What did you think of the Kitty and Colossus wedding twist?

Well, given my feelings about the marriage as a concept, I might as well comment.

WARNING: Spoilers for X-Men Gold #30.

I would categorize the fandom’s issue with the wedding being twofold: first, that writers would use the marriage between Kitty and Colossus to avoid ever having to address Kitty’s bisexuality, and the deeply emotionally intimate (if not canonically physically intimate) relationships she’s had with Rachel Grey and Illyana Rasputin (which has got to be a source of awkwardness, given her role in the proceedings). At the same time, it’s not like bisexual people don’t get married to opposite-sex partners, but it’s rare for writers to tackle that and do a decent job. (I believe @elanabrooklyn has some more thoughts on this.)

Another reason is that Kitty and Piotr’s relationship has always been a rather rocky one, as the comic itself notes, and leaving aside the fact that Kitty began pursuing the relationship when she was 13 and Piotr was 19, it’s been marked by Piotr dumping Kitty via editorial mandate back during Secret Wars, and recently(ish) him getting very creepy with her when he was possessed by the Phoenix Force:

That’s not to say that they’re the only comics couple with issues, but there hasn’t exactly been a lot of time where the two of them have had a chance to work out these issues and demonstrate some real passion and chemistry. Which made the whole thing feel very editorially-mandated.

And then we get to the switcheroo: Kitty gets cold feet literally with the ring being slid on her finger and phases into the ground, which is a VERY soap opera-y way to do it. (To be honest, I feel like the event would have landed better if there had been better build-up where we see Kitty having second thoughts all the way through.) At the same time, there’s nothing very concrete about why she gets cold feet, and her bisexuality remains unmentioned.

…And then Rogue and Gambit get married instead, which I love as an idea, especially since it’s in the wake of the x-cellent Rogue & Gambit miniseries by Kelly Thompson in which Remy and Anna Marie processed a lot of continuity in a way that made me believe in the relationship in a way I hadn’t in years, and iit’s leading into a new series written by the same Kelly Thompson in which Rogue and Gambit are going to do married heist shenanigans in space, which is what this couple should have been doing for a long time if comics writers were less relationship-phobic.

The switcheroo does feel a bit abrupt, and I wonder if it woudln’t have worked better if they’d been a bit more experimental with time and sequence, showing us a happy wedding but also these two couples intersecting, one coming closer together and another drifting apart, but kept us in the dark as to which were which. Also, the speed at which Colossus and Kitty make up and just smoothly pivot to marrying off their friends doesn’t feel genuine.

That being said, I loved the background stuff: the fun interactions between the Jeans and Rachel, Lockheed’s +1, and Storm providing for perfect weather in full gown.

TLDR: the whole wedding storyline seems a bit of a bust, but the silver lining is we get more great Rogue and Gambit stuff.

Have you seen Deadpool 2?

Yes, and I liked it, albeit with some significant caveats.

2(Spoilers below)

First, Vanessa getting fridged in the first ten minutes of the movie was a high barrier to get over. As much as I liked the rest of the movie, and I did, in the back of my head was the thought “they’d better fix this.” And they did in the credits with the time-travel device, but the result is that Monica Baccarin doesn’t get to do much in the film but be a Jean Grey-esque Dead Girlfriend Ghost, which is a shame both because the fridging trope is really pernicious and because Vanessa’s relationship with Wade was one of my favorite things of the first film.

Second, T.J Miller is a scumbag in so many areas of his life, and I really wish that they’d managed to Christopher Plummer him out of the movie. He absolutely cannot be in Deadpool 3.

But everything else I really liked. Julian Dennison as Russell Collins really sold the emotional heart of the film and was quite funny as well, and I had no idea he was essentially Rusty from X-Factor. Could have used a bit more of the X-Force – as much as the brutal joke was really funny, definitely wanted more Terry Crewes. Zazie Beetz stole every scene she was in, and they would be mad not to have her as a lead in the “real” X-Force movie. And Josh Brolin continues to kill it as Cable; he’s definitely the unsung “hero” of 2018 superhero movies.

X-Men read A Song of Ice and Fire. Who’s rooting for whom?

