X-Men

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Mongrel
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Re: X-Men

Postby Mongrel » Wed May 05, 2021 11:52 pm

Oh shit, I remember that series! Didn't recognize the title, but the story, yeah. Bits and pieces always stuck with me, like Essex in the bar failing to drink himself away.

Was quite different for the era. Art had a Mignola vibe I really enjoyed. The writing also happened to align with Excalibur's somewhat.

Speaking of X-books, Excalibur was for many years was is the only X-book I ended up having fond memories of from my time reading them, and was the only X-book I kept buying after dropping them more generally. But then they cancelled it shortly after, lol.

Of course that was almost entirely... the Warren Ellis run on the series. :( Ellis' run started with issue 88, which was just before I picked it up and which was how far I went in picking up back issues (I had a few earlier ones too here and there, but pre-Ellis it was pretty generic 80's X-tripe). He left after #109. After that someone else covered the writing spot for a year, but couldn't carry the book, and that was it.

IIRC that was my introduction to Ellis work, actually. Never did get around to reading more than an issue or two of Transmetropolitan and now I doubt I ever will. 'Course odds weren't good anyway because something about Spider Robinson was just too annoyingly repellent to me. Which tracks, since Robinson was literally his authorial insert.

But I think I could still enjoy my issues of Excalibur if I dug them out. No one cared about "the British X-team", so Ellis figured out he could just play around and have silly fun with them. It was dark at times (Claremont or whoever the fuck was on it before had run the book in that direction), but mostly Excalibur just goofed around and didn't take itself seriously at all.

Luckily, younger me had the simplistic notion that Ellis' style just came from some generic British school of comics writing, and that sent me chasing other British comics writers, like Garth Ennis, Alan Moore etc. Between Terry Pratchett and Monty Python (and other shows like The Young Ones), I was already heavily into British comedy, so of course I just goofily assumed there was essentially a school somewhere that cranked out comic book writers like Ellis.
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Re: X-Men

Postby Büge » Thu May 06, 2021 8:50 am

Thad wrote:(Aside: Claremont's original plan for Mister Sinister's origin story was that he was going to turn out to be the alter-ego of a child. Which would explain why he would call himself "Mister Sinister" with a straight face. This is not that story.)


That explains why he named his team The Nasty Boys.
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Re: X-Men

Postby Thad » Thu May 06, 2021 12:11 pm

Mongrel wrote:Speaking of X-books, Excalibur was for many years was is the only X-book I ended up having fond memories of from my time reading them, and was the only X-book I kept buying after dropping them more generally. But then they cancelled it shortly after, lol.

Of course that was almost entirely... the Warren Ellis run on the series. :( Ellis' run started with issue 88, which was just before I picked it up and which was how far I went in picking up back issues (I had a few earlier ones too here and there, but pre-Ellis it was pretty generic 80's X-tripe). He left after #109. After that someone else covered the writing spot for a year, but couldn't carry the book, and that was it.


Yeah, I didn't read Ellis's Excalibur run (which would have been contemporaneous with Further Adventures, yeah) but my recollection is that about 5 years later, after his run on The Authority ended, they gave him three different X-books to play with.

For those who don't follow this stuff: The Authority is maybe not a particularly well-known title outside of comics fandom, but it was a huge deal. The art, by Bryan Hitch, has an enduring influence on how comics are laid-out and paced (it's been described as "widescreen"). Hitch himself went on to draw The Ultimates, which (visually, at least) was a major influence on the MCU -- the more realistic approach to costumes, things like Cap wearing a helmet with wings painted on it, that's Hitch. It even had an impact on casting.

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Outside of comics, The Authority was also an influence on Doctor Who. Hitch did production design for the 2005 series, including the TARDIS interior. And you know how there are a few episodes where Rose wears a T-shirt with a Union flag on it? That's the signature look of Jenny Sparks, the lead character in The Authority.

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As for the writing, it was cynical -- superheroes as bickering fascists. It was a lot like Watchmen in that at the time, it was a breath of fresh air that was like nothing else, but after twenty years of everyone copying it, it's not as much fun anymore. (Also, y'know, Warren Ellis being outed as a sexual predator kinda puts a damper on his entire bibliography.) It's been an influence on everything from Justice League (the cartoon) to Justice League (the movie), with varying degrees of success. Some stories, like What's So Funny About Truth, Justice and the American Way? were written directly as a rebuttal to The Authority's take on superheroes (the villains in that story, the Elite, are pretty clearly based on the Authority).

