Reading Through 2021 96: Phoenix Resurrection, by Matthew Rosenberg, Lenil Yu, and more

Phoenix Resurrection, by Matthew Rosenberg, Lenil Yu, and more

2018

2015 to 2019 were the dark ages of X-Men for me, and this book might just be the eye of the storm.

It burns! It burns!

Let's go back to those dark days of 2018 and think about what was going on. The franchise was headless. The books had been spilt into Blue and Gold books to try to capitalize on aging fan nostalgia, and there was a concurrent Astonishing X-Men book out to capitalize on slightly younger fans nostalgia for that title. Basically, the line had been overextended for years, and the concept of a central "main" title had been lost.

At the same time, in order to "shake things up", the franchise had 

-killed Wolverine, only to immediately replace him with Old Man Logan, a time displaced version of him as an old man.

-killed Cyclops.

-left time displaced versions of the 1960's X-Men in the books rather than having Brian Michael Bendis finish off the storyline he'd begun with them. This was particularly egregious, as nothing those characters did after Bendis stopped writing them was compelling to me, or to most readers. The solo Jean Grey book had its fans, but I only lasted a few issues with it.

-left Jubilee a vampire.

-made Sabertooth a good guy, as opposed to a bad guy on a leash like he was the times he was an X-Man before.

-made X-23 the new Wolverine, despite Old Man Logan immediately filling the role on the team.

We have vampire Jubilee, teenage original X-Men minus Jean, and Wolverine is dead, just the old version of him

Most of this was pretty ugly stuff, though I was fully approving of killing Wolverine off for a few years, and letting X-23 step in. Ultimately, the company went with Old Man Logan, and never really let X-23 become the star she might have.

Kitty, Colossus and Nightcrawler were in a pretty traditional place.

With this special mini-series, that's the environment it was trying to thrive in, and it's an uphill battle. It's not a great book, it's not an all-time classic, but it has elements in it which place it firmly in the neighborhood of Claremont X-Men (good), as compared to Bob Harass X-Men (very bad).

Why would X-Men still bury bodies? Why wouldn't they at least have alarms and scanners on the corpses at this point?

The book is very continuity heavy, as in, if I weren't already a hardcore X-Men reader, I wouldn't even bother with it. Beyond the fact that a casual reader would have no idea who half the characters are, the versions of the famous characters aren't themselves, and there's no attempt to explain any of it. Why are there two Iceman characters? Figure it out, check Wikipedia. The book assumes you know exactly who everyone is, and why most of the main characters are nothing like they were five years earlier, much less twenty. Every Marvel team book needs a character page at the front or back, this one being a prime example.

Annie (in the glasses) is the key to the story. Annie's death during Jean's childhood triggered Jean's powers originally

The prologue and much of the story is focused on Jean Grey's origin story, which is also not explained in the book. If you're a diehard fan, you'll know that Jean was playing frisbee with her friend Annie when Annie ran out onto the road and was hit by a car. Jean's telepathic powers were triggered and she experienced her best friend's dying pain. You've read the black and white Marvel magazine from the 1980's Bizarre Adventures #27, which had the origin of Jean Grey, right? I'm sure it's been retold elsewhere, if only in single panel flashback, but it's just not that well known. Writer Rosenberg's choice to make this a key part of the story is the correct choice in order to make a story with an emotional core that's true to the character. The choice not to retell the story in the book, or even reprint a single page for newer readers in the ancillary material at the back, is... I don't want to say baffling, because Marvel makes comics for 40 year olds these days. I'm too accustomed to it to be baffled by Marvel. But it is symptomatic of a bad publishing strategy.

The art is very understated for a modern X-Men comic, and that is really nice

So far, almost all the problems I've described are things that are the responsibilities of the editor and publisher. Given that the X-offices decided Jean needed to come back, that the "X-Men" were in a sorry state, how did Rosenberg do with these lemons? I think he did fairly well. The plot of this is that dead mutants are appearing and disappearing, and it's the Phoenix Force at it again, the cosmic entity that can't quit Earth.

