Let me make a full disclosure here--I'm certainly not a huge X-fan.
I'm not going to rip them. It's just a matter where, for the most part, they just don't align with my tastes. Different strokes and all.
For me, it was primarily Claremont fatigue. After about a million issues of X-Men, I just became bored with what I saw as a sheer repetitiousness of theme and tone that just didn't appeal to me.
And I felt the stories were getting so snarled in their own obsessive continuity, and retcons, that the book was becoming damn near indecipherable. And I'm the guy who says that complaints that current comic continuities are too complex are greatly exaggerated.
Hey, at least this is a special anniversary issue, right?
We should have a jumbo size issue, a celbration of all things X, a great place for new readers to jump on...
Not so much...
As I wrote in my look at the X-Men in 1978: "Can't we just fight a super-villain once in awhile?? Unless, of course, that super-villain is the evil clone of the son you had with a demonically transformed clone of your dead wife. Oh, too late." Well, this gets us more than halfway there...
Ah, Inferno. The multi-part X-Men/X-Factor crossover. Where they all went to Hell, and Hell came to Earth. How can we set the scene?
Let's try: Scott Summers' love Jean Grey had become the Phoenix, and killed herself when she became a threat to the universe; then Scott met someone who just happened to look 100% exactly like Jean, Madelyne Pryor; Scott marries Maddy, they have a kid, he retires from the X-Men; but then it turns out the Jean wasn't really the Phoenix, and now she's alive, so Scott abandons his wife and child to go hang with her and the rest of the original X-Men, forming X-Factor; Maddy hooks up with the X-Men, she and the X-Men die and are resurrected, and Maddy hangs around to play the part their Jarvis for awhile; then Maddy makes a deal with a demon so she can gain revenge on Scott, and became the Goblin Queen (?!); it's then revealed that Maddy was actually a clone of Jean, and when the Phoenix was killed it activated her, and she was implanted with false memories so Scott would fall in love with her and they'd get married and have an offspring that Mr. Sinister thought would be able to defeat Apocalypse; Maddy went both evil and mad and eventually killed herself in hopes of of taking Jean with her.
Pant, pant, pant...
And if you don't know every single bit of that, well, you're out of luck in this issue, bub.
Our creators:
Our anniversary celebration!!
You might need a scorecard to decipher this splash:
As I said, perhaps I'm not the best one to give a thorough critique of this era of X-Men. Let me instead highlight why I'd dropped the book several years earlier: The Late 80's Claremont Checklist:
**Lots and lots of brooding
**Just as Star Trek has technobabble and House has medical technobabble, a Claremont X-Men story always wallows in psychic technobabble:
**You can usually find 2 characters who have had their mind/memories/personality squished together:
**Tons of Phoenix Saga flashbacks:
**Lots and lots of Psylocke. Seriously, Psylocke was getting more page time than Wolverine in this era...
**Dialogue. Tons of dialogue. Soul-crushing, panel covering, unending streams of blathering. No one could fill word balloons like Claremont, and no one needed so many.
I always wondered how those post-Byrne artists felt about Claremont's ever-increasing logorrhea. Did they resent that word balloons covered upo so much of their pictures?**You will find characters who brood about the possibility of turning evil...
...actually turn evil (or are possessed) and revel in it...
...or have to admit a little of the dark side in so they can man up and become more powerful.
In Claremont's world, everybody is always fighting to restrain their dark side. It's tiring to read, and too dismal a view of the world for me.
And so we end our great saga:
Wait a minute--the 25th anniversary of the X-Men, and the 150th issue of the "new" X-Men, and the bloody story is going to be concluded in X-Factor #39?!? What a rip.
At least next issue sounds fun:
Ah, another item on the Claremont Checklist. When the X-Men get too broody, introduce Kitty Pride to lighten things up. When Kitty gets too broody, introduce Jubilee...
Again, I'm not ripping the X-Men (too much) here. A lot of people like this stuff. It's just not my cop of tea.
ELSEWHERE IN THE MARVEL UNIVERSE:
Speaking of demons...
