Even If You’re Not an Artist, You Need to Watch Jim Lee Sketch

Streaming on Twitch, DC’s soft-spoken CCO inspires with his skill and humanity

Anyone who follows my social media presence knows that I have complicated feelings about art. I have always primarily identified myself as a writer, but I periodically find myself dabbling in sketch art despite limited natural aptitude for it — an activity that invariably ends in frustration given that my aspirations quickly outstrip my talent. So it’s with a mixture of reverence and masochism that I will often watch gifted technicians effortlessly spin off drawings and paintings that I could never hope to create. And yet that’s not why I’ve become (not-so-)mildly addicted to Jim Lee’s live streams on Twitch. Instead, I find that I like to watch his art videos simply because they make me feel better about the world I’m living in. Moreover, based on the reactions of my family, I’m pretty sure the feeling is contagious.

Unlocking The Fanboy Within
On my part at least, this sentiment is somewhat fueled by residual fandom of DC Comics’s Chief Creative Officer reaching all the way back to the 1990s. I do, in fact, own one of the several variant covers to Lee’s best-selling X-Men #1. And I enjoyed his runs on Superman and Bat-Man following his stint at Image. Nevertheless, I’ve never really followed individual comic artists with any particular fervor. And while my family and I have been attending comics conventions in our region for a little less than a decade, it’s been for a variety of reasons only loosely tied to the comics themselves.

My spouse, sometime sci-fi/fantasy author C. L. Schock, has typically attended for the purposes of market research, while my kids and I have focused on collecting swag ranging from posters to Funko Pops to LEGO mini-figures. Even on the occasions when we’ve met creators like George Perez, Ethan Van Sciver and Ron Frenz, it’s been to get comics signed or to buy existing art — not to observe their process. It was only a happy accident then that I should happen to stumble across Jim Lee’s Twitch stream — or more appropriately a YouTube compilation of his videos— a little less than two years ago.

Happy Little Muscles Instead of Happy Little Trees?

Lee’s videos are tutorials, ostensibly for would-be artists looking for tips on the respective crafts of penciling and inking comic art. However, they’re also much more than that. For starters, they’re usually filled with various technology-driven misadventures. The legendary artist, who is now in his 50s, often struggles with issues related to his cameras, his microphones and any number of other environmental factors. But rather than this being a distraction, these forgivable technical lapses enhance his charming demeanor; they help to humanize and ingratiate him to an audience that might otherwise be intimidated by his body of work.

Just about everything that Jim Lee does, in fact, works to this effect. Casual, self-effacing, soft-spoken, and candid, Lee doesn’t come across as a titan of his industry. He’s just Jim. He talks about his travels — completed and upcoming. He’ll chat with his wife or his kids if they happen to wander into the room during the streaming event. He reminisces about his experiences in the industry and his collaborations with other creators at DC Comics and elsewhere.

And though it’s often said that extremely talented people struggle to teach — as they’re used to being able to naturally perform at a high level — Lee is very much aware of the fact that his audience is largely made up of 18- and 20-year-olds looking to pick up the tricks of the trade. So he’ll often stop mid-sketch to flip his page over and demonstrate some technique of shaping or shading. As he explains, he interprets many complex aspects of anatomy by deconstructing them — the hand is a pentagon with its base at the wrist, the shoulder a valentine’s heart, the biceps and triceps islands of light in an ocean of shadows. (Note that he once illustrated the first of these principles — quite literally — by drawing a pentagon on the back of his own hand.)

A Little Something for Everyone

To be clear, Jim Lee isn’t Bob Ross — though I do walk away from watching his videos with a similar positive feeling. Whereas Ross’s focus was to create art that his audience could emulate even in real time, Lee sketches rapidly and at a high level of difficulty. So while my youngest child and I are routinely inspired to create our own art after viewing one of his live streams, we don’t really attempt to duplicate his results. And I think that’s okay because it’s not critical to our enjoyment of an experience that transcends the instructional. Just watching Jim Lee make art is a pleasure in its own right.

It’s not without its drama either. I wouldn’t call his style impressionistic, and yet I would often — in the early days of following his stream — find myself wondering how, with perhaps just 5 or 10 minutes left on a project, it was going to round out into a finished sketch with his usual level of quality. And then he’d surprise me by dabbing a piece of tissue paper in ink and rendering a dramatic backdrop in 30 seconds of work. Or he’d grab a whiteout pen and — with just a handful of precise strokes — wrestle a clearly defined image from out of the dark background he’d spent the last quarter hour saturating with marker. In some ways, I suppose you can credit his use of multiple media on a single project — a pencil, a pen, a Sharpie marker, a whiteout pen, tissue paper, a credit card (yes, a credit card dabbed with whiteout, to create flecks of “Kirby crackle”) — as one of the reasons why there can be so many twists and turns on the way to the outcome.

Owing to his numerous production and travel commitments, Lee’s posting schedule can have its ups and downs as well. But I don’t know that I’d consider his streaming events “appointment television” anyhow. Many sessions can last a couple of hours and cover more than one project. So it’s not unusual for my family to watch them in pieces over multiple occasions after they drop to YouTube. That eliminates the opportunity to participate in the conversations associated with the live stream — as the artist will often respond to comments bubbling up in the moderated chat — but it suits our purposes and allows us to enjoy on an on-demand basis.

Visiting with an Old Friend

Something about Lee’s demeanor and delivery combined with the seeming ease with which he draws makes each video feel like you’re checking in with an old friend. That’s marvelously refreshing at a time when the posts showing up in my social media don’t feel particularly social. So I highly recommend that you give one of Lee’s live streams or videos a try. I guarantee you’ll learn something — be it about his technique, his ongoing projects, his career or simply his daily life. And that’s the kind of reality TV I can’t get enough of — since Jim Lee seems to be one guy who is genuinely here for the right reasons.

The Iron Man Legacy Story No One Is Talking About (**With Spoilers**)

As the Mandarin makes news, Far from Home may have quietly set up Armor Wars.

While the end of Robert Downey Jr.’s tenure as the golden avenger may have been bittersweet, his run wasn’t short in terms of screen time. Featured in his own movie trilogy, five Avengers films — yeah, let’s be honest, Captain America Civil War was an Avengers film — and Spider-Man Homecoming, Downey spent a decade embodying this most iconic of MCU characters. But curiously, these multiple appearances only scratched the surface of the Iron Man mythos and rogues gallery.

Villains like Baron Zemo, Ultron, and Thanos are more generally considered Avengers foes in the comic source material. And though Iron Monger, Whiplash, and Killian Aldrich have specifically menaced Tony Stark in the comics, I don’t know that most fans would typically rank them among his most prominent or deadly rivals. So the notable absence of several other major Iron Man villains and their associated plot lines would appear to leave a hole in the fabric of Marvel’s cinematic universe. But with Kevin Feige’s recent announcement of a Phase 4 Shang-Chi movie that will introduce The Mandarin — the real Mandarin, not the impostor played by Ben Kingsley in Iron Man 3 — to the MCU, it’s become evident that some of these loose threads may yet get tied off in unexpected ways. And with that idea in mind, we should all reflect on the implications for Peter Parker in the wake of the events of Spider-Man Far from Home.

