S/D X-Men Runs

I feel like I remember reading somewhere that early in their careers, both Liefeld and McFarlane were regarded as Art Adams copycats. Ive never read it but Ive heard Leifeld's debt to Adans was v apparent in his work on Hawk and Dove...

Casino quit teasing us if you wont revive your blog :P

Right from the start, Liefeld and Jim Lee's artwork seemed to mash up Art Adams (especially all the fiddle-faddle rendering) and Michael Golden (cartoonish faces, rounded figures). The element of grotesque caricature in McFarlane's work makes him slightly harder to place, imho.

^Agree with that. McFarlane's general twistiness/disproportion seemed more deliberate and stylized in comparison

Casino quit teasing us if you wont revive your blog :P

;_; I have schoolwork to do! Negotiations continue. Might float it back in this summer on a trial basis, or something...

Aww I'm not trying to messyour life up, I forgot u were still doing school

Yup, exactly right, as the X-Men are gearing up to go to Asgard. Using the magic space thunderbolts Cyclops saved from their encounter with Arkon the Space Barbarian a few annuals back, since apparently Cyclops is such a good pilot he can even steer a bag of thunderbolts. It's overall a pretty awesome storyline, pretty sure I've raved about it on this very thread actually but I just love the vibe of the whole thing. Sort of my perfect era of X-Men, just the right lineups for both of the teams and a real sense of family/camaraderie rolling through the high adventure and cheesecake scenes.

Cosign this, totally! The Asgard storyline was actually the first X-Men story I read, and I was immediately hooked. There was some angst and drama, but the Bronze Age sense of thrill and adventure was still there too, things hadn't gotten overtly dark yet (Mutant Massacre came a couple years later, right?). I didn't get half of the references in those comics (like who was Rachel's mother, whose tragic past they kept alluding to?), but that was part of the charm - there was a past, a larger universe these characters lived in, and I wanted to find out more about it.

Mutant Massacre was when I started buying X-Men comic books and remains IMO one of the best crossover stories ever told.

Seconded, Dan. Still my favourite story, with all the bleakness, the darkness and the death.

Like, it blew my mind that with each issue, actual serious changes were occurring to this universe and this line-up. It helped that I was young and naive enough to think that these changes would be inviolable, but the story remains a visceral, dramatic slog (in a good way), or at least it was the last time I read it.

Angel has never been the same since Mutant Massacre, though; even when they sort of gave him his original wings back, he kept the Archangel persona, and now that's he's been blank-slated he still has the metal wings

Ah, right... I remember being crushed that Kitty couldn't unphase, and Colossus couldn't un-Colossus.

the miniseries where they fixed Kitty's phasing problem was really, really great IMO

of course the permaphase was brought back by Fraction after Whedon shot her into space in that giant bullet but we knew it wasn't going to be permanent

the miniseries where they fixed Kitty's phasing problem was really, really great IMO

I don't think I've ever read this, which one is it?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantastic_Four_vs._the_X-Men

Especially that part where Kitty contemplates killing herself

Mutant Massacre - i hated that, thought it was an ill thought out debacle (of course i bought all te books) but it was - as usually turns oust to be the case a stupid ending and it wa sthe start of my deep annoyance, verging on hate of the X-books as I (as ranted on other comic threads before) thought the variance between the rest pf the MU where these people interact with other heroes and so there should be some pushback on the hatred just went ridiculously over the line

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

now also mebbe coz of age but i loved the mutants in asgard set across x-men and new mutants, karma lost her weight, sunball was happy for a change, hanging out with warriors three, magik turning tables on enchantess, felt like there was charcter development with just a fun bring these two worlds in the MU never meet together and have fun with it

i read that sean howe marvel marvel book last month -- totally great! made me want to read (or re-read) a bunch of things. I think as a kid the first thing I read was Fall of the Mutants, but as I went back into that mutant massacre stuff, that's the stuff that really sticks with me. the only thing i have left is a collection of those asgard stories -- pretty fun.

xp: conversely, I thought reading a multipart story where multiple heroes were seriously hurt/disfigured and the bad guys won, setting up a series of plot strands with major consequences on the books for the next several years (particularly on the X-Factor side) was amazing

yeah, I think that was why i loved it too dan

Mutant Massacre also didn't really have anything to do with public mutant-hate, right? It was basically a squad of mutant goons mass-murdering the Morlocks for reasons unexplained, and our heroes getting torn up as they try to intervene.

yup

It was a pretty shocking way to jump into collectordom

I'd bought the issue before, which was an anti-racism self-contained story where Kitty faced down a mob screaming at a kid by shaming them with a bald allegory to her own mutant powers (which she didn't use) that was intercut with the story of Frankie and her Hellfire Club guard boyfriend running from some dudes trying to kill them, ending with Frankie getting shot at the entrance of the Morlock tunnels; it was very jarring seeing them go from being able to use words to defuse a situation to them just getting torn up by the Marauders, plus mix in Wolverine's freakout over discovering Jean was back and it was just awesome plot juggling.

like earlnash i too have recently read and enjoyed sean howe's marvel book, but reading this thread now, i wonder if i liked it because i'm basically in sympathy with its elevation of the 70s material at marvel over and above anything since. it v. much paints the claremont-byrne era as the peak of the x-men, because of the creative tension-equilibrium between the pair of em (once byrne left, ironically, the title became even MORE popular, but there was nobody to counteract claremont's more hopeless flights of fancy, and in time the commercial imperative - crossovers, spin-offs, multiple titles etc - really diluted the previous 'purity' of the brand.)

also reading this thread prompted me to read the wiki entry on Mutant Massacre - hadn't known before that the plot was a reworking of a failed attempt to integrate the alan moore captain britain material into the US marvel universe (failed because moore had copyright claim on his Captain Britain strips.) marvel did ultimately publish the moore-davis Cap Brits, and i've never read excalibur, but i'm guessing that claremont did eventually get to play with that universe when he was writing it

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...