Shatterstar in X-Factor

[crabby_lioness]

This is for comic book fans and John Barrowman fans.  Last year Marvel revived a superhero who hadn't been seen in a decade with a new look.  (Which was long overdue, as he'd been a teenager the last time anyone saw him.)  It wasn't long before I and other fans began noticing that as part of his new look he had John Barrowman's onstage body language.  We heard that the writer, Peter David, spoke to JB at a con before bringing Shatterstar back. Later the writer said in an interview that he was using Captain Jack's personality as a template.

The superhero, Shatterstar, had been part of an implied homosexual relationship in the 90s.  At that time Marvel's policy was to lay a lot of groundwork before "outing" a gay character so that no one could claim the character was "just a token gay stereotype", but it also meant that if the title changed writers before the "outing" and the new writer didn't want to  write gays some characters got stuck in the closet for years.  This is what happened to Shatterstar and his boyfriend Rictor. Peter David immediately brought Shatterstar out with an on-panel kiss with his boyfriend.

This called for a picspam!  And a John Barrowman vidspam, which I posted earlier.

BACKGROUND

There's two things you need to understand about Marvel Comics before we get started.

1) Comics are for boys.

2) Boys hate soap operas.

THEREFORE any resemblance you see between the story I'm about to tell and a soap opera is strictly in your head, I don't know where you people get such crazy ideas. ;)

Let's meet our cast, shall we?

First we have Julio Esteban Richter (code name "Rictor" -- spelling is not his strong suit). Born into a family of Mexican gun-runners, "Ric" saw his mutation as his ticket out of a life of crime in the ghetto. He had the ability to generate earthquakes and to feel in touch with the earth itself.





Then there's Shatterstar. A genetically-engineered slave from another dimension, he was bred for the short, violent life of a gladiator to entertain the jaded masses back home. He escaped to Earth and was adopted by that haven for super-powered misfit teens, Xavier's Academy. He's highly agile, moderately super-strong, and a skilled warrior. (The inset pics are of him as a teenager with atrocious fashion sense and an even worse artist. The 90s -- what were peoplel thinking?)





But 'Star isn't the only escaped gladiator-slave Xavier's Academy has taken in. Years before another slave named Longshot made it to Earth and joined the X-men. Genetic testing revealed that Longshot is probably 'Star's sperm-daddy, and there appear to be some human genes in his makeup as well, but all attempts to pin down his ancestry any further have been inconclusive. As for the two former slaves, this news doesn't seem to have effected them at all yet. Both gladiators arrived on Earth completely clueless about any relationship that did not take place in the combat arena and required extensive socialization.





As student-superheroes at Xavier's academy, Ric and 'Star bonded over their love of TV and their mutual social cluelessness. Ric began to "teach" 'Star about American culture, in the manner of the one-eyed man leading the blind. Sometime after that they began a romantic relationship which was heavily subtexted although they didn't discuss it in public. But Ric has a bad habit of not talking about his feelings and walking away when he's not happy. He's walked out on 'Star twice. Both times 'Star fell to pieces, the second time he even went back to his homeworld.  There's a website devoted to their early relationship if you want to subject yourself to the awful 90s artwork.

Now on to the present and X-Factor.  (This has a fair amount of Ric before 'Star shows up because he's been in the book four years longer, but it's worth the wait.)

X-Factor #1 begins with Ric about to jump off a roof and kill himself. He and over 90% of the world's mutants lost their powers in an unexplained (to the public) event called the Decimation, and he feels like his life is over.





Former schoolmate Jamie Madrox (code name "the Mutliple Man") climbs up and offers him a job instead. Jamie used to run an all-mutant government team; but he quit, took his people with him, and formed a private detective agency.





Jamie has the power to create duplicates of himself ("dupes") on impact. Recently Jamie's dupes have begun to manifest repressed aspects of his personality, giving him an unusual form of Mutiple Personality Disorder.





Ric is a good detective, but he's too depressed to notice that fact. He's always sad and lonely and oh so pretty, which is noticed by Pietro





and Jamie





although the latter has yet to come out of the closet even to himself.





Pietro has been a mainstay of various government superhero teams for years, including Jamie's old team. Publicly he's considered to be a great hero. Privately he's considered to be unstable. Some people think he's less trustworthy than his father, which is saying something since his father is one of the two biggest supervillains on Earth. Pietro is feeling bad about having accidently caused the Decimation by playing head games with his immensely powerful and seriously mentally unstable sister. (Remember, this is not a soap opera.)





However, he's not feeling bad enough to actually admit this fact in public, because doing so would probably get him killed by millions of irate ex-mutants.









Unfortunately Pietro's power-restoration scheme goes about as well as all his other schemes (i.e. utter disaster), leaving Ric more depressed than ever. He elicits pity sex from his childhood sweetheart...