When Marvel Studios originally framed Far from Home as an epilogue to Phase 3, I’m sure that no one could have imagined the extent to which the Spider-Man sequel would revolve around Tony Stark’s legacy. The emotional notes were somewhat predictable, but the tangible effects of Tony’s death were not. In many ways, the MCU version of Mysterio represented the embodiment of all of Tony’s faults — the sins of the father come crashing down on his spiritual son and would-be successor. But it didn’t end there. Tony would go a step further by handing off a literal physical legacy — a mcguffin with the potential to re-shape the rest of Peter’s life— in the form of the E.D.I.T.H. technology. And it’s in the fallout of this bequeathing that we may yet see an adaptation of one of the most famous of Iron Man stories played out as a Spider-Man sequel.

Stark Contrast
The MCU incarnation of Tony Stark could be a haunted character, much as he is often portrayed in the comics. But that movie angst stemmed from a different source than the comics. As is shown particularly in Iron Man 3 and Avengers Age of Ultron, RDJ’s Stark struggled under the weight of responsibility for Earth’s protection after the “Battle of New York.” “Cursed with knowledge” of what lurked beyond the stars, this would be his obsession and the guiding force behind his development of the Iron Legion and Ultron. And that bent is unique to the Marvel cinematic universe.

In the comics, Stark could also be driven at times to mania and paranoia — but it wasn’t because he was failing to change the world enough. On the contrary, his worry stemmed from the potential for his inventions to escape his control — for his tech to fall into the wrong hands. In many ways, the cinematic Tony Stark could be imagined as the comic book variant’s worst nightmare — someone so eager to put his imprint on the world that he had failed to account for all possible consequences. It’s not surprising then that this theme, as represented in the famous “Armor Wars” story line, couldn’t be reconciled with the story arcs and characterization planned for Downey’s role. However, there may now be a clear path for it to play out in the life of a closely related hero also defined by his sense of responsibility.

Armor Wars is an interesting story arc in that it’s a globe-spanning tale that forces Iron Man to interact with a long list of similar armored characters inhabiting the Marvel universe: Crimson Dynamo, Titanium Man, Mauler, The Beetle, and many more. In the 1987–1988 Armor Wars story — originally called “Stark Wars”— Tony learns that the villain known as Spymaster has stolen numerous weapon and armor designs from Stark Enterprises and has sold them to entities ranging from petty criminals to various domestic and foreign governments. Incensed by the idea that his technology is being used without his involvement or permission, Stark initially attempts to achieve a legal resolution but is rebuffed by the courts. At this point, he goes on a vigilante crusade against friend and foe alike to defeat and disable any armored character he believes to be using some aspect of his technology. In the midst of this crusade, Stark Enterprises and the Avengers both publicly break ties with Iron Man and the hero finds himself the subject of a worldwide manhunt — one that only ends when the Iron Man armor is seemingly destroyed by a nuclear missile attack.

While it’s not a perfect fit — and I’d fully expect Disney to take its usual liberties with the source material — I believe that Marvel Studios is well positioned to put Peter Parker through a very similar gauntlet. (Pun intended.) Let’s remember our hero’s circumstances at the end of Far from Home: he’s a fugitive on the run and in possession of technology coveted by every villain, villain group, and government in the world. Sound familiar?

First Name: Edith. Last Name: McGuffin.
Of course, some aspects of the Armor Wars would be more difficult to reconcile as part of what would essentially be an E.D.I.T.H. Wars story. Two of the biggest disappointments of the Iron Man sequels have to be the omission of Titanium Man and Crimson Dynamo, but pitting one or both of them against Spider-Man alone would be a mismatch. So unless Peter would manage to collect some allies — Prowler, perhaps? — they’d have to miss the cut once again in spite of their government’s logical interest in a key to Stark’s technology. That means the participants in this re-imagined Armor Wars would have to skew lower on the power scale — The Beetle, The Mauler and a few others who have conveniently sparred with Spider-Man in the comics.

Alternatively, Marvel could do what it has done in several previous films and blend two classic stories. As I’ve mentioned in a prior essay, many fans have long-anticipated the depiction of the Sinister Six in the MCU — and Otto Octavius has used satellites in his strategems in the past, so it’s not difficult to imagine him seeking access to E.D.I.T.H.

Ultimately, the most important elements are already in place — as you have an intensely responsible character who will have to fight to keep hold of a technology that will inevitably harm innocents if it falls into the wrong hands. In this way, Marvel and Disney could manage to have their cake and eat it too — as they will have spread Robert Downey Jr.’s movie appearances across the plot lines they wanted to prioritize while still managing to leave the door open to pillage Iron Man’s back catalog of plot lines for years following his departure. And that, more than anything Quentin Beck planned or accomplished, could be the most impressive feat of smoke in mirrors to come out of Phase 3’s final film.

How to Be a Geek on a Budget

As the content landscape becomes more fragmented, consider your options carefully

It’s getting hard to remember what life was like for geeks prior to Netflix. I could say streaming services in general, but I think it was specifically the advent of Netflix — first in DVD rental and later through content streaming — that heralded the modern age of geekdom.

For years, the running joke in our extended family was that everyone rented from the “Schock Video Library” — as we had an extensive collection of first VHS and then later DVD copies of numerous movies and TV shows within the genre that we freely shared with family and friends. We still have a cute, card-catalog-style DVD storage system containing offerings ranging from the Bruce Timm/Paul Dini DC cartoons to various early MCU movies to shows like Fringe, The Big Bang Theory, Sherlock and Doctor Who. But our accumulation of physical media — of outright content purchases — certainly waned as it became easier and easier to simply access content via Netflix.

When our older child developed an interest — on separate occasions— in Star Trek and The X-Files, we were able to simply stream them. When our younger child wanted to snuggle up and watch Toho’s kaiju films, we simply streamed them. There was even an ill-conceived rental of the full series of the original Flash TV show —not the Arrowverse show but rather the John Wesley Shipp/Amanda Pays vehicle from the 1990s which, I’m sorry to say, didn’t hold up to the way I remembered it from my youth. So as I’ve watched Netflix slowly lose access to content — beginning with Doctor Who a few years ago and accelerating with the development of competing streaming services from Disney, Warner Bros. and NBC Universal — I can’t help but wonder if we aren’t seeing the sun set on a golden age.

Most of the competing content outlets won’t be expensive individually, but the shared global geek culture that has flourished over the last decade can’t help but be impacted by the collective cost of fragmentation. Increasingly, most people will have to become more selective about the content they choose to rent given that less and less of it will be baked into diverse and expansive bundles — each major franchise becoming the tent pole for a separate streaming business. As such, many of the strategies that budget-conscious geeks employed 15–20 years ago will remain applicable in this brave new (yet somehow old) world. They just need to be rediscovered.

