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For what it's worth, what makes no sense to me about the intelligent evil DNA twist in Morrison's run is that it's introduced in the final arc as the mastermind behind every conflict in the run, and apparently it's capable of possessing people and has existed since prehistory. Also, it was in that street drug mutants kept using. Also, it has a hive mind that can be extremely physically remote from itself while maintaining unity as one entity. None of this is properly explained, and it's all dropped on the reader's head in the last arc with a couple of lines of floaty exposition. It's not the concept, it's the execution - the sudden, jarring and strange revelation of an ancient evil that has been pulling the strings all along. Morrison likes these Ahriman, ultimate representation of fundamental evil figures in his work, and it's a nice tie-in to the X-Men's themes that this one is biological as opposed to theological, but it isn't strongly foreshadowed or strongly explained in its actual big reveal. Kick has never been shown to cause possession before, so what, did Hank just use a lot more of it than anyone else? Is Glob Herman secretly a puppet of Sublime, too? Thematically, it's foreshadowed with Cassandra Nova, who is also instantiated from natural processes as a purely biological engine of hatred and competition, so there's some symmetry in that the run both opens and closes with the X-Men confronting an ideology encoded in biology, with Cassandra's redemption and sacrifice in the fight against Sublime showing that eventually nurture can defeat nature. Thematically, it's saying some pretty big things. I just think the actual plotting, the moment to moment of those broad strokes, is messy and inept. Not to say Claremont is immune to this. (Everything to do with Mr. Sinister in his run is a pretty similar kind of plotting mess). This is strictly as a criticism of Morrison, not for the sake of elevating a different writer above him.
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May 25, 2018 14:31
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Rhyno posted:They are lasers and cyclops did 9/11 I thought it was juggernaut and the webbed menace helped him!!
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May 25, 2018 16:57
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I'll add to the Claremont love, he rules. One of the best runs ever. Morrison's run is not my thing, but I certainly dig that it was a cohesively written run that would be a bounce back from the last few years on the books, with a style for that time. Just not the vibe or direction I myself would've wanted. I also enjoyed X-Treme X-Men by Claremont at the same time, for the most part. By the way, now that Ottley is done with Invincible, I'd like him to draw Uncanny X-Men after his Spider-Man run. And it should be written by somebody cool and fun, I'll say... Dan Abnett. On runs of similar quality around that time, a big one for me is John Wagner on Judge Dredd, and co-writing with Alan Grant for a while. With an assist by Pat Mills. In 1978 and 79 when X-Men was getting really good, Judge Dredd was getting really good as well with The Cursed Earth, Day the Law Died, and whatnot. And guys like Brian Bolland, Carlos Ezquerra, that run kept getting better and better too. Miller on Daredevil is another run that stands out above most Marvel/DC stuff at that time for me. Likewise with the literature and cinema influence mentioned with Claremont there. Heavy Metal fucked around with this message at 23:08 on May 25, 2018 |
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May 25, 2018 23:02
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I love Morrison's run, but it wouldn't exist without Claremont's. It was explicitly written as a response to the legacy Claremont left on the series and was intended to move X-Men past that. It didn't work, as Morrison's legacies at Marvel tended not to, but that was the point.
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May 25, 2018 23:21
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Endless Mike posted:I love Morrison's run, but it wouldn't exist without Claremont's. It was explicitly written as a response to the legacy Claremont left on the series and was intended to move X-Men past that. It didn't work, as Morrison's legacies at Marvel tended not to, but that was the point. It's sort of unfortunate. The X-Men have not really been able to evolve since Clermont. Like they taken diversions, but everything is still Claremont. And the problem with that is just it can lead to recycling. I mean, Comics will always recycle because it's the only way to keep a story going long past the point it should have ended. But you can really see it with the X-Men that keep finding a new dark future or have Magneto turn evil again or have Magneto become good again or are the cusp of becoming accepted only for that to be yanked Away by the conspiracies of the bigots. The problem is that the X-Men have an end goal, but it can never be attained. Now one could argue that the fight against bigotry never really ends so that makes sense, but no substantial gains can ever be made without someone undoing them to bring them back to status quo. I think that's what makes it tougher to evolve them and what looms over their head more than characters like Spider-Man whose only goal is to just do what's right in the moment or Captain America which is just to be a patriot, even when that means going against your country, and so on and so forth with other Heroes. I guess what I'm saying is that didn't really like the Morrison run that but I am sad that no one has been able to permanently take the X-Men in a New Direction so that they could avoid recycling or maybe finally succeeded their goal and be able to move on.