In terms of double page spreads, I found this one lacking

The dead mutants are merely a distraction from the Force's real plan: bringing back Jean from the dead to be the new avatar for it. The Phoenix has had multiple avatars and they've never been stable, not like it was with Jean. So it's incubating her a new body to bond with. Why the Phoenix creates a town populated with dead mutants and a diner run by a grown up version of her dead childhood friend is vague, but sure, maybe the emotional resonance is soothing. It's a superhero comic. 

It's such a weird concept to make another book about dead X-Men... Necrosha was probably a year ago in Marvel continuity

What I liked about this is that, despite the fights, this is not a fight book. When it's all resolved, it's an emotional resolution. I've been reading pieces of the Claremont run recently, and when that book was at its best, it wasn't because characters were punching each other. It was because the characters talked and expressed themselves. It was a sensitive book. 

I'm not going to make the thesis that that is what an X-book has to be; books and characters evolve with the times. But if you think about what made X-Men stand out on the stands in the 1980's, when it was the number one selling book in America, it was the heart of it. It was the way the characters expressed longing and fear, and supported one another through it all. 

The book has battles, but ultimately it's about personal relationships and philosophies on living

Rosenberg, at least with this book, got that, and made it a story about Jean's heart, not about overcoming a cosmic being. 

He went on to write the short run of Uncanny X-Men before House of X/Powers of X, and I think it was pretty terrible. So I don't know if it was the assignment here that raised his game, or if the assignment of killing time (and a ton of characters) before HOXPOX left him uninspired.

Even if it is only for one book, I like seeing this variation on Phoenix's costume

In the current HiX-Men continuity, death has been removed from the narrative of the X-Men. All characters now can be reanimated in a snap, so I wonder why this book was even editorially mandated to be made. Shortly after, Cyclops also would be mandated to return, using some other comic book logic. Why did they bother to do that when in HOXPOX, they brought back everyone any writer wanted to use? 

It's baffling, and makes me question just what the point of this book even was, when it's unlikely to ever be referenced in continuity ever again. But, if you ignore the convoluted continuity it was based in, and that within a year, all of the continuity in this would be ignored, the book itself is pretty good! It has some of the stuff that good X-Men comics are made of.

Reading Through 2021 68: X-Men Reload Volume 2, by Chris Claremont and Chris Bachalo

X-Men Reload Volume 2, by Chris Claremont and Chris Bachalo

2000s, collected in 2019

In February, I read the first collection of Chris Claremont's final Uncanny X-Men run and... it was alright. I enjoyed it, but I didn't love it. But I decided that if I was going to read that, I may as well finish off the run.

Has Chris Bachalo managed to work with more X-writers than anyone else?

This book, collecting issues 462-474 and, strangely, annual #1, ties up the mystery of Jamie Braddock, the mystery of Psylocke's resurrection, and ignores Sage's story and the blossoming romances of Nightcrawler. It also loses Wolverine for the most part, as he was in the concurrently published Astonishing X-Men.  And it's forced to deal with the crossover House of M and its aftermath. 

If it sounds like it's heaving along, it is. At this time, there was Uncanny X-Men, X-Men, and Astonishing X-Men, and X-Men Academy, and theoretically they were all in sync, but in reality, someone had to be making decisions that other writers were made to deal with. And Claremont had about two years on this book total before it was taken over by Ed Brubaker, so I have a feeling that Claremont was dealing with what he was given, not making the sweeping changes on his own.

Davis gets to draw gender swapped X-Men; that's good for a chuckle

With the House of M crossover, Claremont uses it as an opportunity to do more Excalibur comics. He started his run with the X-Men fighting Captain Britain villain The Fury at Braddock Manor, so maybe he was dying just to relaunch Excalibur. Alan Davis gets an opportunity to do wild variations of Marvel characters across realities, so that was alright. Ultimately, the arc was alternate reality filler.  How much one enjoys these sorts of inconsequential stories, on a scale of Age of Apocalypse to Age of X-Man, depends on the creative team and the twist it brings. The four-parter, drawn half by Davis and half by Chris Bachalo, reads well enough, but I found it to be unmemorable. I like Captain Britain and Meggan as side characters, but they have trouble carrying an X-Men story.

