These kids today want everything just given to them. In my day you didn't just "get" a boner, you had to use elbow grease and a little ingenuity.

When did you meet Zauriel?

A trapdoor? *braces for pain*

Is any of this relevant outside a small Subculture?

That's part of what's hurt the X-Men; if you want to tell stories about racism or homophobia, nowadays you can just tell stories about real-world minority characters.

Yes, because a guy who uses a manga-influenced style is totally like a guy who fans rag on for literally tracing porn.

That's what they call me: Astute Joe Propinka.

And then Cyclops's X-Men spent an entire series doing nothing of interest, which ended with a love-in on the Capitol steps.

It's almost as if the people writing the Avengers don't want it to turn into another X-book, and the people writing the X-Men don't want to lose what makes the X-Men distinctive by having every other hero spend their time fighting for mutants.

Oh, I agree; that's why I refer to that moment elsewhere as him briefly switching minds with Ultimate Cap, who really is a hardnosed jingoist asshole.

The problem being that the Phoenix had never done anything even a little like that before, which makes it rather bizarre that the X-Men believed what they were told. The whole "Phoenix Force wants to revive mutantkind" thing was something they dropped into the books once they decided to undo House of M and needed a…

Even in Marvel Universe terms, you've got Wakandan xenophobia, Latveria in general, and a dozen other conflicts that aren't about "food and water" or whatever. And this is without getting into real-world messes like border disputes: what'd the P5 do about Israel and Palestine, or the Kashmir?

It was really great how the Phoenix Five saved the planet totally off-panel, and in a way that kept the writers safe from having to explain how they settled controversies and entrenched conflicts around the world without taking sides or pissing off scores of real-world groups.

Except that the writers have stated — and some dialogue in the final issue also states — that only the Avengers training Hope in Kun Lun and combining the Phoenix's power with Wanda's are the things that led to the final effect of rekindling mutantkind.

10 years is an awfully long time for the Inhumans books to run. Just two or so years ago, Marvel wasn't able to make the "Inhumanity" ongoing sell, and that was spinning them out of Hickman's FF and Hickman's Infinity event. The new strategy seems to be to usethe FF and some stray Avengers as main characters in the…

Fortunately, you can "read around" the three or four AXIS tie-in issues and lose nothing at all.

I'm beginning to think you're a Cyclops fan of some kind.

Yes…the Badoon.

It was all downhill after Mormon Massacre, though Fall of the Adams was still pretty good.

It also works a lot better on very down-to-earth solo character titles than it does on big teams of colorful superpeople fighting world-shaking menaces.