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NikkolasKing posted:So, for long time readers and stuff, is it fair to say the X-Men have had a couple Dark Ages: You can look here for sales date per year: https://www.comichron.com/yearlycomicssales.html Except 96 there's tons of X-Men in the Top 100 each year and in 2000 X-Men was 19 of the Top 20 so I'm not sure how they were a detriment.
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Apr 22, 2024 21:45
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Sales doesn’t equal quality!
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Apr 22, 2024 21:49
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Conrad_Birdie posted:Sales doesn’t equal quality! Was the question not that the existence of the books was actively harming Marvel's business?
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Apr 22, 2024 21:53
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I think dark period is kinda rough to interpret. I'd say from about 97-2000 was probably a dark period in regards to pretty forgettable stories. Then around the time Morrison comes on most everything improves. I'd disagree with post AvX, but that probably depends on how you feel about Bendis. I personally enjoyed his run, so I would only say the main title was bad when Rosenberg took over. But again, you still had other good X-Men titles around. But that Rosenberg run was just absolutely dire.
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Apr 22, 2024 22:18
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Roth posted:You can look here for sales date per year: https://www.comichron.com/yearlycomicssales.html Thanks for the link. Very interesting. So yeah, definitely doesn't look like from a sales perspective that the X-Men were failing. I dunno anything about comics business history but apparently Marvel went bankrupt in 1996. Maybe that wasn't the X-Men's fault, or maybe even the fault of any comics, but something else. Businesses are big and stupid.
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Apr 22, 2024 22:19
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Mid to late '90s is kinda a bad time for comics in general not just X-Men if we're being honest. It's an especially rough period for Marvel storytelling wise. Post AvX in my opinion is no different than any other in the decade or so before it. It all just depends on if you like the creative teams and the books. Everyone's going to have an opinion on that. I think anyone who says there's some big consensus on that era is probably speaking from a place of bias. Like everything there's good stuff and bad stuff.
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Apr 22, 2024 22:24
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That Matthew Rosenberg run on Uncanny X-Men thoroughly convinced me to never give another Rosenberg written comic a shot ever again.NikkolasKing posted:Thanks for the link. Very interesting. Edge & Christian has some in-depth posts about it but the basic summary as I recall is that Marvel's bankruptcy is largely the result of them making a very large purchase for a trading card company and then that industry crashed.
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Apr 22, 2024 22:34
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Roth posted:That Matthew Rosenberg run on Uncanny X-Men thoroughly convinced me to never give another Rosenberg written comic a shot ever again. I liked his Wildcats 12 issues run which started just as the Krakoa had began. But his edgier stuff works better there for characters Before Uncanny, Rosenberg had tried a Madrox mini that was pretty mild in good plotting and heavy on edgy violence. I detect a pattern. That Madrox mini still managed to have a better in-character Jamie than X-Corp -- good lord, was that book so bad.
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Apr 22, 2024 22:37
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X-O posted:Mid to late '90s is kinda a bad time for comics in general not just X-Men if we're being honest. It's an especially rough period for Marvel storytelling wise. I was pretty young but this seems like it would naturally follow dumb cash-grabby poo poo they were up to
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Apr 22, 2024 22:45
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I feel like I've read good Matthew Rosenberg comics, to the point that I thought his X-Men would probably be decent, but I couldn't actually name them if you put a gun to my head. Was I thinking of a different writer?
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Apr 22, 2024 22:50
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A local vegan place by me (that is really good) has a panel up of Beast from Rosenberg’s run saying that the place is amazing. You can see it walking in front of the restaurant. Every time I walk by it makes me laugh. Just everyone’s least favorite Xman from everyone’s least favorite run endorsing the place.
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Apr 22, 2024 23:01
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Air Skwirl posted:Was I thinking of a different writer? Apparently, yes.
