jerseykrs said:

I can agree with that.

sextonseven said:

OH HELL YEAH!!! He is also the man for explaining how all the Marvel/DC crossovers occurred in the JLA/Avengers series!

JediMaster said:

Oh, yeah?!

You're welcome to your opinion. Currently, Uncanny X-Men is the only Marvel series I truly like.

I might like Excalibur better if it had a better artist...

scififilmnerd said:

I have always hated the majority of the X spinoffs. I LOVED the first New Mutants series. It was well written, at least the early stuff. When Cable and Liefeld arrived, , I jumped off.
[Edited 6/10/05 12:50pm]

scififilmnerd said:

WOW! Hard to fathom, since to me it's almost like someone trying desperately to ape Claremont's style.

Excalibur is pure crap, through and through.

JediMaster said:

Yeah. Kurt is good.

jerseykrs said:

TOTALLY agree. Fucking Liefeld! When will someone just kill him? He is the biggest hack in comics, EVER!

JediMaster said:

He still hasn't written anything I felt like reading.

scififilmnerd said:

Mmmm Hmmmm, and he made a Marvel/DC crossover that not only counted, it also made every other one peripheral continuity (sure, they were all little pocket, alternate realities that didn't last, but at least they were given some sort of weight). The fact that the "egg" that was formed in this crossover re-appeared in the pages of JLA is pretty friggin' cool too!

scififilmnerd said:

Dude, Sandman alone is some of the best comics I've ever read, and his novels are all kindsa kick ass! American Gods was one of the best reads I've had in ages.

sextonseven said:

Probably not.

But my money is on it having been intended to be Gambit as he was originally conceived as a clone of Cyclops acting as Mr. Sinister's undercover agent in the X-Men - with every intention to betray them. Claremont has revealed that much in interviews following his initial departure from the X-Men.

JediMaster said:

I wasted a good 45 minutes reading the latest X-Force limited series--one of the worst comics ever! (And I'll waste another half hour reading his Shatterstar book--I'm such a masochist.) And now DC has let him draw two issues of my favorite DC book, Teen Titans! Can't publishers see how bad his work is?

JediMaster said:

All of which I couuld have done without.

And no, I am not reading Young Avengers (Teen Titans rip-off ) or New Avengers . A team of Avengers consisting of Spider-Man, Wolverine, Luke Cage and Spider-Woman #47?

It's an exciting time for comics,
outside of the tired super-hero
genre...

The last American comic I really enjoyed
is Charles Burnes' 12-issues 'Black Hole'.

Check it out, fanboys

Did you guys ever read that write up in Wizard that showed how he copied all sorts of other artists. I mean, they had back to back panels and his were EXACT to the original artist. He completely lost credit with me when I saw that.

JediMaster said:

That's nice. But Sandman as a concept and a character really doesn't appeal to my sphere of interests. That said, not havin' read Sandman, I'm sure they are good for someone who enjoys such a series. Otherwise Gaiman wouldn't have gotten the acclaim that he has.

scififilmnerd said:

Man, that is too good. That would explain the red eyes. Although since Gambit's initial appearance so much has been said about his backstory that the clone plot doesn't really work anymore, but his debt to Sinister is still very much a part of current continuity as was recently seen in Peter Milligans last story arc and in 'X-Men: The End'.

Claremont has a habit of making everyone related to everyone else: Cyclops and Corsair, Bishop and Gateway, Lorna Dane and Zaladane, and the best one of them all--Spider Woman and Viper!

scififilmnerd said:

Actually, New Avengers is surprisingly good! I didn't expect to like it, but its been pretty darned entertaining.

sextonseven said:

STOP BUYING HIS STUFF!!! Its the only way he'll stop getting work!

Heck, I'm dropping Teen Titans for the two issues he's doing! I'll pick it back up when he is gone!
[Edited 6/10/05 13:16pm]

sextonseven said:

Yeah, he's gotten carried away with it, and it's rubbed off onto other X writers as well now. Polaris is now Magneto's daughter!

