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“Turn—face your demise! You are not the only cosmic force to corral life and death, celestial.”

AoA Jean Grey challenges The Heir of Apocalypse: Archangel.

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“Mutation: it is the key to our evolution. It has enabled us to evolve from a single-celled organism into the dominant species on the planet. This process is slow, normally taking thousands and thousands of years. But every few hundred millennia…evolution leaps forward.”

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art-is-the-word:

coolkidstable:

I actually show a good bit of restraint with how much nerdiness I include on the blog, but I can’t do it right now. I’m not that strong. And the fact is, there’s some cool stuff going on in the X-Men books right now that’s worth discussing.

If I do this right, this’ll actually be something other nerds can use to tell their friends: It’s OK to read X-Men. I know, I know. It’s scary. There’s a lot going on, but I’mma help you through it. I’ll go real slow. Slow as you want. Til it feels right. Mmm.

So basically, here’s the five things you need to know to understand the X-Men right now.

1. They still make new issues; it’s an ongoing story. I say this for those beautiful girls I’ve taken to the comic book store who’ve said “So… they still make these?” (You can hear the boi-oi-oing boner sound of every nerd who hears them say this, and wants to use this as an in to talk to a hot chick IRL.) It started in the 60s with these jokers…

…before it was saved from cancellation when some big guns formed a new team. 

2. YOU love the 90s. The most popular the print versions of the characters got was in the 90s, and a lot of people know this incarnation of the team through the popular FOX cartoon series, which was very true to the books. If you know the cartoon stories, you know what went down in the books. One of the things folks loved about that era was that the X-Men operated in two teams who worked together. The blue team, led by Cyclops:

And the gold team, led by Storm:

Things were like the movies for the most part. They didn’t have the black leather, but they did have a private school and not a lot of Puerto-Ricans friends.

3. Things changed. Then things get different from what you know, starting around the year 2000. First off, they got a Puerto Rican friend. (Finalmente!) But then the school went public. The costume gets all movie-like…

And they brought on bad guy Emma Frost to teach at the school. She starts bangin’ Cyclops, and because girls are DRAMATIC, Jean grey dies. Tip a 40 for ya telekinetic ho-mie. Oh, and then Magneto’s reality warping daughter goes fucking batshit crazy and wipes out all but 200 mutants on Earth.

(Check out those full lips. She’ll NEVER say “No more collagen.”)

4. They go to the island. Not the island from LOST (but I wish; nerd boner!). Not Temptation Island (Infidelity boner!). But because they’re an endangered species, Cyclops does the one thing Xavier and Magneto couldn’t do: he unites every surviving mutant into the X-Men on an island called Utopia off the coast of SF with the goal to keep on survivin’ (and not diss YOU on the internet.) The redhead quota gets filled by the arrival of Hope Summers, the mutant messiah who’s destined to save the remaining mutants. The Puerto Rican quota remains stable. Because God forbid, right? Anyway, now the team is just about everyone who’s ever been an X-Men character, including Magneto.

5. The Break-Up. This brings us to the new story, where Wolverine is the Vince Vaughn and Cyclops is the Jennifer Aniston and it is just NOT working. And they basically use a strip of duct tape to divide the X-Men down the middle. Now, Wolverine is starting up the school again, because he thinks the team needs to get out more. Cyclops is like, NOPE because a. He knows better than to trust a Canadian and b. He thinks the isolation thing is necessary to the whole breathing thing. Oh, and Wolverine wants to turn kids into students (Mutant Saved by the Bell) while Cyclops thinks they need to be soldiers (Mutant Saving Private Ryan.)

Anyway, that brings us to the big picture you see up top, with the people revealed as joining Wolverine’s school team (the new Gold Team) in October. Things I like and don’t…

• My favorite team, X-Factor — a group of mutant detectives — joins Team Wolvie. And they’re maybe being led by Cyclops’ brother Havok. It’s just gonna make the holidays weird, and you know it. Oh, and in gaining X-Factor’s allegiance, Wolverine got all the good gays. Bastard.
• Iceman is a big player on Wolvie’s team, which makes me happy. Dude has been ignored by writers for like 8 years. You have to assume he spent all the time on the island making margaritas.
• Kitty Pryde is on this team, and in the process, she’s broken up with Colossus. Let me sum up why this is a deal-breaker: because when a dark-haired, blue eyed Russian muscle man comes back from the dead for you, YOU LOCK THAT SHIT UP.
• Rogue has chosen Wolvie’s side as well. I guess Cyclops sent her “Paquin!” JOKES!
• Finally, Scott Wolv (my Scott Wolf joke, because they’re both short and Canadian) also keeps black ops squad X-Force. As this is the team full of spy-ish mutants who wear black all the team, I consider this a big loss for Team Cyclops. But a big win for Team Justifiable Homicide. (Targets include Apocalypse, Shadow King, and eventually Miley Cyrus.) 

I now leave you to your regularly scheduled normality.

oh my…. I think I may love you

This was the single greatest thing I have read on the internet. Concise and awesome. Now if anyone says there isn’t a way for them to get into X-Men, you shall be hung at dawn. Oh and P.S. I think you maybe should’ve put more emphasis on the whole Decimation and Hope Summers thing, since they’ve been massive ongoing stories and basically the pillar for anything X-Men for the past few years. Otherwise though, awesome job!

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A little teaser I put together at college advertising the eventual return of none other than the queen of comic book death herself, Jean Grey. I threw in a couple of references to Hope Summers because let’s face it, she will indefinitely be involved somehow.