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Apr 22, 2024 23:09
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X-O posted:Mid to late '90s is kinda a bad time for comics in general not just X-Men if we're being honest. It's an especially rough period for Marvel storytelling wise. We all have different taste (and good taste!) on here, but for me mid-to-late 90s is a wonderful time overall for comics. At least in proportion to what I'd expect anyway. I found Image was doing better and better, you'd have more interesting stuff than in the early 90s anyway, and I liked the cartoony and manga/anime influenced vibes. And stuff like Kelly's run on Deadpool, stuff like that, though I do hear it wasn't a good time for X-books overall. And if we're including worldwide, it's a really really cool time. John Wagner going ham on Dredd with some of his best consistent runs etc. 2000AD in particular had a down period in the early-to-mid 90s but was bouncing back big time overall in the mid-to-late 90s. Creators like Abnett doing a bunch of stuff like Sinister Dexter, and manga having a golden age etc.
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Apr 22, 2024 23:15
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NikkolasKing posted:So yeah, definitely doesn't look like from a sales perspective that the X-Men were failing. I dunno anything about comics business history but apparently Marvel went bankrupt in 1996. Maybe that wasn't the X-Men's fault, or maybe even the fault of any comics, but something else. Businesses are big and stupid. There were a lot of very good comics produced in the late 1990s, though also not very many of them were top-selling books with marquee superheroes. Quality of the stories aside, Marvel's comics business in the 1990s was still solid, though the industry itself was contracting and slumping a lot. Nevertheless the X-Books were still best-sellers, both for Marvel and for the direct market in general. Marvel's publishing arm was also still profitable, though perhaps not to the degree they had promised shareholders. But yes, in general "paying $700 million dollars to acquire Fleer and Skybox and then selling them off a few years later for $30 million dollars" was unquestionably a bigger issue than any lovely X-Men or Spider-Man comics that may have been disliked.
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Apr 22, 2024 23:23
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Edge & Christian posted:There are a number of things to blame for Marvel going bankrupt but probably the biggest single reason is that Marvel Entertainment dumped close to a billion dollars into buying up a bunch of trading card companies right as that market was in the process of collapsing. That makes sense. In the business world, the quality of the product isn't always the key to success or failure, I guess. I found this audiobook called Marvel Comics: The Untold Story which seems to go in depth on all this. I'll try to get it with my next month's free credit.
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Apr 22, 2024 23:31
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Fritzler posted:A local vegan place by me (that is really good) has a panel up of Beast from Rosenberg’s run saying that the place is amazing. You can see it walking in front of the restaurant. Every time I walk by it makes me laugh. Just everyone’s least favorite Xman from everyone’s least favorite run endorsing the place. I'm sure some people like Beast, they just haven't read a comic and only remember him from the animated series... Anyway I'm sure I'd do the same if I were the owner. Like unless the comic featured the Red Skull endorsing my place, I'd think it was just cool to be shouted out in a comic.
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Apr 23, 2024 06:21
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   I reached New Mutants 14-17 on my reading order and decided to give it a try. I think I might bump it up into my follow along category. Loved everything I saw in this little arc with Shadow King and Gabby and all.
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Apr 23, 2024 09:56
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TwoPair posted:I'm sure some people like Beast, they just haven't read a comic and only remember him from the animated series... Beast was always one of my favorites, pre-dating the animated series (not by a lot, but still) and I really hope that the new, old save slot Beast is written with some loving affection so he can be a viable character again.