JediMaster said:

JediMaster said:

That was so wrong. I hope someone undoes that travesty soon. I will not remember Chuck Austen's run on 'Uncanny' as one of the better ones.

Sinister said:

If you're talking about when she originally transformed into Phoenix, it was by editorial decree. Claremont and Cockrum loved having a female hero who was cosmic - the X-Men's equivalent of Thor. But then editorial stepped in and said that they couldn't have a hero that was cosmic in the X-Men. So they had to power her down to STorm's level and then come up with an explanationm as to why she could no longer access Phoenix-level powers. And the explanation was that she wasn't mature enough to handle the Phoenix power, so her subconscious denied her access, sort of like a safety block closing down, to protect her sanity.

When John Byrne replaced Cockrum, Byrne didn't share Claremont and Cockrum's interest in Phoenix. In fact, he didn't like her at all. He felt she made the rest of the team redundant. So, although she became an X-Man in #110, she was immediately moved to the sidelines and the plot was hatched to make her develop into a villain.

But when push came to shove, Claremont and Byrne couldn't find it within themselves to make her be truly evil, which is why X-Men #137 initially ended with her having the Phoenix exorcised from her. They said she went mad - then she got better.

That's when Jim Shooter stepped in, because this didn't fit with what he had approved - a storyline about a hero that got corrupted by power. And for destroying a star system, he demanded she be punished - for instance that she be jailed by the Shi'ar on an asteroid to suffer torture for eternity. (Which happened to Loki in Norse Mythology and later to Doomsday in Superman.)

But Claremont and Byrne couldn't make themselves do that to Jean Grey, so they figured thee'd rather just kill her off. Which they did. And they liked the solution, because now it had become a story about the triumph of the human spirit.

But that was then...

sextonseven said:

Did you have to bring that up? I had happily repressed it.

And the whole Nightcrawler's dad storyline. The horror of it!

See. That's what happens when other people start messing with Claremont's visions for the characters. Anyone remember when Lorna Dane lost her Polaris powers to her sister, Zaladane? Then, mysteriously, Lorna Dane acquired new powers and it said in Marvel Age that she would get a new code name to go with her new powers.

But before anything came of it, Claremont had left the book, and the new writers immediately reverted her to Polaris.

They explained her new powers away with them having been caused by the Shadow King influencing her, even though that happened later...

sextonseven said:

Yeah! But the latter got negated almost immediately by J.M. DeMatteis in the pages of Captain America. He said that Viper had been brainwashed into believing that Jessica Drew was her daughter, but she wasn't. He never did explain who on earth could possibly gain from brainwashing Viper in such a manner.
[Edited 6/10/05 13:39pm]

JediMaster said:

I like both New Avengers and Young Avengers. I didn't think I would like Young Avengers, but it's very well-written and the art is top-notch. And how often do you see two potentially gay characters on the same team? That's rarer than having two Black characters on the same team.

JediMaster said:

Why? According to Preview's Top 100 most ordered comics, Excalibur is selling quite well, so he must be doing somethin right.
[Edited 6/10/05 13:45pm]

sextonseven said:[quote]

JediMaster said:

Did you say "gay"?

Who's gay?

scififilmnerd said:

Marvel needs some überfan to tie up the entire X-Men run and make sense of it like Kurt Busiek did with Avengers on 'Avengers Forever'. And no, the 'X-Men Forever' mini doesn't count.

sextonseven said:

Adam X, the X-Treme is the the third brother. Fabian Nicieza dropped all the clues needed to make that conclusion, but also said in an interview(at X-Fan or somewhere) that X-Treme was the third brother, but he never had time to clear that up. When D'Ken raped Katherine Summers(I think that's her name), the third brother was born. However, there could easily be more. Sinister said "brothers", but didn't give us a number.