Issue #226 was the last one I got from the era where I got them on the regular. I still don’t know the details and don’t want to know. The last Claremont era X-Men I remember getting was some bullshit where they have been brought back to life in Australia and were fighting Mad Max rejects after being killed in the Fall of the Mutants crossover or something. Let no one say that young men can’t identify with heroic young women. But #168’s focus on Kitty really struck me.
I started reading on the regular with #168. Osvaldo: I had nearly the opposite experience. X-Men #168 (April 1983), “Professor Xavier Is a Jerk!” One of the interesting aspects to our respective experiences with “Days of Future Past” is that for Eric it marks the beginning of the end of his time reading/collecting X-Men comics, while for Osvaldo the story was from before he even saw his first X-Men comic. This story is rife with Cold War tensions, and there is a sense of a lot being at stake both in the future and present aspects to the action. to stop the assassination, her friends in the future are undertaking the nearly impossible task of infiltrating the Sentinel headquarters (the former Baxter Building) to make one last ditch effort to stop Sentinel incursion to the rest of the world, which Europe and the Soviet Union will react to by nuking all of North America. While Kitty (now called Kate) is in the past, getting the X-Men to travel to Washington D.C. It is supposedly the precipitating event that led to the creation of the Sentinel program. “Days of Future Past” is the story of how the surviving X-Men in a dark future 33 years from 1980-where Sentinels rule North America and most mutants and superheroes have been killed-work to send adult Kitty Pryde’s mind back in time to inhabit her 1980 teenaged body and stop the murder of Senator Robert Kelly, Professor Charles Xavier and Moira MacTaggert at a Senate hearing about the mutant threat. However, it never made it into the 2013 schedule of posts, and instead, now that a film adaptation of this story is making it to the big screen on May 23rd, it seemed like a good time to re-read the original issues and examine the story that started it all. Originally, the plan was to post something about “Days of Future Past” last year, in 2013-the year that the two-issue story depicts as a dark era in which giant robot Sentinels have taken over North America in their unending mission to destroy and/or contain the super-powered mutant threat, controlling every aspect of human life in order to do so and having killed off the vast majority of superheroes, mutant or not, who might try to stop them. This part however is a bit of a departure from the usual themes explored on this blog and more about our own experience with Uncanny X-Men, the “Days of Future Past” story arc more specifically, and our thoughts about the influence of “Days of Future Past” on the Marvel Comics that followed it.
#DAYS OF FUTURE PAST SERIES#
The second part will be diving into some of the political connotations of the dark future the story depicts, both in terms of the anxieties of the late 1970s/early 1980s when the series was published, and in regards to the current moment that comic’s dark future was supposed to represent.
They are both in a hybrid essay/dialogue format co-written and conceptualized by me and my long-time friend and erstwhile historian, Eric G. This is Part One of a two-part series of posts on the classic X-Men comics arc, “Days of Future Past,” which originally appeared in X-Men issues #141 and #142.
0 kommentar(er)