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Apr 23, 2024 12:45
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NikkolasKing posted:I found this audiobook called Marvel Comics: The Untold Story which seems to go in depth on all this. I'll try to get it with my next month's free credit. Untold is great. During peak-COVID, I started a reading club specifically to work through the X-Events in the post-Claremont through Krakoa because I was very in-and-out with the books over those decades. I've also been picking up the Epic Collections, which have gotten into the mid-90s. Overall: - the post-Claremont stuff is sometimes much better than its reputation but at other times much worse. AoA is Bad; Onslaught is... readable. - The all-too-brief Joe Kelly-Steve Seagle era was pretty great and weird and unfortunately ended too soon because... - The Alan Davis Era just before Claremont's return is the lowest of the low. - It's insane how different the books are after Morrison. Not just because of things they did (that were later ignored; in many cases, thankfully) but the shift in how mainstream comics were written/presented around that time is wild. Reading House of M just months after Alan Davis doing Skrull adventures is goddam whiplash. I know Bendis isn't perfect, but how comics writing changed because of him is undeniable. - Messiah Complex is a Top 10 All Time X-Story. The two sequels are not as good but that era had some excellent stuff. - Age of X is almost as good. I haven't read all the Mike Carey run but what I have read is a underappreciated peak for the books. - The Schism Era starts off pretty well but the events after (AvX through the Inhumans crap) are mostly bad. The writing talent on those books is WILD but the execution is mostly rough. I do agree with whoever mentioned that the AvX Versus is a hoot. - Age of X-Man is one of the most insane things either Big Two company has ever published and I say that as a big fan of the Nocenti-JRJR Daredevil run.
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Apr 23, 2024 13:39
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AoA is bad? What?
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Apr 23, 2024 14:41
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I don't think AoA is bad but I don't think it's anywhere near as good as its reputation if you're reading it well after the fact. It's really badly paced at the outset, the world building is inconsistent and doesn't really stand up to scrutiny and it released the scourge that is Nate loving Grey into the 90's. It only gels in about the last third and at that point it is really good but it's so shambolic in the lead up that I was really surprised people love it as intensely as they do. I think House of M and Age of X--which is criminally underrated, imo--do the alternate reality thing vastly better than AoA, though that's definitely because of the lessons learned during AoA so credit where credit is due. There's a lot of good stuff throughout AoA but on the whole, it's kind of a mess that manages to really stick the landing.
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Apr 23, 2024 15:00
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I think in some cases a lot of that is nostalgia for Joe Mad but that's also the era where Chris Bachalo was turning in his super detailed stuff he's arguably not even the best artist working on the event. Admittedly I couldn't tell you much of what happened in either book except Astonishing was where they fought Holocaust and gave us Blink* while in Generation Next gave us Sugar Man who I am unsure of the current status of. *Who we think of as Blink, rather. Dawgstar fucked around with this message at 15:19 on Apr 23, 2024 |
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Apr 23, 2024 15:17
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Age of Apocalypse is mostly interesting as a product of its time and place in the comics. If you're a reader at the time regularly and it happens it's quite a wild ride. And it was at the time. I can see how reading it self contained some decades later might remove some of the gut punch of it.
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Apr 23, 2024 15:19
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It's also worth remembering that recency bias literally applies to individual works in a way. People remember endings way more than beginnings, so a strong end can lift someone's memory of an otherwise middling story and a poor one can impact people's opinion of an other great one.
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Apr 23, 2024 15:24
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Dawgstar posted:I think in some cases a lot of that is nostalgia for Joe Mad but that's also the era where Chris Bachalo was turning in his super detailed stuff he's arguably not even the best artist working on the event. Admittedly I couldn't tell you much of what happened in either book except Astonishing was where they fought Holocaust and gave us Blink* while in Generation Next gave us Sugar Man who I am unsure of the current status of. Generation Next was excellent. The rest of the the story is slap-dash and inconsistent and representative of some of the worst impulses of that era.
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Apr 23, 2024 15:30
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I missed the original AoA, as it dropped right when I dropped comics (or rather, moved into Sandman/Hellblazer and other 'higher concept' comics). A few years back I was staying at a friend's place who collected them and tried to give them a read, and it felt like such a jumbled mess I don't thing I reached the fourth issue. It was almost Image/Youngblood level "look at this edgy people growling at each other and getting ready to do..._something_. Maybe even next issue! But not likely."
