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Post by tarkintino on Mar 28, 2024 21:44:17 GMT -5
That, and creators such as Kirby's engaged in various rinse and repeat concepts (quest for meaning / ultimate...something / blonde-haired male heroes, etc.) were like watching the same 30 minutes of a re-run over and over again. I don't mind a creator revisiting the same themes over and over - if those themes are what the creator seems to be genuinely concerned with and I happen to find them interesting myself. I rate Philip K. Dick as possibly the best science fiction writer of all time and he dealt with the same ideas in most of his books. Roger Zelazny would be another example. Even Edgar Rice Burroughs, at a lower conceptual level. These nmes come to mind because they're favourites of mine and I've enjoyed reading their books - in some ways precisely because they keep coming back to the same ideas - or in the case of ERB, the same formula.
But it's a mistake to assume that all these variations on a theme are exactly the same for any given writer. Looking at Kirby, one of the fundamental errors many readers and comics creators have made is assuming that, for example, the Eternals sereis was just a watered down, second edition of the New Gods, or that the Celestials were exactly like Galactus only bigger and multiplied. Lazy thinking of this kind puts the blinders on and leads to a misunderstanding of the work in question.
I believe there's a stark difference between a "revisit" and being someone utterly lacking in creative diversity, where he obsessively regurgitates all too similar tropes, plots and characterization to the point the work was not much more than one "new" idea wrapped in the clothing of a previous, familiar "user", so to speak. It is similar to the Irwin Allen effect: he had the creatively lifeless impulse to use the same types of characters serving the same role within the same kind of stories: one could exchange Lost in Space's Don West (the "outlier"/quasi-antagonist with Land of the Giants' Mark Wilson and not miss a beat. The same with LiS' Zachary Smith and LOTG's Alexander Fitzhugh. Even the basic series premise--a group of people in a spaceship drawn off-course and lost and/or stranded on an alien world (or worlds in LiS' case) were interchangeable because of that aforementioned lack of creative diversity (and a possible lack of creative curiosity). Some might call it a "leaning", but at some point, the individual creator should at least try to step back and see they cannot keep using most of the same ingredients and expecting a different kind of meal each time. Or perhaps they want the same meal, which would be the core of the problem. I could make the same examples of Allen's one-note, obsessive tendencies during his disaster movie phase, where the structure / event (something that's the biggest and/or unprecedented and/or most dangerous, etc.) and characters (hothead, love interest, authority figure, Child in Danger, Victim-to-Be. et al.) reaction to it (infighting) could be swapped with other Allen disaster films with not much tweaking to make it blend seamlessly. The point being is that there's comic book writers (or artist/writers) who suffered from the same lack of creative diversity, giving in to impulses to walk over the same ground (percentage in similarity matters not if its instantly recognized) too many times.
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Post by codystarbuck on Mar 28, 2024 23:43:08 GMT -5
I'm not a big fan on how he writes romantic relationships; he always felt stuck in the soap opera tropes of endless suffering, for the heroes That makes sense, I think the "Claremont's X-Men" documentary went into his background saying that he studied theater. Maybe a bit of a fan of Hamlet? No idea, but he is definitely a fan of Ripley.....Ellen Ripley. Not sure who suggest using the Avengers UK tv episode, "A Touch of Brimstone," when they added the Hellfire Club to the X-Men; but, Claremont seemed to latch onto it and its trappings for a long time. Then again, readers also seemed to respond to it.