...who then runs out on him, leaving Ric more depressed. (Remember, this is not a soap opera.)

Still, Ric is a good investigator, if a trifle undiplomatic.





He's always willing to help the authorities.





Ric's team-mate Guido tries to get Ric to open while they're looking for Jamie, who went MIA after his unstable genes caused the death of his and his girlfriend Terry's infant son.









They don't find Jamie, instead they find Shatterstar, albeit a possessed and homicidal Shatterstar taken over by one of the bad guys who Jamie, unbeknownst to his team, has been hijacked into the future to fight (long story).





Even in the middle of a battle, Ric can't help but admire his former lover.













Guido, who hasn't met Shatterstar, is confused by Ric's protectiveness towards their attacker.





His confusion grows after Shatterstar suddenly collapses.









Poor Guido feels like he fell down the proverbial rabbit hole.

































Back home, they find out that their team is in trouble and Ric finds out that Star is a lot less anti-social than he used to be.





And Star finds the guy who possessed him.





The bad guy gets ganged up on, Jamie the lost time traveler is somehow (nobody's sure how just yet) returned to the present, and our couple enjoy a nice on-cover cuddle.





Back in New York, Shatterstar settles into the life of a detective's muscle, which involves waiting around for cases to show up





and escorting clients, in this case Franklin and Valeria Richards, the children of the Fantastic Four's Reed and Sue Richards. Their mother is missing and their father is uncharacteristically unconcerned. He's acting weird and abrasive, or in the case of Reed Richards, even more weird and abrasive than usual.









It also means distracting the suspects while the detectives snoop, which leads to Guido and Shatterstar tag-teaming the Thing.






















But Guido isn't used to having another male muscle around, especially not one who's so skillful. (Although he doesn't have a problem with the team's female muscle.)





Back at the office, Longshot, who also recently joined the team, takes a psychic reading off a clue which points them to Latveria, the home of the Fantastic Four's nemesis, Doctor Doom. Shatterstar offers to be the village bicycle.









But the Thing shows up looking for a rematch.





Thanks to Ben's interference, Guido gets left behind, and Ben and Monet St. Croix tumble through the teleport gate. Monet, the team's female muscle, is basically a black, telepathic Supergirl with an ATTITUDE. She's supposed to be working on a seperate case. She ain't happy about being dragged along; and when Monet ain't happy, ain't nobody happy.









The team's detectives find and rescue the real Reed Richards, and discover that the doppleganger is an alternate-universe Reed possessed by an alternate-universe Doom. (Things like this happen to the Fantastic Four about every other Tuesday.)









It may be inadvisable but it sure is fun,









and not just for the good guys.





Our heroes storm the castle and find





their youngest, strangest, and deadliest team-mate Layla Millar, lost time-traveling into the future almost a year ago, now at least five years older.





Layla's abilities include a limited knowledge of the future. (The colorist messed up here and gave Layla Monet's darker coloring.)





Layla distracts 'Star





just as faux-Reed was trying to come through the portal. It closes and decapitates him, while stranding 'Star and Layla in Latveria long enough for Doom to finish her portrait.





After they return, our crew head over to San Francisco Bay for the Big Mutant Reunion. It's just like your family or class reunion, only with colorful costumes, lost loves, snarky Evil Overlords, bickering couples, chldren playng ball on the lawn, angry giants, and not enough alcohol. Then again, maybe it is just like your reunion.... Jamie drinks beer and argues politics, Guido roughhouses with the kids, Monet and her old girlfriends hook Longshot up with his ex-wife, and Ric and 'Star meet people. (Remember, this is not a soap opera.)
















And that's it so far, although the writer has mentioned that Ric and 'Star get a lot of play this year dealing with their relationship going public, figuring out the rules they want for that relationship, the hinted-at return of an old flame, and such day-to-day problems as a plot to kill all the world's mutants and an attempt to use Ric to revive Pietro's mutant power-restoration scheme. The two things the writer promised on http://www.afterelton.com won't happen are Ric or 'Star dying or breaking up. Those are the cheap, easy options which he refuses to take (mainly because everyone expects him to and he refuses to be predictable). The stories with Shatterstar in them have been collected in X-Factor: Time and a Half, X-Factor: Overtime, and X- Factor: The Invisible Woman Has Vanished. The first two volumes are the climax of a four-year story arc involving time travel, mind control, cross-overs, and double crosses; they can get a bit convoluted. The third volume was designed as a starting point for new readers; no previous knowledge is necessary.

Above all, remember THIS IS NOT A SOAP OPERA.

PS: Yesterday JB tweated that he's working with Stan Lee on something for Marvel. Wonder what that's about?

Part 2

Comments

[qara-isuke.livejournal.com]

This is awesome.

And no, not a Soap Opera AT ALL.

[crabby-lioness.livejournal.com]

This is awesome.

