I heard the news early yesterday morning that Hayden Panettiere had passed away. It was shocking news. Her demons were well covered, but still, she was a bright light of an actor, gone too soon.
Like many comics nerds, I was a huge fan of Heroes when it premiered in the fall of 2006. Marvel and particularly the X-Men were clearly inspiration for the show. Watching that first season was an almost magical experience, the story unfolding in an ever-widening circle of characters and conspiracies, everyone racing to save the world from potential destruction. It was a classic super hero tale on network TV, with a classic tagline.
The timing on this one! I mentioned pacing issues in my review of Miles Morales: Spider-Man #1, and then this morning, I’m catching up on episodes of Off Panel when this related gem of writerly wisdom from Kelly Sue DeConnick suddenly goes by.
It's “not all the cast,” as Kevin Feige phrased it Friday night, but we now have our X-Men. At least some of them. What does this glimpse into the X-Men say about what we’re building toward in the MCU? There are some obvious take aways.
A younger, good looking cast
Clearly, we’re getting a younger version of the X-Men in the MCU. This is a good looking cast, too. Hmmmmm. What drama unfolds when you have a bunch of good looking, younger X-Men?
Love triangles between Scott, Jean, and Emma? Maybe.
Late teen/early 20s angst as characters come into their own? Almost certainly.
Overlap with X-Men ’97 characters
Anyone else notice the overlap between this cast and the roster for X-Men ’97? For now, we have a near 1 for 1 match. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it as we say here in the south. It seems clear that Marvel is casting fan favorite characters.
There are some omissions. No Magneto yet. No Wolverine. No Gambit. Are these intentional misses or just gaps in the casting so far? When we see the full cast announced, we’ll get a better sense of how close to the animated series this cast will stick.
Anchored by Sadie Sink
The casting of Sadie Sink as Jean Grey is really interesting to me. She’s the most well-known actor here. The rest are relatively unknowns. It doesn’t seem a stretch to think of Sadie Sink’s Jean Grey as the anchor of the film.
She’s the heavy weight in the list of X-Men actors, and Spider-Man: Brand New Day acts as on-ramp to this film. Does that mean we’ll get a Jean Grey centered film? I don’t know if I would go that far just yet, but clearly, Sink is the star. Jean Grey has all our attention.
It’s also interesting to me that Claremont’s 80s run on X-Men comics is inspiration for this film, and Sink has that 80s connection with Stranger Things. The X-Men film has to be set in our modern day, given current timelines and Jean Grey’s role in Spider-Man: Brand New Day. But still, there’s an 80s connection there I find interesting.
Not sure what, if anything, we should make of that just yet.
A Sinister Villain
Alongside Sink's Jean Grey we're getting Adam Driver as Mr. Sinister. Sink might be the big name among the X-Men actors, but Driver is a huge casting get and will loom large as the film's villain. I take both the casting of Driver and the choice of Mr. Sinister to mean this film will be dealing with themes like fascism and genocide.
Mr. Sinister is the mutant equivalent of a mad Nazi scientist. It's not hard to see the cultural relevance and themes at play here.
Other things I’m curious about
This will be our first American Professor X. That’s new. I’m curious to see how that plays onscreen and in the story.
We also don’t have much in the way of international characters here except for Storm. I wouldn’t expect the Sh’iar or space-faring teams either, given all the talk about a more grounded X-Men film.
All of this leaves me curious about the range of this story.
5.5.28 — Coming Soon
There’s a lot of directions this film could go, but we do have some sense of its core now. It’s a younger, character-driven version of the X-Men with a bit of a soap opera feel. It’s likely anchored on Sadie Sink’s Jean Grey, with a heavy-weight villain in Adam Driver’s Mr. Sinister. It’s trying for new ground in the MCU, while also focusing on the most popular X-Men characters.
After Disney bought Fox, it seemed like we would never get an X-Men film. Now we have a cast and a release date. I expect things to move quickly from here, each of us living with the feels of this X-Men film coming soon.
I finished off Miles Morales: Spider-Man #1 from my weekly comics haul. Overall, it’s a good but not great comic. I am still interested to see where the series goes from here.
First up, the art is gorgeous. There are so many great looking pages and panels throughout. Action and characters alike are so well drawn.
The characters themselves might be the best part of the story. Miles feels like a teenager. He's got his friend group, his superhero family, and his real family. I love how the issue is grounded in Miles's return to Brooklyn as his home base, too.
The story does have some pacing issues for a single-issue comic, though.
Take this exchange between Miles and new student—and potential love interest—Valentina. There's this weird interaction over eye color that doesn't play well in a comic. This might have worked better in a film. For a comic, it had me wanting to reach for my phone to better understand whatever this eye condition is.
It's not just this example alone. The story also ends oddly coming out of a flashback scene, which is again beautifully rendered. I think this book was just trying to do too much in its 25 pages of story.
