Posts

In Memoriam: Metamorpho: The Element Man (2024-2025)

  Friends, Romans, fellow Fabulous Freaks, I come before you to mourn Metamorpho: The Element Man, which sadly came to and end this week at six issues. I’ll freely admit I am a cynical man, bitter and jaded, pickled in the depths of internet discourse of comics, that poisonous stew of vitriol and negativity, as I am sure many of you are as well. So last September when I was looking at the racks at my local comic book store, I was surprised when I found out Al Ewing and Steve Lieber were taking up the task of penning a new Metamorpho series. Created in 1965 by Bob Haney and Ramona Fradon, the freak of a thousand changes was originally intended as a parody of the far-out powers that populated comic books in the sixties. He was not a character I expected to enjoy but from that very first issue with its constant hep cat slang and throwback artistic sensibility there was a sincerity that grasped me and a wholehearted love of the source material and comics as a medium that poured thr...
Post a Comment
Read more

Blood Brothers: It's Bad

  I enjoy bad comics, you know that, that’s why you’re here, that’s why this blog is here. But there are those rare and special moments when I come across a comic that falls beneath even my own incredibly low expectations. Today that is the 1998 X-Man event Blood Brothers. Playing out in the pages of Terry Kavanagh’s X-Man and Joe Casey’s Cable , the four-issue saga sees the two clones/brothers/alternate universe doppelgangers teaming up to battle their equally confusing clone/brother/doppelganger from the future Stryfe, who we covered extensively in my exploration of X-Cutioner’s Song . Sounds like a recipe for success, right? Stryfe is one of my favorite villains, Cable and Nate Grey are delightfully messy and this story even has Madelyne Pryor, one of my favorite classic X Men, but this event displays such a lack of understanding and poor plotting that even I can’t find much good in it. However, we must set the stage a little before we dive in as we actually haven’t had time t...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Defense of the Onslaught Saga

       The Onslaught Saga is a bad event comic. I don’t really think that is up for debate. What I am trying to highlight is the good that is weighed down by the cruft. But to fully grok the frankly insane story we are about to embark on we have to turn our attention back the 1993 crossover event Fatal Attractions, penned by Fabian Nicieza and Scott Lobdell, the event chronicles the aftereffects of Magneto’s heel turn in X-Men (1991) #1-3. The key part of the event, at least for our purposes, is the iconic finale where the X-Men confront the villain on his asteroid base Avalon. It is here after Magneto uses his power to rip the adamantium coating from Wolverine’s bones, that Magneto has his mind wiped by Professor Xavier in a fit of anger. This is the moment that will create Onslaught and sets us on the path to one of the most notorious event comics of all time.           Now what precisely is Onslaught? In the simplest...
Post a Comment
Read more