Thank you.

And no, not a Soap Opera AT ALL.

LOL That got started on a Doctor Who forum. Some guys were saying, "But guys don't like soap operas!" and I was like, "Dude, have you EVER read a Marvel comic book in your entire life? They've made a fortune writing soap operas for boys!"

[eliyes.livejournal.com]

Um. Couple things:

First we have Julio Esteban Richter (code name "Rictor" -- spelling is not his strong suit).

He was given that name by Cameron Hodge and did not choose to change it, probably because he didn't want his family to find him. Also, Rictor is a real first name. It was years before they decided to dub him Julio Richter, so really, don't pin that one on him.

Born into a family of Mexican gun-runners, "Ric" saw his mutation as his ticket out of a life of crime in the barrio.

Ric initially saw his mutation as a curse that made him a monster and a danger to everyone he loved. The original X-Factor managed to give him a more positive outlook on being a mutant, but meanwhile the circumstances of him parting his family have never been entirely explained. He seems to have run away, and then shortly thereafter been kidnapped away to Virginia by Hodge to be tortured and experimented on. Also, he's not from "the barrio", he's from mexico, where "barrio" just means neighbourhood, as opposed to in the US where it's pretty much a synonym for "ghetto".

Other than that, good recap! (Someday -- someday -- I will figure out what the hell the gladiator joke is. Someday!)

(Things like this happen to the Fantastic Four about every other Tuesday.)

*snicker* Yeah, basically.

[crabby-lioness.livejournal.com]

Um. Couple things:

Yeah I know, but I learned the hard way that TMI in an intro post is a deal-breaker. You should have seen what I cut out. I was especially proud of the bit about Rahne, Himrahi, and Josh. :(

Other than that, good recap

Thank you.

[eliyes.livejournal.com]

Yeah I know, but I learned the hard way that TMI in an intro post is a deal-breaker. You should have seen what I cut out. I was especially proud of the bit about Rahne, Himrahi, and Josh. :(

Years of weird soap opera comics continuity: the bane of fan synopses everywhere! I know that particular agony as well.

[qara-isuke.livejournal.com]

Other than that, good recap! (Someday -- someday -- I will figure out what the hell the gladiator joke is. Someday!)

In the movie Airplane!, the pilot asks a little boy visiting the cockpit various slightly homoerotic questions. Including asking him if he's "ever seen a grown man naked" and "Do you like movies about gladiators?"

The joke, apparently, being that back in the 60s and such, Gladiator movies were supposedly VERY popular with the gay crowd.

[eliyes.livejournal.com]

AH! Thank you so very much!

[michiru42.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this! There are a few scenes I hadn't seen--I'll buy more TPBs the moment I have money, but. I don't right now. -_-

In the meantime, I'm glad to read little tidbits like this and keeping up. I love how PAD writes relationships, and this one in particular is going forward really realistically. It's easy to see one party or the other as "bad" in a relationship, but really, in most relationships, both people are acting as good as they know how to, and rarely understand why their partner is upset by something or other they're doing.

Shatty is so in love with Ric, and doesn't equate sex with love (at least not at this point, since he's so new to it and has a lot to learn), so he just thinks it's silly that Ric would worry. Ric, on the other hand, who knows more about the trouble sex can bring--and, of course, he's already a fairly insecure guy, and always has been--is quite rightly annoyed at Star. But he sucks at communication, so instead of talking he's snapping and cutting Star off when Star tries to open dialogue. He has no idea why Star isn't understanding what he's saying, or at least he doesn't know how to communicate more clearly, and so Star just assumes it's Ric's problem, rather than anything he's doing.

That's my take on it at this point, anyway. Obviously, as PAD reveals more, I could turn out to be wrong. (And, as ridiculously interested as I am, I'm very open to people with the same or other opinions looking for discussion!)

I love your bit about "soap opera" by the way, it's so true in its sarcasm. Have you seen the WWF? Or the new "Spartacus: Blood and Sand" show on Starz? SOAP OPERA.

[michiru42.livejournal.com]

And oh! The bit about Star's fashion sense was great, too. There's this hilarious discussion going on over at the uncannyxmen-dot-com boards about how incredibly gay X-Force was in the early 90s. Our resident homophobe on the boards, who has been complaining about Star being gay since PAD brought him out of the closet, grumbled that the poster must be gay to see that, because a REAL MAN like him sees the male body as a tank, and so the idea of X-Force seeming gay was "preposterous".

I told him to take a look at "The 40 worst Rob Liefeld drawings". Hee.

[crabby-lioness.livejournal.com]

I think you've got a good analysis there. :)

One of the oldest recipes for disaster is "innocent babe in the woods with a libido". It's also one of the oldest plots for porn novels. We've got an "innocent babe in the woods" here. We'll see which direction PAD goes in.

