Catching Up With the Bendis Run on X-Men

In my ongoing read-through of the X-Men oeuvre on Marvel Unlimited, give or take a few series here and there, I've just finished the two-year run by Brian Michael Bendis on Uncanny X-Men and All-New X-Men. Bendis took over after the Avengers vs X-Men crossover, which he co-wrote with a bunch of other creators, and his issues focused on the fallout of that storyline up until the eve of the next big crossover event, Jonathan Hickman's Secret Wars.

(I fully expect to write a blog post about Secret Wars, eventually)

I've spent the days since I finished Bendis's run on those books considering their legacy. Overall I liked them better than I expected to, and better than some of the stuff that came before AvX, though it also feels a little unfinished - which it is, because apparently Bendis left the X-books early due to not wanting to get involved with another big X-crossover later on. His Uncanny issues focused on Cyclops and his mutant revolution, with a group of new mutants that seem not to have done anything interesting since, while his All-New issues focused on time-displaced versions of the original five X-Men (don't ask), plus their professor Kitty Pryde and Wolverine's clone/daughter, X-23.

I think I liked All-New better, for a few reasons. One is that I liked the art better overall - the series started out being drawn by Stuart Immonen, a creator whose work I remember from DC back in the 1990s, and was later drawn by Mahmud Asrar, whose work I know from later issues. I also preferred the mix of characters - the original X-Men get to see their futures, and because everything is so screwed up, they go off in their own directions for a while and do interesting things, sometimes independent of each other. And finally, X-23 has become one of my favorite characters, so I feel that adding her to any book classes it up quite a bit.

This wasn't my first time reading part of Bendis's run, by the way. A friend gave me a bunch of back issues of both series a few years ago, which was my first update on what was happening in the X-books since the end of Grant Morrison's New X-Men. I was taken by the idea behind All-New X-Men back then, and some of the stuff in Uncanny was cool, too, though I think the Matthew Malloy/Last Will and Testament of Professor X storyline was a bit of a whiff. The new characters introduced by Bendis and artist Chris Bachalo didn't make as much of an impression, and there were so many of them that they didn't get much development.

I do recall being a little annoyed on learning back then that Bendis had taken on the X-books - I guess I'd formed a kind of negative impression of his Marvel work since Ultimate Spider-Man back in the early 2000s. Having now read his issues of these books, I know that negative impression wasn't fair, and it does make me want to go back and read more Miles Morales, whom he created after I stopped reading the Ultimate books.

That said, a check on Reddit revealed that a lot of fans don't seem to rate Bendis's run on these books so highly. They cite the kind of damp-squib ending of Uncanny and the abrupt end of his time on the books as reasons why the run feels half-baked compared to some other writers' tenures. And definitely Bendis isn't ranking anywhere near Morrison or Hickman for me, to say nothing of Claremont - but as I mentioned, there are aspects that I liked more than, say Ed Brubaker's time or even Kieron Gillen's tenure. The fact that Bendis explores how Cyclops has gone to an extreme position in his fight to protect mutants is fascinating. I also appreciate how the justification Bendis has Cyclops give for killing Professor X doesn't ring true - because it should feel like BS.

The upshot is, now that I've actually gotten a better look at Bendis's work in the context of the regular Marvel Universe, I'm more eager to check out his work on books like Avengers and the Dark Reign storyline. It also makes me think I should have another look at the Ultimate books, especially the ones written by him, rather than those written by certain other creators. It's good to be able to revisit certain prejudices about a given book or creator, and to discover stuff I want to read next.

10 Years Since Leicester City Won the Premier League

I finally got a chance to listen to the Totally Football Show's episode looking back at Leicester City's history English Premier League triumph in the 2015-16 season. They published it a week or two ago, but my podcast listening was disrupted for a while, so I wasn't able to listen to it until this weekend. It was a good reminder of that exciting campaign, if a little sad to also consider the stuff that's happened to Leicester City since then.

