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In the Heart of the Beast, Part 2 X-Men Adventures (Season II) #10 Writer: Ralph Macchio Penciller: Paul Borges Inker: James Pascoe Colorist: Joe Agostinelli * As we learned in part 1 of this essay, 1992's  X-Men: The Animated Series had distilled 30 years of drastic personality changes into an ideal version of the Beast – smart, funny, kind, disciplined. But there was one aspect of the character remained extremely unsettled: His love life. A season two spotlight episode of X-Men: The Animated Series is an encapsulation  of the Beast’s miserable romantic history, which is perhaps even more convoluted and confusing than his personality issues. First airing January 15, 1994, “Beauty and the Beast" was based on an idea by Julia Lewald and written by Stephane J. Mathison. The story finds Beast working at a clinic to give sight to a blind woman named Carly Crocker. In working together, they have developed a strong mutual attraction, but of course Carly doesn’t know exactly wha

In the Heart of the Beast, Part 1   X-Men Adventures (Season II) #10 Writer: Ralph Macchio            Penciller: Paul Borges Inker: James Pascoe Colorist: Joe Agostinelli   * This year marks the 50th anniversary of Fantastic Four #1, and the birth of the modern Marvel universe. Most of the most recognizable Marvel characters debuted within a couple of years of that landmark issue. And most of those characters have had stories told about them for every single month since. That adds up to a staggering number of tales. Even more staggering is that we're meant to believe all of it actually happened, despite the fact that most of the characters have barely aged, and that different writers and editors have had vastly different interpretations of the characters. The result is that superheroes have the most convoluted backstories in all of fiction, and yes I'm including soap operas characters in that. This means that reading superhero comics takes a level of compartmentalizing, cont

Look Out Your Window, I Can See His Light Starman #0  Writer: James Robinson Penciller: Tony Harris Inker: Wade Von Grawbadger Colorist: Gregory Wright * In September 1994, which was the beginning of my senior year of high school, I wrote a journal entry in which I boldly declared, "Superhero comics are dead."  My argument was that all that was interesting about superheroes had already been done and that there was nothing new to be done in the genre. I declared that all of the most interesting and innovative comic books were non-superhero titles: Tales of the Beanworld , A Distant Soil , Scud the Disposable Assassin , Atomic City Tales , etc.  Ah, the brashness of youth. And though I didn’t state them in that particular one-page handwritten treatise, I realize now there were a trio of reasons I had taken on this attitude. One was the diminished quality of the books Marvel (and Image, and Malibu, and…) were producing. Another was that I was genuinely excited by indie boo

A Show of Force   Force Works #1  Writers: Abnett and Lanning     Penciller: Tom Tenney    Inker: Rey Garcia Colorist: Joe Rosas *   At the risk of beating a dead horse, I need to say it again: The massive success of Rob Liefeld and Image comics had a seismic impact on the superhero comics industry, both from a business standpoint and a creative one. On the latter, there were two main responses. Books either tried to define themselves against what Image was doing (a la 1963   and the Ultraverse ), or they tried to imitate it.   While DC dabbled in both approaches, Marvel almost exclusively took the latter route. Like a jilted lover who just can’t get over the one who spurned him, Marvel couldn’t move past the success of Liefeld and X-Force . So they just kept trying to recreate it, resulting in them subjecting some of their most prominent team books to what I call "the Force Treatment."   The Force Treatment is where a previously happy-go-lucky superhero team is broken down