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Whatever happened to Dakken anyway?
The cliffnotes version:

After Dark Avengers, Dakken hooked up with Sabretooth (who he was created partly to replace and partly because Dakken was Daniel Way's self-insert complete with Dakken being bisexual because Daniel Way was bisexual) and Sabretooth convinced him to form his Super-Group version of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants using Big Name villains and for them to bring back the Shadow King.

They kidnapped Genesis (the young uncorrupted Apocalypse clone Deadpool and Phantomax had been mentoring) and Fantomax, tortured Fantomax to death in front of Genesis, and tried to hollow out Genesis's mind so they could then seal his body into a battle armor of Apocalypse's that Sabretooth found and allow Shadow King to take over Genesis's body. Oh and they also created a cadre of Omega Red clones who all had fake memories of Deadpool torturing them as kids and murdering their parents in front of them for added shits and giggles of Dakken creating life purely to suffer fake delusions of horror inflicted upon them.

The bloody fight between the Brotherhood and Uncanny X-Force that ensued, culminated in Wolverine snapping and deciding his son would just keep escalating and escalating horror-wise and drowned Dakken to death in a puddle of muddy water.... which was the entire point of Sabretooth's alliance with Dakken; as Sabretooth revealed he kept pushing Dakken to do increasingly beyond the pale shit during the caper so he could get the sick jollies of watching Logan kill his own son. Something Sabretooth TAPED and then sold a copy of to the bastard twin children of Archangel and an evil geisha Horseman of the Apocalypse, who showed the tape to Thor in order to try and break up the Unity Squad/Uncanny Avengers team by playing to Thor's moral faggotry.

The twins then dug up Dakken and resurrected him as part of an "All Death" Horsemen of the Apocalypse team and created a bad future timeline where Earth was destroyed but all mutants were in outer space under their control and let Dakken torture Wolverine for a full decade before Havok, Wasp, and Thor freed him and went back in time to stop the twins from destroying the Earth/Rogue and Scarlet Witch being tricked into killing each other by the twins. The story ended with the twins defeated and Grim Reaper and Dakken, still in their "Horsemen of Death" forms dragging the unconscious twins from the wreckage of their spaceship and scheming new schemes of what they would do next.

Then Krakoa happened......

Dakken got a full-on personality reboot, which I can tolerate since OG Dakken was an unlikable shit and he's now straight, was fucking Aurora from Alpha Flight, palling around with Polaris and her new X-Factor, wearing Imperial Guard member's Fang's costume/using the codename Fang, and being on great terms with Wolverine/X-23 and aiding Alpha Flight ferret mutants out from Canada to Logan's X-Force hideout when Justin Trudeau sided with ORCHIS and started back up his dad's mutant concentration camps.

Sadly, Sabretooth came back and not only cut off Dakken's head but dismembered his corpses along with the corpses of innocent kids Logan was giving shelter to, to spell out "Happy Birthday" to Logan as part of Sabretooth's yearly birthday atrocity he pulls on Logan every birthday to torture him.

Did they ever follow up on Moira being murdered by Mystique back in 01? Now that she's back I mean.
All we ever got was a throwaway "Moira's Diary" entry in House/Power of X that said Moira wanted to "go back to working in the shadows" and had Xavier lend her Shi'ar tech to create a "golem" to impersonate her.

I'm also kind of shocked we never got followed up on the aborted plot thread from the early 00s Mystique series where (IIRC) where a writer had Mystique claim for a bit that all of the bad shit she did in Claremont's second run and the Joe Casey run was an "imposture"; a plot thread that was so reviled for trying to whitewash Mystique as a didn't do nuttin' that editorial squashed it after a couple of issues.

daken is wolverine for edgy 13 year olds
No, Dakken was a replacement for Sabretooth (as Jeph Loeb was obsessed with killing off Sabretooth and basically demanding that he stay dead for the longest time, outside the heroic AOA version in Exiles that was still running around at the time) and Daniel Way's self-insert, right up to and including being bisexual liek Way was.
 
I liked Dakken for being Logan's fatherless offspring predictably being the violent degenerate he is on the inside. Had no fucking idea why the plot of his comic went nowhere but all solos outside the biggies typically go that route.
Laura encompassing the broken longing to be normal but incapable of ever being so was her inheritance from her gene baby daddy.
and then, well, they both got reset/retconned so they're not in the least recognizable anymore
 
All we ever got was a throwaway "Moira's Diary" entry in House/Power of X that said Moira wanted to "go back to working in the shadows" and had Xavier lend her Shi'ar tech to create a "golem" to impersonate her.

