Day #30: Your Favourite Marvel Event - X-Men: Messiah Complex
The final day, and I have to say, this one was easy as well: Messiah Complex is one of my favourite comic book stories, and out of the big event stories, involving several titles over many months, it’s my favourite.
One of the things that I like about Messiah Complex is just how high the stakes feel from the very first issue. By this point, it’s been a few years since the Scarlet Witch screwed over mutantkind on M-Day, and they’re getting desperate. And then the baby (who we now know as Hope) is born, fucking up Cerebro/Cerebra, and setting the X-Men off on an adventure to secure her safety. Now, it has to be said that the stakes are essentially the same in the X-Events since, particularly Messiah War and Second Coming, but there are a few reasons that Messiah Complex is better than those were. Firstly, there’s a constant sense of action. Here you have several teams of mutants, doing several different things, so the story never really lets up. In Second Coming, and Messiah War, I never really felt that was the case. Particularly in Second Coming, where you had several issues where nothing really went on. Following on directly from that, I never felt as if there was a weak chapter of Messiah War like in Second Coming, and it also seems to flow better, possibly because despite the different writing styles, there’s a more spread out focus.
Finally, I feel like Messiah Complex actually did establish something, and it genuinely changed things: Cable had to go on the run from Bishop, the Professor was dead, and the X-Men were disbanded after this storyline, as well as several other changes including something about Rogue’s powers. A lot of the time when I read these events, I feel that whilst they may affect something, a lot of the time they’re really not as big a story as all the hype would have you believe, and by the end of it there’s really not all that much that’s happened. I mean, how much actually went on in Second Coming?
I totally can’t believe I actually managed to remember to do this every day for a month. I’m actually quite proud of myself. Thanks for reading these, I know they’ve been essentially incoherent ramblings, but I hope at least some people have enjoyed reading as much as I’ve enjoyed writing them!
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It turns out that Bishop was always a bit of an asshole, even before he spent his days taking potshots at the X-Men.
Who’d have known.
This is a semi-carefully curated selection of things I love, including the X-Men, pop music, Hawkeye, food, Cougar Town, bearded men, bourbon, drag queens, Archer, animals who think they're people, Happy Endings, Wonder Woman, and anything that can make me smile. All of the views contained in this blog are my own, and do not necessarily reflect those of the BBC.
