Filed under: Pixie
So, here’s a question for you guys: What’s your opinion on Pixie?
I, at first, wasn’t sure how I felt about the little sprite of an X-Man, especially at the very beginning of her stint. When she was just a whimpy fairy that had butterfly-like wings and the most horrid green corduroy uniform. However, after M-Day and Decimation, she seems to have been given the luck of the draw by retaining her abilities and remaining with the X-Men. Here we see the first change in her; no longer does she have her little Asian girl bob but longer, more unruly hair that isn’t fluorescent pink any longer but black with pink streaks (how punk?). Though it wasn’t until her time in Limbo with Illyana (AKA Magik) that her character really was put into the spotlight. Losing a little bit of her soul and brandishing a souldaggar, Pixie has made her first baby steps into being a respectable character with a pretty good back story.
From Westchester to San Fransisco, Pixie comes along with the team (even having her very own one-shot) which somewhat establishes her as an official member of the Uncanny team. An odd choice, I thought, since they already had a teleporter, but her magical abilities (yet to be explored) seem to be a good thing to play upon and add a quirky element to the somewhat “straight-laced” team. But her involvement in Second Coming is somewhat interesting to me, because while Hellbound is interesting it sort of diverges from the normal storyline and Pixie (along will all those stuck in hell) are missing out in a lot back on Earth. However, I’m sure between demons and Nimrod Sentinels there really isn’t a better choice.
Isn’t the growth of her appearance so odd? I mean, don’t get be wrong, all the changes were necessary because now she looks like a decent character–and I rather like that they reinstituted her pink hair. I also think Chris Claremont’s art make every X-Men look epic and for her to be immortalized in a Chris Claremont rendition I think is a big thing.
Just when we thought Marvel was wetting our whistle with the previews from last week of the new series X-Men, here they go gorging us with more textless panels! I don’t know, before I might have seemed a little skeptical with the previous preview, but these scans are making me lean more to the positive side of the fence (especially with the last panel.)
I love how graphic and edgy Marvel is making the X-Men, not that they haven’t always been a little rough around the edges, but ever since the revival of X-Force I feel like the envelope has been pushed so far on what the audience expects. I think this is why Uncanny X-Men is suffering, because they are still sunshine and rainbows while titles like X-Force and X-Factor are all high octane action with a solid storyline. If the writers are solid on this series, I think they might have the ability to make the whole “Vampire” storyline salvageable.
Once the dust settles from Second Coming, you’d think the poor ol’ X-Crew would get a day off–but this is the comics kids, and of course the world is going to be thrown right back into chaos. It’s interesting, just from the preview, where the X-Men are going after this really epic plot line. Here we have the dwindling species fighting for their EXISTENCE and now they are fighting *insert dramatic music* vampires.
Yes, you heard me right. Vampires. I guess the Twilight obsession is making it’s way into the comics, not that I’m going to bring up the abomination that is the Twilight manga. However, it must be said that vampires have existed in the Marvel Universe, as well as the X-Verse, so it isn’t like this came too far from out of the blue, but still… vampires? Here are the new scans that Marvel just put up the other day, I’ll let you guys take a peek at it:
One: Who is the sandbag-suicide bomber? (Vampire obviously)
Two: Who are the two punks playing hackisac? (Gays most likely)
Three: Where are the X-Men now? Seriously, they are like drifters? Like in the last three years they’ve had four different homes.
Four: Who are the people in the building over looking everything?
Five: I’m guessing the girl who gets the blood bath is Jubilee… which I’m guessing will lead her to this:
Thoughts, comments, concerns?
P.S. I might act like I’m completely against the whole vampire nonsense, but I’m not. I’ve been obsessed with Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles as of late so I think it’s fitting that it is reflected in my favorite comic series. (Also, as another side note, I thought it highly interesting that the X-Men all moved to Utopia right when I was shipping off to college. I love the parallels.)
Filed under: Hellbound, New Mutants, Second Coming, X-Factor, X-Force, X-Men: Legacy
Well the Second Coming is here and halfway over and I must say that this storyline is fantastic. This is exactly what the X-Verse needed to get itself back in the game. With story archs like Utopia, Nation X, and even Necrosha, the X-Men have faded into the background to let comics, like the Avengers, take the mainstage–WTF!? However, salvation is here in more ways than one–Introducing the teenaged messiah of all us X-Freaks, Hope Summers. Back from the future, Hope and everyone’s favorite cyborg, Cable, have returned to our time period (shaking off the Bitch of a Mutant, Bishop) to put an end to this whole cat-n-mouse chase. However, when they return they are not met with the promise that they thought they would. The mansion is in rubble (if we can remember back to the times when the X-Men still worked out of Westchester) and Cable doesn’t now what to do. Fight or flight leads the pair to a motel where they find an old Newspaper that says the X-Men are now working out of San Fran. In hopes to find their friends and family, the pair are ambushed by Bastion and his groups of anti-mutant fanatics causing the pair to go off map, causing the X-Men to even have difficulties finding them.
Cyclops breaks the X-Men into two groups Alpha and Beta (Alpha being a mix of Uncanny and X-Force and Beta being the New Mutants). He sends Alpha to find Cable and Hope while Beta is sent on the task of putting a stop to Cameron Hodge’s slowly growing army of smiley face bots. The Alpha team falls short of a victory, losing Magik to some interdimensional rift (which archs us into Hellbound, a subserious happening at the same time as Second Coming) and loses sight of our time jumpers. Meanwhile, Beta team, while more successful in their ploy, take heavy damage; Karma loses are leg to the cyborg Hodge/Spider thing while Cypher tells Warlock to go back on his promise of not taking a human life. Luckily for the New Mutants, Warlock uses his TO virus to save the say and sucks all the life out of Hodge and his followers.
