Minifixation - Update 06/03/18

Another round-up of recent reviews! At last I have a Banshee (meaning I have to update all the reviews bemoaning the lack of Banshee), plus there's updated comic-based Black Widow and Tigra figures and I've updated my homemade Shocker. The imminence of Infinity War means some guesses at Steve Rogers, the Black Widow and Iron Man, while also from the Marvel Multiverse comes a suited versions Whiplash and Killmonger plus Peggy Carter as Captain America. DC gets a new updated Flash, Saint Walker, Indigo-1, Black Hand, Parallax, and Golden Age Reverse-Flash. The Arrowverse finally gets a Huntress and an Overgirl, while from the DC animated universe there's the Justice Lord Batman; Bats also gets an Orange Lantern version.

Comic Review - X-Men Legacy Vol 1: Prodigal

Legion is one of those characters that dropped off my own mental map at some point - obviously I remember "LeqionQuest", though now I think about it I mainly remember "The Age of Apocalypse" and not much of the catalyst story beyond the Legion killing Professor X in the past bit. I couldn't tell you what happened to Legion, a.k.a Charles Xavier's son David Haller, in the intervening years so just have to take the Marvel NOW book featuring him as I find it.

Comic Review - Avengers vs X-Men

To shake up the status quo of the Marvel Universe ahead of the Marvel NOW! relaunch strategy the company naturally went for a big mad event and decided to pit its' two premiere teams against each other. Both have evolved considerably since I last properly read the titles. The Avengers have gone from being just another superteam that spent long periods struggling to live up to the Earth's Mightiest title to an all-star Justice League type roster of the company's premiere heroes while the X-Men have become more of a political collective, given their own island Utopia. Off-panel as well there have been some changes to the stats quo as well - to whit that the box office success of the heavily Avengers-centric Marvel Universe has turned what was a single book that for vast chunks of the preceding decades was kept ticking over out of seeming obligation has become the hub around which Marvel's comics arm rotates. Conversely, the X-Men film franchise was (until a recent takeover) owned by dastardly evil empire Fox, who refused to hand over the rights they'd paid for. While mutant sales are strong Marvel have subtly done what they can to try and position their books as of secondary concern and by the time AvX was published the pressure was becoming more overt.

[CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR ANYONE ELSE FIVE YEARS BEHIND]

Minifigures: X-Men, Part 2 - All-New! All-Different!

Of course, famously the original X-Men were something of a damp squib and after a few years the title turned into a reprint book. However, Stan Lee was never one to accept the unpopularity of his creations (see: Namor) and in 1975 Giant-Size X-Men #1 launched with a new-look team and would kick off an era of huge popularity for the mutants that has continued since. Sadly not all of the new team have yet been represented by Minifigures, unofficial or otherwise - the complex designs for Banshee (with so much of his classic look dependent on his unusual cape) and Sunfire (with his unique helmet) currently being impossible to find. Which leaves...

Minifigures: X-Men, Part 1 - The Originals

As touched on elsewhere on this blog, now that Marvel are part of Disney they're not too fond of the deals made a decade or so before where the rights to some of their most popular properties were sold off to other studios. While they wait for rights to revert they've indulged in various cockblocking exercises to try and prevent these outsourced films from being successful, both to limit the competition to their own films and to try and make them flop so the process of rights reverting to Disney (typically after a certain amount of time has passed without new product, as in the case of Daredevil). This extended to actually taking Silver Age flagship Fantastic Four out of print when Josh Trank's reboot film came out. While a deal has been reached with Columbia for Spider-Man the undoubted thorn in their side is Fox's X-Men franchise, currently sitting at ten films and if anything getting more popular. While they'd never dare take the X-Men family of books out of print they have lend on licencees to avoid doing what amounts to promotion for their rivals, most notably Lego.

Comic Review: X-Men - X-Tinction Agenda

PUBLISHER: MARVEL (1990-1991)
WRITERS: CHRIS CLAREMONT, LOUISE SIMONSON
ARTISTS: JIM LEE, ROB LIEFIELD, JON BOGDANOVE

This is it, the progenitor, the prototype, the big daddy - the first real mutant crossover, the harbinger of "X-Cutioner's Song", "Fatal Attractions", "Age of Apocalypse" and "Onslaught". Marvel's mutant titles had done events before, starting with "Fall of the Mutants" in 1988 and "Inferno" the following year but for those each title had remained relatively self-contained. But 1990's "X-Tinction Agenda" featured a full flow of three issues of the three books with a constantly shifting cast; if you didn't buy all nine issues involved you would not have a clue what was happening and while each title would subtly focus ever so slightly on the home team it was only as part of an ongoing plot.

