Getting through the Silver Age Era of the X-Men is the most difficult time I've had reading X-Men comics. It's not any worse than the convoluted late 90s where storylines just disappeared as their hacky writers got too overwhelmed to figure out endings. But as I grew up in the 90s and was familiar with that style, I found it easier to eyeroll over those speedbumpy pages than the "Holy, Hannah, it's time for another dull alien or mutant to monologue through a few pages before we never have to think of them again!" era of the X-Men. I made it through this time, though. And while I didn't exactly enjoy it, I finally feel comfortable saying that it doesn't suck, it just isn't for me or very many modern readers. Ed Piskor's Grand Design, which is also not exactly the pinnacle of great writing, is a much more compact way to read the silver-age material, and you really don't miss much. Apart from Neal Adams's evolution in panel design and X-Men costumes from the last dozen or so 1960s comics, there's not a lot of historically relevant art or writing after the first couple of hacky storyarcs in the original series. You'll find that nothing from this post ends up in my headcanon. It doesn't mean this is all bad or that you shouldn't pick it up without gloves, tongs, and a ton of bleach. If you can stomach Silver Age writing, this post is filled with books that provide is a mostly mediocre X-perience. There's certainly no dearth of story here. It's just a repetitive story without a ton of development or interesting villains. Avengers Epic Masters Of Evil by Roy Thomas, Gary Friedrich, John Buscema, Don Heck, Werner Roth, George Tuska, and Gene Colan While it's not intriguing enough to make my X-Men headcanon, this is a fun, cheesecake factory level comic romp. While most of the volume is just random Avengers adventures with major character inconsistencies and over-the-top writing, the latter third starts to involve X-Men characters. It starts with Magneto returning from the space prison he was kidnapped to in the pages of the X-Men. And eventually we get to see an actual crossover where the X-Men and the Avengers battle before realizing they should be working together. Is it the best crossover you've ever read? Certainly not. Is it a thousand times better than the 2010s Avengers vs X-Men fiasco. Hell. Yes. If you enjoy silver age comics and are an X-Men fan, this Avengers collection is worth picking up. If you're an Avengers fan, you can pretty much skip this one. The non X-Men storylines are a mess. X-Men Epic: Lonely Are The Hunted by Roy Thomas, Gary Friedrich, Warner Roth, Don Heck, George Tuska, Ross Andru, Jack Sparling, Dan Adkins, and Jon Buscema Roy Thomas officially takes over writing duty in this collection. I wish that meant a welcome change from Stan Lee's tortured prose but Thomas was a student of Lee, and continued the stilted dialogue and familiar storytelling techniques that Lee used in his tenure. He does give each X-Man a little bit more of their own voice than Lee, as not every character speaks like Beast from the 90s Animated Series anymore but it's still a slog to get through. The biggest disappointment is that while Thomas has the equivalent craft of Lee, his choice of villains is less inspired. There are several villains in the first half of this collection from "Suspense" and "Strange Tales" but none that you'll remember if you aren't a staunch silver age Marvel comics fan. Apart from Banshee, you really don't see any of these villains popping up again in post-Roy Thomas X-continuity. They just aren't memorable. About halfway through, we move from forgettable villain-of-the-week to let's-get-super-into-continuity-and-examine-the-X-Men's-history-and-sprinkle-in-some-special-guests. After a Juggernaut story, we focus on Factor Three, who were mentioned at the end of the previous volume. I both respect and am confused by the fact that there are more than three of them, and that none of them turn out to be Magneto. But the highlight of the Factor Three story is a one-issue appearance of Spider-Man who is mistakenly believed to be the villain. It totally fits in with his sad sack luck and with the X-Men's punch-first-figure-out-you-messed-up-later approach to pretty much everything. The rest of the volume features more C+ X-Men tales but includes origin stories at the end of each issue. They're stories that were already explored in earlier issues but are told in more detail. They're fine but unnecessary if you're reading these in modern collections. They were mainly for people jumping into the story twenty or thirty issues in who also wouldn't have had any sort of access to the first few issues. Dark days. The collection builds up to a major death. I'm not sure if it's impactful because the intervening fifty-someodd years of history have taught me that the character isn't going to be dead for long. The major con to this story is still Roy Thomas's Stan Leeism-filled writing. Holy Hannah, it's repetitive and annoying. There are also an unfair amount of puns that would be outlawed in a better society. I don't think this would be a highlight, even if you're a silver age fan. X-Men Epic: The Sentinels Live! by Roy Thomas, Arnold Drake, Linda Fite, Dennis O'Neill, Neal Adams, Jim Steranko, Barry Windsor-Smith, Don Heck, Werner Roth, and Sal Buscema Given the quality of the first 48 issues or so of the X-Men, I expected it must have gone downhill a bit when it got cancelled. I actually found the last dozen issues or so to be the most intriguing the series has been so far. While Havoc and Polaris are hardly the most interesting characters ever created, they do add an element of flavor that the book had previously been lacking. The villains continue to be forgettable, and Roy Thomas "Oh Hannah"s hard upon his return, but Neal Adams's panel layouts make the book more visually