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Apr 23, 2024 15:32
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I first read AoA standalone but I also read it in sequence when I read the entire X-line and I really think that nostalgia for reading it in the 90's is a big, entirely reasonable, part of the reputation it has.
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Apr 23, 2024 15:34
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I think the good parts of AoA outweigh the bad. Maybe since there have been a lot of other similar stories since then dulls the impact but it was wild.
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Apr 23, 2024 16:04
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As a naïve, callow youth, I foolishly thought they were gonna stick with this all new, crazy timeline and cool new takes on various characters for a while and lapped the whole thing up. Of course, the penny dropped as soon as talk of the M'kraan crystal and the possibility of fixing things came to light, and it was clear this was only going to be another temporary thing with no lasting effect. That disappointment with the end of AoA marked the end of me reading cape stuff for almost the rest of the decade. I stopped reading comics entirely for a couple of years, then started seeing someone who was really into 2000AD and Vertigo stuff, which is how I ended up reading The Sandman, Hellblazer, et al. She really broadened my horizons, ended up reading so many cool and interesting things I would have completely ignored otherwise. Oddly enough, she even got me back into hero stuff with Stormwatch/The Authority and Planetary. I was so close to being out, dammit, all the money and shelf space I could have saved...
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Apr 23, 2024 16:07
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Sentinel Red posted:As a naïve, callow youth, I foolishly thought they were gonna stick with this all new, crazy timeline and cool new takes on various characters for a while and lapped the whole thing up. Of course, the penny dropped as soon as talk of the M'kraan crystal and the possibility of fixing things came to light, and it was clear this was only going to be another temporary thing with no lasting effect. I had a friend who stopped reading X-comics because of AoA, figuring it was the new status quo. She never jumped back onboard, possibly out of embarrassment.
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Apr 23, 2024 16:30
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I sort of get it. I mean, I basically flipped through it after giving up, and the ending was apparently Magneto remembering he could just tear Apocalypse in two but didn't before for -reasons-, then bombs fall, everyone dies. Not sure what the thread policy for spoilers is, and it's a 25 year old arc, but better safe thansorry.
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Apr 23, 2024 17:55
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Dawgstar posted:I had a friend who stopped reading X-comics because of AoA, figuring it was the new status quo. She never jumped back onboard, possibly out of embarrassment. As far as I remember Marvel was saying it was permanent. That's why it was such a big deal. People lost their minds on the usenet newsgroups. Ya see, the internet was in its infancy and we didn't have the resoruces or knowlege we have nowadays....
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Apr 23, 2024 18:12
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NikkolasKing posted:That makes sense. In the business world, the quality of the product isn't always the key to success or failure, I guess. The best parts of that book are talking about older stuff because people are a lot more candid about poo poo that happened in the 60s and 70s and people who aren't still in the industry than they are about more recent history, and people they still might have a professional relationship but it does talk about what was going on in the 90s some. It's an excellent book however and I recommend it to anyone interested in comics history Ironically, Marvel going bankrupt is probably the reason we got RDJ as Iron-Man, to stave off bankruptcy they sold off the movie rights to all of the more popular characters, that's why, until Disney bought them, all the X-Men movies were Fox movies and the movie rights to Spider-Man are still held by Sony. So when the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man and the original Fox X-Men movies were huge hits Marvel (which had not been bought by Disney yet) said, "well, what characters do we own that we haven't sold the movie rights too?" and came up with Iron-Man, who was, at the time, a relatively minor character. Like he had fans, but he wasn't a Spider-Man or a Batman in terms of popularity, he was like a Daredevil. Fantastic Four were probably more popular in general.
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Apr 23, 2024 21:09
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it cannot be overstated how little of a poo poo anyone gave about Iron Man the comic book character prior to that movie
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Apr 23, 2024 22:24
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No kidding. Being a main fixture in the Avengers kept him (barely) at the bottom of tier B. but as the team itself struggled with relevance, leading to the ForceWorks era and such you could say he was a C-lister for a while and not be too far off.
