MARCH 2025: I TAKE THINGS TOO LITERALLY

And we're back! So far, so good with this new format. And this month I even have something of interest (at least to me) to talk about!

Not too long ago on the Marvel Masterworks Message Board, in a discussion about X-Men Omnibuses, the dreaded Chuck Austen was name-dropped. I was there when Austin's run on UNCANNY X-MEN was published. I read it. I actually thought it started off okay, but it quickly went off the rails and ended as one of the most rightly reviled stretches in the title's history. However -- even when it was briefly good, it wasn't what I was expecting.

See, in advance of his run, Austen did an interview with WIZARD magazine where he said that to prepare, he had gone back and re-read the 1970s Chris Claremont/Dave Cockrum issues. I'm assuming he was a kid when that material was published, because he seemed to consider it the X-Men's gold standard, even more than the subsequent Claremont/John Byrne run. So naturally when he said this, I figured, "Great! He'll probably bring back Banshee and redeem him from Joe Casey's character assassination. Maybe they'll even visit his castle! Maybe they'll fight Count Nefaria or something. I bet we'll get some good swashbuckling Nightcrawler action. Ooh, maybe he'll even bring back Eric the Red!!

None of that happened. In fact, Austen's run bore zero resemblance to the Claremont/Cockrum run I loved. Aside from Nightcrawler and Wolverine, it was a completely different cast. The stories did not in any way, shape, or form, call back to that classic run. It didn't "feel" like the run in terms of style, either.

But that wasn't the first time this happened to me. When Grant Morrison was on NEW X-MEN, he described his run as a "love letter" to Claremont & Byrne. Now, to me, that term would mean you're going to have the X-Men fight the Hellfire Club, Mesmero, and Magneto. Maybe go on an updated version of the "World Tour" from UNCANNY 111 - 121, including a vist to the Savage Land. Throw in some guest appearances by Misty Knight and Colleen Wing. Bring back Moses frikkin' Magnum!! Tell superhero stories about a band of outlaw heroes, feared and hated by the world they're sworn to protect. Oh, and have Banshee as a cast member!

It does not mean you're going to do... whatever it was Morrison did. Again, I can't draw a line from Claremont/Byrne to Morrison/Quitely/Etc. The only connection is some Shi'ar stuff, a cool splash page with Magneto, a few of the same main cast members, and some Phoenix nonsense at the end. Otherwise, Morrison's work again "feels" absolutely nothing like the work he claimed to be homaging.

Not too long after the Morrison run, Brian Michael Bendis took over writing AVENGERS. I recall he said at the time that he had read every single issue of the title in preparation for the assignment. "Great," I thought. That would likely mean lots of exciting world-shattering adventure, lots of soap opera involving Vision, Scarlet Witch, Wonder Man, and whoever else. Hawkeye would surely be a regular main character. And with any luck, he'd bring back Bansh -- oops. Wrong series. But anyway.

Again, I was sorely disappointed. Bendis may have read every AVENGERS issue (and I believe that he did; he wrote an "Oral History of the Avengers" text piece that ran in the final issues of the series before it was relauched as NEW AVENGERS, and it was quite in-depth), but he didn't seem interested in following in the footsteps of anyone who had written the title before him.

Now, I'll admit, as I've mentioned here before, that I'm not as versed in AVENGERS as I am in the X-MEN. At the time Bendis took over the series, I had read the full Kurt Busiek run, some of the very early Lee/Kirby issues, and assorted single issues here and there written by Roy Thomas, Steve Englehart, Roger Stern, and Bob Harras. But one thing all those other guys had in common was a very strong penchant for melodrama and soap opera, which was nowhere to be seen in Bendis's run. Even taking into account changing writing styles across the industry in general and Bendis's style in particular, which I can't stand, his work looked and, again, "felt" nothing like the work of his predecessors.