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Post by commond on Mar 29, 2024 2:52:05 GMT -5
I knew plenty of people who left X-Men all together. Claremont's writing was a factor, as was art; but, mostly, they were tired of the grandiose events, the lesser spin-offs, and just wanted something different. There was plenty of fan criticism, in certain quarters, about the endless Alien-influenced/swiped plots, for a start, extended subplots that either never got resolved or were underwhelming in their resolution. Personally, I bailed after Paul Smith left, as I felt Claremont was rehashing storylines, trying to redo Dark Phoenix and he kept throwing monkey wrenches into relationship, which felt backwards,to me. I'm not big on endless soap opera; a bit of emotional drama, from time to time, is one thing, but every issue gets tiresome. It's a big reason why I never warmed to the regular Spidey books and why I found Claremont's non-X-Men writing to be diminishing returns. The Aliens vs Predator mini he did ended up being not as interesting as previous ones, since the only thing he seemed to bring to it was a focus on a female human, a female predator and an alien queen. I liked his Star Trek graphic novel, up to a point; but, he turned it into another Alien riff, too, with Kirk and a bunch of old tv show characters teaming up with Klingons from the original series and a Romulan commander, to fight ....well, the Alien species, in a barely disguised form.. Now, X-Men chugged right along and others were fine and dandy with it; but, it is no more true to say that readers weren't tired of Claremont than to say everyone was hunky dory. There were detractors; but, they were probably a much smaller minority than the people who didn't care, as long as they got their X-Men fix or art they liked. The thing is X-Men continued to gain more readers than it lost. Even if there were a bunch of readers who grew tired of the series after Paul Smith left, etc., the book continued to grow in terms of sales numbers and readership. I started reading the book when Silvestri was the penciler. It never crossed my mind that anyone other than Claremont would ever write the book. Certainly when Jim Lee became the penciler fans seemed genuinely pleased, especially when Claremont finally put the team back together. I think it’s fine to critique the run and determine where the book peaked and where it began to decline, or whatever opinion a person may have, but I don’t think it’s accurate to say the readers in 1991 wanted Claremont gone.
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Post by sunofdarkchild on Mar 29, 2024 4:09:25 GMT -5
I do get the sense that Claremont was declining in quality by the late 80s, but the reason he left was because Jim Lee and Bob Harris wanted to keep the X-Men stuck in the 70s, which while it paid off in the short term with the high sales of the early 90s, in the long run caused the entire franchise to stagnate by the mid-90s and throughout this millennium. They were determined to make the mistake of bringing Jean Grey back and regressing all of the original 5 X-Men so X-Factor could exist into the guiding policy of the entire X-Men brand. It was a lot like what Dragonball Z did when Goku was brought back at the end of the Buu Saga, going backwards, ruining characters because other characters are seen as more marketable even though the story has already moved past them, and stagnating the franchise as a result. The latest chapter of Dragonball Super basically finally returned the story to the point it had already reached more than 30 years ago after decades of doing the same boring thing over and over again.
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Post by commond on Mar 29, 2024 7:53:50 GMT -5
I do get the sense that Claremont was declining in quality by the late 80s, but the reason he left was because Jim Lee and Bob Harris wanted to keep the X-Men stuck in the 70s, which while it paid off in the short term with the high sales of the early 90s, in the long run caused the entire franchise to stagnate by the mid-90s and throughout this millennium. They were determined to make the mistake of bringing Jean Grey back and regressing all of the original 5 X-Men so X-Factor could exist into the guiding policy of the entire X-Men brand. It was a lot like what Dragonball Z did when Goku was brought back at the end of the Buu Saga, going backwards, ruining characters because other characters are seen as more marketable even though the story has already moved past them, and stagnating the franchise as a result. The latest chapter of Dragonball Super basically finally returned the story to the point it had already reached more than 30 years ago after decades of doing the same boring thing over and over again. I don't really know how to define a decline in Claremont's quality, so to speak, because I began reading the X-Men after they'd died and were hiding out in Australia, but from what I can gleam, Claremont eventually reached the point where he was in an experimental phase. The book was selling so well that he could almost do anything he pleased especially when he was tight with the editors. For some fans that was the jumping off point but for others it was the starting point. To be perfectly honest, it sometimes annoys me when people talk about when they stopped reading Claremont's X-Men. You don't get a badge for where you jumped off. I'm sorry that I was nine years old and didn't know that Longshot wasn't that great. Personal feelings aside, when should Claremont have left and who should have taken over? Let's say Claremont leaves with issue #175, who takes over and what direction do they take?
