Marvel Comics blabbery

the gist of it is that Marvel lost distribution in 1957 and until 1968 they were distributed by the company that owned DC, so they were limited to eight titles per month

xxp - pretty well is relative, the internal numbers I've see have Squirrel Girl/Hellcat-type of titles selling ~10% of Spider-Man, it's actually pretty shocking that they haven't been cancelled.

By anthology, though, I also mean trying different types of stories and target groups. I feel like the way Strange Tales started (Marvel's version of EC SuspenStories/horror) with the marketing push of Marvel AND the opportunity to do oddball stuff with the usual characters on occasion would sell.

Marvel Comics Presents was probably the series that fit the bill when I first started reading comics

i bought the shit outta MCP
Marvel does those infinite digital comix that are sort of fast and easy anthology type stories?

There were quite a few anthology titles put out during Secret Wars and CivWar 2, mostly tryouts for new artists and writers. Taking Sides and Street Dance Battle or something. I can't recall reading any really good ones, though :/

Isn't it the case that anthology formats have traditionally been unpopular with US comic buyers? That's one of the reasons that's usually given for why 2000AD never really caught on out there.

2000AD is popular to a general audience in mass-market locations in the UK. Archie is popular to a general audience in mass-market locations in the US. Heavy Metal is successful to a general audience in mass-market locations in the US. Best American seems to be successful with a bookstore audience in bookstores in the US. Marvel Comics Presents is probably the last time a superhero anthology at an economical price was offered to a general audience in the US?

I liked MCP but also remember it being pretty unpopular, one of those series always found in bargain bins

MCP started off as more of an a-list title with strong modern stuff alongside '70s luminaries revisiting famous haunts (Gerber on Man-Thing! Moench on Shang-Chi! McGregor on Black Panther!) but, with some exceptions, slowly became a regular 'who's that?' in terms of the talent involved.

Yeah, MCP as far as I could tell was always middling and died off around the time distribution focus shifted from newsstands to comic book shops.

The only issues I remember kids trading or looking for were those containing that Weapon X arc

Weapon X and early Sam Kieth work is pretty much the only mid-period MCP stuff that stands out in my memory but I never read it that consistently. Perhaps there are hidden gems I'm unaware of.

Oh, yeah, there was also Nocenti's Typhoid Mary batshittery (which was recently collected).

Got the 2 vols of tom king's vision on google play for $8 each, and they really were as good as everyone said

Yeah. It works really well as a miniseries, but would have been happy for it to carry on.

It is *highly* emo without being cloying or clever or meta, which I haven't seem comics do effectively very often. Maybe Love and Rockets?

I just read the Claremont/Miller Wolverine series for the first time and was impressed. Haven't read any Claremont besides Dark Phoenix and Days of Future Past, but he came across quite menschy in the Sean Howe book, and this was fun and more well-written than I was expecting given Claremont's reputation. Is anything else of his worth checking, or is it just Miller making him look better than usual?

The classic X-Men run and New Mutants (especially the Sienkiewicz issues) are essential but nothing else has ever really grabbed me. His 00s X-Men stuff isn't horrible but is mostly forgettable -- all the character development isn't anything he hadn't done before, and the plot arcs are kind of lame.

He never lets go of the "Character, from the rolling hills of New Zealand, feels the primal forces of nature and her power of feeling primal forces weighs heavily on her conscience as she flies over the desert (not her native terrain by any stretch of the imagination) to help her friends, the mutants known as the X-Men!"

I think he's fluctuated but there are issues where it's 90% exposition boxes over the first half of the issue

Where does the "classic" run begin and end?

I actually kind of enjoyed the exposition, which was what surprised me. He's a pretty good sentence-writer, albeit within what I'm guessing is a limited bag of tricks. I don't want to overrate him - I was just surprised by its enjoyable competence and relative lack of purple-ness. No doubt diminished on repetition.

