#ben deeds

My biggest issue with Generation X was Emplate/Monet and the fact that the X-Men weren’t putting any effort to track down A TEAMMATE whose body has essentially been POSSESSED by her evil brother!

Apparently Kitty thinks it’s unimportant to send out a team to look for Monet, not check on or protect the Morlocks (seriously the X-Men ALWAYS f*** over the Morlocks!), or provide proper protection to the school (that she’s weirdly chosen to put IN CENTRAL PARK: why not just force the X-kids to wear a target on their backs while you’re at it Kitty?!)

The original ‘Generation X’ AT LEAST HAD REASONS FOR WHY THEY COULDN’T TRACK DOWN EMPLATE. They’d start looking into it only for Sean’s castle to disappear, or have to deal with a mutant holding hostages at a high school, or something.

This… just kind of comes off as ‘they don’t really want to bother to look for her… -\_😕_/-’, I guess…

The problem is Christina Strain clearly wanted to do a character motivated book focusing on their personal lives; not a superhero book. So the super hero aspects feel tacked on last minute.

Where does this fit in with Resurrection and Quire’s appearance in Thor? Why is no one looking for Monet, but Jubilee races out the minute Quire is missing? Is it ACTUALLY a good idea to have mutants with physical mutations out in the real world, considering the death rate of mutants just THIS YEAR?!

Again, there’s not much of an answer because Strain didn’t really care about these continuity issues…

The other issue is once again, DeFilippis and Weir’s Academy X focused on the characters personal lives more than the superhero aspect…but it did it better.

I never really cared about many of these characters. Quire essentially repeats the same 'I’m really just misunderstood’ story arc he’s done ad nauseam since Aaron’s WATXM run; without ever REALLY honestly being sympathetic because Quire would have to face consequences for his actions for this to actually work. Hindsight was okay, and there’s very few Asian male characters in comic books, so I was okay with him. I’m largely apathetic still to Eyeboy and Nature Girl, despite being featured now in TWO to THREE BOOKS (that’s a pretty bad sign in my opinion). The appeal in these characters is their physical appearance; writers let the design do the work without giving them much of a personality.Morph was…meh. Not bad development, but not all that spectacular either. Plus I always think of 90’s cartoon Morph when he’s brought up despite them being totally different characters (I really dislike cartoon Morph, sorry not sorry!). Bling was the only character that I think had an interesting character arc in this book. Every scene with her stood out, and made the others look very empty in comparison. Jubilee’s character development…felt like a bunch of single mom stereotypes, I’m going to be honest. While I appreciated Strain letting Jubilee grow up a bit, she just never quite felt like Jubilee to me.

The problem with this series was all the characters were pretty subdued personalities past Quire and Bling; where the New X-Men had a good mix of different personality types. The power sets also in my opinion didn’t mesh very well with this team, which WAS kind of the point- but caused it to always feel like something was missing. A large part of why I picked this book up was only because of Chamber…and when you're only reading a team book for essentially one character that's secondary- THAT’S A BAD SIGN, in my opinion.

From X-Men: Gold Annual, “Cross-Atlantic Caper”

Art by Alitha Martinez, Craig Yeung, Jay David Ramos and Dono Sánchez-Almara

From Generation X #086

Art by Amilcar Pinna and Felipe Sobreiro

From Generation X #087

Art by Amilcar Pinna and Felipe Sobreiro

“Yeah, well, as I get older, I realize… we don’t always get to choose the family we’re born with… but that doesn’t mean we can’t make one for ourselves.” -- Jubilee

Cover art for Generation X #087