Blue #27 preview came out. The site that gave the preview has all broken images, so I had to pull from elsewhere. I don’t want to post them directly here. But I know people need to see them, so I uploaded to my imgur. Here’s an album link.

Thoughts on Preview

I’m judging just by these pages. I’m not judging by what could and should have been. I’m judging by making the most of a bad situation. I’m judging by what’s possible now that we’re stuck with this scenario and it’s too late to be in a better one, cause you can’t just stop in the middle of a story arc and say “fuck it, let’s start over without Havok this time.”

These pages are good for the story arc we’re stuck with.

Lorna gets to outright say that it’s fucked up for her value to be seen as coming from her history with Havok and nothing of herself.

Lorna gets to have a positive interaction with her father, that doesn’t imply she’s dumber, weaker, etc compared to him.

Having Wildside show illusions of Magneto, Havok and Malice saying what they say works great here for one very important reason: it’s all at once. If you had an illusion of just Magneto, or just Havok, or just Malice, it might look like Lorna should be seen as “inferior” to that one character. Having all three at once provides a diluting effect. It shows she’s a multi-faceted character.

And honestly, it was kinda cool to see Lorna knock WIldside out with a punch. She used her powers to trap him, but that shows toughness outside her powers, meaning she’s committed enough to go beyond what her powers provide for her.

… That’s not all I have to say though. I have to say more surrounding Havok and the point we’ve reached because of Blue.

Thoughts on Havok

Short and simple: Lorna needs to be kept away from Havok for another 10 years.

Blue pushed it to that point. Improvements in Lorna’s treatment on Blue are good, but they’re too little, too late. 

I like to compare the current status of when Lorna and Havok might be viable interacting again to a poisoned well. You need to clean out the poison before it’s safe to consume. You need chemical agents to counteract the poison, and you need those agents to have enough time to fully get the job done.

In the case of Lorna and Havok, that means Lorna needs a lot of use with Havok not involved or mentioned much or at all. She also needs time for her use without Havok to have a real impact on perception and treatment of her.

What Blue did was dump massive amounts of fresh poison into the well.

I was serious when I said she needs enough time away from Havok to establish who she is without him. Marvel and/or Bunn chose not to listen. Because they chose not to listen, Lorna got screwed over for Havok’s benefit, exactly like I said would happen to her.

I didn’t say Lorna needs to be away from Havok for 10 years just to be pissy about Havok. I said it because I knew writers, and if not writers then Marvel as a whole, need that long to fully understand that Lorna is her own character with her own value and potential that has nothing to do with Havok. I knew the second Havok was around her, writers and Marvel would lose sight of Lorna and only see her as defined by Havok.

And I knew this would happen no matter who the writer was. You could get Neil Gaiman to write it and he’d screw it up. The problem isn’t the writer. It’s existing material.

There’s no taking what’s happened on Blue and writing it into a fix. There isn’t going to be some groundbreaking story that rights all wrongs and makes these two immediately viable.

Here’s why. Even if Bunn wrote the best story ever in all of existence and it happened to star Polaris and Havok, the next writer to come after Bunn would revert their relationship back to a toxic cesspool. They wouldn’t have enough material of Lorna without Havok to understand how to write Lorna well around him.

Lorna was on the path of potentially being viable around Havok again in… I’ll say probably 6-7 years. Purely because of Marvel putting Lorna in forced limbo for 2 years. But Blue disrupted the process and now it needs to start over.

So, 10 more years. That’s how long Lorna has to be away from Havok after this arc is done.