Claremont's X-Men/New Mutants/Excalibur stuff ca. '75-'91 is essential and highly recommended (some eras and storylines more than others, obvs).

imo you can drop off a ways before '91

I think you stick with each title until a little while after the next one starts publishing. You can see his interest shift. So drop the X-Men after the Asgardian Wars in '85, the New Mutants sometime after Excalibur gets going in '88, and leave Excalibur at the end of the Cross-Time Caper.

good theory

In my view, the classic Claremont run begins with the first Shi'ar story (in Uncanny X-Men #104-105) and ends with the Fall of the Mutants (in Uncanny #225-227). FotM feels like a conclusion to Claremont's run in many ways:
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(WARNING! SPOILERS FOR SAID STORYLINE!)
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The X-Men "die", the whole "heroes feared by the world" running theme is put to rest (for a while), Storm gets her powers back, etc. Also, Claremont begans seeding that storyline years before (in the issues right after Storm loses her powers), so if you quit reading at Asgardian Wars, you'll never find out how the story concludes. And pretty much every other dangling Claremont subplot is resolved by then, so it feels like a logical place to stop. (The only major exception I can think of is the question of who Mr. Sinister is and why he ordered the Mutant Massacre, but I don't think those get resolved during the rest of Claremont's run either.)
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(SPOILERS END.)
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Before the first Shi'ar story you still get some weird 1970s goofiness such as Wolverine vs. leprechauns, but that story introduces some of the most enduring elements of Claremont's run, and Byrne arrives just in time to conclude it. And after FotM you get the Australian era, when Claremont clearly starts to get bored with the whole concept of the X-Men, so he starts to deconstruct it in odd ways, which might provide for some interesting individual stories, but it doesn't feel like "proper" X-Men to me anymore.

Then Jim Lee arrives and starts to influence the plotting more and more, often is stupid ways (such as making Psylocke into a ridiculous bikini ninja), and you can see Claremont losing his control until he's mostly just providing dialogue for Lee's cheesecake pinups. Claremont's final story (in X-Men #1-3) is a mess and a sad ending for his lengthy run. So yeah, better to stop at FotM, so you won't have to witness this sad decline.

Though arguably Claremont's humanist and, ultimately, optimistic tone wasn't a good fit for the grim & gritty superhero comics of the '90s, so even without the Lee debacle it seems unlikely he could've continued to write X-Men in his trademark style. Presumably he would've faded away if he hadn't be forced to quit.

Never read much claremont, but as an Australian the idea of reading him doing anything set in Australia makes my teeth hurt

The "Australian" things in those issues are mostly just limited to them having a secret base in the middle of the desert. Other parts of the country aren't really shown, nor do they interact with Aussies, except for a stereotypically portrayed Aboriginal mutant teleporter. Said teleporter allows to them travel anywhere in the world, so the fact their base is in Australia isn't really important, it could be anywhere in the world as long as it's not in the US. (At this point the X-Men were pretending to be dead, so presumably Claremont moved them to another country so it'd be easier to sell the idea that no one recognises them.)

Of all the 'major' post-Kirby Marvel writers, Claremont seemed to benefit the most from working with 'good' artists - or at least, younger artists like Cockrum, Byrne, Miller, Sienkiewicz who were heavily invested in the plotting etc of the comics that they created with Claremont. I have great fondness for Marvel stalwarts like Sal Buscema and George Tuska, but I'm pretty sure Claremont's reputation would be much lesser if he'd had them as regular collaborators (as Englehart and Gerber did). Against that, Claremont's dialogue, captions and, especially, thought balloons are highly distinctive (and therefore easy to parody); so he arrived at a 'voice', slightly overwrought and ever-so-serious, quite early on, and stayed at the top of his profession for a very long time, long past his writing having any merit or interest.

Started with the issue 162 last night, because who could resist a Wolverine so erotic even his head is shaped like a cock:

http://i.imgur.com/c17En44.jpg

Aside from that, a few issues in and great fun so far. Did someone pinch the Dominator design (sort of) from the Brood?

