Media manipulation, morally ambiguous celebrities, and white-hot death: when Brit Peter Milligan, who first followed Alan Moore on UK's Marvel Man, and later wrote challenging comics like Shade, The Changing Man, teamed up with day-glo retro indie artists Mike and Laura Allred to create a new X-Force title, they merged marketing cynicism into a story about a group of media-approved superheroes. I reviewed this on Goodreads, after devouring nearly the entire forty issue run in two days. Funny follow-up to Shakespearean plays, but obviously, I enjoyed it. If you would like to try a book like this but don't know X-Men continuity up to that point, all the better. It contains some of the tough decisions that mark that storied franchise, but X-Statix reverses the role from the persecuted to the celebrities- who are hated and feared in their own ways. With a super-rich mogul, not adverse to blackmail and murder plots, as the team's benefactor- or as he puts it, 'own...

Stay, child. You have done enough. I have regained control of my circuitry. Now the horror shall have to answer to ROM. Only once again does memory dictate preserving some cluster of information, centered around the relief of loneliness that comes from believing someone has touched one’s inner being. Love, between two souls united by an intimate current of being, comes only so rarely for one encased in spaceknight’s skin. The young woman was a mutant named Rogue. Her kiss somehow reached the inner man in a way that the physical touch of no one could. This cluster is so intense, the time of abandoning Clairton’s embrace to search out the Wraiths in all corners of the world. With this, his humanity recently destroyed while in the possession of the usurping knight Terminus in a maddened defense against Galactus, Rom feels the loss of his chance to again become fully human. Thus, while his love is now known by the cast (thanks in part to an unexpected event caused by a Wraith plot...