X-23 19 - Growing Pains

[terrykun]

Four beautiful and painful scans behind the cut, along with a very short summary of the preceding portion of the issue.

The gang fights their way back from The Collector, clean up the mess they made of the Baxter Building, and Reed and Sue are none the wiser (if not for the character growth bits in these pages, I would have had to post the ADORABLE Franklin and Valeria art. Someone else should do that).

As they leave together, Julian pulls Laura to him and kisses her.






EEEEEEEE!!! :D!

 

Comments

[salinea]

Laura broke up with Julian to be with Jubes! I'm not sure whether to be sad or to rejoyce!!

[q99]

Yea, it's a mixed feeling. Julian and Laura back in NXM were cute.

[salinea]

On the plus side, I liked how Julian was portrayed. And of course that doesn't tell us much of how they'll be portrayed in the future. I mean, once someone has done enough work to make a ship popular, it tends not to disappear utterly in comics.

[terrykun]

"You wanted me, then you didn't, now you want me again?"
"Yes."
"Wow, you have become a real girl."

[salinea]

Heh!

[shadowpsykie]

see my comment below... be both :D

[salinea]

I can do that!

[drexer]

"Miss you? I feel... I want.. you"

And then s_d exploded. And then the world. And that's why there is no issue beyond #20.

[salinea]

Liu is One of Us, so she's very good at playing up that sort of things :D

[darkknightjrk]

"Ignore all the boxes."

My thought: It's porn in those boxes. It has to be.

But yes, good scans. Man, I really gotta get the trades for this series.

[shadowpsykie]

how are they able to shatter my heart so completely and make me go into gleeful spasms as well? Anyone else reading WAY into Jube's comments?

who do you think Laura loves n ow?

[lieut_kettch]

I have two candidates in mind, and they both love wearing trenchcoats.

[salinea]

She didn't really interact with all that many people overall, so the candidate pool is pretty narrow.

[mullon]

That's the best outcome ever. It's a Christmas miracle!

[q99]

Dump the boy, get the girl :)

[brooms]

for a moment, i thought it would be revealed she had feelings for gambit and i clutched my pearls.

[long_silence]

Now that this arc is over I think I can say that I'm not too crazy about Liu's characterization of Julian.

He just came off as an abusive (ex-)boyfriend. Laura asks him to open a window, he shatters it and floats the glass inches away from her face in a show of force. Laura tries to walk away from him, he grabs her arm to stop her and she has to ask him to let go. He jealously accuses Laura of having some kind of "pervy" relationship with Gambit. Laura tells him she doesn't want to be with him, he yells at her to her face and calls her an unfeeling machine.

[outlawpoet]

yeah. ditto. Hellion has always been kind of a jerk, but he's pretty fierce about loyalty and he had acknowledged his complicated feelings for X-23 before. He spent a lot of time defending X-23 to the other kids, to Emma Frost, it just seems like Character Decay to have him revert to slurs and violence.
Then again, they had never talked before, and he is going through a rough time with the artificial hands. Too bad they never talked about cyborg experience. Laura has implants and mental programming, seems like they would have some stuff to discuss now that Julian is dealing with the same kinds of issues (killing Karima, having cyborg hands, living through a war in the Age of X alternate reality).

[brooms]

he seemed like he needed the sort of help laura isn't equipped to provide before they even get to a stage where they can discuss their similar experiences properly in this arc.

[rordulum]

I didn't care for it either.

Definitely abusive overtones, which just jar with everything that Julian Keller was in New X-Men. That's not who he was, and I hate the excuse of his PTSD and the loss of his hands being used to cover for crappy character writing.

At least Liu managed to make him look heroic a couple of times, but this whole arc has ended with the stench of 'I don't like this relationship, so I'm gonna end it' from the writer. Though, having said that, I can only hope she does it again with the Gambit and Rogue train wreck when she starts writing Astonishing X-Men.

[crabby_lioness]

I hate the excuse of his PTSD and the loss of his hands being used to cover for crappy character writing.

PTSD and mutilation are not lightweight matters. Julian is a mutilated soldier home from the front without the VA to talk to.

[batman]

So let me see if I get this straight.