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May 25, 2018 23:45
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Covok posted:I guess what I'm saying is that didn't really like the Morrison run that but I am sad that no one has been able to permanently take the X-Men in a New Direction so that they could avoid recycling or maybe finally succeeded their goal and be able to move on. If you haven't, I recommend checking out Invincible. It's a superhero comic with the relationship and day to day stuff we dig from X-Men or Spidey, and it does all the stuff you're saying you'd like as well. Wrapped up recently at 144 issues.
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May 25, 2018 23:56
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Heavy Metal posted:If you haven't, I recommend checking out Invincible. It's a superhero comic with the relationship and day to day stuff we dig from X-Men or Spidey, and it does all the stuff you're saying you'd like as well. Wrapped up recently at 144 issues. Also lots of graphic violence.
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May 26, 2018 00:01
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Android Blues posted:One of the best things about Claremont is his obvious literary influence. He's bringing ideas into comics from romance novels, sci-fi novels, adventure, detective and mystery novels, throughout his run. He approaches the X-Men's powers with a sort of sci-fi zeal, rigorously elaborating on the nature of telepathy and how Storm needs to use a deft touch to prevent her weather control abilities from having a cascade effect on local weather systems. He uses words like "hydroplaning" and "compeers", and there's one whole issue where the villains are all characters from The Master & Margarita, a censored Soviet novel from the 1930s, and he never mentions this or calls out the reference, they just are. I agree with your basic point but I don't think Claremont's style of mega syncretic literariness would have been possible at all if Marvel hadn't already established a precedent for vaguely countercultural, omivorously nerdy, and thematically ambitious writers. I see him as an evolution of a certain mode that was already pretty evident in Steve Englehart, sort of found its footing in some elements of Roy Thomas and Denny O'Neil, and was in full bloom with Steve Gerber's early stuff. See too, I guess, Harlan Ellison's occasional (and often pretty stupid) fill-in work on various titles. I think that the difference isn't that Claremont had loftier literary aspirations than anyone else at Marvel, but that he knew how to combine those aspirations with working in a medium like comics better. Thomas and Englehart were continuity fiends and could come up with big wild ideas to throw around, and they could cite Shelley or whatever, but Claremont had this knack you allude to of making all of these things feel like they fit together, that his characters are people with some degree of psychological realism who can still fight ancient demons and teleport and whatever else. He had the rare gift of selling his world-building on the level of the personal-- his Wolverine makes sense and even when he goes off the deep end a little in the 80s you can be totally at sea with the plot of an issue while still being crystal clear about what the stakes are to the characters, what they're feeling, why they're reacting in the way they are, etc. (mostly-- there's a really bad issue shortly before they go to the Outback where they keep terrorizing and harrassing Havok that I've never understood, and some of the New Mutants characters are a mess just because there were so many of them). I guess I'd call it less a literary touch than a specifically novelistic touch-- he did things with comics as not just a serial form but a longform that I don't think anybody prior to him had really thought about putting into practice. Somewhere John Byrne has a post grumbling a bit about Claremont's insistance on downtime issues, but I think they're key-- they'd definitely existed before him, but he used them differently, in a way I'm not sure I can articulate off the top of my head, as a way of marking time as much as the more classic function of carving out some space to catch up with subplots and soap stuff. I think Claremont based his understanding of how he wanted the superhero serial narrative to work on accumulation-- that we get a sense of character through understanding a sense of history, which we can only get by seeing the same characters doing variations on the same things over and over, with signal differences, such that the "downtime issue" is a way of formalizing and instantiating important freeze-frames in the emotional choreography of his casts-- a way of lining everyone up in the doorframe and carving