Consider Your Purchases as Investments
When my wife and I were young and (very) poor, we had to think of our entertainment in terms of our overall spend. We could go to a movie in the theater and spend $X for perhaps 2 to 2-and-a-half hours of entertainment. Or we could wait to rent the same movie for a third of the cost. Or we could buy it outright for roughly the same cost as seeing it in the theater and then we could watch it on numerous occasions. Similar logic applied to new and used video games. Books were easier because rental wasn’t really a concern — you’d either buy a book or sign it out at the local library. In any given month, we’d have $X to spend and Y number of hours of entertainment we could hope to cover with it.

While the options are a bit different now with the rapid decline in physical media, the decision-making process is pretty much the same. If you love a movie, TV series or game enough that you think you’ll want to watch it repeatedly, do the math — you could well save money by buying over renting if you believe that you’re really going to enjoy that content throughout coming months. Just remember that you’re locking those dollars in — and also be careful to be sure that your access to any digital media is secure, as you don’t want to try to watch that movie 6 months from now only to find that it’s been pulled from the cloud by the content retailer.

When You Do Rent Content, Rent Strategically
Unlike cable companies, streaming services aren’t currently tying people down to long-term contracts. So it can be prudent to time your subscriptions to allow you to binge multiple properties in the same subscription period. The downside can be timeliness, of course — if you’re trying to avoid spoilers for one show that’s ending, it might not be feasible to wait until a second one drops — so that’s something to keep in mind.

On a related note, think of your fandoms collectively when choosing which services to patronize. And that doesn’t just apply to your existing favorites. Consider some of the other shows that these services are creating — as they’re actively trying to keep you on their sites and are increasingly developing compatible content to supplement the tent pole offerings.

Also think of your subscriptions holistically. Your Amazon Prime membership comes with a variety of perks aside from access to streaming content — at least if you’re someone who uses Amazon.com a lot. And there are other content-related subscription services not centered on video — digital comics and other text content, for example. So think carefully about the combination of options that delivers you the most entertainment for your dollar.

Remember That Analog Is a Viable Option
If you’re a reader, I’m sure I don’t need to sell you on the merits of physical books. But you should also consider physical games — specifically tabletop board games — as a cost-effective diversion. While elaborate European-style board games can be as expensive as modern video games, you don’t need to keep up with the ongoing console arms race to play them. They’re made to have a lot of replay value — with games like Betrayal at House on the Hill having literally 100+ scenarios you can encounter. And while many require multiple players, that’s hardly a detractor — as you’re essentially multiplying the value of the purchase in terms of collective player-hours of entertainment.

Remember That Content Doesn’t Have to Be New to Be Interesting or Compelling
The surge in interest in all things geek is still subject to the law of supply and demand. So another avenue to consider is to dive into these various franchises’ back catalogs — as the continuous influx of new content tends to drive down the demand for (and associated cost of) some of its precursors.

Here are some budget-friendly quests that promise to be entertaining yet easy on your wallet:

• Hit up the bargain bins at your local comic shop: If you’re looking to purchase comics for the purposes of collecting, then you likely turn your nose up at the yellow, dog-eared pages of the comics sitting in the dollar bin. But if you’re buying comics simply to read them, that doesn’t need to be a consideration. And there are plenty of full story arcs — great ones — sitting in the bargain bins either because the comics themselves aren’t in pristine shape or because the characters are (currently) obscure. I once bought my younger child an almost two-year-long run of a beloved series from my childhood for something like $10–12 during a sale — a great way to stretch those content dollars. Oh, and remember to just check out sales in general — for both individual comics and TPBs (trade paperbacks)/graphic novels — as that will likewise help to stretch your dollar.
• Ditto for your local gaming shop: Same philosophy as above save applied to gaming books and modules.
• Don’t forget your local public library: New video and book releases tend to be in high demand, but you can typically get your hands on them if you’re patient and thoughtful about it. Also, be aware that many libraries now have sections devoted to comics compilations and graphic novels in addition to their science fiction and fantasy holdings.
• Don’t forget the public domain: I’ll never advocate pirating because that hurts content creators. But you’d be surprised by how much content is out there for free because the copyright on it has simply lapsed. When my kids first got their respective Kindles, I remember that they were able to download a lot of classic science fiction, fantasy, and horror novels at no cost. And there are more than a few classic sci-fi and horror movies from the early days of cinema that can likewise be found for little or no cost.
• And last, but not least, never forget that used can be as good as new: If you don’t mind going a little old school, physical media are still an option — and a very inexpensive one if you’re willing to buy used. Used books are usually pretty safe, of course. And while I’ve had a handful of bad experiences buying used games or DVDs, it’s hardly been common enough to dissuade me from the practice.

Ultimately, it comes down to making the best use of your limited entertainment dollars. Consider what your priorities are — what you absolutely need to have when it’s hot off the presses — and then work backwards from there. You’ll likely find that your fervor for certain fandoms exceeds others and that the urgency to get access to that latter content isn’t great enough to warrant it being a big part of your overall spend. Once you’ve drawn that line, it won’t be too hard to reconcile your content consumption strategy to those priorities without reducing your enjoyment. And doing so might even put you on the path to discover some great guilt-free options that you might not have encountered otherwise.

Want to Become a Better Storyteller? Join a Role-Playing Game.

You might think that improv troupes are hard to find, but odds are good that an acquaintance of yours is conducting one around the dining room table at least a couple of times per month.

I suppose I was about eleven when I first discovered Dungeons & Dragons and the world of role-playing games in general. It was at the now-defunct Kay-Bee toy store in my local mall, where there were perhaps half a dozen different modules sitting in a white wire rack along one of the aisles. Having successfully cajoled my parents into buying me one — and then eventually another and another — I was soon picking my way through the ruins of the Ghost Tower of Inverness and plumbing the many secrets of Saltmarsh.

At first, I was just reading the modules. It took a while to romance my friends into playing some of the adventures with me serving as the “Dungeon Master” (DM). Unfortunately, it quickly became evident that they much preferred to just throw the football around in the backyard — something I enjoyed also — and it wasn’t long before my D&D modules were buried like detritus under a growing pile of comics and other pre-teen memorabilia. But the hobby marched on around me. Our local Waldenbooks dedicated an entire shelf to an increasingly diverse assortment of RPGs to suit a variety of tastes — space operas, tactical, horror, etc. And with changes in my friend group over time, I was back into RPGs again when I hit high school.

My second go wasn’t with Dungeons & Dragons however. No, I was a huge comics fan and TSR, Inc. had wisely chosen a different and even more irresistible infection vector — a Marvel Comics role-playing game. I didn’t buy every single game module and supplement that they created for that variant, but I’m sure I came close. And while my friends and I didn’t play RPGs all the time — we had other interests — the games were remarkably memorable, to the extent that certain situations and catch phrases have achieved a somewhat legendary status within my family to this day.

I know that RPG groups are typically portrayed as insular and their participants as reclusive, but I’ve always found the exact opposite to be true. When I gamed in high school, my girlfriend was part of our crew and others brought their girlfriends as well. It was a genuinely social activity. And when I went off to college, my then-girlfriend — now my wife — enjoyed participating too. In fact, we often muse that we first realized that our relationship might be on the serious side when I retrofitted the ending of one game scenario after seeing she’d been upset with the conclusion. (I’d inadvertently killed off a character she’d enjoyed designing — and when she got teary-eyed, I kind of bent the rules to give her an out. Probably makes me a bad DM — but a better boyfriend.)

