but he doesn’t hate the girl since she’s his late wife’s legacy. Gambit must also be off his game, because he gets kicked off by Georgina’s dad and only his daughter telling him to let her try this and if it fails and she dies she’ll have a one-on-one talk with god about it gets him to settle down for a moment.
Once the moment passes Quicksilver takes him and sits him down elsewhere only for men with tracer bullets that would follow him to the ends of the earth to threaten opening fire on him. Never mind the fact that he could probably trap them in a steel box or knock their tracer mechanism out with a pipe or just hide behind a steel wall and let them shatter to pieces unless they’re made of adamantium. Fortunately Harrison Snow shows up out of nowhere to prevent even more ammo from being wasted and takes Scott to discuss this in private like they’re old friends. Quicksilver and the head bodyguard are just as confused as we are.
While Georgina succeeds in reviving Cypher, the police decide to try sniping them. Polaris hijacks their guns and gives them thirty seconds before she opens fire. Her father wouldn’t have given them even that, so they wisely decide to leave as Cypher offers to take Georgina to the JGS when Danger ruins the sales-pitch by pointing out they train to fight evil mutants, risk their lives, and die repeatedly.
She runs like any sane person would as Warlock basically confirm it. To be fair, Danger and Warlock aren’t lying. There are only a handful of X-Men who haven’t died and aren’t wallpaper yet. When her dad is in a meeting she uses her powers to bring the door crumbling down and we learn that he and Harrison Snow want her to go with him.
It’s damn heartbreaking as he tells her that he loved his daughter and when she became a mutant she was just some thing that replaced her. He can’t even face her as he says it while Snow is looking nonchalant about it. As the comic ends it’s made clear that Snow forced him to say it and he’s driven to near tears while alone….
Okay, review time.
Yeah… I’m starting to think Harrison might be evil. He’s taking the man’s daughter as a hostage (come on, even though they didn’t say it we all know that’s what it is). That being said, the fact that he knew where his team was and managed to get inside the locked-down building brings up questions.
Either way, he did bail them out of trouble that they had no business getting involved with. Like I said in my last review they broke a ton of laws that you can’t do when part of a corporate super-hero team and Harrison straight-up Mafia’d them out of trouble to probably save his own ass.
Other than that, I find myself somewhat sympathizing with the man. Don’t get me wrong, I hate bigots in Marvel and if he was a Purifier I would be rooting for someone to put him down. But he’s having his daughter taken away from him because of whatever dirt Snow has on him and the alternative would have somehow been worse. He gets some pity from me… only some, not a lot.
The fact that the comic could make me feel anything like that deserves a 4 out of 5 and only misses a perfect score because the artwork hurts my eyes.
Magneto #3 Comic Review
Magneto’s finally found the people responsible for making the poor-man’s version of the Omega Sentinels and now he’s going to make them pay in issue #3. There’s surprisingly little bloodshed, but I still enjoyed it. This is my review.
Our comic opens up at the tent city from last issue, where the SHIELD douche-bags have arrived to kick everyone out of it since Magneto went waltzing through and leaving bodies. Leaving aside the fact that the police were probably aware of the place and let it be until SHIELD comes barking orders, they question Samuel and treat him like he helped the man kill those bastards despite it being clear he doesn’t know a damn thing. This is why no one likes them, television show be damned, but it shows the ramifications of those who were just at the wrong place at the wrong time or are unjustly punished for a good deed.
Magneto himself laments he isn’t as strong as he used to be, since then he would have tossed the building into space. Instead he’s relegated into sneaking around until he comes across the process being done and recalls how the X-Men and him have kicked Sentinel-ass so much that they’d gotten to the point of underestimating them. Then Genosha happened and a nation of mutants millions strong was wiped out in a single attack, a nation he ruled as a safe haven for them.
He maps out the building with a magnetic pulse like a bat does sonar and finds a Master Mold, which he can’t destroy on his own with his powers nerfed. So instead he finds this nerdy looking scientist woman who’s thanking three-freshly minted omegas for sacrificing themselves for this, which Magneto calls BS on. Toying with both human and mutant lives to play at being God is nothing but vanity.
The three attack him, but he makes short work of them after getting nicked by a blade before he gets a name out of her. She’s Elizabeth Alain, the project leader. That was just the person he was looking for to help him shut it down. She resists of course, but that ends as he forces a paper clip into her skin and moves it through her slowly and agonizingly until she leads him to the console room.
She explains that the mutant murders that Colton committed were oversights, an accident. The facility was meant to be a human refuge for those who fear mutants and wanted to be segregated from them. Someone direct them to it so they could create guardians to protect them. Her speech eventually gets on his nerves and he kills her, because all while she’s doing it he remembers Genosha and how that ended, and he brings the place down with a few keyboard strokes.
As the comic ends he wonders if he was too rash, not with killing her but with not getting the name of who led her to the Master Mold and figures he’ll find them just the same.
Okay, Review time…
Now, I have to say either that woman was naive and stupid or she was a liar. Using ramshackle Omega Sentinels at all is not only morally questionable, as it requires messing around with a human being and those people from the Tent City were being forcibly taken, but downright paranoia fuel.
At least with the giant ones when people see them coming they can run. That lowers the number of civilians killed in the crossfire for the most part. The Omega Sentinels are meant to be stealthy so as to sneak up and kill mutants, not guard people when you consider how loose they are with their weaponry.
Whoever directed her had far more ominous intentions, so either she was too stupid to realize it or she knew and was sugarcoating it. It doesn’t matter now. So, it was a good issue and I can’t really find any fault with the comic or story that detracts from it.
5 out of 5.
Magneto #2 Review
It’s that time again. I’m back with my review of the most mature and violent X-Men comic in production right now, Magneto #2. Read on folk!
We begin with SHIELD interviewing some of those caught in the crossfire of Magneto’s last fight. You don’t invade a police station without someone being injured and there’s no getting over the fact that taking down the kid turned into a dime-store Omega Sentinel had shaken some people to their very core. However, we learn that he has some fans that rock ‘Magneto was right’ shirts harder than Quentin Quire and I must say I am slightly as disturbed as the SHIELD agents who ponder what unholy terror he would be if his powers ever got fixed.
Meanwhile, Magneto arrives at a shanty-town made of tents and people who fell down through the cracks of society called Down Acres. He finds their plight familiar because in the 1940’s he was in a similar situation when he and two others started smuggling food to survive and feed their families. He and another made it, but they could only listen in as the other didn’t and was held at gunpoint.