[swordznsorcery.livejournal.com]

Hmm. If they wanted to have a comic book Captain Jack, why not think up a new character? That's better than doing a one eighty on Shatterstar's personality.

It's nice to have some antisocial characters. There's far too few of them.

[crabby-lioness.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's so much a 180 as it is a maturing process. Shatterstar's early behavior was pretty consistent with that of an abused child hitting puberty and being anti-social as Hell, but it's something many people grow out of. It was also completely at odds with his pre-conditioned desire to be a media darling. He either had to give up one or the other.

[liliaeth]

Really? I've always felt there are way way too many antisocial characters. But that might be the overuse of Wolverine talking.

[swordznsorcery.livejournal.com]

I think that depends on what fandoms you're into. Certainly in film and television it's pretty much de rigeur to have the hero be a permanently smiley people person. There are exceptions of course, but not all that many.

I never really thought of Wolverine as anti-social. Mind you, it's been a long while since I've seen any of The X-Men outside of the old TV cartoon!

[webbgirl.livejournal.com]

I'd seen the snippets of 'Star coming back last year, but X-Factor was the one X book that I could *never* get into. (Plus Liefeld scarred my brain for life in the 90's) These are great though.

I attended a panel at SD Comic Con last year with PAD as one of the guests and I love that he said he didn't see what the big deal was about the kiss.

The reunions scenes in San Fran were AWESOME. That was such a Captain Jack scene.

[crabby-lioness.livejournal.com]

Liefeld and Lee have much to answer for. They scarred me so badly I was just last year getting back in, and only then for my daughters' sakes. And even then I wouldn't have if I hadn't heard that John Byrne's retconning away of the Scarlet Witch's twins hadn't been de-retconned.

[jennelldhalrbj.livejournal.com]

Men and boys don't like Soap Operas--this probably explains why my Husband and oldest son watch Eastenders. Of course, they think it is a comedy and laugh throughout but still----

[crabby-lioness.livejournal.com]

And we realize it's a blind spot and laugh at them....

[crabby-lioness.livejournal.com]

Tabby doesn't "get" shame. It's a totally alien concept, along with "modesty" and "restraint".

[prolixe.livejournal.com]

What issue is the big reunion in san fran? I just got issue 203 from my comic store, expecting a ricstar fix, and it was all about guido and monet. :\

[crabby-lioness.livejournal.com]

The big reunion is in the special X-Factor: Nation X, which leads into X-Factor 204 which comes out Wednesday. Here's the preview, where the bad guys fire up their combat simulator and punch in "frontal assault". They change their minds - http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=preview&id=4925

The big reunion and this story will probably be collected together in a few months.

[prolixe.livejournal.com]

Ahhh thank you! I found that in my bag. I thought it was some alternate universe bs and forgot to read it. ;P

[crabby-lioness.livejournal.com]

Not an AU, just that life has got very strange for Marvel's mutants recently. There's less than 200 left and the bad guys are trying to see how fast they can kill them all, hence the move to a more easily-defended location.

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks for the entry. This helped me a lot. I haven't been able to read this comic in a while and this caught me up to speed. I love Shatterstar =P He is so naive~ Haha The Gladiator scene was great!

[crabby-lioness.livejournal.com]

Wait until you see this month's story. This month Shatterstar takes the wheel and drives:

Shatterstar: Oh, this vehicle's operation is rudimentary. That, combined with my warrior's reflexes, have made this a fairly simple exercise.

Layla: We just have one or two fine points to work out.

Terry: YOU'RE DRIVING ON BOTH SIDES OF THE ROAD!

Layla: Yeah, that's one of them. Plus, he's not big on using the brakes.

Shatterstar: It slows us down. Seems pointless.

[crazykidben.livejournal.com]

Nice synopsis and breakdown of the characters. It's always tricky trying to sum comic continuity up, especially for a series like X-Factor that takes pre-existing characters with convoluted backstories and thrusts them into a semi-realistic sci-fi noir series. I had plenty of trouble trying to explain Monet's history to a friend...

[crabby-lioness.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

Way back in 1985 I sat down at one of those fancy new word processors to type up a quick Intro to the X-Men that I could print out and hand to new readers. (Continuity-wise, this was not long after the New Mutants title began.) When I reached 28 PAGES OF PURE TEXT and I still hadn't covered Magik I began to contemplate the virtue of "less is more".

[rattsu.livejournal.com]

THANK YOU!

I might now have to check out X-factor...

[crabby-lioness.livejournal.com]

You're welcome. Be sure to read Part 2!

[meghannibrooks.livejournal.com]

It really bugs me in that panel where they've just arived at Doom castle that monet and Shatterstar seem to have swapped speach bubbles. Monet should have 'Star's and 'Star should have Monet's.

I love this summery so much I kind of want to marry it.