Uzumeri x Godel #3: I Break Fourth Walls Down In Africa (Animal Man 10-14, Secret Origins 39)

Godel: Wellllllllcome back everybody! I’m the Uncanny Addison Godel and this is David Uzumeri – better known as The Batmannotator. In this ongoing feature, we’re guiding each other through extended runs on classic titles by major creators. This time, we continue our journey through the late 1980s’ Animal Man title written by Grant Morrison and pencilled by Chas Truog. David knows where this is all going, and brings the expertise; this is my first time reading this stuff and I bring the wide-eyed wonder.

Uzumeri: In Animal Man #10-12 and Secret Origins #39, we first get a retelling of Animal Man’s classic origin before an arc explaining Post-Crisis changes to his continuity via the introduction of the yellow continuity cop aliens in an arc that also features an immortal white ape sheikh of some kind, former Justice League Detroit member Vixen and more foreshadowing about the continuity crisis with Highwater and Psycho-Pirate, including a short piece about Morrison’s childhood.

#13 is a one-off introducing the successor to the white B’wana Beast: Freedom Beast, a black dude fighting apartheid in South Africa. #14 is a oneshot, pencilled by Tom Grummett again, featuring more Highwater and a great deal of ominous foreshadowing about Buddy and his family centered on the date September 27.

Godel: Or just the numbers 9 and 27 – – – that it’s a date isn’t really stated here, although I read it that way too.

Uzumeri: Let’s kick it off with the origin arc, though. It’s definitely a trippy story, as the fourth wall is broken pretty constantly throughout, especially by the aliens who are practically speaking to the reader at various points.

Godel: Can I ask, first of all, what is the deal with Secret Origins as a series?

Uzumeri: Basically, it was just an anthology title for the post-Crisis origins of all of DC’s characters. So for stuff like, how does Barbara Gordon fit into the DC Universe since she isn’t around in Frank Miller’s Batman Year One? The story where it was explained she was his niece is in there. There’s another Morrison story in Secret Origins #50 that we’ll get to after this arc which provides the post-Crisis explanation of how the two Flashes (Jay Garrick – the ’40s wing helmet head guy – and Barry Allen) met for the first time. It’s pretty insane.

Godel: See, even that is pretty striking, that you could milk years of comics out of just, like, publishing the new canonical storylines for minor characters. And it’s interesting that, I guess, for most characters that was probably enough, but Morrison decides basically to make a whole storyline out of, A) the continuity glitch and B) the fact that the old origin was really hokey in a lot of ways, although back at the beginning of the series he was insistent that he just loved those old Animal Man stories.

Like, really, you don’t need the yellow continuity cops at all. If you just wanted to fix Animal Man’s new origin/status quo, you would just do an ordinary issue of Secret Origins.

Uzumeri: Haha, well, I don’t want to spoil anything, but there’s definitely a reason Morrison told the story this way rather than just giving him a new origin. This wasn’t a one-and-done deal, but you probably guessed that from the fact that the Highwater hallucination plotline kept going on afterwards since he explicitly dreams of Grant Morrison in #14.

Godel: Oh, well, totally. I mean, 10-12 are also interesting issues on their own, too, so I’m glad he actually pulled this apart and basically made hay out of how weird it is to be going back and “fixing” these characters and their pasts. It also turns out to be a convenient way to sweep the “gene bomb” story under the carpet, as the aliens also reveal that they gave Animal Man his powers for some important purpose, so while they’ve got him there, they reset his powers.

Uzumeri: There’s a complaint at times that Morrison tends to make comics about comics, and this is certainly a big example of that.

Godel: Yeah, this gets really meta – – I mean, the aliens make fun of how cheezy the old story was, and when they kill a walk-on they’re like “He was a minor character, without even a name, of no significance.”

Uzumeri: The thing about the Psycho-Pirate thing and the continuum is – the basic plot of Crisis on Infinite Earths, because we’re gonna need it not just for this story but also going forward in Morrison’s DCU, is that… alright, I’m going to go back to some really crazy old DC history.

Godel: Ooh, fire away.

Uzumeri: Okay, you know those blue dickheads who run the Green Lanterns? The Guardians of the Universe? They evolved on this planet called Maltus, which was horrendously overpopulated. That’s why they were all dudes for a while, since Maltusians gender-separated and all the chicks went off to become the Zamarons, who run the Star Sapphires.

Godel: Wow, I love the heavy-handedness of the planet with the population problem being called Maltus.

