Marvel Voices: Pride #1 - "Colossus"

[laughing_tree]

This was one of my childhood "Yeah, not exactly straight, are you?" moments. -- Kieron Gillen

Comments

[beyondthefringe]

It would make just a tiny bit more sense for David to be pansexual, just given the nature of his power and how it played into his self-awakening. I know it's not a HUGE distinction between bi and pan, but if anyone was going to be able to relate to desire of all sorts transcending specific definitions, it would be him.

And yeah, I can see where Piotr would set off all sorts of attraction whistles, if you like them big and sometimes metallic. Buns of STEEL, baby.

What I really like is the framing of David's awareness as an empathy thing. Like empathy as in a super power, but the natural ability to connect, relate to, and understand someone different than yourself.

[zachbeacon]

It is a solid use of his powers.

An ace* YouTuber I like was talking about how she was briefly convinced she was bi because she liked both men and women "the same amount". She noted that all we really have to go on is our own thoughts and experiences and we can't really compare what we feel inside. David can actually do that.

*Another group prone to erasure even in the LGBT+ community.

[janegray]

This is really nice :)

[cyberghostface]

Making the sexual predator front and center on the cover was a choice.

[onsokumaru]

It was retconned (in a creepy "I can't make them do what they don't want to do" way), if I didn't misunderstand.
Now he's just a cold blood murderer, so everything's good.

[zachbeacon]

So the Starfox defense? Argh.

[deh_tommy]

Hey, Starfox is innocent.

[dan_ingram]

Styarfox's defense is that he is innocent, he's not a villain and his powers are far from subtle.

Daken's first appearance, he coerced his then girlfriend to commit suicide by insinuating he was having an affair with a man (whom he actually strangled to death).

[janegray]

Didn't he murder her and made it appear a suicide?

IIRC, he also took sadistic glee in taunting her as he did so, while she was crying her eyes out.

[dan_ingram]

IIRC, he deliberately talked her into suicide. It's been a while though, and I have no desire to check. And given that there's never any visual indication of his pheromone powers, he may have tipped the scales there too.

And if she refused, I doubt the cliche depraved bisexual 60 year old man with claws would have just let her walk away.

God, Daniel Way way wishes he were Ennis so bad. He killed his girlfriend to 'cover his tracks, because cops totally care about couples that break up.

[tinygaylaura]

I'm happy for Marvel to go ahead and say nothing Daniel Way wrote was canon. Not just for Daken but in general

Nothing of value would be lost

[dan_ingram]

We'd lose Daken.

...full steam ahead!

[janegray]

Wait, that's Daken on the cover?

...Uh. I kind of assumed it was a new character I wasn't familiar with. He looks very different than I remember.

[zachbeacon]

Yeah, kept catching myself wondering "who's that guy?" when looking at X-Factor scans here.

I just don't remember him being this huge in the past.

[shakalooloo]

Also, Angela doesn't even star in any of the stories inside.

[zachbeacon]

Does Julie?

[shakalooloo]

No. That cover is pretty deceitful in that way. 2/4 ain't bad?

Still, it's way better than the contents page, which lists the stories in a weird path that you have to follow, so you can't look up, say, the fourth story in the book without searching for a second or two. That wouldn't be so bad, were the creator credits present in the stories themselves, but THEY ARE NOT.

So, if you like the art and want to see who drew it, you have to work out which number story in the book it is, flip back to the start and then count spaces along a trail. Not cool, Marvel.

[zachbeacon]

Well 50% is still a failing grade. And honestly Julie is the only one of those four that I care about.

[shakalooloo]

Yeah, I feel sorry for anyone that may have been a fan of Julie or Angela (neither of whom has been seen for a while, IIRC?) picking this up for a check-in on either.

Fine for an alternate cover to depict characters not appearing in the book, but not for the main cover. Someone inform the Duly Appointed Enforcer of the Tyrest Accord!

[tinygaylaura]

Fortress Maximus will be after them now

Julie did appear in the Power Pack miniseries recently! It was good fun. She's still with her girlfriend too though sadly she only got a small cameo in the book

I don't think Angela has appeared since Strikeforce ended :(

[laughing_tree]

You could just look up the title of the story and find that in the contents page.

[shakalooloo]

True, but it is a two-page spread, and it's not even as if the first page contains the first half and the second the second half. Sure it's not the most inconvenient thing in the world, but more annoying than it should be. I can see no benefit over simply listing the stories.

[deh_tommy]

No Angela, no Loki, no Kitty, no Quill and no Starfox. Lots of focus on L and G and a bit of B, not much TQA. Still, baby steps.

[alliterator]

There were three trans characters in the book, I believe: Dr. Charlene McGowan, Jessie Drake, and Jennifer Harris, a brand-new character who was just cosplaying as She-Hulk.

The problem, of course, is that Jessie Drake had two appearances back in 1994, but if you didn't read them and didn't know she was trans, there's nothing to indicate that. And, like I said, Jennifer Harris is completely new and probably won't be showing up again, considering she was only cosplaying and not an actual superhero.

So yeah, the book could have been better.

[tinygaylaura]

As someone who knew about Jennifer Harris I was happy to see her again. And seeing her and Black Cat flirting was very cute as well

[cygnia]

Aces and aros are now the ones hanging out with the unicorns and the ampersands.

[blueprintstyles]

I want a full oneshot of men and women having an intense reaction to Piotr's outfit from the Hellfire Gala.

[leahandillyana]

Being able to lust over real people must make self-realisation so simple.

[shakalooloo]

Dialogue from the page before these:

"I imagine for adults, the X-Men are bisexual heaven, but not when you're in a hormonal hell. Imagine trying to pay attention when EMMA FROST is your teacher."

[icon_uk]

I'm reminded a little of Caleb from "The Bright Sessions", a 16 year old guy who is an empath, but only receptive, so he can't change anyone's emotions, but he feels EVERYONE'S emotions ALL THE TIME, and in a high school setting too, so he get's a bit overwhelmed, especially when he's not sure whether the emotions he's feeling towards anyone are his own or someone else's.

[leahandillyana]

I meant something else. When you are a stone butch or a bambi and you love women but don't really want to have sex with them, at least not the way you are "supposed" to want to have sex, it can difficult to come to identify yourself as being a queer woman, both to yourself and to "protect" your identity against scrutiny from queer people who think same sex lust rather than love is crucial to queer identities. I don't want to put love on a pedestal and lust is by no means negative, but these are my experiences.

[tinygaylaura]

I would definitely NOT be focusing on my education

[redmagpie]

Like when Daken was introduced he was a bag of offensive stereotype so him becoming less awful and us all quietly pretending he wasn't that bad in the past feels fine to me

[tinygaylaura]

I loved this one shot as a whole and this story was so sweet

I thought Gillen did a much better job of writing about how Prodigy came to realise he was bisexual here than in an earlier scene during his Young Avengers run. And I found it very sweet that Kitty was part of what helped his bisexual awakening.

Kitty doesn't just help every woman she meets realise they're into girls, she helps the guys she meets realise they're into guys as well. She's like a magical LGBT beacon

[tinygaylaura]

I'm in favor of doing this much in the same way as DC and Marvel have collectively agreed to banish just how racist so many of their heroes were in the golden age of comics to discontinuity by agreeing that the stories where countless characters were finding new racial slurs to call Japanese people every month or Billy Batson doing black face or literally everything to do with "Whitewash Jones" never happened

I'm all for putting crappy biphobic portrayals of bisexual characters in the same "This never happened" category that the stories featuring the "Black Talon" and "Egg Fu" have been put in