Sunday, July 15, 2012
Of Wolf and God
This is, and remains primarily, a superhero comics related blog, but that's not to say I can't write about other topics here. Especially if they relate to the things that interest me about about superheroes, in comics or otherwise. With that in mind this post has nothing to do with X-People, Bat people or Spider-people.It has to do with a man, a Wolf Man.
Friday, July 13, 2012
No One Feels Bad About Decapitating A Robot
The next X-villains are ones that almost everybody of my generation is familiar with. In the animated X-Men series of the early nineties, they were the antagonists of the two part series premiere. I give you the elite robotic mutant hunting force of the world, the Sentinels.
Certain aspects of the sentinels as a concept make them ideal for villains in an early nineties Saturday morning cartoon. They have relatively little individual personality (most of the time) which allows more space to establish the individual X-Men and women's personalities, they let you introduce the idea of non-powered humans hating and fearing mutants in a way that has substantial metaphorical weight, and ,best of all, they are robots. That means you can have Wolverine do whatever you want to them and it's a-okay. Decapitations and eviscerations aplenty are perfectly acceptable, as long as it's happening to a big dumb robot. The title of this debut episode is Night of the Sentinels, a riff on Remero's classic debut that launched a thousand apocalypses. Sentinels tend to be used like the zombie as a creature our heroes can abuse almost anyway they like without moral reservation. Our heroes can't murder the human scientists and politicians and average people on the street who react poorly to their fear of being rendered obsolete by quirks of genetics, but they can abuse the robotic manifestations of that hate and fear all they like. It's a role they play well, but as with the other X-folks I've looked at here, I wonder if the narrow role of a robotic anti-mutant gestapo is really the best that can be done with these guys.
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| Art by Buster Moody |
Certain aspects of the sentinels as a concept make them ideal for villains in an early nineties Saturday morning cartoon. They have relatively little individual personality (most of the time) which allows more space to establish the individual X-Men and women's personalities, they let you introduce the idea of non-powered humans hating and fearing mutants in a way that has substantial metaphorical weight, and ,best of all, they are robots. That means you can have Wolverine do whatever you want to them and it's a-okay. Decapitations and eviscerations aplenty are perfectly acceptable, as long as it's happening to a big dumb robot. The title of this debut episode is Night of the Sentinels, a riff on Remero's classic debut that launched a thousand apocalypses. Sentinels tend to be used like the zombie as a creature our heroes can abuse almost anyway they like without moral reservation. Our heroes can't murder the human scientists and politicians and average people on the street who react poorly to their fear of being rendered obsolete by quirks of genetics, but they can abuse the robotic manifestations of that hate and fear all they like. It's a role they play well, but as with the other X-folks I've looked at here, I wonder if the narrow role of a robotic anti-mutant gestapo is really the best that can be done with these guys.
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