A Question About the Kurt/Ororo/Logan love triangle, et al.

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neling4
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A Question About the Kurt/Ororo/Logan love triangle, et al.

Post by neling4 »

Mr. Davis:

First, I would like to say how much I like your work, particularly on the first Excalibur series.

I recently re-read the Uncanny X-Men End of History arc, #444 through #447, and # 455, which you did with Mr. Claremont, as well as #453, with art by Andy Park.

I am hoping you know the answer to my question which is this: What did Mr. Claremont intend to happen? Did he mean the Logan/Ororo and the Kurt/Rachel relationships to end the way they did, with Ororo marrying the Black Panther, and Rachel being brushed aside by Kurt's relationship with Psylocke, or did he intend the relationships to continue? Just curious.

Thank you very much.

neling4
Alan Davis
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Post by Alan Davis »

Sorry neling4

I have no idea what was planned or who got hitched to whom. I didn’t even read the issues I pencilled.

Alan
neling4
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Post by neling4 »

Ah well! :( Thank you anyway Mr. Davis.

neling4
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Post by wonderdallas »

Alan Davis wrote:Sorry neling4

I have no idea what was planned or who got hitched to whom. I didn’t even read the issues I pencilled.

Alan

I find that very curious! Why wouldn't you want to read the final result of something you had worked on?

After reading this forum for a few years, my impression (and I could be wrong) is that you seem to have a cool detachment from the industry you work in. Which I can understand as I'm quite detached from the news industry where I work as a designer(years of bad news can do that).


-Dallas
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Post by ChastMastr »

I had a totally different image from the title of this thread in my head... :lol: (Cue old-time soap opera music) "Will Ororo break up Logan and Kurt? Tune in tomorrow, dear viewer...)

(And Logan adds new meaning to the term "slash fiction"...) :lol: :lol: :lol:

David
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neling4
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Post by neling4 »

:) I guess I need to be more careful when I compose a title for my threads. I knew this one sounded racy, but I couldn't think how else to phrase it.
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Post by ChastMastr »

Oh, no need to apologize. It's a quite lovely image, and I thank you for it. :P

Actually, depending on how you look at continuity, Logan did end up with Ororo in the end. I'm weird. I can't see the current storylines fitting in the same universe as the storylines of the 1990s or even the early 2000s. It's just written too differently! (Oh, the scathing things I say about Marvel when given the chance! I loathed Disassembled, Decimation, Civil War etc.) But Tom DeFalco spun a whole world out of the Marvel of the 1990s which I like very much, MC-2 with Spider-Girl and all, in which [SPOILERS] Logan got a happy ending with Elektra and they have a daughter named Rina -- and after all the depressing stuff in the current MU, quite honestly it's heartwarming to see him driving up in a truck picking up his daughter from school, in a more or less peaceful future in which, yes, many of the X-Men are dead, but because they saved the world one last time, mutants are not disliked nearly as much anymore and are more part of society -- which means we get to see Xavier's dream fulfilled! -- while in Chris Claremont's X-Men: The End, which spins more out of Marvel from the early 2000s, [SPOILERS] Logan does wind up with Ororo in the end! And again it has a happy final ending in which Kitty Pryde is the first mutant-American president of the United States...

So if you're like me, you can see one or the other reality being the wrap-up to those storylines and giving them the proper literary/dramatic closure they deserve, rather than whatever Marvel's decided it's going to be this week. :) (Since the X-Men's whole point has always been trying to forge a better future for humans and mutants to coexist, rather than generically fight crime, in a way I feel that it kind of calls for some kind of eventual closure in a way that, say, the Avengers doesn't. Having the X-Men try for decades to get people to just stop hating them, but never really succeed in some final way, is actually kind of depressing otherwise. And don't get me started on Decimation...)
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neling4
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Post by neling4 »

You are welcome! I'm glad you enjoyed my thread title. :D

I do see happy endings for Marvel characters...in my head. I often imagine my own versions of every story. When Nightcrawler was in a coma after the Mutant Massacre, I imagined him waking up to begin a course of study under Doctor Moira MacTaggert and eventually becoming a doctor of mutant medicine.:P

Here is my theory:

The problem with happy endings is that they are endings. If every story ended happily, Marvel would probably be out of business. Since their stories are all continuous, rather like TV soap operas, they have to keep going with the angst and the drama.

