#kingsofpain

So the New Mutants (actually I guess it’s X-Force now even though the X-Force comic hasn’t started yet) and the New Warriors travel to Muir Island to investigate the power nexuses they’ve been detecting, and of course there’s no welcoming reception here because everyone on the island is possessed by the Shadow King who’s still forcing them to dress sexily (and has been for like a year and a half at this point). That makes sense, and I’m thinking, ok how is this going to play out?? How are our heroes going to interact with a whole bunch of corrupted X-Men side characters? And they even acknowledge this state of affairs by having the Shadow King’s disembodied corpse face floating above everyone, but then, for the sake of, I don’t know, plot I guess, the Shadow King just fucks off out of this comic for the next 30 pages?? Seriously? Like, he just stops possessing everyone for a few hours so we can do this story?? And when he . . . “loosens his hold,” Moira and Lorna don’t kind of shake the cobwebs loose and wonder why they’ve been dressing like they’ve been sleeping over in Lady Gaga’s basement for the last 18 months? Ya gotta be shitting me with this shit. And then, because this is a Marvel comic, a fight still happens, because it has to, FOR NO GOD DAMNED REASON, causing hundreds of thousands if not MILLIONS of dollars of damage to Moira’s scientific research facility.

Namorita gets slugged in the face by someone with super strength for the second time in two issues, and eventually everyone stops fighting and we continue on with the story like nothing happened.

Scotland blew up in the last issue when Proteus was resurrected, and out of the all the superheroes on Earth, they send in X-Factor to investigate. Not the Avengers, not local superhero team Excalibur, not even the People’s Protectorate (who in the fuck are the People’s Protectorate??). No, we send in X-Factor, a the bunch of entitled, elitist, New York snobs who I’m sure would rather be at some expensive restaurant pretentiously talking about how much better they are than everyone else. I’m sure they’re going to take their time and find a real compassionate solution to this humanitarian issue. (Yeah right). Anyway, as they get closer to Edinburgh, we find that Proteus has transformed the entire geographic area into something that looks like a computer program, and the rest of this comic basically looks like it takes place in Tron. Which is not nearly as awesome as it sounds. 

Unfortunately, this really isn’t the bloodthirsty, sociopathic Proteus that the X-Men tangled with all those years ago. He’s not turning everyone inside out and melting the skin of helpless bystanders and plucking everyone’s eyeballs out of their heads. If the original Proteus was a horror movie, this one isn’t even PG-13. He’s just very conveniently hanging out and holding everyone prisoner in his computer jail, and it’s not long before all the superheroes find each other and are conveniently given enough time to hatch a plan.

Oof look at that gutter loss. Feral looks like Mecha-Neck with his neck retracted. Anyway, I don’t know how much of this fap fight between the New Mutants / X-Force and the New Warriors I want to show. Its another one of those fights where everyone is on the same side but they start trying to fry each others’ faces off before even attempting to have a conversation about what’s going on. Anyway, here’s Warpath punching a petite blonde in the face.

Here’s a guy busting Shatterstar’s teeth out of his mouth with a couple of police batons.

Yeah speak English, pretty boy! Gotta like that. Here’s a whole bunch more garbage going on that my brain can’t be bothered to process.

X-Force is still kind of the New Mutants here . . . maybe these guys are fighting over which team is newer? I dunno. Eventually everybody gets winded so they stop fighting for about five seconds and then Speedball of all people (fucking Speedball!) becomes the voice of reason.

Geez look at how draw right up everyone’s buttholes in these comics (including Nova). Anyway, once everyone gets together on Muir Island and stops fighting, we get a recap on the old Proteus story from Uncanny X-Men #125-128 which is good for people like me because I read those comics like five years ago and I completely forget how all that went down.

Sometimes it seems like the reason they make these annuals is to see how many of these dildos they can fit on one page. Anyway, this ended up being a pretty boring comic. The New Warrriors and X-Force split into 3 teams and do a bunch of reconnaissance, and then they regroup to talk about everything they learned. Apparently, the villains in this comic are collecting energy from all over the place in order to resurrect . . . Proteus??

Not even one person, not a single one of you Scott Summers sympathizers out there, should be surprised that Cyclops’s solution to this epsilon level threat, this minor inconvenience, this wayward soul who’s just trying to figure things out and isn’t really hurting anyone, is for Proteus to go fuck himself. Literally, in Scott’s mind, everything in his life would just be easier if anyone that’s causing him even the slightest inconvenience would just fuck off and die. Like, he could have got divorced. He could have provided some closure and financial support to his wife and child which could have prevented her from transforming into a Goblin Queen. He could have been honest and just admitted he was a dickhead who would rather be with his ex-girlfriend, but also, granted, it was a lot easier when Madelyne just died. That’s why it seemed like he was pretending to be upset when it happened. How many times is this man going to ritualistically exhibit this sort of toxic behavior before everyone realizes what a dickhead he is!! The only redeeming thing about this scene is when everyone else is debating whether to go through with Cyclops’s asshole plan, Feral refers to Shatterstar as . . . “Shattybuns.”