S/D X-Men Runs

The Claremont/Byrne/Austin <i>Uncanny</i> run (up through #143, especially the final year) is really what defined the characters and the franchise...

When did the Byrne run start? Like I said, I've got it from #111 through 130 (I'll have to get the last 13).

I think the Claremont/John Romita Jr. run was quite good too, Claremont's writing only got shitty after that "Fall of the Mutants" storyline (where they fight Chaos).

I'd also suggest trying to find the X-Men/New Mutants crossover where they go to Asgård, and the X-Men/Alpha Flight annual(?), where someone finds a fountain in Canada that gives everyone who enters it superpowers. Those are about as classic Claremont as it gets, and they're pretty easy to read out of continuity.

I'm not mad on that Asgardian Wars one. But hey.

There is some of the later Claremont stuff where Genosha is introduced, the island paradise built on enslavement of mutants. I liked that.

My favorite period of Claremont's run was from just before the Mutant Massacre up through halfway through the Australian era. About 190something on through 230something, just before Inferno comes around. But that was my entry point to the series, so I'm a bit biased. You can get most of that stuff in the two most recent volumes of Essential X-Men.

The Genosha storyline comes early in the Australia era -- the early 230s, I believe. That's a really fabulous storyline, and pretty much the last truly great idea Chris Claremont ever had.

If you don't know what we're talking about re: Australia -- in Uncanny #227, a group of X-Men featuring some mainstays and some new recruits "die" to save the world, but they are given another shot at life by this mystical chick called Roma. They decide that it would be for the best to let the world believe that they are dead so they can shake off their enemies (specifically the Marauders) and presumably work with greater efficiency in secret. They establish a new headquarters in the Australian outback, and that is the status quo for a few years until the group falls apart and is eventually replaced by a new line-up in the first Jim Lee run.

Avoid Inferno and everything to do with it like the plague, this was the nadir of X-Men.

I remember thinking it had its moments. Or maybe the tie-in bits of other titles were fun (like in Daredevil where buidlings were coming alive and eating people for no obvious reason).

I think Inferno jump-started my critical faculties when I was a kid. It was perhaps the first moment when I realized a comic I'd been eagerly reading for years wasn't really that good anymore.

Mordechai: the Byrne / Claremont run began w/ #108, but that's actually the final issue of a 4 or 5-part storyline (featuring SPACE PIRATE SHENANIGANS). #109 & #110 are one-offs, I think - the former deals w/ Wolverine's Canadian shenanigans. #111, IIRC, is the start of a Savage Land / Magneto / X-Babies story (which was pretty swell).

Of course, you cut yourself off (@ #130) just before THE DARK PHOENIX SAGA and DAYS OF FUTURES PAST, so you'll definitely want to catch up w/ those.

I would link to the old ILC X-Men: Classic / Dud thread, but I can't find the damn thing.

I think Inferno had some good parts too, but they were written Louise Simonson, who I think was better than Claremont at that point. If I remember correctly, the New Mutants part of the story was better than the X-Men issues.

If you don't know what we're talking about re: Australia -- in Uncanny #227, a group of X-Men featuring some mainstays and some new recruits "die" to save the world, but they are given another shot at life by this mystical chick called Roma.

This was the finale of the "Fall of the Mutants" story I mentioned earlier. Though actually Claremont had been building the story up to this for two or three years, starting from when Forge and Naze were first introduced, which is why it felt pretty special. Even though Inferno was probably even a bigger event storywise (what with all that Jean Grey and Madelyne stuff finally resolved), I thought this was the high point of Claremont's X-Men, and it was downhill after that.

Anyway, since this is my 2nd-to-last day @ my current job, I can squat on this thread & bore the shit out of y'all w/ recommendations. Unfortunately, if you actually want to read hard-copies of my recommendations, the cheapest route would involve springing for the Marvel Essentials B&W reprints, so consider these things you follow up on if you're really jonesin' for a fix:

- #162-183: about 2 years' worth of post-Byrne 80s-era Claremont; the first few issues are the start of THE BROOD WAR (The Brood being space aliens a la Alien, but instead of chest-bursting, they just transmogrify their hosts).

The last 2 issues of that storyline (165 & 166, A DOUBLE SIZED EVENT) are the start of Paul Smith's much-too-short & under-appreciated (outside of the Perpetua household) art tenure, which featured the Morlocks, the first app of Jean Grey look-alike Madeleine Pryor, Rogue hooking up w/ the team, Wolverine in Japan (back when it wasn't happening every other month), & Storm going punk rock. He leaves w/ issue 175 (A DOUBLE SIZED EVENT), featuring the "return" of Dark Phoenix (OR IS IT) and the new X-artist, John Romita Jr.

177 and 178 have a New Brotherhood of Evil Mutants thing going on, which I was always a sucker for, & after that, IIRC, Claremont started writing self-enclosed one-issue stories focusing on one or two X-folks. I end w/ 183 because it's a great little Juggernaut / Colossus throwdown, and the very next issue starts off the Rachel Grey NEVER-ENDING RETURN TO DAYS OF FUTURE PAST stuff, which lingers around the X-books for the next, oh, 20 years or so.

- I 2nd Tuomas' Asgard / X-story recommendation, mostly because of the art (Paul Smith one more time, & Art Adams!!!) Of course, this story happens in: NEW MUTANTS SPECIAL #1, X-MEN ANNUAL #9, and X-MEN / ALPHA FLIGHT #1-2, so, um, happy hunting!

- Uncanny #190-191 is an awesome biff whang pazow 2-part storyline guest-starring just about everyone in the Marvel Universe fighting Kulan Gath (a sorceror from Conan stories, I think!) sending NYC back in time to the days of, um, Conan. No Conan, tho there's plenty of Dr. Strange.

- Uncanny #202-203 is John Romita Jr. drawing Sentinels - nuff said!

&, um, I'm kinda stumped after that (tho I can probably think of more if given time, so watch out! (Sorry if the "well DUH" refs to artists are alienating, BTW - a quick Google image search for them can probably tell you if you'd like their work or not, tho.)

Though actually Claremont had been building the story up to this for two or three years...

Ha - that's the boon and the bane of Claremont's run after Byrne left. He would start introducing all these plotlines, & tease them out interminably. I'm pretty sure an assload of plotlines he began were either left unresolved or simply tied up in a slipshod fashion.

Inferno is the perfect example - it involved Madeleine Pryor (who was or was not a clone of Jean Grey) becoming the Goblin Queen (thanks to Sym & Nastir'h, two demons tied into the X-verse), as well as Mr. Sinister (a newly introduced supervillain w/ deep-seeded ties to Cyclops' family) (& notice the phonetic resemblance between "Sinister" / "Sym/Nastir'h" - ooooooh!). Just involving those 4 characters involved about 6 or 7 dangling plot threads (from Uncanny & a few other X-books as well). And though this was supposed to resolve a lot of crap, it was more like a dead stop to the crap that was supposed to be resolved, & was about as satisfying as a getting a root canal.

&, sadly (because of editorial dictates, the need for more event-driven storylines, or CC simply resting on his laurels), Claremont didn't get any better at starting & stopping his stories successfully.

A link to the old thread will probably reveal that I've probably repeated myself word-for-word but WHATEVER.

Possibly of interest:

Chris Claremont: C/D
here is where we list CCCs (Chris Claremont Cliches)

Ha - that's the boon and the bane of Claremont's run after Byrne left. He would start introducing all these plotlines, & tease them out interminably. I'm pretty sure an assload of plotlines he began were either left unresolved or simply tied up in a slipshod fashion.

That's true. I remember the story which came during the Australian era, when for some reason all the other X-Men except Wolverine decided to enter the magic portal Roma gave them, which was supposed to end their lives and reincarnate them. Now, it wasn't even explained why they just suddenly decided to do this, and the magic portal didn't even reincarnate them, they just dropped off in different parts of the world staying basically the same. Except that Psylocke became an Asian women with massive boobs, a totally wtf plot turn which seemed to serve no other purpose than provide Jim Lee (who'd just begun to draw the series) an hot Asian babe to draw. I still read the series for a year or two after that, but it was never explained why the magic portal didn't reincarnate them like Roma said it would.

So should we blame Claremont for not resolving Wolverine's origin & the whole Days of Future Past / The Twelve stuff, or should we blame the folks that actually TRIED to resolve that nonsense? Personally, I kinda liked that both these threads were left unresolved (tho they were milked more than I would've liked, from what I remember), & while it's a bit much to ask for in committee-written serial fiction, leaving these suckers unresolved would've been better in the long run (until someone actually brought A GOOD STORY to the table to deal w/ this stuff).

</obvious>

<i>Avoid Inferno and everything to do with it like the plague, this was the nadir of X-Men.</i>

Oh God, Inferno isn't that good, but yeeee, there's much lower lows once you get into the 90s! I mean, actually, I'd say the all-time low for X-Men is the Chuck Austen run from this decade.

- I 2nd Tuomas' Asgard / X-story recommendation, mostly because of the art (Paul Smith one more time, & Art Adams!!!) Of course, this story happens in: NEW MUTANTS SPECIAL #1, X-MEN ANNUAL #9, and X-MEN / ALPHA FLIGHT #1-2, so, um, happy hunting!

I love that storyline too, but it's not exactly hard to find -- it's all in the Asgardian Wars trade, which goes in and out of print, but should be easy enough to acquire via the internet.

The Twelve thing, that's post-Claremont, right? There's all kinds of inane bullshit in the early to mid-90s, it's like they were trying to outdo the master when it came to dangling plots.

Now, I haven't read the end of the Australian era in a looooooooooooooooooong time, but if I recall correctly, Wolverine was out of the picture when the remainder of the team went through the Siege Perilous. He was crucified by the Reavers, remember? Storm and Rogue were presumed dead, Longshot disappeared, and Wolverine and Jubilee went off in their own direction. I can't remember the plot circumstances exactly, but I think the last four X-Men felt cornered and hopeless, and so they went through the SP that Roma provided as a last resort. I mean, it's all plot mechanics -- those characters were written out of the story, but it also set up Claremont with the opportunity to come back to them later on in somewhat surprising ways.