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Apr 23, 2024 22:33
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Harold Fjord posted:it cannot be overstated how little of a poo poo anyone gave about Iron Man the comic book character prior to that movie I mentioned in the Marvel thread that the first comics I ever read were at the end of Civil War. As such I can say at least comic book readers had an intense hatred for him, if that counts as giving a poo poo. Although this line of discussion reminded me of a topic I read yesterday when Googling for Marvel in the 90s facts and stuff https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/xky6ly/til_in_the_1990s_marvel_released_their_financial/ It's a long, meandering discussion but two things stuck out to me. It got into the weeds of who was more popular in the 90s, Marvel or DC, based admittedly largely on our memories of living through that time period. 1. Marvel's characters were generally perceived as way cooler than DC's. DC had Batman and...Batman. Marvel meanwhile had multiple X-Men, Wolverine (he's basically his own thing in this analysis), Spiderman, etc.. 2. One commenter brought up a point I've never thought much about which is that both identities mattered equally to fans of Marvel characters. In my experience just like theirs, people saw Bruce Wayne as a boring mask for the real badass, Batman. But in Marvel, Peter and Spiderman are both equally part of the package. You love one you love the other. Again, this is all just middle-aged people reflecting on our childhoods or teenage years around comic books and cartoons. Who's to say how accurate it is to everyone's experience of the same time. But I thought it was an interesting topic, just discussing our perceptions of all this. If anyone here has any memories or views on all this, I'd certainly love to hear them.
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Apr 23, 2024 22:47
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Air Skwirl posted:Ironically, Marvel going bankrupt is probably the reason we got RDJ as Iron-Man, to stave off bankruptcy they sold off the movie rights to all of the more popular characters. Even then, Spider-Man and the X-Men specifically weren't part of that, as Spider-Man had been tied up in various lawsuits over who could make the movie dating back to the late 1980s and continuing into the bankruptcy and post-bankruptcy era. Similarly, X-Men movies were being developed throughout the 1980s and looked like it might actually happen after the success of the 1992 X-Men animated series; the gap between 1992 and 2000 was more due to Batman & Robin bombing and everyone thinking superhero movies weren't tenable until Blade was a relative smash and people started thinking the market might bear a superhero movie or two. Spider-Man and the X-Men were never going to be on the table for Marvel Studios, which was actually formed shortly prior to the bankruptcy to try to better shepherd characters into film. They'd begun working to claw back as many of the options that they could through the late 90s and early 2000s, but when they announced they'd be self-financing movies in 2005, their roster didn't even include Iron Man; the originally announced list of properties was Captain America, the Avengers, Nick Fury, Black Panther, Ant-Man, Cloak & Dagger, Dr. Strange, Hawkeye, Power Pack and Shang-Chi. Not to say that several of these characters (along with Daredevil, Elektra, Fantastic Four, Punisher, Ghost Rider, Deathlok, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, Mort the Dead Teenager, Strikeforce Morituri, etc. etc. etc.) hadn't been optioned in the 1990s, those were just the character Marvel had regained the movie rights to in 2005. New Line was still holding onto the Iron Man rights when the initial announcement was made, but gave them up shortly after. Part of the whole motivation for Bendis's New Avengers (and Brubaker's Captain America, Ellis's abortive Iron Man run, etc.) was to generate interest in the characters prior to the movies happening, and at least with the first two they succeeded to a good degree before the movies even came out. Iron Man not so much. Edge & Christian fucked around with this message at 22:54 on Apr 23, 2024 |
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Apr 23, 2024 22:49
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Ellis did the Extremis arc, right? I thought that was well received.
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Apr 23, 2024 22:58
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And Cap still never got his Broadway show. 
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Apr 23, 2024 22:58
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X-Men was like the thing when I was a kid in the 90s and now one of my younger co-workers doesn't even know who Cyclops is.
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Apr 23, 2024 23:15
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