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Sandwolf posted:Horny... how? I can't tell if this is a serious post. If it is, you don't even have to read his entire run or anything to check it out. And no, you don't even have to look into when he got worse with X-Treme X-Men literally having tentacle hentai in a bath tub. Uncanny X-Men #189 is enough to see all the Claremont trademarks: bondage gear, mind control, french maids, strong women fighting half naked, and more! It's all there in one issue. It's like a best of album, if I ever saw one.
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Mar 30, 2020 01:54
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What I always find interesting about superhero comics of the 1980s-1990s is how many writers/editors seemed to look at Claremont X-Men as a touchstone for success and their basic takeaways were "longrunning plot threads" and "lots of soap opera-y romance subplots" and in doing so demonstrate just how hard it is to do either of those very well. There are plenty of people who did their own spin on it (arguably Roy Thomas and Jim Shooter provided a solid template for Claremont in Avengers and Legion, respectively) and contemporaries of Claremont X-Men like Levitz's Legion and Wolfman's Titans did it well for stretches of time. But for every insane anecdote in Claremont X-Men, there are a dozen runs like Jim Valentino's incredibly horny Guardians of the Galaxy run which had subplots with (PG-rated) unwilling polycules and a husband and wife who were merged into one body that could swap back and forth and when their marriage was on the rocks the wife hooked up with a team member while the husband was trapped inside her body and they could only have sex in a specially treated room that replicated his magic suit that kept his body from disintegrating and was built by a fourth team member with implicitly the primary purpose of "gotta give you a chance to cuckold our teammate, buddy!" It's a very weird book and also really plays up the idea that any two characters with similar characteristics (flame hair, very tall, fat, reptilian) are going to immediately try to gently caress regardless of any other characteristic or war going on.
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Mar 30, 2020 02:10
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Was Claremont’s plan always to jump off the x-men books at the very start of the Jim Lee X-Men comic? I’m reading the epic collection right now, and everything seems to happen very suddenly.
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Mar 30, 2020 03:49
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:Was Claremont’s plan always to jump off the x-men books at the very start of the Jim Lee X-Men comic? I’m reading the epic collection right now, and everything seems to happen very suddenly. Nah, the artists started having more say over storylines and stuff and Claremont was basically forced off/quit in frustration.
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Mar 30, 2020 03:55
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Skwirl posted:Nah, the artists started having more say over storylines and stuff and Claremont was basically forced off/quit in frustration. It wasn't just "more say." The late '80s and early '90s at Marvel were a period of superstar artists getting written a lot of blank checks, and as a result, Claremont in particular found his role in the book diminished to the point where he was just scripting over whatever the hell Jim Lee felt like drawing that day. I'd quit too, in that environment. You can really see it in a couple of the last arcs if you know about it.
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Mar 30, 2020 03:57
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Wanderer posted:If anything, he was forced to sneak a lot of it past his editors. As has recently been discussed, his original plan was that Mystique would've shapeshifted into a man in order to father Nightcrawler with Destiny. Dude was 20 years ahead of the American horniness curve. Now THAT is loving hilarious. If there was ever a civilization that deserved to be overthrown it was that one.
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Mar 30, 2020 04:09
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Skwirl posted:Nah, the artists started having more say over storylines and stuff and Claremont was basically forced off/quit in frustration. That really explains a lot about the 90s.
