X-men: "Forever" #9 (SPOILERS Obv.)

[Flâneur]

Ah, X-men: Corrections, how I love thee. Just not this week.

At long last, Ziggy Trask will set things right! I love that name 'Ziggy', it's the name of Nazi LOL Trask's granddaughter and the bulk of the issue is about her Aryan arse. I assume CC is compensating for the Kitty Sage racism by showing how evil Ziggy is. In short order this is what happens in the main plot:

• Ziggy has Fury at gun point.
• Ziggy spends four pages explaining why she doesn't like Fury. There are a minimum of three word balloons per panel on these four pages. CHUNKY.
• Ziggy shoots Fury and RUNS away out of fright.
• Ziggy resists the immense psychic power of Phoenix, trying to detect her from a few hundred metres away. Is this traditional CC foreshadowing of an amazing simmering plot? Maybe the magic telepathy resistant mountains are involved. Let's wait and see!
• Ziggy falls over and is AMAZED at how the Sentinels she created will OBEY her. Good going, Ziggy!

There is zero potency here. Why do we really care about this? We're given no reason to think the Sentinels she created wouldn't obey her and the talk between her and Fury is drawn out and verbose so even if we'd been given a reason in-text to care about Ziggy, this would be meh.

We then go to the sub-plots:

• X-men vs. Sentinels:
  • The X-men begin to lay waste to the quite obviously more dangerous and threatening than ever Sentinels. Even Beast is able to defeat one.
  • Jean goes out of control and beats the rest! While the rest of the X-men recoil in shock at Jean beating them so easily.
  • Kitty then trolls Jean by revealing that these Sentinels have no internal combat systems.
• The Consortium:
  • The Consortium, who were in charge of evil(!) Storm are having a deep and dark discussion. It's revealed that Ziggy's mother is the leader of the Consortium.

The Sentinels stuff is just more evidence of lazy writing. The Sentinels, were built up badly to build up Jean's big quasi-phoenix moment but the Sentinels are hammered home as far from dangerous (despite dialogue saying they are !dangerous!) and we have more moments of Jean's failure when she cannot detect Ziggy. Oh, and there's a What the Devil! here. At least CC is getting rid of old cliches, right?

The Consortium reveal moment is also pointless, since why are we meant to care that Ziggy's mother is in charge since Ziggy doesn't give us a reason to be shocked over it. We get no other information from this scene either.

Usually, I read this because it's comedic albeit unintentionally. This issue wasn't funny, just boring and ham fisted. Art was okay though and the colourer is matched well to his old school style.

Patient Diagnosis: D+

[psycwave]

Did Kitty use her claw??

[Flâneur]

Originally Posted by psycwave

Did Kitty use her claw??

She poked a sentinel.

[timbox]

I wish Kitty would get a solo book from this continuity.

[Stephane Garrelie]

Ok, given there's no insult in the title of the thread i'll play your game and will post my review here later.
Yet, until the "consortium" part of your review i was wondering if you had actually read the issue or was making a joke thread based on the preview

Of course i obviously don't share your point of view (anybody surprised?)
Overall i liked the issue, there's no big surprises and the end is more open than i would have thought, but it was ok.
It certainly deserves a better note than you D+. Not a A, but something between those two grades. Maybe a C+ or a B.

[timbox]

I'm still not sure why Ziggy doesn't like Fury.

[Flâneur]

Originally Posted by timbox

I'm still not sure why Ziggy doesn't like Fury.

I think it needed more explaining, tim. Don't you agree?

[Stephane Garrelie]

X-Men Forever #9
SENTINELS-REBORN! by Chris Claremont, Steve Scott and Peter Vale.

