Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Astonishing X-Men (Vol. 3) Issue #14 – “Torn (Part 2)”! In the previous installment… look, let’s just say I don’t understand a fucking thing that’s happening and let’s move on. Maybe it will come together after this one.

Or maybe I’m going to have to give up reading comic books forever! Thanks, Joss Whedon.

Astonishing X-Men (Vol. 3), Issue #14 [June, 2006]
Written by: Joss Whedon
“Torn (Part 2)”

Hairy-ass Wolverine kissing Emma Frost? Fucking gross, dude. Come on.

“Is it very different without them?” asks Jean Grey.

“Well, there’s the blue,” responds Scott Summers. “I see blue, but it’s tinged… everything’s tinged with red. But now… well now I know you really are a redhead.”

Is that a pube joke? Come on.

Jean asks Scott if she made him sad. Scott’s like “aw hell naw bae, it’s all good.” He just has to think about controlling his power just about all the time, day in day out, for the rest of his life is all! No biggie.

Flash forward to the present where Emma tries to seduce Scott by looking like Jean.

“Oh, Scott, don’t you want a little taste?” she asks.

“Don’t touch me,” he responds. Rightfully so. Gross, dude. Come on.

Emma says she doesn’t mind if he gets all up in her Jean Grey-lookin’ guts. Scott says he doesn’t play games. Emma says that Scott only likes homework and vegetables. He probably agrees with that. Scott Summers is such a white loser.

She reminds him about their emotional affair while Jean was still alive. Psychic trysts, as she calls them. Does he think his conscience is clear, huh, hmm, huh? And the answer is no, absolutely not, he thinks about it just about all the time, day in and day out, for the rest of his life is all!

Eww, you turned me into Hugh Jackman?? Fucking gross. Come on.

Emma-Jean continues seducing Scott because “no” apparently doesn’t mean “no”. She leans in close… he doesn’t resist… then suddenly it’s Wolverine and Emma kissing. Because she turned back into herself and turned Scott into Wolverine, you see. He’s mad! She tells him to stop hiding it, that he has always wished to be him, the one that everyone remembers, the cool mutant.

Scott tackles this woman to the floor with a “DDDNYAAAGH!” He spikes her right through the goddamn chest with his SNIKITY SNIKT claws!

She gets up, unharmed. “Poor puppy, don’t you remember? You don’t have any claws.”

Scott, as Scott, looks down at this manipulative little wench and frowns. Oh, does he frown. Frown of the Year.

Meanwhile, Peter fucks Kitty so hard that she phases through the floor nude and lands in the level below where a hairy goblin kid is watching TV. She wraps her self up in a blanket and runs back upstairs embarrassed as the dickens. “Oh my God! Oh my God!” she keeps saying. She smiles at Peter when she returns to their bedroom. Fucking gross. Come on.

And now Scott is sitting at the edge of his bed while Emma continues making him feel bad. Jean was Xavier’s favorite. Hank is a genius. Warren looked like a god. Then there’s stinky ol’ you, sir, and you’re the one whom Xavier picked to lead? What is he, some sort of dolt? No, here’s the reason: and she gets right up in Scott’s ear: and she says: quietly: “Because you had nothing else.”

You would think at this point that Scott would tackle her again, but no. He just stands up and starts to tell her how she has no idea what she’s talking about. And what is Emma trying to achieve anyway? Getting Scott to poop his pants in a fit of blind rage. Because, honey, those pants are already full of poop.

No, she’s trying to find Scott. Whatever that means. He’s never trusted her, even after all the fuckin’ they’ve been doing. And the professor really let him down now after the whole Robot Medusa lab rat thing.

Not quite good enough yet for the Special Olympics, ha ha, but we’ll get there.

After more armchair psychology, Emma determines that Xavier had indeed given Scott the leader position out of pity. “Because he thought you’d wash out if you didn’t get a little boost.”

And then she lifts his chin up and goes all sorts of “AND IT WORKED, YOU’RE A LEADER AND YOU EVEN GET TO BONE YOURS TRULY!”

When Jean died, though, that’s when Scott felt like he lost control. Emma then asks if Scott wants to go to the Bug Room. And it’s like, no bitch, he doesn’t want to go to the Bug Room. Then he follows her to the Bug Room.

Up in space in that lavish, inefficiently designed space station, Agent Brand asks her little team “how sure they are”. Here’s the conversation:

“And how sure are we about this?”

“Well, it’s precog stuff, so there’s always–”

“How sure?”

“Zero dissent.”

“Sydren, you catching any of this?”

“I don’t read the future, but I’ve sniffed out the precogs and I sssmell certainty. And terror.”

“Yeah, it’s going around. Why now? Why do they all see it now?”