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Mar 30, 2020 04:21
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A big part of that was also editorial shuffling; the book jumped around a lot between editors in the first few years (though to be fair, Marvel itself had five editors in chief in four years 1974-1978) but by 1980 Jim Shooter had settled into the EiC role and Louise Jones/Simonson started editing X-Men as of Uncanny #137/summer 1980. Jones would edit the book for the next four years before she started focusing more on writing and Ann Nocenti took over as the X-Editor. Claremont got along well with both of them, and when pressure for "more X-Men books" continued, Claremont tried to write as many as he could himself, but when he couldn't he trusted Simonson/Nocenti to write them, and they (especially Simonson) wrote nearly every X-Book that Claremont didn't through the 1980s. But then a few years after that, Jim Shooter was out and Tom DeFalco was in as EiC. DeFalco kind of felt like a "well nobody else wants to do it" pick, and pretty soon Nocenti was out and Bob Harras was in as the X-Editor. Over the next two years Harras would bring in all of the future-Image-Guys (Silvestri was already there and some of them were working at Marvel but specifically Lee, Liefeld, and Portacio on X-Men, New Mutants, and X-Factor) and push for at least one big annual crossover, which never really happened pre-Harras; Mutant Massacre and Fall of the Mutants were thematically connected but Harras started pushing for more "gotta buy them all to follow the story" things like Inferno, X-Tinction Agenda, etc. By the end of 1990, Louise Simonson had quit New Mutants and was about to quit X-Factor over being overridden on story ideas/scripts by the hot artists. Claremont took over X-Factor for a minute, but by the end of 1991 he was pretty much gone and the majority of the X-Books were being plotted by the artists with "assists" from Nicieza, Lobdell, etc. When they were promoting the "Mutant Genesis" (when X-Force and the adjectiveless X-Men book launched) in 1991, it was a sign of the times that Marvel Age ran interviews with Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld, and Bob Harras but not Claremont. Claremont was still being promoted as the writer of both "core" X-Books, Uncanny X-Men #281 was even solicited as being written by him, but he pulled out and the book was "co-written" by Lee/Portacio with literally last-minute scripting done by Byrne in I want to say 48 hours. Those solicits in general are a mess of shuffled plans probably worth its own post. And then by the end of 1992, all of those artists quit and went to form Image, so Marvel had neither Claremont etc. nor the artists they alienated all of the writers to please. The punchline to all of this is that the person who caused all of this (Bob Harras) went on to become Editor in Chief of Marvel from 1994-2000, and is now the Editor in Chief at DC.
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Mar 30, 2020 04:42
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But those short term gains though..
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Mar 30, 2020 04:50
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We should note that Harras took over as Marvel's EIC in '94...and Marvel declared bankruptcy in '96. The reason Fox and Sony have "until we stop making 'em" contracts for X-Men and Spider-Man and Fantastic Four was Marvel selling the rights off to help get out of bankruptcy. I don't want to say for sure that Harras leaves devastation and ruined careers wherever he goes....but the evidence is kinda there. 
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Mar 30, 2020 04:56
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I like the last year of X-Factor than anything that came before it so if it was phantom written by Whilce Portacio than good on him (I know hos modern work is really bad but I loved his 90s stuff).
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Mar 30, 2020 05:29
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I love making GBS threads on Bob Harras as much as the next person -- possibly more, since most people have no idea who he is -- but the bankruptcy (or ensuing issues like the film rights) shouldn't really fall on him. Marvel's Annual Net Revenues: 1988: $61 Million 1989: $69 Million 1990: $81 Million 1991: $115 Million 1992: $224 Million 1993: $415 Million 1994: $515 Million 1995: $829 Million Looks pretty good! Except in that time Marvel (corporate) went on a buying spree: 1992: $286M for Fleer 1993: ~$15M + not getting paid for their toy license anymore to get minority ownership of Toy Biz 1994: $158M for Panini Stickers, ~$16M for Malibu and Heroes World if I'm reading the annual report correctly 1995: Skybox/Impel for $150M They straight up bragged in an annual report about how they "weren't just a "funny book company" any more, and how by 1993 comics only accounted for 37% of their revenue, down from 91% when Perelman bought them, even though sales/profits from comics kept going up each year. The next year it was only 25% of revenue. But the comics division stayed profitable (even as the peak of the speculator bubble was past), what killed them was the speculator bubble for trading cards fell even harder. In the early 1990s baseball cards (not all trading cards, just baseball) were a billion dollar industry, and by 1995 it had cratered into the $250M range, right as Marvel corporate had poured nearly $600,000,000 into it. Comic sales had declined from their peak, but nothing remotely like that. All of these moves were done by Perelman and the Marvel corporate executives to pump up quarterly earnings reports (and therefore the stock prices) in order to make more money when they sold the company a few years down the line, long-term feasibility be damned. This is the same reason they did those terrible movie options, better to get paid a lump sum Q3 1994 and make that period seem more lucrative, who cares how things shake out when the movie is actually made, they wouldn't be around anymore. Which turned out to be true, just not for the reasons they thought. Some of this mentality definitely permeated down to folks like Harras who were working in the comics department, but not to the insanely irresponsible level of the upper brass, and definitely not in a way that drove Marvel to bankruptcy.
