Tag Archives: Dazzler

Aug 20 2013

Uncanny X-Men 10

uncanny x-men 10Today, Ethan and Drew are discussing Uncanny X-Men 10, originally released August 14th, 2013.

Ethan: When moderately intelligent villains start going about business of realizing their aims, one of the early practical considerations is that of personnel. If you want to take over the world, or bend its orbit into the sun, or just make a whole lot of money, you’re gonna need some other people to help you get there. You can solve this problem in a few different ways: one common one is to just shell out the cash, but you tend to get an army of dim thugs that way. Another way is to come up with an idea that has the twin benefits of both supporting your own aims while striking a chord in the hearts and minds of your potential followers/muscle. In Uncanny X-Men #10, we start to receive signals that Scott is in danger of following in the footsteps of the bad guys he used to square off against, and I don’t even think he knows he’s doing it. Continue reading →

Aug 14 2013

All-New X-Men 15

all new x-men 15

Today,  Shelby and Patrick are discussing All-New X-Men 15, originally released August 7th, 2013.

Shelby: No one knows better than I the importance of taking a break every once in a while; heck, I took several writing breaks before I even started this post. But seriously, it’s important to take breaks to keep from getting burned out, and the same applies to comic books. Stories take little breaks with what we call “hang-out issues,” where the bulk of the plot consists of the characters hanging-out. The beauty of the hang-out issue is, when it’s done well, we get a story break AND character development. Artists take breaks too, but the obviously visual nature of art can make an artist break more jarring and disruptive. This month, Brian Michael Bendis gives us a story break as we wait for Battle of the Atom to start, and David Lafuente gives Stuart Immonen a break on pencils; the result is a story which feels very different from what we’re used to in All-New X-Men.

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Aug 7 2013

Uncanny X-Men 9

Alternating Currents: Uncanny X-Men 9, Drew and Patrick

Today, Drew and Patrick are discussing Uncanny X-Men 9, originally released July 31st, 2013.

Drew: Earlier this year, I became addicted to Radiolab, NPR’s quirky show about science and the philosophical repercussions of that science. The show is fascinating, but is also maddeningly self-referential — the hosts will often refer to massive concepts and conclusions from episodes that aired years before. The one that has come up the most often is the idea that your sense of self — the thing that makes you you — is basically the story you tell yourself about your life. That is to say, it isn’t how you look, how you spend your time, what you value, or even the company you keep — what you are is the narrative you believe about your life. Uncanny X-Men 9 finds Brian Michael Bendis examining every single one of his theories, as our new mutants (and a few old ones) struggle to get a handle on their own identities. Continue reading →

Jul 17 2013

Uncanny X-Men 8

uncanny x-men 8

Today, Patrick and Ethan are discussing Uncanny X-Men 8, originally released June 10th, 2013.

Are there demons? Please no Dormammu please no Dormammu please no Dormammu… Oh, thank God.

-Fabio “Gold Balls” Medina

Patrick: Scott Summers and the New Uncanny X-Men have spent the last three issues stuck in purgatory. I’m being literal, but what the hell – it’s a metaphor too. The fall-out from the Avengers’ battle with the X-Men has left the mutant leadership in ruins, their superpowers in shambles, and even fractured our heroes’ goals. Illyana Rasputina Conquers Purgatory featured some fantastic art; Frazier Irving rendered Dante-level hellscapes marvelously, but the story had started to spiral around obscure minutae of the Marvel world, all personified by Dormammu. Fabio starts the issue basically praying to be done with Dormammu – when he opens his eyes to see a familiar sight, home, his relief is our relief. The X-Men are back where they belong. Continue reading →

May 28 2013

Uncanny X-Men 6

uncanny x-men 6Today, Ethan and Drew are discussing Uncanny X-Men 6, originally released May 22nd 2013.

Ethan: One evening in college, I was getting ready to turn in a paper that was due the next day. It was all written & polished, so I was just going to skim it one last time and make sure there weren’t any glaring issues. As the file loaded, Word showed a popup window, which I dismissed without reading in the same way you click “I agree” at the bottom of Terms & Conditions. Computers are always showing popup messages, right? They’re usually redundant, whatever. The first page of my paper rendered as a solid mass of gibberish: letters, numbers, and symbols smashed together without spaces… as did the rest of it. 15 pages of junk characters. Alarmed, I closed the file without saving & re-opened it; it turns out that the popup window was warning me that the file was corrupted. As I sat there, in the fading light of the last day before I had to turn this thing in, I thought about what it would take to reproduce the paper from scratch: all the quotes, analysis, and dozens of footnotes containing the specific page references. All of which didn’t exist anywhere else, neither as a hard copy nor digital. While I knew I could pull it together again given some time, in that moment I was overwhelmed with trying to figure out how I was going to make the situation work. While writing a paper isn’t quite the same thing as fighting a giant, fireball-headed master of a hell-dimension, the characters in Brian Michael Bendis’s Uncanny X-Men 6 are definitely up the creek without a paddle (OR MLA-formatted citations).

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