After we were married and started to lean hard into adulting, I figured all of that was behind us. Dog-eared game modules and squashed-flat boxes languished at the bottom of plastic storage tubs moving with us from apartment to apartment and then our first house — retained for the sake of nostalgia, something to be smiled at when found and then just as quickly repacked. Occasionally, we’d play with our kids — both of whom expressed some level of affinity for RPGs and both of whom have moved on to play with their respective friends. But even then, I’d seen this as a seeding activity — a “nerding forward” situation, if you will — and not as any sort of prolonged re-engagement on my part.

And then something really curious happened — role-playing seemed to go through a very visible renaissance. As some of my friends have since explained to me, an underground of die-hard gamers had continued to flourish as a lot of dads quietly replaced “poker night” with an RPG night. These weren’t teens in heavy metal tee shirts crouching in the basement under a dim ceiling light with pencil and paper. These were accomplished professionals sitting on their decks with beer or other spirits in hand using apps on their smart phones to track their stats. They would come to gaming events with velvet dice bags carrying high-end brushed bronze dice or perhaps dice they molded themselves. (They could roll dice on their smart phones too, but if you don’t like the tactile feel of a twenty-sided die — or d20 — well, then you just might be a monster.)

How the media portrayed RPGs began to change as well — first by rediscovering them with ironic hipster fascination and then later by embracing them more wholeheartedly as a legitimate form of entertainment. Simply put, RPGs as a subset of overall gaming culture got well… sexy. Serialized RPGs would pop up in content on YouTube and Twitch and in podcast form. Entire auditoriums would fill to capacity to watch live celebrity gaming events — like the “Acquisitions Incorporated” series conducted annually at Penny Arcade’s PAX Conventions. While I won’t attempt to summarize all of that content here, you can easily find recent gaming videos including the likes of Vin Diesel, Joe Manganiello, Terry Crews, and Deborah Ann Woll. Some televised campaigns like Critical Role have gone on for years now at this point.

So why should you, as an aspiring storyteller — as a writer or photographer or film-maker — care about any of this? Because this resurgence in role-playing isn’t a casual phenomenon — another turn of the culture wheel, another capricious shift in the zeitgeist. It’s a fundamental recognition of shared narrative as a distinct and novel form of performance art.

Being a DM (or game judge) is an enormous undertaking and I’m always very impressed by — and grateful to — my friends who are willing to assume that responsibility. While I suppose that you can still buy game modules, most of the DMs I know generate their own scenarios based on any number of game systems ranging from D&D to Pathfinder to Dungeon Crawl Classics. So that is clearly a great opportunity for self-expression — a literal world-building activity. Nevertheless, even just being a participant in a RPG offers near limitless opportunities for creativity and improvisation. In fact, the better DMs I know specifically build their campaigns to promote those activities.

I’ve heard it said that Gary Gygax — the co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons — didn’t intend for it to be a “fighting game.” Characters weren’t just outfitted with weapons and hit points. The rules were crafted to allow numerous paths to victory — through stealth and persuasion and cunning and guile. In a day before modern video games, it was the first “open world” game — taking place in the theater of the mind. And while I’ll admit that I love to hear the words “roll for initiative,” some of the best games I’ve joined involved very few battles.

In one recent one-shot hosted by one of my friends, my character didn’t need to unsheathe his weapon once. We ended up making a mutually beneficial deal with the monster and his family that saw them relocated to greener pastures. (Picture Beowulf meets Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.) But the fact that we could have engaged in a fight — one that likely would have gone quite badly for us — is part of what makes participating in a RPG such an ideal form of shared storytelling. Our DM had a few different outcomes in mind and reined us in ever so slightly — ensuring a measure of structure — but we had the latitude to pursue a wide variety of paths. And we weren’t the only players; because dice decide the success of actions proposed by both the DM and the gamers, Lady Luck always has a seat at the table as well. I recall one game where my wife just kept punishing the game judge with one improbable “crit” (when you roll 20 on a d20) after another — driving the game and the story into uncharted territory for hours.

In the best gaming circles, players identify with their avatars and craft reactions to suit both evolving circumstances and the world view of their characters. Likewise, the game judges — expressing themselves through numerous non-player characters (NPCs) — aren’t ever really in opposition to the gamers; they too are simply playing out the personalities and interests they’ve built into the characters forming the infrastructure of the game. The result is a mélange of ever-changing story elements with a narrative created jointly by every player at the table, the DM and the dice. And while it might not be Colin Mockery and Ryan Stiles playing “scenes from a hat” on Whose Line Is It Anyway, it can be an extremely fun, challenging, and oft-times amusing combination of improv and problem-solving.

There has probably never been a better time to get into the hobby either — both because of its recent rise to prominence and also the ease with which people can game collectively over different communication platforms even at a distance. And if you’re not a big fan of science fiction or fantasy, there’s enough diversity in the gaming world that you can likely find a lightly themed campaign that suits your tastes. So the next time you want to take a break from more traditional creativity-building techniques like story prompts, consider probing your social network to find out who is involved in a gaming group. You’ll note that such groups are usually quite open — even evangelical — as RPGs thrive on new blood and new perspectives.

I can only speculate on the impact it will have to your creative process. You might walk away with inspiration for your magnum opus or just a fond recollection of sharing some mead with a bunch of rowdy orcs. Ultimately, art depends on shared human experience — even if, as in this case, shared in an unreal setting. Most RPGs revolve around character growth — building XP, as they say. As luck would have it, so does being an artist. So given the opportunity to satisfy both needs, there’s really only one obvious choice — you roll with it.

What Does The MCU’s Sinister Six Look Like Now? (**CONTAINS SPOILERS**)

Assessing the impact of Far from Home on Spider-Man’s rogue’s gallery.

From the cover of volume 5 of the trade paperbacks compiling Marvel’s Ultimate Spider-Man (“The Ultimate Six”). Credit: Marvel Comics.

While the Sinister Six may be among the most classic examples of a super-villain team-up, few people realize that they assembled relatively infrequently in the first 40 years of Marvel Comics continuity. Introduced in Amazing Spider-Man Annual #1 in 1964, a group consisting of Doctor Octopus, Electro, The Vulture, Kraven the Hunter, Sandman and Mysterio put the wall-crawler through a deadly gauntlet to save the lives of Daily Bugle co-worker (and then love interest) Betty Brant and his Aunt May. But this was treated as a special event by the publishers — one that, for as memorable as it was, wouldn’t be repeated for almost thirty years. However, that hasn’t prevented the team from capturing the imagination of fans of both the comics and the other media they’ve inspired. So it’s really less a question of whether they’ll appear in film than how and when.

Each of Spider-Man’s cinematic adventures has expanded his rogues gallery and therefore the odds of various scenarios playing out — and Spider-Man: Far from Home is no exception. Here are some observations regarding how this latest movie may or may not facilitate different incarnations of the villain team. As noted in the title of the article, detailed spoilers from Far from Home are discussed below; if you haven’t seen the film, you might want to read this after you’re caught up.