(Awhile back, I saw somebody in a comments section say "What would it look like if Zack Snyder adapted What's So Funny About Truth, Justice & the American Way?" and I responded, "It would be exactly the same, right up until you get to the end and the part where Superman explains he didn't actually murder everybody never comes.")

So. Circling back to Warren Ellis on the X-books. My recollection is that, after the success of The Authority, Marvel gave him three of them at once, three books that had seen declining sales and were on the verge of cancellation; they figured if anybody could take once-popular '90s superhero team books and turn them around, it'd be the guy who spun Stormwatch into The Authority.

He didn't turn them around, at least not in terms of sales. X-Man and Generation X were cancelled shortly after (whereas X-Force was radically revamped again, by another team, and I'll get around to that story eventually). But creatively, he did some pretty interesting stuff with them.

I think I picked up one issue of each of them; X-Force and Generation X didn't grab me but X-Man did.

X-Man...okay, so X-Man was the only book from the Age of Apocalypse event that actually outlasted the AoA and kept going after issue #4. Somehow a book about a parallel-universe version of Cable coming to our universe managed to last for 70+ issues.

Ellis threw out most of that convoluted baggage and turned Nate Grey into the Shaman of Earth. He was very much an Ellis protagonist -- a character with godlike powers who fights monsters from other planes of existence and enjoys smugly delivering monologues about how he's defeated them right before the axe falls.

And the beautiful painted art, by Ariel Olivetti, looked more like something out of Heavy Metal than the various styles the X-books had seen in the '90s (from the muscles and pouches of Lee and Liefeld to the manga influence ushered in by Joe Mad).

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(ETA some examples.)

Yeah, Mongrel, I think you're on the money -- The Further Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix was a precursor to Marvel's early-aughts experimentation, bringing in writers and artists who'd been successful at indie publishers. It wasn't quite the creative renaissance of the '70s, but it was still a pretty good period for Marvel. They were coming out of bankruptcy, they were under new management by people whose lack of comics-industry experience was actually a blessing, not a curse, and they were willing to bring on talented creators and let them do what they wanted. Like turn Nate Grey into a multidimensional shaman. Or handing X-Force over to an art team with a brightly-colored, retro-'60s style, replacing the entire cast with new characters, and then graphically killing them all off by the end of the first issue.

But I'll get to that later.

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Re: X-Men

Postby Mongrel » Thu May 06, 2021 3:43 pm

Ha. You accidentally put your finger on what it is exactly that put me off Transmet: The smugness.

Excalibur wasn't smug, it was just plain fun. And grounded too - I suspect Ellis' run was one of the 90's precursors to the stories with more "ordinary" heroes in the aughts.

It was still an X-Book so they were still the good guys and not corrupt (as opposed to Garth Ennis' The Boys, which took The Authority's concept to the extreme of EVERY superteam being corrupt and corporate to at least some degree). But it had characters who were very much written more like ordinary folks who ended up as heroes, and in a more complex and modern sense than Stan Lee's "heroes have hangups" concept from the birth of the FF and Spider-man. Excalibur weren't even the C-team, they were just the obligatory "local franchise", but they knew it. Pete Best (a former not-MI6 man, IIRC?) was a good example of this, even though he predated Ellis' run by a fair bit; he was just a cranky dude in a trenchcoat and suit. No superhero name, nothing. Not original by then of course, but still rare and notable.

There was an issue I particularly remember where Moira gets so annoyed at everyone that she drags them all to the pub for the entire issue. That was it. They all just hung out at the bar. It was refreshing for the reader too - let's just forget about superpowers for a bit, eh? And it was all very British of course. Ellis played up Moira's Scottishness to the point where she would at times be truly - accurately, as I learned - near-incomprehensible, and she gets absolutely hammered in that issue, so that got dialed to 11.