Magneto meets with the person in charge of Down Acre, a seemingly nice man named Samuel who welcomes him in and offers to feed and shelter him as long as he pulls his weight. Once in private though, Magneto gets to the point by asking about the men who took Colton, the poor young man who was turned into that killing machine last issue. Men come in the night and offer them work, but when the people wised up that they never returned the men started taking them—starting with the ones who fought back.
It was an all too familiar thing for Magneto as he recalls that fateful night, when his friend that got caught was given a choice out of desperation. He tells the name of the other friend, not Magneto, in exchange for being allowed to take his food back to his family. He is promptly shot in the head while the other friend flees, leaving Magneto to learn that desperation and hunger could make men break. He thinks back to that day, that his name wasn’t the one that was uttered, and wonders if it was necessary for him to do as he does to determine the course of history.
With that in mind, Magneto promptly kills the men coming with rusty nails. No banter, no declaration, just an ambush that graphically kills them all with the exception of one since he can’t afford the luxury that is mercy. To the final one he gives a similar ultimatum to the man who killed his friend, information so that he could walk away alive. The man talked in desperation to survive, and Magneto guns him down now that he knew where to strike.
Okay, review time.
This was a powerful issue. Rather than relying on action, we look at some of the hardships in the past and present, how desperate times makes men into monsters. Magneto has never shied away from being a monster, so long as it was for a cause that would ensure his people don’t go through the same shit he went through.
This issue gets a 5 out of 5.
All-New X-Factor #5 Review
Out of one murder attempt by a future member and into another as All-New X-Factor #5 picks up shortly after the end of the previous issue. This is my review of it.
This time around the story opens with Gambit waking up to find a woman in his room while he’s naked beneath the sheets. While this probably wouldn’t be uncommon for him, he didn’t invite Danger to bed last night so he’s confused as hell when he finds her there. She claims that his kiss reset some of her functions, but she needs more interaction to become whole. Better than nothing as an excuse to why kissing her worked I supposed.
It seems that Gambit isn’t the only one who woke with a pretty woman in his room. Harrison Snow, like all married but corrupt CEOs, is having an affair with Linda from his company. Their post-coitus talk is of a new player on the computer market that Harrison wants to buy out and he’s having a meeting with him later on. As he leaves out, he tells her to be out by the time his wife gets back from her business trip and then goes about his day with a swagger in his step.
Quicksilver and Polaris are already up, sharing breakfast and exchanging obscure trivia when Gambit tells them Danger is in his room. Polaris brings up the possibility that she wants him sexually, and Quicksilver sees nothing wrong with it. Then again, their sister married Vision and then magic’d up some kids so…
Anyway, Harrison pops by to tell them he wants them at the meeting and Quicksilver runs out to tell Havok, who somehow comes out acting like even more of a sell-out asshole than normal. He’s like one of those damn stalkers who have a PI following your every step. Quicksilver makes it back to Serval before they think he’s done in the bathroom, smooth as silk, only for Danger to sense his vitals and know he’s been running, but he gets out of it by lying. Same goes for Linda when Danger notes that she has Harrsion’s DNA on her in a way that only comes from being intimate with one another.
The meeting takes two turns, the first being the guy who Harrison planned to buy out turned to be The Magus, an enemy leader of an alien race. Danger discovers this by putting her hand through his chest, and Polaris gives its metallic butt a one-way trip out of the building. The second is when Warlock shows up defending his father, before the two of them split.
I’m sure they didn’t wake up planning to get into a brawl, but now that they were in it they were going to get some answers. And so, as the comic ends, Polaris suggests they pay a little visit to Doug Ramsey aka Cypher of the X-Men, aka the guy who can talk to anything and read any language.
A bit more crude humor-wise, but character development is always welcomed. I’ll give it a 4 out of 5.
All-New X-Factor #4 Review
Its comic book day today and thus it’s also time for my reviews, with the first of the day being All-New X-Factor #4.
The comic picks up where we last left off, with Danger being freed and subsequently deciding to go the usual evil robot route of killing everyone present after she’s dealt with her captor. Gambit tries to reason with her, but she claims she doesn’t know who he is and blasts him with a rocket punch before looking to find Nil gone. He’s fleeing the scene, passing by Jean-Luc as the building explodes and leaves the guy to the mercy of the angry robot.
Gambit intervenes to save Jean-Luc, while Quicksilver saves him. Danger then catches up to Nil, with it being revealed he took her memory from her and offers to give them back. She decides to go without them as long as she gets to kill him, but Quicksilver once again intervenes to save the guy and Danger decides to take off the kid gloves by generating Hard-Light holograms to trick Quicksilver into running off of a cliff.
Lorna stops their fall by levitating them and gives Danger one opportunity to surrender, which she refuses. The mistress of magnetism then tears her apart, causing an argument with Gambit since she and he have a difference of opinion on the robot that was trying to kill them. That ends when Danger turns out to have inhabited their plane, which is something that Gambit should have remembered she could do earlier, and opens fire on them.
While Lorna stops the plane, Gambit faces off against a construct of her and tries to reason with her again on the belief that there is still a part of her that remembers their bond. That’s tested when Danger blows apart the escape ship Nil was boarding, subdues Lorna by distracting her with an image of her father rocking his new solo series outfit, and Gambit arrives to stop her from killing the 150 year old technomancer by following Disney’s mandate and kissing her.
It worked, of course. Danger calmed down and they gave her memories back to her. Then the comic ended with Gambit asking her to join X-Factor since she had nowhere to go, much to Lorna’s displeasure.
Okay, review time.
I can’t lie. I didn’t really like how the comic issue was resolved. In the first place, the “Kissing cures amnesia’” thing is really played out. They could have done a better job with it. Then again, this was basically an excuse plot so that they could add her to the roster and at least it ended quickly.
Secondly, Danger kept putting off killing them to get to Nil when it would have been in her best interest to simply kill them and go about her way. That’s poorly done, unless they justify it by her programming hindering her from doing so or at least show that she had fragments of memories whenever it came up. If the villains aren’t going to actually kill off the characters, or make a solid attempt, then they shouldn’t say so.
In the end, I can only give this an average score of 3 out of 5.
Magneto #1 Review
Something violent to wash down the aftertaste of this week’s Uncanny X-Men
The Master of Magnetism has struck out on his own and I’ll be following along in the path of destruction he has laid out as we review the first issue of the Magneto solo series.
The story starts in Cape Girardean, Missouri, where some unfortunate barista is having the pleasure of being questioned about the murder that transpired moments ago. And when I say murder, I mean the victim got skewered by sign posts through his mouth until he was pinned to the ground. The barista states that the assassin knew his routine and had a brief discussion before he ripped the fillings out of the victim’s mouth, threw him into the street, and then replaced them with said sign posts, and that for this guy killing was like autopilot.