The Blob is depowered in a subplot that fizzles out. He gets his powers back with a hand wave somewhere in a few years

Then House of M ends, and a new status quo is thrust upon the series: 99% of the mutants have been depowered and the X-mansion is surrounded by sentinels for their protection. So much is made of the X-Men being at their weakest, and that the government is stepping up to protect them. In this time of vulnerability, who knows which villains will take their chance to deliver the final blow. The Reavers? Nimrod? Factor Three? 

So the next six issues is a fight with Shiar black ops that have zero connection to this new status quo. They're there to destroy the Phoenix. It's like he was handed this complicated mess of continuity and just decided to do the Shiar thing he was already going to do anyway, and add a few panels about Sentinels at the mansion.

When Claremont starts narrating the history of a human character, they are 100% guaranteed to die within a panel or two

I'm torn about whether this arc is good or not. I don't think it is. The one issue has a very good concept: The Shiar Death Commandoes attack and kill everyone they can in 24 seconds. That's the issue, 22 pages of a strategic attack, and the X-Men's reaction to it. If it were done in the 80s, it would probably have been a legendary issue.  Here, it's cool, and probably the most memorable part of the book, so it is a success.

I like the gray one

Where I'm torn is that the Shiar Death Commandoes are bland characters with hard to grasp powers, not the first time Claremont has made such characters. It's not helped by Bachalo's art, which can be confusing as it is, but on gray armored characters, I couldn't tell what was going on multiple times. I was squinting on lots of pages.

I like Bachalo's art a lot in general, but it wasn't always in the service of storytelling here.

That's a great Bachalo illustration of Storm

Bachalo's art elsewhere in the book is pretty fabulous. He's got a real sense of depth to his art, and a bold design sense.

The next arc also has nothing to do with the Sentinels stationed around the mansion and the X-Men's vulnerability, as if Claremont knew his days were numbered and wasn't going to waste them doing anything more than lip service to continuity. Instead, it has another problem that hurts his X-Men comics: power creep, that the dangers they face become of a scale way too big, too often. Look who appeared, the threat is so dire:

Maybe he shouldn't have played the Uatu card

This last arc is about the inverse of the Phoenix force. Rather than a force of destruction and creation, this is a force of stasis. It's a strange story where reality-shifter Jamie Braddock isn't invincible, and the X-Men are zapped to an Egyptian-looking place where their powers are neutralized and aliens live in peace. 

Roger Cruz does decent work; not my favorite, but pretty good

When you bring the Watcher in to announce a story, it should be epic, and this story isn't. It actually feels pretty small because not much power is displayed. 

The volume is closed with a story about Storm in Africa which might be a spiritual successor to  Life Death. Storm is stopping a child-kidnapping African warlord, and the X-Men come to offer backup. Storm is hurt and has multiple hallucinations of her experience with different people she cares for. Unfortunately, it has weak art. It's drawn competently, but lacks the flair or emotion to carry the story.

That looks like art from a DC book

If it sounds like I'm beating on the book, I guess I am. I read it quickly enough so I was enjoying it. But other than the story with compressed time in it, none of it really stuck in my memory.  It was a fizzle. If Claremont had been writing this same stuff in 1989, it would have sunk in a lot more, but in comparison with what else was going on in the era, these aren't exceptional comics.

As this was finishing at the time, Ed Brubaker was delivering Deadly Genesis, a comic which was certainly memorable, though more infamous than beloved. His X-Men run starts the issue after this book ends with a 12 part space adventure which I enjoyed a lot. It felt fresh because he was dipping into the X-Men for the first time. In comparison, Claremont was doing what came naturally to him with his run, but after a lifetime reading his original 17-year run repeatedly, it's almost like a new Rolling Stones song. It's them, it's alright, but it just isn't hitting as hard as the old stuff did.

I Really Should Read This 16: X-Men Epic Collection 1: Children of the Atom by Lee, Kirby, Roth and Thomas

X-Men Epic Collection 1: Children of the Atom by Lee, Kirby, Roth and Thomas

1963-1966

The X-Men debuted in September 1963 and the legend goes that it wasn't very good. It was nearly canceled and barely survived to 1975 when it was rebooted under Len Wein and Chris Claremont with Giant Size X-Men 1, where it then went on to be the number one comic for decades. I am a huge X-Men fan. Not obsessive, but in the 80s and early 90s, I would have been classified as obsessive, and today, X-Men are the single largest block of my comics collection. Yet I've read almost no silver age X-Men except for the brief Neil Adams run in the late 60s. I decided I would change that.

