Wolverine and the X-men #37 PREVIEW - Bad Girls Kiss Better

I’m convinced that evolution was just fucking with every man in history when it made bad girls, the kind are as likely to fuck a man as they are to mutilate his rotting corpse, so damn sexy. I don’t deny that I have a dangerous attraction to women of certain moral shortcomings. Men look at these bad girls the way kids look at sugary candy. It looks so good, but in certain quantities it can be very unhealthy. Robin Williams once said that divorce was Latin for “to rip a man’s wallet through his genitals” and I think bad girls understand this on some levels.

But what’s almost as alluring as a sexy bad girl is a good girl who just became bad. For many years, Jean Grey was one of Marvel’s good girls who only occasionally entertained doing some incredibly immoral things with Wolverine. Sure, she may go batshit crazy when she gets drunk on the Phoenix Force, but even the nicest, sweetest girls can go batshit with the proper application of alcohol, hormones, and peer pressure. My old high school proved that on a daily basis. Jean Grey seemed to beat the odds and managed to stay relatively sweet despite the best efforts of the Phoenix Force. Then Xorna came along.

Recent issues of Battle of the Atom have revealed the phony future X-men to be just like those good girls who go bad, but in a much less sexy sort of way. And Xorna, who happens to be O5 Jean Grey who never went back to the past, somehow managed to go from that overwhelmed yet lovable teenage girl to a misguided, manipulative bitch. Yet even though she has to wear that butt-ugly Xorn costume to control her powers, she’s still sexy and now she has the bad girl thing going for her. My heart and my penis are officially in conflict, but both seem to agree that it’s still pretty damn awesome.

So far, Xorna has dropped only a few minor hints as to what turned her from the X-men’s golden girl into a manipulative bitch. Whatever it was, it was so horrific that when O5 Jean Grey read her mind she immediately decided to stop running and agreed to go back to the past. It was never shown what she saw. For all we know, she could have seen Juggernaut getting a sex change. It’s all so fucking ambiguous and that is part of why Battle of the Atom has been so infuriating at times. But with only two issues left, the blanks have to be filled at some point. And a very telling preview from Comic Book Resources offers some hope that my penis and my heart will somehow make peace.

CBR: Wolverine and the X-men #37 PREVIEW
In addition, it finally allows Cyclops and Jean Grey to have a conversation that lasts longer than a few panels for once. I know that may seem petty on my part, but it’s the X-men’s 50^th anniversary for fuck’s sake. Shouldn’t two of the oldest and most iconic X-men have a conversation that involves more than awkward teenage moments like in X-men #5?

I agree with Cyclops. Bad girls are better kissers. That’s how they lure men in. They understand that the penis has authority over the brain in some instances. But beyond the effects on my penis, this preview offers a few clues as to what fucked O5 Jean Grey enough to make her into Xorna.

It seems to tie into some of O5 Jean’s recent efforts to avoid being with Cyclops. She claims she’s not in love with him, yet her panties get wet when she watches him take his shirt off. Again, see X-men #5. By pushing him away, this may have caused something very bad to happen to Cyclops in the future. This whole shit storm started with him nearly dying at the hands of a Sentinel. If in the future he dies by some other means, it could not only fuck Jean up on an emotional level. It could fuck up her powers to the point where she has to use that creepy yet oddly sexy Xorna suit. She’s had a lot of “Oh Scott,” moments in Battle of the Atom thus far. In the same way not having Jean Grey around makes Cyclops more prone to being a douche-bag, not having Cyclops around may make Jean Grey more prone to being a bitch.

This still doesn’t address the larger issue about the so-called paradox that was revealed in Uncanny X-men #13. Whatever Jean’s reasons were for becoming Xorna, they won’t mean dick if all it does is fuck the space time continuum in a way that allows Marvel to fuck with the O5 even more. In the same way offering free beer at a race track is a bad combination, detaching the O5 from the past completely would allow Marvel to write them the same way a drunk drives a dump truck. Very little good can come of it. I’m still holding out hope that Marvel won’t make the time displaced X-men into glorified clones. But in the same way hope doesn’t prevent a hangover after a weekend in Las Vegas, it won’t prevent Marvel from giving the finger to the 50 years of continuity that they’re supposed to be celebrating. Nuff said!