Meanwhile, in the Marvelverse...
Nov. 26th, 2009 12:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakA friend of mine wanted the complete Whedon run of Astonishing X-Men for his birthday in two weeks, which gave me an excuse to acquire the omnibus before wrapping it up as a present. Additional material that comes with it are basically an introduction containing the X-Men backstory parts important to AXM, an interview with John Cassady, emails from Joss Whedon to Joe Quesada and Michael Marts and some sketches; nice to see/read but not a must, so if you like myself already have the individual trades, you don't have to by the omnibus for these alone. Anyway, it left me all mellow and wistful. Not only was Cassady's art the prettiest, but I really loved those arcs and the way Joss wrote every single character, both the stalwarts he inherited and the new ones he created. To this day I'm frustrated AXM didn't get more fannish attention because it was fantastic and really the best thing he did post-Chosen (and I include Firefly here).
I also got Invincible Iron Man #20 (start of a new arc, Stark Disassambled) by Matt Fraction. I loved the dreamscape sequences; fitting that reduced-to-the-essentials-Tony's inner landscape is the Nevada desert, the testing ground of the atom bomb, with himself and his parents in the army scientist outfits and every encounter ending with the nuclear explosion which is however not caused by the atom bomb (which Howard Stark is in the Marvelverse co-responsible for) but Tony's own inventions. The atom bomb is still our most powerful symbol for science's fall from grace, the science/military amalgan, "I have become death, the destroyer of worlds", ending wars, but through mass destruction. And it's interesting that Tony addresses his parents by their first names - Howard and Maria; their deaths by car crash might be important to his origin but he's not Bruce Wayne, and angsting about them dying isn't what these encounters are about.
In current day news, Fraction twists expectations by letting Bucky and Don Blake agree to "reboot" Tony at once and Pepper be the one who balks. I find this fascinating, provided there is some follow-up and "why should he be the one to come back?" isn't presented as her real reason but just the one to come out first. Because much as Pepper has loved and supported Tony through the years, there is bound to be some murky ambivalence somewhere. Neither the Knaufs nor Fraction really dealt so far with the fact she had asked Tony to euthanize Happy, and that Tony did it, for example. I could see Pepper deliberately not thinking about any of this for near two years because it's just too hard to think about, but now, in this particular situation with Tony in exactly the state Happy was in when she asked Tony to kill him, it would come up.
The recorded message with its mixture of sincerity, manipulativeness and gall is very Tony. Just out of curiosity, is he the only Marvel hero who gets to be an atheist (the "I never let myself belief in God" comes twice just in case we miss it, both in the dreamscape and in the message) or are there others?
In other news, my Whedon/Cassady AXM love made me go back to the AXM mood theme for a while.
I also got Invincible Iron Man #20 (start of a new arc, Stark Disassambled) by Matt Fraction. I loved the dreamscape sequences; fitting that reduced-to-the-essentials-Tony's inner landscape is the Nevada desert, the testing ground of the atom bomb, with himself and his parents in the army scientist outfits and every encounter ending with the nuclear explosion which is however not caused by the atom bomb (which Howard Stark is in the Marvelverse co-responsible for) but Tony's own inventions. The atom bomb is still our most powerful symbol for science's fall from grace, the science/military amalgan, "I have become death, the destroyer of worlds", ending wars, but through mass destruction. And it's interesting that Tony addresses his parents by their first names - Howard and Maria; their deaths by car crash might be important to his origin but he's not Bruce Wayne, and angsting about them dying isn't what these encounters are about.
In current day news, Fraction twists expectations by letting Bucky and Don Blake agree to "reboot" Tony at once and Pepper be the one who balks. I find this fascinating, provided there is some follow-up and "why should he be the one to come back?" isn't presented as her real reason but just the one to come out first. Because much as Pepper has loved and supported Tony through the years, there is bound to be some murky ambivalence somewhere. Neither the Knaufs nor Fraction really dealt so far with the fact she had asked Tony to euthanize Happy, and that Tony did it, for example. I could see Pepper deliberately not thinking about any of this for near two years because it's just too hard to think about, but now, in this particular situation with Tony in exactly the state Happy was in when she asked Tony to kill him, it would come up.
The recorded message with its mixture of sincerity, manipulativeness and gall is very Tony. Just out of curiosity, is he the only Marvel hero who gets to be an atheist (the "I never let myself belief in God" comes twice just in case we miss it, both in the dreamscape and in the message) or are there others?
In other news, my Whedon/Cassady AXM love made me go back to the AXM mood theme for a while.