This is a great question for @postcardsfromspace, but I’ll throw my two cents in:

Magneto would probably be a fan of Melisandre or Beric Dondarrion.
Xavier…I can see the parallel to Doran Martell, but I actually think he’d be a big fan of Sam Tarly.
Emma Frost is all about the Lannisters, but prefers Tywin while cosplaying as Cersei.
Cyclops I would see as a huge fan of Ned Stark and/or Stannis.
Jean Grey would be all about Daenerys Targaryen and Sansa, which is hilarious given the state of the fandom atm.
Wolverine is absolutely a fan of Sandor Clegane.
Storm might be an Asha Greyjoy fan. I could see her either liking or having a huge problem with Daenerys, not sure.
Beast and Iceman would be fans of Tyrion for different reasons.
Nightcrawler would probably be either into Oberyn Martell or Jon Snow.
Kitty Pryde would be an Arya fan, I think.
Angel would be into Jaime Lannister, I think.
Colossus would be into Davos, although I could see an argument for Gendry.

What mutants will you put on the MCU X-Men team? I think we can all agree Xavier, Cyclops and Jean are essential; Storm and Wolverine could replace Angel, Beast and Iceman (because the O5 were super-WASPy and quite male-heavy, and Iceman’s kind of redundant with Storm on the team), and maybe add Kitty Pryde as an audience surrogate, to explain what the heck were the X-Men doing all this time.

It’s tricky, because there have been lots of different rosters that people have been attached to at various times – O5, Giant-Sized, the Australia team, Gold and Blue, etc.

IMHO, you start with the roster as it was in X-Men #129 – Cyclops, Phoenix, Storm, Nightcrawler, Wolverine, Colossus – with Kitty Pryde as an audience surrogate. That’s a solid and flexible core that you can easily add onto – Rogue, Gambit, Longshot, etc. – without losing the character dynamics.

How would you do a Marvel “Excalibur” film?

Eventually? More than most X-properties, Excalibur relies on some pretty heavy legacy elements – you need to really care about the relationships between Kitty and Rachel, and Kitty and Kurt, and to a lesser extent between Betsy and Brian, in order for the emotional elements of the premise to land.

Then you’d need to find a writer/director who can do action, screwball comedy, feel-good emotions, and surreal genre parody all at the same time. Taika Waititi would be a natural pick, but I dunno if he’d want to reprise and/or might be busy with other Marvel properties (ditto James Gunn); Edgar Wright would be a good pick too, but he’s probably way too pissed off at Marvel; maybe Greta Gerwig if she’s interested?

How to Integrate the X-Men into the MCU, Take 2

So a while back I talked about how I would integrate the X-Men into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but in more general thematic terms as opposed to plot and specific continuity.

A tweet by “Moviebob” Bob Chipman got me thinking in more detail, and I think I have some ideas:

Part of the issue I was having is how to combine certain timeline issues with the new revelation about mutants’ existence, and I think I’ve hit on a nifty solution. We already know from CA:CW and Ant-Man (and Hulk too) that the U.S Govt. had a covert superhero program from the 60s onwards, trying to replicate the lost Super-Soldier program.

This project could easily have included more forceful and less savory attempts to recruit mutants into the national security state, i.e Weapon X, with SHIELD trying to cover up the existence of mutants and HYDRA infiltrating the unethical human experimentation side. In response, mutants go underground to avoid being turned into weapons of war against their will and have remained underground ever since. This solves the problem of how to combine secrecy and the mutant metaphor.

The mutant “Masquerade” to borrow from my White Wolf days continues until the emergence of the Avengers and the collapse of SHIELD, since now the public is starting to warm to the idea of superpowered people as good and the institution that’s been hunting them is deinstitutionalized. Xavier (who’s updated to be a Vietnam War veteran) begins to recruit and train the X-Men into becoming an Avengers for the mutants.

However, the events of CA:CW creates the basis for “a world that hates and fears them” through the backlash against the Avengers and the creation of the Sokovia Accords, which looks very different to mutants. Now the whole world is out to get them, not just SHIELD/HYDRA. At the same time, the events of Infinity War and A4 convince Xavier that the X-Men are needed to save the world, since mutant registration is moot if someone like Thanos kills half of the world. However, this stance is controversial within the mutant community, not everyone agrees, but after the first appearance of the X-Men the cat’s out of the bag…

Which brings in the X-Men’s own protagonists. Personally, I wouldn’t bring in Magneto as the primary villain in the first film – he’s been really over-used by the Bryan Singer X-Men films and needs a break. Rather, I would start the X-Men off with someone who hasn’t been seen yet in the X-films:

Yes, the mad scientist Mr. Sinister, who brings in all the same eugenics/Darwinian theme as Apocalypse but with glam rock stylings instead of ponderousness. And the best part is, the X-Men can totally kill off Sinister in the first film without wasting him, because Mr. Sinister has INFINITE CLONES. Hell, if they want to, they can even do the gender-swapped Miss Sinister thing, because Mr. Sinister doesn’t care about gender norms.