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Post by sunofdarkchild on Mar 29, 2024 8:12:30 GMT -5
I do get the sense that Claremont was declining in quality by the late 80s, but the reason he left was because Jim Lee and Bob Harris wanted to keep the X-Men stuck in the 70s, which while it paid off in the short term with the high sales of the early 90s, in the long run caused the entire franchise to stagnate by the mid-90s and throughout this millennium. They were determined to make the mistake of bringing Jean Grey back and regressing all of the original 5 X-Men so X-Factor could exist into the guiding policy of the entire X-Men brand. It was a lot like what Dragonball Z did when Goku was brought back at the end of the Buu Saga, going backwards, ruining characters because other characters are seen as more marketable even though the story has already moved past them, and stagnating the franchise as a result. The latest chapter of Dragonball Super basically finally returned the story to the point it had already reached more than 30 years ago after decades of doing the same boring thing over and over again. I don't really know how to define a decline in Claremont's quality, so to speak, because I began reading the X-Men after they'd died and were hiding out in Australia, but from what I can gleam, Claremont eventually reached the point where he was in an experimental phase. The book was selling so well that he could almost do anything he pleased especially when he was tight with the editors. For some fans that was the jumping off point but for others it was the starting point. To be perfectly honest, it sometimes annoys me when people talk about when they stopped reading Claremont's X-Men. You don't get a badge for where you jumped off. I'm sorry that I was nine years old and didn't know that Longshot wasn't that great. Personal feelings aside, when should Claremont have left and who should have taken over? Let's say Claremont leaves with issue #175, who takes over and what direction do they take? I wasn't born yet. To me the problem is not with Claremont so much as decisions that were forced on him. He very nearly quit when Jean was brought back, which would have seen him leave after issue 200. The entire Inferno event was the X-Men staff attempting to fix many of the problems created by that stupid decision, and the entire process caused him to hate Cyclops as a character. New Mutants became a million times worse the moment he left the book to do Excalibur and Louise Simonson took over, and his Excalibur was never as good as his New Mutants. As soon as he redeemed Magneto after a 50-issue arc editorial was already trying to undo all the character development he gave him so he could go back to being a 60s villain. By the end he was fighting with Lee and Harris over whether the X-Men should be allowed to evolve or be stuck forever in the 70s, and when he lost that fight and left X-Men completely stagnated. This was the period where Steve Englehart created clones of the Fantastic Four who acted just like they did in the early 60s and basically recreated their earliest stories almost word for word to spite the editors who were pressing him to have the stories be more like they used to be, and the editors didn't even realize he was just mocking them and loved it. Marvel was not a well-run company by that point, and nostalgia was valued above story and character.
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Mar 29, 2024 10:13:46 GMT -5
I do get the sense that Claremont was declining in quality by the late 80s, but the reason he left was because Jim Lee and Bob Harris wanted to keep the X-Men stuck in the 70s, which while it paid off in the short term with the high sales of the early 90s, in the long run caused the entire franchise to stagnate by the mid-90s and throughout this millennium. They were determined to make the mistake of bringing Jean Grey back and regressing all of the original 5 X-Men so X-Factor could exist into the guiding policy of the entire X-Men brand. It was a lot like what Dragonball Z did when Goku was brought back at the end of the Buu Saga, going backwards, ruining characters because other characters are seen as more marketable even though the story has already moved past them, and stagnating the franchise as a result. The latest chapter of Dragonball Super basically finally returned the story to the point it had already reached more than 30 years ago after decades of doing the same boring thing over and over again. I don't really know how to define a decline in Claremont's quality, so to speak, because I began reading the X-Men after they'd died and were hiding out in Australia, but from what I can gleam, Claremont eventually reached the point where he was in an experimental phase. Yes and no. To his credit, Chris did try to change the book's status quo when it would have been easy to simply coast on a tried and true formula. He removed very popular characters from the book and replaced them with B-listers, dropped all the sub-plots that he had developed over more than a decade, turned his back on the familiarity of Xavier's school and, basically, tried something new. Props to him for refusing comfortable stagnation. However, that is not why the stories declined in interest (in my humble opinion). The actual reasons are many and go beyong an increasing allergy to Claremontisms; among them are, first, a lack of new big ideas. (The only one I can think of in those days is the creation of Genosha). The Phoenix, Days of Future Past, Magneto reforming, the Brood, Storm losing her powers, Rogue joining the team, those were all very engaging storylines; moping in the desert, punching cyborgs and wandering aimlessly with no memory, not so much. Dropping the supporting cast after the Mutant Massacre also cut into my interest, as one of the draws of the X-universe had been its increasing complexity and its organic growth. Suddenly, the new status quonwas a bare bones affair and we were treated to ad hoc changes that were left mostly unexplained. Why did the team abandon Xavier's dream to focus on being a band of Long Ranger-type do-gooders? Why not reveal their survival to their friends after