We then go to Kansas, where Magneto contemplates his circumstances in the motel. He knows he’s got a one-way trip to hell, but right now what he’s doing is for the greater good of mutants and so his actions are all that matters. This is shown in a minor flashback to when he met the victim of the murder, who contributed to many of the Anti-Mutant organizations even if he never once pulled the trigger himself. Magneto made him pay for what he did in the past by taking away his future and he would do the same for others.
It’s then a maid arrives and gives him some newspapers that he asked for. He can tell she knows the name he’s given her is an alias and that he’s dangerous, but very few people know what Magneto looks like without the helmet. Still, he makes sure to tip her very well. Never let it be said he was mean to the help.
He then goes to his poster board map, which outlines where he’s tracking down the enemies of mutants. He’s lower on resources than before, going from some of the most sophisticated tech to old laptops and newspaper clippings, but he’s still managed to stay out of the hands of SHIELD and those who would be interested in him. SHIELD’s gone as far as to place fake reports of attacks on mutants to draw him out, but he can tell real from fake and figures they won’t take him seriously until he hits a target too big to ignore.
Until then he focuses on his next target, in Mountain Air, California. It took him awhile to get there since he was flying under the radar, and while tracking the killer of three mutants was easy enough he didn’t expect him to turn himself in. Magneto acknowledges that he’s jailed, but thinks that’s too little of a punishment and not nearly severe enough for the grimness of his crime.
So he strolls into a police station and calmly calls forth all the metal he can to clear out the cops while reforming a helmet to match the rocking black motif he’s got going on. I doubt it’ll offer him psychic protection like the normal one does, but it’s the image that counts. After taking care of the police in the way, he confronts the killer who seems frightful and wants him to leave, even shocked that he murdered someone. Then the freaky stuff happens.
His chest tears open, his arms twist into weaponry, and he opens fire upon Magneto. He’s a poor-man’s version of the Omega Sentinel, a human turned into a death machine. Magneto puts him out of his misery by ripping the machinery away, leaving him dying and in pain.
In the man’s final moments Magneto asks who turned him into that monster, realizing he was as much of a victim as those he killed. He gets a location and relates to his pain of being unable to stop himself like he was on autopilot. And then he swears to find the ones responsible for this and make them pay as well as the first issue ends.
Okay, review time.
Now, this was a good start overall. The plot picks up some time after Magneto dropped a building on Mystique and flew off, so we’re catching up on what he’s like after doing this for some time. There’s no time wasted in-between and we get straight to the grittiness that’s evident in the artwork.
Character-wise, I felt Magneto was spot on. He’s always had mutants’ best interest at heart and punishes those who deserved it for endangering the species. While he’s had moments where he was a flat-out villain, the current version of him tries not to overdo the killing of innocents or straight-up human bashing. You could see it on his face in the final page that he felt bad about it, but there was really little choice in the matter…that being said, if you try to lynch him after he saves your ass from a train wreck, he will drop all the wreckage on you.
I can’t really think of any faults to the story for the opening of the series and it was a decent read, so I’m giving Magneto #1 (2014) a perfect 5 out of 5.
Uncanny X-Men #18 Review
Fair Warning: This Review Contains Heavy Swearing
…Yeah, I can’t say I’m enthusiastic about this art or issue but I’ve been reviewing the series for a minute and that means I write about the good and the bad. And boy was there a lot of bad in Issue #18 of Uncanny X-Men. So I going to do this, but it’s going to be short and I will be using many, many swear words.
The story begins with the NXS kids and staff returning from somewhere in what appears to be the Blackbird, sometime after the botched Tabula Rasa training mission judging from how they say Tempus has been nagging on Cyclops to take Hijack back into their group for some time. You wouldn’t know time had passed given that her hair is short again while Phoebe’s is missing a distinctive shade of red. Yeah, if I didn’t have enough issues with the art before, I’m going to bitch about that later on. Anyway, it’s the aftermath of the beginning of the Trial of Jean Grey event and as such they find the All New X-Men group gone and the flashbacks begin.
The first one starts with two weeks ago, where Cyclops is training with his broken powers when Magik decides to bring Kitty to meet with him and then goes to hold the rest of the NXS back so they don’t interfere while the two come to terms with themselves. Kitty pretty much puts her fingers inside his head and threatens to kill him by un-phasing just enough for it to damage his brain. Arguments that have already been fucking discussed get brought up again, which understandable given it is a flashback to before BotA, and they whine about it for a minute until he asks her what she needs, which we already knew was a place to stay with the Teenage Original 5 X-Men.
Then, a week later, they pick up with the O5 arriving and some of the worst scenes in the series with Emma Frost bitching about bringing teenage Jean Grey to stay with them. And then the scene between Cyclops and Teen Jean and Teen Cyclops was…lackluster. It was not only short, but what should have been an emotional session that tugged at my heartstrings was a waste of three pages.
Back in the present they wonder what steps they should take next. These range from securing a space-craft and going after them, trusting them to make it on their own and so on. It then ends with Cyclops firing into the sky.
Okay, review time…
What. The. Hell?
Leaving aside the fact that this art is not my cup of tea—I mean come on, the continuity errors with Eva and Phoebes’ appearances, the lack of eyes some times, the horrendous expressions, and the sheer amount of wasted space was something that spits in the face of those who bought the comic—what is wrong with the writer?
Having Eva whining about Hijack twelve times like a little girl? Come on now, you can do better when you come from the future. Given some legitimate reasons like if he goes rogue or something, and then take Cyclops, Emma, Magik, and the Stepford sisters, into a private room and do that psychic projection thing that they did in Battle of the Atom so they have a leg up on what’s going down.
And then Emma? What was this? She was practically cordial to her teenage-rival in Battle of the Atom and to this damn point in this series. Granted the moment she saw an adult Jean Grey she tried to gouge out her eyes, but we all knew that was coming. Being so childish and saying she would bring a baby Colossus to their time and see how they liked it…that doesn’t make any sense coming from the former White Queen and Headmistress of the X-Men.
And then the reunion between Cyclops, Jeen, and Tyke? Short, inconclusive, and a waste of three pages like I said prior. This could have gone a lot better, and I mean that in every sense of the word.