notches in the wood. He does so, so many interesting things, that we never stop to notice because they were also such useful things that they immediately got absorbed into the normative grammar of superhero comics. I think Morrison was the first writer to try to consciously follow up on Claremont as a formal innovator rather than as a generator of IPs (I'm not a huge fan of Lobdell or Nicieza or really any of the franchise caretakers throughout the 90s) and I really admire his run as an attempt to do a critique of Claremont within the narrative space that Claremont himself created, so I don't really want to think of them as competing with one another. Morrison helped me understand what Claremont was up to much better, as well as throwing out a lot of suggestions, deliberately left up in the air for other writers to fulfill (or, as it happened, for editors to immediately backtrack on) about where this sort of narrative could go next. I love both runs! How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 00:06 on May 26, 2018 |
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May 26, 2018 00:02
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Heavy Metal posted:If you haven't, I recommend checking out Invincible. It's a superhero comic with the relationship and day to day stuff we dig from X-Men or Spidey, and it does all the stuff you're saying you'd like as well. Wrapped up recently at 144 issues. I read Invincible and it is good, but, whenever I go back to finish it, the misery of the situations wear me down till I stop. It's kind of like 90s Spider-Man in that sense. It's a good book, but it suffers from just so many bad things happening to the main character all the time that it does tire the reader out. Eventually, I'll finish it, though.
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May 26, 2018 00:16
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I think you can see Claremont improving consistently as his run progresses as well. I think there's a particular point just after the Brood Sag where he's clearly read Alan Moore's Captain Britain comics and even after nearly 100 issues on the book, consciously decided to try upping his game. I think that results in stuff like that one-off issue he did with Barry Windsor-Smith where Wolverine goes feral and fights the Reavers in Central Park during a snowstorm; that's not something I think you'd expect in a run that's been going for about eight years and 100 issues by then.
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May 26, 2018 00:28
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Covok posted:I read Invincible and it is good, but, whenever I go back to finish it, the misery of the situations wear me down till I stop. It's kind of like 90s Spider-Man in that sense. It's a good book, but it suffers from just so many bad things happening to the main character all the time that it does tire the reader out. Eventually, I'll finish it, though. I felt that way a bit, especially since I'm always really rooting for Mark and Eve, but, without spoiling anything, you may dig where it all goes, I sure did. Kirkman even comments on this a few times in the letters column, he's like, what kind of monster do you guys think I am? When things don't go as darkly as anticipated etc. It came to mind since it does tackle the idea of trying to really end the big problems, and really changing things. Though in the case of X-Men and similar books, ending the big problems could mean the end of the book I guess. But since everybody loves the downtime issues, in general writers and editors might remember that, and not throw horror at the heroes nonstop. Heavy Metal fucked around with this message at 01:04 on May 26, 2018 |
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May 26, 2018 00:56
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Wheat Loaf posted:I think you can see Claremont improving consistently as his run progresses as well. I agree with this, too. A lot of people I know and a few people in this thread have said that Australia is where Claremont starts to peter out for them, but I love that he really just tries to upset the status quo and do something new (and then tries again when he disbands the X-Men for like a year). It's never perfect, but it works rather well. X-Tinction Agenda is a bit of a step back, but it's also at the tail end of his run, and even it's trying something new (that is the first crossover where the individual books were taken over to tell a sequential story, right?). This is part of why I hate X-Men Gold so much. I can't think of a single writer that's tried to strip-mine the Claremont stuff as much as Guggenheim has. While there's Claremont nostalgia all over the place, other writers have at least glanced at books published since 1992.