Inferno was made into a company wide crossover for February, March and April. Even though the X-Teams didn't appear in anyone else's mag, virtually every Marvel hero had to deal with the intrusion of evil hellspawn into their nice, quiet lives. A decent enough way to do a crossover, I suppose...you don't have to read the "parent" mag or some limited series, because there really was no actual continuity involved. Any type of demonic activity was good enough.
Daredevil was no exception. He had to battle a demonic dentist. No, I'm not making that up. Still, it's better than the umpteenth battle against the Hand...
I'm not going to rip them. It's just a matter where, for the most part, they just don't align with my tastes. Different strokes and all.
For me, it was primarily Claremont fatigue. After about a million issues of X-Men, I just became bored with what I saw as a sheer repetitiousness of theme and tone that just didn't appeal to me.
And I felt the stories were getting so snarled in their own obsessive continuity, and retcons, that the book was becoming damn near indecipherable. And I'm the guy who says that complaints that current comic continuities are too complex are greatly exaggerated.
Hey, at least this is a special anniversary issue, right?
We should have a jumbo size issue, a celbration of all things X, a great place for new readers to jump on...
Not so much...As I wrote in my look at the X-Men in 1978: "Can't we just fight a super-villain once in awhile?? Unless, of course, that super-villain is the evil clone of the son you had with a demonically transformed clone of your dead wife. Oh, too late." Well, this gets us more than halfway there...
Ah, Inferno. The multi-part X-Men/X-Factor crossover. Where they all went to Hell, and Hell came to Earth. How can we set the scene?
Let's try: Scott Summers' love Jean Grey had become the Phoenix, and killed herself when she became a threat to the universe; then Scott met someone who just happened to look 100% exactly like Jean, Madelyne Pryor; Scott marries Maddy, they have a kid, he retires from the X-Men; but then it turns out the Jean wasn't really the Phoenix, and now she's alive, so Scott abandons his wife and child to go hang with her and the rest of the original X-Men, forming X-Factor; Maddy hooks up with the X-Men, she and the X-Men die and are resurrected, and Maddy hangs around to play the part their Jarvis for awhile; then Maddy makes a deal with a demon so she can gain revenge on Scott, and became the Goblin Queen (?!); it's then revealed that Maddy was actually a clone of Jean, and when the Phoenix was killed it activated her, and she was implanted with false memories so Scott would fall in love with her and they'd get married and have an offspring that Mr. Sinister thought would be able to defeat Apocalypse; Maddy went both evil and mad and eventually killed herself in hopes of of taking Jean with her.
Pant, pant, pant...
And if you don't know every single bit of that, well, you're out of luck in this issue, bub.
Our creators:
Our anniversary celebration!!
You might need a scorecard to decipher this splash:
As I said, perhaps I'm not the best one to give a thorough critique of this era of X-Men. Let me instead highlight why I'd dropped the book several years earlier: The Late 80's Claremont Checklist:**Lots and lots of brooding
**Just as Star Trek has technobabble and House has medical technobabble, a Claremont X-Men story always wallows in psychic technobabble:
**You can usually find 2 characters who have had their mind/memories/personality squished together:
**Tons of Phoenix Saga flashbacks:
**Lots and lots of Psylocke. Seriously, Psylocke was getting more page time than Wolverine in this era...
**Dialogue. Tons of dialogue. Soul-crushing, panel covering, unending streams of blathering. No one could fill word balloons like Claremont, and no one needed so many.
I always wondered how those post-Byrne artists felt about Claremont's ever-increasing logorrhea. Did they resent that word balloons covered upo so much of their pictures?**You will find characters who brood about the possibility of turning evil...
...actually turn evil (or are possessed) and revel in it...
...or have to admit a little of the dark side in so they can man up and become more powerful.
In Claremont's world, everybody is always fighting to restrain their dark side. It's tiring to read, and too dismal a view of the world for me.And so we end our great saga:
Wait a minute--the 25th anniversary of the X-Men, and the 150th issue of the "new" X-Men, and the bloody story is going to be concluded in X-Factor #39?!? What a rip.At least next issue sounds fun:
Ah, another item on the Claremont Checklist. When the X-Men get too broody, introduce Kitty Pride to lighten things up. When Kitty gets too broody, introduce Jubilee...Again, I'm not ripping the X-Men (too much) here. A lot of people like this stuff. It's just not my cop of tea.
