I know it sounds crazy, but bear with me

Now that the final issue of Avengers Academy is out, I just want to say thank you. To my incredible team, and to our incredible readers. Every week has been such a joy. AvAc has been such a career highlight for me--I truly love this story & this cast & I deeply mourn its end.

If you enjoyed our book, consider emailing [email protected]. It was through your voices we were able to get printed, so feel free to share that voice again.

We proudly present Rain and Sun: A MarcNath 2025 Zine!

It’s available to read digitally for free on Anyflip and in PDF format.

The zine ended up so large, we had to split it into two parts on Anyflip. However, the full zine can be downloaded in the PDF link below.

Part 1 on Anyflip.

Part 2 on Anyflip.

Full zine PDF here.

Thank you to everyone who helped us make this zine possible! Five years running, this zine project is old enough to enter Kindergarten. Wild stuff!

i made a vine comp for x force 1991 bc no one else was gonna do it.

Ok so I want to first say I totally understand where you’re coming from-there is undeniably racial fetishizing (and fetishizing in gen) in fandom especially with mlm shipping dynamics (I am mlm btw but I digress), you can see it with peoples ocs or how they interpret certain characters so again I do agree that said I do think Star and Julio are an exception due to the fact that Julio really is a masculine gay man and makes a point to avoid being seen as an effeminate gay man like that is the crux of his character is his relationship to masculinity and his sexuality-he’s literally leather gay adjacent 😭 and honestly if Marvel wasn’t so fatphobic you just know he’d be a bear, whilst with Star he really was gnc and effeminate up until xfi (sm jokes about him wearing makeup in xforce 😭) (and there was still stereotypical femme gay jokes about him in xfi tbh) and rn he’s somewhat gnc again. Given the coding of his character there is a real argument to make for nb/Trans Star in canon (along with transmasc Julio tbh). Also Star being white in comics is a separate conversation because tbh he shouldn’t be 😭. So again whilst I totally understand and respect where you’re coming from with this Julio really is canonically a masc gay man-purposely so (and to a fault tbh)-and Star is a gnc/femme bi man when he’s allowed to be (and still mocked for being one regardless) I know my answer isn’t phrased perf but it’s the best I can do rn. If you want to talk about this in more depth my inbox and dms are always open

Anon, please don’t come on the internet to be abrasive smh

I’d start off by saying that having XFI Shatterstar as your only reference makes the reference pool pretty shallow. PAD did what he wanted with the character, and what we ended up with was an emotionally unavailable slut and a pretty harmful bi stereotype. It is a known fact that he wasn’t actually writing Shatterstar, per say, as he had based his characterization off of a different character. (from a show? I believe it was)

Now, personality aside, I am ok with the redesign he got, Shatterstar was a character from the 90’s and since he was out of publication for a while he was at risk of becoming tacky, so a redesign was in demand. And I think it was a solid one, hence why it was kept in use (with mild alterations) until Ed Brisson X-Force (where he changed into a team outfit), now while the outfit was the same, the characterization wasn’t because the writers who took on Shatterstar after PAD had actually done their homework and leaned away from the hyper masculine, bi stereotype that was XFI Star.

If you look at the character in the 90’s under Nicieza, Nicieza has come forward saying that he wrote Shatterstar as both gay (and in love with Rictor) and non-binary (he just didn’t know he word for it); while Rictor on the other hand was supposed to be straight and reject Shatterstar (romantically) in a storyline meant to educate (straight) kids on not being weird about having a gay friend, this storyline didn’t come to be cuz Nicieza left the book. Loeb who took over after, saw things differently and had Ric leave the team and Shatterstar taking it as sort of a breakup, and also wrote that infamous textbox that compares Siryn and Warpath to Ric and Star both being too stubborn to admit that they are more than friends.

All throughout the 90’s Shatterstar is described as being graceful and elegant, characters make comments on his great hair, villains taunt him by calling him “pretty boy” and Feral famously teases him for wearing makeup and having a nice ass.

Now in the current era, a lot of characters are going through a revival, and taking more after their 90’s selves to appeal to older fans who are now drawn again to the franchise, praying on the nostalgia factor. Shatterstar is one of those characters, mainly, because as we have discussed XFI didn’t do a good job characterizing Star and subsequent writers have always leaned more towards the 90’s characterization, so his characterization is now more accurate, actually. (Id say anything that isn’t written by Liefeld (who writes a very emotionless gladiator) or PAD (who wrote whatever the hell that was) is pretty solid in that matter.) And so, if Shatterstar looks more like he did in the 90’s when he was being characterized as non-binary… there you go.

Rictor, as we pointed out was mostly viewed as straight and has been a leather kind of guy since the 80’s, so again, if those characterizations are being brought back, that’s what you can expect.

i bit the bullet and drew what i would have had him wear to the Hellfire Gala...