And then the plot? Wasted. We just got one team member kicked off, one sent to the future or past and back, and a looming confrontation with SHIELD…and you give me this piece of garbage, Marvel? The majority of the issue covered the prelude and aftermath of the ANXM kids coming to the school. They turned what should have been inserted directly after that waste of time and money that was the most useless crossover of the year, Battle of the Atom, into a goddamn filler piece that does little to nothing and keeps away from the meat of the good stuff. And there was no damn closure at the end at that.
This issue…words do not begin to describe how disappointed I am. People were already whining Cyclops’ revolution was taking too long, and you put useless filler that would have been better several issues ago in with bad art? Fuck you, Marvel, for adding to the problem when I legitimately like the series.
This Issue is getting a 1 out of 5.
Uncanny X-Men #17 Review
Stuff Happens. Important Stuff with the Kids.
At this point I’m starting to think that the NXS kids deserve their own side series like Wolverine’s do. But then I think about that travesty and decide this way better as I review Issue #17 of Uncanny X-Men…although I will admit the one about Toad was a good one.
The issue begins with the kids being dropped off in a strange landscape and left there with no instructions by Magik. Given that she can teleport across time and space, it’s natural to assume that they may not even be on earth, but each comes up with their own theory as to where they are and that they are being tested. Also it appears that Phoebe has dyed her hair red like she said she wanted back after Irma went black.
Anyway, Hijack reveals he kept his cellphone and whips it out. They tell him Cyclops said they can be tracked by them, but he states he couldn’t break his contract so he kept it and then states they’re in Montana. They are then split apart by a very large creature with jagged teeth and a deafening roar.
Eva, who has a very potty mouth upon being surprised, goes with Fabio and correctly guesses its training to see how they deal with unpredictable situations. That includes her and Fabio being surprised again by some Ostrich-dinosaur thing that chokes of Fabio’s goldballs (sorry for the phrasing) and keels over, but not before Eva has vanished in her Time Bubble and is nowhere to be seen.
With Phoebe and Irma, they have to put up with Triage screaming like a little girl because they ended up in a cave with a spider-slug thing the size of his fist. I will never let him live this down, but since the girls are trying to hide Irma does the mind manipulation thing they did in Limbo to make him brave. He seems to like it, but that might because he and Irma clearly are developing something and having a pretty girl in your head doesn’t sound too bad as long as you can stop thinking about dirty thoughts every few minutes. It worked for Cyclops and Emma, if you ignore she took advantage of his vulnerability while with Jean and then Jean hooked them up to avoid a bad future from the grave…Yeah, he might want to be careful in the long run. Anyway, Fabio finds them, but Eva is still nowhere to be seen.
We then skip to Benjamin, Hijack, and Celeste hiding. She explains they are in Tabula Rasa, a.k.a the place Archangel blew up and led to the bad future of Uncanny Avengers. She’s giving them an overview of them being in a bubble that will show what the earth will look like well after I’m good and dead when she can sense a mind in the distance. Unfortunately said minds don’t like her and mind-rape her to the point that her sister’s couldn’t hear her and assumed she was dead within their Hive Mind, leaving it to Benjamin to try and reason with them by using his powers to gain some level of trust and understanding and calming them down. It works to an extent, as they touch and read Benjamin’s mind, and they reactivate her brain.
She’s pissed, more than Emma when confronting an Adult Jean Grey, and tries to mentally assault them despite Benjamin stating that they are an evolved species. It goes poorly. But then Eva pops up and traps them in the time bubble.
She looks like she went through hell. Her hair is longer, her clothing are torn, and she looks like she aged a bit. But the first things she does were hug Benjamin as though she hadn’t seen him in a long time, tell Celeste not to tell anyone anything about what she gleamed from her mind, and kissed Fabio on the forehead. But she became downright hostile to Triage, who only wanted to heal her, and seeing as the two of them were the first of the team to meet up and be friends he must’ve fucked up bad in the future.
Anyway, SHIELD shows up with Nick Fury, Coulson, Fucking Hawkeye, and Spider-Woman because of Hijack’s phone. Yeah, he fucked up. They want Cyclops, the big fish, not the small minnows and tell them to put their hands up.
The Stepford Sisters can’t affect them because SHIELD regularly has anti-telepathy equipment given their line of work. Now Eva could probably take them again, but Hijack turns their fancy gear on them. It’s then that Magik teleports them out and back to their base.
Cyclops is pissed off. It was a field test to see how they reacted, and most of them passed with flying colors. Even Fabio, who stumbled his way into a victory. While I doubt Celeste and Triage did as well, the only one to outright fail was Hijack.
They were in the most unexplored place on the planet and SHIELD tracked them down in 15 minutes, because of his cellphone at that, and he revealed his power. Next time SHIELD is going to be prepared for it like they were with the Stepford Sisters. Cyclops can’t have that so they drop him off at his old place, which is bad when you remember what happened to Fabio and that Mystique will most likely be the one talking to him with that silver tongue of hers to turn him evil, and the issue ends.
Okay, review time.
First off, considering that Kitty was in the background during that lecture I’m assuming this is before the Trial of Jean Grey. Second off, according to rumors next issue revolves around Cyclops, Teen!Cyclops, the aftermath of this chapter, and Tempus’ crush on him.
While I want to believe she went to a bad future and took some training from hell, there is a chance that the writers aged her so they could pair her with Cyclops if what I’m hearing about her romance for him coming into play. You can’t blame the young girl either for the crush. He’s hot enough that Pixie, Irma (for a while), and even the teenage host of Lady Deathstrike in X-Men #11 wants him.
Teenage girls find him hot, to the extent even his teen version was getting some play before BOTA, but while Cyclops is a lot of things, and most of them positives with a spattering of negatives, he’s not skeezy enough to have a relationship with her like that. Even though he did meet her mother already, and she was his first rescue, and so on. That’s Wolverine’s department.
Not to mention, whenever she was at clearly traumatized her. I mean, getting lost in time is mandatory for an X-Men with powers remotely close to hers. But if there is any luck she learned more about her powers and will serve as the leader of the team behind the adults.
As for Hijack, I’m conflicted on how to feel because Cyclops was a little harsh, but he has a point since they stated he warned the idiot about the phone thing. It’d be one thing to kick him off the team because he was disobeying an order that was morally wrong, but Hijack admitted the main reason he didn’t toss his phone was because of the damn contract. You’re an X-Man, and a fugitive one at that, fuck the phone contract and worry about the giant-ass robots SHIELD and Helmet-Head keeps sending at you!
Honesty, Cyclops can’t have that sort of reckless behavior right now and was somewhat right to kick him out, despite the benefits his power-set has to offer. If he’d used his phone at the base, they would have been compromised in a hurry. Like Cyclops said, mistakes have killed good X-Men before.