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Mar 30, 2020 05:51
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Edge & Christian posted:And then by the end of 1992, all of those artists quit and went to form Image, so Marvel had neither Claremont etc. nor the artists they alienated all of the writers to please. Has anyone written a book about the arc of the Image guys from their rise as superstar artists to present day? I find it fascinating how they had this big rockstar creators rights break with the big two, and then 90% of them ultimately ended up going back to doing the work for hire stuff with a fair bit of regularity, Jim Lee going as far as to sell all his creator-owned stuff and become one of the bosses they positioned themselves opposite of Granted, a lot of it was probably just publicity blather, and there might've been labor and royalty changes in the time since that ameliorated the issues they liked to talk up, but I still find it funny how basically everyone except Todd McFarlane ended up reconciling with corporate-owned superhero comics in some form or another (and that guy has kinda stepped out of comics altogether)
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Mar 30, 2020 09:06
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Edge & Christian posted:By the end of 1990, Louise Simonson had quit New Mutants and was about to quit X-Factor over being overridden on story ideas/scripts by the hot artists. Claremont took over X-Factor for a minute, but by the end of 1991 he was pretty much gone and the majority of the X-Books were being plotted by the artists with "assists" from Nicieza, Lobdell, etc. It was interesting to hear stories about Weezie and Liefeld clashing over on New Mutants.
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Mar 30, 2020 12:47
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Do Marvel still own Malibu?
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Mar 30, 2020 17:00
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OnimaruXLR posted:Has anyone written a book about the arc of the Image guys from their rise as superstar artists to present day? I find it fascinating how they had this big rockstar creators rights break with the big two, and then 90% of them ultimately ended up going back to doing the work for hire stuff with a fair bit of regularity, Jim Lee going as far as to sell all his creator-owned stuff and become one of the bosses they positioned themselves opposite of Definitely a story that can be told in entertaining ways. Based on what I've read, Rob was already a troublemaker while Jim Lee was always more of a company kid, so his career path makes sense. If nothing else, I am very glad that Image eventually became a good home for creator-owned comic books of all genres, even though most of the initial set of titles by said artistic superstars were...pretty but trashy superhero comics (and sometimes just plain trashy yet not pretty at all).
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Mar 30, 2020 17:09
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El Gallinero Gros posted:Do Marvel still own Malibu? As for the other acquisitions from that time: Fleer: acquired for $286-340M depending on how you calculate it in 1992, sold off for 'best offer' after initial asking price of $30M in 1999. Liquidated assets in 2005 which were picked up for $6M by Upper Deck Skybox: acquired for $150M in 1995, folded into Fleer a year later Heroes World: Shut down in 1997 Panini: Sold to an Italian investment group for an amount I cannot find Toy Biz: Managed to come out of Marvel's bankruptcy merged with Marvel and with their people (Ike Perlmutter, Avi Arad) in control
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Mar 30, 2020 18:30
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Edge & Christian posted:Malibu as a company doesn't really exist but Marvel appears to own all of their properties, such as they are. Wasn't there an issue somewhere along the line regarding the Malibu characters? I want to say I heard they were in a legal limbo.
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Mar 30, 2020 21:28
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:I don’t know where to post this, but I just have to say it: I’ve been reading old X-Men and New Mutants comics, and Chris Claremont is extremely horny. I don’t know if there was an editorial policy at the time that horny was mandatory, but wow is it noticeable now. It definitely wasn't editorial forcing Claremont's pen to veer horny. His plots are famously laden with horniness and paraphilia, although honestly it usually comes off as quirky and charming more than creepy. Like, standard comics horny is "leering over busty ladies getting their clothes ripped up while fighting space aliens" - scenarios that feel exploitative and sexist. Claremont horny is a villain turning Storm into a dragon, or a mind-controlled Rachel Grey doing BDSM on Bishop. It still sometimes feels exploitative, but it usually feels pretty equal opportunity, and it's often so weird that it doesn't really feel chauvinistic so much as odd.