Cyclops now understand that Bastion is trying to set up the X-Men by taking out all of their strategical advantages, such as teleporters and communication via telepaths. Cyclops rounds up a team to send to Limbo to rescue Magik (Cannonball, Pixie, Anole, Trance, Gambit, Dazzler, and Northstar) while he calls back Beta team after the damage they took to their team. Meanwhile, Cyclops assigns Ariel as teleporter for the X-Men’s Alpha team (I included the link to her Wiki page, since the majority of you probably don’t know who she is, minus her small appearance in Utopia) and sends them out to find Cable and Hope. In their attempts to find them, the team is gunned down by a helicopter and Ariel is killed in the explosion.
Meanwhile, Rogue and Nightcrawler port like crazy trying to get to Hope and Cable. They are successful as meeting up with the pair, but are attacked by Bastion himself. Rogue, having suped up with all the Alpha teams powers, takes on Bastion while Nightcrawler attempts to get the trio out of the line of fire. Rogue gets her ass handed to her due to Bastions regenerative abilities and is seconds away from killing Hope when Nightcrawler, in one final porting attempt saves the pair, but in doing so is slain by Bastion. RIP Elf, we will miss you (guess Cyclops never has to explain to you about X-Force though, phew… oh yeah, X-Force isn’t a secret anymore).
Hope is now back on Utopia, but it seems that not everyone is as excited to see her. Dani Moonstar and Wolverine are among the group that aren’t so sure about all this risk for one girl, Dani even getting into a fist fight with the Messiah. However, not even Utopia is safe from Bastion’s plans, for the mutant hating Cyborg Peirce is sitting dangerously unknown to the X-Men in their containment brig. Danger is made to believe that Donald Pierce’s presence is still there thanks to the TO virus Bastion has infected all his hosts with and allows Pierce to blow up the the area with the Blackbird and all the X-Men’s means of transportation. He has stranded them on their island, making them sitting ducks.
However, something far worse is happening–a huge impenetrable red sphere engulfs the entire San Francisco area, locking all the mutant population within it. Also, a rift in the space-time continium has opened up in the middle of the Golden Gate bridge and it leaking in sentinels from the Future. The X-Men, seemingly trapped with their lives at stake, send all they can into the front to stop the onslaught from the Nimrod Sentinels while X-Force is sent into the future (with Cable and Cypher) to combat at the source of the problem–however, there is a catch. To go to the future Cable must use his armtech to jump them there though he only has one jump left. It is ultimately a suicide mission that Cyclops and all the X-Men know is completely necessary.
Saying their goodbyes, the team ports into the future where they see that all the X-Men have been eliminated and a huge “wanted” board is decked out with posters of ever mutant. The team quickly gets to work, however, it seems that their task might be impossible for an infinite line of Nimrod Sentinels awaits the jump into their timeline. Their plan is to use Douglas’ abilities of language and communication to tell the source of these robots to end this, though how they plan on accomplishing this is still up in the air.
Back at home, the team has taken some damage and are not able to continue at this pace, it seems that the X-Men might face some more causalities in the near future for their is little that they can do to fight the onslaught of Nimrods.
I am in love with this serious, so much is happening and absolutely everyone is being used or at least mentioned–even the Avengers and Fantastic Four are out there trying to help out the struggling race. Also something that is really interesting in this plot line is all the story lines that are going along with it (Hellbound, Blind Science, and X-Factor). This literally is affecting every single mutant on the planet and it will only stop if every mutant, evil or good, comes together and stops this. I love it. I can’t wait to see what Hope has in store in this plot line because as of now she has had very little
impact, other than being the catalysis to all the pandimonium. Slowly but surely we are seeing that Hope’s powers are a lot like Rogue’s, though I’m not sure if they work like hers. She seems to have more like Prodigy’s powers.
WHOOOSSHHH! Sorry about the HUGE absence; school and theater seemed to have taken over my life. But now that I am in Summer Stock hell (for all those who understand my pain) I have acquired a lot of need to escape my current situation–AND what a better to do that than with my X-Blog!
Well I’ll sum up everything that has happened recently in the X-Verse so that my posts to come will tie in nicely. So we shall begin with Necrosha.
So Necrosha had a pretty nice plot line–nothing too amazing, but entertaining. I was originally excited about this because I thought maybe the X-Gene, or at least the reanimated mutants, would retain their powers, but alas this was not the case. Only a select few of the zombified mutants retained their powers, much like the ones living. Also, I was hoping the newly reanimated would remain animated, but that was also not the case–minus Douglas Ramsey, aka Cypher. The plot was pretty linear, no one really was changed forever (minus Cypher being left alive), and for the most part life as the X-Men know it was relatively unchanged. However, this story arch gave the New Mutants and X-Force a little more game time and it showed that these covers work well–especially New Mutants. However, in the wake of Utopia, Necrosha seemed to just fade away with a rather anticlimactic death of Selene, who probably won’t remain dead for long.
I’d say, read it them. The story is pretty solid, it has a lot of exciting elements, and you get to see a lot of those mutants you’d never expect to see again. Overall I give the Necrosha plot line a 3.8/5. Not completely a four because nothing major impacted the X-Verse, but not completely a three because it did have some awesome elements in it.
