Oh yeah… the X-Men… I remember the X-Men…

by Thom Yee

Dark Phoenix images courtesy of 20th Century Fox

I hate X-Men: Apocalypse.

I hate its little face. I hate its guts. And I hate the way it ruined the X-Men franchise.

Though to be fair, X-Men: The Last Stand did that first.

And that’s really the story of the X-Men on the big screen: Generally okay movies ruined by a few bad installments. For every couple of decent ones — X-Men and X-Men 2 — and even some good or great ones — X-Men: First Class and X-Men: Days of Future Past — there’s an X-Men: The Last Stand or X-Men: Apocalypse to set things back and screw everything up for those that try to follow them. Even the Wolverine and Deadpool movies were both almost tanked before they could start by X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

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Let slip the dogs of war, and just cry, Havok

by Thom Yee

X-Men: Apocalypse images courtesy of 20th Century Fox

Sometimes I still can’t believe what a genius thing that early ‘90s X-Men cartoon wound up being.  It’s not like it was all that good (in fact it was laughably bad on a regular basis) but it ended up being an unexpectedly strong introduction to many of the bigger, crazier concepts and tropes of superhero comicbooks, and for a generation of ‘90s kids (like me), it was the key gateway to all the time-bending, cosmos-spanning stories that comicbooks, and the X-Men especially, specialize in. In many ways it laid the foundation for the superhero movies we’ve, by and large, enjoyed in the 21st century.  Plus, that theme song: Continue reading →

So DMX’s entire rap career really was a joke

by Thom Yee

Deadpool images courtesy of 20th Century Fox

For most of their published lives in North America, comicbooks have been seen as a medium primarily for kids, but for the last 15-20 years, the truth is that comicbooks haven’t really been for anyone. At first, comicbooks were mostly bought for children, tossed around and then thrown away, but after the Marvel explosion of the ‘60s, they expanded their reach to a wider audience, affected and were affected by the [counter] cultures of the times, and would even become collector’s items as the writers and artists that created them wrote stories of increasing sophistication. That trend towards sophistication kept going, however, as the stories became more realistic, more grim and gritty as they stopped being written for kids, and in doing so they lost their chance to pick up a generation of young new readers, and today it’s pretty much just the freaks that have continued to read comicbooks into their adulthoods (like me) that still buy them.

Or maybe everyone’s just been waiting for the movie. Continue reading →