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Mar 30, 2020 22:38
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Also, it counts for a lot that his female characters rule and lead the books in ways that modern comics still struggle with. Standard-grade horny comics usually pair the cheesecake with chauvinism, but that's never the vibe with Claremont. It's hard to begrudge him turning Kitty Pryde into a baby now and then when he's spent fourteen years making her a deeper and more central character than Cyclops.
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Mar 30, 2020 22:47
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Wanderer posted:Wasn't there an issue somewhere along the line regarding the Malibu characters? I want to say I heard they were in a legal limbo. IIRC (this is all based on interviews and such from many years ago, don't ask me to dig up a link for anything): speculation for a while was that the way the Ultraverse royalties were structured (I forget exactly how, but it was much more generous to the creators than standard WFH) made it cost-prohibitive for Marvel to revive those IP. Marvel editorial denied this, and I believe either Brevoort or Quesada said that the actual reason why they couldn't bring them back was "dirty laundry" they didn't want to air and/or under NDA, possibly for legal reasons. However, a couple Ultraverse creators subsequently contradicted this and said that they weren't aware of anything besides the royalty issue that would impede Marvel from bringing the characters back. so basically, no one outside Marvel knows for sure what the actual reason is, but don't expect to see any of the Ultraverse properties revived, like ever
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Mar 30, 2020 22:54
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It's almost definitely Scott Rosenberg, not the royalties to the creators. Quoting myself from the last time this came up:quote:The likely reason that Marvel hasn't used them since isn't the creator-participation thing, which while is/was probably distasteful for Marvel isn't THAT big a deal I assume, and I believe Quesda/Brevoort/others when they say that isn't a dealbreaker. When they intimate there are "other issues" and said they don't want to air any dirty laundry, I assume it's something to do with contracts and Scott Rosenberg. Ultraverse co-creators (the ones who would be paid the royalties) seem to subscribe to the Rosenberg contract theory. In the time since I wrote this, Rosenberg also sold the rights to Youngblood (which he may or may not have actual rights to) to Andrew Rev, which is the last time he came up about a year ago. Edge & Christian fucked around with this message at 01:10 on Mar 31, 2020 |
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Mar 31, 2020 01:07
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Maybe they're not publishing stories with those characters because they were loving terrible.
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Mar 31, 2020 02:14
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danbanana posted:Maybe they're not publishing stories with those characters because they were loving terrible. A few were okay. Topaz and Foxfire were kinda cool, and Firearm was a decent read.
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Mar 31, 2020 02:17
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Edge & Christian posted:It's almost definitely Scott Rosenberg, not the royalties to the creators. Quoting myself from the last time this came up: Is Youngblood any good? I only ever saw the adverts when I was young, I didn't have the spare money to dip into it.
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Mar 31, 2020 02:22
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danbanana posted:Maybe they're not publishing stories with those characters because they were loving terrible. And as mentioned, there were some cool concepts strewn between the redundant or problematic ones in the Ultraverse, I'm sure someone could do something fun with some of them. Rick posted:Is Youngblood any good? I only ever saw the adverts when I was young, I didn't have the spare money to dip into it. Slightly longer answer: maybe once or twice in 30 years if you really dig around, but mostly no.
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Mar 31, 2020 02:51
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I'd be very surprised if Hickman or Ewing hadn't pitched something with the Ultraverse characters for some of their books.
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Mar 31, 2020 03:22
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That one Youngblood relaunch drawn by Liefeld where the writer was very clearly making fun of Liefeld was at least funny for the one(?) issue it ran for. Though I think that was the one that had Wolverine and Cyclops gay jokes so maybe not. And maybe there was another one that seemed promising and also died early? I can't remember. Don't bother with Youngblood. What was that Ultraverse dude who was a knockoff of Captain Marvel except he had to like rip himself out of the body? Prime! I had to look that up. Anyway, bring back Prime.
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Mar 31, 2020 05:08
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Edge & Christian posted:That has literally never stopped any corporation with intellectual property rights before but go off! This is a company that does a desultory revamp of the New Universe, Exiles, etc. every seven years. Exiles ruled. 
