Posted in: Comics, DC Comics, Marvel Comics | Tagged: Comics, dc, marvel, The Week in Comics, x-men, X-ual Healing - The Weekly X-Men Recap Column

The Week in Comics – Sunday, March 14th, 2021

Yes, The Week in Comics is back for another column this week. Maybe the last one. Who knows? Let's just get through the comics news this week and try not to put a label on this relationship, okay?

The Week in Comics News

No Fun Intended

In a move we should have all seen coming, Mrs. Freeze was "fridged" at the end of this week's issue of Batman: Urban Legends.

Pride Goeth Before a Variant Cover

Rivals DC and Marvel Comics are once again at odds as each company has announced dueling Pride Month anthologies to celebrate equality. Now, the race is on to prove which company loves LGBTQ+ people more, which the community has agreed will be decided based on which company pumps out the most pride-themed variant covers, a stipulation both companies readily agreed to. But when DC cheated by revealing a new bisexual sidekick for Batman, it prompted speculation that Marvel could choose to escalate the war by unveiling new LGBTQ+ characters of its own. One source told Bleeding Cool that if the competition ramps up any further, Marvel and DC may have no other choice but to continue celebrating LGBTQ+ characters even beyond the month of June.

Crossing Over

Marvel announced the first issue in its big Summer X-over event, the Hellfire Gala. That event will kick off in June with Planet-Sized X-Men, a double-sized one-shot, before infecting the entire X-Men line with crossover tie-ins. Declaring Hellfire Gala a "major turning point in the saga of the X-Men" that will be a must-read for X-Men fans, the press release insisted, "if you only read one bloated crossover from Marvel this year, it should be this one," and wondered "why did anyone even bother buying all those X of Swords tie-ins," and promised, "this time readers will definitely get their money's worth as long as they buy all 37 tie-ins, one-shots, and overpriced bookend issues, for sure, cross our hearts and hope to die." The unpaid intern responsible for typing up the press release was struck by lightning minutes after leaving the Marvel offices that night.

"They tell me, Vlad, wear rubber shoes to work from now on," said unpaid intern Vlad Kozinkerov. "So that is what I do."

Look: A Callback

Speaking of rehashing the same idea over and over again, Spider-Man got a new costume from Marvel Comics this week. "Is there any possibility Spider-Man's new costume could be bi-sexual," asked Marvel Editor-in-Chief Akira Yoshida. "It's just, we've got this thing going on with DC and… you know what, forget I asked."

Weekend at Richie's

Jeanine Schaefer quietly stepped down as Executive Editor of BOOM! Studios and nobody knew about it until this week. But if you think that's shocking, wait until you learn that Bleeding Cool's own Rich Johnston passed away 6 years ago, and we've just been propping his body up at a computer Weekend at Bernie's style and sending electrical shocks through it to make his fingers type out new clickbait articles. The most shocking thing is nobody has suspected anything all this time, even though the quotient of typos produced by the method has been drastically reduced since Johnston was alive and well.

The Best Dudes

Aubrey Sitterson and Toni Gregori will launch a new series from Dark Horse, and Bleeding Cool has an EXXXCLUSIVE interview with the team.

It Could Have Been Anyone

Former Valiant Executive Editor Joe Illidge sparked a mystery this week when he subtweeted about a comic book about "Blackness" with a creative team consisting of "a group of White men and no Black people" without naming what comic he was talking about. "All of them?" collectively (and correctly) guessed comics Twitter, but it turns out he was talking about the new Shadowman series by the Bob Iger and Bob Chapek of comics, Cullen Bunn and Jon Davis-Hunt.

Who Needs the Environment When We Can Never Leave the House Anyway?

DC Comics revealed this week that it's getting into the crypto-art market, pissing off the company's stable of creators. Bleeding Cool, wanting to get in on this action, also announced that we will be releasing The Week in Comics from now in the form of crypto-comics-journalism articles. Unfortunately, Bleeding Cool lacks the technology to produce comic book news articles using blockchain, so instead, we've decided to simply toss a Molotov cocktail into the South American rainforest every time somebody clicks on this story.

