S/D X-Men Runs

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...

I <3 you guys and this thread. Now I feel like I have to hold back tho because if I start going on about Arcade and Alpha Flight I'll blow all my material for the next blog!

I don't think we even scratched the surface of John Byrne internet douchery, unfortunately. Here's another good one from Wikiquote:

Personal prejudice: Hispanic and Latino (sic) women with blond hair look like hookers to me, no matter how clean or “cute” they are. Somehow those skin tones that look so good with dark, dark hair just don’t work for me with lighter shades. (...) Interestingly, of all the “lurkers” who have flocked here to be “offended” today (as well as one or two regulars) none are Hispanic or Latino (sic) women who have dyed their hair blond.

why does J. Byrne think we would be at all interested in any of these insights?

That comment was made in reference to Jessica Alba being cast as Sue Storm in the FF movie, right? Not that it makes it any better.

Byrne is kind of a fascinating person, obviously he's quite intelligent, and some comments he's made are really on the money, but apparently he also has this batshit insane side to him. And it seems like he really enjoys making his female characters suffer.

eesh, had no idea byrne was such an idiot. (great post btw -- keep em coming!)

Thanks! The thing that kills me is that Byrne, all this apart, is one of my all-time favorite superhero artists. Terry Austin's inks help, but the guy was just a rock-solid action/adventure guy. He might not really sink his teeth into the trippy journeys through time and space (which David keeps ribbing him for) but he manages to make the Savage Land actually look pretty exciting and wild and that's a feat in my opinion. Plus, he set the bar for Art Adams (another fave) in terms of SWARTHY HAIRY WOLVERINE, although I think Austin might probably deserve a lot of the credit for scratching in all those hairs.

Actually, X-Men pencillers basically define my whole taste in superhero art really. JRJr is also a huge personal favorite...

haha yeah, Terry Austin was born to draw lots of body hair.

terry austin began as dick giordano's body hair and rubble assistant! one of the things that really distinguishes the whole byrne-claremont run is the quality of their collaborators - austin, tom orz's lettering, glynis wein's colouring. austin almost - almost - makes perez tolerable on that x-men annual that i think dr casino and his bud are due to review in their next batch of claremont issues

Perez and Byrne seem like two sides of the same coin, a lot of similar stylistic and formal tics.

I only went up to the 3rd Essentials, but I wish I had bought the rest because I'd really love to see Paul Smith, Art Adams, JR Jr., and even Silvestri draw these characters.

i started reading comics with the silvestri era (fall of the mutants, i think?) and he's still the artist who defines the x-men for me. not sure what i'd think of his style now?

but it is amazing the leap in quality from the cockrum to byrne era ...

He might not really sink his teeth into the trippy journeys through time and space (which David keeps ribbing him for) but he manages to make the Savage Land actually look pretty exciting and wild and that's a feat in my opinion.

Maybe not in X-Men, but there's some trippy space and magic imagery in his Fantastic Four and Alpha Flight run. I've been rereading Alpha Flight lately, and I've sort of fallen in love with Byrne's art again. I used to like it as a kid, but then for years I sort of dissed that kind of solid, realistic style, until I started rereading Byrne's 80s material, and realized there's more to him than what I remembered. Sure, he draws human beings in this sort of detailed, naturalistic style I'm not the biggest fan of (I prefer more idiosyncratic and/or cartoonish lines), but he also has an impeccable eye for design, composition, and panel-to-panel transitions. (The last thing is something many flashy superhero artists of today are lacking, which makes the storytelling in 90s and 00s superhero comics clearly worse than it was in the 80s and 70s.). And especially in Alpha Flight some of compositions are really stark and bold and not as realistic as I remembered them to be - Byrne certainly doesn't need to fill all the panels with minuscule details like Perez does.

there is definitely some weird-ass shit in Alpha Flight

(which I had completely forgotten about for the most part and then recently re-read the entire run thx to that html.comics guy)

Byrne does a lot of cool things in Alpha Flight (and some lazy things that are kind of sort of backhandedly cool) but any conversation about early AF issues begins and ends imo with Andrew Yachus...

