Introducing – Some Big Ideas
When Comic Book Herald EIC (Ed note: and all around genius savant bachelor) Dave Buesing asked me to look into the non-comics sci-fi connections to Jonathan Hickman’s 2019 House of X
Obviously, there are endless such questions we could formulate, especially when it comes to the early years of pulp adventure and popular sf*, of which virtually no one but a handful of scholars has ready knowledge. And anyway, what does this have to do with Hickman’s X-Men at this point? Well, if you know his work going back to the start of his comics career, you’re certainly familiar with the fact that he’s always been a nut for high-concept sf; indeed, many of his influences appear to call back quite clearly to Golden Age sf classics (the 1930s and ’40s) and sundry benchmarks in the genre—even if it’s not intentional or a direct citing of specific stories. To be clear, it’s not my intention here to ever presume that any author is plagiarizing. However, I do work off the assumption that even the most astonishing creators aren’t creating ex nihilo: Everything comes from somewhere, but ultimate origins are all but impossible to trace. We are inspired by what’s in our environment, education, and experience, and even the most radical auteurs are so limited. Simply put, what this series of articles will try to track to the best of my current ability is the evolution of those tropes central to the current X-Men narrative from its earliest discernible origins in the primal soup of pulp sf, with an undeniable dash of (warped) Nietzscheanism and necessary historical and cultural context. [Read more…] about Science Fiction & The X-Men, Part 1: The Golden Age Origins of Marvel’s Heroes & Mutants
were first published in 1990 and 1991, the Avengers were in a bit of flux. Writer Roger Stern’s acclaimed five year long run on the book had come to an end a few years earlier. Just prior to the start of this volume, writer John Byrne had abruptly left his stewardship of both Avengers and Avengers West Coast, a stewardship which had culminated in putting the Avengers at the center of Marvel’s line-wide crossover “Acts of Vengeance” just before he left the books. On the other side of these collected issues, the creative run by writer Bob Harras and (chiefly) penciler Steve Epting looms, a run that will come to define “Avengers in the 90s,” for better and worse. With the benefit of hindsight, this chunk of issues feels very much like it’s simply filling the gap between the Byrne and Harras/Epting runs, merely killing time despite the fact that Larry Hama – whose entire work on the Avengers is collected in this volume – had every intention of staying on the title for a good long while (more on that below). Yet for that, at least some of the stories collected herein are not without their charms, even if few of them rise to the level of all time Avengers greats. 
in #95 that the techno-organic being known as Warlock (temporarily) perished at the hands of Cameron Hodge. This was in 1990, immediately before she left the book with #97 and it transformed into X-Force. Here, nine years later, she returns to the character while remaining soundly outside of the X-Line for which they were both known. In the interim, she was one of the main architects behind 
” event, she was transported to the Marvel 616 universe and decided to become a hero, so she wouldn’t get killed off or simply disappear. That’s her main “villain”: the fear of being canceled. You can’t say that’s not original.