Particle_Man said:
I guess Peter David's Mutietown is going down the tubes (it was the setting for Maddrox: Multiple Man set up a private eye biz there).
Hey is Multiple Man gonna live through this or is he gone too?
Madrox, Strong Guy (yes!), Wolfsbane, Siren, M, Rictor, and Layla Miller (who? See House of Mediocrity) will be setting up X-Factor investigations in Mutant town starting in December. Yes, the writer of Madrox will be returning to the superhero-noir investigation team of that same (awesome) Limited Series. Presumably, they will all still retain their mutant powers, though I suppose it isn't known for sure at this point.
As for whether or not Mutanttown will be the same, well, probably not. I think it will be a lot smaller, but that's ostensibly where X-Factor will be set.
Personally, I find the whole "genie back in the bottle" thing to be a bunch of bunk. Mutants are still the underdogs/minorities in the Marvel Universe, it's just that the writers don't do a very good job of playing up that angle any more.
Part of the problem is that, when you are writing superhero books, where superhero characters are constantly interacting with other superhero characters, well, let's face it, being a mutant isn't really a minority thing. *Everyone* you're interacting with has powers, so you're all in the same boat.
The only thing they really needed to do was to play up the mutant minority angle more in the books (particularly the X-Books) than they had been. Bring in more *normal* (ie, non-mutant and non-powered) characters, to play off against the mutants. Bring in more situations where mutants and non-mutants/non-powers have to interact and conflict, instead of focusing on all the heroes vs. villains stuff. If you want to have that minority dynamic, you need to make a paradigm shift in the stories you are telling. If all you do is have superpowered goons fighting one another, the mutant minority angle is insignificant.
I don't see that reducing the population to a few hundred will enable the writers to tell more "minority" stories than they could otherwise. If they want to tell stories about black minorities in the MU, will they have to have the Scarlet Witch reduce the black population? No- because that would just be stupid. The problems exist already- they don't need to exacerbate them in order to make them "relatable."
Granted, I think there are too many mutant characters, because I frankly think it is just too lazy and too much of a copout to creating new characters. "Oh, he got his powers because he's a mutant." The best and most long lasting characters in the MU tend to have interesting and wildly different origins- Spider-Man got bitten by a radioactive spider; Captain America gained his powers through a government program. I just think that the "genie in the bottle" idea is based on a flawed premise- that the only way to tell the stories Quesada wants to tell is by altering the landscape of the MU that has developed over the last 50 or so years. It's just as lazy and uncreative as creating a new character and having him be a mutant in lieu of a more detailed and creative origin.