Epic Collection 1 collects issue 1 through 23, and unlike later collections, there are no annuals, crossovers, or miscellaneous appearances. I wish more of these Epic Collections were like this. 

It's hard to see mutants as a parallel for other minorities when they spend half their time fighting "evil" mutants

Right from the start, the stories in this are not great. While some of the villains become legendary characters, there are villains who never came close to being legendary. And the characters are not nearly as well defined as they would be in the Bronze Age comics. Xavier has very poorly defined abilities, shifting from issue to issue. Magneto appears a lot, probably in about 10 of the 23 issues, and though he has magnetic abilities, he can astrally project himself and do other things that future writers would ignore. 

The famous single page where Xavier thinks about being in love with Marvel Girl. It was panel six of a page where all the boys on the team are horny for the single female on the team (except Scott, he's in love)

Of the original five X-Men, Beast stands out most as a character. He's smart and in his free time he writes equations with his feet, which would have been Kirby's joke, but then Stan Lee pulls out the thesaurus to write his loquacious dialogue. It's easy to see the contemporary character's roots here.

Cyclops is a stick in the mud; when the team is given free time, everyone goes out to have fun, and Cyclops stays back to feel sorry for himself. His other main feature is a thought balloon every issue pining over Marvel Girl. 

Marvel Girl's only character is to wish Cyclops would acknowledge her and take her out. 

Iceman is initially defined as a prankster, but in later issues would be shown as Beast's best friend, and gets to play off of their relationship. 

Angel is never really a character, simply a character design. The closest he gets to showing his personality is in his over-confidence in his success. Reading his original appearances, I understand why he was so completely revamped as an angsty bad boy in the 80s. I'm not a big Archangel fan, but he is a better defined character than he was as the Angel.

Cyclops on this page is pure Kirby

Kirby's art here isn't his best. A lot of it feels like 1950s style. Occasionally it pops out and you see the bold blacks, and I love it, but overall, this is not exciting Kirby art. The character design is great though. You get so used to seeing these characters that you forget just how strange it is that the leader of the team shoots red force beams out his eyes. It's a really weird concept.

I just love this image so much

From Pussey! by Dan Clowes 

Beast also stands out from a design standpoint; Kirby really emphasizes the massive feet and toes on him. It's been decided that he will be a blue-furred character from here on in in Marvel continuity, but he's pretty cool without the fur. I think a lot of artists just had difficulty making his feet look as weird as Kirby did. 

Iceman starts out looking like a snowman, much like the Thing starts out as a lumpen rock before being refined into his famous design. In issue 8, snowy Iceman becomes icy Iceman and never goes back. It's interesting to see Kirby evolving his character design.

At first, the stories are focused on mutant themes: finding mutants and fighting mutants. Issues 1 has Magneto, 2 has the Vanisher, 3 has the Blob, and 4 has the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants with Quicksilver, the Scarlet Witch, Toad and Mastermind. That's great initial line up of villains. But Magneto is overused until he his taken off the board with a ridiculous story in issue  11 (A powerful being, The Stranger, is discovered and both the X-Men and Magneto investigate. The Stranger is revealed to be an alien on Earth to collect mutant specimens, and takes Magneto and Toad back to his alien world with him.) Other winners in the early run are Juggernaut and the Sentinels. Kirby created a huge amount of characters, and there are a lot more that stuck around than ones that fell through the cracks. We don't hear much from Unus the Untouchable these days.

Lucifer's boss, Dominus

One of the subplots in the early run is about a space alien, Lucifer, who was responsible for the loss of Xavier's legs. One of the reasons Xavier formed the X-Men was to stop this menace. The character never really works and when Roy Thomas takes over as writer he quickly wraps up this plot, and the character doesn't appear in X-Men again. 

The creators were all feeling their way toward what the X-Men were, and there were naturally going to be some dead ends.

