What Is The Appeal?

I tell you, to this day I can't figure out why exactly I was excited by Joe Casey's Uncanny X-Men. I mean, I know why I had zero interest in Morrison's X-Men. It was a team with Emma Frost, Scott Summers, and Jean Grey, one of whom shouldn't be a hero, and the other two I'm sick to death of. But Casey's team, for some odd reason, worked.

Archangel: I've haven't really liked him since he went back to the birdy wings. I'm sorry, but those metal wings were frickin' awesome. And he was periodically psychotic, and throwing blades out of the wings, cool! Without them, I thought he'd be kind of lame. But he took over, became the leader. He was kind of bossy, but that was made sense, most of the other people on this team are stubborn, and not big on following commands, so you need someone to rein them in.

Iceman: He became the Guy Gardner of the team, the character I could hate without reservation (though I've never read anything with Gardner in it long enough to hate him). He was a smug, arrogant jerk, who gave the newbie on the team a bunch crap, and even talked crap towards his friends. Still, he was always there in a fight, even when Black Tom impales him with a tree branch (though that's from the Adequate Chuck Austen period, before he started to suck).

Wolverine: On certain occasions, I need a character that likes to maim other sentient beings. Plus, he likes to give whoever is running the team a lot of static. Down with authority! Kalinara's glaring at me right now, while holding a Cyclops poster.

Nightcrawler: I remember when Bendis started New Avengers, he said Spider-Man and Wolverine were one of the great unintentional comedy teams in comics. I wouldn't know, they haven't spent more than five pages together in the entire book so far! Besides, Nightcrawler and Wolverine form a great 'buddy cop' tandem. "Come on Logan, I'm tired of having to teleport you away from the cops for killing people whenever we go out drinking." Come on Elf, lighten up a little." Hmm, I don't think I've quite captured the essence. Whatever. Teleporting is cool. So is speaking German. Plus, he tries to be funny without being good at it. And while not a religious person myself, I always found Kurt's faith to be kind of an interesting facet, and while I didn't think he would really try to enter the clergy - he's too much of a swashbuckler to take a vow of celibacy, like Hal Jordan, except not eternally concussed - I thought it made things kind of interesting until Horrible Chuck Austen decided Kurt was being mentally manipulated the whole time. Cripes.

Chamber: I knew nothing about him. Still don't know much other than he's British, telepathic, ran with Generation X, and can fire energy blasts. I'll be straightforward: I HATE telepaths. For some reason, the whole idea of people being able to get in someone's head bothers me. Actually I know the reason, I wouldn't want people being able to get inside my mind, how rude. And I wouldn't believe them if they said they would never do that to me. But one whose ability is basically just developed to the point of communication, like Chamber's, plus he has a different cool power, plus he didn't want to join the team initially, and never seemed totally onboard with it, though that may be because he was gone so frequently.

Stacy X: Some people hate her. I'm not one of them. Before Austen turned her into Super-Slut, I thought she was progressing nicely, maybe making a few friends, or at least people who trusted her (Logan, Chamber, Nightcrawler). Then Horrible Chuck Austen. . . well, I've said it all before. People didn't like a character who's an 'escort'? Fine, it's called "character development". Watch the character "develop" over time into someone who maybe isn't quite as rude, but still independent, and has friends, and isn't hitting on every person in the Mansion (which was Austen's fault, God I HATE CHUCK AUSTEN!).

The thing I notice is the symmetry. You have two old-school X-Men (Archangel, Iceman), two 2nd-generationers (Wolverine, Nightcrawler), and two relative newbies (Chamber, Stacy).

I think what made the team work was a bunch of them didn't like each other. Drake hated Stacy. Stacy hated Drake. Archangel had never liked Logan. Logan has never gotten along with a person who called themselves his "leader". Chamber really wished he could still be with his pop star girlfriend. Kurt's supposed to be the leader, but he didn't really want the responsibility. If you throw in the Juggernaut or Northstar as the 7th member (all good teams just seem to have seven members, don't they?), that's a team full of abrasive personalities. But they come from enough walks of life, with enough different powers, that they could have been in any number of different stories.

Sadly, Casey didn't last. Nothing good ever does. But, we'll always have those ten issues or so.

The Team Role

This stems from a conversation Len and I have had the last couple of Fridays. Comics did a lot of things wrong in the '90s by most accounts. On the Marvel side, there were entirely too many books and crossovers with "X" or "Maximum" in the title. But one thing Len and I agreed was that Marvel did the right thing with their teams, mainly keep them separate entities. Think about it, for those who read them, what is the difference between Uncanny X-Men and X-Men right now? Multiple characters seem to appear in both books, and is there really anything different about what they're doing?

When X-Men originally started, it was set up as different from Uncanny. Look at the rosters:

Uncanny - Jean Grey, Storm, Colossus, Archangel, Iceman, Bishop
X-Men - Cyclops, Beast, Wolverine, Psylocke, Rouge, Gambit, Jubilee (sometimes)

Uncanny seemed to deal with more social and political aspects. There was more talking, more diplomacy, and then at the end of the story, a BIG explosion. By contrast, X-Men seemed to take the style of "Diplomacy? Screw that! We've got Wolverine and Jim Lee art! Let's have battles and curvy women!" Or as Len put, 'X-Men was lots of Sentinels getting destroyed constantly.'

You had X-Factor, the government team, going where the U.S. told them to, including to a Middle Eastern country to defend a regime the government apparently supported from the Hulk and the Pantheon. Granted that was in Incredible Hulk, but Peter David was writing both books, so it could have just as easily taken place in X-Factor.

Meanwhile, X-Force is the hardcore team that deals with Cable's crap. They find the Mutant Liberation Front, they stomp on it. If it's in Antarctica, fine, go there, shoot some people, blow stuff up. If it's in the Statue of Liberty, or Prague, fine there too. In fact, they would seem to be the kind of threat X-Factor would be called in on.

Then you've still got the Avengers (for your everyday Earth-threatening problems), and the Fantastic Four (I think Mark Waid had the best idea, that they're explorers, with the others coming along to help Reed. Plus fighting the Skrulls). Actually, I liked that each major team sort of had their own primary alien problem. Avengers had the Kree, FF had the Skrulls, and the X-Men have the Shi'ar. The New Warriors dealt with typically smaller stuff, closer to street level, while serving as a learning opportunity for what is supposed to be the next generation of heroes (I know, Teen Titans rip-off). I mean, the differences aren't huge, but they are there, so each team can sort of fill a niche.

Anyway, that still exists to some extent, though not so much with the X-books, though X-Factor may be an exception to that, but in theory New Avengers and Fantastic Four still play different roles within the Marvel U.

Anyway, this brings me to a question for my DC-oriented readers: How would you define the roles of the teams in DC right now? JLA (if they still existed. It's down to what Black Canary, Dawn, and Green Arrow)? JSA? Teen Titans? Outsiders? Where the Freedom Fighters turned into cannon fodder because their team showed no recognizable purpose? Am I missing teams? What do you think?