On the spirituality issue:

Since I'm not going to get another chance…

Man, Jeager's line about the tits he'd like to bounce like basketballs really stood out like a sore thumb. Just seemed like vulgarity for vulgarity's sake. Seems to have missed the tone.

Hmmm, that's interesting, but I don't buy it. Wolvy's got plenty of other reasons to have a chip on his shoulder, and I've just never read him as that insecure.

Of course, the MCU benefits from the fact that it's flagship character wears armor, not spandex, and the comics have tinkered with that armor since, like, his second issue.

Maybe I'm just speaking with the benefit of having seen the X-Franchise and Ultimate Wolverine, but I really fail to see how Wolverine's height is a sine qua non of the character. Besides letting Sabretooth call him "runt", what did it add to any classic X-Men stories?

Marvel seems to be moving away from this, though, with Kamala and Miles in the A-List.

Sorta necessary, but the problem was, just about every mutant who'd ever been an important cast member was in the 198, or got their powers back pretty quickly due to Because Comics. It didn't do anything to rein in the convolution.

This is a really good point, and even outside of traumas like that, his characters had an emotional maturity. No, it was not always conveyed well by the dialogue, but Claremont's characters really grew and changed, often in unexpected, messy ways.

But it was a choice in the movie that illustrated his character. No reason X-Men couldn't do the same thing.

I think the point is that in the franchise's attempt to give Xavier an edge and make Magneto redeemable enough to be in every film, the philosophical divide (which is in many ways the core of the X-Universe, it's certainly the thing Marvel pats itself on the back for the most) has been sanded down to nothing.

But, like, the reason for Iron Man's color scheme is literally "Tony Stark wants it to look like a sexy race car."

But what would be the "realistic" consequences for what Ramsay's done? Who's willing to go to war for Theon, or the peasant girls he hunted? Maybe the Freys should be getting up in arms (maybe they are!), but otherwise, it's kind of just Sansa, and, well, looks like that's a-comin'.

I don't disagree that they moved awfully damned fast with Cain's arc, but the counterpoint is we knew where it was headed from Jump Street, and I'm glad they just got on with it.

"Reading of the book as a metaphor for gun control, which it so obviously thinks it is"

It's so weird to read about a time in Bat-comics when Bruce Wayne (as opposed to Batman) had a love life.

To be fair, wasn't Alberto a pretty big cheat? As I recall, there was no way to see that coming.

Yeah. Even Born Again has some really fucked up gender politics. You've got the Madonna and the Whore (but it's OK, because Matt Murdock redeems her by pressing on the right pressure points), and then the only other prominent female character is Kingpin's muscle.

He made the sitting President the antagonist. He had a political agenda, it's just not the straight left-right one he's always been tagged with.

Comics Alliance actually has a pretty convincing article that the "Bwa-ha-ha" JL was pretty influential on team books. They all seem to have some flavor of "this is a job and these are my co-workers" that JL brought to the forefront.