Summary
There is a lot of promise here. The art sings. That cast of characters is chef’s kiss! I will stick with the series to see if the pacing improves over the next couple issues. It's a good start, and I could see this one growing on me with time.
I've been wondering if Marvel's Wolverine game would be open world or not. I couldn't imagine how that would turn out. Turns out that was a correct assumption.
"We're telling a Logan story," senior project director Jess Reiner-Reed says when I ask about the decision to ditch the open world. "He's so different from Spider-Man in so many different ways. One of the ways is that Logan is not somebody who stays in the same spot for a while. He's not somebody who has a friendly neighborhood. He's not settling down in one location. He's a loner guy in a lot of ways."
WandaVision is a beautiful portrait of how one hero deals with her grief. For me, it's the best of the current MCU era. Her imagination and power birthed an entire family. Let that sink in! Then came Agatha All Along and the teenage version of Wanda and Vision’s son, Billy. Now we’ll be getting Vision’s journey as a father and an introduction to the teenage Tommy.
This is, indeed, a groundbreaking trilogy. I’m literally counting the days until the story’s conclusion.
I expect this series to be the same weird mix of technology and magic, but this time, focused on Vision’s recovery of his memory and coming to terms with fatherhood. Vision’s father Ultron will be present, played in the flesh by James Spader. Fatherhood is complicated in the MCU.
I'm sure the series will play with the tensions and the weirdness of this family experiment. Are we building toward a lasting family here? I think so. The series releases an episode a week until mid December, leading right up to Avengers: Doomsday.
Will we see Wanda and Vision, and maybe their kids, in the biggest MCU film of the year? Man, I hope so. But until then, I'll count the days until VisionQuest appears.
I stayed up as late as I could last night, following along with New Rockstars live stream of Disney’s showcase from D23. Once we hit the X-Men and midnight EDT, I just couldn’t stay up, especially given I had a mini family reunion the next day.
Here’s the video if you want to see the NR reaction, which was live as it happened last night.
In the cold light of morning, I’ve been searching online for a recap on everything I missed, especially with the Star Wars stuff airing after Marvel. I have two recaps to recommend.
D23: The Ultimate Disney Fan Event brought a lot of surprises and first looks of what the entertainment company is preparing in the following months and years.
Taking place over three days in Anaheim, California, Disney kicked off the weekend with a showcase that teased what is to come and updates from Avengers: Doomsday, the Star Wars franchise, the new X-Men cast, a teaser for the new season of Percy Jackson and the Olympians as well as first looks at the live-action Tangled adaptation, Coco 2, Oswald and The Bluey Movie, among many others.
If you want just the Marvel and Star Wars stuff (with a little extra thrown in) you really can’t beat the Verge’s Disney D23 2026 round up from Richard Lawler.
Opening page of the Verge’s D23 announcements recap
Apparently, we can expect Christopher Abbottto be announced as the Marvel Cinematic Universe's Charles Xavier.
Last week, a rumor circulated online that Marvel had already cast someone to play Professor X, and the actor had "previously appeared in a Marvel project." Abbott, 40, played The Foreigner in Sony Pictures' Kraven the Hunter. His other credits include Wolfman, Poor Things, Bring Them Down, and Catch-22.
The PlayStation blog has Hands-on report: Marvel’s Wolverine, a deep dive on the story, characters, and game play. Complete with some great in-game pictures!
Our two-hour session kicked off with the game’s opening mission in the wilds of Telambang, where Wolverine has reunited with Team X to carry out a critical mission infiltrating the facility of anti-mutant industrialist Bolivar Trask. After slicing our way to a daring rescue, we jumped ahead in the game to a bombastic boss fight and a taste of Madripoor’s Lowtown. Between brutal barrages, stealthy scouting, and a range of rage-filled takedowns, we got to cut to the bone of the game’s story, flesh out Wolverine’s allies and foes, and uncover a piece of his buried past.
Also, this bit caught my eye, emphasis mine:
Their mission takes them from the hidden facility of billionaire Bolivar Trask to the seedy backstreets of Madripoor, presenting Wolverine with the grim reality of what mutants in this world are facing. With mutants largely unknown by society, Trask has been spending his billions abducting, studying, and cruelly disposing of mutants with little regard for his victims in a quest to maintain human superiority.
A thing Insomniac’s Spider-Man games were able to do is remain a distinct universe while making nods to things MCU fans would recognize and appreciate. I wonder if this is a sign on how mutants in the MCU will be treated—always here, but largely unknown? It won’t be long now until we find out.
This September, the X-Virus threatens to mutate all of mankind in DNX, the five-issue event series by Jed MacKay and Federico Vicentini. But the X-Men aren’t alone in dealing with this seismic threat, joining forces with the Fantastic Four to try stop the clandestine group known as 3K from forcibly transforming all of humanity into mutants.
I like big Marvel X events like “Age of Revelation,” but it’s also nice to have these smaller, more self-contained events. I keep forgetting this is a Fantastic Four crossover event, too.