Uzumeri: In any case, on Maltus, there was this scientist dude Krona, who wanted to see the beginning of the universe. Like, he was obsessed with it. And against basically everyone’s advice and the law and the university and etc etc etc he built this machine to view the beginning of the universe. And he saw this big spiral galaxy thing and a hand around it which is presumably God, and then this crazy chain reaction happened since the universe was being observed by its later self or something and reality refracted and that’s when the multiverse was created. Krona later went on to become a Green Lantern villain, obviously.

But the thing was, only the POSITIVE matter universe splintered. The NEGATIVE matter universe didn’t.

Godel: Uh oh!

Uzumeri: So there’s these dudes created during the splintering for no real discernible reason, the Monitor and the Anti-Monitor. The Monitor gathers up some heroes from across all the Earths because the Anti-Monitor is unleashing a wave of antimatter that’s destroying all of the positive matter universes and stealing their, uh, matter energy or something i don’t know, for the antimatter universe.

Godel: You know, people sometimes ask me why I cleave to Marvel rather than DC, and I think it’s because the Marvel cosmology is so many piled-up levels of confusing nonsense that it feels lived-in and fun, whereas, I mean, Monitor and Anti-Monitor just sounds horrendously simplified and corny to me.

Uzumeri: So these heroes all start doing some fighting, the Monitor dies, they all fight the Anti-Monitor some more, they go back to the beginning of time to fight the Anti-Monitor, who arm-wrestles the Spectre over the spiral galaxy thing while another team of heroes goes back to stop Krona from turning on the machine, and then reality reboots itself with one universe with elements of the five universes that were remaining at that time which were kept within the essence of Lyra the Harbinger who betrayed the Monitor becuase she was possessed by one of the Anti-Monitor’s shadow demons, even though the Monitor raised her as she was an orphan.

Godel: ….

Uzumeri: OH, and an Alexander Luthor from Earth-3, which was destroyed at the very beginning, was the son of the good Lex Luthor on that Earth where all the superheores were villains and vice versa. He’s made of half-antimatter, so he powers all of this. Anyways, so basically they all stay on this one earth but then the Anti-Monitor comes back and then Superman of Earth-Two punches him in the face in the antimatter universe and then finally the Anti-Monitor dies.

And there’s one universe. And Barry Allen died at some point.

Godel: And this is basically, a way of salvaging the good bits of lots of old and mutually contradictory DC stories, right? It all happened on parallel universes and then they got stitched back together into one definitive universe?

Uzumeri: This was the idea, yeah, but immediately they all started disagreeing with what was the definitive thing, so things almost immediately started getting MORE fucked-up than the original continuity. I think the worst example was the revelation that the entire Legion of Super-Heroes history had taken place in a pocket universe with a fake Superboy since John Byrne didn’t want his Superman to have been in the Legion as a kid.

Godel: Yeah, see, that would never have happened at Marvel. Mark Gruenwald would have had a four-hundred page single-space document already prepared that established exactly how everything happened.

Uzumeri: And at the end of all of this, Psycho-Pirate is the ONLY one who remembers the multiverse even existed. Everyone else remembers a big fight with the Anti-Monitor, but nothing involving the multiple worlds crap.

Godel:  I think I sort of accepted stuff like that at face value.   I read the Man of Steel limited series as a kid and it made a lot of sense to me, because I was totally oblivious to the fact that there ever was a Legion of Superheroes. Like, I still have yet to read a LSH comic.

Uzumeri: Now, in 2010, Crisis has been completely undone. But it was fairly fresh at this juncture. So the big thing that shattered the continuum that the aliens are talking about, that was Crisis.   It’s a story that’s important to keep in mind, since it gets referenced obliquely a few times in JLA and, well, obviously it’s important to know about for when we get to Final Crisis.

Also, there’s a cute hat-tip here, when the Psycho-Pirate asks Highwater if “the wolfman” sent him.

Godel: I figured that was something to do with Marv Wolfman.

Uzumeri: Marv Wolfman wrote Crisis.

Godel: Ha!

Thanks for the backstory – I have a sort of basic familiarity with the concept, being a general superhero reader, but it’s good to have the references to draw on. It still seems totally wanky and indulgent to me. I mean, nowadays I feel like the way you would deal with having a bunch of contradictory stories lying around is to either not reference the ones you don’t like, or retcon them into something more suitable. The global continuity surgery thing just seems crazy.