But Hijack knows wayyyy too damn much to be let go if he decides to go traitor and turn them into SHIELD. I don’t normally agree with mind-fuckery, but at least fudge the location of their base in his mind so he can retain his abilities and know how they work without compromising the group. Even if he’s being used as SHIELD bait by some chance, like a couple of people suggest when I lurked in the forums.
The sad thing is that I liked Hijack as he had the potential to be a great character. A victim of prejudice-turned-crusader of their rights without going overboard, a neat power, and as an older member of the team he would have been an excellent big brother figure to the rest of the younger members (barring Benjamin since he’s collage-age). On the other hand, the X-Men are lacking interesting villains and if you can’t join or stay with the team…in the end it really depends on what the storyboard has laid out for Hijack, but this won’t be the last we see of him.
So, between Tempus having aged and gone on her own time travel trauma and Hijack gotten the boot, many things have happened. I’m calling this a must-have issue that will have major effects on the plot, so it gets a 5 out of 5.
All New X-Factor #3 Review
The latest entry in the newest iteration of the X-Factor series is out now and I’m here to review it, no strings attached and my personal opinions abound. So, let’s get straight into it.
The story opens with Havok, brother of Cyclops and figurehead of the failure of a team that is the Avengers Unity squad, playing pool in a bar and getting briefed on Serval and the X-Factor team by his man on the inside. Yeah, no one is really surprised that it’s Quicksilver, what with Gambit pegging him from the moment he walked into Serval., but let’s talk about Havok. Now, if there is one person I dislike more than Wolverine and Captain America whenever they show up in an X-Men book, it’s this sellout right here.
First off, he left Polaris at her wedding for the nurse he was psychically dating while in a coma with the help of her mutant son. Second off, wasn’t he flirting to high-heaven with Wasp in Uncanny Avengers? They have a child together and are married in the upcoming arc, which I know will be retconned soon enough since Cap got disfigured by acid and Marvel can’t have that, but still. Now he claims he wants Quicksilver looking out for her because she’s his girlfriend and she’s nuts, and he uses these exact terms in the same page.
Quicksilver wisely points out that she has no reason to trust him well enough to serve as a mole and she tried to shoot him, but she was drunk and their whole family has issues like…well, every major character in these books. Wolverine kills his kids, the Summers brothers are currently on the opposite sides of the law and don’t get me started on their extended families, do I need to cover anymore? For that reason Havok’s claim that she’ll trust him because they’re blood rings hollow as hell. They wrap it up with Havok also being a deadbeat and Quicksilver saying everyone hates him, which he tends to bring on himself and I think Finesse likes him as a mentor.
We then skip to Serval, aka Google, and learn that Harrison Snow had implanted a nanotech camera in Polaris’ eye while she was sleeping so he sees what she sees. Yes, he violates her privacy like it was a Tuesday for him, but he’s big business. It was probably in her contract under the terms no one reads. Anyway, he learns at that moment they’ve been hacked from the PR head and decides to give his new team a call.
Two members of the team, Polaris and Gambit, are in his new room in the building and playing with his cats that Mystique gave him when Iceman decided to freeze the world over after corralling his ex-girlfriends into a snow cave for their safety, his ice clones claim, in Astonishing X-Men…including Polaris. Anyway, one cat scratches her and she flips out and gets ready to deal with it violently until Gambit snaps her out of it. Okay, maybe she isn’t a paragon of good mental health but I refuse to say Havok was right.
Snow pops up then and takes them down to their server room, where the guy running the place reveals they are being hacked and he knows the location for their team to go deal with it. Gambit notes he’s screwed as the place is the headquarters of his Thieves’ Guild even though it doesn’t pop up on the map. So he and Polaris suit up as Quicksilver arrives (with Gambit correctly claiming he was updating the Avengers about them) and take their shiny new jet out for a spin after it beams them up.
Meanwhile Snow goes to confront last arc’s villain of the week, Hoffman, and recruits him after illegally detaining him. He still has his mutant powers, but his DNA reads human, so naturally the megacorp wants him to work for them. Hoffman signs up when he learns they get benefits, which A.I.M doesn’t I suppose. Must be because they keep getting blown up or attacked…
As the team arrives on location, Gambit come clean that he knows who’s responsible despite the fact that he’s not involved in this one. One of his members is Nil, a technomancer. He uses magic to control computers and such…really, magic for that? Anyway, Nil confesses he was only able to get into Serval by using a new medium for his powers.
It’s Danger, who helped spring Cyclops from prison and hates being locked up and controlled more than anything. So naturally when Polaris springs her she’s too pissed to think about anything but killing everything. Cue fight next issue before she joins the team.
Okay, so while it isn’t an action-based issue it does move the plot along and reveals several key things while introducing a new team member. We learn that Serval is basically any big corporation in Marvel like Roxxon or Alchemax or Oscorp and we learn Quicksilver is a spy, but no real shocker there until his sister finds out and tries to kill him again.
So I’m giving it a 4 out of 5 because the art work still isn’t doing it for me and calling it a review.
All New X-Factor #1-2 Review
Okay, I feel that I need to expand my horizons beyond the big names of Cyclops, Emma Frost, and Wolverine (not a fan of the guy lately). So I’ve decided, after reading the first two chapters of the fourth iteration of X-Factor going under the “Original” name of All-New X-Factor, to start reviewing this series. This review in particular will encompass Issues# 1 -2, which features Gambit, Polaris, and Quicksilver undergoing their first outing as part of the new X-Factor, which is now a corporate superhero team.
So let’s get to it with Issue #1, which opens with two scientists, the one named Hoffman being the important one, giving themselves pats on the back for a good and hard day’s work of torturing some mutant in the name of science. This is the Marvel Universe so that’s expected, but Hoffman seems even more douche-baggish with the sincere way he smiles as he says it’s for the greater good and then goes to get an espresso from Starbucks. That tells you two things, the first of which is that this is normal behavior that he does daily and the second is that he honestly believes what he says. But more on him later as the scene changes to Gambit.
Being one of the premiere thieves of the Marvel Universe, he’s taking to his role to liberate a statue locked into place with a mystic spell after navigating a bunch of laser alarms while hanging from the ceiling. It’s once he gets it that he finds that Wolverine is there and that the owner knew he had tried robbing him since he tripped an alarm made by Tony Stark, which must’ve hurt his ego as much as Logan talking down to him like a child and revealing he knows Gambit is running the Thieves’ Guild. Now, despite his condescending tone Wolverine has a point in that it poses no immediate threat and he is stealing…which is wrong I suppose.
