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...

Sponsored by Integr8d Soul Productions, featuring DNA: The Mountain, drawn with crisp, clear story telling by Lue Lyron and the Marc Kane, with scenes and ideas you won't find anywhere else in entertainment!! The comic for those who don't read comics! Black and White, $3 plus shipping each. Available from C Lue Disharoon 542 6th Ave. San Diego, CA 92101 Ad from 1977. First, i just LOVED X-Men: First Class. My friend Josh felt like it was one of the best action flicks he's ever seen, from effects to characterization. I can't explain why it seemed to slow down just as they hit the act with the climactic action, but I suspect it's me and my tendency not to sit through more than an hour of anything anymore, unless it's something I'm actively making, myself. We got off to a great start; I felt like Xavier calling his mutants together as I checked to see who on this side of town would like to share the movie experience. With six of us set to converge, and ...

I was picturing Wolverine vying for the lead singer spot to take things punk rock, sparring with Cyclops, the rhythm/ lead guitarist for the job...then I realized, "Wolverine's naturally a shredder..." For some reason, Banshee reminds me of Steve Winwood. Why is that? Just Roll With it, baby. Storm already looks like a dancer from Sly and the Family Stone, or maybe P-Funk. Give her a tambourine. If only I had a sense of her being deep into World Beat music, but while she was celebrated and serenaded, I've never known her to have an instrumental proclivity. Some type of flute would be bad ass. A Djimbe? I'm so tempted to put colossus on drums...really, Nightcrawler would've been a totally gnarly look for a singer. So would Coloshuss... Jean's got the pyro technics down for sure...have to imagine she can sing, too... Cyclops still makes me think of a guitarist, but without a doubt, he comes with his own light show. The Beast could seriously get down on a bas...

[IMG]http://i34.tinypic.com/2m33dsj.jpg[/IMG] I arrive at the home of Brock Jones, Clairton’s deputized super hero, the Torpedo. His recovery on the couch brings concerned family, friends, and a doctor, who listen to his demoralized account of an enemy materializing on the old Marks farm. Steve Jackson and his fiance, Brandy Clark, discuss the town’s vulnerability in wake of my apparent absence. I walk in then, reassuring all, aware of my imposing armored frame and glinting appearance---reminding me, while I am human at heart, a spaceknight stands as one apart. I ask Brock to describe his foe, and from this and the location I begin to tell of Jimmy Marks, a youth who foreswore his humanity---“the crossbreed progeny of a human woman and a Dire Wraith.” A reporter named Mack Killburn---who’s followed the case of my existence since shortly after his co-worker was slain by the Wraiths---rescued the Torpedo after the attack. I welcome him to the fight. Now I confess my culpability: hu...

Isolated by white, blanketing snows, a house built to showcase luxury contains, in its heart, a nightmare. Before Rom arrives upon the scene, the Hybrid works his subtle machinations to use and subvert the women before him. They are like no other women, each in her own way. There is one way they are each women, and that is the wicked purpose for which Hybrid begins his subjugation. Each have fled the scene of an attempt to free the male consortium of their group. The blue-skinned woman, who could truly appear to be anyone, calls herself Mystique, leader of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. On this occasion, it would be correct to call them the Sisterhood. Hybrid affects her first. His ploy? He is victim of a mind-touch not of his own device, which he accuses Mystique of initiating. Here she gains the common knowledge: they have all fought the X-Men before, and consider them active enemies. The X-Men team unites and protects humans and mutants alike, with a dream of peace based o...

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...