their apparent death (a rather cruel move), since people like Pierce and the Marauders did know they were alive? Why not retire if things were so dire? It's not that all adventures in those days were bad, of course, but as a reader I really had a feeling of "when will this interlude be over so we can return to the real thing?" I also blame editorial for imposing atrocities like the creation of X-Factor; that completely messed up Chris's beautiful coda to the Phoenix saga and his well crafted evolution of the team. It also made his inspiring lesson about grief and acceptance completely moot. (Plus it caused me to drop comics entirely for a good long while!) Had Chris been allowed to do what he wanted unhindered from the get-go, I suspect that the team would have continued to progress over time, with more characters actually retiring and more coming in to replace them. Scott would have stayed in Alaska with Madelyne, Kitty would have grown up to become team leader, and even Wolverine might have married Mariko and moved to Japan. I certainly would have preferred that to seeing the team stuck in a perpetual present. #175 is a bit early for me; I enjoyed the JRJr era quite a lot. It's after #210 that things soured for me. And it's not so much that I would have wanted Chris to go, but that I would have liked an editor to tell him "this thing with Psylocke and Dazzler and Longshot isn't really working". Who could have replaced him? I really don't know. He really knew those characters like no one else did. Only Grant Morrison, many years later, tried something truly innovative with the X-Men. *edit* I see that sunofdarkchild made several of these points already. I apologize for the redundancy!
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Post by impulse on Mar 29, 2024 10:36:48 GMT -5
Probably, not that what came after was much of an improvement. Though had he left earlier, that might have gone very differently. I have to disagree, I liked the whedon and the Morrison runs. I do as well, but I don't really consider that right after. That was after nearly a decade of others driving the property into the ground starting with Lobdell's and Nicieza's bad Claremont impressions. Morrison and Whedon's were the breaths of fresh air needed IMO with the right amount of nostalgia and pushing forward. Naturally Marvel came out with the retcon sledgehammer the moment Morrison left to erase everything interesting.
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Post by spoon on Mar 29, 2024 13:11:00 GMT -5
I knew plenty of people who left X-Men all together. Claremont's writing was a factor, as was art; but, mostly, they were tired of the grandiose events, the lesser spin-offs, and just wanted something different. There was plenty of fan criticism, in certain quarters, about the endless Alien-influenced/swiped plots, for a start, extended subplots that either never got resolved or were underwhelming in their resolution. Personally, I bailed after Paul Smith left, as I felt Claremont was rehashing storylines, trying to redo Dark Phoenix and he kept throwing monkey wrenches into relationship, which felt backwards,to me. I'm not big on endless soap opera; a bit of emotional drama, from time to time, is one thing, but every issue gets tiresome. It's a big reason why I never warmed to the regular Spidey books and why I found Claremont's non-X-Men writing to be diminishing returns. The Aliens vs Predator mini he did ended up being not as interesting as previous ones, since the only thing he seemed to bring to it was a focus on a female human, a female predator and an alien queen. I liked his Star Trek graphic novel, up to a point; but, he turned it into another Alien riff, too, with Kirk and a bunch of old tv show characters teaming up with Klingons from the original series and a Romulan commander, to fight ....well, the Alien species, in a barely disguised form.. Now, X-Men chugged right along and others were fine and dandy with it; but, it is no more true to say that readers weren't tired of Claremont than to say everyone was hunky dory. There were detractors; but, they were probably a much smaller minority than the people who didn't care, as long as they got their X-Men fix or art they liked. The thing is X-Men continued to gain more readers than it lost. Even if there were a bunch of readers who grew tired of the series after Paul Smith left, etc., the book continued to grow in terms of sales numbers and readership. I started reading the book when Silvestri was the penciler. It never crossed my mind that anyone other than Claremont would ever write the book. Certainly when Jim Lee became the penciler fans seemed genuinely pleased, especially when Claremont finally put the team back together. I think it’s fine to critique the run and determine where the book peaked and where it began to decline, or whatever opinion a person may have, but I don’t think it’s accurate to say the readers in 1991 wanted Claremont gone. Add me to the list of people who were actually reading X-Men in 1991 who didn't want Claremont gone. Not only was the readership growing, but Marvel started publishing multiple issues during some months starting in 1988. Fans who dropped the series for good in 1980 or 1983 are good representatives of what folks who were reading it in the later 80s or early 90s were thinking. I read comics; I wasn't reading the behind-the-scenes articles. So I was genuinely shocked when I found out Claremont was out after adjectiveless X-Men #3. Of course, folks who dislike Claremont work from this period and that are entitled to their opinions. The point is simply that one's own personal taste/opinions and the views of the larger readership are two different questions. For instance, there are movies that I think are horribly overrated that the public (or at least movies nerds) love. In many recent Oscar ceremonies, the Best Picture winner was a movie I'd rate 8th, 9th, or 10th among the nominees. I stand by my personal opinions/preferences, but I don't delude myself into believing my opinion is the ascendant view. I have my Claremont pet peeves, but I would have preferred for him to continue as writer in 1991 rather than having him replaced.
