“i’ll kill you” “not tonight”

anyone got a copy of the hardcover version of You Look Like Death who would be willing to share the "Letters to Athena" short story at the end? 🙏 even just photos of the pages would be great

what’s interesting to me about the bendis era is the antagonist xmen team being scott, illyana, magneto, n emma. bc like. i would say that the four of them are characters with textually victim narratives, who’s backstories cannot be separated from their exploitation. but the nature of xmen as a franchise means that it can never get toooo explicit in confirming this. mags gets closest cause modern day fans generally accept the holocaust survivor version of him as fixed canon. but he’s still the Bad Guy at the end of the day. emma’s relationship to sex & power and her efforts to subvert her sexual abuse is like, baked into the text. but if we treat her as character who can be hurt by sexualization then we must address the ways she is sexualized on a meta sense. marvel will never stop making cheesecake covers of her, and so we don’t. smarter people than me have written essays on illyana’s time in limbo as a metaphor for csa and again its all laid out plain there when you read it. it makes ppl uncomfortable to acknowledge the csa and it would be controversial (and no doubt poorly handled) if they ever said it explicitly so they don’t. i do think the recent magik miniseries engages with it allegorically (darkchild as a trauma response). csa in scott’s backstory is less… direct… but it’s hard to ignore once you see it. it’s scattered in 40 year old backup stories via retcons but it’s there. and scott’s exploitation is the hardest to canonize bc what does it say about xmen as a franchise if the First X-Men was a victim taken in by another manipulative patriarch? if we start looking too hard at scott’s consent it all sort of falls apart. and so there’s something interesting to me that the transgressive “revolutionary” xmen team is formed entirely of victims who are never allowed to be treated as such by the narrative. the xmen team who most heavily push and prod at the x-narrative being these imperfect victims. and then it’s doubly interesting, that for entirely editorial reasons, the next big xmen to join them is kitty pryde. bc again, they can never reallyyy acknowledge the grooming of kitty pryde, bc it renders every single big name xmen as complicit in grooming. and i don’t necessarily have a Big Point here it’s just like. in order to keep a serialized franchise going it must mirror a cultural desire towards the cycle of abuse.

at what point does reading a comic book count as self destructive behaviour. get me outta here (here being modern era batman)

no more fucking circular retrospective narration no more masturbatory soliloquies no more goddamn tongue-in-cheek catchphrases repeated ad nauseam !!! and i don’t even mind a nine panel grid spread but no more of that either ! no more self-congratulatory white male writers i can’t fucking do it anymore abolish tom king comics now !!!

the thing about DCeased is that it isn’t very good but i think about it sooo often. steph and damian and the spectre of grief and legacies nobody wanted them to have. talia and steph being unlikely allies in the aftermath of the world. ivy and the task of rebuilding a world she spent so many years trying to destroy. the speedsters and the knowledge that they could infect the whole world in seconds. the ways zombie media often unintentionally coincides with covid and the things nobody wants to think too hard about. the unkillables being the cockroaches of the world. the way it unabashedly can do what serialized mainline comics cannot: kill and grieve and grow without takebacks. all that just to be written by tom taylor. sure.