striking than it has ever been. While I am grateful to be finished with this era of the X-Men comics, I'm glad I finally stuck it out and read the original material so I don't feel like I missed anything. I didn't miss anything. As with my reviews of the previous volumes, I think your enjoyment of this collection will depend on whether you're into the mid-twentieth century comic hackery style of lots of alliteration, puns, and characters leaning heavily into melodrama rather than logic or character development. I think, if you're a fan of comic art and panel layouts, this is several steps above the previous collections. X-Men Grand Design by Ed Piskor I've occasionally tried to read as much of the full run of X-Men and related comics (X-Factor, X-Force, Generation X, New Mutants, etc.) as possible but until this year, I never managed to read all of the Silver Age material. This book is like the best possible illustrated Wikipedia page for Silver Age X-Men. It's chronologically straight-forward, contains the bare bones of most of the stories, but it looks awesome. It contains all of the stories from the first three Epic Collections ("Children Of The Atom", "Lonely Are The Hunted", "The Sentinels Live" in deliciously bite-sized portions. I would recommend this for people who love the X-Men but don't have the time or patience for the Silver Age era, fans of the Silver Age era X-Men looking for a quick nostalgic overview of the first 65 issues, people who've never read the X-Men but are looking for a quick primer, fans of Piskor's Hip Hop Family Tree, Vol. 1: 1970s-1981, and mutant plot enthusiasts. X-Men The Hidden Years Vols 1 & 2 by John Byrne The first time I read this, I was in the midst of reading modern X-Men comics, and the writing and forgettable aliens and villains felt really clunky. I struggled to finish the book. Reading it now, having just finished the silver aged Stan Lee/Roy Thomas era this legitimately feels like it belongs in the pre-Claremont X-verse. It's not great. Tossing in a preview of the Dark Phoenix storyline seems less like fun backforeshadowing and more like an undercutting of a much better story. But the rest of the action is pretty on par with the Roy Thomas/Neal Adams run but with slightly (and I mean slightly) more modern writing. Byrne doesn't quite have the same flare for alliteration, purple prose, and Stan Lee-style editorial remarks that tunelessly hummed through the original run but that's ok. I don't think we need any more of that without tongue granited into cheek. I will confess that I read this earlier this morning and I already couldn't tell you much about it other than: Savage Land, Iceman vs Havoc, the "ghost" of Magneto, the Fantastic Four are involved, and Storm appears ahead of Claremont's run, but that feels like enough. Again, it's not super fun, the writing is an improvement over the silver age dreck but it isn't good, and the art is best defined as John-Byrne-apes-Neal-Adams-to-a-reasonably-successful-degree but it's not worse than the comics it successfully emulates. If you were curious as to what happens between the final all-new material issue of the classic X-Men run, and when the characters started popping up in Hulk, Spider-Man, and Amazing Adventures, this is a perfectly adequate bridge between them.
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In 2017/2018, I read through most of the X-Men related trade paperbacks and hardcover collections that I owned. This is somewhere around 4-500 books. I rated many, but not enough, of them on a website to keep track of what I loved and what I never wanted to read again. Well, I'm going to read them all one more time. This time, cataloging my reading experience here. Consider this a companion to The X-Men In Five Seasons Worth Reading. A much longer, in-depth look at what books do and don't make it into my X-Men Headcanon. My Headcanon isn't focused on the Big Event Must Read Collections that many people my age and older cobweb poetic about, it's just books that I enjoyed, and I explain why I enjoyed them. This first entry is made up of a few books that are set before the original X-Men run in 1963 but which were written much later, mainly in the 21st century. I just don't think modern readers should have to start out by reading Silver Age books. It's just not a fun way to get into comics unless you're an early reader who hasn't experienced serialized storytelling before. I'm not starting with Wolverine Origins or including much of Wolverine's pre-Hulk #181 appearances in the early chronology because the entire first forty years of his character depended on him not knowing his history, so we will get to see his pre-X-Men adventures but not for a long while. All numbered titles in BOLD are those I'd consider part of the Headcanon of X-Books I recommend. Anything not boldfaced or numbered is a book I read but will probably skip, should I ever do another readthrough. Understand MOST books will not be numbered or boldfaced. There are going to be at least 500 books on this readthrough. At most, 50-100 will make Headcanon. At most. I hope. 1. Magneto Testament by Greg Pak & Carmine Di Giandomenico If you've seen an X-Men movie, you've almost definitely seen a scene of a youngish Magneto in an office of a concentration camp using his powers of magnetism to kill someone. You've seen iron gates ripped from the ground, projectiles launched at Nazis. That's not what this book is. Interspersed with historical data about The Holocaust, we get the story of a young teenage Max (he has not yet taken the name Erich...his father's name) who's targeted at school because of his Jewishness, as the nation of Germany descends into anti-semitism and genocide. We get brief glimpses of important moments in his young life. He falls in love based on almost nothing. He rebels when it seems convenient. He