shaxper
CCF Site Custodian
Posts: 22,408
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Post by shaxper on Oct 30, 2022 0:39:36 GMT -5
To be fair, Claremont had very little training and previous experience at this point. He was a former assistant editor thrown into a dream gig and learning as he went. Talent he had in spades, of course. Not at the point of Dark Phoenix. He had been on X-Men for 5 years, had published stories for 7, and had been writing anywhere from 3-5 titles at a go, for at least 3 years. He had a lot of published writing under his belt. I wouldn't call him a rookie, by the time he is doing Dark Phoenix; when he came on the book, yes. It's less a matter of time for me as it is for notable progression. Claremont is still very much learning at the point of the Dark Phoenix Saga, at least as far as I'm concerned. As for what he wrote in those two years prior to X-Men, it's all filler stuff written by an assistant editor who was available to do it at the last minute. I truly don't know much about anything else he wrote for Marvel while he was doing X-Men. I guess there was a brief stint on Iron Fist, as well as a bunch of one-shots in the anthology and try-out titles (a few Starlord stories and Marada the She-Wolf come to mind). I can't think of another property where he would have gotten experience crafting large story arcs. What am I forgetting? |
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Post by Ozymandias on Oct 30, 2022 1:28:05 GMT -5
I guess there was a brief stint on Iron Fist, as well as a bunch of one-shots in the anthology and try-out titles (a few Starlord stories and Marada the She-Wolf come to mind). I can't think of another property where he would have gotten experience crafting large story arcs. What am I forgetting? Those were 18 issues of Iron Fist, between April 1975 and May 1977. He had a long running story there. |
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Post by Duragizer on Oct 30, 2022 2:42:49 GMT -5
Tentative 8. Would've been a 9 long years ago, but I haven't revisited the storyline since 2012, and I've retroactively come to the conclusion that space opera and the X-Men don't mix (Cyclops' parents abducted by aliens, with his dad becoming a space buccaneer. WTF is this BS doing in a comic book revolving around human mutants and racial hatred?)
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Post by Cei-U! on Oct 30, 2022 5:01:54 GMT -5
To quote Oscar Wilde: "All art is useless." Doesn't mean it has no intrinsic value but, from a utilitarian standpoint, it serves no purpose (other than to employ its makers and disseminators).
Cei-U!
I summon the alternative viewpoint!
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Post by Ozymandias on Oct 30, 2022 5:24:33 GMT -5
To quote Oscar Wilde: "All art is useless." Doesn't mean it has no intrinsic value but, from a utilitarian standpoint, it serves no purpose (other than to employ its makers and disseminators). Cei-U! I summon the alternative viewpoint! Precisely from an utilitarian point of view, that statement is wrong. This is more so in Mill than in Bentham. The later was more of a hedonist, while the former placed a higher value on the pleasure obtained from art. |
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Post by chaykinstevens on Oct 30, 2022 9:15:36 GMT -5
I prefer Gerber's Man-Thing to the bulk of The Dark Phoenix Saga, but I probably wouldn't choose it over #137, specifically. Thus part of my difficulty with what is being asked. Gerber had left Marvel by 1980. That month's Man-Thing was by Claremont and Don Perlin and definitely wasn't in the same league as X-Men. |
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Post by berkley on Oct 30, 2022 11:52:32 GMT -5
Much as I enjoyed the Claremont/Byrne X-Men it's very much in the second rank of my personal favourite Marvel runs, well below what I consider top-rank titles such as Doctor strange, MoKF, ToD, Gerber's various series, Kirby's solo '70s books, etc. Even within the more specific category of superhero team books it wouldn't come anywhere near the best of the Avengers or the first 50 or 60 issues of the Defenders or the Kirby/Lee FF.
I feel pretty clear about the above but I still find it hard to put a number on where I'd rank the X-Men. 6 feels too low, because I really liked it for what it was - entertaining Marvel superhero stories with very attractive artwork - but 7 and above seem like they should be reserved for what I think are the very best.