Going back to Inferno -- I think the thing I take away from that storyline is that it was the point where Claremont et al just threw down and said "you know what? we're going to be as pervy as we've always wanted to be. Madelyne Pryor and Alex Summers are going to have an affair and wear the sluttiest outfits EVER, and the X-Men will be turned into EVIL FREAKS, and there will be DEMONS and FIRE and SEVERE ANGST and RITUALS INVOLVING BABIES." It's a pretty batshit storyline!

Yeah, but it's BORING batshit (thought it's definitely more competent than the truly batshit Chuck Austen nonsense, which we shd avoid discussing at all costs).

X-Men #56 - #65 by Roy Thomas and Neal Adams

Wasn't the explanation for the X-Men going into the Siege Perilous that Psylocke was mildly controlling their minds? She knew that like some bad guy was coming, and thought that they'd all be killed, so she convinced everybody to escape into the Seige Perilous instead of staying and fighting?

not to be too repetitious, but round about 1985, every element of Claremont became unreadable to me. I'd chalk this up to being indulged as the golden goose of Marvel, with no one to rein him in (ie Byrne). Shooter apparently was the disciplinarian with everyone else…but Claremont was perceived to have been doing something right, as the X-franchise rilly started to heat up then.

I'm open to the idea that something afterward could be worthwhile, but I came across the first issue he did with Jim lee in the early '90s, and I couldn't take it. I don't think its at all a stretch to say that the Claremont Byrne run set the agenda for '80s super hero comics, and is thus one of the most influential and, yes, best runs ever.

It's not that fun to read now, though. I don't know. I guess I'm too young.

Do any of you have issues numbers for the Australian storyline recommended above? (I can only work off numbers.) Also, David, thanks for the recommendations. I picked em all up.

Wasn't the explanation for the X-Men going into the Siege Perilous that Psylocke was mildly controlling their minds? She knew that like some bad guy was coming, and thought that they'd all be killed, so she convinced everybody to escape into the Seige Perilous instead of staying and fighting?

Maybe, but this doesn't explain why they weren't reincarnated, as Roma said they would, and instead returned more or less the same. And why did that siege thing change Psylocke's ethnicity and cup size?

I always hated Silvestri's art on the Australia run, though the crucified-Wolverine story was good.

Good X-Runs not yet mentioned:

Uncanny when Jim Lee started - around 267-8-280: the set-up for the X-franchise status quo in the 90s, a good space-story, some great team-coming-back-together stuff and very nice art throughout. CAUTION: I have not read these issues since they came out, they may well not stand up AT ALL.

THE AGE OF APOCALYPSE - I think I am alone on ILC in thinking this was good! It's definitely the highlight of 90s X-Men and the heart of that era in the way "Future Past" is the heart of 80s X-Men. "Issue Numbers" are a nightmare - it was a set of 8 or 9 interlocking mini-series - but the whole thing is being reissued as a series of bumper GNs. AVOID the dreadful "oh I suppose we'd better look at the rest of the marvel universe then" mini (X-Chronicles?) but almost everything else is good and fits together very well. You also need to read "Legion Quest", the lead-in, whose issue numbers I completely forget.

NEW MUTANTS 18-34 - you probably also need to read an early NM issue to see who the characters are. This is Bill Sienkiewicz' run on the comic which allowed - or forced! - Claremont to get a bit more grown-up and experimental in his storytelling. Really gorgeous stuff here, the issues with Professor X's multiple-personality kid (26-28) are particularly memorable but even when the stories are lame the art is gorgeous.

The Siege Perilous didn't transform Psylocke, the Hand did. They basically switched Betsy's mind into the new body of a woman called Kwannon.

All four of them -- Psylocke, Colossus, Havok, and Dazzler -- emerged from the Siege amnesiacs, reborn at least in the sense of being blank slates.

Ah, okay. Did Psylocke ever get her old body back, or did she prefer the new babe look?

I thought that The Twelve thing was mostly Rob L1efe1d's fault- if I'm thinking of the right story, it was something to do with Cable and Cannonball and a set of immortal mutant Illuminati-types (back before they fucked up when no-one knew Cable's origin)

Wasn't that around when New Mutants became X-Force? Which iirc was about the time my X-Disenchantment set in and I went off to read DC stuff.

xpost
The Claremont/Sienkewicz New Mutants is absolutely extraordinary; I have no idea how any of it got past the mediocrity police. The Demon Bear, Warlock and Magus etc. - there's a load of utterly mental stuff in that run.

Bill S actually only draws up to 31, but 32-34 are a very good story drawn by Leialoha which finishes up a few of the plot threads from the "Gladiators" story in 29-31.

my recollection is that Excalibur was still being written by Claremont around the time of Inferno, and was a bag of fun. It was basically an X-Men spin-off, with Kitty Pryde and Nightcrawler going to the UK to team up with Captain Britain and Mrs Captain Britain for no obvious reason.

The Siege Perilous didn't transform Psylocke, the Hand did. They basically switched Betsy's mind into the new body of a woman called Kwannon.

I thought she was captured by some Asian criminal, brainwashed into being a martial arts fighter, and had her features changed to look Chinese because he was rascist.

But she was captured because of the Seige Perilous (I think)!

That whole post-Fall of the Mutants phase (despite some semicool Brood & Savage Land shenanigans) makes me sad.

So should we blame Claremont for not resolving Wolverine's origin & the whole Days of Future Past / The Twelve stuff,

I vote no, because neither of these were really his stories. IIRC, the Twelve were alluded to in Louise Simonson's X-Factor and sat untouched until a bad 90s storyline decided to pick them up. Not to be confused with the even worse earlier 90s Liefeld storyline that Stone Monkey is thinking of.

Wolverine's origin was basically a non-issue in the mainline X-books, it was really emphasized elsewhere, like the "Weapon X" storyline etc. I never got the impression Claremont really cared, and he was subject to surprisingly few Claremontian danglers as far as I remember.

I like pretty much the entire Claremont run from whenever it stops being horrendously 70s and cheesy (let's say 110, 120?) up through the Australian period. Certainly there are highs and lows within that...Fall of the Mutants is not exactly great, but the Brood story, the Paul Smith period as a whole, Dark Phoenix, Kulan Gath etc etc, all deserve the hype. One very underrated period IMO is the JRJr era, when the theme seemed to be "let's try just heaping continuous abuse on the X-Men." This would later become so much the default position of the entire line that it's hard to realize how striking the year or so covering Nimrod and the Mutant Massacre are. Rachel Grey may epitomize a failure of long-term planning - she shows up, angsts around for a while, then leaves without accomplishing anything - but she does kickstart an era where bleakness is for once convincing rather than gratuitous. Nightcrawler's speech in issue ??? sets the tone well - "Thunderbird - killed! Jean Grey - killed! Where will it all end?" It all ends with the IMO absolutely harrowing final scene in 211, which still sends shivers up my spine... ahem, anyway....

I would second the recommendations for New Mutants, and extend them up to issue 50 to include a fairly fun (if predictabale) time-travel arc. The stuff with Bill S. on art really can't fail, but you'll want to keep going past that to get the meat of Magneto's term as headmaster. There's a reason people are still nostalgic for that period and continue to regard the evil Magneto as some sort of editorial betrayal, fifteen years down the line. Naturally, this period includes the Asgard crossover that keeps getting justifiably upped, so grab that too - it takes place around #35 or so if I recall correctly. Proceed past issue 50 at your own risk, it gets hairy fast. If you grow attached to the characters (as you might well do), you're better served by (brace yourself) fanfic, especially Connie Hirsch's canonical epic "Kid Dynamo."

A little later in NM continuity but readable on its own is the Jo Duffy-penned miniseries "Fallen Angels," which is probably my favorite bit of X-ephemera ever. Eight goofy but convincing issues of a motley crew of outcast mutants including a Tyrannosaurus Rex and two lobsters. 1987 doesn't get any better than that.

Stepping outside the 80s "golden age" there's not much I can recommend wholeheartedly that you haven't already read. Lobdell and Bachalo's "Generation X" from the 90s is IMO really good although it has its detractors and quickly gets bad after the first twenty-five issues or so. The four-issue Age of Apocalypse tie-in, "Generation Next," is another one of those books where bleakness convinces in a good way, although it's about as subtle as a sledgehammer. This is back when Bachalo could draw a lot better, too.

Etc.

Am I crazy or was Inferno HEAVILY influenced by DC's proto-vertigo Swamp Thing and Hellblazer runs of "Hell comes to comictown" storyline arcs?
In any case it was pretty horrible.

It all ends with the IMO absolutely harrowing final scene in 211, which still sends shivers up my spine... ahem, anyway....

That issue really did a number on me when I first read it as a little kid. I feel like my taste in genre fiction is basically defined by my very early exposure to the Mutant Massacre and the Empire Strikes Back.

Picked up buying Uncanny X-men at 206, although i'd been reading a friend's copies for a year or so. Mutant Massacre is probably the peak for me in retrospect, as i became more interested in the back issues than whatever happened later in Australia. Couldn't afford to buy them past 160 back then, as the local shop marked everything past that to obscene prices.

When the early Claremont stuff was reprinted in Classic X-Men, i loved it, until the comic book shop went under.

Feel uncomfortable with the Dazzler teams. I still remember seeing on the stands in the supermarket the covers with her wearing facepaint and mirrorball around her neck. (I liked Shogun Warriors then though.) She'd be cooler if she stuck with that look instead of playing dress-up with whatever Claremont thinks the kids are digging. Between Dazzler and Lila the spacejumper, i winced a lot at all music references in X-Men.

Inferno did not happen. Abysmal. It's odd that right now "New X-Men" (New Mutants) is bring back Belasco and Magik.

Loathed Louise Simonson & Bret Blevins for screwing up New Mutants, even though Claremont probably would have done that well himself. The Claremont/Sienkiewicz run on New Mutants might even be the favorite of the '80s X-titles. I'm reluctant to go back to read too much of this stuff

Very fond of the Kulan Gath and the Asgard stories too. It felt right that Asgard had a lasting impact on the New Mutants as well.

Wasn't Psylocke brought into the X-Men fold with a New Mutants story?

Part of the reason why i started following comics again in earnest was because of reading the Morrison X-Men run.

I have an irrational hope that Ellis' run on Astonishing will be vaguely like Nextwave.

THE AGE OF APOCALYPSE - I think I am alone on ILC in thinking this was good!

