A balmy night in March in 2018, Pollard arrived with a plastic, translucent, hamster-tunnel-style bong and 100 USD worth of Dimethyltriptamine for yours truly.
We’re sitting on a bad futon, backed against the front wall of a 500-sq ft one-BR apartment unit, reclining beneath the window that peered down onto a faintly orange-colored sodium-streetlamp-lit courtyard of an Irish Channel-located apt. complex in the relatively arborealy-dense uptown area of New Orleans, baby.
I’m on the right side of the couch. He is on the left side. I’m putting on a brave face, playing down the significance and clowning whorishly. Pollard is focused. I haven’t seen a DMT spirit/Mother Ayuahsca since just before Philadelphia over 2 years prior, and on that occasion, a/the goddess assured me not to blast off during that attempt. It was as though I throttled upwards into the upper atmosphere only to be greeted by a concerned goddess shooing me back down like a cock-blocking nanny, insisting she knew best, and I knew to agree. I yo-yo’d up and back down to earth like Wiley Coyote that night, utterly slingshotted, and had to walk away with nothing ultimately ventured, gained.
Pollard arranges the bowl. He hands it to me. I have put on a record by Daniel Lopatin x Tim Hecker called Instrumental Tourist. The record consists of clashes of radio static, bit-crashed theremin synths and warm, huge smears of pink, white and brown noise. I’m nervous. I’m still nervous about it.
The time comes and you just have to do it. You hit once, twice on your own. You’re holding it in. Pollard tells you “again”. You hit thrice, and the world-noise starts to emanate. He says “again, one more” and you can barely muster it. I don’t know if I was able to do a fourth. The sound comes from your lungs but also all around you all at once.
The universal drone now is ripping me to shreds— this saw-toothed hum. A big, all encompassing vibration. You knew about the noise’s existence even before the first time you tried DMT, but the drug has once again turned off the sensory-blocks that we live most of our waking life with. Now with the blindfold removed, one might reacquaint oneself with the World Sound once more, the origin, the source etc. The sound of the very planet itself which must needs be blocked out or else we’d all be blasting off all the time, and commute traffic would turn really horrific fast.
You’re gone now. But you still are in the apartment. Maybe because no 4th hit. Baby left some milk in the bottle. But a potted-plant in the right corner of the room, in front of the “kitchen” area of the apt sort of, reveals itself as in fact, surprise, a goddess(!). Some legendarily ancient forest nymph demurring herself into space-time. Or did I put her there. She's not shy necessarily, but then where was she before? She was the plant. Is, even.
She is there and she is almost blushing to see you see her. She is waving, grinning, full of love. Hello! Daskldj;alksfjs I’ve been odfijskf;sdlf watching you all along! Pdkfiosdjfosdjf so proud !
I’m also definitely not in the apartment anymore. I’m in a space ship. I’m definitely in deep space, probably not our system. It’s a hospital. But not in a scary way. I’m in a hospital bed on a space ship in space, and the nymph is there too, garbed in alien scrubs. She’s still smiling this just unconditional love-smile. I’ve been here the whole time, right. Right. Oh yeah.
Oh my gosh of course right, this. Ssssgsssss~~S d fahkufhd fisuf dfd the hum is still going, like all of this is being communicated by way of the hum, the World Noise.
She’s proud of me. Happy to “see” me again. I know I have to go back down though. And on the way back down, as I stare out the space ship hospital room window, I marvel at the brilliant technicolor blinking lights outside the ship, and the vessel’s own canyon-sized hull which extends past the window’s perspective into a shimmering nebula filled sky, a twinkling star-sea, so much like the lights of an oil refinery at night, far off on the horizon, a 2D sonic casino worth of lights, I sense the Chaos Jester.
He’s kind of just there somewhere. He’s in my apartment now. He’s kind of maniacally sitting with his two long spindly legs squatting under him but he’s on his tush, arms resting on his knees. He’s not in the apartment but he is there. He did this. He did all of this, I think to myself. I’m tempted to call him menacing but I don’t know if that’s really right. He’s not evil. But I would say that he gladly if not mercilessly kicked off a lot of this very enterprise we find ourselves in.