A Sinister Six That Includes Mysterio Is Now Much Less Likely — and Not for the Reason You’d Think

If you’re reading this, then you’ve presumably seen the movie and know that Quentin Beck appears to perish at the end of the film. Given that this is a character who leans heavily on deception, that doesn’t preclude his reappearance in any one of a variety of ways — he could have faked his death, the mantle could be assumed by someone else, etc. But what makes me think that his inclusion in the Sinister Six is now less likely has more to do with the character’s MCU origins and nature.

Rather than Mysterio simply being a special effects wizard with an ax to grind, I think of the MCU Mysterio as a troupe rather than an individual. Simply put, the MCU Mysterio is the combination of Count Olaf and his band of actors from A Series of Unfortunate Events — only on a grander scale. While we’re introduced to a handful of his accomplices, we really have no idea as to how many former Stark Industries employees have supported this cause — and it really comes across as a cause, the usurpation of Tony Stark’s legacy.

As a result, Beck is essentially a megalomaniacal director in the movie’s third act. And I don’t see either the leaderless troupe or this directorial portrayal of Beck jibing with the version of Mysterio who would join a group like the Sinister Six.

I Also Believe That A Variant of The Sinister Six That Includes The Vulture Is Now Less Likely

This opinion is largely based on the implications of the movie’s mid-credit scene — perhaps the most impactful mid-credit scene we’ve seen in the MCU to date. While you can debate Adrian Toomes’s motivations for not spilling Peter’s secret identity at the end of Spider-Man: Homecoming, you can’t deny that the villain is observing his own complicated moral code and that he isn’t hell bent on Peter’s destruction — something he could have easily facilitated. Now that the hero’s secret identity has been exposed and he’s going to be on the run from various law enforcement agencies, I’d find it hard to picture Toomes joining the hunt. In the end, The Vulture is still a villain and will still want to face off with Spider-Man — so I don’t see this as part of some redemption arc where he’d join the Sinister Six to sabotage them. But if/when they do cross each other’s paths, I’d see it happening on Toomes’s terms and not as part of a massive manhunt.

I Think It’s Also Becoming Increasingly Unlikely That The Sinister Six Will Be an All-Star Team

The comics have a huge advantage over cinema when it comes to team-ups because of simple math. Movie series need to summarize, in perhaps a dozen hours of run time or less, character introductions that could span literally thousands of pages of story arcs in the source comic material. Even with contract extensions, Tom Holland’s tenure as Spider-Man is going to be finite. And the fact that he has appeared in five MCU movies with minimal foundation for an ongoing rogue’s gallery doesn’t hold a lot of promise for an all-star roster for the Sinister Six.

As the original Batman movie series demonstrated, it can be tricky to feature more than one major villain in a film. In villain duos, it’s not uncommon for one to represent the brains and the other to represent the brawn — often to the detriment of the establishment of one or both characters. So the chances that Marvel Studios could slip 5 or 6 major Spider-Man villains into its next few films — while doing them any justice — seem unlikely. This is especially true when you consider that, where the Sinister Six are concerned, this would require the reintroduction of powerhouse fan-favorites Doctor Octopus and/or the Green Goblin (if the MCU chose to interpret the “Ultimate Spider-Man” version of the team).

One alternative would be to revisit an idea that Sony had been considering prior to its collaboration with Disney — and that’s to develop the roster of the Sinister Six in a stand-alone movie, an Ocean’s Eleven with super-villains as it were. This idea has a lot of merit given that it would allow the filmmakers to devote 100% of the allotted screen time to development of these rogues prior to their first encounter with the webslinger. But the same partnership that has made Spider-Man: Homecoming and Spider-Man: Far from Home possible would also create logistical issues for such an approach. For example, would this movie be an MCU movie or an MCU-adjacent Sony movie? And would any of these characters be hinted at or shown in other MCU movies first? Because otherwise, why would they have any specific rivalry with Spider-Man if most of them wouldn’t have encountered him previously?

None of the above considerations would need to be blockers, however I think that there might be a more practical — if perhaps less satisfying — way that Marvel could subvert expectations while introducing a Sinister Six into the MCU.

The Best Chance for Seeing a Sinister Six May Now Lie with a More Modern Roster

If you read a recent Marvel comic including the Sinister Six, you’re not going to see the classic roster. Several years ago, that team disbanded following the apparent death of their nominal leader Otto Octavius. And while Octavius’s demise was short-lived, it was still long enough for the moniker to be picked up by a group of B-list villains that had previously called themselves “The Sinister Syndicate.”

While the members of the Sinister Syndicate are also classic villains including the likes of Boomerang, Rhino, and the Beetle, they definitely represent a second tier of characters that might not require the same level of character development that would be expected for Doctor Octopus, Kraven or Electro. And that could offer a loophole — a cheat — that Marvel and Sony could exploit. Because no one ever said that the Sinister Six need to be the primary villains in the story where they’re introduced. They could essentially serve as shock troops in the employ of a master villain who could even join them in battle to flesh out their ranks.

This approach might not be the most satisfying for fans, but it seems like the shortest path available given the current status quo in the MCU. As it is, it seems like Marvel and Sony are currently leaning towards opposing Spider-Man with humans leveraging technology rather than super-powered individuals. So a group of technology-enabled, animal-themed mercenaries would match this aesthetic while also paying off on a concept first introduced in the now out-of-continuity Amazing Spider-Man 2. And it would give them the flexibility to continue inserting their more major villains selectively and on their own timeline.

One Thing Is Certain — The Clock Is Ticking

For my part, I really liked Far from Home. However, it did help to remind me that the clock is ultimately ticking where this incarnation of Spider-Man is concerned. Every Tom Holland movie appearance that doesn’t help to set up the Sinister Six removes a chunk of runway from any future attempt to leverage the concept. What remains to be seen is whether Marvel is doing this because they’re playing the long game — holding onto this card for Holland’s eventual swan song and a handing of the mantle to a Miles Morales Spider-Man — or if they’re simply not as invested in the group as many fans are.

Mac Gargan’s heavy hint from Homecoming’s mid-credit scene, that he’s got “friends” who’d like to demolish the wall-crawler, would seem to suggest it’s not the latter — and would also align with my belief that The Six might fall somewhere on the continuum between henchmen and minor villains when they do make their MCU debut. Given that Spider-Man will be a hunted man when we next see him, having a group of augmented mercenaries tracking him down would make a lot of sense. So I think that the simplest solution remains the most likely — even if it won’t necessarily be the most satisfying for every fan.