1-The Story
[SPOILER]
In South-America the X-Men are fighting 10 Sentinels that are attacking a village. Each member of the team fights well but finally, when a Sentinel falls on Kitty, Jean with her (Phoenix?) enhanced telekinesis destroy all the Sentinels that were still standing.
In the consortium complex, Ziggy who has shot Nick Fury in the leg is still menacing him with her gun . For her it is a long overdue revenge: Her grandfather was a dreamer and an idealist, Fury was a member of the commandos that killed him (Though Logan was the actual killer). Nick Fury answers it was a world war, and if guys on every side may have done things they later maybe came to regret, the death of Dietrich Trask, her grandfather, made a difference. « if he lived, if his technology had been deployed, who knows how many more would have died? » He then asks her what is her story, an she tell him how her grandmother and her father then moved to South-America where they made the name Trask once more respectable. After the death of his first wife (The mother of Larry), his father then married her mother and they together continued to bring her grandfather’s dream to life, but the X-Men where always on their way.
Meanwhile in the village, Kitty opens a passage with her claw in a sentinels an the X-Men realize that those where construction units, the operational and combat system being all in the limbs and the torso , the body itself being mostly hollow.
While Ziggy explains to Furry that unlike the ones of her brother Larry, her creations will be perfect, a S.H.I.E.L.D unit arrives led by Daisy Dugan she disarms Ziggy but suddenly the Aircraft that brought here on the site is destroyed, killing 3 agents, Ziggy takes advantage of the diversion and disappears. Daisy wanna follow her, but Nick says no.
Abit later the X-Men are back at the consortium complex where Fury, Daisy and a few other S.H.I.E.L.D. agents are too. Beast says to Nick he saw one of the Sentinels in the village go after scrap metal and that he thinks it was « attempting to procure material for building », Jean regrets to not have tried to psy-probe Ziggy harder, and Kitty says to Kurt that if Sabretooth were there he would be able to follow her trail. So obviously she didn’t get this ability from Logan…. Yet. (This commentary is mine.)
In the jungle Ziggy is running and remembers her childhood, and a visit with her mother to the site where he was building his Sentinels, for the good of all mankind. A beautiful scene, very sweet. A cute little girl, a nice family and a dream.
Today in the jungle Ziggy hears a noise:
-Keep your distance, out there… I’m armed
-Weapon scan negative. Subject is unarmed.
-?!?
In the American consortium HQ 3 persons are talking about the situation, two of them are men and a bit worried to not say panicking. The third is a woman and seems to be the boss. This is Ziggy’s mother:
-I will deal with my daughter, when it is appropriate. She sought to fulfill her father’s dream by succeeding where my stepson failed… to create at least an unflawed and perfect iteration of the Sentinel. We all knew the risks, yet the consortium still sanctified the project. Before we take action, we at least need to learn how it turned out.
In South America Ziggy realize that she is face to face with her creation:*-Oh Mama, have I got a surprise for you and the X-Men
*smile*[/SPOILER]

2-The Characters.
[SPOILER]
Ziggy rules, both as a kid and an adult. Still needs more depth, but cool character.
Jean and Kitty do fine, Beast is cool. Nick is… hurt; but human and smart.
Daisy Dugan is excellent. I hope we will see more of her.
Rogue is good at fight and ok overall.
Kurt teleports.[/SPOILER]

3- Overall opinion.

A good issue, where the end is more open than I would have thought. In term of action, and even character development for the X-Men, the issue may seem light, but on the other hand we learn things about Ziggy, and she is the one who steals the issue, though Daisy and Jean have great scenes too. So since this is the third part of a story-arc I’ll say that it is a good issue, that makes the story move on, but only an episode in a bigger thing. Lot of stuff is still to come obviously. The consortium , and for this reason the Trasks and the Sentinels, being very central in this series.
The writing of Chris Claremont has its usual quality, and on the art level Steve Scott’s work seems to have reached some sort of unity: His style looks less like a patchwork than in the previous issues, nothing really bright (though i love the page where Rogue & Jean destroy the Sentinels), but it is good art. The guest artist Peter Vale does nicely the childhood sequence with the Sentinels, and his style finds its place in the issue without making too big a contrast with Steve Scott’s art. There’s a synergy between the work of the two artists that serves the story.
A good issue, very enjoyable as part of a bigger story, but maybe less as a stand-alone. A new chapter in the X-Men Forever novel.

[nightw1ng]

claremont needs to try harder to come up with some menacing names. ziggy trask is just as lolz as sophie von doom from genext.

[Agent_Torpor]

Originally Posted by nightw1ng

claremont needs to try harder to come up with some menacing names. ziggy trask is just as lolz as sophie von doom from genext.

Or Evangeline Whedon.

[Phoenix_Force]

But Daisy Dugan is so WIN

[coveredinbees]

Is Ziggy a nickname?

[Grunty]

I hate Zigfried, she gives Ziggy Stardust a bad reputation since everyone here seems to call her Ziggy now.

[Goshin]

Hold up, Ziggy Marley created the senntinels?

[CmX]

It didn't take long for Forever to transform into a real piece of crap.