HI I'M STILL HERE TOM

I need to start reading comics industry nonsense again because I had NO IDEA Ellis was taking over Astonishing!!!!!! omg ditto to the Nextwave hopes

In the Newsarama interview, he claims that the nu-Nextwave (the title he writes totally for himself) is Thunderbolts, so I'm guessing this will be more like his "straight" superhero stuff.

I think Psylocke's first (American?) appearance was in a New Mutants Annual (#2, I think), so I'm pretty sure orb_q gets some sort of prize. Maybe.

Ellis is taking over Astonishing?! I don't know whether I'm thrilled or disappointed.. considering the scheduling delays that have plagued the book and its completely mysterious status in continuity, I was sort of hoping Whedon's run would end and that would be it...you would buy a big omnibus edition proclaiming "WHEDON - CASSADAY : ASTONISHING X-MEN," thrill to the spills and chills, and move on. As an continuing part of the X-landscape, I just dunno. I'd hate to see it with any other artist but Cassaday, but at the same time it will never, ever be timely enough to be relevant with him on art.

Ellis is getting PHASE II or somesuch put in the title, specifically so you can treat the Whedon/Cassady run as one discrete chunk.

Although i wasn't really serious about Astonishing being the new Nextwave, it would make more sense in an odd way, in that it's a comic driven less by expositional writing and more by big explosions and spit-takes, without a looming sense of rigid adherence to continuity.

Yeah, it seems like they are doing the right thing with Astonishing X-Men --- on one hand, it's a boutique title where big names can come in and do something that isn't subject to the whims of the rest of the line, and it's obviously geared towards building up a strong library of trade paperbacks. On the other, Whedon did season 4 and 5 of New X-Men, and Ellis is doing seaon 6 and presumably 7.

I came to the X-Men rather late in the game (except for the random Claremont issues I read here and there as a kid and didn't understand in the slightest out of context). A few years back, I read everything (and I mean everything...blechhh) from the beginning of Claremont's run through to right before New X-Men in one huge rush. Not much of Claremont's run really stuck with me (although I liked it a lot and look forward to re-reading it much more slowly soon). The period of time when Uncanny and New Mutants kind of bled into one another was fun. I was quite surprised that the Scott Lobdell era was much better than I remembered it being, particularly around the time when Romita was doing the art. So that was good. And I'm always a huge shill for the brief Alan Davis solo run on Excalibur.

(See also, <A HREF="Astonishing X-Men C/D;>Astonishing X-Men C/D</A>.)

ARGH

Astonishing X-Men C/D

I come back from Comic Con and Tuomas has contributed more to an X-Men thread than Dan? Surely I've returned to a Bizarro ILC.

Some of the Bill Sienkiewicz New Mutant issues are good, provided that you can get with his artwork style.

The thing that got bad about Claremont on X-Men is that he would NEVER end a freaking story and instead would start up other threads. It was one long soap opera. I thought that outside the McFarlene run on Spiderman and Walt Simonson in Thor, Marvel kind of hit the skids after Byrne and bunch of the others jumped ship to go to DC in the wake of the first Crisis. (Peter David did some cool stuff on the also on the Hulk , I liked the early issues of The Punisher and the Mike Golden's The Nam.)

By the time they started up X-Factor, Wolverine and some of the other titles, I thought the X-men franchise was worn out. It was popular, but I wasn't much of a fan.

Hey guys, so, my buddy David and I are starting a project to read and comment upon the whole entire Claremont run from '75 to '91. Hopefully some yuks along the way, but also hopefully digging up interesting tangents that weren't followed, great moments not quite canonized, bad moments unfortunately canonized, etc. etc. http://kangaratms.com/ , spread the word?

fun read Doc!

How can I not have posted in this thread? Was I away that long?

Recently re-read 94-142 or so of UNCANNY. There's much that's wince-inducing, but I still love it. Maybe even more than Morrison's run, but then Morrison's run in many ways was precisely a love letter to that book.

ILC X-Men threads (esp. nostalgia threads!) are prolley some of the best things on the Internet...

I just read Dark Avengers/Dark X-Men: Utopia. Pretty surprised - probably one of the more fun X-stories in recent years.

Ok, not to be one of those guys who revives every time he updates a blog, but after numerous delays David and I are back in the saddle on that thing! Hopefully should have a Claremont update every other week, cross fingers....

these are fun! i haven't read a lot of this early stuff. where's the best place to get it -- is there an anthology or anything? much to my wife's dismay, I've started having the urge to revisit the uncanny x-men.

The black-and-white "Essential X-Men" volumes are cheap for how much story is in them, so those are easy if you just want to dig in somewhere. You do lose a lot without the coloring, honestly, although it's fun to see just the inked art by itself, gives you a new appreciation for the linework and so on. The "Uncanny X-Men Masterworks" is the color reprint series for this same material, and it's been relaunched in paperback starting last year, so it's pretty available. The whole Masterworks line has a pretty fabulous old-school fansite: http://www.marvelmasterworks.com/cornershop/buy_masterworks.html

There are also hardcover omnibus things but they listed at a hundred bucks a pop and are now out of print, besides which it's not clear whether there will be followup editions. I hate the idea of a "Volume 1" on a shelf with no matching "volume 2," but that's why I'm a comics collector I guess.

Any decent comics shop should have a pile of Classic X-Men back issues for cheap - this was a reprint series launched in the mid-80s, which starts from Giant-Size #1. However, they are sort of funky reprints, with pages inserted mid-story for no really clear reason. You also get some nice Claremont-scribed backup strips. I'm planning to do a blog piece on those at some point, it's an interesting continuity backwater. Anyway, if you could find Classic X-Mens for a buck a pop that'd be an economical alternative to the Masterworks.

BTW, the Masterworks also incorporate a smattering of material from other titles, which is cool - - like the Uncanny series includes Rogue's debut in Avengers Annual (one of my most prized comics possessions!), and the 1960s X-Men series incorporates Beast's Amazing Adventures material because god knows you won't find it elsewhere.

Here's hoping they do some kind of "miscellaneous miniseries masterworks" to gather up all the 80s ephemera: Nightcrawler, Magik, first Wolverine mini, Kitty Pryde & Wolverine, Firestar maybe, etc etc...

yeah, i used to get classic x-men when i was a kid. they used to have exclusive little shorts in the back of the books, right? or am i imagining that?

Yeah, that's the backup strips I alluded to above. Lot of interesting vignettes, some total filler of course, but an interesting thing, Claremont in '85 or so going back and doing the character work he felt like he should have done 8-9 years earlier. They definitely deserve to be anthologized. If I can get my longbox out of my dad's garage I'll do a feature on them when we get to that point in the chronology.

(Uncannyxmen.net, of course, has absurdly detailed summaries for all of them.)

I always thought the best of the backup strips was the one where the Phoenix was having the little interior monologue while cocooning Jean Grey and preparing to take her place.

I like the one where Professor X is in space with Lilandra and acting bitchy because nobody is paying the slightest attention to him. As a 14-year-old, of course, I was really taken with the one where an ingenue Hellfire Club dancer gets schooled by the White Queen. That's Ann Nocenti writing that one...

Uncannyxmen.net also reveals that these were anthologized, as X-Men: Vignettes. Only two volumes (covering issues 1-25) though.

i think the earliest i've read is the dark phoenix stuff? i used to have a trade paperback of all of that. pretty awesome, iirc.

Currently up to about issue ten of the original run. It's good fun stuff with some great Kirby, but the Scott/Jean unrequited love thing is laughably corny. It's almost like Stan's gone back to his formative years when he was churning out all those romance comics for Atlas. "Oh! How I love him, but he must NEVER KNOW MY TRUE FEELINGS!" "If only I could tell her how the glint of sunlight on her hair makes my heart beat faster, BUT I CAN'T!", etc, etc.

Also, this picture of 70's era Lee from his wiki page. Zoinks.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ec/Stan_Lee_1973.jpg

Three issues in a row end with the defeated bad guys just being allowed to wander off at the end. Admittedly, two of them renounced their wicked ways, but Lucifer(in #9)clearly hasn't, and Prof. X is all like "Ahh, whatever. We'll just leave him." Huh??

I really should plow through those at some point. Paul O'Brien's index made them seem just totally lovable in an awkward Silver Age way. That material seems to be offline now but you can still pull it up on archive.org: http://web.archive.org/web/20080714230840/www.thexaxis.com/indexes/intro.htm Sample commentary from #9:

A more innocent time:
Needing to travel from New York to the Balkans, the X-Men have sized up their options and decided that cruise liner would be a suitable and efficient way of getting there.

Stan Lee can't make up his mind which country he's setting he story in. The story claims to be set in both the Balkans (matching the previous issue) and Bavaria (in West Germany).

In a memorably awful sequence, Scott points out to Marvel Girl that she's running towards a hole. Indeed she is. It's about one foot square. Nonetheless, "there's not enough time to side step", and Jean bravely resorts to covering it with a nearby log. Rather than, say, just jumping over it.

Iceman accuses Thor of being "square."

Having defeated Lucifer, the X-Men simply let him go. Why? Because "we X-Men are pledged never to cause injury to a human being." Er... come again? And if he was planning to blow up the world, wouldn't that at least justify handing him over to the police?

really loving your blog dr c...
are there any other blogs i should read that discuss bronze age classics with the same levity and passion? i had a period as a comics obsessive when i was ten or so, back in the 80s, and a local bookstore here had tonnes of 1970s marvels at crazy cheap prices, and i get a proustian rush at the thought of power man/iron fist, etc...

Nice revive. I've been reading G-Mo's New X-Men run lately... I was never big on X-Men, beyond watching the cartoon when I was a kid. Digging New X-Men, but not loving it, especially considering the level of quality I tend to expect from Morrison. Maybe I'd appreciate it more if I read the classic Claremont stuff first.

hree issues in a row end with the defeated bad guys just being allowed to wander off at the end. Admittedly, two of them renounced their wicked ways, but Lucifer(in #9)clearly hasn't, and Prof. X is all like "Ahh, whatever. We'll just leave him." Huh??

Early Marvel is full of this kind of shoddy plotting - like the end of FF 1, when they seal up the entrance to The Mole Man's kingdom on some island and are all like 'well that's that guy sorted', forgetting he has been digging big fuck-off holes ALL OVER THE WORLD.