I'm also kind of shocked we never got followed up on the aborted plot thread from the early 00s Mystique series where (IIRC) where a writer had Mystique claim for a bit that all of the bad shit she did in Claremont's second run and the Joe Casey run was an "imposture"; a plot thread that was so reviled for trying to whitewash Mystique as a didn't do nuttin' that editorial squashed it after a couple of issues.


No, Dakken was a replacement for Sabretooth (as Jeph Loeb was obsessed with killing off Sabretooth and basically demanding that he stay dead for the longest time, outside the heroic AOA version in Exiles that was still running around at the time) and Daniel Way's self-insert, right up to and including being bisexual liek Way was.
You just reminded me I have the TPB's of Mystique and Rogue solo series. Mystique had that little blonde guy with her who as far as I know hasn't reappeared.

Loeb comment reminds me of Psylocke. My understanding was that either she wasn't meant to die in X-Treme and/or someone else was supposed to bite it but they changed at last second, that Claremont didn't actually want her to die, and that it was allegedly from higher ups like Quesada who forced him to write it in?
 
You just reminded me I have the TPB's of Mystique and Rogue solo series. Mystique had that little blonde guy with her who as far as I know hasn't reappeared.

Loeb comment reminds me of Psylocke. My understanding was that either she wasn't meant to die in X-Treme and/or someone else was supposed to bite it but they changed at last second, that Claremont didn't actually want her to die, and that it was allegedly from higher ups like Quesada who forced him to write it in?
Not quite.

Claremont planned on finally rebooting Betsy back to her British body via a morbid plotline where Vargas (the originally planned big bad for Xtreme X-Men) kills her and then steals her corpse and bronzes her corpse to create a statue that would serve as a sick trophy of Vargas's kill.

But around the time that the first four issues of Xtreme X-Men were being written/drawn, Morrison convinced Quesada to go on the record that "any character killed under the Quesada/Jemas regime or even prior to their takeover would never come back to life". Which itself was a big fucking smokescreen for making people think that Magneto (who Morrison killed off) was going to stay dead as opposed to being the Chink in the metal mask that Morrison planned on introducing as the lead-in for Magneto being the end boss of his X-Men run.

As such, Claremont was told that he was banned from doing his resurrection of Psylockes story which threw his entire X-Treme X-Men run into chaos and forced a LOT of rewrites for what he planned (most notably, Betsy was supposed to be revived and her return to British status done when plot device shit makes her macabre corpse statue turn into a literal cocoon and her return to her British form being treated like a caterpillar emerging from a cocoon as a butterfly and for her to basically beat Vargas, not Rogue). Needless to say, Claremont was NOT happy.

Ultimately, after Morrison had left and Whedon assraped Claremont, getting him banned from using the Hellfire Club in any shape or form after starting a major plotline with them and Sat-yr-9 staging a takeover of the club because he wanted to use the name for Cassandra Nova's psychic phantom clone henchmen, Quesada said fuck it and told Claremont he could bring Betsy back to life. But by that point, Claremont couldn't do his original storyline and more to the point, just brought her back in her Asian form and did so in the most anti-climatic manner possible via her brother Jamie Braddock secretly resurrecting her in the middle of the X-Men out of the blue with no build-up or payoff.
 
You know I just remembered something from one of the early issues. During the part where Remy infiltrates Vargas' compound, this happens
Screenshot_20240309-030103_Firefox.jpg
 
I liked Dakken for being Logan's fatherless offspring predictably being the violent degenerate he is on the inside. Had no fucking idea why the plot of his comic went nowhere but all solos outside the biggies typically go that route.
Laura encompassing the broken longing to be normal but incapable of ever being so was her inheritance from her gene baby daddy.
and then, well, they both got reset/retconned so they're not in the least recognizable anymore
Daken and Laura are the two Wolverine kids that actually lasted. I know the Wolverine solo series did a whole plot where he was tricked into slaughtering his offspring and that wound up mentally breaking him.
 
Was Joe Casey's X-Men any good?

The only X-men I've really read was Morrsion's run and some of X-Static (which really isn't X-Men but you get my point)
 
Meta thought: I wonder why of all teams the X-Men has the biggest set of beloved members that still feel undeniably a part of the team when they're there. Like, way more than your usual superhero team.

