Articles with the Tag X-Men

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 47: Essential X-Men Vol. 07

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Essential X-Men Vol. 07
Chris Claremont, Marc Silvestri, Jon Bogdanove and friends
Reprints: X-Men #214-228, #Annual 10-11, Fantastic Four v X-Men (February 1987 – April 1988)
Get this for: X-Men at their nadir — three stars

Let’s talk about why the X-Men went sour. Because it did turn sour, didn’t it, at some point in Claremont’s long, long run on Uncanny X-Men. At some point the long drawn out subplots no longer intrigued and mystified, but annoyed, the relentless grinding misery and inability of the X-Men to win their battles started to grind you down as well and the title just seemed to devolve into an endless series of inconclusive battles with ill defined villains. Different people reach this point sooner or later with Claremont, for me rereading some of the stories in this volume it was reached here.

I have to be honest however. Back when I first started following the X-Men, I got going with issue 220, the start of the whole Adversary Saga that was in itself turn of the socalled Fall of Mutants, the big 1988 Summer event in the mutant titles. At the time, dropping in with little real knowledge of the X-Men, I loved this story. Rereading it in context, it now serves as the climax of a long, painful two years of stories in which the X-Men only got more and more hurt. Especially the Fantastic Four vs. the X-Men limited series in retrospect is excruciating in its doom and gloom.

In that miniseries the X-Men call on Reed Richard’s scientific expertise to help save Shadowcat, stuck in phasing mode and slowly disappearing, but he’s uncharacteristic unsure of himself, the result of a longterm psychological trap set by Doctor Doom. Things get worse, the X-Men and Fantastic Four come to blows, Reed’s teammates desert him and Shadowcat’s fate seems sealed… But that psychological trap of Doom’s — a pre-FF journal supposedly written by Reed that shows he planned to turn himself and his friends into the Fantastic Four rather than it being an accident — just doesn’t work for me this time. It’s out of character for the Fantastic Four to believe this so suddenly, or for Reed not to realise it’s a fake straight away. Meanwhile the antagonism between them and the X-Men doesn’t ring true either. For one, Claremont had Johnny Storm use the word “muties”, which just doesn’t fit his character at all. He may be a hothead, but not a bigot.

In the main title, the X-Men are still recovering from the Mutant Massacre and their battles with the Marauders and still in disaster recovery mode. They’re still only reacting to threats, not gaining anything, though slowly trying to rebuild the team. Even then things go wrong, as when they recruit Havok, yet lose his girlfriend, Polaris, to the Marauders. It’s incredibly frustrating to read issue after issue of this sort of halfwins or outright defeats for the X-Men, especially since Claremont is a good enough writer to still make you care for them. That’s the worst part, those glimpses of how good Claremont can be when not obsessed with doom and gloom.

The art in this volume is a mixed bag, with a series of guest artists — Barry Windsor Smith, Alan Davis, Jackson Guice — before The Uncanny X-Men settles with Marc Silvestri, whose very very scratchy, semi-realistic style is quite different from John Romita Jr.’s art in the previous volume, but as good in its own right. So is Jon Bogdanove, on the Fantastic Four vs. the X-Men limited series, who has a more “cute” style. It makes for a less united look to this volume, but then these were never intended to be collected together in the first place…

So yeah, a frustrating, annoying final volume of Essential X-Men to be reviewed in this series. Yet Claremont still manages to hook me here, the bastard.

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 41: Essential X-Men Vol. 06

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Essential X-Men Vol. 06
Chris Claremont, John Romita Jr., Arthur Adams and friends
Reprints: X-Men #199-213 and more (July 1970 – December 1972)
Get this for: X-Men fighting losing battles — four stars

And so we reach Late Period Claremont with Volume six of Essential X-Men, having of necessity skipped Vol. 5 — such is the danger of buying from a remainders shop. This is my least favourite period of Claremont’s X-Men even though this was also when I bought my first issues new off the rack, in Dutch translation, with #200 being my first one. Didn’t start to regularly buy the series until much later though; limited pocket money led me chose The Avengers and Spider-Man over The X-Men. At least they won their fights more often than not.