I followed it all from this side of the Atlantic, because I'd moved to the US by then. In a way it was better to follow it like that, because the results were there to look at when I woke up on weekends, and the Guardian's Football Weekly was usually ready when I woke up on Monday mornings to catch up on their discussion of the weekend's action. Though it also must have been fun to be a football fan watching Leicester City's campaign unfold as it did in real-time.

The podcast talks about all the stuff that made up the ingredients for Leicester's season - from assembling a team of genuinely good players from unlikely sources, to the hiring of Claudio Ranieri after a sex-tape scandal involving the son of the previous manager, Nigel Pearson. But it also makes the point, which I didn't know, that Leicester's form for that title-winning season was actually a continuation of the end of the previous season, when they'd been anchored to the foot of the table for most of the year and only pulled themselves out of the relegation zone in the last couple of months of the 2014-15 season.

Which leads to speculation about whether Pearson could have overseen the run at the title, or if he was too conservative to go for it. That question can't be answered, but it's also true that when Leicester hired Ranieri, he was coming off a disastrous four-match run as the manager of the Greek national team, which had ended after his team had lost to the Faroe Islands. That was on top of Ranieri's reputation in England as the "tinker man", who always futzed around with his lineups to the detriment of actually winning stuff - and it has to be said, he'd never won a league title until that season with Leicester.

One thing that the podcast didn't go into too much detail about, although they did touch on it, was how that season turned Tottenham Hotspur into one of the "big six" sides for many years, on the strength of players like Harry Kane and Toby Alderweireld and Jan Vertonghen, among others. It feels odd to think about when you consider that Spurs are in active danger of relegation - as I type, they're in 18th place in the league table, a point off from safety, having conceded a late equalizer in this weekend's match.

Spurs are, in a way, traveling along a similar trajectory to Leicester City, which saw a lot of things go well that season, but neither team was able to capitalize on those positives in subsequent seasons. Leicester suffered some off-pitch tragedy as well, such as when their owner died in a helicopter crash right outside the stadium, but there were a lot of decisions that didn't pan out as the club's executives hoped - and Spurs did it to themselves as well, in hiring a selection of managers post 2016 who each left the club weaker than when they left - last season's Europa League triumph notwithstanding.

Leicester's story is one that repeats itself every few years, at different league levels: a team that overextends itself to chase success, and then finds itself suffering relegation and financial chaos. But, even though Leicester is currently in danger of relegation to English football's third tier, at least they can boast that their grasp for the stars actually paid off and led to a league title.

How to Write Romantasy, by Jenna Moreci

I've already written about how romantasy seems to be everywhere, but now that I've started writing my own, I've had a lot more opportunity to think about how it's built. My Instagram feed has a lot of discussion of tropes - both over- and under-used - and I've taken inspiration from Sarah J Maas's A Court of Thorns and Roses series and Rebecca Yarros's Empyrean/Fourth Wing series. Inspiration, in this case, being both stuff to try in my own story and stuff to avoid.

But the other week I was poking around my local, Kepler's, and found Jenna Moreci's How to Write Romantasy, and snapped it up on a whim. I was already about 80,000 words into my own, but the layout of Moreci's book appealed to me. I've since read a chapter or so every day, and just finished it today, so I thought I'd give some thoughts on it.

The first thing to say, which I think the book does well, is to define the key aspects of both the romance and the fantasy genres, and from there, to define the two sub-strands that define romantasy: romantic fantasy and fantasy romance. In short, romantasy is essentially fantasy that doesn't work if you take out the romantic parts, and romantic fantasy puts more emphasis on the fantasy part, while fantasy romance puts more emphasis on the romance part. The differences are in the world building and when the leading couple gets together.

It's worth noting that this passage, which occurs early in the book, reflects what I've read elsewhere. My impression is that Fourth Wing is a little more romantic fantasy, and ACOTAR is maybe a little more fantasy romance, but I suspect the lines are more blurry than I'm suggesting.

