Northstar in UXM #530

[MistressMerr]

Now, now, you can't be too demanding!

Honestly, though, and in their defence, I do believe the creative teams I've been seeing on UXM are mildly competent. They just all insist on making alienating choices - so much so, I suspect it's more executive meddling than artistic choice.

'cept the teeth thing.

Eeeeh, I see very, very few redeeming qualities in anything Fraction or Land have done on the title, I wouldn't apply the competence label to any part of their run. Whilce Portacio, on the other hand (Dr. Teeth as it were) is actually a really great artist, but he's had a lot of health problems that have affected the quality of his work, so while I really don't like his stuff on UXM, it's definitely not as grating as Land's traced porn stars or Fraction's ridiculous out-of-character dialogue. As for Fraction's new co-writer Gillen, I have liked the other stuff of his that I've read, so time will tell to see if the writing improves any.

[Le Messor]

Fraction has had some good ideas for stories. Whilce's work, for all his health problems (I didn't know about them, btw), has been decent - he knows what a human being looks like, unlike some comic artists I've never learned the name of. He has reasonably detailed and good backgrounds. The teeth thing is the only problem I have with it - unfortunately, it's a really big, distracting one. Characters who're supposed to be happy are creeping me out.
Land's habit is even creepier (that, I did know about).
The colourists have a lot of technique, and are good at special effects, but the dingy colours and lack of light and too much orange / earth tones make it next to impossible for me to engage emotionally with the comics.

Thing is, I don't know how much of Fraction's OOC dialogue, or the colouring (which has been across all comics for roughly ten? years) is the artists or the editors.

So I will call them all mildly competent.
The term there is 'damning with faint praise'. I'm not giving them more than that.

- Le Messor
"She told me you weren't fit to sleep with pigs, but I defended you. I told her you were fit to sleep with pigs."
~ old joke

[Phil]

I prefer Fraction's run to Claremont's recent, and Austen's....

[Le Messor]

Whilce Portacio's art for the last several issues. It got him (from me) the nickname 'Dr. Teeth'...

I've now read the issue, and I think I've been to harsh on Whilce Portacio. If changing the artist didn't get rid of the teeth problem (though it did lessen it a bit), I now have to believe it comes from Editorial.

- Le Messor
"I cried because I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no socks."

[Le Messor]

I mentioned this in another thread, but why do Northstar and Dazzler need

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Storm to show up to help them be a better X-team? The whole thing rubbed me the wrong way.

What really annoyed me about that is that they treated it like a shocking reveal.
Fresh from her latest appearance last issue, and the issue before that, and the one before that, it's...
...
STORM!

- Le Messor
"Calculon's back!"
~ Futurama character, five seconds after learning Calculon was gone.