I just kind of stare off like a dumb baby for a bit now. Things wind down. The record playing re-emerges and the Hum dissipates and fades back into reality. The oceanic force is gone but only in that it got turned back down to the point of being ignorable. Afterglow now.
Here I will be listening through the first 4 LPs of Lana Del Rey for the first time, as a late-in-life super fan (Post-NMR poser). Sorry for anything perceived as hate, I do love this woman.
Born to Die (2012)- This is when the trip hop beats feel a bit canned and temporally displaced from their English, 90s origins in an awkward way, and the strings feel a little canned too— reaching for Zimmer-esque grandeur but falling short. She also uses voices on this that eventually disappear completely from her repertoire, sometimes evoking weird freak-folk stuff like CocoRosie but in a bad girl poet context. She does a Lolita or Little Orphan Annie thing on track 2 Off to the Races, and becomes a weepy tweety bird lush hiccuping her way through Blue Jeans, and I do not bemoan the loss of this slutty b-tier Bond girl schlock she would eventually shed and become more direct about critiquing. It was probably always critique of the male gaze all along, but the lines are blurrier in the beginning for sure when she isn’t willing to so eloquently describe the dimensions of her containment within a patriarchal system.
I imagine how much this must have spoken to the “bad” yet vaguely creative-seeming girls I knew in high school. Lana offered them a clarion call to actualization. By the time this came out though, I was in college working at an Urban Outfitters, and I remember distinctly that the cover photo with the sheer collared blouse and the anal-y coiffed, voluminous Auburn-dyed hair. It just seemed like a in-store promo. “this must be the UO special edition” I thought to myself.
But no, this is how Lana presented, and it happened to coincide with a stupid new idea of the “hipster” that flourished under Obama. Irony, and something about the 60s and 80s and mustache memes all coincided in a fresh new hell that Lana could slot into. But she wasn’t neat and tidy like, say, Vampire Weekend. She was a bad girl. But was it just a bad girl character on par with early Gaga with her vacant party girl shenanigans? Was it new? Ultimately Lizzie Grant will of course go on to reveal the artifice in full, proving the authenticity of the bit as artifice and then go on to remove the mask and invite us in forreal, not just into another one of her haunted mirror labyrinths of lust.
But as I already knew, Lana is less interesting here when she is refusing to take off the mask. This character could definitely speak deeply to someone who sees themselves as actually living a life comparable to that of this Lana Del Rey creation, and the stunning vividity with which the bit is rendered can be engrossing on its own. If all I can hear is the bit, the character, the “mask”, though, well then it’s all artifice without the true artistry she would harness later on and I question what lies beneath without much of an answer in sight. Video Games might come the closest as obvious as it sounds. The critique of her own character and of the culture at large becomes a little more defined.
The contours of MTV’s idea of reality and its failing in the broader context of the 20th century, so tacky and Ed Hardy-ized compared to this misremembered flapper era opulence she insists on reminding us of, it all feels like the ultimate Punk-ing. To dog us all like that while also presenting as the ultimate specimen of a post MTV world. What would you have us do Lana? Go back to the 20s, be rich and white? Go back to the “Gay 1890”s and live for crystalline jazz singers hanging from chandeliers as champagne showers over us, absolving us of our post-industrial, Walmart-ified sins and burning us in a holy conflagration. Nice try Lana, but you’re gonna need to try again next time. Game Over.
7.2/10 (Little more about the music… the writing, the beats, everything is serviceable here, the production helps things never become sleepy, which her vocal stylings might have eventually done. She does not hold back in terms of describing every cubic inch of the world-view of this Lana character. This is not just instagram filter music. It is deeply realized and sometimes novel-esque, if only in terms of seeming like a 11th grader’s slightly last-minute book report on Gatsby. But the ultra textual-density is all already there all along, sheer lyrical depth on par only with conscious rappers. You will not normally find this many words on any other pop records in 2011, that I can almost guarantee. And you also will not find such an utterly and deeply realized aesthetic world, unlike anything any other starlet was even attempting at the time.)
Ultraviolence (2014)
She’s singing softly again, like she always does.
She’s coming on to me, (the gay male listener).