“We gotta figure it’s temporal. That it’s imminent.”

“And if our guys picked it up, the breakworld–”

“The closed down communication sixteen hours ago.”

And then this keeps going. Basically, something is going to attack mutants again. And it’s gonna be ugly. Not the “something”, the situation will be ugly. Although I’m sure the “something” will be ugly too.

“Agent Brand,” says Agent Bald Black Guy, “meet the destroyer of worlds.” He holds up a file folder and shows her Frankie Muniz.

Emma shows Scott some creepy visions of bugs in the Bug Room where she also shows him other shit he’s afraid of. Like the time he leapt out of the burning airplane that killed his parents, brother holding onto him for dear life. And other such fun memories. Emma tells him he’s afraid of his powers, but he’s really afraid of the truth!

After more truth bombs about still being that scared boy, Scott starts crying. Emma tells him to let go.

Let’s lighten the mood! Wolverine is eating cereal!

WHO-O-O-O-OOOAAA!! WHAT WON’T THIS GUY DO?!

Peter and Kitty come downstairs to the kitchen. Wolverine stares at each of them then goes back to his bowl. “’Bout time,” he says.

Because they fucked.

We end with Hank-Beast in his Lab O’ Science. He’s checking out some blips and bloops on a screen. A shadowy figure walks into the room. Hank mistakes the figure for Emma, but it ain’t Emma. It’s some lady! Let’s keep adding to the list of things I’m supposed to know but I don’t! Hank goes “oh god no” in a small voice, so I’m guessing this lady is either his ex-wife or his probation officer.

Emma leaves Scott on the bed, telling him he’s now free. He’s a drooling, catatonic mess for some reason, but his visor is off. His visor is off, revealing dead-looking, brown eyes. It’s quite gross.

Come on.

Final Thoughts

I DON’T KNOW WHAT’S GOING ON. Was I supposed to read 40 years of X-Men comics before getting to this one? Because let me tell you, this shit sucks! Grrr!

Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Astonishing X-Men (Vol. 3) Issue #13 – “Torn (Part 1)”! After a long break, we’re back with some more Joss Whedon X-Men “excitement”! In the previous storyline, the Danger Room that Professor Xavier built up at the school has malfunctioned after Wing, the flying kid, kills himself inside of it. This causes the Danger Room to become sentient and start terrorizing the mutants, eventually manifesting itself as a robot named “Danger”, but I liked to endearingly call her “Robot Medusa”.

Robot Medusa flies to the ruins of Genosha, a fake country presumably near Africa or the Middle East that was the site of an attack on mutants that killed 16 million of the bastards. Professor Xavier is there hiding out for some reason. Anyway, he’s able to keep her at bay until the rest of the X-Men team arrive. They fight her, and then they fight some giant Mega-Beast (the one that razed Genosha), and then they win.

Afterward they learned that Xavier was treating Robot Medusa like a lab rat for years, which pissed off the team. Wolverine likens Xavier’s immoral behavior to Magneto.

Oh yeah, and Frost is still not to be trusted. Watch out for her.

Astonishing X-Men (Vol. 3), Issue #13 [April, 2006]
Written by: Joss Whedon
“Torn (Part 1)”

“Some time ago”, Frost asks an elderly man (or woman, I can’t tell) dressed as either a big-game hunter or a World War I recreationist “why me.” The response she gets is “Because you’re a predator, Miss Frost.”

Yeah, a sexual predator. Woozle wuzzle!

Frost tells this man/woman that he/she seems pretty confident that he/she won’t be stopped. The individual is like “Bitch, please, you won’t even remember you were here.”

“They’re all going to die, Emma,” the woman (I’ve decided that she’s a woman) narrows her eyes. “Millions, in minutes. No warning, no escape – and you’re going to be right in the middle of it.”

Sounds awfully attractive, Your Honor! But she’ll take a pass on this one, fam.

Don’t back out yet, Emma! You’ll survive this shit via “secondary mutation” and this old lady and her people are going to “create” one for her! Not at all confusing, right?! I’m glad we’re done with this scene. The woman looked like Spider-Man’s Aunt May on meth and she was making me very uncomfortable!

Wolverine addresses a pile of sad students. He tells them that nothing has changed. Students are gone, sure. Shit went down, ok. But did anything change? Nothing that matters changed. “What matters is the fight,” he says, and I’d be rolling my eyes right about now if I were one of these pissant little kids. “What matters is the last time you were in this room… you all wussed out.”

What’s-her-name — Wing’s friend. She tells him “uh, sir, sorry, sir, but the Danger Room is where I found my dead friend, sir.” And Wolverine, he just waves her off and goes “self-pity is for people named Cyclops” and leaves it at that.

