Marvel Comics blabbery

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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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

Jeez...it started maybe fifteen years ago? I'm surprised to suddenly realize I've read everything from that point on. Only run that I'd highly recommend since then is Hickman's.

i've been reading bits of that site over the last couple of days and it actually seems to put forward a pretty coherent argument! at the very least it does a great job of charting the genuine evolution of the characters over decades, the scale of which i don't think i'd every appreciated before.

either way i've started reading stan and jack's ff again and it really is one of the towering achievements of not just superhero comics but comics as a form. so much wild creativity packed into every issue - i can't imagine how impossibly exciting it must have been to read them month-to-month as they were published.

Having somewhat recently read silver age Marvel in its entirety, I can confirm at least that Lee & Kirby FF is one of a small handful of silver age Marvel things worth reading in its entirety.

i could happily live without the egregious sexism, that's for sure. from what i remember from reading the first 125 issues or so of amazing spider-man in the essential collections a decade or so ago, they mostly read pretty well too.

what were the standouts from your insane journey into mystery the silver age, by the way? once i've worked my way through the ff i might do some more marvel unlimited reading furtehr down the line...

I'll have to go back and review. One surprising highlight for me was Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos, which was much grittier and far less perfunctory than I would've imagined. The unquestionable lowlight was Ant-Man, which I honestly don't know if I even finished because it was completely perfunctory and awful. It was like something they whipped together on the train while riding to work but didn't have time to finish so they got like the janitor to put the finishing touches on it before it went to press.

Lee/Kirby original run of Thor is incredible

sure there's a lot of big dumb fight scenes and "I SAY THEE NAY!" but so much fun, and so many crazy ideas

Yeah, I mean, most of the generally-accepted highlights held true. Lee & Kirby FF and Thor (and I'd put their Captain America and Nick Fury stuff pretty high up there, too), for sure. The 'Tales of Asgard' backups in Thor might be my favorite of all. Steranko's Nick Fury, of course. Ditko's Spider-Man and Doctor Strange are both good but kinda overrated imo (at least inasmuch as they're often held in regard as paragons of the form). A lot of the other stuff is kind of a haphazard mess. Romita on Amazing and Colan on Daredevil get top marks in the art department. I left off around 1970, when they just seemed to be getting a handle on how to tell longer stories, so I think I'm likely to find the bronze age to be more rewarding once I get back around to it.

Steranko's Nick Fury art is a great extension of Kirby but omg did I get sick of all the exposition

when I re-read that run recently I was struck by just the sheer volume of words I was carelessly skipping over

lolling at the thought of old lunch ploughing through old issues of ant-man out of some misguided sense of duty and also coming to the grim realisation that it's exactly the kind of pointless waste of time i'll probably end up doing sometime too

i've been meaning to read the lee/kirby thor for a while - am i right in thinking it ends with a bit of a whimper due to stan and jack falling out?

yeah the very end of the run is weird because you can tell the plotting/writing was fucked with. From existing original artwork it looks like Kirby wanted to run with this Galactus+Thor teamup angle and then Lee clumsily reconfigured it into something else. Plus the artwork scale was changed (much to Kirby's displeasure) and that hampers things as well. The last issue is a standalone thing that feels more like one of Kirby's Fourth World stories (a bizarre super-rich dude with a mind-swapping machine!)

You have no idea how much art and entertainment I've consumed out of a misguided sense of duty, bizarro. It's sick.

the pre-Marvel Universe issues of Tales to Astonish and Tales of Suspense are on Marvel Unlimited, there's lots of good stuff there - great art by Kirby, Ditko and others, some hilariously hokey "twist" endings

I like that FF great american novel thing, some of his arguments seem a bit of a stretch but there is some genuinely insightful stuff there as well imo. particularly enjoyed his argument that Kirby was actually an excellent writer of dialogue for comics (which I agree with 100%)

Stan Lee is a terrible terrible scripter imo