We know that the babysitting arc takes place over a few hours because Laura goes from the school to meeting Sue to go babysit the kids. The arc opens with Wolverine basically telling Hellion that he never speaks to anyone or leaves his depressed cave of a room and that the staff think that he might do something very drastic (with the implication being some kind of self-harm). We're told throughout the arc that he thinks that Laura is the only one who could understand the position he's in, and that Laura is profoundly uncomfortable with the emotional stresses he's putting on her. Julian's involvement ends with him pretty much realising that no, Laura doesn't want anything to do with him either, and he has an abandonment issues streak a mile wide.

And then ... he's left in NYC. A clearly severely depressed teenaged boy who people a few hours ago expressed concerns for his own well-being is left on his own after a girl dumps him and no-one (like, say, Gambit, who is heading back to the school anyway) thinks to offer him a lift back to the school. Let's just keep aside the whole animosity that Gambit has towards him, because that's just immature to be that kind of a dick to a kid when you're an adult.

What's wrong with these people that they just left him to his own devices after that?

I really hope the next issue contains a remark about how someone brought him home because wow. Talk about terrible guardianship.

Laura dumping him was pretty reasonable, given that he and her literally are in different spheres. They're in different spaces now, and have been for a while, realistically. I'm just stunned at the adults. Ostensible ones, anyway.

[viridian5]

Unfortunately, this kind of irresponsibility and callousness from the adults has been canonical for the X groups for several years, in my opinion.

[batman]

Oh, definitely. It's just genuinely shocking when, in the same issue, Gambit is talking to Laura about what happened with Hellion. It's really no wonder the NXM kids feel like no-one cares about them.

[viridian5]

I really miss the feeling of family that the X teams had in the 80s. The teams stayed fairly stable for years, leading to complex interconnected relationships, and members really seemed to care about one another. That's hard to get today when so many characters don't stick around long from being shuffled off to other teams or obscurity, people die mostly temporarily, and so many are having limbs getting lopped off that it's starting to seem usual.

[rordulum]

This has happened to Julian more than once, of course.

His parents disowned him because he was a mutant and wouldn't hide the fact. Because he was proud of what he was.

Emma Frost became his mentor, and someone he really seemed to look up to, but he felt like she abandoned them during the whole House of M aftermath, distancing herself because she feared they were all going to die.

Then, she and the rest of them literally abandoned him, while he was unconscious and recovering from lifesaving surgery. He woke up to be told the X-Men were no more, and he was on his own. I'm still pissed that he then just appeared in San Francisco without explanation, by the way.

And after he went through the trauma of losing his hands, he got dickwads like Cyclops and Rogue telling him to suck it up and threatening him.

After this last one, I really wish someone would keep writing the character, and follow up on how he deals with the latest rejection. Right now, I'm almost aching for him to become a villain, on the off chance someone might feel the tiniest bit of guilt over how they never bothered to make sure he was okay. But I doubt anything will happen, other than him becoming background art in one of the books now and again.

[batman]

You forgot his appearances in X-Force and Dark Reign too, which were basically beating the snot out of him some more.

I have to admit that I keep hoping that someone is going to pick him up, but to put him in a book where he's able to do good things for people just for the sheer hell of it. Wolverine and the X-Men is not that book, given that the students it's focusing on are two aliens, one Light and one pre-M Day mutant. Makes you wish for a NXM book that transcends the schism and has the kids off looking for Josh Foley because no-one else cares enough about him to go looking for him and along the way do random good deeds because no-one else is.

[rordulum]

I'd rather he was a hero too, but the X-Men don't deserve for him to be, in my view.

Though honestly, if he did turn on them, all we'd probably get would be Wolverine calling him an ungrateful little snot before beating the crap out of him.

I think this is the main problem with the X-verse at the moment. Unless a character has a particular writer as an advocate for them (Cyclops, Rogue, Kitty in ASM, etc) or unless they're Wolverine and will be forced into any book possible, then that character is screwed.