ELSEWHERE IN THE MARVEL UNIVERSE:
Speaking of demons...
Inferno was made into a company wide crossover for February, March and April. Even though the X-Teams didn't appear in anyone else's mag, virtually every Marvel hero had to deal with the intrusion of evil hellspawn into their nice, quiet lives. A decent enough way to do a crossover, I suppose...you don't have to read the "parent" mag or some limited series, because there really was no actual continuity involved. Any type of demonic activity was good enough.
Daredevil was no exception. He had to battle a demonic dentist. No, I'm not making that up. Still, it's better than the umpteenth battle against the Hand...
Uncanny X-Men was the first comic I actually collected (i.e. bought every issue of), more than 100 issues' worth, so at this time, I was buying it basically not to break the chain.
ReplyDeleteBut it's bad for all the reasons you cite. I finally broke down and dropped it in the Great Marvel Purge of 1990.
That Ann Nocenti/John Romita Jr. run of Daredevil, however, was the BOMB!
ReplyDeleteWas this issue a special anniversary issue? If it had been, wouldn't that have been on the cover? To me it really seemed as if those little caption-boxes were added as an afterthought to indicate to obsessive fans that no, they had not forgotten that it was now 150 issues after Claremont took over writing The X-Men. BTW, if you wanna micro-critique (and that is what comic fans like to do), the issue (cover-dated April 1989) actually wasn't a 25th anniversary issue any more than a lot of other issues before it - X-Men #1 was cover-dated September 1963, so the "real" 25th anniversary issues probably were #233 and 234 (both cover-dated September 1988).
ReplyDeletePersonally I don't think that you have to honour every divisible-by-50 issue with a special issue (especially considering that #242 was a double-sized one). Also, such special divisible by 50 or 100 issues very often spend a lot of space on flashbacks or having the hero(es) fight against their entire gallery of villains, so you actually got off easy with the flashbacks. BTW, to someone not already immersed in the X-Men, the number "243" does not exactly scream "special number" or "anniversary". Also I believe back in the 1980s they had not yet made a fetish of "jumping-on points" (much less discovered that these also make great jumping-off points).
Apart from that, just a few quick thoughts:
As Marvel mega-crossovers go, Inferno was one of the better ones, indeed IMO one of the best ones. (I had great fun trying to construct a chronology, as I recall). And even though I did not like some of the end results, it did manage to resolve a lot of the plots weaving through the mutant books for several years, in particular the Jean/Scott/Madelyne mess (which was the responsibility of the early makers of X-Factor and of Kurt Busiek, inventor of the "Jean-wasn't-really-Phoenix" retcon). And here it is generally assumed that Chris Claremont and Louise Simonson were under orders to come up with a solution that left Scott smelling of roses, which is why Madelyne was retconned into Jean's clone and turned into a (temporarily) dead villain.
(BTW, I don't think that current continuity is too complex, the problem actually is that these days writers and editors all too often don't even try to make it work and thus inconsistencies keep piling up).
As a matter of fact, UXM #244 was a lighthearted issue and would have been fun even if Jubilee had not appeared in it. (The same goes for #245, the Invasion parody, even though it was pencilled by Liefeld). Also, at that point Kitty Pryde had not become too broody but had moved on to the very lighthearted Excalibur.
And the Nocenti/Romita, Jr. Daredevil rocked!
Thank you for once again reminding me of why I dumped X-men and started reading Excalibur instead.
ReplyDeleteMenshevik--don't put too much responsibility on Busiek. He just had a fanboy/freelancer idea...nobody forced Marvel to do it.
ReplyDeleteKitty not broody? I'll plead to a short memory on most things X-Men, but I seem to recall her getting severely wounded during the Mutant Massacre and seemingly spending years stuck intangible and feeling sorry for herself...