Tom Taylor (1) (1978–)

I have been eyeing this series down for years, and I finally decided to cave and bought it for my birthday! AND I AM SO HAPPY I DID! I love the Justice League - it was a childhood obsession and now into my adulthood I still love them! I devour DC content like you wouldn't believe!

Seeing Gods Among Us come out made my heart flutter, but these books can be expensive. So I waited until I had enough points to grab this book on a great sale! But now I want the rest of the series... It'll have to show more wait!

I LOVED this book. Keep in mind, I am very biased. I love almost all things DC (almost... you can message me and argue with me all about that). Knowing this, be aware that my review is how good it is! I didn't see many faults but that's because I loved it too much.

This story is a change in the timeline! I imagine it's like Flashpoint or an anthology series. Superman's love (Lois) and their unborn child are brutally murdered by, you guessed it, the Joker. Suddenly, the world is in chaos. The Justice League and some of their villains are in an all out DC "Civil War". Green Arrow, Black Canary, Harley Quinn, Wonder Woman, Aquaman (not Jason Momoa Aquaman, good old blondie Aquaman!), Martian Man Hunter, Huntress, Robin and many other characters make their way onto the screen. It felt like a giant, epic event... but it doesn't end in this book. The book sums up this little plot line nicely, but you know there's going to be more coming in the next book.

Friendships are destroyed. Cities are destroyed. Aliens are destroyed. Lots of destruction.

I do have many "bad" things to say, but it's mostly about characters I love being wasted. That doesn't truly affect this book though, just my opinion.

Although... some of these characters are very... sexualized? But there's not much you can do about that. They are supposed to be gods among us, so they better be pretty darn beautiful.

My overall, humble opinion is that this book is WILD. It's a fun and epic ride and you might not see the ending coming! If you love superheroes or graphic novels, pick this book up! It's now one of my all time favourite comic books / graphic novels. AND I WANT MORE!

Five out of five stars.

I'll be sitting over here in my sad, little corner waiting until I can find book 2 on sale. ;) show less

My feelings on this book are complicated, and discussing them is gonna be hella spoilery so, if you don't want the spoilers, the tl;dr is: I love Jean, always have, always will. This arc has a strong story, VERY rooted in 2017 and, unfortunately, VERY naïve and centrist in its moral outlook.

Ok, now the meat So we basically have a ton of very thinly veiled (like, not veiled AT ALL, just straight up panels of photos we all saw, and moments that actually happened) references to everything that show more happened in 2016 through 2017, but make it Mutants.

Casandra Nova is straight up Cambridge Analytica (the consulting firm, partially owned by Steve Bannon, that harvested a ton of data from Facebook through loopholes and questionable means, and then was paid by the furthest fringes of Right Wing politics to use that data for micro-targeted advertising to (provably, like, this 100% happened) sway the 2016 UK Brexit vote and the 2016 US Presidential Election. They did this. In the UK, they did this literally illegally as the Leave campaign was found guilty of funnelling money to CA through subsidiaries to try to get around Campaign Finance Laws. They got caught, but it didn't matter, they'd already won and a re-vote was never called.

And in this comic, that actual company who was paid to manipulate people towards hate and intolerance, is replaced with a telepath using nano sentinels and implanted thoughts to force people into hate and rage against mutants. Fine right? It's a superhero comic, there needs to be something to fight! You can't punch the abstract concept of radicalisation. Well, I mean, you kind of can? And that Nazi fuckwad deserved that punch and 100000 more. But the problem with this, is by making it nano sentinels forcing people into these actions, you're taking away culpability for what they did. You're implying that the people radicalised by CA, by the alt-right, by gamergate and every other radicalisation pipeline that now exists and is recruiting all over social media... you're implying that those people aren't responsible for the things they do and say once they've drunk the Nazi kool-aid.

And that's bullshit. Total, complete horseshit. It's even worse when the arc ends with Jean being all "fight hate with love". It's centrist crap like that that opened the door for January 6th and has left the politicians who incited that insurrection in office with no consequences.

But the worst part? Issue #3. Gambit is in Louisiana at an anti-mutant protest. Except it's not just an anti-mutant protest. It's 100% the Charlottesville tiki Nazi demonstration, just moved to Louisiana and now about Mutants instead of Jews and other minorities. Like, there's no question that's what they're referencing. There's a bunch of white people in polo shirts and khakis carrying tiki torches! And one of them, in a car, murders a mutant in cold blood. Yeah, sure, he shoots her instead of running her over, but this is so obviously a direct allegory for the murder of Heather Heyer that making it so the man who murdered her was being controlled by a machine embedded in his brain against his will? Yeah, that's some grade A centrist nonsense right there.

And it sucks! I LOVED Jean in this until the very end. I LOVE Honey Badger always and forever, and she's great in this! And calls Namor ABS-LANTIS! Taylor clearly loves these characters and has their voices and characterisations down cold. If only the world hadn't gotten so much worse because of the same "don't punch Nazis" style rhetoric that this book ends up promoting, maybe I could just love it how the little girl in me who always wanted to be Jean Grey desperately wants to love it.

And yeah, comics are supposed to be aspirational and idealistic and show us heroes who can solve the problems that feel too big for us. But when Marvel had just that same year turned Captain America - a Jewish power fantasy created by two Jews to push the US into WWII that they were happy to profit from and stay out of - into a Nazi in Secret Empire, it just feels hollow for the book pushing that's ostensibly pushing back against that hate and aggression to have the moral of "well, can't we all just get along?" "just hug it out!" "when they go low, we go high!" etc. It's just... yeah

This got long and ranty. I wish I could love this book. I WANT to love this book. It has the heart of a book I'd love to read, but the message at the end just isn't the correct response to these situations. show less

Fabulous!
11:15 pm 27 October 2016
All-New Wolverine (2015-) #6 - Tom Taylor, David Lopez, Bengal
Gabby and Laura get the best speeches: they tell the men who owned them - the men who are like them in Laura's case - how it feels and what it makes them want to do. They walk away, clean, good with themselves, and they carry each other throughout this.

It seems like it's just a plain old action story, but there is so much more in this. It's subtle and sly, but it's got a lot to do with how women show more can do without the men who want to keep them under their boots. And it's surprisingly effective and resonant.

This story, however, ends even as it shows the sacrifices that must be made to escape such men. I hope this comes back later, but for now, I'm looking forward to the next issue in this series - and the last one currently on MU.
X-Men Marvel Graphic Novel read in 2016
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Ok, I'm impressed. It's like Taylor read my review for volume 1, went back in time and adjusted the story in this volume to fix the issues I had.

Sure, the sentinites are still making things worse, but it's explicit that the radicalisation, the hate, the misinformation, the dangerous conspiracy theories all existed long before Cassandra's plan. And exist without it too. Trinary has spent years fighting hate and bigotry online and we see her ramping up that battle here.

Even Nova herself is show more de-radicalised (with comics sci-fi magic, but still) rather than just killed or defeated.

The hope and message in the first volume felt naïve and dismissive of real hate and its roots. This volume's hope felt grounded and meaningful, even if still ambitious and hand-wavy, but it should be ambitious and aspirational. Jean Grey and her team are superheroes. And here they give us something to live up to.

All that said, though, in the real world? When in doubt, punch a Nazi. show less