Uzumeri: Well, the problem with the book is that while it does feature a lot of big, crazy visuals because of that continuity surgery, it still feels like a checklist. I’m all about stories that take place on that scale, but not when the reason for its existence is to affect other stories. If that makes any sense.

OH! And in the midst of Crisis, Animal Man and the rest of the team Forgotten Heroes (check this sweet Gil Kane cover) get involved, but I can’t…. Let me double check that.

Godel: So you mean to say you’ve… FORGOTTEN what happened to these heroes?

Uzumeri: I’m now grabbing my huge-ass COIE hardcover. Okay, yeah, in #12 they fly with Brainiac to Apokolips to ask Darkseid for help.

Godel: Was that Animal Man similar to the one in the Morrison comic, or more like the crew-cut old-school guy?

Uzumeri: Crew-cut old-school guy, absolutely.   So according to the (this exists) separate compendium volume in the Absolute COIE, which features the next appearances of every character in the crossover, Animal Man totally disappeared between COIE #12, where he was told by Darkseid to get the hell off Apokolips, and the first issue of Morrison’s Animal Man.

So that’s the background to this story.

Godel: Okay!   What happens here is, Animal Man gets picked up by the aliens who originally gave him his powers, but they’ve been in hibernation and missed the whole Crisis and are now confused because their memory of Animal Man doesn’t match the guy who’s been wandering around in this comic.

In what seemed to me like some shaky padding of the story, they can’t just call Animal Man on the phone, but instead send spectral demon-beasts to chase after a different animal-related character until she flees to Animal Man’s house in desperation, at which point the aliens themselves show up to move the plot forward.

Uzumeri: Yeah, that entire part was kind of mystifying, but I guess the aliens can’t get a phone connection from the spaceship beneath Zambezi.

Godel: But they can teleport into his living room! Would have saved everybody a lot of trouble to just start with that, but then we’d lose the parallel between the foxes being chased by posh Englishmen, and Vixen being chased by the monsters. And the sweet, Sweet-referencing title of FOX ON THE RUN.

I think what I’m really getting at here is that I don’t understand what Vixen’s doing in this story at all, she seems to have almost no personality.

That’s okay - neither do we.

Uzumeri: I’ve never really been enthralled by Vixen in … well, any kind of story; keep in mind she was part of the worst Justice League lineup in history, or at least the most-mocked, JUSTICE LEAGUE DETROIT.

That’s right: they based themselves out of Detroit. The only old members on the team were Martian Manhunter and Aquaman. Vixen was one of a few new characters for the team, which also included Vibe, a breakdancing Latino kid with shockwave powers who used to run with a street gang called Los Lobos. So as you can probably guess, it was an attempt to create a more diverse team, which really just meant a bunch of stereotypes.

Godel: The All-New! All-Different!…yeah. This Vibe guy sounds familiar, I must have seen him in like a “worst characters” list at some point. It also sounds, improbably, like Louise and Walt Simonson read those comics, said “What an awesome character!” and created Rictor.

Anyway, Vixen’s conflict with Hamed Ali, the ghostly dictator who is foolishly drilling into the aliens’ buried spaceship, is in here to give this some kind of an action story, because otherwise you’re looking at two or three issues of talking heads arguing about continuity.

Uzumeri: I didn’t really get the Hamed Ali thing. I honestly kept expecting them to reveal he was a gorilla or something; he looked somewhat apelike.

Godel: Yeah, he was weird. I mean, basically the big problem with that arc for me is that Hamed Ali is a terrible, one-dimensional, old-school villain. Morrison eventually comments on that and has the aliens write him out of existence (in a cutely drawn sequence, where he reverts to just inks, pencils, eventually a stick figure, then nothing), but it doesn’t really change the fact that for a few issues you have to put up with this stock supervillain. He even has a terrible, one-dimensional henchwoman with animal-themed powers, apparently just so Vixen has someone to fight.

Uzumeri: I totally love how Hamed Ali’s big tank looks literally like a gigantic erect dick.

Godel: Way better is his tank with the big DRAGON HEAD on it. I wish we got more of that, really. I can’t help but think that Morrison a few years later would have really pulled out all of the stops to sell the over-the-top ridiculousness of that villain, give him all the stupid accoutrements of a good Silver Age baddie. I also wonder whether he’d be so eager to erase him.