After work, she pulls me in close by my blue paisley-patterned tie and I’m overwhelmed by her Chanel. She’s pulled me back into her world again and I’m hers completely, again and again and again~
This is the one where Lana steps out of the filtered instagram images evoking an abstract past and into the technicolor world of reality, where the Pygmalion of Lizzie Grant’s mind walks full-figured and flesh-covered from out of the mall displays like Kim Catrall in Mannequin (1987). But instead of a bright new future for Lana, this newfound realness comes more in the form of the specificity of a monochromatic, noir landscape and a world utterly described.
Right off the bat, atmosphere seems to have taken on new importance. On her first outing, Lana was proving she was a real girl who could walk and talk. But on UV, now she has a whole windswept seaside to herself to pal around— she isn’t just Off to the Races anymore, but instead insists that every grassy lawn that exists in America is part of her vivid world, which now includes the aesthetics of the films of Lynch and Tim Burton as touchstones. The way they too revel in revealing the decay hidden by suburban facade through film, is also intrinsic to Lana’s music.
This tension too is a part of her world, alongside all the F. Scott Fitzgerald signifiers— sometimes she even seems to be singing to us from the snow globe of Citizen Kane. A starlet tripping the light fantastique in Gotham’s red light district, but now speaking more directly about matters of the soul than merely of the body. And to really Make it Real, she extends her references explicitly:
They think I don't understand
The freedom land of the seventies
I get down to Beat poetry
And my jazz collection's rare
I can play most anything
I'm a Brooklyn baby
(on Shades of Cool). Well okay then Lana, maybe you are more than a mood board. Maybe you like Didion and Kerouac, that tracks. Does she actually like Nabokov or is Lolita entirely useful to her for surface-level reasons? In early interviews she speaks of Cobain and Cash and Dylan, the greats of every genre. And here she does seem more genre-minded… if the trip-hop on LP1 seemed almost out of place under her Jazz age affect, then by leaning into the noir and the gothic that someone like Portishead always channeled, she brings her work closer to something of undeniable substance. Whether she is a trust-fund kid yucking it up in Brooklyn and cultivating a personality made up of vapid cultural cherry-picking, or if she is in fact slyly making fun of that girl is besides the point. She’s real now and she’s here and she’s taking (some) questions.
She tells us on Sad Girl that she’s “a sad girl”. Not just in the summertime then? Do we take her word for it, or is this simply clarification. But we should have known that a being trapped in nostalgia like her early incarnation so clearly is, that she could not possibly be happy constantly looking back like that (or else looking in the mirror). That’s what fast sex and Chiffon is for, always has been, to distract from always looking to find one’s future hidden somewhere in the past.
Generally, we’re introduced to a laconic Lana here. Gone mostly are the peppy, borderline creepy Lolita-isms, and most of the higher BPMs. Now there is darkness and there is violence in its wake. But whether it’s the literal violence of the darkest of relationships or the violence of what ensues when a Fame Monster begins to consume and digest an individual, as it had thoroughly begun to do to Lana, well that all depends on perspective.
Lana had had her awkward SNL performance by now. She had already moved past the discourse around ideas that she was merely an “industry plant”. Something about the times back then and how Adele was the only pop star we allowed to write in a singer-songwriter mode had us truly questioning if this unique artist could possibly be real. “Fucked My Way to the Top” says to stuff all of that, that it’s not that deep. And we’re inclined to believe her.
Lou Reed is mentioned. The beats too. But so is Axel Rose. And the drugged out Lolita returns roughly one time, on Florida Kilos, towards the end. But she’s mostly resolved to stay in ballad mode. She leaves bread crumbs, but the destination isn’t the point. Lana’s artistry here by merely existing as it does seems to say over and over to stop the meaningless discourse. To just shut up. ‘Here is some art that I made, that i needed to make’, she seems to say. And if the mood board seems more varied and specific this time than just ‘The Great Gatsby,’ well I think we’re inclined to keep believing her. She could have truly pulled back and become pure caricature after LP1. Instead she leaned in, slowed it down, clarified herself, and spoke of an all consuming darkness. A decade later and she’s still finding light amidst all the death and the violence of a Cruel World.
