S/D X-Men Runs

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...