Setting aside the ins and outs of the DCU and the continuity glitches and so on, I think what’s interesting about the origin arc, just in terms of the overall flow of the Animal Man series, is that it seems like an attempt to revisit the thematic material of the coyote, the red mask, and the Thanagarian dude. Only this time, he’s addressing the problem that those stories, while excellent, weren’t actually about Animal Man.

So here we get it all: creators reckoning with their creation, the violence inherent in art, father-son issues, and the baggage of “origin stories,” but Buddy’s actually at the center of it all. So despite the blankness of Vixen and Hamed Ali, it works, and it’s a good showcase for Buddy to do the things you expect in an Animal Man book: the guy whose name is on the cover does clever things with his powers, has character moments, gets himself out of a jam, etc.

Uzumeri: That’s a really good summation, I’d say – it definitely feels like a tentpole arc. If it’d just been 66 pages of the aliens bickering about changes to continuity, it would have maybe been an interesting analysis but probably not a very compelling superhero action comic.

Godel: Particularly since the continuity problems actually seem really lame and easily solved, basically they boil down to the original Animal Man seeming to be a slightly older guy living in more of a Mark Trail milieu. And I did like the whole bit with them having to escape from Hamed Ali’s completely sealed-off dungeon. I’m a sucker for your basic superhero genre setups: how will they get out of this one?!

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Uzumeri: I think the reason the aliens do all of this stuff and basically set this up is that – when you think about it – the genre demands it. They can’t just teleport Buddy over, because then it isn’t an interesting superhero story. And they need an over-the-top villain while they’re at it.

Godel: That’s interesting, although it would make more sense if the aliens had actually set Hamed Ali into motion as a lure for Animal Man, or something like that. Like, give him the kind of villain he’d expect to be facing, that’s the way to bring in a superhero! When in fact, they seem really annoyed that this guy is drilling into their spaceship, it’s like #2 on their to-do list after fixing Animal Man’s gene bomb problem.

Uzumeri: I guess it’s totally possible this all tied into some kind of ongoing Vixen plotline, too. I wonder — neither of us have even considered the possibility that Hamed Ali was an old character.

Godel: I sort of figured he was like the Red Mask, conjured up to make a point.

Uzumeri: Welp. I’m about to blow your mind: Hamed Ali is the archenemy of B’wana Beast.

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Godel: d’ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. I gotta say, being a guy who never dies is a pretty cool, though sort of limited, superpower. I wish the Red Mask had stuck around long enough to fight him.

Uzumeri: Yeah, so this is totally Morrison just saying that this character kind of sucks, I guess. I wonder if he was a horrible racist caricature in his original appearances. I could totally see this just being him taking revenge on what he thought was an offensive comic.

Godel: You wonder. I mean, given that the very next storyline is this desperate attempt to draw a line under B’wana Beast, make vague sense out of his “white savage” overtones, and then pass the costume off to a new, non-white character. Like, in the space of two issues, he effectively ends the career of B’wana Beast and kills off his unkillable arch-enemy.

Uzumeri: I don’t think it’ll at all surprise you when I tell you that, in 2010, Freedom Beast was murdered to get a reaction out of a white guy.

Godel: awww, man. RIP Freedom Beast.

Uzumeri: Justice League: Cry for Justice #1. He gets murdered brutally, and somewhat ironically, by Prometheus – who, you might recall, was created by Grant Morrison in JLA.

Godel: Oh yeahhhhhhhhh, the guy with the CD-ROMs?

Uzumeri: Yup!

Godel: That guy was great!

Uzumeri: This was the same book where Prometheus gets shot in the head by Green Arrow, who then turns to the reader and says “JUSTICE.” Also, Speedy’s eight-year-old daughter gets fridged.

Godel: You know, people sometimes ask me why I cleave to Marvel…

Uzumeri: But anyway, yeah, Freedom Beast is introduced in Animal Man for sure, and he’s honestly a well-done character – he manages to be political and talk about CURRENT ISSUES without being condescending, and he’s pointed without falling into the angry black man stereotype.

He’s also pretty funny – I really loved the ironic death with the zebra unicorn thing. And he gets two great lines: “Today’s politics are tomorrow’s mythology” and “He died of a rare disease. Symbolism.”

Godel: That was good. This is a Highly Topical Apartheid Issue, and it’s interesting to see someone struggle to do a story set in actual South Africa, rather than using a stand-in (like Claremont did by inventing Genosha the year before).