8.3/10
Honeymoon (2015)
Well, so I have a confession to make. A bit of a mask-off moment for myself after so much talk of character and artifice. It turns out, embarrassingly enough, that I simply have trouble getting into or distinguishing a lot of early Lana. I say that as a super-fan of the recent 4 LPs, but that may not qualify much. Those who go all the way back with Lana are the real ones. And now that I think of it, more of BTD may have stood out to me than LP2 and 3. Despite the sunny cover featuring our honey looking glamorous in a sun hat, this album mostly continues the thread of dark glamour and decayed opulence she began to focus on between her debut and this 3rd full length outing.
A bit of background: As is the case with many recent bangwagoners, Norman Fucking Rockwell is the moment I went from being a sometimes curious spectator to full stan. Specifically, with the initial utterance on that record (Goddamn, man child/ you fucked me so good that I almost said I love you), Lana had kicked down a backdoor in my mind and ever since that day, she has been with me. Even in 2019, that last summer before COVID, when the greatest ruled both my mind and my piano alike, I remember thinking: Oh, I should go back to her older LPs, right? But even then I knew the answer. It simply might not be for me, that earlier stuff.
And why? The answer either does not exist clearly or is an uncomfortable one. NFR bandwagoners like me should almost feel a need to explain clearly that we are not actually just stans of Jack Antonoff’s production. It might feel that way given the data... he starts working with on her on LP5 which is the first to make a serious ripple on tastemakers’ AotY lists after years of resistance. And then he has been a mainstay collaborator ever since. But that can’t be it. I refuse to give a man credit when the majority of the words and melodies are hers. So what is it? Well, that is something to speak of when I do get to NFR and the material that followed.
For now, I will focus on Lana’s honeymoon phase, even if it is a honeymoon as tragic as her Ultraviolence days. Much of this glides by my ears, and unlike post-2018 material, neither the melodies nor the lyrics often truly grab me. Now to be clear, nothing is bad, nothing is offensive... it’s all often so lovely. And on-brand. But it’s more than beautifully on-brand, right?
Well if the first two LPs had me thinking so much of the character of Lana, well then Honeymoon is the record that has me thinking more about the listener. The listener that Lana imagines when writing, the one she is singing to. Both the imagined one and the literal actual one. She is a girl between the ages of 14 and 24 I believe. She may or may not have had dog-eared copies of Gatsby or Lolita on her dorm-room desk. A poster of Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss on the wall. Does she have crystals? Thoughts about astrology? (yes).
Does she have a troubled past and upbringing? I think she likely does. That this platonic listener of my dreams, whose spirits still haunt r/lana and r/lanita alike, that she truly receives from beyond through these records, of that I am sure. That there is healing for that girl inside of these songs, positive.
I know that several times this girl has moved on from Lana only to return when she needed her most. After a big breakup, or a big meltdown or a really, really bad day at work. But Lana’s songs are also there in the good moments. Nothing here is so blatantly “sad” that it cannot also just mostly be “pretty,” beautiful and transcendent of being emotionally one-note. Fodder for a road trip to the Grand Canyon. Or a time in her life when everything is calm and she can’t believe that death and violence is behind her now. Lana has and will soundtrack all of that for her. New songs to paper over the walls of her own mind with every year or so.
And so now something like Honeymoon is alive for me again. Because I understand at this point, that this is a conversation. And if I am not always one end of this two-way, than I am lucky enough to hopefully (and not intrusively, unwantedly) take part. Maybe some things, for some people, should stay behind glass. It might not be for me per se, and that’s ok.
7.0/10
Lust for Life (2017)
She looks the most like my mom on this cover photo. And this is the first time she’s so clearly gone for a 60s thing... specifically a 1967, Summer of Love thing, Haigh-Ashburry, San Francisco, She’s Leaving Home kind of thing. It’s all right there on the cover and in that smile, and the daisies in her hair, if not always the actual music.
So then this is the far-flung future for Lana. If her music and image and her character was always so haunted by some kind of vague 20s-through-the-50s specter of the recently Old World, then now she’s inhabiting a time that some of our parent’s might actually remember. And to make her intentions clear, that vibrato’d out surf guitar bass on opening track ‘Love’ screams Nancy Sinatra. And the white lace chiffon
Click through for the definitive guide to the crème de la crop of the greatest spy-thriller saga in all of film history!