I'd argue the true core is the 80s team - Cyke, Jean, Wolvie, Colossus, Nightcrawler, Storm - with Beast (Avengers at the time) and PERHAPS Iceman. But like. There's so many more well-known members you can naturally slot in for a run or adaption! Kitty Pryde, Rogue, Angel, Psylocke, Bishop, Gambit.... more I probably forgot even.... they could all fit in (X) run with those "core" members and you'd recognize them as important X-Men. Or you mix and match core and the "B-listers" (so to speak, remember!) for a team, same deal. Or entirely the "B-listers" and yet it feels as legitimate a team set-up as undeniably X-Men as any. This is in comparison to the Teen Titans' most well-known set being the New TT, the JLA's truest form being the charter founders back in the 60s, or the Avengers really needing "the Big Three" (Cap, Iron Man, Thor) and maybe the other founders (Hulk, Ant-Man, Wasp) to not be seen as a write-off. The Justice League International team is rightly beloved but they're "JLI" than just "JL", you know?

What is it on X-Men that made so many of its later additions feel as vital or at least a totally natural part of the "main team" versus any other group?
 
Meta thought: I wonder why of all teams the X-Men has the biggest set of beloved members that still feel undeniably a part of the team when they're there. Like, way more than your usual superhero team.

I'd argue the true core is the 80s team - Cyke, Jean, Wolvie, Colossus, Nightcrawler, Storm - with Beast (Avengers at the time) and PERHAPS Iceman. But like. There's so many more well-known members you can naturally slot in for a run or adaption! Kitty Pryde, Rogue, Angel, Psylocke, Bishop, Gambit.... more I probably forgot even.... they could all fit in (X) run with those "core" members and you'd recognize them as important X-Men. Or you mix and match core and the "B-listers" (so to speak, remember!) for a team, same deal. Or entirely the "B-listers" and yet it feels as legitimate a team set-up as undeniably X-Men as any. This is in comparison to the Teen Titans' most well-known set being the New TT, the JLA's truest form being the charter founders back in the 60s, or the Avengers really needing "the Big Three" (Cap, Iron Man, Thor) and maybe the other founders (Hulk, Ant-Man, Wasp) to not be seen as a write-off. The Justice League International team is rightly beloved but they're "JLI" than just "JL", you know?

What is it on X-Men that made so many of its later additions feel as vital or at least a totally natural part of the "main team" versus any other group?
the X-Men's core major members that are very recognizable have been there for the very prominent stories and whatnot.

Even in the case of Psylocke, Dazzler, Bishop, and etc., there's still a case of them being there during these prominent runs and people kinda remembering them. Of course, they also had either waifu potential or interesting enough premises to be inserted into all this like Cable or Bishop did.

As for newer X-Men, I think we never really got any new prominent "iconic" ones after the 90s. The closest is X-23/Daken and they're just Wolverine hangons.

Maybe Vulcan? Eh. Not sure about him.

The Titans have 2 iconic lineups. The originals and the New TT. People aren't really gonna remember Bumblebee or Herald from the original group's expansion.

The JLA is usually divided into "eras" but the original pre-detroit lineup is the most iconic. The streamlined original 7 are the ones everyone remembers. But fans do remember the Satellite era JLA, the 60s JLA, the Detroit League, etc. The stuff that happened between JLI and the Morrison JLA? Not so much. Reminding fans that fucking NUklon and Obsidian were on the JLA is funny because that era's kinda swept under the rug. Still, you could count most of the conventional silver/bronze age superheroes that were adults as JLA members at some point. Fucking Mikaal Tomas Starman was made into one. Hell, they eventually made Black Lightning and Metamorpho into JLA members too. A lot of DC is aware that fans just want to see "classic" heroes join their premier team book, so every major hero gets a shot. At this point, every relevant superhero in DC has been made a member due to the events of the past few years.

Avengers are an oddball group but you are right in that they usually have to have one of the founders+Captain America to get off the ground. They're the kings of getting all the C-B listers to join them. Still, I think the last 20 years have shown that if a "classic" non-mutant/inhuman superhero from the silver-bronze age isn't a member yet, they will eventually be one. Unless, that is, they're fucking extremely obscure. But even then, we had the 50-State initiative shit that technically made them avengers teams in the loosest sense, didn't we? Still, with the MCU, we've sort of got options for 2-3 avengers teams to fill out books.

The F4 have had changes, but the core 4 are the only ones anyone cares about. She-Hulk or Medusa or whatever sometimes subs in.

JLI has an iconic lineup but it's just the JLI. At that point I'd say the JSA's lineup is also iconic but we're talking about the originals from the '40s.

The Outsiders also has an iconic lineup. Batman and a bunch of DC's heroes that turned down the JLA or were involved in more personal arcs.