Because Late Period Claremont is a very depressing writer and the world he lets the X-Men operate in here is dark and bleak, where the villains have become much more dangerous and murderous, friends have all vanished and everything the X-Men do goes wrong. From the start of his run on X-Men Claremont had a tendency to make the X-Men’s battles ambiguous and them suffer, as well as a prediliction for long running and complicated subplots, with various threats kept simmering on the backburner for long stretches. In the current volume this has reached the point where it seems the X-Men are destined never to win another battle, or vanquish a foe. Meanwhile subplots over the course of the series have taken longer and longer to resolve and here they seemingly never do so…

So the volume starts with the inconclusive trail of Magneto in Paris in #199-200, for which the entire creative team actually got to fly to Paris for, as a reward for their succes with the X-Men. The trail is interrupted by a crossover with the New Mutants in Asgard, itself a followup to an earlier X-Men/Alpha Flight adventure. The trial ends inconclusive, professor Xavier has a health crisis and is taken into space by the Starjammers, while veteran X-Man Cyclops leaves next issue, after losing a leadership battle to the now powerless Storm. The next couple of issues has them tangling with the Beyonder, as Secret Wars II comes to visit. Two solo adventures of Nightcrawler and Wolverine, the latter being almost killed by some old enemies lead us into a confrontation with the socalled Freedom Force, the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants under a new name and sanctioned by the US government.

After that Rachel Summers, the daughter of Scott “Cyclops” Summers and Jean “Phoenix” Grey from the “Days of Future Passed” alternate future, decides to take on the Hellfire Club on her own, to take her revenge on the psychic vampire and mass murdereress Selene, only to be almost killed herself by Wolverine as the only way to stop Rachel from becoming a murderer herself. This of course leads to a fullblown battle between the Hellfire Club and the rest of the X-Men, which in turn is interrupted by the attack of Nimrod, the ultimate Sentinel mutant hunter, which forces the two teams to work together to defeat him, barely. All of which is merely a prelude to the Mutant Massacre, the first proper mutant mega crossover, between the X-Men, New Mutants, Power Pack, Thor and X-Factor, the culmination of several years of subplots about the general public’s growing paranoia and hatred of mutants.

The crossover revolves around a new group of villains, the Marauders, largely new but with some old faces thrown in, who go on a killing spree against the Morlocks, mutant outcasts living in an old, abandoned fallout shelter underneath New York. Most of them have barely any powers and are easy prey for these killers, who strike without motive. Why the Marauders strike is never explained and the most the X-Men or any of the other heroes involved can do is damage control. The Mutant Massacre is everything The X-Men has been building towards for years: intense frustration.

Frustration, because Claremont keeps on twisting the knife. Throughout this volume the X-Men keep losing battles, keep getting wounded and nearly killed, keep failing to protect themselves and others from increasingly murderous villains. The Mutant Massacre is just the icing on the cake. Claremont is good at piling up the pressure month to month, but reading this in one sitting the frustration just gets too much. It’s the Joker problem as much as anything: if the Joker is killing people indiscriminately every time he breaks out of Arkham Asylum, Batman looks like a smuck rather than a hero if he doesn’t kill him in battle but delivers him back to Arkham to escape again. With the X-Men, you have them facing menaces able and willing to kill every mutie in the country, yet they’re still playing by superhero rules, not wanting to kill a mass murderer like Selene. What’s even worse about that issue is that Wolverine himself way back in #116 had been shown (offpanel) to kill a guard in the way when the X-Men were trying to sneak into a villain’s headquarters.

What also frustrated me was the theme of mutant paranoia. It was always present in the series of course, but here it completely dominates The X-Men. At times it seems every human, including superheroes like The Avengers or the Fantastic Four hates and fears the X-Men, no matter what they do. It feels manipulative at times.

