Defensive Gold
Daily Ramble 218: Defensive Gold
The Angels started their series against the Yankees Friday and I hope it’s not a precursor to another bad homestand. They played pretty well, even excellently on defense, but even so, they ended up losing in extra innings. They really need to start playing better at home.
Along with the start of that series, I started another series – X-Men: Gold – which turned out to be pretty good and looks to set up a new team configuration for the X-Men who are back to trying to get the humans to trust them again.
Extra Innings!
It was extras and it shouldn’t have been. I thought things would have been over much earlier but somehow the challenge didn’t go through when Calhoun caught and threw out Stanton at second. It was a great over the wall catch and a perfect throw to 2nd but somehow they ruled Gregorius touched home plate before the force out at 2nd base happened. Kinda close but it sure looked to me like the Yankees were given a gift there.
While Calhoun didn’t do anything at the plate, his defense deserves my Player of the Game. Not only did he rob Walker of that home run but he also made an earlier spectacular catch that robbed Torres of a hit in the 3rd.
On the offensive side of the plate, Ohtani smacked his 4th home run of the season in the 2nd but for some reason – I didn’t hear before the game was over – he left the game the 7th. Hopefully he’s ok. The other highlight was Simmons hitting a 2 run triple in the 7th.
Sadly the Angels lost the game in the 10th.
X-Men: Gold #1
Back to the Basics, Part 1 by Marc Guggenheim , Adrian Syaf, Jay Leisten, and Frank Martin. Published by Marvel Comics, 2017.
This is an interesting issue and for the most part I wasn’t really sure of the whole setup. As it is, we’ve got Old Man Logan, Kitty Pryde, Storm, Nightcrawler, Colossus, and Prestige as the group of X-Men this issue is concerned with. And while the people of the world may hate them, it’s Kitty’s goal to make sure the humans know the mutants are still gonna fight for them and save them from bad stuff. And the bad stuff starts almost as soon as the issue does.
Some guy named Terrax is attacking the city making a mess of the place and the team assembles to take him down. There’s a well choreographed fight that shows how the various members can contribute to a battle and it’s cool to see all these heroes doing their thing. The art is pretty nice and I particularly like everything that’s depicted in some of the larger scenes – not just a lot of stuff though, but tons of action going on simultaneously. Then when it’s appropriate, the granularity is adjusted and features disappear with body language expressing emotion rather than dialog. It’s very well put together.
So, the team takes down Terrax and head back to the school where they give us some background for those of us not up to speed. Apparently Storm lead the mutants into a war against the Inhumans and they lost. It couldn’t have been too bad since things seem to be working out for them now, but Storm isn’t very happy. Another backstory that indicates unhappiness is that Kitty and Peter, Colossus, seem to have had a relationship that’s in the past.
Hmm…quite a bit of baggage I don’t know about in this issue and I hope the future issues either don’t rely on knowing that stuff or they build up the explainintions of what’s gone on. Oh…at the end of the issue we get what appears to be an almost complete history of the X-Men – wow! It’s good stuff but, be prepared for a lot of reading though.
On the whole I enjoyed the issue and could see this turning into a nice series. I rate it a B-.