But, if you’ve read Cable and the X-Force, Colossus and Domino successfully did the same with a Hell-hole device that was inside of a secure bank lock-box after releasing demonic hordes. Why these apocalyptic things are even left in one piece escapes me, but I’m with Gambit in that it would be better if the thing disappeared. After all, if some ancient sorcerer comes from three thousand years in the past and knows the spell to activate it, they’re screwed. And since this is the Marvel Universe that will probably happen in a later arc.
After getting dressed down by Wolverine, Gambit goes to a bar to unwind. Said unwinding involves beating the hell out of a bunch of guys saying New Orleans had Hurricane Katrina coming a few years back. We don’t blame him for the ass-kicking in that case, but before he can get another drink Polaris comes up to him and tells him to get a coffee to sober up so they can talk business. When he explains that Wolverine told him to go straight and narrow if he wants to stay at the school and remain a member of the X-Men (which I will point out has nothing to do with one another given the sheer amount of crap they get into illegal or otherwise) she asks him to take a trip with her to Virginia.
While on the private jet she explains she’s working with Serval Industries, a rising company that specializes in electronics and such. There’s a minor incident when someone launches a missile at the jet, but Polaris is the Mistress of Magnetism for a reason and it goes boom with a snap of her fingers. She then explains that Serval is basically Marvel’s version of Google and they have enemies, but since they help people she’s working for them as a member of their new corporate team, X-Factor, the name for which was bought from the previous owner Jamie Madrox (Multiple Man) by Harrison Snow, the CEO of Serval, at Linda Kwan’s insistence as their PR person.
Now, this guy is smooth as silk but gives you that greasy feeling that Gambit picks up on and asks flat out if he’s evil. He laughs, not really denying it, but he wants Gambit on the team because Polaris recommended him. He then reveals Quicksilver, Polaris’ half-brother, wanted to join to look after her upon learning they got Polaris out of jail after she tried to shoot him and trashed a bar while drunk. Yeah, that doesn’t go over well.
We can clearly see that Quicksilver isn’t the most wanted person around by Polaris or Gambit, with one claiming he’s spying on them for the Avengers, which he denies (although the preview for issue #3 says otherwise) and the other thinking he’s evil, which he denies again. But ultimately Polaris decides to give him a chance. And it’s just in time as Harrison sends them on their first mission to deal with Hoffman, who it turns out is a biologist who has been employed by some A.I.M looking dudes and he wants them to go and do what they do best when it comes to heroes and shady organizations.
So they put on some snazzy outfits and go in destroying stuff to rescue the kidnapped victims. Gambit doesn’t really buy the timing and the excuse Harrison gave him for having them do this, but he’s done worse for less and gives it a go. The team arrives just as Hoffman is about to vivisect Fatale and he is ecstatic at more mutants arriving since they would be more test subjects.
So ends Issue #1.
Going straight into Issue #2, it picks up with Hoffman going to field test his research against the intruding mutants and unlocks a doorway to two mutants who are locked up in giant pods and clearly dislike the man, what with the torture and all. It then skips to our heroes being split apart and Polaris deciding to just trash the place in a fit of rage until she ends up where Fatale is. Gambit somehow escapes the standard Fall-into-Furnace trap with a well-placed charged card only to find himself at gun point. Quicksilver shows up about then and takes their guns away, but the chumps prove to be smarter than the average mooks as they have wrist mounted spares built into their bracelets. It doesn’t help as Quicksilver dodges the bullets and Gambit puts them down with another charged card.
On the subject of Polaris, she’s with Fatale who reveals Quicksilver gave her and the other two who were captured their powers back after M-Day but turned them into living bombs. The only reason they didn’t blow up was because they were frozen in time in another dimension and then pulled out of it by Hoffman, who siphoned off the excess energy. We then cut to Hoffman following up on that and getting ready to use that energy for himself to turn into an energy monster.
Cue the boss fight where Hoffman claims the mutants didn’t know the potential of their abilities or how to manipulate them and then claims that it was because of this that they let the world treat them like dirt and he can do it so much better than they can. Yet, for all that bragging, Gambit and Quicksilver put him down with an charged card inside his ear in less than five pages without a scratch. Pathetic.
Naturally the mutants he tortured want to finish him after he goes night-night, but they turn their hatred towards Quicksilver and make it clear they will get even for what he did to him one day. But that’s a story for another day as the comic ends.
Okay, review time.
Now art-wise I’ve seen better and it’s just not my style how the artist has drawn the series, but it’s still good enough for me to understand what’s going on. Plot-wise, it’s a good opening and doesn’t take forever like some other series that will remain nameless. On the minor characters, Hoffman is an affably evil douche who you find charming and want to throttle at the same time, Harrison is clearly shady but he’s big business so that comes with the territory, and it’s pretty clear Fatale, Abyss, and Reaper have a bone to pick with Quicksilver and will show up later as antagonists. The major characters interact with one another in an interesting manner, with Gambit and Polaris being rather close while no one really likes Quicksilver, but they do work well enough for a first mission with no real hiccups.
So I give both issues a 4 out of 5, as it is interesting but the artwork leaves a lot to be desired.
Uncanny X-Men #16 Review
Don’t do drugs kids, or Magneto gets angry!
Everyone else has had some character development on the staff somewhat, but not old Mags. So we get this lead up into his own upcoming series in Issue #16 of Uncanny X-Men.
The issue begins with a follow-up Pro-Mutant rally at the same campus that the Blockbuster Sentinel ran amok in, where Magneto is having a vivid daydream of slaughtering them left and right. He’s pissed off because until now they’ve done nothing while his people have suffered and their problems comes from humans. He’s so pissed off he bites his lip until blood comes out and he snaps back to reality, where Agent Dazzler (Mystique) meets with him.
As usual she knows nothing, he doesn’t trust her, but then she starts cross analyzing him and states that what the world is focusing on is Scott and no one really paid much mind to him. She basically baits him into going to Madripoor, where a mutant suddenly runs the show and has taken over. Naturally, his interest is peaked so he dons a suave hat and goes on vacation here.
If you don’t know, Madripoor is essentially a hellhole in the Marvel Universe. That’s saying something. Even more so when we see some kids going to get Mutant Growth Hormone (drugs) from a bar while some dude is getting his ass beat on the street.
Mags walks into the Bar and starts asking around for some info after a drink. They don’t take to kindly to that and the bartender cracks him over the head with a baseball bat and tells them to take him out back and gut him. Now, at this point they didn’t know it was Mags they were screwing with, so he makes it clear by controlling their guns and knives and beating the hell out of them until they tell him to go to the Hydra Tower.