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Post by Ozymandias on Oct 30, 2022 13:49:08 GMT -5
Much as I enjoyed the Claremont/Byrne X-Men it's very much in the second rank of my personal favourite Marvel runs, well below what I consider top-rank titles such as Doctor strange, MoKF, ToD, Gerber's various series, Kirby's solo '70s books, etc. Even within the more specific category of superhero team books it wouldn't come anywhere near the best of the Avengers or the first 50 or 60 issues of the Defenders or the Kirby/Lee FF. I feel pretty clear about the above but I still find it hard to put a number on where I'd rank the X-Men. 6 feels too low, because I really liked it for what it was - entertaining Marvel superhero stories with very attractive artwork - but 7 and above seem like they should be reserved for what I think are the very best. I thought about giving the option for half points, but decided it was too much. Probably it would've been better to let people choose two options. I myself could've chosen 7 and 8, for an average of 7.5, without actually adding 9 extra options. Oh well, next one. |
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Post by chaykinstevens on Oct 30, 2022 14:32:39 GMT -5
I thought about giving the option for half points, but decided it was too much. Probably it would've been better to let people choose two options. I myself could've chosen 7 and 8, for an average of 7.5, without actually adding 9 extra options. Oh well, next one. Wouldn't that give twice as much weight to the opinion of someone voting for a number ending in .5 as to someone voting for a round number? I think adding the 10 extra options would work better, unless there's an upper limit on the number of poll options. |
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Post by Deleted on Oct 30, 2022 16:49:15 GMT -5
I went an 8 on it.
It was one of the earliest trades I picked up when I was getting back into comics and for years was an evergreen story that I would read and reread. It's been a while since I read it though.
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Post by badwolf on Oct 30, 2022 18:39:52 GMT -5
10
Now this is what comics should be like!
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Post by berkley on Oct 30, 2022 22:51:11 GMT -5
Much as I enjoyed the Claremont/Byrne X-Men it's very much in the second rank of my personal favourite Marvel runs, well below what I consider top-rank titles such as Doctor strange, MoKF, ToD, Gerber's various series, Kirby's solo '70s books, etc. Even within the more specific category of superhero team books it wouldn't come anywhere near the best of the Avengers or the first 50 or 60 issues of the Defenders or the Kirby/Lee FF. I feel pretty clear about the above but I still find it hard to put a number on where I'd rank the X-Men. 6 feels too low, because I really liked it for what it was - entertaining Marvel superhero stories with very attractive artwork - but 7 and above seem like they should be reserved for what I think are the very best. I thought about giving the option for half points, but decided it was too much. Probably it would've been better to let people choose two options. I myself could've chosen 7 and 8, for an average of 7.5, without actually adding 9 extra options. Oh well, next one.
I don't think it would help me, as 6.5 still sounds a bit too stingy for a comic I enjoyed this much in spite of my reservations. So I broke down and gave it a 7, even though it feels a bit generous. I'm thinking more of my overall feelings about the Claremont/Cockrum and Claremont/Byrne X-Men, since I don't remember Dark Phoenix specifically enough to judge it separately.
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Post by Ozymandias on Oct 31, 2022 1:40:31 GMT -5
10 Now this is what comics should be like! Funny, I don't remember if it was in this thread or in FB, but someone said their major problem with the saga was precisely fans saying exactly that. How that would be a fault of the work, I don't know. [...] 6.5 still sounds a bit too stingy for a comic I enjoyed this much in spite of my reservations. So I broke down and gave it a 7, even though it feels a bit generous. [...] Nice, with that vote, the distribution looks completely symmetric around 8 (except for the three outliers).
I wasn't expecting to see people finding the fine grain useful, and even wishing for much more! In general, I rounded my ratings to half points, but originally it went down all the way to decimals.
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Post by mikelmidnight on Oct 31, 2022 11:26:20 GMT -5
I gave it a 5. I'm a die-hard Claremont X-Men fan, but that storyline seemed awkwardly paced, as if Claremont wasn't really sure what he wanted to do, and so the thing limped along awkwardly and then jumped to an arbitrary climax far too quickly. I adore what the Dark Phoenix Saga did for the X-Men franchise in its aftermath, and the concept itself was very powerful, but as a stand-alone story, I think it was problematic at best.
To be fair, the climax was dictated by Shooter, and was not Claremont's original climax at all (although, given what he had planned, maybe it was for the better).
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shaxper
CCF Site Custodian
Posts: 22,408
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Post by shaxper on Oct 31, 2022 13:55:00 GMT -5
I gave it a 5. I'm a die-hard Claremont X-Men fan, but that storyline seemed awkwardly paced, as if Claremont wasn't really sure what he wanted to do, and so the thing limped along awkwardly and then jumped to an arbitrary climax far too quickly. I adore what the Dark Phoenix Saga did for the X-Men franchise in its aftermath, and the concept itself was very powerful, but as a stand-alone story, I think it was problematic at best.
To be fair, the climax was dictated by Shooter, and was not Claremont's original climax at all (although, given what he had planned, maybe it was for the better).
Having read what was supposed to happen, yeah, I think it would have been all the worse. At least Shooter's way gave the story an earned emotional climax. |
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