We Would Not Read It on a Boat

Dynamite has pulped remaining copies of several Dr. Seuss parody variants after the popular children's book author was canceled on Twitter, prompting a new look at racial stereotypes in the covers. Meanwhile, DC Comics parent company Warner Bros quietly shelved plans for a live action adaptation of Identity Crisis starring Pepe le Pew.

And that's The Week in Comics News!

X-ual Healing – The Week in X-Men Comics

Sworn to sell comics for Marvel executives who feared and hated the fact that Fox owned their movie rights, The Uncanny X-Men suffered great indignities. Still, thanks to a corporate merger, a line-wide relaunch, and Jonathan Hickman's giant ego, the X-Men can finally get back to doing what they do best: being objectively the best franchise in all of comics for lovers of soap opera drama.

Children of the Atom #1

Children of the Atom #1 introduces a team of kids, each with powers and a look designed to pay tribute to a classic mutant: Cherub (Archangel), Marvel Guy (Marvel Girl), Cyclops Lass (Cyclops), Gimmick (Gambit), and Daycrawler (Nightcrawler), and we see them defeat The Helle's Belles in combat and leave them tied up for the authorities. Pixie, Magma, and Maggot track them down and invite them back to Krakoa, but though the kids are obviously huge X-Men fans, they don't take the invitation.

Cyclops, Jean Grey, Storm, Wolverine, and Nightcrawler play a sultry game of pool while they debate whether those kids should be brought in against their will, and during this conversation, we learn Cerebro can't detect the kids. Scott and Kurt favor letting the kids make their own choices, but Jean, Ororo, and (unsurprisingly) Logan want to go the fascist route. They end up deciding Storm will go talk to them.

Cut to Corbeau Prep School, where the kids attend, and where, during a basketball practice, we learn there's a love triangle between Cyclops Lass, Gimmick, and Cerub, so these kids will fit right in on Krakoa. Later that night, the kids all get together and go through a gate to Krakoa, but it doesn't work for them. How mysterious!

This was a fine first issue that introduced the characters and established a core mystery about their identities. But the real highlight was the sexual tension in that one scene on the moon. The whole scene is laced with sexual tension that makes me wonder if Wolverine might have three or four dicks instead of two.

Not that there's any real evidence to support such an outrageous theory. Two is much more sensible.

X-Factor #8

The Morrigan murders everyone in X-Factor except Eye Boy, Prodigy, and Daken with the help of Siryn's sonic hypnosis. Daken sacrifices himself so the other two can escape and tell the rest of the team, once resurrected, what happened. The next day, the resurrected X-Factor returns to their phallic headquarters and battles zombie versions of themselves, winning and finding a distressed Siryn. That story will be concluded next issue. We also learn that Prodigy hid secret information in the EXIF data of the photo Tommy showed him. Hence, there is some mystery about how he previously died that he is trying to tell himself about.

This issue was all about the execution, which isn't going to come through in a recap like this. As usual, X-Factor is a character-focused book, so you'll find a lot of insight into stuff like how Eye Boy's powers work and how Daken feels emotionally on the inside overflowing from these pages. I recommend reading it for yourself.

Marvel also published Deadpool Nerdy 30 last week, but listen, there's no way The Week in Comics is hitting a Sunday deadline if I have to recap fourteen stories in an anthology.

Wolverine's Wiener X-Pick of the Week

Children of the Atom wins the Wolverine's Wiener X-Pick of the Week award for the sexual tension in that one scene. Congratulations to the creative team on this honor.

Want to have your thoughts, opinions, or dick jokes included in an upcoming edition of The Week in Comics? Please email us at judeterror [at] bleedingcool.com!

If you're lucky, The Week in Comics will return next week. But no promises!

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