Uzumeri: It’s unapologetic in being about the real world, yeah — there’s really no metaphor here. It’s interesting, since this is honestly one of his relative few overtly real-world political works. I mean, he says Final Crisis was about living under the Bush administration, but it’s not like the book is about Darkseid refusing to pull beleaguered troops out of Maltus.

Godel: It’s interesting to see Animal Man, already established as a sort of liberal do-gooder superhero, trying to make a small difference in South Africa by foiling a government plan to incite a riot that they can then blame on the Desmond Tutu analogue, as an excuse to arrest him. That seems like the right “scale” of intervention for the character – – – I mean, Animal Man’s not going to overthrow the government, and neither is Freedom Beast. But then there’s this hand-waving reference to how B’Wana and Freedom Beasts are going to stay around to deal with the inevitable reprisals against the people, and it’s like…yeah. That’s gonna happen, people are going to get beaten and jailed and killed. Great job, Animal Man.

Uzumeri: Well, I mean, keep in mind that he’s a Justice League International member still. Overthrowing apartheid single-handedly, while theoretically possible, would lead to way WORSE reprisals. And doing nothing is doing nothing. Also, presumably South Africa has a few of their own superhumans on payroll, ones who could theoretically pound Animal Man into the dirt.

Godel: Oh, yeah, I mean, I’m not saying Animal Man should have been like “ehh, I don’t want to get involved, there might be reprisals,” because the thing about a repressive police state is that it will always find an excuse to exert violence, so it doesn’t really matter if you “provoke” those reprisals or not. I’m just saying, those implications are all there and the story sort of has to wipe its hands at the end and say “well, back to America for me!” I totally admire the intentions of the creative team doing this issue though.

I just think putting real-world stuff into the superhero universe is always realllllllly tough to pull off, because it’s like, if South Africa actually existed in the DCU, why wasn’t Superman doing something about it? Why aren’t heroes constantly over there breaking open secret jails, revealing suppressed evidence, smuggling film out of the country (as Buddy does here), etc etc? There’s lots of reasons why that would be a bad idea – – – so there’s a real can of worms problem.

Uzumeri: We also haven’t gotten to the issue where the superheroes start giving him shit for his activism, unless that started happening back in #9? I forget.

Godel: No, not that I noticed – – Martian Manhunter actually says the reason he’s recruiting Buddy for the JLE is that he admires his political stance, or at least the fact that he has a political stance and isn’t just doing this for the hell of it.

Uzumeri: In any case, yeah, I think that as these sorts of issues go, this is definitely way stronger than the vast majority of PSAish stuff.

Godel: Well, because it’s not a PSA, you know? It’s a reasonable, complete story set within the context of South Africa. It doesn’t really try to teach a lesson or anything. There’s definitely some fantasy vengeance on the real-world bad guys; Morrison can’t stop them but he can at least imagine one of them getting gored to death by a unicorn.

Uzumeri: There’s a sense that A) Morrison actually tried to do research and B) this is something that really pisses him off, not something he just wants to educate about or whatever.

Godel: Research, or just reading the papers – – – this was a HUGELY important current events thing at the time, only slightly overshadowed by the end of the Cold War.

Uzumeri: In the world of superhero comics writing about social issues, “reading the papers” is a fuck of a lot more research than the vast majority of writers do.

Godel: hahaha, okay, true. And, again, I basically liked this issue.

Uzumeri: It’s totally strong stuff. I really like Chas Truog more and more the more I read this book – he’s not just a really solid superhero artist with totally on-point facial expressions, but he gets better and better at the weird conceptual shit Morrison throws at him. He really nails all the storytelling stuff the writer goes for.

Godel: Truog’s acting is really good. It’s easy to imagine certain sequences being much more crazy and tripped-out with a different artist (like when the aliens sort of unspindle Animal Man’s body piece by piece) but the straightforward approach also kind of works – it seems even weirder for being so matter-of-fact.

Uzumeri: I wonder how Morrison wrote this, considering I’ve heard from basically all sources that he currently works pretty close to Marvel style. The documentary said he usually thumbnails the comics first in a notebook, then describes what he drew in a panel-by-panel plot with little/no dialogue, then sends that off to be reinterpreted by the artist, and then writes the dialogue after seeing his original vision reinterpreted by whoever he’s working with.

He does not send the thumbnails, and he doesn’t talk to the artist outside of the plots; all e-mails are answered by his wife unless it’s J.H. Williams or Frank Quitely, or J. G. Jones on Final Crisis. And he seems to think seeing what the artists do different from how he would have done it, and then adapting his dialogue to it, is half of the fun.