However, I believe that any character can become prominent in the right hands. Bendis had a golden spoon given to him at DC and kinda bungled everything up. His Superman gimmick with revealing the identity didn't pan out. His Naomi character is kinda on the sidelines at best. Hell, I'd say his most interesting idea was the whole Event Leviathan bit that just got pushed to the side after he had the radicalized Leviathan members kill off Mark Shaw and then just have Talia get the organization, thus dampening the purpose of all the bullshit that happened. And now we're getting an arc where Amanda Waller is also doing the whole "prepare to fuck with the superpowered community" stuff at the behest of "The Light" (oh hey an YJ show thing) and now it's all just feeling like someone's taking bits of Bendis' work and improving on them.


Naomi seemed intriguing but they never did anything worthwhile with her. I do find it weird how she's also barefoot in her official costume. I. . . uh. . . don't know if this is a creator's fetish. I hope she comes back in better hands.


Also the push for CW characters in some comics has been weird. We had The Ray pop up more because of the CW show.
 
Been a long time since I read this one, but the Elseworld Story Supergirl: Wings is a good one.
If you are a fan of Peter Davids run on Supergirl in the late 90s (as I am), you will find similar concepts in this story that was present in his runs( Angels, redemptions, devils etc etc), but it does it in its own way.
wings.jpg
It is not an action book at all and if you are not a fan of the religous themes, maybe skip it.
Otherwise, I recommended it.
 
Was Joe Casey's X-Men any good?

The only X-men I've really read was Morrsion's run and some of X-Static (which really isn't X-Men but you get my point)
His first issue #394 (with the infamous Jean/Logan kissing cover) is tolerable in a one-off filler story sort of way.

#395-400 is a huge god-damn train wreck that reflects the fact that rather than giving fans the traditional X-Men comic fans were expecting from Casey ala the Kelly/Seagle run, Casey (who by his own admission wasted all of the money he got paid upfront to write the book, bought a shit ton of LSD and pot and other illicit drugs) produced a barely readable god-damn train wreck with a storyline about Chamber fucking a British Britany Spears type who is dating him for publicity and a British Morlock community being slaughtered by a guy with a flamethrower and of course, Stacy X the snake skinned professional whore who's mutant brothel gets massacred by Casey's new anti-mutant hate group Church of Humanity. Who does SOMETHING to Nightcrawler (according to Casey, they psychically remove his faith/religious side of his personality for shits and giggles) and is led, at least as Casey wrote them, by a 100+ devil worshipper who sold his soul to Satan in exchange for immortality and power to kill the mutant (who could turn into a bear) that murdered his dad and seduced his mom.

Then there was the UXM Annual for 2001 which is practically unreadable as it features Ashley Wood drawing a sideways comic about Vanisher working with corrupt members of Archangel's company to create Mutant Growth Hormones in the concept's first appearance, meaning that it can't just be skipped especially since the last two issues of Casey's run (#409-410) revisit the plotline.

The only decent part of Casey's run is the X-Corps arc (#401-408) which ironically is where the concept of X-Corps comes from (though Morrison, when he referenced it, ignored Casey's view that it was a paramilitary group operating outside of Xavier's control lead by Banshee and featuring members of Gen X, Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, and the OC characters Seagle's Alpha Flight and a couple of other one-off mutants including the regular universe version of AOA Horseman of the Apocalypse Abyss). There are some decent twists to the storyline and the payoff involves Mystique coming back as a villain doing really bad shit before Quesada ordered her to get her own ongoing and treated as a Didn't Do Nuttin' type.

Fans generally hated the run save for the X-Corps arc (which was the result of editorial meddling as Casey was ordered after sales cratered due to his hackery, to give fans what they wanted IE fan service). Casey has long since disowned his X-Men run and it's one of the reasons why Chuck Austen's run was filled with so much fan service (Havok and Polaris coming back, Juggernaut getting a redemption arc, Northstar and Husk joining the team full time, Stacy X being written out, Angel becoming a white guy again) and why fandom is generally divided on Holy War (the Austen resolution to the Church of Humanity arc) because exploding communion wafers, vengeful God-hating ex-nuns who were raped by a liberal SJW priest, and Nightcrawler being prepped to become Pope via political manipulation to bring about a mass murder of people that will bring down the Catholic Church in an holy mockery of the rapture made a lot more sense in a crackhead sort of way than "Church of Humanity is run by an immortal devil worshipper who hates mutants because his mommy fucked one who liked to walk around the house in his bear form and ate the guy's dad while his mom cheered her mutant lover on and removed the part of Nightcrawler's personality that made him religious for shits and giggles"; which is what Casey wanted.