Gawd I love Alpha Flight! Bill Mantlo's the one who really brings teh craziness!

i think i had some of those alpha flight comics as a kid...are they anthologized anywhere?

re: the later Essentials: Oh dude, it's totally worth it. I LOVE the too-short Paul Smith run, despite the prominence given to things like the Morlocks that I've never been 100% sold on. Wonderfully clean linework - he had worked as an animator before he came to Marvel and you can totally tell. By contrast, I kind of loathe Silvestri's work but I'm looking forward to giving it a closer look in, uh, a year or so when the blog gets there. I think of it as just staggeringly ugly and too-stylized, particularly in contrast to such classicist approaches as Byrne's or even Romita's. But after David's point about the Tony DeZuniga fill-in, that the X-Men sort of should look freakish and weird, I can imagine an argument being made for the Silvestri.

I think if you don't count Romita's 1990s return to the book, Silvestri has the second-most issues of Uncanny to his name, maybe almost tied with Byrne....

Oh and yeah, the Perez-drawn annual is in our next batch.

I really should dig into the Byrne Fantastic Four - - I've read a few scattered issues that I picked up as cheapies at some point and I basically dug them. David and I have kicked it around as a possible future blog project as well, especially now that he's gotten really into the FF thanks to Hickman.

xp to tyler about AF -- Idk, I haven't heard of them getting the Essential treatment. They aren't the X-Men, much of the Byrne run are solo stories, and for a lot of them he used the format of having a sixteen-page straight adventure yarn, usually involving only one or two of the characters, coupled with a six-page back-up feature which told the origin of a specific character. This was mostly because Byrne felt a sort of inferiority complex about his own creations, and so spent ungodly amounts of time trying to make them as multifaceted as possible.

With the two-part stories and the lack of any real team cohesion, it seems like it would be kind of awkward to anthologize.

Byrne's FF run starts out really well - still the best comics he's ever written just by himself - but really loses its way after the first few storylines. I think this is a common fault with Byrne - he never seems to be able to sustain interest, or good working relations, on any comic book he touches.

By contrast, always thought his Alpha Flight comics were pretty dull, and while I kinda like the fact that he often does it all himself - writing, pencilling, inking, even lettering - I think his artwork generally looks much better with a more disciplined finisher on it (aside from the peerless Terry Austin, Jerry Ordway did a lovely job on Byrne on some of those FF issues.)

Oh and superficial similarities aside, give me Byrne over Perez any day - just a much better, more exciting and varied storyteller, with a MUCH greater grasp of anatomy, facial expressions etc

Byrne > Perez as well, though Perez was better at crowd scenes.

Byrne's FF run, for about the first three volumes of the VISIONARIES collection, is really really great. I mean, really great. It's not WAR AND PEACE or anything, but for a serial superhero comic, it was pretty damn good. But yes, it seemed as his interest flagged and he just continued out of momentum more than anything else. Still, the first two years is absolutely stellar, not really a dud in the bunch. His run was one of the things that drove me to get on my bike and ride over to the 7-11 every week to see if another issue had come out. Imagine, that and Miller's DAREDEVIL coming out at the same time.

stay classy Arizona!

I feel sorry for my friends that live there

haha um wrong thread

LMAO I wz just reading that thread

new blog update! This one contains Alpha Flight!! Go read it!!!

lol @ the ILE thread link btw!

Thanks D.A.M.! Just posted a new non-X one, on Batman: Gothic. Next time round, X goes ham with Proteus, Kitty, Emma, Dazzler. I'm pretty excited about that one, I think the run is finally getting to that golden point where you don't have to table any quantity of "well, it was the 70s" type stuff, it's just really consistently enjoyable and involving.

what's the url?

http://kangaratms.com/

xxp yeah Dr. Casino I agree that's exactly the point where things get really good!

I'm trying to read all of GMo's stuff in real time, so I will prolley have to come back to the Animal Man & Gothic stuff...

Enjoyed David U's tale of getting thrown out of Grace O'Malleys -- that used to be my old work pub. Horrible place...

Surprised to learn DU's a Torontonian, never met him but we probably went to every one of the same nerd events...

