S/D X-Men Runs

But she was captured because of the Seige Perilous (I think)!

That whole post-Fall of the Mutants phase (despite some semicool Brood & Savage Land shenanigans) makes me sad.

So should we blame Claremont for not resolving Wolverine's origin & the whole Days of Future Past / The Twelve stuff,

I vote no, because neither of these were really his stories. IIRC, the Twelve were alluded to in Louise Simonson's X-Factor and sat untouched until a bad 90s storyline decided to pick them up. Not to be confused with the even worse earlier 90s Liefeld storyline that Stone Monkey is thinking of.

Wolverine's origin was basically a non-issue in the mainline X-books, it was really emphasized elsewhere, like the "Weapon X" storyline etc. I never got the impression Claremont really cared, and he was subject to surprisingly few Claremontian danglers as far as I remember.

I like pretty much the entire Claremont run from whenever it stops being horrendously 70s and cheesy (let's say 110, 120?) up through the Australian period. Certainly there are highs and lows within that...Fall of the Mutants is not exactly great, but the Brood story, the Paul Smith period as a whole, Dark Phoenix, Kulan Gath etc etc, all deserve the hype. One very underrated period IMO is the JRJr era, when the theme seemed to be "let's try just heaping continuous abuse on the X-Men." This would later become so much the default position of the entire line that it's hard to realize how striking the year or so covering Nimrod and the Mutant Massacre are. Rachel Grey may epitomize a failure of long-term planning - she shows up, angsts around for a while, then leaves without accomplishing anything - but she does kickstart an era where bleakness is for once convincing rather than gratuitous. Nightcrawler's speech in issue ??? sets the tone well - "Thunderbird - killed! Jean Grey - killed! Where will it all end?" It all ends with the IMO absolutely harrowing final scene in 211, which still sends shivers up my spine... ahem, anyway....

I would second the recommendations for New Mutants, and extend them up to issue 50 to include a fairly fun (if predictabale) time-travel arc. The stuff with Bill S. on art really can't fail, but you'll want to keep going past that to get the meat of Magneto's term as headmaster. There's a reason people are still nostalgic for that period and continue to regard the evil Magneto as some sort of editorial betrayal, fifteen years down the line. Naturally, this period includes the Asgard crossover that keeps getting justifiably upped, so grab that too - it takes place around #35 or so if I recall correctly. Proceed past issue 50 at your own risk, it gets hairy fast. If you grow attached to the characters (as you might well do), you're better served by (brace yourself) fanfic, especially Connie Hirsch's canonical epic "Kid Dynamo."

A little later in NM continuity but readable on its own is the Jo Duffy-penned miniseries "Fallen Angels," which is probably my favorite bit of X-ephemera ever. Eight goofy but convincing issues of a motley crew of outcast mutants including a Tyrannosaurus Rex and two lobsters. 1987 doesn't get any better than that.

Stepping outside the 80s "golden age" there's not much I can recommend wholeheartedly that you haven't already read. Lobdell and Bachalo's "Generation X" from the 90s is IMO really good although it has its detractors and quickly gets bad after the first twenty-five issues or so. The four-issue Age of Apocalypse tie-in, "Generation Next," is another one of those books where bleakness convinces in a good way, although it's about as subtle as a sledgehammer. This is back when Bachalo could draw a lot better, too.

Etc.

Am I crazy or was Inferno HEAVILY influenced by DC's proto-vertigo Swamp Thing and Hellblazer runs of "Hell comes to comictown" storyline arcs?
In any case it was pretty horrible.

It all ends with the IMO absolutely harrowing final scene in 211, which still sends shivers up my spine... ahem, anyway....

That issue really did a number on me when I first read it as a little kid. I feel like my taste in genre fiction is basically defined by my very early exposure to the Mutant Massacre and the Empire Strikes Back.

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 started collecting them all the X-titles for the first year of that run, but you're right, like 80% of it is spaced out incredibly. there are interesting setups for almost every series but most of them feel totally unnecessary. Winnowed it down to just core X-Men and Marauders. If anyone else thinks the other titles are worthwhile, let me know.

They introduced so many new titles even AFTER Dawn of X that I gave up trying to catch them all. Like is Ewing's SWORD worth it?

You can read the collected X of Swords next which is a decent story, pushing some of the elements introduced in Hox/PoX regarding Arakko/Krakoa and Apocalypse. The following events (Hellfire Gala/Trial of Magneto and Inferno) are just getting started now.

Another note that is that Marvel IS surprisingly - with six months backlog time - collecting the entirely of the X-Men titles in chronological order in various trades, previously Dawn of X (16 volumes) currently Reign of X (up to 3, expected to go to 11). Kinda hoping someday they'll all just be super cheap on Comixology or something.

While I have enjoyed some of these extended storyline type runs, criminy that is like $300+ bucks to read one huge story.

Everything melting down into this stuff is why I pretty much gave up on the weekly habit. Too much...

Nhex, thanks!

I’ll probably wait until the inevitable reboot of the line before really diving into those volumes. Volume form is how I’ve followed say, Saga - it requires some patience but then again there’s no shortage of things to be distracted by.

earlnash, by and large I’m with you. I can’t imagine buying, whatever, 10-15 titles a month like I did when I was 13. For reasons discussed exhaustively everywhere, it isn’t worth it: decompression, the flashiness of art/pages post-1991 or so, etc etc

Much of my comics money goes to comics or collections pre-1992 or so

I could not keep up on Batman at all. It used to be like 2-3 issues a month and DC said f'k it - they want Batman we will give them Batman a few years ago and it was like 10-12 issues a month.

X-men is some serious major nerd commitment. Read a bit of the big late model runs but it's just too dense at this point for me. Definitely need a scorecard to keep track of the multiple versions of characters and all the wacky changes and I cannot imagine what a Hickman deconstruction would be like.

Last i saw, MOST of the X-runs are available in Marvel Unlimited if you have a tablet and/or are comfortable reading at your computer
https://www.marvel.com/unlimited

that's true, a good option for the price
I wish Marvel Unlimited was better at multi-title collections and crossover reading order. though maybe they've improved, I haven't used it in a few years

Just checked - they're only 3 months behind now? Maybe I should just give up on print, most of my floppies are Marvel

there's any numbers of reading order guides online of course
https://comicbookreadingorders.com/marvel/events/

Hickman’s runs are so long I need to pause and get a breather, and then I forget everything and start again.

I read the first issues hickman’s monthly (agree marauders was the only other dece title, although xforce (!) was fun). But then the pandemic and having a toddler happened and I have a year and a half of deliveries from my comic book store to catch up on. Is any of it as good as hoxpox was?

Nope, unfortunately, but I feel like it might pick up on the way out. Also, he's leaving Marvel soon to do that Substack thing, so this era won't be as long as his other projects.

I followed but unsubscribed from his substack– it’s like all the boring texty bits Hickman puts in his book run rampant

Also substack is evil of course