It's just another mutant fight comic, but with musical accompaniment. Read Full Review

I haven't been reading any of the X-Line lately, and this miniseries was my first real break back into it... It does not bode well. I read in the letter pages somewhere that they're just firing off these miniseries and seeing what works. That's not how you get a quality line, it seems, because this book is above all else, painfully boring. Ignoring the more specific issues I have with it, most anyone reading this book will be viscerally bored. Dazzler is not an interesting character here, and none of the supporting cast is given any time to shine themselves. It's perfunctory, at best.

My *real* issue with the miniseries is how blatantly the creators have transplanted Taylor Swift onto Dazzler. It's lazy and it really ruins the book for me because I can't read this character now without comparing her to Taylor Swift, someone I think is a terrible person. It's so bad that when Dazzler is speaking about mutant rights, I wonder if it's just as performative and insincere as when Swift speaks on marginalized people and their rights. Does Dazzler also choke the atmosphere with multiple daily private plane trips? Who did she silence to keep that under wraps? Did Dazzler intentionally block smaller mutant artists from taking her spot on the billboard charts with a nauseating amount of variants of her milquetoast, boring, much-too-long album? Is Dazzler also a billionaire who cynically takes up the mutant cause to appeal to a rabid fanbase? Modeling Dazzler on Taylor Swift specifically is so off because of the mutant rights angle the writer wants to pursue. It's naive and lazy. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. Some acknowledgment from the creators that things aren't so simple. But there is no other shoe. You could've modeled Dazzler on other, more fitting famous pop stars if you really needed to model her off of anyone. Billie Eilish or Charli XCX may have been more fitting. Hell, throw us for a loop and model her after Chappell Roan, as annoying as she can be (come at me, lesbians), and you get a better, more fitting tone and story here.

And these are just larger, more mainstream choices. You could hide the transplant much better, and maybe even highlight more Queer (since that would fit the mutant rights plotline) artists in the back, by getting inspiration from more indie pop artists: SOPHIE, Dorian Electra, Snail Mail, Adrianne Lenker, etc. It screams of an unaware creative team putting in the least amount of effort.

Not a good sign for the X-Line. more