#1. North By Northwest (1959)- A staggering achievement for every artist and performer involved. Directed by peak middle-period Hitchcock, and written by Ernest Lehmen, this production stands as a defining role for both Carey Grant and Eva Marie Saint alike. Released only 6 years after the inception of agent 007 (still a creature of spy-thriller novels at this point, another 4 years out from the silver-screen debut), Grant’s performance would leave an indelible mark on the collective unconscious and would surely go on to influence the likes of Connery’s own portrayal years later.
Case-and-point for why Grant excels here is his undeniably amorphous quality. Sure he’d proven his sheer on-screen magnetism for decades by this point, but the dynamic quality of his “character arc”--as the kids like to call it-- in this film speaks for itself. He goes effortlessly from buffoonish in the introductory and more comical part of the movie, to suave and inter-personally-entangled in the middle third, to finally making good on all the romancing and endangerment that the character is thrust into by the final frame.
Meanwhile Eva Marie Saint undergoes multiple transformations herself-- a feat pulled off by both her deft acting and the writing/directing alike. She sets a precedent for Bond fatales that isn’t fulfilled for years and years by Bond’s own franchise in that she maintains complexity-- and more importantly agency-- until the last.
Lastly, Hitchcock himself with Lehmen’s script is able to craft a narrative with visual thrust which balances humor, tension and pacing better than most of his very finest productions. The well-loved cropduster chase-scene is a masterclass in tension and directorial pyrotechnics, and all the heartbreak and salacious revelations that unfold from that moment onward seal the deal for this film as pure unmatched brilliance.
#2 Charade (1963)- A year after Connery’s debut as Bond, a lighter thriller shows a possible alternate-universe for the franchise; one in which Carey Grant maintains his stranglehold on the archetype in lieu of the mad Scotsmen himself.
Director Stanley Donen and writer Peter Stone, clearly taking some inspiration from Hitchcock’s work with Grant, tease out one of the actor's greatest performances in the process, and similarly to North By Northwest, it has equal-parts to do with Grant’s acting as it does the air-tight screenplay and the myriad twists and turns found within.
If North By Northwest starts from a hijinks-ridden tone and works its way towards spy-thriller seriousness, Charade stays madcap and light-hearted throughout its runtime, while only hinting at the tension and stakes that one would come to be accustomed to glimpsing in a proper 007 endeavor.
The fantastic chemistry between Audrey Hepburn and Grant throughout maintains an emotional center around which a whole satellite of criminal and comic figures can orbit in perfect narrative symmetry.
The suspension of clarity when it comes to the nature of Grant’s character might be the ideal pocket from which this renowned thespian operates from, keeping both the audience and Hepburn’s character guessing until the final moments of the runtime. And as the mystery unfolds, Donen is sure to center Paris itself as the immaculate stage from which all of this cinematic pleasure plays out.
#3- To Catch a Thief (1955)- This film may have traces of North By Northwest-in utero (with plenty more influence for Charade in store), but it's still a phenomenon of its own kind. Hitchcock, working from a John Michael Hayes-penned screenplay is able to catalyze a wholly different kind of thriller from what he’d go on to accomplish with Grant later, and the elusive, mysterious atmosphere would have echoes in masterworks such as Vertigo just a few years later.
While the plot-beats and the atmosphere may differ heavily from North, the strange twists and turns of Grant and Grace Kelly's characters echo that of Grant and Saint’s roles in the aforementioned film, if perhaps in inverse. Grace Kelly brilliantly-- and a bit psychotically-- somersaults from the role of a mute wallflower, to a coy would-be detective and thrill-seeker, to that of a scorned-- if confused-- romantic throughout the runtime; finally settling as a willing participant to Carey Grant’s ex-cat burglar escapades. Grant’s character is anything but the everyman that he would go on to portray in North, while Kelly’s is far more complex-- and potentially much more unlikeable-- than her character in the then newly minted classic Rear Window.