So how do we deal with Magneto’s timeline thing? Well, to begin with, I’d keep him in the background and build him up through mentions in dialogue and post-credit scenes until they’ve built him up enough (especially if they need to recast Magneto). And there’s a couple of ways you can hook Magneto into setting while still keeping his origin:

We know that HYDRA was operating human experimentation programs during WWII, and that they used human cryonics to deal with potentially dangerous subjects. What if HYDRA were experimenting on a young Erik Lensherr (a bit older than the child the Singer films had him, more like a young man in his mid-20s, closer to Claremont’s continuity), he rebelled and they flash-froze him to prevent him escaping?
He’s stuck in an abandoned HYDRA lab for however many years are necessary, but at a useful time, the systems keeping him frozen fail and he wakes up. They could go the amnesia route (he’s been down that road before), or you could have Magneto hunting HYDRA from the shadows as in First Class.
At some point, he meets Xavier, they become friends but disagree about the possibility of mutant integration into human society. Then sometime around A:AoU, Magneto finds out that the wife and/or kids he thought died in the camps survived and settled in Sokovia…and Wanda and Pietro were his grandchildren, experimented on by HYDRA to unlock their genetic potential.

This gives him a good hook into a main cast member of the existing MCU – he’s the grandfather of an Avenger – but also a good reason to be an anti-villain: he hates HYDRA and the Sokovia Accords, but also blames Stark and the Avengers for the death of his kin.

So, if you’ve spoken about Jean and Scott, can you talk a little bit about Jean and her relationship with her kids? I think there’s a lot to unpack about Jean and Rachel and Jean and Cable. (Also, that wedding in July should be Kitty and Rachel, and everyone knows it.)

Good question (and you’re damn right about Kitty and Rachel)!

Jean Grey’s relationship with “her” kids is incredibly weird, even by comic book standards.

Because she comes from the future of Earth-811, Rachel’s relationship with her parents has been affected quite profoundly by the fact that she comes from an alternate future and thus hasn’t yet and might not be born in Earth-611. This was more of an issue with Scott to begin with, since Jean was dead and Scott had married Madelyn and had Nathan (who didn’t exist in Earth-811), giving Rachel something of an identity crisis, and making her relationship with Scott rather awkward.

When Jean finally met Rachel, Jean was dealing with having memories of her Phoenix self and Madelyn in her head, and thus was not quite ready to be a mother to a young woman she hadn’t given birth to (yet), especially given Rachel’s connection to the Phoenix Force through her mother, which brought up issues that the reborn Jean wasn’t ready to deal with either. So it took a while for them to gel.

~~Nathan Christopher Askani Dayspring Summers~~ Cable is even weirder. He was born to Scott and Maddy originally, but then Jean subsumed Maddy’s memories, so Jean is in this weird

Schrödingerian situation where she both did and didn’t give birth to him at the same time that she remembers Scott abandoning the kid and other-her to be with her. But in the course of the original run on X-Factor, Jean dealt with her issues for Cable’s sake…only to have to give up the child in order to save him from the technovirus. And then the baby came back to her as a man who was older than she was, which is pretty damn awkward even if he hadn’t been a hard-bitten soldier from the future.

So overall, the thing about Jean Grey is that she’s never been allowed to get pregnant, have a kid, and then raise that kid. Which I think is a damn shame. There are a ton of examples of how to make interesting stories about superhero moms and kids: Hopeless’ run on Spider-Woman and Slott’s “Renew Your Vows” (to say nothing of the FF, Power Pack, Luke Cage and Jessica Jones, etc. etc.)

Kind of a mammoth ask here, but what’s your opinion on the whole Scott Summers-Jean Grey “romance,” as well as how it relates to the Cyclops-Emma Frost and Wolverine-Jean Grey relationships(and the resulting love triangles)?