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X-Man is sort of funny. I read it when it came out after all because it was as you mentioned a new (and central) book to the Onslaught storyline, and honestly it was terrible, but it was the second-last X-book I dropped because I really liked the art at the time. Which in retrospect is hilarious because if I look at Steve Skroce's work now I'm like "uh... what did I like about this so much????" Skroce's not a bad artist or anything, but there's nothing he does that's in tune with the way I like(d) to draw; he just blends into the generic superhero artwork crowd.
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Re: X-Men

Postby Thad » Thu May 06, 2021 6:10 pm

Doubling back to what we were saying upthread about Wertham and the Code: Busiek (him again!) talked a bit the other day about how the narrative that the Code killed everything but superheroes is reductive. While some genres (chiefly horror and crime) were pretty much immediately cut off at the knees, most died off slowly. You can't really blame the Code for the decline of westerns, for example, which happened across multiple media. And it wasn't Fredric Wertham who brought down sci-fi anthology comics; it was Rod Serling and Alfred Hitchcock and James P. Outerlimits.

It's not just that superhero comics stuck around because they survived the Code. That's part of the story, but other genres -- romance, war, pulp adventure -- survived the Code too, only to suffer declining readership over years and decades that followed. Busiek says superhero fans were more loyal. I think there's probably something to that.

And for as much as we drag Marvel and DC, it's not that they never try anything different; they routinely introduce new books that aren't like the other stuff they're publishing, and usually those books sell poorly and get cancelled.

Just in the last ten years DC's introduced or reintroduced, what, GI Combat, Sgt. Rock, Dial H, Demon Knights, Frankenstein: Agent of SHADE, Gotham Academy...those books were different! They weren't traditional superhero fare! Some of them were really good! All of them got cancelled due to low sales!

Now, that's not all the readers' fault. If I started complaining about mistakes DC (and, worse, its corporate parent AT&T) has made in expanding its audience, I'd be here all day. But y'know, they really did give some of those books a fighting chance. Some of them ran for years, got a chance to get collected, show up at bookstores and Scholastic book fairs, and still never found a big enough audience to keep going. So yeah, the Big Two make plenty of poor judgement calls, but it's not just that. Sometimes they do everything right, and a new book, which is good and different, still just can't get a toehold. Some of the problems with the Big Two really do come down to a fanbase who just want to buy the same old shit and then complain about it.

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Re: X-Men

Postby Friday » Thu May 06, 2021 7:20 pm

Majora's Mask's reception taught me a long time ago that (the majority of) people just want the fucking Zelda Formula over and over and then bitch about it. Only apply that to all media, everywhere, forever.
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Re: X-Men

Postby Thad » Thu May 06, 2021 9:07 pm

But then sometimes you get A Link Between Worlds or Breath of the Wild, which fuck with the formula and are well-received (on release, not just in hindsight like Majora's Mask and Break Like the Wind).

Similarly, there have been big crossover hits in comics (and by "crossover" here I mean attracting an audience outside the people who buy monthly comics in comic stores, not "crossover" like when Howard the Duck shows up in Squirrel Girl). Sandman may be the most important Big Two comic of the past 50 years (and yes, I'm saying it may be more important than Dark Knight Returns or Watchmen, though of course that's reductive and ignores that without those comics Sandman probably wouldn't have happened).

Though DC and its parent company have been busy the last 10 years dismantling everything that allowed Sandman to happen.

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Re: X-Men

Postby Büge » Tue Jul 20, 2021 9:51 pm

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Re: X-Men

Postby Thad » Mon Aug 23, 2021 4:28 pm

One of the things I like about the cartoon is its willingness to forego origin stories, to give us an X-Men team that's been around for awhile so that when Juggernaut or Shadow King or whoever shows up, they're like "Oh, yeah, this asshole again."

But that makes it pretty weird that when Magneto shows up in episode 3, Xavier has to explain who he is to everybody because they've never heard of him before.

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Re: X-Men

Postby Thad » Mon Aug 23, 2021 5:05 pm

Also, gonna rerun this, which I wrote in 2017:

Thad wrote:The first issue of X-Men: Grand Design, by Ed Piskor (Wizzywig, Hip-Hop Family Tree) is out.

The hook is, he's adapting the first 280 issues of X-Men as a 6-issue miniseries. He wants to take one of the most tangled and confusing superhero series and make it accessible to somebody who's never picked up an X-Men comic before.