protects his family when he can. But his powers are a hint, not a weapon. When his family is murdered, he survives presumably because of his power of magnetism but we don't know. They could have just missed him or not delivered a fatal wound. He ends up in a concentration camp where he eventually is in charge of leading other Jew to their deaths. It is, of course, a grim book. There is no moment of catharsis where he rips open an iron gate. He does not kill any officers by hurling cutlery at them. He survives. He does what he has to do to survive and to try and save a girl he loves, even though he doesn't seem to know very much about her. I think this is a great starting point for a read-through of the Marvel Mutant Universe. It clearly sets the tone that, despite what your drooling, all-caps, anti-woke, right wing nutjob uncle thinks, this is a story about overcoming the harms of prejudice, bigotry, and racism/anti-semitism. Marvel's mutant sector, in particular has ALWAYS been about civil rights. Anyone who tells you otherwise lacks reading comprehension skills, and you should never give credence to anything they tell you about literature or writing because they're clearly too stupid to understand the basic premise of a comic series that's mostly directed at children and teenagers. Carmine Di Giandomenico's art is superb, and I think the muted grey color palette helps the book feel like something from our past without that visual metaphor overwhelming the story. The story is affecting but not devastating to read. If you're familiar with the basic horrors of The Holocaust, you're likely to learn some new details, and maybe get a better feel for the timeline but it doesn't delve so deep into the story that you're likely to be weeping. The First X-Men by Christos Gage & Neal Adams If someone presented me with an outline for this story from concept to final page, I'd cautiously suggest that with precisely the right creative team, this could be interesting but on the surface the story feels very forced and not very original or fun. The dialogue on the first few pages scraped against my eyes. I was trying to figure out if Gage was trying to suggest this took place at a particular time or whether he was trying to make a modern sounding patter between characters. Whatever he was trying to do, it didn't work. The syntax was off, and while it wasn't difficult to follow, it was jarring. But by the time the second issue rolled around, characters started talking somewhat stiltedly but believably. Another big stumbling point for me is the art. You might love Neal Adams , and if that's the case, you might love the look of this book. For me, Adams's art has always felt inconsistent. It's not terrible. It's not ugly. It's just that Wolverine's face and haircut looks different from page to page, as do other characters. Every character was always recognizable and distinguishable from others but it's like watching a movie and an actor got a nose job and switched wigs several times during shooting, and since it wasn't filmed chronologically the nose seems to change from scene to scene. The end result of this story is never truly in question, as it is supposed to take place "long before" Professor X builds the Westchester School (though, actually, we see him build it at the end of the story). We don't really learn anything new about any of the characters except it gives us a possible reason why Sabretooth has always been such a dick to Wolverine. It's sort of like a shoddier version of Star Wars' Rogue One, you know the new characters you're introduced to aren't going to survive to the parts of the story you've already seen so it seems like the creators don't even bother trying to give you any reason to care about them before they're inevitably killed off. Angel: Revelations by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa & Adam Pollina A gothic horror take on the origins of Warren Worthington III (aka Angel/Archangel of the X-Men) was a solid read. A rich kid coming of age at a boarding school mixed with the story of a religious psychopath who kidnaps a psychic little girl and uses her to track down and kill mutants. There are a ton of tropes in this collection including a priest who's a sexual predator, teens throwing homophobia at everything they don't understand, rich bullies with powerful parents, the protagonist having toxic parents who make know effort to know their own children, and secrets breaking apart a young romance. Aguirre-Sacasa handles them all well. This is almost a B+ coming of age movie that happens to work as the origin story of an X-Man. Adam Pollina's art isn't my favorite for a long form story. He has a very particular style for how he draws anatomy that I think works beautifully for covers and full page spreads but which end up being distracting over the course of a full comic. Every feature is absurdly long and thin. Necks are almost giraffish, ears are twice the size of heads, and Warren, in particular, is 75% torso in this comic, and he's often walking around shirtless. I do love his backgrounds and shadow work, though. I think if this were a spot illustrated novel with mostly text, I'd love his work. I don't think this is quite good enough for me to put in my headcanon for the best X-Men stories but it's a solid read with very stylized art that might appeal to someone looking for a slightly offbeat X-story. X-Men Children Of The Atom by Joe Casey & Steve Rude This is tough to review because it's specifically designed to set up the first issues of X-Men written by Stan Lee in 1963. It does an admirable job of making the characters as melodramatic and overwritten as they are in the original series. I just don't like that style, and didn't like the characters as they were presented in that era. Like many Stan Lee-era comic characters, there is very little