Which brings me to that other mutant series, X-Factor, which has some of its issues collected here in the Mutant Massacre crossover. The creation of X-Factor, done largely without Claremont’s input, was a mistake, not in the least because it led to the cancellation of one of my favourite series, Defenders. The idea behind the series was ridiculous — the original X-Men regrouping and posing as the mutant hunters X-Factor, to find and train dangerous new mutants — and the fallout of it poisoned the X-Men for years, with the worst consequence being the whole “return of Jean Grey/Scott Summers leaving his bride Madelyne Pryor plus newborn baby” business.

All of which amounts to a lot of silent screaming at the comic, as my frustration gets the better of me. To be honest, this frustation is not all bad: Claremont must be doing something right to get thousands of fans buying the series month in month out despite it or perhaps because of it. He certainly kept me reading. It helps a lot to have John Romita Jr. doing the art: his dark, scratchy style fits the series well.

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 36: Essential X-Men Vol. 04

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Essential X-Men Vol. 4
Chris Claremont, Dave Cockrum, Paul Smith, John Romita Jr and friends
Reprints: Uncanny X-Men #162-179, Annual #7, Marvel Graphic Novel #5 (October 1982 – March 1984)
Get this for: full blown mutant paranoia with the X-Men — four stars

The fourth volume of Essential X-Men starts with the tail end of Dave Cockrum’s second run on the title, and the Brood Saga. At the end of the previous volume the X-Men had been kidnapped into space, this volume opens with Wolverine discovering where they were: on the home planet of the Brood, Marvel’s very own Alien knockoff. On the run from them, lost and alone in a very hostile alien jungle Wolvie discovers things are even worse than he thought, as it turns out he and the other X-Men have been impregnated by the Brood Queen and are carrying an alien embryo. They’ll die giving birth to new queens but not before they might be able to hurt the Brood. It’s another X-Men space epic, but a much more depressive one than the previous ones.

It sets the tone for the rest of this volume, as the X-Men’s world gets progressively darker. After the Brood Saga and its aftermath, the next story is from Marvel Graphic Novel #5, “X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills”, which after “Days of Future Past” is the first story explicitely about mutant hatred. It’s not a good story, with the subtely of a sledgehammer and very eighties with its televangelist villain, but it’s a prelude of what’s to come. Though this had supposedly always been the theme of The X-Men, for the most part the classic X-Men had been a regular superhero title and mutant hatred even with Claremont at the helm it took to “Days of Future Past” in #141-142 that it became explicit. But while that story showed the nightmare future the X-Men fought again, it still wasn’t a big part of the series afterwards. With the graphic novel Claremont put mutant phobia in the spotlights again and in the regular title as well it became more prominent, as the X-Men became more and more mistrusted by the world they had saved so often

For example, even in the lighthearted story from Annual 7 this mistrust is shown. The Impossible Man, an old Fantastic Four villain, is on a scavenger hunt taking trophies from all his favourite superheros: the X-Men’s mansion, Nick Fury’s eye patch and the Wasp’s entire collection of costumes, with the X-Men chasing after him. When Rogue and Colossus follow him to the Avengers’ Mansion, they’re attacked by She-Hulk and Iron Man who mistake them for the thieves. It’s one small example of the mistrust between our favourite muties and the rest of the superhero community.

Another big change for the X-Men is that they’re no longer the only mutant team: while they were kidnapped by the Brood, Charles Xavier had assembled a team of New Mutants. It showed how popular the X-Men had become that there was now a second mutant title. It’s not immediately notable in the X-Men’s own title, except for the inevitable confrontation when they return from outer space.