The Titans have 2 iconic lineups. The originals and the New TT. People aren't really gonna remember Bumblebee or Herald from the original group's expansion.
Herald and Bumblebee have a rather large following in Titan fandom. They and Lilith are the only non-founding/non-Speedy Titans that keep coming back though Marv Wolfman famously kept the two retired due to his own personal dislike of the late 70s Titans.
 
Herald and Bumblebee have a rather large following in Titan fandom. They and Lilith are the only non-founding/non-Speedy Titans that keep coming back though Marv Wolfman famously kept the two retired due to his own personal dislike of the late 70s Titans.
I can believe it.

Also helps that Herald/Bumblebee are some of the earliest black superheroes and Lilith's role and potential is pretty high.
Lmao Red Star and Duela Dent and Flamebird really got shafted. Flamebird coulda had more of a role, but they didn't even bother killing her off like they did to the original Batwoman.


Who else was an early Titan that just gets shafted. Aquagirl Tula got killed during crisis. Lagoon Boy sort of popped up out of nowhere. Hawk/Dove were titans but they've also been their own thing. Gnark got axed during crisis. Kole did too.

The only reason anyone cares about Danny Chase is because of the new teen titans lmao. He's been dead for 30 years at this rate too because Id on't think he got brought back.

I know the 00s with their one-year later shit brought in random stuff like Little Barda and a teen Zatara. Don't think that went anywhere. I know they had the Blue Devil sidekick turn into an actual character (and then they killed him in a heroic sacrifice. poor Eddie).

Hell, my real question is what the fuck was up with Superboy and The Ravers. That series went on for longer than I'd expected and didn't even leave a single minor impact on the DCU.
 
I'm fairly confident that I can say that Art Speigelman probably wasn't jerking off while he wrote his book about the horrors of the Holocaust.
> implying jews use Holocaust refs in pop culture as anything other than torture/ victim porn

:story:
 
One thing to remember about Maus is that the whole main arc relating to the Holocaust is just window dressing for the writer to go into his dysfunctional relationship with his dad, his mom's suicide, and the fact that his dad isn't exactly the nicest guy (see how the first flashback chapter of Maus is about how his dad was an obnoxious gold digging fuckboy with multiple girlfriends he was leading on while trying to find out which one could give him the best life financially if he married them), and the fact that his mom refused to talk about her experiences during the Holocaust.

Or the Planet Hell excerpt (the only segment where there are humans) which is from a previously published comic by the writer who basically uses it to vent on how much he hated his dad for going full weeping baby mode when his mom died, forcing him to have to repress his grief over his mom's suicide in order to do all of the funeral arrangements and how their Jewish friends resented him having to repress said grief and be the adult in the room/blaming him for not stopping his mom from killing herself while giving his dad a free pass on being useless and not realizing his wife was on the verge of taking her own life.
 
I get the allegory, but I don’t care for the art style. It’s one of those books that’s carried by it being The Holocaust comic
I see it the same. Fun fact, when the police, under the most bogus pretenses, raided one of the most renowned and most well established video stores (it is known in all of Europe pretty much for its extensive library) in my city in 1999 they also raided their basement store where they sold all matter of comics and manga. Maus was one of the comics they confiscated under the pretense of it being Nazi propaganda, simply because one of the editions had artwork with a swastika on the cover. Gold star (heh) for our coppers, we already knew they don't hire the brightest people but this drove the point home.
I think on even a casual viewing of the material the anthropomorphic nature of the characters in Maus is clearly supposed to be allegorical
Yeah, i'm pretty sure i read Art Spiegelman saying as much. It's very on the nose, cats and mice.
 
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I like Maus.
I read it when I was a teen and it had an impact on me.
The art of Art (lol) is simple but effective in how to tell the story about what his father went though.
 
Are Allen Moore books worth reading or are they just Britfag commie diatribe's? I vaguely remember reading V for Vendetta when it first came out in movies.
 
Are Allen Moore books worth reading or are they just Britfag commie diatribe's? I vaguely remember reading V for Vendetta when it first came out in movies.
He's written some fun stuff, but I find that he gets cranky.

I liked his early stuff at DC/Marvel like that one superman story. LEague of Extraordinary Gentlemen had flaws but was fun. His Tom strong and ABC comics stuff was solidly fun.
Watchmen's a fine read.

That's all I remember.
 
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