Minifigures - Storm (Film Version)

As a character introduced some forty years ago Storm's had a chequered career; ups have included being a black female superhero of considerable standing and minimal stereotyping and long stints as X-Men leader (including some of the finest stories of the eighties); against that there have been some disappointing moments such as a random regression to a child which went on far too long, the indignity of getting dropped down to X-Treme X-Men along with all the other unfashionable Chris Claremont characters and being pensioned off to marry the Black Panther on the grounds that she was African. She's also not had the best time in the films either, where she was initially played by Halle Berry. Despite Berry's standing being (inexplicably) high at the time and for a few years afterwards she never really did much and is mainly remembered for spouting one of the outright worst lines in cinema history courtesy of Joss Whedon. For X-Men - Apocalypse, which I have yet to see (my watchlist is a complicated and masochistic affair) theere is a kernel of hope, however, with the character recast and played by the young Alexandra Shipp, who couldn't really be any worse than poor old Halle.

Apocalypse again received a Lego blackout so as not to dilute the dollars Disney were reaping from Civil War sets but again customisers and bootleggers came to the rescue and have put out most of the main cast. Storm had enjoyed an official Minifigure previously in a retro-themed 2014 set that's largely faithful to the seventies look but the updated version is entirely unofficial. But it looks great, based on the excellent look of the Shipp version - but without the teenage thing as all Minifigures generally look roughly the same age. It's always a good sign when Storm has a mohawk anyway and it's nicely rendered here even if the rest of the costume is nothing like the fantastic eighties New Wave look Ororo had.

It's not uninteresting either, well-rendered in black with silver highlights, it just fits into the whole problem with the Fox X-Men series of most of the costumes being a bit similar without anyone having the guts to go for the full-on uniforms seen early in the title's life or under Grant Morrison. The permanent snarl is also perhaps a bit much but sadly there are very few black female characters with Minifigures to do a headswap with. Overall though it's an interesting figure for the visual variety of the punky head on a female character compared to all the traditional shoulder-length styles and a well-rendered version of the live action look.

Comic Review: Counter-X - Generation X #63-75

PUBLISHER: MARVEL, 2000-2001
WRITERS: WARREN ELLIS, BRIAN WOOD
ARTISTS: STEVE PUGH, RON LIM

Having got the Heroes Reborn monkey off my back I've decided to go for another Marvel event that I loved back in the day, though I don't hate this one so it could be interesting. In the summer of 2000 Marvel decided to do a line-wide revamp for the X-Men titles under the Revolution event, which simply moved everything forwards six months to free the titles of clutter. Sadly, the main prongs of the strategy were the return of Chris Claremont to Uncanny X-Men and X-Men; a year later he was sent off to the purgatory of X-Treme X-Men while Grant Morrison saved the main title. Anyway. Part of the plan was to try and do something with what had become a bloated family of titles and part of it involved giving three of the most stagnant to Warren Ellis.

Sub-branded Counter-X, these titles were X-Force, Generation X and X-Man, which had all seen some glory days but been poor for years. Generation X had been one of the hottest titles in Marvel's arsenal when it launched as a hip and happening MTV generation version of the New Mutants in 1995 but a succession of poor writers had led to falling sales and it rarely got invited to crossovers anymore or even mentioned by anyone in the main book despite having Sean Cassidey, Emma Frost and Jubilee in the cast.

Ellis meanwhile cut his teeth at Marvel a few years earlier with well-received runs on the likes of Excalibur, Hellstorm and the 2099 universe before absconding to Wildstorm and Vertigo, taking over Stormwatch and then creating in startlingly short order Transmetropolitan, The Authority and Planetary. His role on Counter-X was more of a consultant/editor/overseer; each title followed a similar format with a four-part story catching up with the subject at the point of the Revolution event co-written by Ellis and the actual planned monthly writer, then a second four-parter storylined by Ellis detailing what happened in the six month gap and then regular adventures - though in the event the three titles failed to improve their sales and only managed one 'regular' arc and then a wrap-up before being culled in Marvel's 2001 X-Men revamp.