Calumny - Thanks! I don't know of any other blog projects like this but it seems like there'd have to be some. We could start a WEB RING or something.

My Bronze Age is really limited to X-Men and a few scattered issues of things my mom would find at garage sales. Would love to dig more into the period tho.

G-Mo's New X-Men is really excellent, I think, and relatively light on continuity (it's sort of trying to refire the engines and give the book focus after a decade of spastic nonsense). That said, when it's not being drawn by Quitely or Bachalo it's a lot harder for me to love...

I'm one of the few people who actually liked Igor Kordey's art on New X-Men, though some of it was obviously rushed (apparently Kordey was brought in because unlike Quitely he was able to meet the deadlines, even though he was drawing one or two other titles at the same time). Kordey tends to draw characters that look kinda freaky, they don't have the sort of perfect model looks many other superhero artists are fond of, and IMO that worked well the X-Men who are, you know, supposed to be freaks.

Bachalo has an awesome design sense, but I don't think he's very good with panel-to-panel transitions. That arc where Scott, Logan, and Phantomex infiltrate the miniature world was sometimes kinda hard to follow because of Bachalo's limited storytelling skills.

I'm reading that issue right now Tuomas. Man, I hate Bachalo's work on NXM! I found it distracting me so much that I actually would attempt to visualize what those issues would've looked like if Quitely (or Jimenez) drew them, just so the comic would appeal to me a little more. The way he draws heads and faces really bugs me. It's weird, because I remember his old Gen X art being a lot more visually appealing... maybe it's just cuz I was younger then?

Kordey's stuff wasn't very good, but you could tell that he has talent and a solid style - it's just some of those rush jobs were really unconscionable. One or two of his issues even made me angry with all the melty faces and cluttered action.

It's weird, because I remember his old Gen X art being a lot more visually appealing... maybe it's just cuz I was younger then?

Nevermind... I'm looking at my old Death TPBs now, and the guy's definitely gotten worse

OK, I do agree - he was way better back then, and I think his Generation X stands up incredibly well, one of the best-drawn mainstream superbooks of the period. I think I like his NXM mainly for the character designs, especially his handling of Wolverine and Sabretooth which really felt spot-on for me. He does blow at panel-to-panel activity which makes action sequences a total mess. Even just a couple years later when Mike Carey was writing the title, he'd managed to get even more impenetrable.

Good Bachalo's been showing up in ASM as of late. He tore it up on that Lizard storyline.

Also, <3 his Wu-Tang art: http://pitchfork.com/news/38379-take-cover-method-manghostface-killahraekwon-iwu-massacrei/

Kordey definitely drew some unfortunate pages in NXM; I think he was in fact drawing two other monthly books at the time...I know one of them was Cable.

Cable/Soldier X was an spectacular book. I'd forgive Kordey any idiosyncrasies over that.

thx to this thread/dr. casino's blog, i ordered the first of those essential xmen books. looking forward to reading!

haha awesome! Hope they pan out.

God, I would have killed for something like the Essentials when I was a kid. I remember being on one family trip to the beach and having like five random issues of the second Cockrum run that my mom had picked up at a yard sale, and I read and reread and reread those suckers. A big phone book of X-Men would have been just the Holy Grail.

i am ;((( that this revive isn't news of a new edition of yr blog mr dr casino

hahahaha aww, thanks stevie! It's really cool to know people are digging it! We are on a pretty steady schedule now, new ones are going up on Sunday or Monday each week, alternating with the Grant Morrison blog. Penultimate (and very SPOILER FILLED) Animal Man chapter going up soon, and then, actually, we're gonna just finish off Animal Man because I can't wait to find out what happens next, but then we'll do two X-Men sessions in a row after that to make up for it.

much appreciated!

don't mean to step on Dr. Casino's toes but his new X-men blog is up! Exciting!

borrowed the Marvel Masterworks X-Men vol 5 over the weekend - the one with the Dark Phoenix saga - man this is very lolsome. Had forgotten how goddamn PONDEROUS and text-heavy Claremont's writing was

haa, that's what I've been thinking as I've been reading the first essential x-men paperback. i've been enjoying it, mind you ... other observation is the weirdness of cyclops and professor x -- for primary characters in a comic book, they are super unlikeable! total dicks, matter of fact!

yeah Professor X is always like faking his death or "testing" them by abandoning them or some shit

he kind of becomes nicer later on, right? in the early issues it just seems like he is a stuck up asshole.

Well, the faking-death stuff is more in the 60s run. In the 70s he's a dick in a much more everyday way. There's a really dopey scene where Scott gets a phone call from Ireland like "We need your help in the next five minutes!" and Professor X is like "Go! Help them!" and Scott is like "I can't get to Scotland in five minutes, fuck it, I'm staying here" and they get into a big argument about it. Neither of them comes off particularly well.

Thanks DAM! We might be skipping it this week as David is loaded down with work, but if I have time I'm going to bang together a little filler story I've been meaning to do...

yeah, i think that's when professor x gets so mad, he looks like he's going to slap cyclops.

re: the good doctor's latest entry - had no idea Byrne was such a queer

I remember reading some douche-y things Byrne had said about Claremont, though I must admit that Claremont seems pretty easy to make fun of...

When I recently re-read UNCANNY, I found myself just looking at the art more and more. It's funny, the better the art got, the more that Claremont thought it needed to be cluttered up with lots and lots and lots of words.

yeah the art for me gets good in the Arcade story-line...I have huge reservoirs of love for Alpha Flight but I remember 120-121 being a touch disappointing, but the Arcade storyline is imo where the Claremont/Byrne hits its stride; I remember reading the 2nd Uncanny Essentials and thinking right around that point that I was reading some awesomely classic entertainment, like I could spend like 16 hours reading awesome X-Men comics, as opposed to the 6 hours it would take me to, say, watch the entire Star Wars trilogy...

...you get what I'm saying?

I mean what's after Arcade? It's the Proteus Saga, then the Hellfire Club, and then suddenly Dark Phoenix and Days of Future Passed, which is pretty much THE two-year run that makes the series.

that 'which' is misplaced, I mean the Arcade/Proteus/Hellfire Club/Dark Phoenix/Days of Future Passed run (along w/ AF's 2nd app & Wendigo--not to mention Kitty Pryde & Dazzler in there too!); this is pretty much the defining twenty-issue run for the franchise.

Arcade isn't super-important in this, but it's just where I personally noticed that things were starting to kick serious ass, so to say...not sure why...

I <3 you guys and this thread. Now I feel like I have to hold back tho because if I start going on about Arcade and Alpha Flight I'll blow all my material for the next blog!

I don't think we even scratched the surface of John Byrne internet douchery, unfortunately. Here's another good one from Wikiquote:

Personal prejudice: Hispanic and Latino (sic) women with blond hair look like hookers to me, no matter how clean or “cute” they are. Somehow those skin tones that look so good with dark, dark hair just don’t work for me with lighter shades. (...) Interestingly, of all the “lurkers” who have flocked here to be “offended” today (as well as one or two regulars) none are Hispanic or Latino (sic) women who have dyed their hair blond.

why does J. Byrne think we would be at all interested in any of these insights?

That comment was made in reference to Jessica Alba being cast as Sue Storm in the FF movie, right? Not that it makes it any better.

Byrne is kind of a fascinating person, obviously he's quite intelligent, and some comments he's made are really on the money, but apparently he also has this batshit insane side to him. And it seems like he really enjoys making his female characters suffer.

eesh, had no idea byrne was such an idiot. (great post btw -- keep em coming!)

Thanks! The thing that kills me is that Byrne, all this apart, is one of my all-time favorite superhero artists. Terry Austin's inks help, but the guy was just a rock-solid action/adventure guy. He might not really sink his teeth into the trippy journeys through time and space (which David keeps ribbing him for) but he manages to make the Savage Land actually look pretty exciting and wild and that's a feat in my opinion. Plus, he set the bar for Art Adams (another fave) in terms of SWARTHY HAIRY WOLVERINE, although I think Austin might probably deserve a lot of the credit for scratching in all those hairs.

Actually, X-Men pencillers basically define my whole taste in superhero art really. JRJr is also a huge personal favorite...

haha yeah, Terry Austin was born to draw lots of body hair.

terry austin began as dick giordano's body hair and rubble assistant! one of the things that really distinguishes the whole byrne-claremont run is the quality of their collaborators - austin, tom orz's lettering, glynis wein's colouring. austin almost - almost - makes perez tolerable on that x-men annual that i think dr casino and his bud are due to review in their next batch of claremont issues

Perez and Byrne seem like two sides of the same coin, a lot of similar stylistic and formal tics.

I only went up to the 3rd Essentials, but I wish I had bought the rest because I'd really love to see Paul Smith, Art Adams, JR Jr., and even Silvestri draw these characters.

i started reading comics with the silvestri era (fall of the mutants, i think?) and he's still the artist who defines the x-men for me. not sure what i'd think of his style now?

but it is amazing the leap in quality from the cockrum to byrne era ...

He might not really sink his teeth into the trippy journeys through time and space (which David keeps ribbing him for) but he manages to make the Savage Land actually look pretty exciting and wild and that's a feat in my opinion.

Maybe not in X-Men, but there's some trippy space and magic imagery in his Fantastic Four and Alpha Flight run. I've been rereading Alpha Flight lately, and I've sort of fallen in love with Byrne's art again. I used to like it as a kid, but then for years I sort of dissed that kind of solid, realistic style, until I started rereading Byrne's 80s material, and realized there's more to him than what I remembered. Sure, he draws human beings in this sort of detailed, naturalistic style I'm not the biggest fan of (I prefer more idiosyncratic and/or cartoonish lines), but he also has an impeccable eye for design, composition, and panel-to-panel transitions. (The last thing is something many flashy superhero artists of today are lacking, which makes the storytelling in 90s and 00s superhero comics clearly worse than it was in the 80s and 70s.). And especially in Alpha Flight some of compositions are really stark and bold and not as realistic as I remembered them to be - Byrne certainly doesn't need to fill all the panels with minuscule details like Perez does.

there is definitely some weird-ass shit in Alpha Flight

(which I had completely forgotten about for the most part and then recently re-read the entire run thx to that html.comics guy)

Byrne does a lot of cool things in Alpha Flight (and some lazy things that are kind of sort of backhandedly cool) but any conversation about early AF issues begins and ends imo with Andrew Yachus...