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May 26, 2018 01:39
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Rochallor posted:I agree with this, too. A lot of people I know and a few people in this thread have said that Australia is where Claremont starts to peter out for them, but I love that he really just tries to upset the status quo and do something new (and then tries again when he disbands the X-Men for like a year). It's never perfect, but it works rather well. X-Tinction Agenda is a bit of a step back, but it's also at the tail end of his run, and even it's trying something new (that is the first crossover where the individual books were taken over to tell a sequential story, right?). The Australia stuff and the disbanded team bits are, if you can pretend you don't know how messily things pan out, thrilling comics because he's doing so much to shake up what a longform superhero comic even looks like. Silvestri is a blessing for him because his figures are so sleek and slinky and almost vampire-looking-- all of a sudden we see the X-Men as a human in the Marvel universe might see them, as kind of sexy and inhuman, a truly 80s version of what a species displacing and superseding humanity might look like. From what I understand that's around when Claremont started grating up against editorial more often-- not only having his plans curtailed, but having editors perhaps justifiably get annoyed with him about endlessly deferred resolutions and dangling plot threads-- so on one level its hard not to see the late 80s and early 90s portion of Claremont's X-Men as a failed experiment. But I'm glad he tried-- if you ignore everything you know about Gambit as a cartoon-accented cheeseball, his first appearance is a pretty tense 22 pages of horror/suspense, and it works because Claremont has unsettled so much at that point of what we expect from a superhero comic in terms of risk, pacing, escalation, etc.--- ditto that issue where Wolverine is crucified in the desert and a terrified teen Jubilee has to drag him to safety.
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May 26, 2018 05:05
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I'm incredibly biased because the first comic I ever had purchased for me was X-Men while they were in Australia. It actually didn't really take quite then, it took a few months before I read another comic, (it was Classic, actually that got me hooked, specifically the Brood War), but after I was in, I went back to that and thought it all felt really cool. It also created a space where Excalibur and X-Factor could start.
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May 26, 2018 08:54
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Rochallor posted:This is part of why I hate X-Men Gold so much. I can't think of a single writer that's tried to strip-mine the Claremont stuff as much as Guggenheim has. While there's Claremont nostalgia all over the place, other writers have at least glanced at books published since 1992. Thank you. I was trying to put my finger on why I dislike X-Men Gold so much and you nailed it.
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May 27, 2018 01:02
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This makes me want to check out some classic X Men. I know the Dark Phoenix saga is THE X men story, but are there any other recommendations?
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May 27, 2018 03:35
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Just start at Giant Sized X-Men #1 and read until you lose interest.
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May 27, 2018 03:39
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Unlucky7 posted:This makes me want to check out some classic X Men. I know the Dark Phoenix saga is THE X men story, but are there any other recommendations? This is the Claremont reading order guide. I just started using this to read through Claremont. 
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May 27, 2018 03:41
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Good stuff. I'll add, if starting at Giant Size #1 and you don't feel it for a while, it gets better quick. Comparing the writing in issue 99 to issue 129 for example, it really improved a lot. It felt very retro or I guess of the time at Marvel to some degree at first, but then it became very ahead of it's time and more consistently excellent to me. 129 is where that Dark Phoenix Saga trade paperback starts coincidentally. It introduces Kitty so well, along with Emma, Wolverine looks at porno mags and argues with the clerk, issue 129 is mighty fine.
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May 27, 2018 04:51
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Endless Mike posted:Just start at Giant Sized X-Men #1 and read until you lose interest. This is probably what I'd recommend too. You can probably start at the Dark Phoenix saga like that reading order image suggest and not miss out on much that is important going forward, but I think a lot of the groundwork for the Dark Phoenix starts right after Giant Sized.
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May 27, 2018 04:55
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Unlucky7 posted:This makes me want to check out some classic X Men. I know the Dark Phoenix saga is THE X men story, but are there any other recommendations? A couple of the other major hits are God Loves, Man Kills and Days of Future Past.
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May 27, 2018 05:03
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The worst thing Claremont ever did was when he came back to the X-Men and created the Neo.
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May 27, 2018 05:57
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I wish I had that guide when I reread something like #145ish through 280 earlier this year.
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May 27, 2018 07:23
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My Claremont hot take is that the the Brood War is better than Dark Phoenix.