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Post by commond on Mar 29, 2024 17:08:10 GMT -5
I don't really know how to define a decline in Claremont's quality, so to speak, because I began reading the X-Men after they'd died and were hiding out in Australia, but from what I can gleam, Claremont eventually reached the point where he was in an experimental phase. Yes and no. To his credit, Chris did try to change the book's status quo when it would have been easy to simply coast on a tried and true formula. He removed very popular characters from the book and replaced them with B-listers, dropped all the sub-plots that he had developed over more than a decade, turned his back on the familiarity of Xavier's school and, basically, tried something new. Props to him for refusing comfortable stagnation. However, that is not why the stories declined in interest (in my humble opinion). The actual reasons are many and go beyong an increasing allergy to Claremontisms; among them are, first, a lack of new big ideas. (The only one I can think of in those days is the creation of Genosha). The Phoenix, Days of Future Past, Magneto reforming, the Brood, Storm losing her powers, Rogue joining the team, those were all very engaging storylines; moping in the desert, punching cyborgs and wandering aimlessly with no memory, not so much. Dropping the supporting cast after the Mutant Massacre also cut into my interest, as one of the draws of the X-universe had been its increasing complexity and its organic growth. Suddenly, the new status quonwas a bare bones affair and we were treated to ad hoc changes that were left mostly unexplained. Why did the team abandon Xavier's dream to focus on being a band of Long Ranger-type do-gooders? Why not reveal their survival to their friends after their apparent death (a rather cruel move), since people like Pierce and the Marauders did know they were alive? Why not retire if things were so dire? It's not that all adventures in those days were bad, of course, but as a reader I really had a feeling of "when will this interlude be over so we can return to the real thing?" I also blame editorial for imposing atrocities like the creation of X-Factor; that completely messed up Chris's beautiful coda to the Phoenix saga and his well crafted evolution of the team. It also made his inspiring lesson about grief and acceptance completely moot. (Plus it caused me to drop comics entirely for a good long while!) Had Chris been allowed to do what he wanted unhindered from the get-go, I suspect that the team would have continued to progress over time, with more characters actually retiring and more coming in to replace them. Scott would have stayed in Alaska with Madelyne, Kitty would have grown up to become team leader, and even Wolverine might have married Mariko and moved to Japan. I certainly would have preferred that to seeing the team stuck in a perpetual present. #175 is a bit early for me; I enjoyed the JRJr era quite a lot. It's after #210 that things soured for me. And it's not so much that I would have wanted Chris to go, but that I would have liked an editor to tell him "this thing with Psylocke and Dazzler and Longshot isn't really working". Who could have replaced him? I really don't know. He really knew those characters like no one else did. Only Grant Morrison, many years later, tried something truly innovative with the X-Men. *edit* I see that sunofdarkchild made several of these points already. I apologize for the redundancy! I don't mind the Outback period. That was the status quo when I began reading the X-Men and I embraced it to the extent that it was weird to me whenever I'd read older stories. That said, it was a grim period in the book's history. The team is falling apart and the members spend much of their time squabbling with each other. The decision to pass through the Siege Perilous was a major moment for me as a young reader. In hindsight, it was a tad self-indulgent for Claremont to write the book without an actual team for as long as he did, but at the same time I can't imagine another writer doing so and still maintaining the sales that X-Men had. Some people may have been buying the book out of habit, but for most readers there was an inherent trust in Claremont as author that only a few other creators had at the time. My biggest problem with the post-Outback era, which is now referred to as the "Dissolution and Rebirth" arc in collected form, has to be the unresolved plotlines. There were so many plotlines left dangling when Claremont left. There's an issue smack in the middle of the arc where it's just a collection of newly introduced subplots, many of which were never resolved. Claremont didn't get to wrap up the Shadow King/Muir Island storyline the way he wanted to, and everything else went on the scrap heap so that X-Men #1 could be released. I don't see that as a decline in Claremont's writing, though, other than the fact that things got too messy with two many pots on the go at one time. Interestingly, I've never read anything he wrote after reading to the X-Men. I was out of the hoop when he returned and I guess I feel like you can never go home.