Gawd I love Alpha Flight! Bill Mantlo's the one who really brings teh craziness!

i think i had some of those alpha flight comics as a kid...are they anthologized anywhere?

re: the later Essentials: Oh dude, it's totally worth it. I LOVE the too-short Paul Smith run, despite the prominence given to things like the Morlocks that I've never been 100% sold on. Wonderfully clean linework - he had worked as an animator before he came to Marvel and you can totally tell. By contrast, I kind of loathe Silvestri's work but I'm looking forward to giving it a closer look in, uh, a year or so when the blog gets there. I think of it as just staggeringly ugly and too-stylized, particularly in contrast to such classicist approaches as Byrne's or even Romita's. But after David's point about the Tony DeZuniga fill-in, that the X-Men sort of should look freakish and weird, I can imagine an argument being made for the Silvestri.

I think if you don't count Romita's 1990s return to the book, Silvestri has the second-most issues of Uncanny to his name, maybe almost tied with Byrne....

Oh and yeah, the Perez-drawn annual is in our next batch.

I really should dig into the Byrne Fantastic Four - - I've read a few scattered issues that I picked up as cheapies at some point and I basically dug them. David and I have kicked it around as a possible future blog project as well, especially now that he's gotten really into the FF thanks to Hickman.

xp to tyler about AF -- Idk, I haven't heard of them getting the Essential treatment. They aren't the X-Men, much of the Byrne run are solo stories, and for a lot of them he used the format of having a sixteen-page straight adventure yarn, usually involving only one or two of the characters, coupled with a six-page back-up feature which told the origin of a specific character. This was mostly because Byrne felt a sort of inferiority complex about his own creations, and so spent ungodly amounts of time trying to make them as multifaceted as possible.

With the two-part stories and the lack of any real team cohesion, it seems like it would be kind of awkward to anthologize.

Byrne's FF run starts out really well - still the best comics he's ever written just by himself - but really loses its way after the first few storylines. I think this is a common fault with Byrne - he never seems to be able to sustain interest, or good working relations, on any comic book he touches.

By contrast, always thought his Alpha Flight comics were pretty dull, and while I kinda like the fact that he often does it all himself - writing, pencilling, inking, even lettering - I think his artwork generally looks much better with a more disciplined finisher on it (aside from the peerless Terry Austin, Jerry Ordway did a lovely job on Byrne on some of those FF issues.)

Oh and superficial similarities aside, give me Byrne over Perez any day - just a much better, more exciting and varied storyteller, with a MUCH greater grasp of anatomy, facial expressions etc

Byrne > Perez as well, though Perez was better at crowd scenes.

Byrne's FF run, for about the first three volumes of the VISIONARIES collection, is really really great. I mean, really great. It's not WAR AND PEACE or anything, but for a serial superhero comic, it was pretty damn good. But yes, it seemed as his interest flagged and he just continued out of momentum more than anything else. Still, the first two years is absolutely stellar, not really a dud in the bunch. His run was one of the things that drove me to get on my bike and ride over to the 7-11 every week to see if another issue had come out. Imagine, that and Miller's DAREDEVIL coming out at the same time.

stay classy Arizona!

I feel sorry for my friends that live there

haha um wrong thread

LMAO I wz just reading that thread

new blog update! This one contains Alpha Flight!! Go read it!!!

lol @ the ILE thread link btw!

Thanks D.A.M.! Just posted a new non-X one, on Batman: Gothic. Next time round, X goes ham with Proteus, Kitty, Emma, Dazzler. I'm pretty excited about that one, I think the run is finally getting to that golden point where you don't have to table any quantity of "well, it was the 70s" type stuff, it's just really consistently enjoyable and involving.

what's the url?

http://kangaratms.com/

xxp yeah Dr. Casino I agree that's exactly the point where things get really good!

I'm trying to read all of GMo's stuff in real time, so I will prolley have to come back to the Animal Man & Gothic stuff...

Enjoyed David U's tale of getting thrown out of Grace O'Malleys -- that used to be my old work pub. Horrible place...

Surprised to learn DU's a Torontonian, never met him but we probably went to every one of the same nerd events...

Hey hey we finally got to Dark Phoenix! It's a realll long post, be warned. Editing these things is HARD. And if you missed it, there was another one where we did Proteus and Emma/Kitty/Dazzler...

Nice post!

:) Thanks!

Yeah, that was a meaty read. Though if you guys think that John Byrne was the only one on that team who had a problem with women, dig a little deeper on Chris Claremont. This doesn't excuse Dark Bondage Sue Richards or anything.

I thought it was pretty explicit that Claremont intended for Jean to be a human who wielded a force that was much more than human. If you really want to read more on that, I'd suggest tracking down the CLASSIC X-MEN books that reprinted/retconned that period. There might be more textual nuggets to be gleaned in those (as well as some nice John Bolton art, even if I felt that the retcons were often wrong-headed and unnecessary.)

I actually had a chance to talk with him at SDCC in, oh, geez, 1989 or 1990 where he confirmed that (and politely put aside the thought that he had anything to do with Jean's resurrection in X-FACTOR).

this blog just gets better and better, Doctor Casino! one of my favorite things on the Internet right now...

excellent stuff as ever - re: yr reprint options, dr c, am pretty sure the old phoenix sage tpb doesn't have any original ending material, as i sought that out online for the first time as a result of reading the blog, and i had never read it before.

Awwwwww, thanks y'all, this is really encouraging. I was worried the DPS blog was too flabby and long-winded, it started out at 6600 words and I just barely got it down to 5900..

Yeah, it seems pretty clear that Claremont wanted the "human tapping into too-big powers" story. If the story had run as intended I don't think I would even find the ambiguities that seem to be there. It's still maybe a suspect narrative in terms of sexism, but I think CC does deserve credit, despite his pitfalls, for pushing his female characters to the front of the story and not having them just be accessory characters to the male heroes' narrative (ie women in refrigerators). At one point in the mid-80s, if I'm counting right, the X-Men are majority female! I can't think of another super-team that's ever hit that mark without it being the gimmick of the book. Some of his female characters do suffer from CRAZY WOMAN syndrome but, I think, they are at least interesting crazy stories - - Rachel is basically a traumatized war refuge. And Illyana is the survivor of an abusive childhood, convinced that she is somehow tainted or evil as a result, despite the fact that she basically only does good deeds. That's a great angle for a story - if you're going to do "women with problems" I'd rather see that than, you know, Malice. But maybe I'm being too charitable.

No, Mr. Claremont should get credit for putting female characters on a par or above most of his male characters, particularly on X-MEN. But there's some odd vibes that come off of them at the same time. And sure, compare Rachel to say, Brian Bendis' Scarlet Witch in HOUSE OF M, et al. Wanda in that just comes off as BLEARRRRRGH HOWARD DEAN SCREAM CRAZY whereas Rachel is troubled and self-destructive (love the EXCALIBUR-era 'hound' suit for that) but an actual character.

hooray I was actually checking this blog each day last week thinking "where is my goddamn Dark Phoenix post"

the old phoenix sage tpb doesn't have any original ending material

Marvel Masterworks edition (which I just borrowed and re-read recently) has the original ending plus a long interview with all involved (Shooter, Claremont, Byrne, etc.)

All that material, including the roundrobin discussion was sold as PHOENIX THE UNTOLD STORY or somesuch. I can't recall the date it hit, but I want to say 1987? Might've been to help gin up interest in the X-FACTOR book of the time, but that was all a very long time ago. There were pencil pages from it published in Fantagraphics' X-MEN COMPANION BOOK II from the early 80s.

Yes, Fantagraphics put out not one, but TWO books on the X-MEN back in the day. The second one is a great find by the by. I'd assume the first one is just as good in terms of content, etc.

yeah all that stuff is in the Masterworks edition, plus some b&w/pencil art Phoenix story that ran in some other special edition mag

How is the coloring in those? I always get edgy when they leave the old colors in place and just run them on glossy paper without toning them down. Generally looks TERRIBLE and would rather read the newsprint scans that I have sitting on my hard drive.

looked nice to me but I am hardly a stickler for such things. I like my comics colors bright and saturated. It's b&w reprints of things that I can't stand.

FWIW, I left a little summary of different reprint options as a comment on the last blog, for those who still don't own this one.

Untold Story is from 1983, so the roundtable has an extra layer of tragic pathos with everyone involved going "Well, one thing's for sure, she is DEAD and not coming back, and that's final!"

The Masterworks I have are recolored, occasionally rather insensitively (blank yellow background becomes blank pink background - why?). This seems to vary based on which recolorer is at work, though - some of the issues look just fine.

The most disappointing reprint series that we'll get to in our project is the New Mutants Classic series, which are really bare-bones, and kind of disrespectfully sloppy in that the cover will be like "CLAREMONT - MCLEOD" even though four of the issues inside were pencilled by Sal Buscema. Little things, but annoying. But the comics are great.

yeah I'm psyched for all the off-shoots as well!!!

can i just say that i love the drubbing of misogynist byrne in contrast to the relatively-open-minded claremont in the latest blog?

Hey, thanks! Sooner or later we'll swing back around and give Claremont more of a talking-to on gender stuff, but generally I think, as David said, he deserves more credit than he gets. Being a great draftsman apparently buys Byrne more wiggle room than Claremont being (in the last 15-20 years) a hack storyteller, and that seems sort of unfair. Especially when you read interviews...you get the sense of this guy who's maybe not THAT on the cusp of social revolution or whatever, but is at least TRYING to be a sensitive forward thinker, and he's just surrounded by an old boy's club. At least that's the vibe I get. It'd be really interesting to get some insight from say, Louise Jones and Ann Nocenti about working with him versus the rest of the office. It might not gibe with my reading at all, but I wonder.