I wonder if what they've done to Spiderman will increase sales?
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Post by ChastMastr »

neling4 wrote: Here is my theory:

The problem with happy endings is that they are endings. If every story ended happily, Marvel would probably be out of business. Since their stories are all continuous, rather like TV soap operas, they have to keep going with the angst and the drama.
Oh, absolutely! I think they'd be better off, though, more or less restarting things every few years, not by altering time or whatever but by shifting their focus to a new MU. Like Earth-616, then in ten years they do Earth-617, etc. One of Marvel's particular charms used to be the sense of growth and development continuity, but then characters' aging slowed down and stuff in the 1970s. Of course, again, they've shown that they can have characters age and grow with the quite popular Spider-Girl series, and Claremont is doing a "NeXt" miniseries in which basically everything after the 1980s didn't happen and the New Mutants, etc. aged in real time, so there is certainly a market for it.

David
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Post by ChastMastr »

This also allows for permanent change that actually matters. So for instance if Magneto reforms, or dies, we can see a different approach later on but with a different Magneto (just as we have different ones in the two animated series, the movies, the Ultimate Universe and so on), rather than changing him back and forth between good and evil, having him die and then be back talking about an "impostor" etc. Saying that the Magneto of Earth-1982 reformed and stayed that way, and the Magneto of Earth-2003 died after Wolverine cut off his head, and the Magneto of Earth-2005 lost his powers after M-Day -- that's honestly easier to take than an endless succession of reforms and corruptions and impostors and clones and God knows what else to change the character to whatever the editors think will sell as the years roll by.

David
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neling4
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Post by neling4 »

:idea: If I understand you correctly, David, you mean something like the Universe X, AOA, the Exiles or a continuous "What If?" series. That's not a bad idea.

Nancy
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Post by ChastMastr »

Well, somewhat. We kind of have something like it in MC-2 (whose continuity spins out of the Marvel of the 1990s -- so in that world, not only are Peter and MJ still married, with their daughter as Spider-Girl, but Johnny Storm is still with Lyja, Thunderstrike's son is in the current version of the Avengers and so on).

I kind of already sort my comics this way to a degree, so for instance the future of 1970s Marvel leads to Deathlok and Killraven, and the early 2000s Marvel leads to the finale of X-Men: The End. But I have a whole huge thread on this elsewhere: http://www.comicsbulletin.com/forum/sho ... php?t=4422 :)

David
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neling4
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Post by neling4 »

http://www.comicsbulletin.com/forum/sho ... php?t=4422

Whoa! Give me a second or two, or a few thousand, to process that post.
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Post by ChastMastr »

LOL! Certainly, take your time. Several alternate timelines, if need be. *chuckle*

David
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Alan Davis
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Post by Alan Davis »

I’ve had a few people e-mail my website to point out that I didn’t answer Dallas' question, the implication being it was too tough—And perhaps that I might be prepared to answer the question in a personal e-mail. The simple fact is I missed the question among all of the subsequent posts.
I find that very curious! Why wouldn't you want to read the final result of something you had worked on?
I would like to read the issues I have worked on in the same way I’d love to read more comics in general but. in general, I just don’t connect with the philosophy or raison d’etre behind modern comics. As I have stated elsewhere, if this makes me a dinosaur and ultimately unemployable I am prepared to accept the consequences but I really only want to do the kind of work I like.
In particular, it is usually the colouring that puts me off reading the comics I have drawn. I know precisely what the story SHOULD be about because I have spent a month, a day per page, attempting to get all sorts of details right and to see that work submerged or even destroyed by arbitrary colour decisions in infuriating.
After reading this forum for a few years, my impression (and I could be wrong) is that you seem to have a cool detachment from the industry you work in. Which I can understand as I'm quite detached from the news industry where I work as a designer(years of bad news can do that).
I would hope that I have a ‘cool detachment’ to all of the nonsense in the industry-- The petty politics, ego and hype-- but I’d like to think I am still as passionate about doing good work. If I didn’t feel that way I would quit and do something else. It’s the challenge of improving and perhaps producing something of real quality that keeps me interested.

I am making a point of answering this question here because I’m getting less and less time to answer personal e-mails to my site and it is counter productive to do so while this Forum is available. I had pledged that I would give queries to the Forum priority over e-mails to my site but, the way things are going, I will most likely only answer queries of general interest on the Forum.

Alan
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