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Mar 31, 2020 05:13
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Endless Mike posted:What was that Ultraverse dude who was a knockoff of Captain Marvel except he had to like rip himself out of the body? Prime! I had to look that up. Anyway, bring back Prime. I think Gerard Jones getting arrested put an end to Prime for the foreseeable future.
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Mar 31, 2020 08:00
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Wanderer posted:I think Gerard Jones getting arrested put an end to Prime for the foreseeable future. I just looked this up and it reminded me of the only thing I remember about Prime, which is that his gym teacher was a pedophile.
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Mar 31, 2020 13:08
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:I just looked this up and it reminded me of the only thing I remember about Prime, which is that his gym teacher was a pedophile. There's a lot of pedophilia subtext in Prime. Apart from the relatively innocent "kid hits on adult women in his adult superhero form", his dad was secretly responsible for the experiment that turned the protagonist into Prime, and there's a series of (deeply disturbing in light of the revelations about Gerard Jones) scenes where the little boy protagonist - naked and afraid and dripping with slime after emerging from the Prime body - begs his dad to tell him why he did this to him, and his dad cradles him in his arms and tells him that they have to keep all this a secret from his mom. Oh yeah, and the little boy is always naked when he stops being Prime. He bursts out of the superhero body as a naked kid dripping with slime, sometimes crying and afraid. So there's that!
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Mar 31, 2020 14:03
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Android Blues posted:There's a lot of pedophilia subtext in Prime. Apart from the relatively innocent "kid hits on adult women in his adult superhero form", his dad was secretly responsible for the experiment that turned the protagonist into Prime, and there's a series of (deeply disturbing in light of the revelations about Gerard Jones) scenes where the little boy protagonist - naked and afraid and dripping with slime after emerging from the Prime body - begs his dad to tell him why he did this to him, and his dad cradles him in his arms and tells him that they have to keep all this a secret from his mom. Gah. I was a fan of Jones' work because he was co-writer on a majority of Justice League Europe with Giffen. He also wrote this, which is a great history of the early comics industry. I feel weird having those books on my shelves!
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Mar 31, 2020 14:39
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On Youngblood, I do have a bias but I can recommend the last series written by Chad Bowers It was a lot of fun but got it in the neck when Liefeld lost the rights or whatever happened there. People always recommend Alan Moore's series but it's like two issues long and there's not much meat on them bones. The Ultraverse series I remember most is Mantra, which starts off with a powerful warrior dude being stuck in the body of a woman. In theory you could have possibly used this to explore transgender themes but in reality it's mostly 'how do these dames walk in high heels with all this stuff swinging out in front.' Like that one issue of Guy Gardner where he gets turned into a woman but for the whole series.
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Mar 31, 2020 15:26
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Edge & Christian posted:It's almost definitely Scott Rosenberg, not the royalties to the creators. Quoting myself from the last time this came up: ah, this seems plausible, thanks. How is Platinum Studios still around?
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Mar 31, 2020 16:59
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Barry Convex posted:ah, this seems plausible, thanks. How is Platinum Studios still around? Which is why no one heard anything out of Rosenberg for five years until Rob Liefeld abortively tried to sell the film rights to his Extreme Universe to Netflix, at which point Rosenberg emerged from the shadows to declare he actually owned the rights to some of the characters because of the terms of some loan Jeph Loeb got Liefeld to sign in 2000 or some sort of bullshit.
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Mar 31, 2020 17:37
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Are there no new x books or what
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Apr 2, 2020 01:25
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Marvel / DC postponed all digital release for a month so physical retailers don’t suffer (more than they already are)
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Apr 2, 2020 01:38
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Happy Noodle Boy posted:Marvel / DC postponed all digital release for a month so physical retailers don’t suffer (more than they already are) What's the logic there, precisely? That if people spend a month buying digital comics they'll realize exactly how obsolete brick and mortar shops are?
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Apr 2, 2020 10:07
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Cabbit posted:What's the logic there, precisely? That if people spend a month buying digital comics they'll realize exactly how obsolete brick and mortar shops are? If people buy the digital version of a given comic while stores are closed they won't buy the print version when stores open up? It's not necessarily all that helpful but I guess there's some show of solidarity at least.
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Apr 2, 2020 13:40
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