I reached the part of the book where I can start putting stuff back into TRUTHSEEKER again. The place where I started to do that was, in the original manuscript, page 42. It’s page 85 now. A whole chapter went back in with almost no revisions, which was exciting. I have no idea how this whole middle section will end up working, at this point. It’ll be a little shorter, which will make my editor happy, but shortening it means the last section is going to have to be lengthened, which doesn’t make /me/ happy.
I have to go in to Dublin on Saturday to exchange the new shoes I bought. There happens to be a Dublin Improv Movement/Frozen Dublin (facebook pages) Big Freeze going on at 3pm Saturday afternoon at the spire, so if anybody would like to, I don’t know, grab lunch and then go hold still at the Millennium Spire for five minutes on Saturday, that would be cool.
We got my bicycle fixed! I now need to get a lock for it again, and then I can ride it to and from the gym, and possibly, excitingly, some other places too!
And to pull together five things make a post, I will briefly natter about X-Men Noir and X-Men Forever beneath the cut.
X-Men Noir sucked. It was not the X-Men. It was a bunch of humans in the late 20s or early 30s who were given the X-Men’s names. Even drawing Gambit as Adrian Brody in no way made up for this. It would have been a perfectly fine noir story, particularly if it had come out *before* The Prestige or The Illusionist, without using X-Men names in it. I am extremely disappointed I bought it, especially in hardback. :p
X-Men Forever, otoh, amused me. This is Chris Claremont’s return/reboot of the X-Men, backing up twenty years to pick up the story he claims he intended to tell after the first 3 X-Men comics ended (X-Men, as opposed to Uncanny X-Men, began in 1990ish with a story of Fabian Cortez kicking Magneto’s ass, and Claremont left the new title after 3 issues). In the first issue, Kitty Pryde plays the role of LET ME EXPLAIN THIS TO YOU IN CASE YOU MISSED ANYTHING, which is pretty standard Claremont writing but it was so obvious in this case I thought it was funny.
I also was amused by the Scott/Jean/Logan love triangle, which, frankly, I never thought was all that much of a triangle really, as it was always quite clear Jean was never, ever, ever going to leave Scott. However, this issue opens up with what Ted and I have been calling LET ME MAKE THIS LOVE TRIANGLE PERFECTLY CLEAR, and so we of course wonder if it was much clearer in Claremont’s head, all those years ago.
Peculiarities: Remy’s last name has been changed to Picard (which makes his father Jean-Luc Picard o.O), and Rogue’s been given the name she’s been using in more recent comics, Anna-Marie Raven (after Anna Paquin and Marie D’Ancanto, which was Rogue’s name in the movie, and after Mystique, whose real name is Raven Darkholme). I particularly hate the “Raven” part of her name; if it was Anna-Marie Darkholme I’d be much less irritated, and if it was just Marie *anything* I’d be satisfied (mostly because I gave her the name Marie back when we played on Classic X, the short-lived MUSH of yore, and I am nothing if not egotistical). Their accents have largely been dropped, too, which is really probably just as well. :)
I’m interested enough that I may keep getting the monthlies (or the bi-monthlies, as it happens, since they’re coming out every two weeks), but mostly–because I read an interview with Claremont which said, “Of course the idea of what to do with them has evolved since in the twenty years since I didn’t write this,”–mostly I kind of wish I could see the story he’d been *going* to tell two decades ago, and compare it to the one he’s going to tell now.
The covers for issues 2-4 look like the X-Men get a makeover in badass between issues 3 and 4. And like Kitty’s taking charge. Which would be very Claremont, and very cool. So yeah. Having fun with that, anyway. ;)