There he runs into The Blob, Sabertooth, Silver Samurai, and the new Queen of Madripoor, Dazzler. Well, at least for a few seconds before she dropped the disguise and shows she’s Mystique. She wants to offer him a seat at the table, since he’s given them a chance, but he brings up the MGH that’s on the streets. While she says it was all in play before she got there, and to be fair it probably was given the place, he says that while Charles wanted co-existence and he wanted them to be the dominant species, this ain’t going to fly since kids and drugs don’t work for either.
Magneto flips his lid, has Silver Samurai stab Mystique, whip out bullets that he controls and basically tears through everyone and brings down the building. Now, Mystique and Sabertooth will probably be fine, but it makes a point. He’s clearly unhappy with that place and leaves, but he doesn’t return to NXS and the issue ends with a prompt saying to check him out in his own Solo series.
…What can I say, this issue was excellent. Mags showed that what Mystique had been building up was not what he had in mind. They weren’t the dominant species or co-existing, but wallowing in the waste of drugs and sin. He wants the mutant race to flourish and it won’t as long as MGH and Sentinels are floating around, so he’s going off to do something.
A must-have issue, it gets a 5 out of 5.
Uncanny X-Men #15.INH Review
Filler ahoy!
It’s that time again, where we take a look into Cyclop’s side of things in the X-Men world, and so we dive right into Issue #15 of Uncanny X-Men that also serves as a tie-in for Inhumanity.
The issue begins with Magik having fallen asleep during a training session with Doctor Strange in the past, before that whole AvX fall-out that made the Avengers unrepentant douche-bags. She nearly guts him for waking her up and apologizes for it, claiming it has been a stressful time for her and she’d tell him more, but she shouldn’t. He’s surprisingly cool with it as long as the world is still turning, although his assistant wants to know if he’s still around and kicking in the future.
When she returns back to her time the girl students have assembled and essentially butter her up for a girl’s nights out because they need to convince Emma and she’s the only one who can do it without risking the wrath of the former White Queen. They find Emma sleeping like a toddler, which infuriates her, but the mention of shopping manages to change her tune until one of her daughters reminds her they don’t have money.
Now, remember they joked about robbing that Casino last issue? Yeah, I don’t think they were joking cause she has a dufflebag full of money. She decides to drag along Kitty as well since she hasn’t changed clothes in ages, who resists until Jean guilts her into it and they leave for shopping in Paris.
After an off-screen spree they get a bite to eat and Tempus asks why the Stepford Sisters hate Jean. Jean states its because of her future self and really just Celeste emulating her mother, who has enough class to not mentally bully a teenage Jean Grey. It nearly starts a psychic cat-fight when Emma notes something is wrong and they leave to go check it out.
After the Stepford Sisters mentally disperse the crowd we get a basic outline of the Inhuman situation. Basically, during Infinity this mist spread around the world and cocooned people who had Inhuman DNA. Simply puy, they’re mutants but with different roots coming from the Kree rather than Celestials or something and they wake up with powers and changed appearances once the cocoon hatches.
This guy wakes up with no clue to his situation until he turns out to be an anti-mutant bigot (really, who isn’t this week) and knocks them out with his power after learning who they were, before passing out himself. AIM then shows up to kidnap him before SHIELD gets there, but leaves the mutants alone and states they tend to kill themselves off against one another. The girls wake up and disperse the police when Emma calls the night over.
Jean wonders what this means for mutants, while Irma thinks that its good since the blame will get shifted onto the Inhumans rather than mutants. Its easier to blame new minorities for their problems, which Emma points out. But Jean states how can they tell the difference at a glance and the issue ends with Emma commenting things just got complicated.
Yeah, I’m not too hot about the Inhuman insert, but it was a nice casual issue. Not really worth buying unless you’re looking to complete a set, but not too bad. It gets a 3 out of 5.
Uncanny X-Men #14 Review
Time for Benjamin to become more than wallpaper.
Cyclops’ revolutionary team has an assortment of powers among their new recruits, but out of all of them the one who lacks any development to them or his power is Benjamin Deeds. He’s been wallpaper up to this point, useless in general. It’s time to change that and who better to do it than the only member of the team with a teaching degree, Emma Frost.
Issue #14 begins with a training session taking place after Battle of the Atom, but before the O5 X-Men and Kitty get there. It’s basically a requirement of the X-Men to be able to fight and endure, so having them climb a rocky mountain or hill or whatever in the rain is no surprise. Along the way they discuss how things are going to go down when the O5 get here, with Emma taking shots at Scott throughout the training session, when Benjamin is the last to reach the top and complains about it.
Cyclops, in a rather dickish but accurate move, points out he needs training more than the rest as his powers have no known combat usage. He then hits him and tells him to hit back, which he fails to do so and gets flipped and chewed out with the whole ‘You are not ready’ point. After a shower and an attempt at a pep talk by Triage, he returns to his room to find Emma there and dressed in something that I’d expect Magik to be wearing.
Emma doesn’t need telepathy to read his mind: His powers aren’t as openly awesome as the others, he doesn’t feel like he belongs, he doesn’t know what to push for because he doesn’t know what he can offer. So she pressures him and notices that Benjamin’s powers are more than transformation, but has an effect that makes you feel good about everything as long as he’s around. Thus she decides to take him out for a night.
Magik joins the pair and takes them to Atlantic City, where she tells him to chat up a random girl. He says he’s gay, but I’m not sure he’s serious given that he seems to constantly stare at Magik’s ass. Either way, the attempt goes poorly and he’s forced to flee while Magik notes Emma is being more patient and she claims its Character Development.
In order to elude capture Benjamin tries again and this time he’s more successful, chatting up a girl and shifting his hair to match her own. Emma has him do it more while sending word to Cyclops and we get a montage of him bonding with a variety of people before she has Magik drag him to the Financial District to deliver a letter. He gets it done, but it nearly gets him arrested since she sent him into a SHIELD compound and had him deliver Cyclops’ declaration of war.
Note this type of place has very high security and he just walked up to the big brass. Assassination potential very high. Magik saves him and he gets a pat on the back from the big man himself, stating its time he got himself a Mutant Name.
Now, this issue was filler to me, but character development is always welcomed. At first I thought the guy was going to be another Mystique, which isn’t a bad thing, but he can be more. His ability screws over recording devices and charms people, in addition to a level of transformation. He’s an infiltration expert, a spy in the making, and thus useful.
Despite lacking the violence I love, it gets a 4 out of 5.