The original Cerebro was quite different

Other trademark X-Men ideas appear in a different form. The Danger Room is there early on, but it is very much like a gymnasium obstacle course, though not too different from what would be in the early Claremont run. Cerebro is nothing like Cerebro I've ever seen. It's a 1960s stereo with names of specific mutants on it. The X-Men of the movies and cartoons didn't spring from nowhere, it evolved over decades and under different writers and artists. And you always have to remember with these books: none of the people working on them thought that adults would be following these stories half a century later.  These were disposable books for kids.

Very subtle, Professor. Nobody will know you're secretly the leader!

From issue 12, Kirby is credited with breakdowns, with Alex Toth doing a bland fill in before it's taken over by Werner Roth (credited as Jay Gavins), who then takes over as full penciller in issue 18. Stan Lee is credited as plotter/scripter until Roy Thomas takes over in issue 20. Roth's art is unexceptional for the most part. He feels like someone more suited to 1950s westerns or romance comics. He apes Kirby action in places, but it doesn't seem like it comes natural to him.

Roth had some nice hatching

Occasionally though, he draws a character in a clean line and it looks incredible. It'll be just one panel over two pages, but if he drew like this all the time, he would have been like Bruce Timm before Bruce Timm.

Look at Marvel Girl's face and mask! It's perfect! 

Thomas gives the book a jolt of energy though. He takes care of Lucifer immediately, but he seems more specific in his writing than Stan Lee was. Lee was giving quick elevator pitches for stories, "The X-Men fight mutant hunting robots!" And the artist drew that pitch for 20 pages. Thomas seems to be injecting more specific occurrences into the story, like Beast and Iceman going on a double date together with their Greenwich Village girlfriends Vera and Zelda.

This is pretty funny

I'm looking forward to the next Epic Collection to see how the book evolves. Roth is not an artist I love, but Thomas is a writer I'm interested in knowing better. Most of his work was before my time. I mainly know him from his stories in Avengers with the Vision and Squadron Supreme. It seems so crazy that a fanboy off the street managed to insinuate himself so deeply into Marvel at the height of its heyday.

I enjoyed reading this collection. I didn't love it, but it's so weird to see the original five X-Men as teenagers in a school, not as adults. It's the roots of the X-Men. I would never recommend this to someone as a starter X-book, or even as a sample of Marvel in the 60s, but if you've already read over 200 issues of X-Men and you're all in on the concept, this is an interesting book and has little treasures to uncover.

Other notes about the book:

-There are a number of continuity errors. I don't know if the writer or the letterer was at fault, but I was surprised. It's nice that Marvel stays true to the original vision/can't be bothered to fix them.

Who is this mystery man named Bobby Blake?

-The Kirby in this book isn't the best Kirby, but when the Kirby comes out, it's great. I wish I understood his skill better as a kid, because I skipped over a lot of great Kirby books in the four-for-a-dollar bin as a young collector.

That's what I'm talking about

-Epic Collections tend to recolor the front and back covers. Is it better than the original coloring? Is the modern X-Men logo better than the original? How about that little Angel flying over the logo every month? There was a lot of magic going on in the 60s Marvel books.

-In the mid 80s, X-Men was the number one book, but the only issues of the original run available were the Neal Adams series. Instead, I bought the Official Marvel Index to the X-Men, an encyclopedia of the golden age stories.

Art by Sandy Plunket and P. Craig Russel

Each issue would have a lengthy breakdown. I loved reading X-Men, but at a certain point it became a kind of studying. Boys and men have this competitiveness in their circles, be it comics or baseball or video games, where when a friend doesn't know some trivia, others snort derisively, "You didn't know that?" It's gross, I did it too, and it hammered in some obsessive traits into me at that age. If I couldn't play sports even remotely well, at least I could know more about X-Men than all my friends.

I read every single one of these entries

The entries give creator credits, list the characters that appeared, notable items that appeared, gave a synopsis, and helped you become a better Marvel Zombie.

Countless hours of my life has gone into this.

Reading Through 2021 22: X-Men Reload Volume 1 by Chris Claremont and Alan Davis

 X-Men Reload Volume 1 by Chris Claremont and Alan Davis and others

2000s, collected in 2018

Is this series remembered well by people who didn't grow up with Chris Claremont X-Men? It was a weird time for X-Men to try to go retro. 

