what are we, twelve?

X-Men Forever is rounding true to form, reading like a fanboy's wet dream - a fanboy stuck in a '90s time warp and never grew up. we get ideas that were probably bandied about during a 'can you top this' bullshit session between pimpled dorks. Wolverine reduced to a skeleton? check. Wolverine doing the telepathic nasty with Jean? check. Sabretooth is actually Logan's dad? check. every major character acting out of character? check. Storm blinding Sabretooth with lightning? check. hey, what if Logan gave Kitty one of his claws to scratch Storm's eyes out? why, that's a cool idea! let's put it in.

there's a sequence that gets my goat - and i will honor any considerably decent explanations. a rogue Storm turns on her pals, and they try to capture her for "killing Wolverine" as posited by a captive Sabretooth and a loopy Jean Grey. she ducks out and locks them in the Danger Room.

for someone who can punch holes in starships, Cyclops holds back his righteous anger (he actually fired the first shot at Storm moments ago) and does nothing more than slam his fists at the door. ok, maybe he doesn't want to put that on his expense account, but the Professor has a first rate Sh'iar insurance policy that magically rebuilds the mansion every single time its leveled by their enemies. it could also be explained by what Kurt says: Storm activated a 'dampening field' so he can't teleport out and go after Ororo. i assume that means a device that negates their powers. they have such a device?? they could have caused M-Day without Wanda ...

so even with that dampening field, Kitty actually phases through the door. because that's what Kitty does.

ehh?

i'm too dumb for this. i await your explanations.

maybe it was a good idea for Claremont to walk away at that time. if this was the storyline that became canon as we know it, i'm not sure how the X-fans would have turned out.

"The Cruelest Cut" would be that, at the end of this series, this is all a hallucination by a pot-smoking Charles Xavier.

drive-by readings: X-Men Forever #1

X-Men Forever #1 (Marvel) "Love - and Loss!" Chris Claremont Tom Grummett Cory Hamscher Wil Quintana Tom Orzechowski

loosely labelled as the "Screw You, Jim Lee, Screw You, Bob Harras" Project, X-Men Forever looks like more of Marvel's continued appreciation of Chris Claremont's contributions by giving him more sandboxes to play with, as long as those sandboxes do not interfere with the current incarnation of the team he built from the ground up (cough, cough John Byrne, cough, Dave Cockrum cough cough).

picking up from the events of X-Men #1-3 (with #1 being the best-selling book of all time), the X-Men find themselves tracking down the tastefully-named Fabian Cortez, who in 99% of the time would be a fey loser, except this time he managed to kill Magneto. or so they think. they get ambushed, and they get their asses handed to them. huh, that never happens. especially not by someone named Fabian Cortez.

Claremont uses this chance to put his unused stories right out there, which was the intent all along. the Scott-Jean-Logan love triangle is right there on the forefront, and it looks like Logan will be dead next issue, which could be a convenient excuse for his real body to disappear and be reborn as a Hand assassin (wait, Millar did that already). by the way, why is Gambit called "Remy Picard"? was that the intent all along? to be named after the character played by the actor who was going to play Professor X?

i'm not sure who the audience for this book is. those who lived the Claremont/Lee years have moved on by now, so why would they want to do a What If alternate branch at this point? new readers following the current (convoluted) X-storylines may not remember this period, and would be more confused without a Wikipedia.