Is that the issue where Wolvie is all alone on the Brood planet when all the others have been infected with their eggs? I remember it being really bleak and intensive for a superhero comic of its era, didn't expect Claremont being capable of what is essentially survival horror.

There was that Kitty vs. the demon story before, but that one felt like it was more in the standard superhero mold.

Man, Claremont really liked ripping off Alien, didn't he?

That's the one. I think he's pretty restrained, panel exposition-wise, compared to Starlin, Wein and Gerber. In the issue I just finished, Ms Marvel mutates into a cosmic powers hero called Binary, because the 80s. It's leading up to the Paul Smith run, which I heard was good. The reprints are A5-sized digests with crappy binding made by Panini, but the crappiness adds to the reading texture. No computerised colouring thank God. They're just about to put out the Miller Daredevil run, which might make it the only way of reading it in the original colours (aside from buying the back issues).

I picked up some of those panini digests a couple of years back, a great cheap way to read those comics - I already had the b&w phonebooks (but you really miss the colours) and some of the original issues or Classic X-Men reprints (but up in a loft somewhere). som volumes are bizarrely expensive now, though.

For me, Claremont X-men kind of lost its way after the mutant massacre, which I found totally gripping when I read it in real-time as a kid. Up till then, though, I love even his overly verbose tics. What a great series of comics to grow up with.

speaking of comix + aliens this was the first time i learnt about aliens in any format:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superman/Aliens

I started reading X-Tinction Agenda, which was referenced by a lot of the X-Men comics I read as a kid. I always assumed it was decent -- after a few years of reading comics I realized that superhero comics were an incoherent mess by '92 or so when I really got into them, so anything before was probably a little better. I'd gone back and read all the classic X-Men stories (Lee/Kirby, the new lineup, Claremont peak years) but... it turns out I hadn't missed anything.

X-Tinction Agenda was not good.

Mutant Massacre was the last gasp.

I started with Uncanny literally one issue after the X-Tinction Agenda finished. Had zero idea what was going on or who anyone was but I was immediately hooked.

what the hell is going on in captain america

http://68.media.tumblr.com/296c685fe1a698d24b5f21402b198a04/tumblr_inline_ojac1tpaE31svg1vl_400.png
http://68.media.tumblr.com/35e97de80ca3c15aa99ba747ea3fb559/tumblr_inline_ojac0kGkkx1svg1vl_500.jpg
http://68.media.tumblr.com/2f2753977c6619db594c122003f212e9/tumblr_inline_ojac4ipGYz1svg1vl_500.png

wow didn't realize the New (Social Justice) Warriors title was debuting in there

Who scripted that

nick spencer, apparently

yikes

eh, it's just a (not very good) comedy fill-in issue

*googles spencer*

Well he's not a republican or a trumpist so I guess he 'kids because he loves'

i don't think it's even that significant, it's just 2-3 pages of a terrible comic that's mostly about something else

What I've read of Spencer's has been pretty good, and he's never struck me as a douchebag (a surprisingly high number of current Marvel writers seem fairly progressive). That dialogue may be cringey but I'm fairly confident that it's at least well-intentioned.

... how?

neo nazi guy: "aw, did that trigger you?"
me: "Oh I am way 'triggered'!" *pulls triggers on my half dozen giant guns turning him into red goo*

i guess this and Jeremy Lin is what it takes for more Asian Americans to show up lol

http://zak-site.com/Great-American-Novel/index.html

idk if this is something everyone here is already familiar with, but I've just gone down the rabbit-hole of this incredibly detailed website that makes the argument that the first 30 years of Fantastic Four comics are The Great American Novel. it includes graphs:

https://static.minichan.org/img/1475125041967855.gif

it all seems sort of reminiscent of that movie where ppl have intricate theories about The Shining

"Zaps Franklin" was some seriously heavy shit, for real.

that kind of nuclear-grade nerd shit is like catnip to me tbh

when was the Waid run? that's the last one i actually read