What I thought was really well done about the book, however, was in its discussion of structure. It uses the classic Freytag structure:

1. Exposition
2. Rising action
3. Climax
4. Falling action
5. Resolution

Moreci looks separately at how fantasy and romance stories fall along this structure, and then combines them to show how romantasy should flow from one act to the next. She then talks over several chapters about how to create a good central relationship, ranging from matching the two (or more) romantic leads with one another to building that chemistry between them, to putting obstacles in their way, in the shape of both fantasy tsuris and romantic tsuris (as an aside, I've been warming to the potential of that word, "tsuris", which is Yiddish for something between trouble and grief).

Because I was already well into my own story, I used How to Write Romantasy more as a map to ensure I was hitting all the right notes, rather than to get ideas or anything else. But as I said, I liked the description of structure, especially because Moreci treats structure not as a strict prescription but as a general guideline of when things are meant to happen.

Now, I wrote this blog to talk about this book that I enjoyed, but also, it's because I've been thinking about what exactly I'm doing here, writing in a genre that I'd never properly read before about December and that is dominated by women. And then, this morning, I found this article in the Guardian. I agreed with the author's general thesis, that straight men aren't really writing sex anymore, although I thought he could have ventured beyond literary or highbrow fiction and talked about genre - though I can't think of too many recent SFF novels that contained much sex.

The exception being Joe Abercrombie's Age of Madness trilogy, though those scenes don't have the same goal as sex scenes in romantasy (or indeed romance), ie to deepen intimacy between the principal characters. Which I guess means I'm saying that the Guardian article could more profitably have been a discussion of why straight men aren't writing romance.

Answer: because straight men aren't reading romance. But also, maybe we should be? Both reading and writing romance and romantasy, I mean. Instead of writing porn, we could be writing about what sex means to our characters, and what it reveals about them - which strikes me as just as valid a subject matter as thinly veiled allegories of the Byzantine Empire or the Industrial Revolution, especially when elves and dragons are involved.

Bringing it all back to my original point, I think How to Write Romantasy is a good primer for anyone delving into writing the genre, though you should also read the genre, to get a sense of what other authors are doing, what works for you and what doesn't. Go and get it from your local bookstore rather than on Kindle, though!

RIP Sam Kieth

It feels like there have been quite a few notable deaths recently (former FBI chief Robert Mueller, Nicholas Brendon of Buffy), but the one that struck me the most was comics artist Sam Kieth, whose death I saw announced by a fellow penciller, Kelley Jones.

I didn't know Kieth's work too well beyond a few issues of various books and pinups that popped up on posters or the internet. But he had such a notable style, evinced partly in his issues of the first Sandman storyline, Preludes and Nocturnes, but even more in his creator-owned Image series, the Maxx. I had that first issue of the Maxx, or the Maxx's appearance in the sole published issue of Darker Image, but it disappeared in one of the many clear-outs I had over the years, but I remember how the line art in it was unlike basically anything else in mainstream (ish) comics.

As for the Sandman issues, I have them on hand and was able to look through those issues Kieth drew, and he was able to change tone from issue to issue and page to page, going from brooding horror and the landscapes of Hell to traditional superhero work and even down to a Jack Kirby homage. Mike Dringenberg remains the artist I associate most with early Sandman, but Kieth did so much to bring the look of the book to life, which set the bar for subsequent artists.

To put it another way, if my mental image of Dream is drawn by Dringenberg, my mental image of Cain and Abel (and Goldie) is by Kieth.

It's sad to see such a talent go so young (he was 63), but it's even sadder that there's not that much of his body of work, and I don't know where to find most of it. Still, having been on the Sandman's greatest storyline (along with the Season of Mists) is a hell of a legacy to leave.

