S/D X-Men Runs

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.