For Generation X the 'regular' writer working alongside Ellis was Brian Wood, who then was largely known for Channel Zero and had otherwise worked outside of comics. Each Counter-X book would be given a radical format overhaul to try and inject some life, and there's more than a little meta involved in the one given to Generation X. The story opens with the Massachusetts academy in ruins, Synch dead of unspecified causes, the human students along with Artie, Leech and Penance gone and the team unsure of their direction. There's a group realisation that after five years they're not really training to be the next X-Men anymore, a tacit admittance of how little attention the parent books were paying, and the remaining students - Jubilee, M, Chamber, Husk and Skin - decide to be a more proactive force, under the tutelage of Banshee and bankrolled by Emma Frost.

The first storyline concerns their attempts to shut down the House of Corrections, a highly secret prison system where wayward children are illegally imprisoned and tortured by one Warden Coffin, a huge bald maniac with a force of similarly hairless and bruising wardens and his special children. It's all very post-Columbine Dubya-era stuff but generally hangs together well as a character-driven adventure. Wood and Ellis get a good handle on most of the characters with the best writing Jubilee especially had received for years (actually remembering she'd been part of the X-Men for years before she was sacrificed to successfully launch Generation X) while Steve Pugh even remembers she's Asian. Emma Frost, while a supporting character, sparkles while everyone gets something to do. The only weakness is that after three and a half solid issues the arc comes to an indecently rapid ending, with Coffin himself quickly defeated.

The second arc is the roll-back "Shockwaves" micro-event filling in what brought on the change; "Come on Die Young" shows the death of Synch and the destruction of the academy. The main cause is Emma's sister Adrienne, already known as a villain from previous appearances and the weak point of the arc. It's so obvious that she's lying to everyone and causing the increased unrest in the school that it just makes Emma and Sean especially look very silly for even entertaining any other options. The rest of the team are well-represented and Synch gets a decent send-off but really far too much hinges on convenience.

The first - and indeed only - four issue arc exclusively by Wood is "Four Days", about the team having a day off in Manhattan, their adventures being split up into four parallel stories - first we see Chamber's day, then Monet & Jubilee's, then Sean & Angelo's, then Paige's. It's not a bad gimmick but the individual stories are variable. Chamber's revolves around him meeting a deaf girl who can hear his speech and is a punk misfit like him; sadly this brings out Jono's emo side a tad too much. Jubes and M going shopping together and getting involved in a hostage situation isn't a bad bit of team bonding however, the same going for Angelo and Sean (rocked by the discovery of Moira MacTaggert's death) in a deal for security software gone wrong. Piage gets an odd little ghost story but again shows well. Aside from a few wobbly bits in the Chamber issue none of it's bad it just seriously lacks substance for a four-issue arc.

By this point the axe was hovering and there's just time to end the team in #75. It's another rather contrived story with the remaining students all coming to the same realisation that there's no real point in hanging around together and to go their separate ways. It's unconvincing and the relief from the fictional characters is strangely palpable, especially that of Banshee, drinking heavily since the death of Moira despite apparently dealing with it on his road trip with Skin. Emma meanwhile arbitrarily turns into a total bitch in belated reaction to her killing of Adrienne months beforehand as she's rather clumsily turned a bit nasty again in order to be in the right place for Grant Morrison's New X-Men; her behaviour gets noticed by her students who decide to simply not say goodbye in response instead of finding out whether she's murdered a policeman after information about Adrienne or what. It's not really a great sign-off for the team, featuring no real action and a couple of plot red herrings which don't come to anything, which makes it a strangely fitting send-off for Generation X.

Overall the two main strengths of Generation X are the characterisation, especially of the students and despite a slight wobble on the part of the staff in the last issue, and the potential. The first arc points to what could have been a fun team-based action title given a bit more space and fair buzzes in places; the flashback arc loses a lot of this momentum and to be honest showed by the title was in such trouble in the first place while "Four Days" is disappointingly pedestrian and showed that perhaps little was lost when the axe fell. It's not a bad read, there's just a feeling it could have been a lot better.