He's got a ways to go (the series is on a twice-a-year schedule, so if there are no delays the last issue will be out in June 2020), and I haven't even finished the first issue (these are 40-page comics and, as you might expect from the amount of information he has to go through, those pages are pretty packed). But so far, he is succeeding. I can legitimately say that this is the best entry point to X-Men I've ever seen. It's fucking gorgeous, and it manages to take a famously convoluted history, rearrange it so it goes in chronological order (starting, where else, with WWII), and make it not just coherent but narratively compelling.

I'm only up to the part where young Charles Xavier is introduced to his new stepbrother, Cain Marko. But I'm far enough along to know that this is something fucking special.


The rest of the series did not disappoint. And now it's collected in an oversized format. Well worth checking out.

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Re: X-Men

Postby Friday » Mon Aug 23, 2021 5:34 pm

But that makes it pretty weird that when Magneto shows up in episode 3, Xavier has to explain who he is to everybody because they've never heard of him before.


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Re: X-Men

Postby Thad » Wed Aug 25, 2021 3:37 pm

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Re: X-Men

Postby Mongrel » Wed Aug 25, 2021 4:11 pm

Oh man, Kyle Baker!
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Re: X-Men

Postby Thad » Fri Sep 03, 2021 2:50 pm

I like how committed the show is to being serialized even when it's episodic.

Like, a little ways into season two, there's a Wolverine/Alpha Flight episode and then a Gambit/Thieves' Guild episode, and while they flesh out those characters' backstories, they're pretty much self-contained. But the episodes still have recaps, which are just kind of random "best of" montages of stuff Wolverine and Gambit have said and done in previous episodes. THIS ONE'S FOR YOU, MORPH!

(Meanwhile, the one part that is serialized, the Chuck and Erik's Excellent Savage Land Adventure B-plot, I don't think is even part of the recap in the Gambit episode.)

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Re: X-Men

Postby Thad » Fri Sep 03, 2021 5:12 pm

I got to season 2's Bishop two-parter and I like how at the beginning Cable and the last survivors of humanity are making a hopeless last stand against Apocalypse, and then they start disappearing and Cable's computer tells him it's because history has been rewritten, and Cable's response to this is "Oh no my shithole future where everybody was about to die anyway, I have to save it!"

Granted, it turns out later in the episode that the new future is even worse and involves everybody dying even sooner, but Cable doesn't know that when he goes back in time to stop Bishop; he just does it because he loves living in a doomed post-Apocalyptic dystopia so goddamn much.

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Re: X-Men

Postby Thad » Fri Sep 17, 2021 5:04 pm

Man, everybody's stupid in Time Fugitives. Like, even for this show.

Cable shows up, tells Bishop "I'm a time traveler too," and Bishop's like "I can't let you stop me!" and...like, by Bishop's reckoning, the amount of time since he changed history, went back to his time, and saw it was still fucked up is, like, five minutes. Somehow it does not occur to him that the man telling him his meddling in history will have unintended consequences might be right, even though that's, y'know, the entire reason he's here in the first goddamn place.

And then when Cable explains to Wolverine that Apocalypse is behind the plague, Wolverine's like "Uh-huh. Apocalypse. In league with the Tooth Fairy." Because, y'know, the idea that the guy who hangs out with a lady named Pestilence might be involved in spreading a plague is just so wildly implausible.

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Re: X-Men

Postby Thad » Fri Sep 17, 2021 6:07 pm

I decided to start reading Chris Sims's episode-by-episode X-Men reviews again.

"I like solitaire okay, unless I got someone... to play with."

For those of you who may have missed that, this is how the X-Men cartoon chooses to introduce Gambit: With him announcing through the thinnest possible metaphor that he likes to masturbate unless there's someone around willing to have sex. Gambit, everybody!

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Re: X-Men

Postby Mongrel » Fri Sep 17, 2021 6:24 pm

Hon hon hon
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Re: X-Men

Postby IGNORE ME » Fri Sep 17, 2021 6:30 pm

I still want to be Gambit when I grow up.

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Re: X-Men

Postby Friday » Fri Sep 17, 2021 6:33 pm

Was Gambit super popular because of the show, or was he put into the show because he was so popular?

I can't imagine him having the same impact on everyone without the voice acting.
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