Godel: I mean, I can imagine working like that. It’d be really cool to see what one of these geniuses does with your idea, and then sort of wing it based on that. It would also just be healthy for a writer in general, like it’d be a device to keep you from getting too attached to your initial idea of what it is you’re trying to do.

Uzumeri: It totally sucks when the artist blows and fucks up his vision, though. I mean, it tends not to happen, but sometimes DC will try to pair him up with a Big Name who will completely neglect important details and shit. See: Batman: The Return with David Finch.

Back to the issues: I think it’s also important to touch on Highwater finding that little vignette from Morrison in Psycho-Pirate’s cell, about the Morse Code signals with his imaginary friend.

(Click for the full page.)

It’s weird seeing him put so much of himself on the page in these issues in a literal way; he obviously still does it, since his work is filled, for instance, with those big, imposing, strong, supportive dads like Pa Kent and Thomas Wayne, and we get that here with his own.

Godel: And don’t forget the sequence in #14 where we see Morrison the adult wandering around in the rain struggling to think of some non-cliched narration.

Uzumeri: I don’t think it’s a mistake we saw Animal Man rescue a fox in the beginning of that issue.

Godel: And the imaginary friend was named Foxy. HMMMM! The vignette is pretty open-ended in its symbolism and I think we’ll come back to it in the long term so just for the record: the speaker, as a kid, saw flashes of light coming from a hill across town, and interpreted these to be a signal from someone trying to communicate. He flashed his own signals back and believed he was dialoguing with something, although it’s just as likely that they were car lights or something.

In a more psychological comic, I’d say this was about a desperate longing to find connections to other people out there somewhere, but here, given that this is intensely metafictional stuff, it seems like it’s about the proliferating possibilities of signals, which produce effects not predictable based on their intended semiotic content. I’m interested to see how this gets followed up.

Uzumeri: We should probably take a quick look at #14 before we wrap up.

Godel: I haven’t got much to say – it’s mostly setup, really, a lot of scenes of everybody at the house with not a lot happening, lot of subplots simmering, plus a new one: a door-to-door PREACHER is killing people with RAY GUNS.  But most of the page count follows up the SHADOWY FIGURE in the bushes, who looks like Buddy.  It’s interesting, but there’s not actually a complete plot in this issue.

Uzumeri: Yeah, any theories on all that? I won’t comment on anything, but I’m curious as to where you think this is going.

Godel: I’m not sure…. Given that we just did this whole story about the other, pre-Crisis Buddy, it seems too soon to do something where that guy actually shows up. But it would fit with a lot of the material here, you could imagine the guy who never had kids wanting to reach out to these children of an alternate self. Meanwhile, the guy who’s been investigating the Psycho Pirate is obviously still floating around, now having moved to San Francisco in what I have to say is a really inept way of trying to get closer to Animal Man, who doesn’t live in San Francisco. It’d be fun if he ends up finding the wrong Animal Man by mistake. I’d say it was a Multiple Man type story, with a spare duplicate wandering off on his own (Animal Man duplicates himself in #12) but the SHADOWY FIGURE’s been around since before that.

Uzumeri: Yeah, those are some pretty good theories. I will say that the end explanation probably won’t disappoint; if there’s one thing Morrison’s good at, it’s sticking the landing. Even Invisibles had a spectacular final issue after a really rushed arc.

Godel: Wait, wait, I’ve got it – – – it’s actually Lex Luthor!  No, wait, it’s Xorn!

Uzumeri: Ha. Ha.

In any case, I’m really glad you’re actually digging the book. Despite the apartheid stuff, it’s shocking how this book doesn’t really feel that dated.

Godel:Yeah, I actually am enjoying this – I don’t think there was anything in this chunk that just killed it the way “Death of the Red Mask” and “Coyote Gospel” did last time around, but I like the things he’s trying to do here. Good comics.

Uzumeri: I’m really looking forward to your reactions to the next crop. I think we’ve got two sessions left of this book. Before then, though, we’ve got some relatively pressing business with Jean Grey and Scott Summers.

And also some bald asshole. You know, I bet Chas Truog wouldn’t have fucked up the Phoenix’s cosmic surgery.

Godel: I still don’t think those pages were so bad!!!

Anyway, yes: next week, we find the X-Men battling a CANADIAN, a CIRCUS, and one of their OLDEST FOES! And someone throws a bowl of DIP at Storm! Nuff Said!