Books I Read In ’23: Part 2
House of X/Powers of X By Johnathan Hickman and others
The X-Men are a weird superhero book, even by american super hero standards. One of the strange things about them is their inability to be mediocre—the X-men are either “as good as superheroes get” or “unreadable trash” with no ground in-between. Compare that to, say, Spider-man, whose spent most of the last 60 years being “yeah, that was pretty good I guess,” with occasional outbreaks of brilliance or clones. This doesn't just apply to the books either: the movies, shows, what-have-you are all either one side of the scale or the other. To put that another way: no one has ever left an X-Men movie without having a strong opinion about what they just saw.
There’s a couple reasons for this, I think? There’s a weird mix of elements: they’re teachers, but also a commando team? In a world full of “regular” super heros, no one likes them? Also, a soap opera? And they’re a metaphor for the dealer’s choice of minority groups. And, the X-Men suffer more than most from the “fighting for the status quo” problem most superheroes have. The upshot is that to make them work, you have to actually have a take, it can’t just be “well, I guess Magneto is up to something again”.
The result is that the’re on this roughly 20 year cycle of someone coming in, having a new take that works, and then Marvel spends the next 10–15 years bleeding out everything from that burst of ideas. Lee & Kirby in the early 60s, Claremont & Byrne in the late 70s, Morrison at the turn of the century.
We’re due for a new spin, and Hickman wipes the deck clear and delivers. He kicked his run off with two linked books, pronounced House of “Ex” and Powers of “Ten”. (All good X-Men runs seem to center around using X to mean 10 in unexpected places.) The core metaphor and premise is pretty straightforward: we’re doing the formation of the State of Israel, but for mutants. (And with the Shi’ar Empire standing in for the United States as the not-so-subtle equipment supplier). This is coupled with a take that basically boils down to: “you know, if all these guys would just work together they’d be unstoppable.”
It’s about as good as the X-Men have ever been, and finally shake off the whole “fighting to protect the ones that hate them” angle: they have their own island now, and you can enter as much anti-mutant legislation as you like. Hickman has a great time riffing on this: Mutants have diplomatic immunity, Magneto is the Ambassador to the US, there are trade agreements. Plus, continuing on the “formation of Israel” angle, the fact that the mutants keep getting genocided gets treated with more seriousness than it ever has.
The layout is also fascinating, mixing traditional comic layouts with infographics, with a design sense that manages to look cutting-edge and and mid-60s at the same time. (Swiss design, coming through.)
The result is genuinely great, but great in the way that you know all the interesting material is going to be drained out of this over the next decade, and all the changes or new concepts are going to be retconned out and we’ll be back to the median-value room-temperature X-Men before too long; there’s a vague itch the whole time reading it thinking “there’s no way they’re going to actually keep any of this.” Which means that they’ve set themselves up for a “Destruction of Israel” story in a bit here, which I’m sure won’t delight all the wrong people.
But, you can’t grade a piece of art down based on what you know other people are going to do with it. As it stands, Hickman has knocked out 400-something pages of as good an X-Men story as there’s ever been. It’s worth enjoying in it’s own right, if for no other reason that he served up my favorite new idea in years: Cyclops, Jean Gray, and Wolverine are just a throuple now. Perfect. See you in another couple of decades, X-Men.
X-Men Epic Collections: Fate of the Phoenix & I, Magneto by Claremont, Byrne, and others
Speaking of those wacky mutants, my son is “exactly the right age to enjoy X-men” years old, so we’ve been picking up the reprints of the greatest hits here and there. And back when I was a kid, this was the Biggest Thing Ever: Dark Phoenix! Jean Grey Dies! Drama! Action! To quote the former galactic President: “Excitement, adventure, and really wild things!”
I hadn’t read any of this in probably 30 years, so I was pleased to see that it mostly holds up? It’s a superhero drama designed to be the most epic thing imaginable to tweens, and it still is.
One thing definitely stood out in hindsight, though. There was a fair amount of behind-the-scenes drama about killing off Jean Grey—the short, short version is that Claremont didn’t want to kill the character, but the editors insisted that she “pay for her actions.” Not to re-litigate 40-year old controversy, but in retrospect it’s so obvious that Jean “had to die” because she was a woman, and they didn’t want any of the female characters to be that powerful. What’s funny is reading this all later you can tell Claremont knows this, so he replaces Jean Grey with the nearly-powerless Kitty Pryde, and then makes sure Storm screws up or gets sucker-punched often enough to keep anyone from noticing how powerful she is too.
