S/D X-Men Runs

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

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