The coastal French Riviera is the setting for this reverse caper in which nothing is as it seems and everything is worth questioning. The script has aged a bit more roughly than other Hitchock masterworks, but the atmosphere-- well supplied by the natural beauty of the Riviera and the green-tint filter of Hitchcock’s nocturnal lens alike-- are a fantastic foundation on which Grant and Kelly flex their adroit acting chops. Grant-- here a still-lithe middle-aged career-criminal-- holds every card except that of Kelly’s heart, and that romantic tension alone sustains the pacing expertly.
#4- The IPCRESS File (1965)- Tracking down a blu-ray for this early spy-thriller classic is tough but, hey, Michael Caine as the thinking-man’s Bond? Sign me up!
#5 From Russia with Love (1963)- Okay, okay, I give. I’ll give you freaks what you want. A taste of legitimate MI6 realness. This is the grade-A real deal, and it may not feature the stabilized quality-control of Roger Moore’s era or the unwieldy set-pieces of the Brosnan/Craig eras (or the darkness of Dalton’s stint) but it is the follow-up to the premiere of Bond as we know it, and its influence would ripple out for over half a century and counting.
If the previous years’ Dr. No was a test-run, then Russia was proof-of-concept and more. Connery--now equipped with the toupeé he so quickly developed a need for between productions of his premiere as Bond and this--rises to the occasion and makes good on the promise of the first film and then some.
In this outing, we find a lot of ‘firsts’ for the long-lived series: the first gadgets, the first larger-than-life villains and the first-- if not long-lived in this case-- signature vehicles. While the Bentley Mark IV would soon be replaced, the other tropes start to take root. The first sequel in a decades-long series has a lot of responsibility to shoulder in terms of solidifying what aspects of the series will continue ad infinitum, after all, and From Russia largely does a fantastic job of it.
Daniela Bianchi-- an actor too Italian to not be dubbed reportedly-- does an excellent job as an early Bond-movie heroine with some depth, but is outshone largely by Kerim Bay, played by phenomenal Mexican actor Pedro Armendáriz.
Armendáriz as a British consulate in Istanbul makes a fantastic second-fiddle to Connery’s Bond and fills shoes that often aren’t filled at all-- those of a proper side-kick’s, if not mentor’s that is. His role along with the equally show-stopping villain-de-juor Donald Grant, played by an incredibly menacing Robert Shaw, are the highlights here.
Indeed, his fight-scene with Connery in a train-car towards the end is one of the unique pinnacles of the film and sets high standard for future showdowns. Elsewhere, we find many of the highs that we’ve come to associate with the series at large: rollicking adventure, suave and shady dealings, tension abound et al. And also some of the lows: indeed, towards the middle we find a belly-dancing scene and a Romani cat-fighting scene in close succession which both exemplify the detached misogyny that often factors into much of early Bond. This, on some level, must be expected from the series I suppose-- a transgression readily accepted by actual 007 films yet not found in any of the progenitors that rank higher on my own list, alas.
Following the fantastic fight-scene-- a culmination of shenanigans in Istanbul and Connery’s budding-yet-relunctant romance with Bianchi-- we have a North By Northwest homage, except with a helicopter in place of a cropduster, as well as the destruction of a sex-tape of Connery and Bianchi, and that's pretty much the movie! It’s almost a perfect Bond flick.
Runner-ups:
Goldfinger (1964)- Incredibly cast and acted villain, an extended golfing sequence and the debut of the iconic, tricked-out Aston Martin DB5 many would come to associate with the Connery-era films. Sure there’s a bit of rape, but it was the 60s! (so sorry)
[Also the original 'Casino Royale' (1967) and 'A Fish Called Wanda' (1988) almost made the list.]
The man with the golden touch, indeed. Sorry for trolling so hard and.... Bond forever~
Most fascinating, sexiest family of magnetopaths, fast-boys and witches oat. Super relevant right now. And if I got anything wrong, then its the fault of Marvel editors and their retcon meddling.
She seems cool and almost stands up to Mother-Ripley before suddenly developing a filial connection toward her. Eat yr heart out, Freud.
#4- Seven of Nine (Voyager)
She just seems cool, y'know.
#3- Data (TNG)
Of course.