I don't remember Alan Davis drawing women's necks so long

In the mid-2000s, I started getting back into mainstream comics, and I read a trade of the first six issues of this, issues 444-449, and it was okay, but I'd just read Brubaker's Captain America and the Grant Morrison New X-Men run. Whedon's Astonishing X-Men may have been coming out at that time as well. Alan Davis is one of my favorite mainstream pencillers, so I was expecting to love the book, but I just didn't. In comparison to those other books, there just didn't seem to be much going on in these issues, and I never read beyond issue 449 of UXM until Brubaker took over writing duties.

Recently, this collection of 444-461 was at a discount, so I decided to give it another shot. Over a decade had passed, and I've been reading a lot more older comics, so I just had very different expectations going in.

You get the feeling Davis could draw these characters from any angle

And I liked it better! There were some problems with it, some major problems, but on the whole, it was enjoyable to read. The thing is, it still wasn't great, so I don't know that its high points made up for the lows.

I want to start with the praise: Alan Davis kills it. Every page has love and attention to detail. Claremont's strong point is character work, and Davis draws every emotion on everyone's face. Davis might be the guy most capable of realizing Claremont's talent. I especially enjoyed the conversations between characters, the smiles and the facial expressions. Davis can draw action well too, but it's not where he shines. He's given all different locations to draw as well, and each come out fully realized. It's exceptional work.

That's a ridiculously well-rendered night club

Claremont does do great character work... with Davis. His work with other artists falls flatter. They try, but that's just not what they're good at, and it can be hard to look at. Davis draws most of the book, but three other artists draw short 2-3 issue arcs between Davis' longer arcs and they all suffer in comparison.

I had remembered Claremont's writing in this as being too wordy, and it really isn't. Narration is limited to a point of view character, and isn't too obtrusive. I actually liked the pace of these stories quite a lot. Breezier than the 80s, and meatier than most modern books.

That's the main stuff I liked and I enjoyed it a great amount. I was buying Claremont and Davis Excalibur off the stands, and it's pleasurable to see them write and draw characters they both seem to have enormous affection for.

The bad stuff though...

This is the worst looking page I saw in a Marvel comic in quite some time

As I wrote, the other artists just aren't up to the task. It's not bad work, but it's pretty bland. 

And Claremont isn't giving them gold to work with either. In four of six arcs, the X-Men lose their powers, and two of those times it's because of nanites. I just shrugged my shoulders and powered ahead. 

The villains aren't what pretty much anyone wants to see. The first story has the Fury from the old Captain Britain comics, followed by the Viper taking over Murderworld from Arcade, a mutant mafioso named Geech, Sebastian Shaw, and finally some evolved dinosaurs in the Savageland and the Savage Land Mutates! Nobody likes the Savage Land Mutates, do they? But Claremont keeps bringing them back. It's like the book is a nostalgia series for Claremont himself, the things he misses writing. I suppose he should be writing stuff he's passionate about, but sometimes...

Claremont is forced to juggle a lot of continuity in this. He brings Psylocke back from the dead, Colossus is brought back from the dead in Astonishing, Jean Grey is killed off in adjective-less X-Men, Wolverine goes rogue in his own title, and I think X-23 is brought in from somewhere else. I don't know if he chose to deal with it all or if the editor forced him to reconcile all this continuity, but he ends up doing it. It is a noble effort, but, as a reader, that's a lot of other titles you're forced to discern the happenings of. And at the end, House of M is teased, so it is only going to get worse in the next collection.  

Finally, he loves Sage. I kind of know who Sage is, she's been used a bit in the current HoX/PoX run, but she is Claremont's Poochie here. When she's not the center of the story, other characters are talking about her and trying to figure out what she's doing. And at the end, I had no real idea of who she was, and wasn't interested in it either. Her use was a prime example of tell, don't show.

Nobody was asking for this

The other disappointment in this was the use of Psylocke and Captain Britain's brother Jamie Braddock as a subplot, which would seem to be resolved in the next collection. I think he's as uninteresting a character as it gets: a malicious reality warper that generally treats characters as playthings. In a series with a roster of villains like Mr. Sinister or that Shadow King, Jamie 
Braddock just isn't bringing much to the table.

I enjoyed reading the book overall, because I enjoy the experience of Claremont and Davis doing X-Men so much, but it's not a great book, and I probably would never recommend it to anyone not already partial to the X-Men. Now to see how much that second collection currently is selling for. I can't stop myself.

