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Phoenix: Endsong
Squee? Okay, that was pretty awesome. (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
likeadeuce: I was supposed to hate it, y/n?)
Very action-packed, though. It could have used some--I think the term is "decompression"? But that's okay, there's always fanfiction for that.
The Cuckoos get many panels in this book, which is of the good. In all of these panels, they are awesome, because they are the Cuckoos and the Cuckoos are awesome. In many of these panels, they are in bed. With each other. Which is also awesome in its way. Just saying. (Actually, the implication I got from the art in this is that they all share a bed. Which I'm pretty sure contradicts Astonishing and New X-Men canon? But maybe they have three beds and sometimes they sleep separately and sometimes they all sleep together in the same bed anyway. That works for me.)
The whole thing is very, very will-to-powery. Which I guess is the point of the whole "Phoenix" storyline. It works for me.
Anyone have any clue where this fits into Astonishing?
likeadeuce: I was supposed to hate it, y/n?)Very action-packed, though. It could have used some--I think the term is "decompression"? But that's okay, there's always fanfiction for that.
The Cuckoos get many panels in this book, which is of the good. In all of these panels, they are awesome, because they are the Cuckoos and the Cuckoos are awesome. In many of these panels, they are in bed. With each other. Which is also awesome in its way. Just saying. (Actually, the implication I got from the art in this is that they all share a bed. Which I'm pretty sure contradicts Astonishing and New X-Men canon? But maybe they have three beds and sometimes they sleep separately and sometimes they all sleep together in the same bed anyway. That works for me.)
The whole thing is very, very will-to-powery. Which I guess is the point of the whole "Phoenix" storyline. It works for me.
Anyone have any clue where this fits into Astonishing?
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And no, you weren't supposed to hate it. I figured you'd like it :).
I really dislike this mini, for reasons that are pretty particular to me. To be honest, I only skimmed the parts with the cuckoos and kid whatzisname, and I don't remember the Jean/Logan bits at all, besides the fact that Greg Land was obviously tracing Hugh Jackman.
So the book bothers me because I thought Jean was so unnecessarily and gratuitiously killed off at the end of Morrison's arc, and this ought to be a book about her coming back and settling unfinished business. But it's not about her at all, it's about how everybody else feels about her, and so it feels like denying the character a function as anything but a grief-fetish object. Meanwhile, Scott/Emma is being forced on the reader in an entirely anvilicious way, which mostly makes me want to hit Emma with a brick.
So basically, it's a Doylist critique rather than a Watsonian one. It's not so much a problem with what the characters do as the way the story's put together -- and, I guess, what's omitted, which is any sense of Jean as a character with agency, which is what made the previous versions of the Phoenix story compelling to me.
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Okay, good. That's where I wanted to put it--especially because Emma's "Call me Emma, Katherine. It's ever so much nicer between friends." just seems out of place if it's
Hmm, yes, I'm particularly ill-equipped to find the faults that you do. I mean, everything I know about Phoenix I learned either from Wikipedia or the 90's cartoon. (I'm assuming that the movie counts for less than nothing.) From the beginning (i.e. Astonishing) Jean has been a grief-fetish object throughout my experience with the canon, and it was actually a very strange experience in the Morrison when she present, albeit in the background (although she was on a lot of the covers for someone who was in another country for pretty much the entire time).
Similarly, I accept Scott/Emma as The Way Things Are. (Emma had some great moments in this one, though.)
And this trade draws heavily on the plotlines I enjoyed in Riot at Xavier's and which hit my adolescent fantasy kinks.
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Right, that's absolutely an element of the canon since -- God, I think she died the first time in 1977 or something. But Morrison was undoing that (I think you actually read the only volume of Morrison in which she's not a -- if not the -- central character). She basically ran the damn school before she died, while Emma and Scott were off playing footsie; she was Xavier's handpicked successor. She was the spokesman and leader for the X Not Scott. Not Emma. Jean.
And the original Phoenix story is very much about Jean's individuality and character, and the uneasy relationship between her self and the cosmic force. I actually think you would love issues 107 & 108 of Uncanny Xmen, which have Jean using her Phoenix power to knit up the fabric of reality (and, because it's Claremont, doing this by holding hands with her best-girlfriend and her boyfriend's dad).
So as a Jean Grey fan, it frustrates me to no end that someone could read Endsong and continue to get the impression that Jean was a pretty girl that everybody liked with no actually personality or individuality, but a mirror that reflects what's going on with everybody else. It's not the same as a series like Astonishing, which has her absence as a pre-condition for everything that happens. This is a story where she's supposed to be back but she basically isn't.
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I think we should make
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I do agree with rec'ing "Dark Phoenix Saga," which really is an essential fandom text -- though I wish some of the earlier issues were readily available, too, because DPS works better with some background information. I've only read spottily in "from the ashes" and "X-factor," but I actually don't like the original Maddie story aside from a couple things, and I have a love/hate relationship with early X-factor.
None of this is really relevant to Alix though, so: Yes, you ought to read the Dark Phoenix Saga, if just to see what all the fuss is about.
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Same issue.
And honestly, I think it's the poorly reproduced coloring rather than the actual art that tends to initially put people off of old comics trades. Maybe individual issues are the way to go. At a half decent comics store, you can probably pick them up. (Uncanny Xmen 129-131 are the Kitty issues).
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Maybe I'll check the independent comic book store I sometimes go to. I also want to pick up the individual issues for some of the New X-Men stuff so I can make scans of the Cuckoos and whatnot.
I never considered myself much of a visual aesthete, so I was shocked when I found myself turned off by the art.
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