(Next installment should be up tonight or tomorrow btw!)

awesome!!

byrne seems a total cock btw

claremont used to proudly show off at comic conventions a sketchbook he'd collected where he'd got just abt every comic book artist you can think of to draw him a nudey pic of storm, so his 'enlightenment' over byrne is v v relative, imho

here's a page from a recent xmen comic by new man chris and milo manara:

http://comiczine-fa.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/XGalsdisco1.jpg

o_0

but still, john byrne seems a truly unpleasant, reactionary, libertarian dickhole.

claremont used to proudly show off at comic conventions a sketchbook he'd collected where he'd got just abt every comic book artist you can think of to draw him a nudey pic of storm, so his 'enlightenment' over byrne is v v relative, imho

Regardless of anecdotes like this, I agree that when it comes to his writing, he really did do a lot to make female superheroes full-fledged rounded individuals, and not just supportive characters, the "ladies of the team". How many superhero writers did that before him? And you have to remember, even during the 80s you had stories like the East Coast/West Coast Avengers crossover, where various Avengers have to figh each other one-on-one, and in each fight the male character beats the female character - even when it's kinda ridiculous, like Captain America beating She-Hulk.

Also, in Marvel comics before Claremont's X-Men, the female superheroes were often relegated to the roles of wives and girlfriends for more prominent male superheroes. During Claremont's prime years with X-Men, only Kitty and Jean were dating a male team member, and both of them were more prominent than their boyfriends.

claremont also always treated racial matters with a lot of sensitivity

http://a3.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc6/44215_10150097347974199_602254198_7403031_5745209_n.jpg
http://a5.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc6/248719_10150318406954199_602254198_9873298_1074945_n.jpg
http://a1.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash1/25773_435405234198_602254198_5589029_2836794_n.jpg

new men like nude women too

why is everyone orgy-dancing & Storm is getting arrested by evil Errol Flynn? it's her party is it not???

One last post before I skip town for a while! Enjoy!

manara really can only draw one woman's face, can't he?

have a good summer Doc! thx for the awesome blog!

xp tbf he draws faces?!

Thank YOU, DAM! Peace!

Doc -

is Kangarat Murder Society dead? We miss you! I know you've been super busy, but figured I'd call you out here instead of twitter.

^

x3

Yeah, loved reading those, give us some more!

Awwwwww, y'all are great! And yeah..this is better, I don't use twitter or know if anybody says anything about us on there(?).

It's NOT dead - this has just been a wacky, um... six months. Wow. Didn't really expect it would be that kind of hiatus (I guess all dormant bloggers say that)...

I have genuine, actual hopes of reviving it after the new year! For real! Keep the fire burning.

Thanks Doc! Can't wait for more to come.

The n-word stuff upthread is a bit of a headfuck.

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/book-news/comics/article/49499-x-men-writer-chris-claremont-donates-archive-to-columbia-university.html

doc, damn, just saw this, sounds like the blog woulda been just what i wanna read but the link dont work, anywhere else to check out the stuff?

http://kangaratmurdersoc.wordpress.com/ is the direct link, not sure what's up with the domain. Hope you like!

Paging Doctor Casino:

http://daviduzumeri.tumblr.com/post/45140694544/any-chance-of-revisiting-the-uncanny-x-men-chats-with

hahah was that you? David sent me that earlier. I knowwwwww, I know!

It was me. :) I can't help it if I miss reading those posts.

I miss doing them! We talk about it every now and then, we're both game, it's just a matter of time - I'm in a PhD program now and it's just hard to commit to something like that. But I really did enjoy it. Maybe we could manage to do, like, one a month or something.

That would be awesome.

Yeah, please do some more!

would read. would read the fuck out of, in fact.

Yeah same here. Love those.

Y'all are the best. We're in talks. Maybe, just maybe!

Woohoo! Tentatively, of course.

start a kickstarter

yeah really I don't even like X-Men and found the blog v entertaining

help me out guys! a friend of mine was wearing this shirt, and i feel like i should've known instinctively which artist it was. my first guess was Art Adams, but not too sure. based on the team line-up it's '81-'83?
http://i.imgur.com/MUXNsmd.jpg

Art Adams, no doubt - he drew the covers for Classic X-Men, the reprint series of the Claremont era that begin in the mid-late 80s.

Is that Kitty between Nightcrawler and (I assume) Rogue?

yup!

As much as I love Art Adams, there's an unsettlingly Liefeldian quality to the character on the left there (Rachel?)

Liefeld is Art Adams without the whimsy or genius. I stopped reading comics before the Liefeld era but I can imagine his work would swiftly have cooled my teenaged ardour for Adams' work.

And yes, that's Rachel on the left in her early Phoenix outfit. Has to be 85-86ish because I don't think Rachel was on the team before then.

Yeah, I knew Adams was a big influence on Liefeld and I'd seen evidence of it in Liefeld's work before - this was the first time I'd seen it so clearly in Adams' own work. Rachel's mullet is spectacular!

When did Storm lose the 'mo?

Storm had a moustache?

Doesn't that image appear in the (Adams-drawn) X-Men/New Mutants crossover, where they travel to Asgard?

When did Storm lose the 'mo?

IIRC, it was just before the "Fall of the Mutants" storyline, when Storm and Forge were stranded on some alternate Earth with no humans for a year or so.

Damn, nice memory Tuomas - I was going to say it was done when Roma resurrected all the X-Men right after Fall of the Mutants, but you're dead on.

You rule, Tuomas! I'm guessing it was interior art, since I've been looking for the source on X-Men/NM covers to no avail.

Yup - just checked my singles, it's a variant of Adams's title page art from UXM Annual #9. Very possibly ginned up for the Classics reprint series, or maybe specifically for T-shirt use etc.

(which is the annual that concludes the Asgard two-parter, per Tuomas's memory)

Whoa, my memory is better than I thought, considering I haven't read that stuff in 15 years or so...

I think the Asgard story was also where Rachel first wore the "Phoenix" suit, which didn't get very good reactions from the other X-Men, since Cyclops didn't even know Rachel was the alternate earth daughter of him and Jean.

Yup, exactly right, as the X-Men are gearing up to go to Asgard. Using the magic space thunderbolts Cyclops saved from their encounter with Arkon the Space Barbarian a few annuals back, since apparently Cyclops is such a good pilot he can even steer a bag of thunderbolts. It's overall a pretty awesome storyline, pretty sure I've raved about it on this very thread actually but I just love the vibe of the whole thing. Sort of my perfect era of X-Men, just the right lineups for both of the teams and a real sense of family/camaraderie rolling through the high adventure and cheesecake scenes.

I feel like I remember reading somewhere that early in their careers, both Liefeld and McFarlane were regarded as Art Adams copycats. Ive never read it but Ive heard Leifeld's debt to Adans was v apparent in his work on Hawk and Dove...

Casino quit teasing us if you wont revive your blog :P

Right from the start, Liefeld and Jim Lee's artwork seemed to mash up Art Adams (especially all the fiddle-faddle rendering) and Michael Golden (cartoonish faces, rounded figures). The element of grotesque caricature in McFarlane's work makes him slightly harder to place, imho.

^Agree with that. McFarlane's general twistiness/disproportion seemed more deliberate and stylized in comparison

Casino quit teasing us if you wont revive your blog :P

;_; I have schoolwork to do! Negotiations continue. Might float it back in this summer on a trial basis, or something...

Aww I'm not trying to messyour life up, I forgot u were still doing school

Yup, exactly right, as the X-Men are gearing up to go to Asgard. Using the magic space thunderbolts Cyclops saved from their encounter with Arkon the Space Barbarian a few annuals back, since apparently Cyclops is such a good pilot he can even steer a bag of thunderbolts. It's overall a pretty awesome storyline, pretty sure I've raved about it on this very thread actually but I just love the vibe of the whole thing. Sort of my perfect era of X-Men, just the right lineups for both of the teams and a real sense of family/camaraderie rolling through the high adventure and cheesecake scenes.

Cosign this, totally! The Asgard storyline was actually the first X-Men story I read, and I was immediately hooked. There was some angst and drama, but the Bronze Age sense of thrill and adventure was still there too, things hadn't gotten overtly dark yet (Mutant Massacre came a couple years later, right?). I didn't get half of the references in those comics (like who was Rachel's mother, whose tragic past they kept alluding to?), but that was part of the charm - there was a past, a larger universe these characters lived in, and I wanted to find out more about it.

Mutant Massacre was when I started buying X-Men comic books and remains IMO one of the best crossover stories ever told.

Seconded, Dan. Still my favourite story, with all the bleakness, the darkness and the death.

Like, it blew my mind that with each issue, actual serious changes were occurring to this universe and this line-up. It helped that I was young and naive enough to think that these changes would be inviolable, but the story remains a visceral, dramatic slog (in a good way), or at least it was the last time I read it.

Angel has never been the same since Mutant Massacre, though; even when they sort of gave him his original wings back, he kept the Archangel persona, and now that's he's been blank-slated he still has the metal wings

Ah, right... I remember being crushed that Kitty couldn't unphase, and Colossus couldn't un-Colossus.

the miniseries where they fixed Kitty's phasing problem was really, really great IMO

of course the permaphase was brought back by Fraction after Whedon shot her into space in that giant bullet but we knew it wasn't going to be permanent

the miniseries where they fixed Kitty's phasing problem was really, really great IMO

I don't think I've ever read this, which one is it?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantastic_Four_vs._the_X-Men

Especially that part where Kitty contemplates killing herself

Mutant Massacre - i hated that, thought it was an ill thought out debacle (of course i bought all te books) but it was - as usually turns oust to be the case a stupid ending and it wa sthe start of my deep annoyance, verging on hate of the X-books as I (as ranted on other comic threads before) thought the variance between the rest pf the MU where these people interact with other heroes and so there should be some pushback on the hatred just went ridiculously over the line

i guess this is why i have Uncanny Avengers which, umm.., is not what i wanted (be careful what you wish for being the message again) and have no idea if just coz i have not been reading comics in a while that it seems bad or is bad

now also mebbe coz of age but i loved the mutants in asgard set across x-men and new mutants, karma lost her weight, sunball was happy for a change, hanging out with warriors three, magik turning tables on enchantess, felt like there was charcter development with just a fun bring these two worlds in the MU never meet together and have fun with it

i read that sean howe marvel marvel book last month -- totally great! made me want to read (or re-read) a bunch of things. I think as a kid the first thing I read was Fall of the Mutants, but as I went back into that mutant massacre stuff, that's the stuff that really sticks with me. the only thing i have left is a collection of those asgard stories -- pretty fun.

xp: conversely, I thought reading a multipart story where multiple heroes were seriously hurt/disfigured and the bad guys won, setting up a series of plot strands with major consequences on the books for the next several years (particularly on the X-Factor side) was amazing

yeah, I think that was why i loved it too dan

Mutant Massacre also didn't really have anything to do with public mutant-hate, right? It was basically a squad of mutant goons mass-murdering the Morlocks for reasons unexplained, and our heroes getting torn up as they try to intervene.

