Personally I disagree there. Well... I mean I definitely agree we have our own personal preferences to how Rogue should behave in the comics as a character, but I do think there were positives to that era of Rogue in the media. The biggest one IMO is reminding people that Rogue's original power is her absorption. I prefer her having the flying brick set but if a writer ignores her base power they are not writing her right IMO. It's a common issue that writers will ignore her absorption powers when she has her flying brick set. Or worse, her absorption gets treated like a complete handicap.
TAS was very guilty of this as well. How many times did TAS Rogue actually use her absorption powers to beat an enemy instead of getting overwhelmed and treated as a weakness? Way too much.
Compared to Evolution, where she only has one power available. It's like night and day, she's not as afraid to touch opponents and uses her powers creatively. I would say Evolution did a ton in helping to portray how dangerous and effective her base absorption powers were. Carey also did this, I don't necessarily like that he felt like he needed to strip away permanently absorbed powers, but I appreciate the era with how Rogue was written as thinking more outside the box because she couldn't just rely in being invulnerable to get her out of tough situations.
Ideally we'd have a Rogue that could balance giving the high-action of being a super-strong and mobile high-flying character with the creativity of having the ability to steal powers from other superhuman, but that's rare to see. I think it's helpful to see both sides and to remind the audience that's she's not one or the other in terms of power-set, both should be core to her identity. It's funny because I started out disliking Evo Rogue for similar reasons like design and her stripped down powers but now I like her just as much as TAS Rogue.
I don't disagree that there were SOME positives , but I do think the negatives far outweighed them.
Seeing Rogue use her absorption power to a great degree was good feature of Evo, but it was all she had so of course that's what she would use.
But Evo also recognized that she wasn't much of a threat until she had absorbed someone's powers, so she typically had to sneak up and absorb someone from behind before she could really do anything, and that just got old quickly to me.
That's why I much prefer when she's got both flying brick and absorption powers, since that makes her so much more powerful, versatile, and independent.
Evo and subsequent cartoons just helped to keep the powered-down Rogue version around longer.
There will always be PIS where they will want to take Rogue out of a fight for some reason and they'll use her absorption to make her overload, or forget she has invulnerability and KO her in some other ridiculous way.
But when you get a good writer, you can definitely write a Rogue that makes good use of superstrength and absorption simultaneously on a regular basis.
The high school aspect of Evo was the other thing didn't like, I like adult superheroes with adult problems. I'm not interested in seeing X-Men worrying about who's taking who to the school dance and such.
I definitely mourned the loss of the flying brick powers post X-Treme and cheered when she got them back in Uncanny Avengers but looking back I don't mind the latter era of Rogue only having her basic abilities.
Mostly it was just Austen and Milligan being bad writers that soured me during that time. The movies were a lost cause from the start. The only casualty I think was Wolverine and the X-Men but that show had some design concept issues as it was. It leaned a bit too heavily into foxverse canon, giving Rogue the sidekick role and being make her diet Evo Rogue.
As for Evo Rogue being less of a threat while not siphoning a power, well yes, but I wouldn't say she was exactly defenseless either. She actually showed some impressive combat and acrobatic skills that were cool to see once in a blue moon.
Granted Gambit had kidnapped her and Cyclops had to deflect some of bones from Sypke, but still. You rarely see Rogue flex in this department because of the brick powers, she never needs to; but she's clearly competent at it.
I agree that CC is one of the few writers able to balance those aspects of her powers. It's sad that he seemed to get bored of Rogue with that set and decided to consistently miss her powers whenever he got the chance to write in the 21st century.
As for disliking the high school setting, that's fair. It doesn't really bother me much but I get how it can get grating to see the characters act so young and immature.
WIP X-Men 1 cover by Rian Gonzales
Some of the most powerful scenes of the 90s I felt was Rogue using her powers to learn about Mags. Not all of it could be seen by her.
Last edited by jmc247; 06-05-2021 at 08:45 AM.
Oh wooow, that WIP cover looks nice already. I can already tell it's gonna be my favorite variant cover.
I wonder which book the X-Men team announcement is taking place in?
Yea it became clear CC needed strong editorial influence to make his plots more coherent. Otherwise, he runs wild.
And OMG, I forget the card variants was a thing. I'm so looking forward to that as well.
Hopefully they correctly state that she has Wonder Man level powers rn, instead of defaulting to her old Ms Marvel stats
I doubt it's Excalibur lol.Originally Posted by AppleJ
Hmm, I'm guessing it's either Planet-Size or SWORD. Maybe leaning toward S.W.O.R.D. because its near the end of the reading order and I feel like Planet-Size will focus on the omegas and whatever they're doing on Mars.
Oops, forgot about X-Men 21. Yea that's a strong possibility.
Here's a fun new J. Scott Campbell cover for X-Men #1.
IMG_20210607_132909.jpg
Not too bad.
Yeah, I have to agree. I'm not counting on Excalibur for actual meanful content for Rogue at this point.
That Optic blast through the diamonds feat...never made any sense. Coolz AF, visually, but senseless...given what we know of Cyclops' optic blasts.
Lord Ewing *Praise His name! Uplift Him in song!* Your divine works will be remembered and glorified in worship for all eternity. Amen!