The Danger Room has just gotten more dangerous, though! It may be offline, but watch this: KILL THE LIGHTS! *does the Wolverine “SNIKT”* See?

Sort of looks like my friend’s dorm room with a little more decoration.

Beast and Cyclops are in a lab both wondering what the other is doing there and why. Very suspicious on both ends! Also, they discuss the possibility that Wolverine might kill all the kids, but they don’t spend too much time focused on that! Not until Wolverine starts killing all the kids, then they’ll take it seriously!

Outside, Kitty Pryde and Russian Peter are chilling under a tree. They seem happy, like nothing short of an unexpected visitor could shatter this lovely little bubble of theirs… oh hey, look over there, an unexpected visitor! A man approaches the tree and addresses Kitty. She gasps in both recognition and butt cramps. “Dad! This is impossible!” She hugs him so hard it shatters half his already-tender ribs.

“Oh, Daddy…”

“I know you’ve got a lot of questions, Kitten. I just have one.”

Dad, stop melting! You’re embarrassing me in front of my boyfriend!

Kitty wakes up from her sudden weird fugue state. It’s chalked up to a bad dream, and she and Peter go right back to sexy huggin’.

While staring out the window overlooking the school grounds, Emma is asked if she’s having fun. She’s with the Hellfire Club, whoever they are, and they want to get down to business. The old man/woman is there, and I still say she’s a woman even though it’s impossible to tell!

“You show up with no regard for… I could hear every word you thought in Genosha,” says Frost to the woman.

“But Xavier couldn’t,” responds the woman. “Dear Charles was the only real threat to our little cabal, and he was well wrapped up in his own problems as always.”

I don’t know what these fools are talking about or why, and they’re making me sleepy so I’m going to take a nap now.

Zzzz.

Merzbow! Merzbow! Merzbow! Merzbow!

And we’re back! The consensus in the room is that action must be taken, whatever that means. Emma is the only one who doesn’t want to “take action”. A guy named Sebastian wants to make the room aware of two things: 1) there’s an actual mission that needs to be adhered to, and 2) they were all brought together by one person and her voice is the last one that needs to be heard on the matter.

*Celine Dion clears her throat*

The woman is named Perfection and she’s completely hooded like Death himself. She points a gloved hand at Emma. “Your game is first,” she says. I hope all of this makes sense quickly or I’m going to eat a butt in outer space!

Atop a giant flying carrier, S.H.I.E.L.D. Director Maria Hill is speaking with the green-haired woman Agent Brand, ugh. I don’t remember who she is or why she’s important. This write-up is horrible. “The mutant situation is still a threat, and I will continue to monitor the X-Men in–” then she gets cut off by Hill, who tells Brand that she’s broken every law she’s ever heard of, including ones no one has heard of. Plus, she’s harboring an intergalactic criminal. If that ain’t illegal then I don’t know what is.

Nick Fury is toast, lady. Brand isn’t going to run with the ball wherever she damn well feels like it anymore! Brand disagrees, saying that Hill is just in the way of any and all of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s operations. Hill calls Brand a thug. Brand gets in her rocket ship and blasts off to some orbiting space station! The space station looks cool as shit and it’s better than some dumb rotating Babylon 5 bullshit, I’ll tell you that much. It’s so cool-looking that it needs its own full-page spread, baby. That’s the stuff.

Meanwhile, Kitty Pryde sits up in her bed mulling things over.

Honey, if you gotta say it, then you ain’t it.

Bracing herself for whatever it is that she’s afraid of (a plate of butts in outer space?), Pryde enters Peter’s room and starts babbling about nonsense for seven panels. It takes her a while to get to the point, which is this: she wants to break up with him for no reason whatsoever, but then he kisses her tenderly on the face hole and that’s the end of that notion!

Emma Frost is watching creepily from a distance down the hall. She turns around to head back to her own room, but as she turns the doorknob that Perfection lady with the hood an’ shit pops in out of nowhere and tells her that she knows what’s going on between her and Scott Summers. She knows what’s going on and none of the rest of the Hellfire Club knows shit!

“You really love him,” says Perfection. It’s not a question.

“With all my predator’s heart,” Emma responds flatly.

Emma enters the room where Scott is filling out paperwork or handwriting his manifesto or doing Sudoku puzzles, I can can’t really tell. She tells him to come to bed, that she has a surprise for him (a plate of butts). He doesn’t want to tear away from his paperwork.

“…I’m wearing your favorite outfit…” she says, turning herself to look exactly like Jean Grey. That’s not weird at all. Jesus.

Final Thoughts

Whatever, Joss Whedon. You better make this make sense quickly or I’m burning all my Angel DVDs.