42: the wildly improbable ideas of Douglas Adams edited by Kevin Jon Davies
Kevin Jon Davies got started as part of the team doing the Guide animations for the BBC TV version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and turned that both into a friendship with Douglas Adams and a career making documentaries.
After Douglas Adams died, his collected papers ended up at Cambridge, where they mostly sat in file boxes. This book is a greatest hits collection of what Davies found when he went through them. Like a lot of posthumous collections, it’s equal parts fascinating and frustrating. As an example: there was a long standing rumor that Adams had written an entire first episode to the unmade second season of the Hitchhiker TV show, it turns out that’s true! And this book includes… only the first page. Then, the second half of the book is page after page of unrealized, unfinished projects. Fascinated, but frustrating. More than ever, this book makes me wish he’d had a business partner that could wrangle these projects over the finish line. Or, you know, make sure he got his heart checked out.
End Of Year Open Tab Bankruptcy Roundup Jamboree, Part 1: Mastodon
I’m declaring bankruptcy on my open tabs; these are all things I’ve had open on my laptop or phone over the last several months, thinking “I should send this to someone? Or Is this a blog post?” Turns out the answer is ‘no’ to both of those, so here they are. Day 1: The Twitter to Mastodon migration, or lack thereof.
I was going do to a whole piece on mastodon last summer. At first, the second half of what became What was happening: Twitter, 2006-2023 was going to be a roundup of alternatives and why none of them were replacements for what I missed, then that got demoted to a bunch of footnotes, then it’s own thing, but I just can’t be bothered because the moment was lost.
The short, short version is that from the end of ’21 and through the first half of ’22 there was an really intersting moment where we could have built an open alternative to twitter. Instead, they built another space space for white male nerds, and the internet didn’t need one more of those.
Mastodon somehow manges to embody every flaw of open source projects: they brought a protocol to a product fight, no one’s even thinking about it as a product, misfeatures dressed up as virtue, and a weirdly hostile userbase that’s too busy patting each other on the back to noice who’s been left out. A whole bunch of gatekeeping bullshit dressed up as faux-libertarian morality. Mixed with this very irritating evangelistic true-believer vibe where Mastodon is the “morally correct” one to use, so there’s no reason to listen to reasons why people don’t use it, because axiomatically, they must be wrong.
And look, this is coming from a guy with an active subscription to Ivory. But the communities on twitter I cared about just aren’t there. They went elsewhere, or just dispersed into the web. I understand that there are people who found what they had on twitter on mastodon, and as before I can only quote former-President Beeblebrox: “Zowee, here we are at the End of the Universe and you haven't even lived yet. Did you miss out.”
One of the key works of our time is that episode of 30 Rock where Liz Lemon realizes that actually, she was the bully in high school. Mastodon was built entirely by people that never had that realization.
Michael Tsai - Blog - Why Has Mastodon Adoption Stalled?
jwz: Mastodon stampede Pretty great comment thread on this one, including this amazing line, re the mastodon developers:
And for this it’s a general Stallman problem. “I don’t understand this. Therefore you are wrong.”
The nerd rage respones to jwz’s entirely reasonable (and positive!) critique is everything you need to know. I’ve got enough weird HOA scolds in my real life without going on Al Gore’s internet and seeking them out.
Drivers of social influence in the Twitter migration to Mastodon | Scientific Reports
(I could have sworn I had more open tabs here, but I think I’m remembering frustrated twitter threads instead)
Wednesday linkblog, Twitter reminisces edition
The reminisces are starting to flow now, as is really starts to settle in that the thing we used to call twitter is gone and won’t be back.. As such, I’d like to call your attention to The Verge’s truly excellent The Year Twitter Died. This is probably the best “what it was, and what we lost, for both good and ill” piece I’ve read. Especially don’t miss The Great Scrollback of Alexandria. I’m glad someone is putting the work into saving some part of what used to be there.
Also, this week in folks talking about twitter, I enjoyed John Scalzi’s check-in a month after finally walking away: Abandoning the Former Twitter: A Four-Week Check-In. Scalzi was one of the strongest “I was here before he got here, and I’ll be here after he leaves” voices I saw a year ago, and the last year beat him like the rest of us.
There’s, of couse, the usual blowback to stuff like this, with at least one article I saw in response to that verge piece claiming that no, twitter always sucked, here’s all the problems it had, I always had a bad time there, so on and so on. I won’t link to it because why give them the attention, but I spent the whole time reading it thinking of this quote from former-President Beeblebrox: “Zowee, here we are at the End of the Universe and you haven't even lived yet. Did you miss out.”