Battle of the Atom Part 10 Review
Well, this has been a waste of two months.
Yeah, I can honestly say I’m glad this is over and I will sum it up in a single review, so keep reading for my review of Battle of the Atom Part 10 and closing thoughts.
It starts with a shower of missiles from above as Xorna and Xavier have somehow telekinetically overridden SHIELD’s safeguards to get them to unleash their payloads upon the gathering. This is the first problem. Telekinesis does not work that way. I could understand them mind-controlling some chumps into firing everything or if one of them had Technopathy, but this was just stupid.
While the X-Men try to stop the rain and Present Beast makes the vow never to Time Travel again, which will be broken in a year or two tops, they also seemed to have forgotten that Magik’s mutant ability is Teleportation and just because she passed on her Soulsword doesn’t mean Colossus can do it too. Either way the missiles don’t explode, leaving Maria Hill to wonder just what the hell they shot and discovering that its…
Sentinels.
Now, this comes as no surprise as SHIELD has been dicey in general. But for the Commander to not know that every Helicarrier has these damn things on it or know they were producing it in this number is fucking ridiculous and screams corruption and incompetents. On top of that, these Sentinels have had magic applied to them so that the future Sorcerer Supreme couldn’t strip away or something. Since when does SHIELD even have a sorcerer department?
The only good thing about it is they killed Future Beast, after which the fighting just adds in a third party. Not only do Cyclops’ and Wolverine’s teams squabble like children, but Future Jubilee bites despite being an immortal regenerating vampire and Future Colossus gets his brain mind-crushed by Xavier. This pisses off Magik into her evil-alter ego, who now has a legitimate reason to kill the psychic douche and everyone is bitching and whining about it rather than letting her finish him off before he causes more trouble.
Xorna Jean blames Wolverine and Cyclops for this entire fiasco because of the event that led to their Schism. Wolverine continues to annoy me throughout the entire fight that has her kicking their asses with psychic fire that I’m assuming she has spontaneous developed, until the O5 X-Men show up and get their asses kicked too. It only ends when she can’t control her powers and explodes, giving everyone enough time to flee as SHIELD finally gets their shit together.
Then comes the Epilogues where Present Iceman has made himself a douche before Wolverine takes over for him. While both sides agree that SHIELD can’t be trusted, which is a damn given at any point and time, Wolverine tries to take the high-ground again in a speech that, by all means, establishes that he’s a douche every day he wakes up. At this point, when they should be mending bridges, his ass has just bombed them all over again and none of the sensible X-Men on his side countered this.
Then we skip to Kymera mentioning she was tasked with tracking the Brotherhood, Adult Shogo and Present Jubilee having a moment, and Magik bidding her dead brother, Future Colossus, a final good-bye. That night Kitty decides to jump ship to Cyclops’ school and takes the O5 with her.
Now, while I expected and am pleased by this, her reasons are fairly shallow and not expressed deeply beyond a sense of betrayal. Her breakup with Bobby, which last I checked shouldn’t have even been a relationship after that date night, came off as vague in that you get the feeling a writer just wanted it to stop and made her look better by derailing Iceman for a few pages. She had plenty of ammo for quitting, I might add, but she chooses the weakest of reasons and, for some reason, Rachel didn’t join her despite all their moments this event.
I’m going to sum up both this issue and event in two words: EPIC FAIL.
The event dragged on for twice as long as it should have. Most issues repeated things that have been said and established that the feud between schools refuses to die, with Wolverine acting like he’s in the damn right and Cyclops is a murdering psychopath. What happened to the Wolverine in AvsX Consequences who understood him at the end, even if he hated him? And don’t get me started on the shit with Storm and Iceman, its like the story writers want Wolverine and his X-Men to seem like the bad guys.
And what the hell happened to Molly?
The only good thing is that Kitty has joined Cyclops’ team with the O5 and we have some actual antagonists in the form of the evil Xavier outside X-Men Legacy. Whoever penned this ought to be a damn shame for wasting the X-Men anniversary and two months of every poor soul who read it’s time.
This issue and event get 2 out of 5.
Battle of the Atom Part 9 (Woverine and the X-Men #37) Review
The chapter where everyone fights.
Okay, so issue #9 of Battle of the Atom is out and here’s the subsequent review.
It begins after Cyclops popped into the room with X-Men aplenty in tow, only to end up in a white room in his mind and face-to-face with Xorna Jean. Being Cyclops and her being a telepath and Jean, what happens next is expected. She kisses him and he notes she’s not his Jean because she’s a better kisser. Oh Cyclops, really…
Snapping back to reality we learn Xorna Jean and her Brotherhood left during that time frame. Emma calls Cyclops out on Jean being in his head, but she no longer has an all-access pass so I can add that up to jealousy, while Future Phoenix warns him not to let her get in his head again since he has no idea what she’s capable of. Cyclops tries to order them to start tracking the Brotherhood down when not-dead Wolverine shows up because Wiccan saved his ass.
He also swears off sex since he got gutted by his son with Mystique (which is going to be hell to explain when Kurt comes back) but considering Storm is his current partner I doubt that’s happening.
After the usual meet and greet and blame-game, with tantalizing hints that something won’t let the O5 go back and yet no answer because Kymera reports Deadpool is dead, we skip to the Brotherhood. They can’t do what they set out to do, and Future Xavier ends up paralyzed like his grandfather, so Future Beast has decided to skip to Plan B. Teen Jean once again remains vague on what she saw, because the writers keep dragging the mystery out, and they land at Cape Citadel and start raising hell.
This naturally gets the attention of SHIELD and Maria Hill, who really should have taken that vacation Cyclops had Magik send her on. Back at the school Future Phoenix is trolling his younger counterpart and Wolverine is being a hypocrite when they get the message too. Thus begins a battle royale where we have everyone throwing down.
It is revealed that Ice Hulk is basically an Ice Clone that gained a little sentience and serves Xorna Jean that they can’t reabsorb, Kymera is Storm’s daughter, and Magik finds her badass future brother awesome. Eventually the fighting stops when SHIELD arrives and Dazzler (Mystique) is antagonizing Maria into launching the tear gas while she borders on another breakdown. Xorna Jean then has all the Helicarriers fire missiles on the gathering of mutants and then snaps a witty line as the issue ends.Now, unless those missiles reveal that they’ve been building Sentinels somewhere on that base, I can’t find any logic in what they were planning on doing here. More than anything I’m tired of the damn subterfuge. Can we get some straight answers for once, it’s not like the future is going to remain the same once they go back.
It gets a 3 out of 5.
Twilit Dreams Circle 