Iran, or We Fucking Told You So

What follows is some incoherent thoughts about the war in Iran and why we're all in Hell:

1. George W Bush must be laughing himself to sleep every night, and Dick Cheney must be laughing down in the fires of Dante's Ninth Circle, at the thought that no matter how stupid, mendacious and ill-prepared their invasion of Iraq was, the Trump Administration is doing it so much worse and making them look like FDR and Alan Dulles by comparison
2. I'm not the first or most eloquent person to make this observation, but the Venezuela thing is what cooked us, because it went off without any hitches for the Trump people, and so now they think doing the same thing to Iran will be just as easy
3. My nearest gas price has gone up to $5.09 per gallon, as opposed to $4.49 per gallon before last week. We need stickers on every pump of Trump pointing and saying "I did this!" Like those Biden stickers, but honest, given that the high gas prices that happened during Biden's term were a result of Trump going to the Middle East and telling them to ramp down production to raise prices
4. Though some of this is to be blamed on Biden, because he could (maybe?) have shut the war in Gaza down, but instead gave Netanyahu carte blanche and now we're riding our bombs down, Dr Strangelove-style, alongside the Israelis
5. I haven't checked my stock portfolio but I'm guessing that all this geopolitical risk is making my retirement accounts crater, which is meaningless for right now, but would mark the first time since I lost my job (almost exactly a year ago) that my net worth has gone down. I say meaningless, but since I'll probably have to start selling off my investments to keep myself going until I find a job, it'd be nice to have a portfolio that lasts me more than a week
6. There's a lot to be said about a person with a drinking problem and no actual leadership experience running the Pentagon and talking about "missions from God" and "triggering Armageddon"
7. How much cultural heritage has been destroyed because of this war and the one in Iraq, plus the Syrian civil war that just "ended" and everything else? It's relatively unimportant in the face of civilian deaths, infrastructure collapse and everything, but also... the Middle East is one of the oldest centers of civilization in the world, which means there's a lot of priceless history being bombed to dust right now
8. Just saying, the Iraq War gave us ISIS/Daesh, so what's this war going to throw up that we'll spend the next two decades dealing with?
9. Please spare me your bad-faith arguments that we're liberating the women of Iran from oppression: on one hand, an Iranian woman with a degree in medical technology once told me that her classes back in Tehran were easily half female; on the other hand, the US is steadily rolling back abortion rights and access to contraceptives is constantly being debated as getting cut next, plus a bunch of "thinkers" near and dear to the administration keep complaining about American women being allowed to vote
10. They probably need to cancel the Men's World Cup this year
11. On a related note, what does this war mean for Trump's chances to win next year's FIFA Peace Prize? Or will FIFA president Gianni Infantino give him two peace prizes?
12. Trump is a bad president: incompetent, intellectually lazy, dishonest, gross, uninformed about the world, uninterested in what effects his decisions will have on the world. He's also the most influential president of my lifetime, in terms of how much he's been able to push through
13. What would it take for someone like Maine Senator Susan Collins to stand up to him on literally anything, at this point? I ask because if the Democrats retake both House and Senate in November and impeach Trump, there's still no way to get enough senators to convict. And even if they did, we'd end up with President JD Vance, who'd just pardon Trump anyway
14. Fuck

RIP Dan Simmons

Sci-fi and fantasy and horror and everything else author Dan Simmons passed away this week, and I've been seeing a lot of people on social media talking about his works that had an effect on them. One or two have mentioned his drift rightwards, but most focused on his Hyperion Cantos, which are the books that put him on the map for me.

I first encountered the series in the pages of Bonelli's Almanacco della Fantascienza, a yearly digest they did around their SF character Nathan Never (Dylan Dog had a horror almanac and Martin Mystere had a mystery almanac), which included articles about notable books and movies and other stuff of interest to Italian science fiction readers. One year the almanac mentioned the Fall of Hyperion, the second in the series, but when I picked it up (in English) I was confused by everything and didn't go back to the series for a while.