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May 27, 2018 08:29
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Rhyno posted:The worst thing Claremont ever did was when he came back to the X-Men and created the Neo. Those and the Alan Davis stories immediately preceding them were my introduction to X-Men comics.
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May 27, 2018 14:52
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Codependent Poster posted:A couple of the other major hits are God Loves, Man Kills and Days of Future Past. I trying to think of any X-Men story I like more than God Loves, Man Kills and I'm having a real hard time of it.
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May 28, 2018 00:45
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Cabbit posted:I trying to think of any X-Men story I like more than God Loves, Man Kills and I'm having a real hard time of it. God Loves Man Kills is probably the perfect comic to show anyone you're trying to trick into being an X-Men fan.
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May 28, 2018 06:50
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I just read Giant Sized X-Men #1 and it is an interesting piece of comics history and a pretty good comic in its own right. I kind of wonder why Sunfire was there at all though: He complains that he is there at all, he doesn't really do anything of note in the issue, and in the next issue he quits within a few pages. I guess that it was an idea that ultimately did not pan out.
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May 28, 2018 08:03
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also see Thunder... hawk? Bolt?
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May 28, 2018 08:13
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Skwirl posted:God Loves Man Kills is probably the perfect comic to show anyone you're trying to trick into being an X-Men fan. Was one of the first comics I ever bought. I bet 12 year old me read it 100 times.
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May 28, 2018 08:47
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Bankok posted:Was one of the first comics I ever bought. I bet 12 year old me read it 100 times. If you want something kinda short that you can hand to anyone who asks you "why do you like comics?" its really hard to beat.
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May 28, 2018 09:07
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Unlucky7 posted:I just read Giant Sized X-Men #1 and it is an interesting piece of comics history and a pretty good comic in its own right. I kind of wonder why Sunfire was there at all though: He complains that he is there at all, he doesn't really do anything of note in the issue, and in the next issue he quits within a few pages. I guess that it was an idea that ultimately did not pan out. I swore I read something about him being forced in the issue for editorial reasons but I can't find anything at all supporting that so maybe I dreamt that up. E: This is all I can find for early concept: http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Sunfire_(comics) quote:team since. He has had some presence in the greater Marvel Universe. ---- Skwirl posted:God Loves Man Kills is probably the perfect comic to show anyone you're trying to trick into being an X-Men fan. It really is. Rick fucked around with this message at 12:15 on May 28, 2018 |
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May 28, 2018 11:58
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Synthbuttrange posted:also see Thunder... hawk? Bolt? He was there intentionally to kill to surprise the readers.
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May 28, 2018 13:32
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Found an X-Men arcade cabinet at a local computer repair place. What a beautiful machine.
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Jun 2, 2018 03:08
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Open Marriage Night posted:Found an X-Men arcade cabinet at a local computer repair place. What a beautiful machine. Was it one of those multimonitor ones?
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Jun 2, 2018 03:22
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No, been about seven, eight years since I've seen one of those. Should of got a picture of the side. As iconic as X-Men art can be to me. 
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Jun 2, 2018 03:49
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There's one at the new barcade here, the multi monitor version. I'll snap a pic if we go tomorrow as it is indeed glorious.
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Jun 2, 2018 04:34
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Rhyno posted:There's one at the new barcade here, the multi monitor version. I'll snap a pic if we go tomorrow as it is indeed glorious. I played that when I was but a wee sprout. It was pretty fun. A bit quarter-munchy, but fun.
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Jun 2, 2018 05:00
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First arcade game I ever beat. We were at a field trip at a water park, but us four nerds knew what was important. I was Nightcrawler.
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Jun 2, 2018 05:11
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I rebought that the moment it came out on Playstation 3 years back, and I think it was free for android one day but I didn't care for the controls on a phone. I loved when in Marvel Heroes when they reworked the powers and added one for Colossus, they used a sound effect from the arcade game. Truly a classic co-op on par with the Simpsons and almost TMNT.
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