Now, believe it or not, these aren't the only times this sort of thing has happened to me! But they are definitely the biggies in my recollection. And I've come to the conclusion, to circle back around to our headline up top, that I tend to take these sorts of statements way, way too literally. When Creator X says their run is influenced by, or an homage to, or a lover letter to, or whatever else regarding some other other run, I'm assuming that means they will be "revisiting" that run. Using similar characters and situations. Not rehashing exactly, but sort of putting their own spin on the classics. I look at the afore-mentioned Claremont/Byrne run as an example of this; if you pay attention, they're basically just hitting all the same notes that Roy Thomas and Neal Adams had done a few years earlier, but in their own style. The same villains, the same locations, but in a different way. Kurt Busiek, too, sort of did the same thing on AVENGERS; he told his own stories, but they felt like they were filtered through a prism of the combined works of Roy Thomas and Steve Englehart.

So I am always, always, without fail, disappointed when writers say things like the above and then don't deliver on what their promise implies. But I don't blame those writers; they want to do their own thing, and they're certainly entitled to do what they want, within the confines of their publisher's limits! Rather, I think it's my own fault for ascribing meaning to these statements that wasn't intended.

All that said, though, it is more than a little annoying that I have never learned -- and seemingly likely never will learn -- not to take such words so literally!!

MORE EXCITING BANNER TALK
Just a quick update on the upcoming new banner: I'm still working on it. Like I said last time, this is a pretty big undertaking, and I draw very, very slowly in my "realistic" style. Plus I'm only working on this project on weekends when I can grab some time, so it's really just an hour or two a week. But I'll get there eventually.

Anyway, last month I had penciled the "unaffiliated" heroes, the Fantastic Four, and the FF-adjacent characters, and was working on the Avengers. As of now, I've finished penciling the Avengers and the Thunderbolts, and I've started on the X-Men. Here's some more of the pencil art, and next month hopefully I'll be done with the X-Men and can maybe show you some inks.

You may recall I mentioned before that I'm trying to do sort of "my iconic versions" of these characters, so you'll see things up there like a bearded Thor and a very late nineties George Pérez-looking Scarlet Witch hanging out with the likes of Beast and Carol Danvers as Captain Marvel among the Avengers. (Also that is very specifically the late eighties/early nineties "Neo-Classic" Iron Man from the second David Michelinie/Bob Layton run; it's probably my favorite iteration of the Golden Avenger's armor.) And I never had the Thunderbolts on any of my prior blog banners, but I love the original Kurt Busiek/Mark Bagley (and later Fabian Nicieza) incarantion of that group, so I'm going to somehow find a place for them when I redo the banner!

WHAT ARE WE READING RIGHT NOW?
Last month I talked a bit about a newspaper strip collection that I acutally finished a while back. I'll do the same now. This time it's the first volume of the venerable soap opera, THE HEART OF JULIET JONES, created by Stan Drake. The strip ran for decades (1953 - 2000), and Drake's run on it lasted until 1989, but to date only four books have been published by Classic Comics Press; three collecting dailies and one for Sundays, taking us up to 1960 in the strip's timeline. And given the most recent volume was released in 2010, I'm guessing sales weren't very good and we can safely assume no further installments are coming.

Nonetheless, I wanted to read this one, if only for Drake's sublime artwork. Years back, I read the Kelly Green series, five graphic novels produced in the eighties, written by Leonard Starr and illustrated by Drake, and I fell in love with the latter's realistic cartooning. (Starr, mind you, was a very successful syndicated cartoonist as well, though he served only as writer on the Kelly Green stories.) So even though series was, and seemingly ever shall remain, unfinished, I picked up all three volumes a while back and read the first one in 2024.

As I said, it's a soap opera. No action and adventure here; it's about a young woman who lives in borderline poverty with her father and college age sister, and all the trials and trevails of their lives. The artwork was the main draw for me, but I found myself getting into the stories as well. It's a very 1950s soap opera to be sure; lots of plots about the young women wanting to get married and so forth, but it's also a very nice slice of vintage small-town Americana in its way.

That said, one volume was enough to last me a while and after finishing it, I moved on to something else, which I'll discuss next time. See you in a month(ish)!