So I've Officially Forgiven The Orville for Not Being Galaxy Quest

As I've commented in previous posts, I don't have time to consume all of the content that might otherwise interest me. I'll catch podcasts in the car on my way to work, select first-run movies in theaters with family and friends, and various binge-worthy TV shows as my schedule allows. Since my wife will often defer watching these same shows until I'm available to enjoy them with her, what makes the cut can be a topic of intensive debate. Not surprisingly, I'm up to date on all of the MCU movies, the Star Wars franchise, Game of Thrones, Stranger Things and The Walking Dead. But beyond checking the boxes on those premiere geeky fandoms, I've had to skip much of--if the not the entirety of--shows like Gotham, Krypton, Cloak and Dagger, Runaways and more. So you can imagine my surprise and delight when I find that some content I've not prioritized turns out to be better than I expected.

I recall having heard--now several years ago--that an adaptation of the fan-favorite comedic space opera Galaxy Quest might be coming to broadcast television. When I subsequently learned that Seth MacFarlane was developing a Star Trek parody for Fox, I supposed it was the same project. Once I learned that the show was going to be called The Orville, I held out hope that the series was being set in the same fictional universe despite the titular starship not being named the NSEA Protector. It wasn't until a few weeks before the air date of the premiere in 2017--upon my reading of some vague plot summaries--that those hopes were definitively dashed. And while I did watch the premiere, I will admit that I did so with a Borg-cube-sized chip on my shoulder.

Even at that first watching, I was grudgingly impressed--though a bit confused by what the show was trying to be. It clearly wasn't Galaxy Quest--arguably not in the same league (or federation or union) as the 1999 cult classic starring Tim Allen, Sigourney Weaver, and Alan Rickman. That movie had been a very clever action comedy that satirized Star Trek while leveraging a smart premise, decent pacing and effects, and charming performances. The core idea was that aliens could see a science fiction show broadcast from Earth and not realize it was fiction. In the movie, this would result in a group of actors finding themselves thrust into a real galactic conflict with life and death consequences. And while the movie was self-contained with a satisfying conclusion, I could picture an accomplished creative team--perhaps the minds behind HBO's Barry--finding much more to explore and unpack about this premise in a longer serialized format like TV. (I'd see it being more of a reboot than a continuation--a slower developing story that could dig into the foibles of the actors and their hosts.)

Aside from also being a parody of Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek, The Orville doesn't really share any conceptual details with Galaxy Quest. Because whereas Galaxy Quest was largely satirizing and fictionalizing the cultural phenomenon of Star Trek--the relationships among the actors and between the actors and their fans, The Orville parodies the internal premises of the show--its democratic federation of planets plagued by the repeated hostile incursions of neighboring space empires. The former is well primed for comedy; the latter--in my mind, at least--not so much. A group of actors acting neurotically while struggling through a colossal case of mistaken identity doesn't require a lot of defense, and I feel that Allen in particular does a good job of selling it. It requires much more suspension of disbelief to picture an advanced society of scientists and explorers bumbling their way in and out of peril. Nevertheless, I think Seth MacFarlane and his cast-mates manage to pull it off more often than not.


WHAT THE ORVILLE ISN'T

The Orville is an unusual adventure narrative. I wouldn't call it a comedy and I wouldn't call it a drama. Even trying to categorize it as a "dramedy"--the term I'd use for shows like M.A.S.H. or Sports Night--is a tough fit since those shows toggled deftly between light and heavy notes, usually leaning into the latter in the waning moments of an episode. The Orville doesn't have that kind of pacing or wit, nor does it really appear to have such aspirations; the creative team seems unabashed about switching gears very quickly, before a joke or emotional note can really take hold, while also sometimes lingering on either drama or comedy for what can be uncomfortable lengths of time. (This makes some of the weaker episodes feel longer than an hour.)

And you can't really make any fair apples-to-apples comparisons between Seth MacFarlane's Captain Ed Mercer and Tim Allen's Jason Nesmith (i.e., TV's Commander Peter Quincy Taggart) or any of the Star Trek captains (Kirk, Picard, Janeway, etc.). While I absolutely love some of the more dramatic moments in Allen's performance in the last 20 minutes of Galaxy Quest--including perhaps one of my favorite space combat gambits inclusive of the Star Trek movies--it's just 20 minutes of film. MacFarlane is navigating the ups and downs of now dozens of hour-long episodes--too much humor for comparison to Star Trek and too much drama for comparison to Galaxy Quest.


WHAT THE ORVILLE IS

What The Orville is, most of all, is an eminently watchable, unvarnished love letter to Star Trek The Next Generation (TNG). Seth MacFarlane and I are about the same age, and I know that I likewise loved the show growing up--being too young to have seen the original Star Trek series save for in syndicated re-runs. This was "our" Star Trek. And that feeling is quite evident throughout The Orville.

MacFarlane's show is an extremely sincere homage from a creator known for snark rather than sincerity. The cold open at the beginning of most episodes feels like it could slip seamlessly into the rotation of any season of TNG. The montage shown under the opening credits, the music, the videography--they literally all feel like they came from a Paramount backlot garage sale. I just finished the Season 2 two-parter called "Identity" and it felt like it was a tribute to TNG's "The Best of Both Worlds." And I like how the sincerity extends to MacFarlane's performances as well as those of Adrianne Palicki, Penny Johnson Jerald and others.


MY (OVERALL) TAKE

I won't lie and tell you that every joke yields a smile or that every intense moment elicits the level of emotional investment that the creative team is targeting. But when The Orville is at its best, it makes me remember exactly what I loved about Star Trek and the crew of the Enterprise. And that is a favor I'll gladly return with continued viewing.

Why I (Probably) Don’t Want to See John Krasinski as Reed Richards

Sometimes two great tastes don’t taste great together.

I’m a big fan of The Office and a decades-long devotee of comics, so you’d think I’d be ecstatic about the possibility of John Krasinski playing Fantastic Four leader Reed Richards. But I’m concerned that the actor’s charm and affability will lead filmmakers to recast the character as an everyman—and if there is anything that Mr. Fantastic is not, it’s an everyman. More than that, I’m also worried that one of the most important stories that Marvel Studios can tell using the Fantastic Four will end up on the cutting room floor since it doesn’t align with that interpretation of the character.

Interpreting the “First Family” of Comics

Long subtitled “The World’s Greatest Comics Magazine,” the Fantastic Four has largely lived up to that hype through its many incarnations over the last 50+ years. The prototypical Silver Age comic, it was at the vanguard of Stan Lee’s redefinition of superhero stories in the early 1960s. And while there has been an understandable ebb and flow in its quality in the intervening years, the book has nevertheless delivered many of Marvel’s most iconic plots and character introductions—Doctor Doom, the Black Panther, the Inhumans, the Silver Surfer, Galactus, Adam Warlock and many more.

In my mind, there are really three great eras of importance when you consider the history of the FF: the Lee-Kirby days, and later stints by John Byrne (in the 1980s) and Jonathan Hickman (with artists Alan Davis and Steve Epting in the early 2000s). The Lee-Kirby era is easy enough to defend for its significance—not just in terms of Lee’s establishment of the characters and their family dynamic but also because of how it revolutionized visual storytelling. Much of the work that gained Kirby the moniker of “King Kirby”—with his splash pages full of “Kirby crackle” and sound effects embedded directly into his graphics—was published during this period. The Byrne and Epting runs would subsequently build on this foundation by evolving the relationships among the members of the family fantastic and between the team and its extensive rogues gallery—with Byrne focusing largely on Reed and Sue’s marriage and Hickman focusing on the relationship between the Richardses and their children.