#2- David (Prometheus and Alien: Covenant)
David is fantastic. Put David in more things or make a “David” movie. Prometheus and Covenant may have some issues but David/Fassbender is not one of them. Put him in more things. Let me watch him do anything. I want to watch Michael Fassbender paint a fence.
There are an awful lot of X-books on the shelves right now. They are most of my monthly haul. No joke it is at least 12 books at this point. So, in order to cope with that, I’ve organized all the books into one of four different categories, aka “booster-pack” themes. Click through if you want to jump aboard the best X-men run since Morrison before the boat pushes off for the Hellfire Gala this summer! These are the 4 categories:
-Mainline Blue/Gold-style
-Jr. Mutants Academy
-2nd-Wave Krakoa Niche (aka “the good stuff”)
-Cetera
#1. Mainline Blue/Gold-style
Mood-color/vibe: Actually 90s-style Blue/Gold and like bright primary colors (but also muddy-ass colors from X-factor).
Typical Pokemon: Scott Summers, Jean Grey, Wolverine, Betsy Braddock, Kate Pride, Beast, Black Tom, Storm, Bishop, Emma Frost, Rogue, Gambit, Jubilee, Kid Omega, Domino, a Pyro, Iceman, Avalanche. Rare drops: Apocalypse, X-23, Synch, Darwin, Kid Cable, Fantomex (in that Giant-Sized!)
These be the books for someone who wants those direct, mainline, core-members-style lineups. On the main book (adjective/word-play-less X-men) Hickman/Yu have worked wonders with their run, but it hasn’t been a stable team, instead focusing on Scott and his adventures dealing with some of the more prominent threats to Krakoa.
So it’s essentially been a revolving door of a book with Cyclops sometimes leading assaults against major problems and sometimes just being a dad to teenagers from the future, and it’s been generally great.
Meanwhile, the teams we find on the other 3 books could basically be a main X-men team if you just throw Jean/Scott/Logan onto them (except for X-force because Logan is usually on that one, actually, and Jean sort of is..)
X-force: Wolverine usually, Kid Omega, Beast, Jean (quitting?/back-up), Domino sorta, Sage, Black Tom Cassidy, Colossus once? Forge sorta. [Lot’s of backup or sometimes-members on this team but kinda centers on Beast, Omega, Wolverine and Jean or Domino]
Marauders: Kate Pride, Storm, Emma Frost, a Pyro, Iceman, Bishop
On X-force, you get a little Morrison-homage energy going on what with Beast being sus, Quentin Quire having a character arc and dating a cuckoo and then all the body-horror. This one hasn’t been amazing and the art sometimes has issues for me but it’s been a solid expansion on Krakoa-Era lore.
On Marauders, you get a book centered on Kate Pride and the Hellfire Club. It’s been aight but I’m not the biggest Kate fan. Definitely has heart and the art has been beautiful.
Excalibur started a little weird for me... I lack the references or attachment to Otherworld or Davis/Moore-era Excalibur so I don’t think I’m even really the target demo, but I will say it recently, post-X of Swords-- which it set up single-handedly basically [along w/ one ish of X-men]-- has gotten more interesting in recent months. The Betsy + Kwannon stuff was great! And Howard did great with Apocalypse before he went off to another dimension. (points off for iffy color-palettes sometimes).
#2. Jr. Mutants Academy
Mood-color/vibe: Pastel
Books: New Mutants, X-factor, Children of the Atom, Cable
Common Pokemon: Magik, Cable, Rachel Summers, Doug, Warlock, Armor, Boom Boom, Scout, Dani, Warpath, Karma, Glob, Beak, Daken, Eye-boy, North Star, Rachael, Prodigy those Children of the Atom kids, Magma, Rahne, and a lot of lil kid mutants runnin’ around in Akademos/the Wild Hunt area of Krakoa whose names I don’t know yet.
This is the junior-crew club. New Mutants would be in the Blue/Gold books practically due to being part of the first wave of post-HoX/DoX books, but its basically been 3 different books/teams over its run and along w/ Children/Cable/X-Factor, it feels like there a whole handful of books offering up junior-crew shenanigans specifically.