When I did, I started with the first book, Hyperion, which became one of my foundational texts as a science fiction reader, up there with Foundation and 2001 and Dune and the Hitchhiker's Guide. I even wrote a blog more than ten years ago about how good the first paragraph is at setting the scene and introducing the themes that float throughout the entire series. The cover of Hyperion is so distinctive that I notice it whenever I see it on someone's shelves, for example in some of Sal Khan's videos on Khan Academy.

Hyperion blew my mind when I finally read it, and Fall of Hyperion did it again when I was ready for it. Endymion and Rise of Endymion broke my heart when I got to those. Most of the discussions of the Hyperion Cantos I've read this week indicate that the last two books weren't as well-received as the first, but I remember them being great, and I remember my dad loved them too. In any case, the Hyperion Cantos overall had enough of an effect on me that I went out and read the book by Teilhard de Chardin, whose philosophy plays such an important part in the story (less of a foundational text for me, but then, I've never really grokked philosophy).

After those books, I was ready to follow Dan Simmons anywhere, and was excited to pick up Ilium. Some of it felt derivative of the Hyperion books, but it had a similar mix of philosophical and literary DNA powering it, and I frequently think about Simmons's portrayal of the Homeric Greeks. Unfortunately Olympos wasn't as successful, in part because by then Simmons had been radicalized by 9/11 - his depiction of the modern world ending because of an Islamist plot felt thin even in 2005 or 2006, or whenever I read it.

It then seemed he'd gone even further down that rabbit hole, when I read a passage from a newer book of his that seemed to imply that Texas was free because they paid full price for healthcare. I'll admit that put me off reading any of his stuff after Olympos, just like Orson Scott Card's increasingly unhinged rants did (at around the same time).

I didn't only read Simmons's books. As I mentioned in my previous blog about him, I spent a lot of time in the 2000s reading his Writing Well columns, now sadly unavailable because his website is no longer up. He did a good job in those columns of deconstructing the craft of writing, and while some of the advice hasn't served me as well as I'd have liked, I still live by his maxim, taken from F Scott Fitzgerald, that you should read at least six top-flight authors every year. I've managed it every year since I moved back to California, and in that time I've also read six non-male SFF authors, in the same spirit, i.e. to broaden my horizons.

While I'm less interested in Dan Simmons's political screeds, I've been thinking it would be nice to revisit the Hyperion books, and to go back to some of his earlier horror books, which seem to evoke the same spirit as early Stephen King and Ray Bradbury. I've heard good things about those, too, so here's hoping.

And even apart from that, I'll always have those indelible images from the Hyperion books he painted: the Consul in his spaceship at the start, the story of Sal and Rachel Weintraub, the world tree ships, and so much more.

Finally Getting to Grips With Avengers Vs X-Men

Spent the last week or so reading the 2012 crossover event that pitted Marvel's two biggest teams against each other, and that heralded a big change in the status quo for the X-Men in particular (I'm assuming, though I haven't read the Avengers books from around that period). I've read that it wasn't universally loved as a story, and I kind of have to agree, since it feels like a number of characters have to act weird for it to work.

Before I get to that, I wanted to consider that statement, that the Avengers and the X-Men are Marvel's two biggest teams. I'm old enough to remember when the X-Men really were Marvel's biggest property, and when nobody really cared about the X-Men, so that feels weird to say. But by then, the Marvel Cinematic Universe had started in earnest, and the crossover came amid the first Avengers movie, which was a big success and seemed to live up to expectations, at least in terms of forming a template for later MCU phases. To put it another way, the Avengers were on the upswing, finally living up to their billing as a top team and pulling in decent sales (I presume).