And when I say the relationships “evolved,” I do mean that they progressed—as the interactions between the characters in the comic’s early days do come across as extremely dated. You have to remember that Lee’s original comics were comparatively progressive—but only in comparison to the social norms of 1960s America.  The portrayal of Reed and Sue’s relationship over the years is full of cringe-worthy moments of the patronizingly named “Invisible Girl” being taken hostage by the villain of the month, gaping in horror as her teammates fought off hordes of monsters or henchmen, or being coaxed into action by the barked orders of her husband. And while the team’s patriarchal bent slowly became more implied than explicit, Byrne accelerated what had been a gradual change by drawing Susan Richards out of her husband’s shadow—showcasing her powers and her leadership abilities while also changing her codename to the more palatable “Invisible Woman.” What emerged was a more modern family dynamic with two invested spouses acting as partners and joint decision-makers. And it’s out of this period that I feel the best version of Mr. Fantastic also emerges—the version that needs to be memorialized in the MCU.

You see, making Sue a more three-dimensional character required a change in Reed’s personality as well. A more assertive Sue was increasingly framed by Byrne and later writers as the yin to his yang, the worldly practical influence serving to ground a single-minded technocrat who might otherwise forget to shave or eat or shower for days while in the throes of scientific discovery. It’s this ethereal—almost haunted—version of Reed Richards whose struggles with marriage and fatherhood I want to see adapted on the big screen. And I just don’t know if that’s a job for John Krasinski.

Not Just Another Day at “The Office”

As I’ve already said, I’m a big Krasinski fan. My family and I binge seasons of The Office often—perhaps too often, as we’re able to quote a lot of the dialogue from memory. But while we’ve enjoyed the actor’s turn as Jim Halpert, my concerns about him playing Reed Richards don’t stem from any doubts about his ability to toggle between comedy and drama. Anyone who harbors such misgivings clearly hasn’t seen A Quiet Place.  (If you haven’t, you really need to do that right now. I mean, finish this article first—but then watch it immediately thereafter.) No, I’m sure he can be serious and intense—as shown in this film as well as his work in 13 Hours and the ongoing Jack Ryan series on Amazon Prime. So it’s not his acting abilities that give me pause.

Instead, I worry that fan expectations will likely push any John Krasinski-attached project to initiate Reed Richards’s story at the end rather than the beginning. One of the most notable aspects of the actor’s performance in A Quiet Place is how heartbreakingly relatable it is. He and wife Emily Blunt have as much as said that they viewed the project as a love letter to their own children—a dramatic portrayal of the lengths they’d undertake to protect their own family. With remarkably little dialogue, both actors make you feel the weight of their devotion. And where Mr. Fantastic is concerned, that sort of emotional connection needs to be the result of a long build-up—the result of hard-fought character growth rather than a starting point.

As I’ve mentioned above, the memorable Jonathan Hickman run on Fantastic Four at the beginning of the 2000s reshaped a lot of relationships within the team. In some ways, he deconstructed it—not as violently as Brian Bendis’s deconstruction of the Avengers in his “Avengers Disassembled” story arc, but every bit as impactful. Just as Byrne had evolved the characters that Lee had created, Hickman continued that evolution in a multi-layered sequence of overlapping arcs that included the death of a teammate and family member and the resulting reinvention of the team as something completely new. And while all of the characters got their moment to shine, it’s on the writer’s treatment of Reed Richards as husband and father that the story largely hinges.

By the beginning of the Hickman, Sue and Reed have two offspring—the soft-spoken but enormously powerful Franklin and the brash genius and sometimes precog Valeria. Franklin had been a fixture in the comics since the 1970s whereas Valeria wouldn’t join the family until the 1990s. But in typical comic book fashion, both characters are school-age when Hickman starts to weave his story. Being that these aren’t typical children, their education poses an unusual challenge—one that Reed ultimately addresses by turning the soon-disbanded Fantastic Four into a different FF, the Future Foundation, a school where he can interact with his children as a lecturer.

“What price a man’s mistakes?” asks the title of one story. As I said at the top of the article, Reed Richards isn’t an everyman and his mistakes therefore aren’t an everyman’s mistakes. He bargains with space gods, wields the power cosmic, and faces down infinite versions of himself and his greatest foes. But his familial relationships tether him to the mundane, to the questions we all must face—including what type of parent and spouse we want to be. Hickman essentially asks him (and us), whether the best path is to seek to make the world a better place for our children or to make the world a better place through our children.

The Struggle is Real Even When It’s Fictional

Though the struggle of balancing work and family seems to be most often portrayed as a mother’s burden, the reality is that it’s equally true for fathers. In real families, love and duty are often at odds—as the people we need to provide for, whose safety and well being we fight to secure, are the same people most impacted by the physical or emotional absence required by our responsibilities.

In the case of the Richardses, there is a clear tension in this regard—as Reed’s abilities as a renowned polymath leave him feeling an oversized responsibility to the world at large even as he endeavors to maintain relationships with those closest to him. And it’s often a conundrum he’s not emotionally or intellectually equipped to resolve—a social challenge that is paradoxically both outside of our everyday experience yet nonetheless humanizing. To paraphrase a line often uttered by his close friend and teammate Ben Grimm (a.k.a. The Thing), “he’s the dumbest smart guy I know.”

It’s this baseline social awkwardness permeating all of his relationships—this fugue-like, almost child-like, state of continuous wonderment—that defines Reed Richards and sets him apart from the bubbly Shuri or the cocksure Tony Stark in the pantheon of Marvel’s transcendent geniuses. He’s every movie scientist who ducks under the yellow caution tape to grab a sample or more closely view the accident scene. He’s Spock from Star Trek The Motion Picture attempting to make solo contact with V’Ger. And I think it remains to be seen if that’s in John Krasinski’s wheelhouse. I fear that Krasinski’s Mr. Fantastic would reprise his role as Lee Abbott from A Quiet Place when the Reed Richards we really need from the MCU, at least to start, would combine equal parts of Dr. John Robinson from Lost in Space (movie version) and Rick Grimes from The Walking Dead—perhaps with a dash of Mr. Banks from Mary Poppins thrown in for good measure.

While he’d be arguably the smartest guy in the Marvel cinematic universe, I need this character to be capable of learning and growing. In many ways, John Krasinski is the guy Reed Richards should aspire to be when he grows up. Let’s hope that—in the wake of this seemingly inevitable casting choice—he doesn’t do so off screen.

When "X" Doesn't Mark the Spot: A Spoiler-Free Look at the Challenges of Presenting X-Men Stories Outside of an Integrated MCU

I come not to praise the Fox X-Men movie franchise but to bury it.

I wouldn’t define myself as a hater, though I would have to admit that I’ve had a problematic relationship with the series since its inception. I’ve loved numerous moments and individual performances even as my enjoyment of the movies on the whole has waxed and waned. But I also have to acknowledge that the Fox Marvel movies—including the recently premiered Dark Phoenix—have labored under limitations that have prevented them from being everything they could have been. And so their most unforgivable sin—of not being the MCU—is nothing they could ever hope to rectify or overcome.