So New Mutants has been all over the place, starting with a lineup of OG Claremont era New Muties, then focusing on a team consisting of Glob, Armor and Boom Boom (perpetual...”young adult” I guess?), now settling on a new team under Vita Ayala with Magik and Warpath heading up a squad of young ‘uns (beautiful art on the recent stretch). Hopefully it’s settling into its self now, because I can see longevity for this new squad... maybe.
I still have to read the 2nd issue of Children of the Atom, but am intrigued by it. X-factor meanwhile seems to be focusing on queer representation with people like Prodigy, Daken, North Star and Rachel on the same group together. Polaris started out the lead of that title only to be plucked out by Duggan (or the fanbase) for the main X-team coming up. This honestly makes sense, because even though she isn’t drawn this way, shouldn’t Polaris be considerably older than someone like Rachel? Eh.
Also, in issue #4 of X-factor we had a beautiful homage to the Academy X mutants, with several cameos, so it seems like Marvel is intentionally using these junior-crew books to acknowledge all the various junior-crews, whether it be OG Claremont kids, Generation X people, the kids intro’d under Morrison and Whedon, or even the dang ‘ol Academy X ones, they seem to all be getting at least some representation in some book.
Also Cable owns. Didn’t know I’d like the Kid-Cable guy until this book and his appearances in the main title, but now it’s confirmed. Him dating Esme, Kid Omega dating Phoebe? These crazy telepaths! Anyway, I hope Duggan’s main-team book is more like Cable than Marauders, in terms of pacing and characterization, but they both have beautiful art!
New mutants: Karma, Magik, Mirage, Scout, Warlock, Warpath and Wolfsbane
X-factor: Daken, Eye-boy, Polaris (quit?), North Star, Rachael, Prodigy
common Pokemon: I mean they’re basically all rare drops
This is the good stuff! Who would have thought. And when I think about it, Way of X and S.W.O.R.D., as part of the second wave of Krakoa-era books that started with Cable, both address some of the core issues and ideas that the whole HoX/DoX mini kicked off better than-- or at least more directly-- the other books. So I guess the non X-men, first-wave Krakoa books feel “mainline” in terms of their team lineups, but in terms of content, these newer ones almost feel more relevant by design. S.W.O.R.D. focuses on the cosmic context of the mutants post-Krakoa and Way is Kurt’s first spot-light moment in the era and is expressly concerned with Kurt’s addressing of the deeper moral quandaries that a people who have conquered death will be faced with. I mean, it's expressly about religion and like, spirituality-- a very tall order, but first issue pulled it off super deftly.
Also Hellions is better than it has any business being! Read this if you want savagely dark humor and some very obscure mutants + Havok/Psylocke/Sinister. But if I had to reccomend one, it’d be a tie b/w S.W.O.R.D and Way. First issue of Way was exceptional and got right into things and Kurt’s very well-written and will surely prove a meditative lead for a book like this, whereas S.W.O.R.D is epic in scale while still have sick character moments/dialogue. Manifold had a great issue or two and is now my favorite new mutant, even in the context of a somehow-actually-good King in Black tie-in. Damn! And everything going on b/w Magneto and Fabian Cortez (who was made to argue for why mutants should be allowed to murder “flatscans”/humans to the whole Krakoan council this week whilst naked. It’s fantastic. Hell, even the Snark-War sounds...interesting? What’s happening to me.
Books included: Fallen Angels (complete 6-ish mini), All the damn Wolverine books, the uh Sword of X “guidebook” and the new Peach Momoko Demon Days books and whatever X-men Legends is.
These are titles which are either complete or don’t fit in with other things or in Demon Days or the X-men Legends’ books’ case, I think don’t even occur in-universe. And per usual of course there are multiple Wolverine books... the main one seems fine.
Anyway all-in-all, these books are doing weirdly well. Mutants as a concept shouldn't be able to be spread this thin story-telling wise, but the books don’t really feel redundant and most are filling a specific niche or purpose. I may be dropping some of the first-wave Blue/Gold style books (Marauders and X-force I'll probably just check in on from time-to-time), but S.W.O.R.D., Way, the main book under Hickman or Duggan and Hellions all have me verrrrrry satisfied. Even standard stories in the Krakoa era feel special, and that speaks to the power of Hickman’s vision. Hellfire Gala, here we come.
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