Scanned Thoughts: Uncanny X-men #9

I love comics. I love getting wasted. And I love doing them all at the same time. I’ve found that there are very few things in life that can’t be made more awesome with the proper mixture of booze and comics. It’s like peanut butter and jelly, chocolate and marshmallow, or beautiful women and thongs. Alone by themselves they are great, but it is only together when they are awesome. That’s why I love to offer the perspective of those who prefer to indulge their love of comics in a less sober mindset. What you’re about to read are the deranged thoughts that emerge from my reading of Uncanny X-men #9. So grab your peanut butter and jelly sandwich, make some smores, and hire a stripper because I’m about to mix it up in a way that only a seasoned drunk can.

In a series that already has a lot of hot blonds, the addition of Dazzler is like mixing cocaine with whiskey. It just makes something that’s already awesome even more awesome. But now Dazzler isn’t just another pretty blond wannabe pop star that tries out for American Idol and blows one of the judges to get a favorable vote. She’s a full-fledged SHIELD agent and that’s why she showed up at Fabio’s home shortly after Cyclops let him leave his team. Needless to say, his parents weren’t thrilled to find out that he was had a unique and interesting trait that would make it difficult to get a boring ass job for the rest of his life. And when Dazzler wanted to talk to him (and by talk I mean arrest and/or detain), Fabio’s dad pulled a gun on her. In the same way that’ll get your ass shot with real cops, Dazzler fucks him up by playing one of her old albums and demonstrating the physics of a flash bang. It’s destructive and messy, but fuck if she doesn’t make it look sexy as hell.

Not everything can be sexy and explosive though. Every now and then, a comic has to deal with some of the more mundane shit we see in everyday life. For the X-men, that includes training. And I guess training at the new Xavier school involves Yoga without the sexy Yoga pants. I have to say I’m very disappointed that I didn’t get to see Emma Frost in Yoga pants, but maybe that’s not a good idea when you’ve already got a boner and a fifth of vodka in you.

It’s still mundane training, but it also gives their newest mutant, David, to show off his new mutant powers that got him shot in the last issue. As we already saw, his powers involve being able to manipulate machines. So he demonstrates it by having the X-jet take off. It’s impressive and he’s a little clumsy with it, but that’s to be expected. He just became a mutant just got shot. He can be forgiven for being a little clumsy. Although I’m curious as to why nobody has asked why the fuck they even need a jet when they have another pretty blond in Illyana to teleport them everywhere. I guess it doesn’t hurt to have a backup in case she gets a bad case of demonic PMS again.

Training isn’t the only mundane aspect of this comic either. After David’s little demonstration, one of the Cuckoos, Irma/Mindee, shows up and reveals that she dyed and cut her hair. For some women, that’s the same as amputating a digit and her two sisters certainly treat it like that. I really don’t see the point of this development or why the fuck Mindee would do something like this. I guess Bendis has been getting way too many blond jokes about this book and wanted to mix it up. That or she wanted something that would allow Chris, who was flirting with her in an earlier issue, to tell them apart so he could keep flirting. Or maybe this is just another one of those cases where women do shit that men will never understand and the best we can do is get drunk enough to forget how frustrating it is.

Some of these mundane plots may not be exciting as a battle in Limbo or an attack on a sentinel factory, but I actually found this sub-plot to be refreshing. Don’t get me wrong. I love seeing Cyclops lead a team of inexperienced young mutants into battle, but you can’t forget they’re inexperienced young mutants no matter how much weed you smoke. They need to train at some point. And they need to actually do shit that is easier to relate to. I’ve fought killer unicorns while tripping on LSD, but that doesn’t help me relate to these characters all that much. It only ensures I will never ever get into horse racing.

Eventually, the mundane has to give way to more serious shit and you can’t get much more serious in the Marvel universe by being detained by SHIELD. Now I’m no lawyer for the ACLU, but I’m pretty sure it’s a dick move on the part of the authorities to just arrest some teenager who did nothing wrong without a warrant or without giving him access to a lawyer. And only did they arrest Fabio, they fucking handcuffed him to a chair while Dazzler interrogated him on the SHIELD helicarrier and not in the way you can make awesome S&M porn out of. I get that she wants to know the location of Cyclops’s base, but I think there are less douchey ways of doing it. And Fabio didn’t know the location anyways. But that never stopped Dick Cheny from ordering that a suspect be water boarded. I imagine the shit a hot blond SHIELD agent would do is a lot more painful and a lot kinkier.

