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.
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 love 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. (This is especially evident if you supplement the X-MEN stuff with a few of their contemporaneous MARVEL TEAM-UP issues.) 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, every single time, 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 JULIET JONES was, and seemingly ever shall remain, unfinished, I picked up all three volumes a while back and read the first one in 2024.
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)!
The Grant Morrison run was the only one of the aforementioned I can see the point being made.
ReplyDeleteMorrison’s run can be read as a post-modern conversation taking place between Morrison and the Chris Claremont years.
Morrison redoes the Phoenix Saga.
Morrison addresses Magneto’s portrayal under Claremont, responding that Claremont was wrong about Magneto. No matter what excuses he made for his actions, he is an irredeemable monster. I felt this was the weakest part of Morrison’s run (which I did enjoy greatly), but I’m sure some X-Men purists did enjoy that Morrison was saying that the Stan Lee Magneto was the “real” Magneto, instead of Claremont’s sympathetic Magneto.
Morrison’s final story (“Here Comes Tomorrow”) was an inversion of “Days of Future Past”, looking at a future where it is mutants on top, and pointing out that this future is as bad as the one where humans win.
Morrison was never going to write a simple homage to Claremont/Byrne. It was always going to feature Morrison’s own style. I’m not sure if I’d call it a “love letter”, but Morrison was definitely influenced by Claremont/Byrne, especially in the second half of the run.
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Austen? Yeah, he used Nightcrawler…to tell a story about Kurt’s father being the mutant devil and then something about crucifying mutants…
I knew nothing about Chuck Austen when he took over on Uncanny. I was glad that Joe Casey’s misfire had come to an end and was willing to give Austen a chance. I thought the first story-arc, about Juggernaut reforming, was a decent X-Men story and thought, “OK, this will be an improvement over Casey.” Then came Austen’s next story, and I got a sinking feeling. It wasn’t long before I regretted wishing Casey would leave the book.
I think I can see what you're saying about Morrison. I have to admit I only read the run once, as it was being published, and it was very much not my cup of tea, so I have never revisited it. I also came into it with no real idea of what Morrison was "about". I had read a few early issues of his JLA, which mostly felt like a pretty traditional superhero comic. So when Morrison came into X-MEN and flipped it on its head, changing it completely from the X-MEN I'd just spent the prior ten or so years reading, I was more than a little disappointed. It's likely that has colored my thoughts on it ever since.
DeleteI do see what you're saying regarding "Here Comes Tomorrow" as sort of a reverse mirror image of "Days of Future Past", but I don't see much else in Morrison's run that feels particularly influenced by Claremont & Byrne. I do, however see what you mean regarding Morrison's "dialogue" with Claremont; I feel like a lot the run is spent flipping Claremont's (and earlier and later writers') tropes on their heads. Which is not something I particularly like; I know it's boring, but my philosophy has always been that once you've found the status quo that works, you should stick with it forever. I rarely react well to big changes like the once Morrison brought t- X-MEN, or, similarly, Jonathan Hickman brought two decades later.
We seem to have had nearly the exact same reaction to Chuck Austen, by the way! I knew nothing of him either before he came aboard, and after what seemed a decent start, he very quickly lost me and made me wish Joe Casey hadn't left.
Casey is an interesting guy; I really liked some of the stuff he did for Marvel in the 90s, and I absolutely love the two "retro" AVENGERS: EARTH'S MIGHTIEST HEROES mini-series he did int he 00s -- I wrote about them here a few years ago -- but he lost me completely with his X-MEN work and most everything else he did around that time outside of the EMH stories. I see he's now writing JONNY QUEST for Dynamite. I picked up issue 0 for free and was pleasantly surprised to find it was set in the 1960s. Based on that, I was read to start reading it regularly -- until I got to the end of the issue and found that the 60s was just for the prologue, and the main series is about the Quest family getting transported to the modern day and adapting to our world, at which point I said "Blecch" and tossed it aside.
Thank you for reading and for the thoughtful comment!