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Post by commond on Mar 29, 2024 17:10:50 GMT -5
The thing is X-Men continued to gain more readers than it lost. Even if there were a bunch of readers who grew tired of the series after Paul Smith left, etc., the book continued to grow in terms of sales numbers and readership. I started reading the book when Silvestri was the penciler. It never crossed my mind that anyone other than Claremont would ever write the book. Certainly when Jim Lee became the penciler fans seemed genuinely pleased, especially when Claremont finally put the team back together. I think it’s fine to critique the run and determine where the book peaked and where it began to decline, or whatever opinion a person may have, but I don’t think it’s accurate to say the readers in 1991 wanted Claremont gone. Add me to the list of people who were actually reading X-Men in 1991 who didn't want Claremont gone. Not only was the readership growing, but Marvel started publishing multiple issues during some months starting in 1988. Fans who dropped the series for good in 1980 or 1983 are good representatives of what folks who were reading it in the later 80s or early 90s were thinking. I read comics; I wasn't reading the behind-the-scenes articles. So I was genuinely shocked when I found out Claremont was out after adjectiveless X-Men #3. I can't remember how I discovered Claremont was gone. I was still buying the issues out of order at the time as my comic shop was ahead of the newsstands but I couldn't visit the comic shop on a regular basis. I might have bought issue #4 before #2 and #3. I do remember it being a complete shock.
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Post by sunofdarkchild on Mar 30, 2024 12:47:01 GMT -5
Growing up there were these 2 large boxes of Marvel comics my father had from the 80s that I was constantly going through, especially since these old comics were much better than the then-new comics I'd occasionally see in certain stores in the early 2000s. It's how I discovered stories like Iron Man's Armor Wars, the big Surtur story where Thor, Odin, and Loki team up, and of course Claremont's X-Men. Even as a little kid I thought the whole thing with Jean 'was never Phoenix' was stupid and I hated Cyclops for running out on his wife and baby. My dad stopped subscribing to Marvel in 1989, probably because our family had moved. As a result, he only had a couple of issues from the Inferno event, 1 from Uncanny, where Sinister reveals Maddelyn was a clone he created, one from X-Factor, and the final issue of the X-Terminators mini-series. So I knew that the character who had become my favorite from all of my dad's comics had been manipulated by the new big bad N'Astirh and had transformed into a red demon, but nothing more. I assumed that Magik got through this arc just fine and maybe the whole S'ym rebellion story was done with, because there was no way her story could possibly end before her promised rematch with Belasco. It would be like not having Voldemort appear at all in the final Harry Potter book and replacing him with some never-before-heard-of villain out of nowhere, or not having Darth Vader appear at all in Return of the Jedi.