Luckily for Fabio and unluckily for my penis, Cyclops and his team show up to save him. During the interrogation, Maria Hill and Agent Coulson realized that by taking Fabio with them they essentially gave the NSA their Facebook password because Cyclops’s team has Cerebro. They can track mutant signatures like Fabio. And while it’s pretty fucking pathetic they didn’t realize that until after they handcuffed the poor kid to a chair, I can’t be too shocked. They’re an overpaid government agency and even in comics, you can’t always expect competence.

But you can always expect Maria Hill to be pissed the fuck off. I think Cyclops and the rest of the team understands that and being the generous outlaws they are, they had Magik teleport Maria Hill to a tropical beach. That’s like Eagles fans pooling their money together to buy Eli Manning six Swedish supermodel prostitutes. It’s a unique kind of pwnage, but pwnage none-the-less. The rest of the SHIELD agents aren’t as lucky since Tempus just freezes them in time. The only benefit they’ll get is being able to punch out early and get overtime.

Then the team confronts Dazzler and while it could have turned into another mutant-on-mutant battle, it’s actually somewhat more mundane. Cyclops confronts Dazzler, who he hasn’t seen since she took a break from her dimension hopping in Xtreme X-men. They aren’t overly hostile, but Dazzler makes it painfully clear that she has little sympathy for him. She still treats him like a criminal and gives him shit for killing Charles Xavier. And I think it’s also a pretty safe bet that she didn’t give any shit to Tony Stark for shooting the Phoenix Force with a big gun, but I’m not drunk enough to have that debate again.

This time, the scene was too mundane and it’s not just because Dazzler let them walk away with Fabio without a struggle of any kind. She’s still bitching to Cyclops the same way every other Marvel team has been doing and this after they seemed to have an understanding during their last encounter in Xtreme X-men #7.1 (a comic you should totally read by the way). That took place after Avengers vs. X-men as well and now she’s all in with SHIELD? I think that’s just fucked up. Cyclops calls her the Uncle Tom of mutants and she calls him the Sirhan Sirhan (the guy who shot RFK). Unless you believe in shitty conspiracy theories, that’s a very poor comparison. I know Dazzler is a hot blond, but she’s smart enough to know that.

After leaving Dazzler behind without a fight or anything that would give anyone more respect for blonds, Cyclops decides to throw in one more act of pwnage. He brought David along for this little rescue mission, now going by the codename Hijack, and he intends to test the limits of his powers. And since they’re on a big ass flying aircraft carrier, those limits better be pretty fucking limited. It’s a nice way to let the new kid shine. I imagine that after getting shot by the police in the previous issue, he has little qualms about pissing off law enforcement now. Personally, I would have flown the helicarrier over Antarctica. But I’m guessing that David hasn’t been harassed by drug cops as much as I have.

Overall, it makes for a pretty shitty day for Dazzler and an awesome day for justice, civil liberties, and minorities. A part of me still feels bad for her, but it’s probably the same part that is okay with seeing the fucking New York Yankees win another World Series. She’s demoralized and defeated. Never mind that she really didn’t do jack shit to stop Cyclops from taking Fabio back. But she attempts to get past it by sharing a cup of coffee with Agent Coulson. Unfortunately, that coffee isn’t coffee and that isn’t Agent Coulson. After fucking a lot of things up in All New X-men, Mystique has done my penis another favor and taken her shenanigans to Uncanny X-men. Not only that, she drugged a hot blond that was acting like a bitch. I know she’s supposed to be the sexy bad girl, but I can’t help but salute her and for once it’s not just with my penis.

After reading this comic, I can’t help but be seriously disappointed with Alison and I never thought I would say that about a pretty blond. But I also can’t help but smile and take a bong hit at how these young mutants are developing under Cyclops’s care. They actually get to pwn SHIELD, save fellow mutants, and expose the bullshit they have to go through with the authorities. It’s all the revolution without the dirty hippie protests. And Mystique drugging Dazzler at the end was a nice bonus. It may be the only appropriate time when a pretty girl being drugged doesn’t turn into some shitty human interest story on Oprah. I give Uncanny X-men #9 a 7 out of 10. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to make a donation to the ACLU and give Bill O’Riley the finger. Nuff said!