You’d think that the longer-tenure of the Fox Marvel universe would be an asset, however that’s not usually how things work where innovation is concerned. So while Fox may have been free to make hay (and money) for roughly a decade before the advent of Marvel Studios, the introduction of Iron Man changed the game dramatically in a way that they couldn’t counter.

It’s ultimately not about budget or effects. In the former category, the X-Men franchise did quite well and that gave its creative team plenty of money to spend—a fact reflected by what was often a stellar cast including literally dozens of critically acclaimed actors. And while the effects in the original X-Men trilogy don’t stand up to MCU movies, that’s understandable and inevitable given the rapid improvements in CGI over that same time period; on that count, you can only really compare the effects of the First Class-era movies to contemporary Marvel Studios films.

No, in the end, the Fox Marvel universe stopped being relevant as soon as the MCU showed what an integrated comics-inspired movie universe could look like. Because from that instant going forward, everyone inside and outside of that creative team had to know that the handwriting was on the wall. Don’t get me wrong—Fox still had access to a ton of mutants as well as many characters attached to the beleaguered Fantastic Four franchise. But what they didn’t have was the luxury of time—because now they were in an arms race they couldn’t possibly win. Fox may have held licenses to some of Marvel’s most prominent characters, but Marvel Studios had the comics company’s entire back catalog—as well as the will to gamble on lesser-known properties, something they could do given that they were essentially playing with house money.

For my part, I’d rank Logan as my favorite movie in the now-completed series, followed by Days of Future Past. Other people might mix in the original film, X2: X-Men United, or even X-Men: First Class in there, and I’d not blame them for doing so. (And Deadpool is just a phenomenon in his own right.)

So what do the three movies that most people put at the bottom—Last Stand, Apocalypse, and the horribly panned Dark Phoenix—have in common? They’re the stories with the most undelivered upside to them—the stories that suffered the most from the external size restrictions that circumstances placed on the X-Men’s cinematic universe. They were corn stalks growing in tea cups.

I should note here that Dark Phoenix was actually much better than the reviews I’d read would have suggested; its 22% freshness score on Rotten Tomatoes—the lowest of any X-Men movie—is simply rubbish, one of the reasons why I think it behooves us all to think for ourselves and not take the opinions of others at face value. However, I do share one of the core concerns of many reviewers—pacing and scale.

The rise and fall of En-Sabah-Nur (a.k.a. Apocalypse) and the entirety of the Phoenix Saga should each warrant trilogies of their own—or at least could have been multi-movie arcs stretched over a longer and more multi-faceted series. A character with the potential to be the Fox franchise’s Thanos, Apocalypse was introduced and dispatched from the X-Men universe in just over two hours of film—less than that, if we exclusively consider his screen time. And while Sophie Turner had marginally more time to develop Jean Grey over two movies, it was wholly insufficient to elicit the emotional attachment that her story of corruption and redemption requires of viewers. What largely makes the Dark Phoenix arc so poignant in the comics is that it comes on the heels of her saving the universe from the mad Shi’ar emperor D’Ken—an epic that takes the team from the Earth to the stars and back again. And while Last Stand completely (and unceremoniously) pushes aside the classic romance of Marvel Girl and Cyclops to focus on Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, Dark Phoenix doesn’t really offer much to the (literally) star-crossed lovers either—offering them far too little visibility to warrant investment in their relationship.

The shame of it is that these stories—which we likely won’t see adapted again for a generation—are ripe for a MCU-type treatment. In many ways, Apocalypse and the Phoenix are both the Thanos-level threat that the X-Men universe deserved; he could/should have been the menace they’d spend years preparing for whereas she’d end up being the real omega-level threat that they never expected.

Ironically, with more time and a little more latitude, the Fox Marvel universe could have rivaled Disney’s MCU in terms of its scope and complexity. Disney has the Kree and Fox could have leveraged the Shi’ar. Disney has its Captain Marvel whereas Fox had the Silver Surfer. Disney has the Guardians of the Galaxy, and Fox could have leveraged the Starjammers—a band of misfit alien freedom fighters and wannabe space pirates led by a human captain who had been kidnapped from his homeworld. (Sound familiar?) Imagine if, instead of a Guardians movie introducing us to the existence of the Infinity Gems, we’d been treated to a Starjammers movie introducing the Shi’ar race and their connection to the Phoenix Force? It’s also notable that the Shi’ar Imperial Guard—one of the most powerful teams in the Marvel Comics library—would have made a great foil for the Starjammers before eventually confronting what would be a hopelessly overmatched X-Men team in the climax of the saga. (Think Thanos’s Black Order only with some more internal politics and moral ambiguity.) So the pieces were always there to create an expansive and interconnected movie franchise using the properties they had licensed.

You can argue that the market couldn’t have handled an expansion in the Fox offering—superhero fare already having saturated cinema in the last 10 years—and that would be a reasonable assertion. If so, then that just confirms that the die was cast the moment that Marvel Studios released its first feature—the first shot in a war that Fox couldn’t win. Because many of the stories that fans would want to see adapted from Fox’s portfolio can only be done justice through a slow build-up—time that the franchise was never going to have.

Prior missed opportunities notwithstanding, I think the best way that the franchise could have ended would have been in making the Phoenix Saga a two-part movie—ideally with a cliffhanger. I can think of one particular scene that could have served as a gut punch for audiences if placed at the end of a Part 1—evoking a similar emotional response to the ending of Infinity War. And while I did actually very much enjoy some of the significant deviations from the source material in the comics, I could picture the expanded run time accommodating the introduction of one or more of the absent plot threads mentioned above. But given that I’ve heard it rumored that late reshoots actually reduced the scope of the movie’s final set piece—to avoid potential conflicts with another Disney property—the chances of Fox’s merry mutants getting that kind of send-off were likely slim to none.

Would I suggest you go see Dark Phoenix? If you’ve enjoyed the First Class-era movies and if you’re a completionist, then you’ll likely want to see this one. In particular, I liked several of the scenes in the final moments of the picture that help to bookend the full series going back to 2000—so worthy of a watch from that perspective. But if you’re a dyed-in-the-wool comics fan who won’t be satisfied by anything other than an ideal treatment of this classic story, then you’re going to walk away disappointed—as you’ve presumably been disappointed by several other installments in the franchise. And given that the potential to fall short of expectations—the distance of the fall—is greatest for this most iconic of X-Men stories (and perhaps all Marvel Comics stories), your disappointment might likewise be greater here.

However you’ve viewed Fox’s stewardship of these characters, I think this final film in the core series is an earnest attempt to bring this MCU-adjacent pocket universe to a close. And whatever rises from its ashes, we can only hope it’s delivered without some of the handicaps that sometimes kept the original run from meeting or exceeding fan expectations. It’s hard to say how long that process will take, but you can be sure that the X-Men’s own phoenix-like return will be as anxiously anticipated as it is inevitable.