Reading through 2021 13: Uncanny X-Men Omnibus 2, by Chris Claremont, John Byrne, Dave Cockrum and many more

Uncanny X-Men Omnibus 2, by Chris Claremont, John Byrne, Dave Cockrum and many more

c.1980, printed in 2020

I could write about ten different essays about this book, so I'm trying to boil it down to essential ideas and not just my nostalgia from reading and rereading these in the mid-80s.

Before X-Men was a movie, before it was a cartoon, before it was product line at Marvel, it was just a minor title with creative freedom. Chris Claremont was the writer of the book for 17 years as it became a juggernaut. Rereading these now, I learned a lot about his writing.

The first half of this is one of the most acclaimed Marvel stories ever, the Dark Phoenix Saga, written by Claremont, drawn by Byrne, and plotted by the both of them together. Byrne later used to joke that if Claremont was writing by himself, it would have just been conversations between characters. Byrne would have major creative differences with Claremont and abruptly leave the book to write and draw Fantastic Four, and if I compare those two books, there is a lot of crossover. Byrne is fun, but he's a "hard sci-fi" guy, he wants to pretend his space aliens have some basis in reality. His run of X-Men shows that.

Then he leaves the book, Dave Cockrum comes on as penciler, and man, the book gets ridiculous. Doctor Doom encases Storm in an organic metal shell and she subconsciously causes the biggest hurricane ever. Cyclops is in the Bermuda Triangle and ship wrecks on an island that just happens to be next to the ancient island Magneto raises from the sea floor to be his new base. The White Queen zaps Storm with a Personality Exchange Gun which swaps their bodies. In the Marvel Fanfare issues included, the Savage Land Mutates use a de-evolving ray to reverse the effects of evolution, turning Spider-Man into a giant spider. Claremont was dead serious about characterization, but at this point, his plots aren't so far off from when he had Wolverine tussle with leprechauns around issue 97.

But then, within this, he uses these ridiculous plots as places to hang incredible character beats. Probably the best is having Magneto take down a fourteen-year-old Kitty Pryde. Looking at her body, he realizes that he's completely lost his way and is becoming the kind of person he claimed to be fighting against. It's pulp storytelling, but Claremont goes on to develop the story for the next four years, as Magneto tries to become a better man and eventually takes over for Xavier. This is essentially what all the X-Men under Claremont did: They saw their own faults, and looked at the other members, even the ones they didn't like, and had respect for them, and used them to be better people. And when they didn't, the other members were there to encourage them to be their best. This isn't what was going on in other team books of the time.

This is a super hero comic ostensibly for kids. Look at that art!

My favorite story in the book exemplifies the amazing character work among the ridiculousness: a short story about Jean Grey's sister Sara remembering an adventure together with her. At Jean's grave, Sara Grey thinks about how much she misses Jean, and remembers when she learned Jean was a mutant. The two were having a day sailing, and Sara thinks about how she was then less comfortable around Jean having learned that Jean is a mutant. She worried that if Jean was a mutant, then possibly her kids could be mutants too. (this is a very clear "coming out" metaphor) Then their sailboat is attacked by Attuma of Atlantis, who brings them to his undersea kingdom and changes them to blue water breathers in order to be his new brides. Absolutely stupid story, and it wasn't a favorite of mine at the time. But then the final page, Sara talks to Jean's grave, and thinks about how different she feels now. She misses her sister, and realizes that she wouldn't care one bit if either of her children were mutants, she only hopes they can grow up to be half the people her sister was. It's such a potent, honest expression on how people can get divided from the people they love due to prejudice and hate, but at the end of the day, (hopefully) it's love and respect that will be the legacy of the relationship. Incredible emotion, well-told, in a story about Attuma using Atlantean technology to capture human brides.

A particularly touching letter

The book also includes letter pages, and they're very interesting, especially the ones written by people who take the book to heart. It really was trying to capture emotions that other books of the time had no interest in. For folks who felt like they couldn't be seen, this book gave them hope.

I enjoyed reading this so much. I still read some new X-Men comics, but after reading this, I'm well-aware of why I loved this group so much, and how much was lost when it simply became a franchise.