Apart from the ongoing mutant paranoia, Claremont also heaps more personal troubles on his heroes. The X-Men and especially Storm start to change again during the Brood Saga, as they have to fight for their lives and kill as well. On Earth too they have to become harder, lose some of their idealism to survive. With Storm, always portrayed as an innocent abroad, this change hits hardest: in issue 170 she actually strikes to kill an opponent, Callisto of the Morlocks who had kidnapped the Angel to be her consort. She fights a knife duel with Callisto, the latter seems to have her on the ropes, but Storm manages to tangle Callisto’s arm in her cape and stabs her full in the heart. This moment is shown in a great six panel sequence by Paul Smith, the upper left panel showing Storm and Callisto as Storm prepares to strike, then a close up from behind Storm’s shoulder showing the expression on Callisto’s face as she’s stabbed in the chest. The third panel then shows them standing, Callisto starting to collapse. The bottom three panels has Storm walking to the camera, past Callisto falling down and with the Morlock crowd in the background. A great sequence and a example of Paul Smith’s talent.

Storm’s change into somebody much more harder, less naive (as symbolised by her new, street tough costume in #173) is not the only angst the X-Men go through. Wolverine sees his marriage to Lady Mariko Yashida fall through at the last moment, Mariko being manipulated by Mastermind, who’s back for vengeance. Even after this is cleared up Wolvie doesn’t get to marry his great love, as Mariko’s family is entangled with the Yakuza again and she feels her duty compels her to clean this up first. But all this is just collatoral damage in Mastermind’s real plot: to convince the X-Men Dark Phoenix is back and get them to kill an innocent woman.

Because on the last page of #168 Madeleine Pryor is introduced to Scott Summers and she is a dead ringer (no pun intended) for Jean Grey, his one true love who had killed herself rather than give in to the temptation to become Dark Phoenix again. Scott falls hard for Madeleine, with the next issue finding them slow dancing together, even though he had spent most of #168 being intimate with his previous girlfriend, Lee Forrester. Madeleine and Scott seem made for each other, but he cannot help but wonder… He finally asks the question he dreads, whether she is Phoenix and is answered by an energy blast. Issue 175 finds the X-Men fighting for their lives against a reborn Phoenix, or so things seem, but Scott finally figures things out and then has to fight for his life against the rest of the X-Men who are now convinced he‘s Phoenix… It all works out in the end, with a wedding for Maddy and Scott, but it was a long hard slog.

The third angst generator is the coming of Rogue, their old adversary from the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, who was the one who robbed Carol Danvers from her powers, memories and almost her life. She joins the X-Men out of desperation, with her powers out of control and confused about who she is thanks to Carol’s personality being entangled with her own. Xavier lets her joint against the wishes of most X-Men, who slowly have to learn to live with her. It’s a good example of Claremont’s great skill at soap opera and how he can manipulate his readers. It makes perfect sense for the X-Men to take in Rogue, with their mission of rehabilitation, but I’m sure many readers would’ve been as outraged as Carol at the unfariness of it all when she learned of it…

A quick word about the art to finish this off. As said, this volume starts with Dave Cockrum doing his usual excellent job, who is replaced by Paul Smith, then a complete unknown but who is just as good as Cockrum from the start. He has a smooth, semi-realistic style that’s sort of reminds me of Alan Davis, but not quite and he’s great at depicting subtle emotions with just a few lines. Smith in turn is replaced by John Romita Jr., who continues in his style but puts a slightly scratchier edge on it. All three artists work well with Claremont, who adapts himself in turn to each of them. A great volume again.

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 25: Essential X-Men Vol. 2

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Essential Essential X-Men Vol. 2
Chris Claremont, John Byrne and friends
Reprints: Uncanny X-Men #120-144 (April 1979 – April 1981)
Get this for: Byrne and Claremont at their peak together — five stars

Essential X-Men Vol. 2 contains the first X-Men comics I had ever read, which was also one of the very few superhero stories that ever gave me nightsmares: X-Men #141-142, “The Days of Future Past”. It’s the story in which the X-Men found the nemesis they would be fighting for the next two decades, the inevitable future that would await them if they slipped up, that for all their victories they might not be able to prevent happening. It’s a great story, perhaps the best Byrne and Claremont ever did together and it captured the essence of the X-Men.

