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X-Men Epic Collection: Bishop’s Crossing Review!

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A scant six weeks after X-Men Vol. 2 #1 became the best-selling comic book of all time, Chris Claremont ended his fifteen-year run as writer of the X-Men. His departure (the final issue credited to him is X-Men Vol. 2 #3) wasn’t unexpected–news of his leaving Marvel had leaked a few months before the launch of the new series, and all three issues had been published after he’d left the company. Claremont had agreed to help launch Marvel’s second X-Men title as a kind of severance package for himself (he has since said the royalties from that launch basically paid for his house). Claremont ultimately left the X-Men because his artistic collaborator at the time, Jim Lee, wanted to do more traditional stories with familiar plot beats and villains. Claremont wanted to continue to push the X-Men forward, breaking new creative ground as he’d been doing for the past fifteen years. When it became clear that Lee’s approach was the one favored by their editor, Bob Harras (as well as with Marvel’s sales and marketing departments), and that Claremont’s time as the ultimate arbiter of the fates of the X-Men was up, he left. Bob Harras was comfortable with letting Chris Claremont–the man who, alongside a series of artistic partners, launched the X-Men to the top of the sales charts and birthed an entire interconnected line of “X-books”–leave, because he still had Jim Lee. [Read more…] about X-Men Epic Collection: Bishop’s Crossing Review!

The Evolution of Marvel Cosmic, Pt 1: Watchers and Skrulls

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[cover by Jack Kirby (p), Paul Reinman (i), Stan Goldberg (c), Art Simek (l)]
[cover by Jack Kirby (p), Paul Reinman (i), Stan Goldberg (c), Art Simek (l)]
This series of articles will track the early rise of all the elements (the recurrent alien beings and venues) that lay the foundation for what will later be known as Marvel Cosmic. So you know this will be a love letter to the wonder-working duo of Stan “the Man” Lee and Jack “the King” Kirby. We’ll focus on moments where some new critical element is added or significantly revised or retconned. We’ll also look at what was happening at the time in US society and global affairs, broadly speaking (obviously, we’ll have many references to and analogies with the [first] peak of the Cold War but also sci-fi and even the counterculture). Our aim is to simply create a chronological guide to this particular (but vast) aspect of Marvel comics that hopefully inspires a deeper appreciation of our favorite cosmic characters and settings as they pop up throughout the Marvel Universe.

With the introduction of each new significant cosmic player or element from the early ’60s on, we’ll look at just the original portrayal, but I’ll try to clarify to the best of my ability how readers of the time would likely have seen these Kirby wonders, distinguishing them from the way we read them now in the 2020s.

Again, we’ll mostly focus on the alien, but the progeny of Earth, humans and otherwise, will be included as they appear, even if they aren’t immediately cosmic players or take their sweet time getting off-planet (like Adam Warlock and the High Evolutionary). (Rick Jones, however, very much to your chagrin no doubt, must wait until he’s bound to Captain Marvel.)

(Also, a side piece on Jack Kirby’s Challengers of the Unknown at DC in the late 1950s might be of interest down the line. After all, it would prove, in retrospect, a trial run for exploring many of the zany sf elements he more successfully expanded on in FF—more grounded by Stan Lee’s character-focused melodrama, however much their contrary styles would see the creative team drift apart over time.)

Anyway, it’s going to be hella fun just salivating over some of that classic Kirby crackle and giant hat porn 😉 [Read more…] about The Evolution of Marvel Cosmic, Pt 1: Watchers and Skrulls

The Living and the Dead: Morbius the Living Vampire, the Comics Code, & Marvel Comics’ Horror Boom

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Comic books were under attack. After the publication in 1954 of his book Seduction of the Innocent, psychiatrist Frederic Wertham launched a campaign against comic books for inspiring what he believed to be negative behavior in children. The campaign was so successful it caught congressional attention, with Senator Estes Kefauver – the same man who took on organized crime – deciding to hold hearings investigating Wertham’s claims. In response, the Comics Magazine Association of America, a group of comic book publishers from across the industry, banded together to form the Comics Code Authority. Fearful of government regulators meddling in their industry, the CCA was created to be a self-censoring control group meant to assure consumers that any comic book affixed with its seal met certain standards and was acceptable for all ages. [Read more…] about The Living and the Dead: Morbius the Living Vampire, the Comics Code, & Marvel Comics’ Horror Boom