yup

It was a pretty shocking way to jump into collectordom

I'd bought the issue before, which was an anti-racism self-contained story where Kitty faced down a mob screaming at a kid by shaming them with a bald allegory to her own mutant powers (which she didn't use) that was intercut with the story of Frankie and her Hellfire Club guard boyfriend running from some dudes trying to kill them, ending with Frankie getting shot at the entrance of the Morlock tunnels; it was very jarring seeing them go from being able to use words to defuse a situation to them just getting torn up by the Marauders, plus mix in Wolverine's freakout over discovering Jean was back and it was just awesome plot juggling.

like earlnash i too have recently read and enjoyed sean howe's marvel book, but reading this thread now, i wonder if i liked it because i'm basically in sympathy with its elevation of the 70s material at marvel over and above anything since. it v. much paints the claremont-byrne era as the peak of the x-men, because of the creative tension-equilibrium between the pair of em (once byrne left, ironically, the title became even MORE popular, but there was nobody to counteract claremont's more hopeless flights of fancy, and in time the commercial imperative - crossovers, spin-offs, multiple titles etc - really diluted the previous 'purity' of the brand.)

also reading this thread prompted me to read the wiki entry on Mutant Massacre - hadn't known before that the plot was a reworking of a failed attempt to integrate the alan moore captain britain material into the US marvel universe (failed because moore had copyright claim on his Captain Britain strips.) marvel did ultimately publish the moore-davis Cap Brits, and i've never read excalibur, but i'm guessing that claremont did eventually get to play with that universe when he was writing it

I don't think Claremont got to using The Fury until the 2000s, but someone factcheck me on that

I think Nimrod was his attempt at the Fury, yes? Paul O'Brien gets into this when he discusses the Alan Davis run much later on.

My pet theory, spoiler alert for a blog coming in 2024 or so, but I'm convinced that what ruined Claremont wasn't the loss of a strong partner in Byrne, but having to make sense out of Marc Silvestri's fucking horrific, incomprehensible pencils month after month, for a seemingly endless period of the title. More and more each page fills up with text that's just trying to establish what's happening past all the scratchy, distorted nothingness and gradually Claremont's work-week has less and less room to work out where the plot is all going....

how do you explain Sovereign Seven, then

Can't put that mess on Silvestri, man. Claremont's baby through and through!

I guess I'm contending that his hand cramped up somewhere around the 304th "focused totality of my psychic power" and he was never the same after. It's like Nilsson and Pussy Cats.

"What's that you're doing there, Wolverine? Are you using your razor-sharp adamantium claws to bust us out of this cage? Because it mostly just looks like a bunch of random lines thrashed themselves in front of you while you stood perfectly still while clenching every muscle in your body and grimacing. Are you okay?"

"Also, where are we? Because all I see behind us is a mauve nothingness?"

Claremont's work was always a little too expository but he kept getting worse over the years until 90% of his 2000s work was just long descriptions of the physical characteristics of characters and their powers

there was a fantastic issue of Kelly's Deadpool run where Wolverine shows up and has increasingly wordy speech bubbles to the point where Deadpool himself starts going "Damn Logan, how do you do all of that in one breath? Is this a mutant power shared by all X-Men?"

claremont wrote plenty of shit before, during and after his byrne collaboration (in the howe book there's a moment in the 1990s when claremont and byrne might get back together on the x-men, and it's like a pink floyd reunion gig, only not for charity, and only it never happens). i'm guessing that his increasing verbosity was partly an effect of enjoying a p free editorial hand, and partly an effect of the 'marvel style' itself, which often finds artist and writer at cross-purposes (perhaps my single fave moment in the howe bk is when steve englehart bitches abt george tuska ignoring Power Man sub-plots that englehart had included in his outline, just because tuska didn't feel like drawing em - it was easier, more lucrative to blap out twenty pages of four panel fight scene pages.)

man, if I had the energy I would totally transcribe the first five pages of Uncanny X-Men #96 right now

i guess this is why i have Uncanny Avengers which, umm.., is not what i wanted (be careful what you wish for being the message again) and have no idea if just coz i have not been reading comics in a while that it seems bad or is bad

I am happy to confirm that Uncanny Avengers is really terrible.

the latest issue is okayish, but not okayish enough for me to justify buying it

RIP Rogue and Havok, I tried

Awww for real..?

for real I'm dropping the book (Rogue and Havok are obv still alive, although Rogue apparently just killed Wonder Man's brother)

it's not the worst comic, but I feel like Remender has decent ideas and really clumsy execution

sweet art, though

oh, also leaden dialogue

it's definitely the worst of the Marvel NOW books I'm reading

I mean, X-Treme X-Men is better, that should tell you something

a book that finally delivers the hot Wolverine/Hercules action fans didn't know they needed

X-Treme X-Men was ok, I just wish it had some kind of actual ending or remembered the original premise of the book

I will say though that I had no idea I'd be picking up so many Avengers books in the wake of Marvel NOW!

Avengers Arena in particular is so much better than it has any right to be

also Hawkeye roolz

Nhex, I think DJP is talking about the new one which is basically Exiles 2.0

Nhex probably is too; the book has been canceled and is being wrapped up as part of a stupid crossover that only seems to exist as a mechanism to kill the various characters created for X-Treme X-Men and the AOA series

That Lapham AOA series had some moments

oh, i had no idea they brought the title back. i was thinking of the Claremont book that ran concurrently with Morrison's New X-Men ten years ago

it would be funny if black Cyclops survived in regular continuity though, because then there would be three Cyke variants running around and other characters could start calling him "nu-Jean"

they really didn't have enough time to flesh out black Cyclops

what do you mean, we know he's black and he's Cyclops, and... um...

Black Cyclops? Maybe I do need to start reading X-Men comics again

we forgot to mention that he's dressed as a Union soldier, btw

Thoughts on Jason Aaron's Wolverine & The X-Men? I'm really enjoying it as of about ten issues in

I think it started great but went downhill somewhere around the circus issues. Had at least a good year/18 months.

That's about right. The recent Hellfire Club showdown is an uptick in quality but not as high as the initial issues.

Agreed. I think I described it somewhere as a half-hearted attempt at rehashing Mojo Mayhem, which might be a bit crude but probably works in big handfuls.

Reading the first Uncanny omnibus. So great, and I haven't even gotten to Byrne yet! Also:

http://i.imgur.com/S3VtNUN.jpg

For those fans of the Claremont/Byrne X-Men, be sure to go and check out Essential Marvel Team-Up Vol. 3. That is a really good Marvel Essential and is filled with Bill Mantlo and Claremont stories with primarily John Byrne artwork. In hindsight, I would think the Spider-man/X-men story in Marvel Team Up along with that Iron Fist/X-Men story should probably be reprinted along side the Uncanny X-men issues. Maybe they will catch those when they re-do the X-men in those new 'epic' trade series Marvel is starting.

It's hard to defend Byrne considering some of the things he said. I know I kind of lost some respect for him back in the 80s when I went to one of the Mid-Ohio cons and he just came off like an ass (and the fawning fans around him was weird), but I still liked his artwork quite a bit. He definitely seemed like a guy that probably thought he crapped gold.

That said, John Byrne had a pretty cool style that seemed to cut the middle between Gil Kane and Neal Adams and I think in hindsight through Byrne's influence through Jim Lee is pretty much become one of the de-facto styles of super hero comic artwork. Those late 70s through mid-80s Marvel comics though are still quite well done. I think in hindsight, you can see even the cracks in the DC Superman run. There are a few issues that are pretty good, but there are some total dogs in there too (like the Big Barda Action issue).

xp lol chuck was such a dick

It's kind of funny reading that panel considering how Ed Brubaker and Josh Whedon kind of went back and really ret-con made Xavier look like an ass.

made him look like more of an ass, or less of an ass?

I think these two stories kind of make Chuck X look quite a bit like a bad guy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Men:_Deadly_Genesis

"Dangerous" (Issues #7–12)
This Whedon arc features a Sentinel attack with a mystery mastermind. The culprit is the Danger Room, which is becoming sentient and appears as a robot called "Danger." Whedon establishes that Professor X imprisoned Danger and made it an unwilling host of the Danger Room, leaving the X-Men disgusted. Whedon also revealed that Emma Frost is aligned with the newly formed Hellfire Club.

Note that this is the same Professor X that threw that temper tantrum, was jealously in love with his student, faked his death how many times...

Prof X and Cyclops were always dicks.

Yeah, the difference is maybe that the more recent stories recognize this and make it a key plot point (almost ad nauseum - I remember just endless Cyclops/Professor X feudery a few years ago), rather than throwing it on the page and leaving you to go "Wait...so is this guy really supposed to be a good guy, or what?"

There is a whole lot of moral ambiguity in the X-men especially from when they opened their arms to Magneto way back in the 80s. You look at how it all developed out, it looks to me more like a weirdo cult in many ways. In the last split of the X-men you had Cyclops pretty much counseling with Magneto, Namor and Emma Frost...not exactly the clean living crew.

Of course the whole Marvel Universe has kind of come ethically unmoored in a similar way in greater levels since the Marvel U has gone all Watchmen/The Authority starting say around Avengers Dissembled.

Diamond was having some crazy sales before Christmas, so I got the Morrison run of New X-Men for $7 as 7 digest-sized TPBs. I'm going to start that when I finish reading Liar's Poker.

I got the Morrison run of New X-Men for $7 as 7 digest-sized TPBs

O_O

it looks to me more like a weirdo cult in many ways

It occurs to me that a lot of Fraction's run on Uncanny could be read that way. Particularly the weirdly optimistic, overly-confident tone it had right out of the gate. But I never felt like he had that great of a grasp on how to write the X-Men.

Whenever I even CONTEMPLATE trying to get back into Xbooks my eyes glaze over - out of the loop since 93 or so, not really missing it

Silvestri was better than many of you think

X-books live and die on how engaging the student characters are IMO

'93 is not a bad place to fall out of the loop. Lots of good places to pick up after, though. Kelly/Seagle era, Morrison's New X-Men, Brubaker/Carey. Assuming you were fishing for suggestions.

