Well, a combination of day job travel, the punishing (for critics) three-a-week release schedule of the second season of Andor, and my laptop completely and utterly dying a couple weeks ago threw me off my regular schedule.
But, things are starting to settle a bit, and I'm hoping to get back into my regular posting groove again, including this column. My plan is to abandon some of the strict formatting I'd been using, to make something more like a typical newsletter in favor of getting it out more regularly.
My other big news of late is that I was selected to present at the Uncanny Experience, the annual X-Men fan convention here in Minneapolis. My panel is called "Fight The Power: The X-Men as Outlaws", and will focus on the way Claremont repositioned the X-Men from traditional superheroes fighting to preserve the status quo to anti-establishment figures trying to upend it. The full description is as follows:
The X-Men are “sworn to protect a world that fears and hates them.” But what happens when they’ve finally had enough? Join pop culture critic and X-Men X-pert Austin Gorton as he examines the way Chris Claremont transformed the X-Men from superheroes into outlaws. Starting with “Days Of Future Past” and encompassing many of the key storylines from the later portion of Claremont’s legendary run, including the reformation of Magneto, the rise of Freedom Force as the new enforcers of the existing social order, and the groundbreaking “Mutant Massacre” crossover event, this panel will illustrate how Claremont turned the X-Men from superheroes fighting to save the world to counterculture figures fighting to change the world. It will also explore the factors that pushed the X-Men back into a more traditional superhero mold, and the ways Claremont’s counterculture outlaw spirit lives on in stories that followed, from the post-superhero tales of Grant Morrison to the mutant nation of Krakoa. Look forward to a fun and thought-provoking session as we explore what happens when fighting to protect the world is no longer enough!
If you're in the area, or feel like making the trip, you can get tickets here. If you can't make it, I'm planning on posting something here about the presentation, either a recording, or the slide deck, or something like that. But I'm also working on a little trading card-inspired swag to hand out at the con, so if you do make it, be sure to say hello and let me know you're a GoL reader!
Review Roundup
Lots of cool stuff out over the last few weeks. It's been a few weeks since Andor wrapped (which is of course an eternity in the modern media landscape), but if you're still jonesing for that fix, all my reviews of the four three part arcs can be found here, as well a rundown of ten favorite things in each arc from me and some friends, which can be found here, In short, it's a stunning piece of television and an all-time great Star Wars story.
Related, I did a piece for a fun new-to-me site called Pop Heist that looks at the history of the Ghorman Massacre, Andor's big season two set piece, through the different iterations of Star Wars storytelling, from its origins in a role playing game to the way it's been canonized, de-canonized, re-canonized, and changed through the years. Check it out here.
Over at Comicon, I've started a new column called "Previously on X-Men", which offers up brief thoughts and fun little bits of trivia or annotations on the week's X-books, part of my effort to turn the fact that I'm reading that stuff anyway into some content.
And at ComicsXF, me and Adam Reck continue to review Uncanny X-Men (which is getting better — if still not quite good — in this latest arc). We also pitched in on a jam review of the recent Giant-Size X-Men #1 event.
What I'm Watching
Work travel means a chance to watch some random movies on the flights. Most recently, I watched A Fish Called Wanda (which was plenty fun but I didn't love as much as its reputation would suggest I should; I've never been a huge Monty Python fan so maybe that's why it didn't quite click for me), Juror #2 (Eastwood's personal politics make me nervous about some of the film's politics, but that aside, it's a taut thriller that stuck with me), The Godfather Part II which I'd never seen, believe it or not (hot take: it's good), and I continued my unofficial tradition of watching notoriously bad comic book movies in the air with the "so bad it's not even 'so bad it's good'" Kraven the Hunter, an utterly bewildering mess of a film that lacks even a brief highlight like Pierce Brosnan in Black Adam, Matt Smith dancing in Morbius, or Dakota Johnson using a car as a weapon in Madame Web. Ariana DeBose, you have an Oscar for god's sake.
Off in the world of theatrical releases, my wife and I made it out to Thunderbolts* on opening weekend, which was pleasantly low key and lots a fun, a nice kickoff to a hopefully strong summer of comic book movies along with FF and Superman (fuller review here). We also went and saw Mission: Impossible Final Reckoning on my birthday, a movie that lands its big action set pieces but was otherwise a surprisingly-leaden and overly-serious sendoff (maybe) to the franchise, and is probably the second-worst film in the series.
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That's all for now. Til next time, excelsior!
ReplyDeleteA Fish Called Wanda is likely one of those movies that doesn’t play as well if you didn’t see it when it came out — which I did with a bunch of friends on a hot summer day before we all went off to college.
Florence Pugh in particular is excellent but as much as I enjoyed most of
Thunderbolts it fell apart for me in multiple ways at the end. Maybe I’ll come back and get into how/why later.
I haven’t read contemporary X-Men comics in decades beyond a few issues of All-New X-Men and the House of X / Powers of X minis digitally, but I might check out this Giant-Size deal and, of course, I think your presentation sounds way cool so congrats on that.