long term character growth or decision making. Every character is concerned precisely with what is happening in that panel. They'll be screaming in one panel and then calmly praising the same character in the next, usually mentioning that they were "testing" the character they were screaming at. You know, typical abusive parenting/mentoring techniques of mid-twentieth century America. Anyone who glamorizes that era of our history is a toxic fucken idiot. The problem with this style of characterization, aside from panel to panel whiplash, is that it can render entire storylines within the larger text moot. For example, in this collection, Professor X goes undercover as a guidance counselor in a high school where three of the five future X-Men are students. He interacts with each of them briefly, and in each case they rebuke him and ask to be left alone. He later approaches all of them individually after they are no longer at the school with entirely different and more logical approaches. So you could just eliminate his entire time as a guidance counselor, and the story would be exactly the same. Professor X is extremely frustrating in this book. As is Magneto, who is used very sparingly. But to give credit to Casey, their frustrating characterizations are completely in line with Stan Lee's over-the-top, inane characters during his tenure on X-Men. If you love the silver-age X-Men comics, this is a really interesting setup for it. And it doesn't even contradict either of the two books I consider canon-y (but not Headcanon) that take place before this: X-Men: Magneto Testament and Angel: Revelations. It even sort of lines up with X-Men: First X-Men, which I'm pretty sure No One imagines as part of any canon. 2. The X-Men Epic Collection Vol 1: Children Of The Atom Stan Lee is one of the most important people in comics history. He was incredibly creative, prolific, and he co-created almost all of your favorite Marvel characters. But Stan Lee is not, and never has been a writer. He was a carnival barker with a typewriter and some very talented artistic coworkers. (I struggle to call them friends, having read many of his coworkers' opinions on the man.) I find his thesaurized prose agonizing to read. He was just so proud of writing that I find cringey. The characters he created are only beloved by people under eighty because other writers fleshed them out and gave them personalities. Every Stan Lee character is an angry buffoon who acts rashly. If they're a hero they have to constantly apologize for their idiocy. If they're a villain, they must twirl their imaginary mustaches and revel in how evil they are. That's it. That's all Stan Lee ever knew how to write. Every issue of his comics is exactly the same. If there is ever any actual progress in a story (a character moving on or having an epiphany) it will be undone during the issue, or in the following issue. Thanks to editorial asides and Stan's own tortured prose, continuity is always acknowledged but rarely do characters seem to have learned from said continuity. For some people, this is The Best Era of X-Men. I don't begrudge them. I like some terribly written and constructed pop music. I like it unapologetically because it makes me happy, and likely nostalgic for when it came out. You, too should feel that way about comics. But I was born and started reading comics during the Claremont era (which I'm not nostalgic for), and didn't start trying to read the silver age adventures until I was well exposed to more complex and interesting stories. They're important in the history of comics. They were an evolution in writing serialized stories, and shouldn't be forgotten. But even though Homo Erectus was a necessary and important stage of human evolution, I don't dream of hanging out in a cave somewhere listening to one tell me stories about a future that is now well within my past. The second half of the collection matures into more long-form storytelling with an evolving and revolving cast of villains. Mainly, a nebulous space character with a variety of powers gets entangled with Magneto, removes him from Earth, allowing the X-Men to deal with Juggernaut and then The Sentinels before Magneto returns with a much smaller scale scheme than usual. It's the usual hokey Stan Lee yarns, though this volume sees Alex Toth and Warner Roth (as Jay Gavin) step in to pencil a few issues, and we also see the first couple of issues written by Roy Thomas, under Stan Lee's editorship. I don't care about any of the villains in this book. The original concept of The Sentinels: Robots designed by man to protect them from mutants end up rebelling is such an early to mid-twentieth century trope that it requires defter hands than Stan Lee's to make it interesting to anyone over the age of nine. (Which, I understand, is around the target age of comics at the time.) Magneto continues to be a mustache twirling buffoon instead of the complex and conflicted villain/anti-hero he became later. Juggernaut is a great introduction here but The Stranger and the return of the incredibly dull pseudo-Magneto, Lucifer, had me barely resisting the urge to start flipping pages and skimming the stories rather than digesting them. If you love silver-age stuff, this is still probably going to be a blast for you, but if you're not someone who adores 1960s comics, this isn't going to be the collection that changes your mind. As much as this volume isn't for me, I am going to include at least this first one in my X-Men Headcanon, since the more interesting prequel stories do lead directly to the first issue in this collection. But I do it begrudgingly, and also to include the header image for this post, which is from page 8 of X-Men #1 (1963) which accidentally foreshadows something that was made canon in 2016. |
April 2024
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