Silvestri was not bad, true. We've had much, much worse.

I'd love it if there was always at least one X-book that's pretty much 75% soapy all the time, preferably the X-student book du jour. I'm a few years behind, but the post-Morrison/Whedon WALL-TO-WALL ACTION! style with very little interpersonal drama (particularly glaring in the student-cenric New X-Men, which read like an adolescent mutant holocaust narrative) kinda put me off.

i wasn't fond of the Brubaker space stuff/Warren Ellis Astonishing run that followed Whedon's run and tuned out. all the crazy AvX junk and after makes me want to catch up though

Agreed about the student New X-Men book. A good one in this vein was Zeb Wells's New Mutants which was actually about the old New Mutants getting back together. Involved something of a nostalgia trip, but there was some smart use of old stories, and IIRC the characters were really written as adults, with histories, getting back together, and that was cool. I don't think there's been an actually really good "student" book since the early issues of Generation X.

I think Aarons Wolverine and the X-Men is a pretty good student book.

xpost! I drifted away just prior to the inception of Wolverine & the X-Men, but what I've heard makes it sound like a decent student-centric book.

Re: getting caught up, I was recently idly thinking about picking up the collections of all the X-stuff I'd missed after 3-ish years out of the loop. IIRC, that amounted to approximately a ridiculous 50 trades. Hence my continued out-of-the-loopness.

yeah, i hear ya, the main reason i have slacked off on it

eh there's no real need to catch up, here's all you need to know:

- Cyclops leads a group of outlaw X-Men who are basically wanted by the Avengers for taking over the world and accidentally killing Xavier
- Wolverine leads a mainstream group of X-Men who have gone back to the original remit of running a mutant school
- In an attempt to keep Cyclops from going crazy, Beast brings the original X-Men forward in time to show them what their future holds in an attempt to change it; this ends up breaking time travel and the originals are now stuck in present time

proceed from here

Doc Casino, that re-New Mutants book sounds cool - I may investigate

anybody feel like putting together a list of everything x-universe worth reading that's up on Marvel Unlimited or does that fall to me?

I have no idea what's on Marvel Unlimited

If Age of X is up there, it's worth a look; probably my favorite of the recent crossover stories due to its disorienting beginning and how it spools back into a background thread running through the X-Books at the time

dan, you have a tablet right? You should get marvel unlimited. would save you a lotta money.

question for Dr Casino - a few years ago I think I remember you linking to a blog you and a friend had written where you reviewed the Claremont/Byrne era X Men issue by issue - is this still online and can you direct me to it? (obv if you'd prefer not to link to it for whatever reason then no worries!)

Aww, I'm touched! Yeah, it's still up there, perpetually shaming both of us since it was sorta just hitting its stride when we both got too busy and lost the whole momentum. Here's just the entries for the X-Men project.

Sweet! I'm reading it for the first time right now, that's great timing.

thanks!

Jonathan Hickman's House of X/Powers of X is outstanding, and we're not even halfway through yet.
These Xavier Files annotations are pretty fun to read, I'll definitely be keeping up every issue.
https://www.polygon.com/2019/8/23/20829772/x-men-marvel-powers-of-x-3-spoilers-references-easter-eggs-theories

Would someone not very versed in X-lore enjoy them, do you think? They sound intriguing, but I don't want to be constantly checking footnotes to understand it all.

Most likely, yes, I think. Though it's insanely detailed, the story on its own is pretty follow-able so far. You don't need to read footnotes to understand it, it just adds to the enjoyment and excitement to understand more of the references.

Also it's (sort of? hard to say right now) a reboot/retcon story. It doesn't undo everything that's happened since the beginning of X-Men times, but tries to re-contextualize it, and you see some of those events through new eyes.

I agree the run is excellent so far first time I’ve been excited for new x issues in many many years

Cheers, might have to take the plunge.

i've only seen the first couple issues. seemed wild and awesome and full of potential. it may seem bonkers overwhelming with new concepts and new takes on familiar characters, but my friend who's been keeping up with stuff more regularly assures me that this is NOT a case of it assuming i know a ton of weird continuity from the last fifteen years - - - it's just throwing a whole ton of new things at you, sorta like the start of Grant Morrison's run in the early 2000s. for what it's worth!

Would someone not very versed in X-lore enjoy them, do you think? They sound intriguing, but I don't want to be constantly checking footnotes to understand it all

My partner's been reading them - she knows the characters from the movies mostly, but she digs it and found it really easy to follow.

Hickman likes to make the reader sweat and work out the connections between things, CONSTANTLY, but it's a much more forgiving sort of complexity than "you need to know every character from the past 43 years of continuity, even the bad bits". I got a similar feeling when I read Gene Wolfe for the first time earlier in the year.

Re reading the HOX/POX hardback over the last day or two.

Really, really good stuff all around. I wish there were a way to read the story going forward in some summarized form though instead of collecting like 12 books per month for years

I’ve picked up some singles here and there but ultimately realized I’d rather wait for *significant* collected arcs.

I started collecting them all the X-titles for the first year of that run, but you're right, like 80% of it is spaced out incredibly. there are interesting setups for almost every series but most of them feel totally unnecessary. Winnowed it down to just core X-Men and Marauders. If anyone else thinks the other titles are worthwhile, let me know.

They introduced so many new titles even AFTER Dawn of X that I gave up trying to catch them all. Like is Ewing's SWORD worth it?

You can read the collected X of Swords next which is a decent story, pushing some of the elements introduced in Hox/PoX regarding Arakko/Krakoa and Apocalypse. The following events (Hellfire Gala/Trial of Magneto and Inferno) are just getting started now.

Another note that is that Marvel IS surprisingly - with six months backlog time - collecting the entirely of the X-Men titles in chronological order in various trades, previously Dawn of X (16 volumes) currently Reign of X (up to 3, expected to go to 11). Kinda hoping someday they'll all just be super cheap on Comixology or something.

While I have enjoyed some of these extended storyline type runs, criminy that is like $300+ bucks to read one huge story.

Everything melting down into this stuff is why I pretty much gave up on the weekly habit. Too much...

Nhex, thanks!

I’ll probably wait until the inevitable reboot of the line before really diving into those volumes. Volume form is how I’ve followed say, Saga - it requires some patience but then again there’s no shortage of things to be distracted by.

earlnash, by and large I’m with you. I can’t imagine buying, whatever, 10-15 titles a month like I did when I was 13. For reasons discussed exhaustively everywhere, it isn’t worth it: decompression, the flashiness of art/pages post-1991 or so, etc etc

Much of my comics money goes to comics or collections pre-1992 or so

I could not keep up on Batman at all. It used to be like 2-3 issues a month and DC said f'k it - they want Batman we will give them Batman a few years ago and it was like 10-12 issues a month.

X-men is some serious major nerd commitment. Read a bit of the big late model runs but it's just too dense at this point for me. Definitely need a scorecard to keep track of the multiple versions of characters and all the wacky changes and I cannot imagine what a Hickman deconstruction would be like.

Last i saw, MOST of the X-runs are available in Marvel Unlimited if you have a tablet and/or are comfortable reading at your computer
https://www.marvel.com/unlimited

that's true, a good option for the price
I wish Marvel Unlimited was better at multi-title collections and crossover reading order. though maybe they've improved, I haven't used it in a few years

Just checked - they're only 3 months behind now? Maybe I should just give up on print, most of my floppies are Marvel

there's any numbers of reading order guides online of course
https://comicbookreadingorders.com/marvel/events/

Hickman’s runs are so long I need to pause and get a breather, and then I forget everything and start again.

I read the first issues hickman’s monthly (agree marauders was the only other dece title, although xforce (!) was fun). But then the pandemic and having a toddler happened and I have a year and a half of deliveries from my comic book store to catch up on. Is any of it as good as hoxpox was?

Nope, unfortunately, but I feel like it might pick up on the way out. Also, he's leaving Marvel soon to do that Substack thing, so this era won't be as long as his other projects.

I followed but unsubscribed from his substack– it’s like all the boring texty bits Hickman puts in his book run rampant

Also substack is evil of course

Did anyone make it to the end/read the last issue? I lost track of Krakoa ages ago, it has seemed like a messy ending that hasn't really played to AE and KG's strengths, and that sapped my interest in finishing Hickman's run.

I have the lot but still haven't even started it, lol.

Perversely, I just started re-reading the immediate (initial) post-Claremont era. No, I don't know why. Alan Davis's solo run on Excalibur (that initial nine-issue storyline, at least) is still very near the top of the all-time X-book heap, and I expect Peter David's inaugural X-Force stint to hold up. The rest, well...

His second run on X-Factor is also decent for a few years

I haven't followed X-Men since the 80s, but I do have the House of X/Powers of X hardcover book and liked it well enough although I wouldn't say I completely understood it all. What should I read next? Preferably something collected in book format so I don't have to chase down lots of stuff.

The Grant Morrison run is a classic that works well a single, discrete story. Peter David's short X-Factor run from the early 90s is also fun.

The rest of the Hickman run is collected, but is a bit of a comedown after HOXPOX. After Hickman leaves, Gerry Duggan takes over to finish the story, quite poorly. Al Ewing and Kieron Gillen also had decently reviewed X books that just finished, but I haven't read them - they're a bit too wrapped up in ongoing continuity for my liking.

I read the Krakoa arc here and there but never with any consistency. The beginning mini-series are fascinating as a story, and a few other early issues really sparked, but there was, for lack of a better word, “too much product” to keep up with.

I think it will actually hold up better over time as people drop all the random minis and not so great runs (looking at you adjectiveless X-Men). They probably won't do a massive Omnibus set with all 700 issues or whatever it is, but people will probably remember selectively pick the good arcs, like HoX/PoX, X of Swords, X Lives/Deaths of Wolverine, all the Ewing stuff (SWORD/X-Men Red) and the Gillen stuff (Immortal X-Men, Eternals/AXE, Sins of Sinister). The more mediocre series and events like the Hellfire Galas, Inferno, Trial of Magneto, etc. will be read by completists. Stuff like Marauders that started out super promising and fizzled out.

Maybe the Percy runs will also be liked, since it's the most cohesive storyline and fairly self-contained between Wolverine and X-Force + Wolverine's event; though a little too grim for my taste, they go really far with making Beast a complete maniac