When I reached the point where I needed my own computer to do schoolwork I discovered Uncannyxmen.net and was extremely disappointed in what actually happened and that she'd been deaged/replaced then and there and killed off less than 4 years later without so much as a 1-panel cameo from her arc-enemy. They really did the equivalent of replacing Voldemort or Darth Vader in the final story. It never occurred to me that Inferno could possibly the final Magik story, because Claremont had so clearly been building up to a final battle between her and Belasco. It was stated outright in both her origin story and the issue where she joined the New Mutants that Belasco was going to come back for on final showdown. To this day I cannot fathom how or why her story was just abandoned instead of paying off what Claremont had set up. I've since discovered that Louise Simonson forgot that Magik spared Belasco's life and thought she killed him - which is like forgetting that Luke threw away his lightsaber and thinking her chopped off Darth Vader's head - and that the new editor, Bob Harris, had a vendetta against everything magic-based in the X-line and wanted to get rid of Magik as quickly as possible and didn't care to check if Simonson was getting crucial details completely wrong or if her exit/death was well-handled or at all consistent with what Claremont had written.
Learning the history of the X-Men post-Claremont, of Marvel in general in the 90s and early 2000s, was just a huge disappointment. Spider-Man's Clone Saga and One More Day, The X-Men going back to crippled Xavier and field-leader Cyclops vs Magneto resetting all 3 characters and more to the 1970s, Iron Man's whole traitor arc. I couldn't believe how bad things had gotten so quickly after my father had stopped buying Marvel comics
Thankfully, by that point, Quest for Magik was already out and X-Infernus was right around the corner, and the whole story of Magik's return was the story Inferno should have been in the first place just by virtue of having Belasco present in any capacity whatsoever. It was great to see the mistakes of 20 years earlier be fixed in real-time, and without her return happening at that time when I needed something to overcome all that disappointment in everything Marvel and it being handled so well compared to 99% of comics resurrections, I certainly would not have bothered with Marvel comics at all in my teens or as an adult, and probably wouldn't have bothered with DC either.
So while I can nitpick Claremont's writing to death, my real problem is with the people who replaced him/kicked him out and came after. Basically, by the time I was born, Marvel had already gone to crap.
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Post by impulse on Apr 1, 2024 20:54:50 GMT -5
I have my nitpicks with Claremont's writing, but most of them got way worse upon his return(s) than on his original run. While I thoroughly enjoyed Morrison's and Whedon's runs (especially and specifically after what preceded them), I honestly probably think the X-books would have been better had Claremont stayed on. It would have been nice to see him continue some of the many subplots he had started, and he was at least willing to move forward and change things as opposed to the perpetual frozen in time era they had after.
And while a good bit of this is probably just the fact I was a kid at the time, there was something larger than life about Claremont's original X-MEN writing before he returned. The stories somehow felt more important, more epic, grander, like they were mythology rather than just funnybooks, and he had a great grasp on a lot of the characters and dynamics that was rarely if ever matched by anyone else. Largely because he is the one who defined the characters for almost 20 years, granted.
So, while I can (and have) critiqued his writing, especially the 21st century stuff, his original X-MEN run was really one of a kind, and good or bad, they've never been like that again.
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Post by tonebone on Apr 2, 2024 11:14:13 GMT -5
I think the thing that caused me to bail out of X-Men was when they became the defacto guest-stars to beef up the sales of each and every other Marvel title. So no matter how diligent you were at reading X-Men, unless you bought every other appearance you felt like you were missing out on huge chunks of their story. Keeping up with all the (*See Power Man and Iron Fist #75) notations and seeking out those appearances became real work.
I avoid real work whenever possible.
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Post by Marv-El on Apr 2, 2024 18:14:58 GMT -5
I've been reading X-Men since 1983.
With that being said, you know how you have comfort food? Well to me, Claremont is comfort reading. His style, narration, prose, characterization, action, themes, etc, love all of it. He's had a plethora of amazing artists over the decades to illustrate that prose. By focusing on the characters, their motives, their emotions, he's endeared them all to readers. Yes, X-Men is a soap opera and I love(d) every page of it.
However upon his later return though, I think a major problem was that his style of writing had gotten passe with then-current readers. Captions, thought balloons and such, readers weren't accustomed to that very much at that time. Combined with his typical emotional in vocative writing style and perhaps readers thought he was mired down in plot(s). The (reading) times had changed and seemingly Claremont may have been passed by as a result.
If so, it still doesn't diminish my overall enjoyment of the man's work and the legacy he built within the X-mythos.
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