#longjohncomic

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Ororo is the best X-Person.

With the release of Dark Phoenix––the last 20th Century Fox-produced X-Men movie––just around the corner, I can’t get it out of my head. So, I’m not going to fight it and keep drawing X-Men until it opens next week.

There’s nothing beyond the X-Men motivating my choices, though with Scott last week and Ororo this week, I seem to be focusing on characters who were official leaders of the team at some point.

When I first started reading X-Men comics, the team was divided across two books––Uncanny X-Men and, simply, X-Men. The team in X-Men (I like the unofficial name of the book, Adjectiveless X-Men) was designated as being “Blue Team” and was lead by Scott. In Uncanny––the “Gold Team”––it was lead by Ororo. In my early reading days, I stuck with the Blue team if only because I, perhaps, wasn’t aware that there was even more X-Men to read in another book. I was also limited by budget, especially for a new hobby.

Ororo, of course, popped up in X-Men all the time but she was never a featured character because she had her own team and book to host. So, when she showed up, she was always portrayed as a stoic, confident commander. While Scott was busy ogling the sexy ladies of his team and fighting with Logan, Storm always came across as a bit boring.

My opinion changed of course with time and further reading. She actually comes across as a capable leader rather than one determined by seniority, as often seemed the case with Scott. This proves especially true when reading through her tribulations in her forty years of comics (de-powered, de-aged, Queen of Wakanda, guilt-ridden figurehead, among many others).

My favorite version of storm is from Extraordinary X-Men, a series lasting twenty issues from 2016 to 2017. Written by one of my personal favorites, Jeff Lemire, this book has Ororo leading the team during a time when mutantkind is facing an existential threat. Her leadership during this run crosses countries and dimensions, revealing depths and nuance of her role as a leader in interesting and powerful ways. Issue #17 is the only comic that I’ve become emotional over, and it was a scene showcasing the scope and growth this wholly unique––but often muted––character has had over the years. This team, especially, was one of liminality––characters pulled out of time, characters newly resurrected, characters newly changed––and Ororo had to not only adapt as a leader, but to challenge her vulnerabilities as a person and friend to those she led.

Like most passionate teenaged comic book fans who aspired to be artists for the medium, in the mid-1990s Josh Tobey and I got to work creating our own superhero group. We were both avid X-Men fans and, by the time of this team’s creation, WildCATs fans (as well as any and every team book published by the Image Comics founders, but we both shared a particular allegiance to Jim Lee’s team and its continuity), and it’s pretty clear looking at the old drawings how much influence they had on our “original” creations.

This team (alternatively known as “Cybers,” “Cybernet,” and “Cybertek”) was a four-person outfit, which was most amenable to a shared creation because, that way, Josh and I could split the work right down the middle. One of the characters I created was Backfire, the assigned leader of the group and, if I am to be honest, the team’s token female as was the wont in the ’90s.

Sketch Fridays #31 - Logan

Although it has been nearly a month since Logan was released to theaters, and even though I’ve seen the film twice, I still can’t gather my feelings and thoughts together into a cohesive, singular response. To be honest, I may still be exhausted from the long talk I had about it on my nerd discussion podcast, A Podcast [ , ] For All Intents and Purposes, where I shared my thoughts about the movie as well as pondered its context within the greater superhero cinema (and my frustrations with both the praise and the criticism the movie drew). My bottom line, however, is just another voice amid the chorus: I very much liked the movie.

More than that, it was inspirational.

My basic approach to creating Long John has been equal parts planning, improvisation, and focused revision. A lot of that was intentional because I didn’t want to sit and deconstruct my favorite westerns or other movies and ask, “What are the best parts from each?” and then compile them into a 150-page genre-referencing pastiche. I wanted it to be “a D. Bethel comic,” representative of my own, innate values and tendencies about storytelling, tone, and theme (and I’m proud to say that it very much is). However, because of the requirement to rely on my own talent and understanding of this world and these characters, I also put a lot of stress on myself. Even though I know I can tell a good story, there’s part of me that still doesn’t trust that I can write a good story. So, there has always been a part of me trying to lay down the track that will lead me all the way to the station at the end.

Up until now, I’ve had broad strokes in mind. Some parts were outlined while others were still gauzy collections of images that I was confident would be sorted out later.

What watching Logan did––and why I’m thankful for it––is tell a completely sober, character-focused story while still being bold and big and a bit ridiculous, too (all terms I would easily use to describe Long John). I’m not embarrassed to say that I’m not a plot-heavy writer. I like characters and watching them move forward; I like getting into people’s personalities and showing their flaws and nuances. I like to break them down and build them back up (for readers of my previous comic, see this in action with the character Ninja Dan’s arc through the storyline, “3-Ring Bound”). That is exciting for me, even if all of that happens during the course of a car ride. That is what Logan does to its title character and it’s really kind of beautiful.