That is a big ask, but I’m game.

I’ve talked a bit about it here, here, and here.

Scott and Jean are tricky, because so much of their early relationship was very grounded in a particular kind of 50s Romance Comic dynamic where Angst and Not Talking About Feelings reigned, and then they became the It Couple because Jean was the only female member of the 05. And then there was the Scott-Jean-Logan love triangle they tried for a while, and then we got the Phoenix Saga (which was all about Scott and Jean as Doomed Lovers), and then Jean was the Lost Love, and then she came back so they became Destined To Be Together, and there was the Evil Ex/Clone, the Time-Travelling Baby, and on and on…

What I’m getting at is that that’s a LOT of dramatic weight being thrown onto their relationship which is about their relationship, without giving them much time just to be a couple. Part of this has to do with the fact that Marvel writers seem to have a problem writing married couples – one of the reasons I’ve been enjoying Slott’s Renew Your Vows is that it’s a rare book which understands that marriage and kids are the springboard for story not the end of it – so they keep adding Relationship Drama as the plot of last resort.

Scott and Emma were, to be honest, one of the most interesting things that had been done with those characters in a long time, and their relationship had enough juice to run for ~20 years. Indeed, I think it could have gone on longer had Jean not been killed off AGAIN (another source of cheap drama in comics) and if they hadn’t gone down the same road with Scott and Emma that culminated with Scott dying and Emma going crazy/evil.

Jean and Logan has some interesting Romance Novel dynamics, and I would be interested in seeing someone take a “Renew Your Vows”-style (although interestingly Jean and Logan are together and have a kid in that AU) take at them having a relationship, although it’s limited by them being in a triangle where the authors see Scott and Jean as the OTP.

However, I’ve said for a while on Twitter that the Scott-Jean-Logan triangle would be much more interesting (and funnier) if it was really about Jean coming into her sexuality (without having to be killed off) and wanting a poly relationship but being really bad at it.

How would you go about adapting Dark Phoenix Saga for the movies? Because the story has a number of problems chief among them that the ending (Jean killing herself) was not what Claremont/Byrne wanted and was put forth by Jim Shooter? And the story was retconned back and forth, and the fact that the Phoenix story is not really connected to the X-Men mutant metaphor. XMen 3 for all its flaws hit upon that problem and came up with a bad solution? But those problems still exist.

Good question!

I’m on record as really liking the Phoenix Saga. As for the critiques of it: honestly, I think that was a rare stopped-clock moment where Jim Shooter was right about the necessary consequences of Jean’s death; while I like Kurt Busiek a lot, I think the way that Jean being a clone was handled was very awkward and I would have gone with her just literally being reborn following the mythology of the phoenix, but I still think it led to some good material (the Wyngarde/Madelyne fake Phoenix stuff); and finally, I don’t think the lack of an mutant metaphor is a problem but rather a strength, that the X-Men aren’t limited to the allegorical.

As to the movies…well, I think my critique can be reverse-engineered: for Phoenix to land, you need to devote a substantial amount of time to Jean Grey and Scott Summers before the Saga starts, so that the audience is invested enough in the characters and their relationship to land. Likewise, for that to work, you have to make the ensemble nature of the X-Men work, so that Scott and Jean don’t get overshadowed by Professor X, Magneto, Wolverine, etc. And that requires a good writer and director, and I don’t know that we have those.

Do you think Marvel will cross X-Men into the MCU smoothly?

I think they’ll definitely take their time at it; for one thing, there’s still Fox films that have been filmed (Deadpool 2, Dark Phoenix, New Mutants) and in development (Gambit, X-Force, Deadpool 3, New Mutants sequels, an X-23 film, the James Franco Multiple Man movie, the Kitty Pryde movie that Miller and Bendis are working on), etc. Likewise, Marvel’s got the rest of Phase 3 (Infinity War, Ant-Man and the Wasp, Captain Marvel, Avengers 4) and Phase 4 (Spiderman Homecoming sequel, Guardians 3, the Black Widow project, etc.) in the works.

So I don’t think you’ll see any integration until after 2020, which means that Feige and his crew will have some time to figure out how to integrate the X-Men into the MCU. Hopefully that allows for a smooth entry.