And here it comes at the end of a great run of stories. While the first volume saw Claremont still finding his feet, here both he and John Byrne are fully in control and confident of their craft. The volume starts with the last leg of the X-Men’s world tour that had begun in the previous collection, as the X-Men run into Alpha Flight attempting to take back Wolverine into the Canadian secret service. This followed by their first match against Arcade, the murderer for hire who likes to kill his victims by funfair. Barely recovered from these fights, they discover Jean Grey, whom they had thought had died in the climatic fight against Magneto a dozen issues or so again, was still alive and kicking at Muir Island, but menaced by a new menace: Mutant X. Defeating him turns out to be the heaviest fight and costliest victory they have known yet, but that’s just the start.

Now things kick into high gear, as professor X is back, two new mutants, Kitty Pryde and the Dazzler are found and turn out to be bait in a trap a new group of villains, the Hellfire Club, has set. Meanwhile this same club turns also be behind a long running subplot in which Jean “Phoenix” Grey has had multiple flashbacks to the live of one of her ancestors, which turns out to be the result of manipulation by Mastermind, in order to recruit her for the Club. The X-Men manage to defeat the Hellfire Club in their first encounter, go on offensive but this turns into tragedy as Jean Grey is indeed turned to the dark side, so to speak. Their second clash with the Hellfire Club sets in motion two new menaces, one longterm as senator Robert Kelly is confirmed in his suspicions about the X-Menb and mutants in general, the second an immediate threat as Mastermind’s manipulations awaken Jean Grey’s cosmic powers and she turns into the evil Dark Phoenix.

The Dark Phoenix Saga is the end point of more than two years of stories and subplots coming together, as Jean’s powers ultimately consume her in one of the most moving issues in the entire X-Men run. Reading these stories in one sitting, all the way from the still fairly mundane fight with Alpha Flight in #120 to the end of Phoenix in #137, you can see how Claremont and Byrne slowly but relentlessly speed up the action and danger until at the end the X-Men have no breathing space whatsoever going from one menace to another. Whereas other heroes, other teams might get some time to savour their victories, the X-Men never get to catch their breaths until it is too late. Even after the climax of the Dark Phoenix saga, there’s only one issue of recaps and half an issue of Kitty’s introduction to the X-Men before the race starts again. First it’s Wolverine and Nightcrawler up in Canada helping out Alpha Flight with Wendigo, then as said, it’s “Days of Future Past”.

Now from the start the X-Men had had as their hook, the thing that made them unique, that they were mutants, heroes different from normal people not through some unlucky accident, study of magic or high tech battlesuits, but because of what they were born with. For a long part this aspect, that they were supposed to be the team that made mutants acceptable to a world that might otherwise hate and fear them, was only paid lipservice to, the occasional Sentinel appearance not withstanding. Under Claremont this aspect had become more prominent, but it was only with “Days of Future Past”, which showed a nightmare future in which the X-Men had not succeeded in their mission and the Sentinels had wiped out most mutants and taken over the world, that this became the cornerstone of the series. With the original X-Men, all that suspicion and fear people felt was just a typical Lee shtick to handicap his heroes: here it became something real and tragic. You could call it a metaphor for racial or sexual prejudice, or more cynically, a metaphor for adolescence, but this is a metaphor made concrete: in the end it is a story about how we might react to the discovery of a mutant race of superpowered beings living amongst us…

That delayed future would become everything the X-Men fought against, though it was still some time away before it would really dominate the series — we must also remember that basically this future denies the very reason of the X-Men’s existence. As long as it is still a possible outcome, it means that all their victories are hollow…

Back to the current volume, the “Days of Future Past” is followed by a perfect one issue story, as Kitty Pryde takes on a demon that does looks nothing like the Alien from the Sigourney Weaver movies at all, uh huh. It’s a textbook example of an “outmatched hero uses the environment and her brains to defeat her almost invincible foe” story. This is followed by another one issue story, a solo Cyclops story following his adventures after he left the X-Men what with Jean’s dead and all, which ends the volume.