Hey hey we finally got to Dark Phoenix! It's a realll long post, be warned. Editing these things is HARD. And if you missed it, there was another one where we did Proteus and Emma/Kitty/Dazzler...

Nice post!

:) Thanks!

Yeah, that was a meaty read. Though if you guys think that John Byrne was the only one on that team who had a problem with women, dig a little deeper on Chris Claremont. This doesn't excuse Dark Bondage Sue Richards or anything.

I thought it was pretty explicit that Claremont intended for Jean to be a human who wielded a force that was much more than human. If you really want to read more on that, I'd suggest tracking down the CLASSIC X-MEN books that reprinted/retconned that period. There might be more textual nuggets to be gleaned in those (as well as some nice John Bolton art, even if I felt that the retcons were often wrong-headed and unnecessary.)

I actually had a chance to talk with him at SDCC in, oh, geez, 1989 or 1990 where he confirmed that (and politely put aside the thought that he had anything to do with Jean's resurrection in X-FACTOR).

this blog just gets better and better, Doctor Casino! one of my favorite things on the Internet right now...

excellent stuff as ever - re: yr reprint options, dr c, am pretty sure the old phoenix sage tpb doesn't have any original ending material, as i sought that out online for the first time as a result of reading the blog, and i had never read it before.

Awwwwww, thanks y'all, this is really encouraging. I was worried the DPS blog was too flabby and long-winded, it started out at 6600 words and I just barely got it down to 5900..

Yeah, it seems pretty clear that Claremont wanted the "human tapping into too-big powers" story. If the story had run as intended I don't think I would even find the ambiguities that seem to be there. It's still maybe a suspect narrative in terms of sexism, but I think CC does deserve credit, despite his pitfalls, for pushing his female characters to the front of the story and not having them just be accessory characters to the male heroes' narrative (ie women in refrigerators). At one point in the mid-80s, if I'm counting right, the X-Men are majority female! I can't think of another super-team that's ever hit that mark without it being the gimmick of the book. Some of his female characters do suffer from CRAZY WOMAN syndrome but, I think, they are at least interesting crazy stories - - Rachel is basically a traumatized war refuge. And Illyana is the survivor of an abusive childhood, convinced that she is somehow tainted or evil as a result, despite the fact that she basically only does good deeds. That's a great angle for a story - if you're going to do "women with problems" I'd rather see that than, you know, Malice. But maybe I'm being too charitable.

No, Mr. Claremont should get credit for putting female characters on a par or above most of his male characters, particularly on X-MEN. But there's some odd vibes that come off of them at the same time. And sure, compare Rachel to say, Brian Bendis' Scarlet Witch in HOUSE OF M, et al. Wanda in that just comes off as BLEARRRRRGH HOWARD DEAN SCREAM CRAZY whereas Rachel is troubled and self-destructive (love the EXCALIBUR-era 'hound' suit for that) but an actual character.

hooray I was actually checking this blog each day last week thinking "where is my goddamn Dark Phoenix post"

the old phoenix sage tpb doesn't have any original ending material

Marvel Masterworks edition (which I just borrowed and re-read recently) has the original ending plus a long interview with all involved (Shooter, Claremont, Byrne, etc.)

All that material, including the roundrobin discussion was sold as PHOENIX THE UNTOLD STORY or somesuch. I can't recall the date it hit, but I want to say 1987? Might've been to help gin up interest in the X-FACTOR book of the time, but that was all a very long time ago. There were pencil pages from it published in Fantagraphics' X-MEN COMPANION BOOK II from the early 80s.

Yes, Fantagraphics put out not one, but TWO books on the X-MEN back in the day. The second one is a great find by the by. I'd assume the first one is just as good in terms of content, etc.

yeah all that stuff is in the Masterworks edition, plus some b&w/pencil art Phoenix story that ran in some other special edition mag

How is the coloring in those? I always get edgy when they leave the old colors in place and just run them on glossy paper without toning them down. Generally looks TERRIBLE and would rather read the newsprint scans that I have sitting on my hard drive.

looked nice to me but I am hardly a stickler for such things. I like my comics colors bright and saturated. It's b&w reprints of things that I can't stand.