The X-Men could be said to have been on the opposite trajectory: their most influential writer, Chris Claremont, was long gone from the books (and crucially, from setting the tone editorially) by 2012, despite a couple of returns in the previous decade or so. The two most innovative runs, Grant Morrison's New X-Men and Joss Whedon and John Cassaday's Astonishing X-Men, were over by then too, leaving the mutants in the hands of writers who weren't worse, necessarily, but whose runs don't seem to have captured the imagination of fans as much. I didn't like Peter Milligan's run, for example, while Mike Carey's was good but maybe not as spectacular as I'd have liked. Same with Matt Fraction and Kieron Gillen's respective runs, though both have a lot to recommend them (apart from when the art was done by Greg Land).

The premise of the story felt like it came out of nowhere, a bit: without much foreshadowing, the Phoenix Force is headed toward Earth, and its presumed new host, Hope Summers, the mutant messiah. The Avengers want to stop the Phoenix, given that it eats planets, while the X-Men, against their history, see it as a force of rebirth for the mutant population, which had been cut down to 198 after the House of M crossover. I thought Cyclops's position was particularly strange, since the two previous Phoenix encounters, the early 80s Phoenix Saga and 2004's Planet X storyline, both ended in the death of his girlfriend-then-wife, Jean Grey (she got better in 1986, died in 2004, and got better again in 2018 or so).

On the other hand, given that the Avengers line had expanded to a bunch of new books and teams, it was nice to see how the rest of the Marvel universe reacted to these events. A storyline that I really found intriguing was the Phoenix's ties to Iron Fist's history, since a previous Iron Fist had fought the Phoenix off with the help of Leonardo da Vinci (but of course!). I also quite liked the storyline in Avengers Academy, the book focused on younger heroes, like Wolverine's clone/daughter X-23, in which the younger mutants from the X-Books were held at the Avengers Academy and the two groups debated their own agency. That may have been the most interesting philosophical debate in the entire crossover, given that it hinged on X-23's own experience of being controlled and manipulated by adults.

Not that it was always easy to follow the storyline across the various books. Marvel Unlimited is usually good at gathering these crossovers into reading lists and funneling you through the story, issue by issue, but this crossover was an exception. The reading list put the VS miniseries first, which was focused on individual fights without regard to the overall plot, then the main AVX miniseries came next, and after that the tie-ins that ran in individual series. That would have meant reading the main storyline in the AVX miniseries, then going back to the beginning with the first of the tie-ins, which made it a little more confusing than it should have been. At any rate, there was a lot of going back and forth in time, so it wasn't always clear where a given issue fit in the narrative.

The other thing that came to mind as I read through the crossover was how interesting it would be for one or more MCU phases to focus on this storyline, or something similar. The X-Men are meant to be joining the MCU in the next couple of movies, Doomsday and Secret Wars, which means there could be a big fight between them eventually. I found myself wondering as I read how Marvel might go about it, but it's probably too convoluted and pie-in-the-sky, and would probably be unfair to the X-characters, since they'd have a lot less backstory to make you root for them.

On another note, an MCU version of AVX would probably turn the Scarlet Witch into the villain again, since the whole thing came from her whispering "No more mutants" and depowering them all, which led to this situation. I feel like she's been through enough.

Still, it's a fascinating artifact from the previous decade, when Marvel was on its way to becoming the entertainment juggernaut that we now know it as, and I feel like it has the epic sweep that could be fun as the big crossover movie that caps a few years of individual movies. Though I worry it would turn into a character assassination of Cyclops, featuring him taking on the Phoenix Force and almost destroying the world. He's a favorite character, so I don't like to see him done dirty this way.

In any case, I'm excited to see how the next phase of X-Men comics plays out - I've already read a few of those books, but not in an organized way, so putting them all into context will be like reading them anew. And I'm interested in eventually getting back to AVX via the Avengers books, which should provide a different perspective.

As I said, I don't think it was always fully successful, and it made the X-Men overall look bad, but I have to give Marvel points for ambition. It was developed by all the big Marvel writers of the time, including Brian Michael Bendis and Jonathan Hickman, who went on to be so influential in later X-books, so it's also neat to see their first work on these characters.