Having Hellion and Elixir as a sort of wandering pair of do-gooders would have been great, and would have been a natural fit after Messiah Complex. But I can't see them getting any sort of attention in the foreseeable future. Maybe Hellion will appear again if some writer wants him to get beaten up on some more. Perhaps lose a leg, or get castrated or something. You know, a rich character opportunity.

[batman]

It sucks because the whole thing that Liu is raising in this is that Hellion fixated on Laura because he thinks that she can understand where he is at the moment. However, Elixir has also been in this situation and it was Hellion who shook him out of it. It'd make a nice counterpoint to see the two of them go off and do things.

But, I guess, you have to wring emotional drama from somewhere. At least now they can't hurt him to make Laura emote.

[outlawpoet]

I think I would like this whole thing a lot more if Gambit weren't such a dickbag about it. It's like, really? It's "too bad" she didn't kill the depressed, recently crippled teenager she loved and protected last year? YOU'RE IN YOUR LATE THIRTIES GAMBIT, GET IT TOGETHER.

Why Liu has Gambit so colossally insecure he's fucking snarking at teenagers is beyond me. He's been deeply mean to a lot of people in this run for no reason. They're not threats to him. He's fucking Gambit, he's fought wars in space, traveled to other times, defied Gods, lived through being used by Apocalypse. She's got him defensive and macho-stepping to everyone in sight and it's making me really dislike him.

And I say all this as someone who bought a trench-coat as a teen because of Gambit. He's my first and most favoritest of characters. But it's really really trying.

[batman]

He's that old? Wow, based on the stuff I've read here with Hellion, I would have put him at best in his early twenties when you're still learning what being an adult means. It could be just me but when you become an adult you ... kind of learn that teenagers say dumb things all the time and you just don't get into this kind of verbal warfare with them because it's immature. They're a kid, you're an adult and you have a responsibility to act like an adult!

I actually disliked him this arc too, because when I read interactions between adults and teenagers, I expect there to be a difference in the way they are with each other. Gambit pointedly ignoring Julian's comments back in #17, telling Laura about the phone, not asking if one of his charges is dead, and offering him a ride home would have done a lot more to show me that Gambit is an adult and Hellion is a stupid kid. Acting at the same level of a miserable sixteen year old doesn't show me how witty and snarky an adult is, it just shows me how pathetic they are that they don't know when to walk away from a pointless conflict. Part of being a grownup is learning when to not engage in a stupid argument; apparently Gambit never learned that.

Right now I don't know which one of them is meant to be the adult.

[rordulum]

Honestly, I wonder whether she's trying too hard to make him seem like the old Gambit, to make up for Mike Carey's appalling treatment of the character.

Better an asshole than a doormat, perhaps. At least, that might be Liu's thinking. And I know doormat's perhaps not PC, but Carey had him tell Rogue that he'd always be there for her, which she then took as carte blanche to screw Magneto a couple of issues later (it might even have been the same issue). And since then, Gambit's been trailing along behind the two of them like a pathetic little puppy... or a knowing cuckhold. It's been worse for his character than Deathbit was, in my opinion.

I don't know that any of the X-Men have a definite age, unless it's been spelled out in a story, and I don't think Gambit's ever has. Late 30s? Maybe, but with the way Marvel time works, he could easily be a decade younger than that.

[biod]

I really cared for her relationship with Julian in the last issue, so it's a bit of a whiplash, but. . .
YES! Jubes and Laura OTP!

[cypherfdp]

This is getting into really creepy fetish territory, opposite-sex clone Wolverine and a vampire.

[eyz]

Oh man, put up that way, that's some weird fanfic in the making right there!...

[introverted_excavator]

NO JIN KAZAMA FROM TEKKEN DON'T SAY THAT TO KRISTEN STEWART NOOOOO!!!

... Oh wait, she's with Jubes now? I can deal with this.

[eyz]

Awww!

Also, Jubes+Laura? I say YES!!! FINALLY!!

[v_various]

I have no interest in picking up this title (I'm also not a fan of the art, but it's growing on me), but next issue? I am getting.

It is not often I'm willing to keep single issues floating on my shelf, but man, girls night out LauraJubes has to be worth it.

[greenmask]

Shipping that.

Potential hit series of 2012: Wolverine and His Bisexual Children