That last story is the only one not to feature Byrne on the art. It’s not always easy to appreciate him, what with the great volume of mediocre work he has done since X-Men, but he starts great and keeps getting better each issue. You understand why he set the style for at least one generation of superhero artists. He takes the best aspect of the Marvel Housestyle of the seventies, that clear, easy to follow style of layout and drawing that means you can immediately understand what’s happening on any page and puts it together with his own flair for composition and figure drawing. His work is always in the service of the story but he always makes it look good as well. He has that knack that so few artists have, of not only making you see the world in his art, but seeing the world through his art. Reading a huge chunk of his work in one go like this means I will see Byrne poses everywhere for the next few days.

A small sacrifice.

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 21: Essential Uncanny X-men Vol. 1

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Essential Uncanny X-men Vol. 1
Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Werner Roth, Roy Thomas and friends
Reprints: Uncanny X-Men #1-24 (September 1963 – September 1966)
Get this for: The X-Men before they were famous — three stars

The X-Men debuted in the same month as that other Marvel superhero team, the Avengers. But whereas the latter team featured five heroes already known from their solo adventures, the X-Men, also with five members, had never been seen before. What’s more, unlike every other Marvel hero the X-Men had no origin, but where born with their powers, socalled mutants. From the start they were different, using their powers not to fight crime, though they did, but to protect the world from evil mutants, to find those mutants still unaware of their powers and to show normal people that mutants could be trusted. It was a far more science fictional approach than Lee and Kirby had tried in any of their other titles, even in the Fantastic Four.

I’ve read many of the earliest stories in this volume before and always found them a tad on the tedious side. This is sadly still the case now. The premise of the series is good, but how it’s worked out is not so much. As you know, there’s professor Xavier’s school, where he trains the X-Men and is on the lookout for potential mutants or mutant threats. The first eight-nine issues all follow the same pattern: some mutant menace makes himself known or is found by professor X, the X-Men try to defeat it but are outmatched, are rallied by Prof X and overcome it. So the first issue has the X-Men going after Magneto, in the second they tackle the Vanisher, in the third the Blob, in the fourth it’s Magneto again, with new allies the Brotherhood of Evil, followed with Magneto teaming up with Namor and so on.

Character wise, especially at the start the old prof is the most annoying character in the series: either the deus ex machina that solves every difficulty at the end of an issue, or the distant trainer/mentor exhorting his pupils to do better. The focus on the X-men’s training in the first seven issues or so doesn’t help either. Another annoying character is Scott Summers, pining for fellow student Jean Grey and whining endlessly about his deadly powers and how he needs to keep his self control.

Things liven up a bit when the The X-Men move into the double figures. In issue ten the X-Men find the Savage Land and meet Ka-Zar, in issue eleven the Stranger, followed by the introduction of the Juggernaut in a fine two part story. The introduction of the Sentinels comes straight after and takes no fewer than three issues to be told. This shift towards longer, multi issue stories works well for the X-Men: they’re much more fun. Gone is any pretence at the original mission of the X-Men though.

What also works out well for the X-Men is the shift in artists, from Jack Kirby to Werner Roth. Roth’s art style is somewhat cruder than Kirby’s, but suits the X-Men better. Kirby never seemed to get a good handle on them. His artwork is always no worse than good, but doesn’t gel the way it does with e.g.
the Fantastic Four. Roth’s artwork doesn’t have the same technical proficieny of Kirby’s, but his fluid lines do seem to work better here. Another newcomer, Roy Thomas, gets to handle the writing duties from issue twenty, which also helps to freshen up the series. Unfortunately they’re only just starting to get up to steam together when the volume ends…

The X-Men was never the best Marvel Silver Age title and this is certainly not an essential volume. Interesting enough to read, but I won’t reach quickly for this again.