Recent Reads: Astonishing X-Men (Warren Ellis run)

[mizkit]

ASTONISHING X-MEN: GHOST BOX, EXOGENETIC, XENOGENESIS: Sometime back Warren Ellis said he was never going to write for Marvel again. After reading this trilogy of story arcs, I really wish he’d stuck with that. I gather the X-universe storylines have taken a turn for the bleak recently, but I liked GHOST BOX less than anything else of Ellis’s I’ve

Comments

[irishkate]

God! Kaare Andrews’ art is terrible. I wouldn't have bought the GN for his depictions of women for a start..

[mizkit]

It was sealed, so all I had to go on was the cover, which is outrageous but, well. Comic book.

[irishkate]

Bummer! Well - I'd remember and anything he puts his name to is worth avoiding.

[la_marquise_de_]

My superhero team is The Avengers (since long before the film), though I dip in and out a lot. And lately what I've noticed there is that in the hands of some artists -- and especially Alessandro Vitti and Matteo Buffagni, most women have a significant scoliosis of the spine. Even when walking/running/fighting, they *have* to adopt a curved pose with their buttocks sticking out quite noticeably. Since this applies to non-heroes too, I can only assume it's some kind of plague effecting Marvel 616 and perhaps will soon be resolved in a major crossover.
Those illustrations you link to are quite something. While I've always found Emma Frost's costume deplorable, in that version... I can only assumer she's cold and has added flesh coloured cushions as padding in several places, because female bodies don't behave like that normally.

[mizkit]

There are aspects of the art I like, some of the straight lines and outrageous flares. I mean: comic book figures, superheroes in particular, do not adhere to reality, and I don't mind that. But I dislike the sense of, mm, making fun of, the character/figure. Emma's a wretched character with a lot of baggage and yes, an god-awful costume, but...I find the art disrespectful. Or something.

[kirbyk]

I agree, Ghost Box did nothing for me. I actually dropped the title in the middle

[mizkit]

I'll use this is as a guideline, thanks. :)

[pgwfolc]

I gave up on 616 X-Men years ago, after the whole Onslaught thing. I never looked back... with one exception. Whedon's founding run on Astonishing was, well... astonishingly good. But when I saw he was leaving and Ellis (whom I've also stopped reading) was taking over, I dropped it, and I'm perfectly happy with that decision.

[mizkit]

I actually didn't much care for Whedon's run on Astonishing, as I felt Kitty was playing the part of Buffy, Emma was Spike, and everybody else was a hash of the rest of the characters. And--while presumably Marvel told him to--I was pretty pissed off at resurrecting Colossus, whose death was one of the few really good things that came out of the 90s X-Men. I re-read it later after I was less pissed about Colossus, and still had the characterization issues, but it's a pretty good story, I'll grant you that. :)

[pgwfolc]

Yeah, I'm not sure what the deal was with Colossus. Whether that was his idea or Marvel's. But at least he brought him back with style. That wordless Fastball Special splash page is one of my all-time favorite pages of X-men.

The story had its faults. And it did feel very much like a Joss story. But it's still the best X-men story I've read this millennium. ;)

[lurkerwithout]

Glad to see I'm not alone in disliking the Morrison run. I liked some of the characters (Beak and the Cuckoos were cool for example) but flipping thru it the thing as a whole was a turn-off...

[mizkit]

I liked the Cuckoos quite a lot, yeah. I mean, any writer brings some good stuff in. I just--well, for one, I really do loathe Quitely's art, and if you ever see a picture of him you realize he's drawing his own face on everybody, but beyond that I generally just don't like Morrison as a storyteller. So no, you're not alone. :)