Hooray for Second Coming

It is bizarre given that I'm writing praise for an event title that I have consciously chosen not to spend money on. I refuse to endorse, monetarily, any more X-Men books that feature Sentinels, or allusions to Days of Future Past/Present/etc. That last time I enjoyed a story featuring these over used mechanoid fun suckers was Operation: Zero Tolerance, only because it assumed the rest of the world of Marvel does, in fact, exist in the same world as the X-Men. Other heroes (okay, just Spider-Man) were drawn into such an inherently unfair conflict as U.S. Government sanctioning of genocide.

I give Second Coming praise for only a few reasons. I praise it for acknowledging this, in its own way. Bastion HAD to isolate San Francisco from the rest of the world because, yeah, the rest of the Marvel Heroes would be forced to deal with this issue. X-Factor covered it perfectly, too. I want to desperately believe that with the end of Second Coming that the stories of Sentinels and futures where robots hunt mutants are finished. In fact, I want to believe that with the end of Second COming most of Claremont's influence on the team has begun to fizzle out.

I honestly want to see the new adjectiveless X-Men succeed, and not just because I consider Victor Gischler a friend of the now dead show. I am not going to pretend that the X-Men shouldn't serve the niche they have for themselves, and that's as representations of minorities and discrimination in this country. However, I would like to see variety in the stories, and the upcoming vampire arc is certainly headed in the right direction. Instead of the minority fighting against the majority, lets go ahead and two dfferent minorities fight each other.

Since Claremont's "Days of Future..." the X-Men have been stuck in a world with pre-WWII sensibilities towards minorities. I hope that we can at least move them into the civil rights era, in terms of the problems mutants in Marvel will have to face. Then again, with Utopia being what it is, a tiny nation off of the bay in San Francisco, perhaps we'll get some stories that are allegories for African Genocide/Yugoslavia. That'll at least get their problems coinciding with the times.