Chronic Sacrilege: X-Men Origins part 2!

It seems almost impossible now, but in 1975 the X-Men were basically a flushed franchise that nobody gave a shit about. The brand had fallen into such disrepair that Marvel's publishing strategy for the team was to simply reprint old issues with new covers. I'm serious.

Len Wein took the job nobody in the world wanted and re-booted the X-Men with Giant-Size # 1, and pretty much kick started both the Bronze age and Marvel's greatest empire. Spider-Man is its greatest single asset, don't get me wrong. But the X-Men have been almost a separate publishing imprint that has turned what seems like hundreds of junk spin-offs into monetary gold. They've sold a few Wolverine lunchboxes, too.

So my next step in finding the roots of the X-Men was to forage for the beginning of the team as we know it now. As stated earlier, that officially began with Giant-Size # 1 and Len Wein, but obviously it was Claremont who scripted what would become the standard of superhero soap operatics. And that began with X-Men # 94.

The formula for Claremont is pretty clear by page 5:

DRAMA = INTERESTING

And nothing produces drama like a pack of giant assholes, which is what the X-Men were. It's unbelievable. The worst of course is Wolverine, who still has a reputation as a bit of a bad ass. Forget about it. The Wolverine in the early Claremont books makes today's version look like a sheepish little fairy.

This was not a silent man with a Samurai code looking to quell the beast within. This was a stone prick desperately interested in starting a fight for no reason at all. It's beautiful.

And he's absolutely not alone, by the way. Cyclops has always been a bit of a douche, in these early Claremont issues he's completely insufferable. Sunfire might be the biggest cock of the whole group, but it's tough to be sure because he's such a giant dong that he immediately leaves, tells everyone to fuck off and never to call him again. You think I'm kidding...I'm not. Read it, it's awesome!

Don't even get me started on Thunderbird, who is simultaneously a giant asshole and a whiny little girl. The good news is that he'll be gone next issue, so you don't have to worry about it for long. That pretty much left just Wolverine to fill the role as Team Bastard. He did it well.

Hey man, give credit where it's due - Claremont was right. Drama is interesting, for the most part. Those stories pop, man! The old Stan Lee stuff is legitimately difficult to slog through in the here and now...the old Claremont stories feel like a guilty pleasure. He basically took a United Nations cast, dipped them in "All My Children", and then handed each of them wide scale lethal destructive force and turned them loose. It's delicious!

But before we crown Chris Claremont as the James Joyce of comic books, let's be realistic about the downsides as well. The problem with running soap operatics is that everything gets a little cartoony. And I guess if you don't mind cartoony, then there is no problem with the X-Men of this era.

But here's the thing. In this issue, the threat is a guy named Count Nefaria, OK? And as if that wasn't absurd enough, his plan is to warp a bunch of Ani-Men into what basically amounts to NORAD. Fine.

But how does he achieve this objective? He sends them a little box with a button on it that literally says "Press Me". AND THEY FUCKING PRESS THE BUTTON. Are you goddamn kidding me???

It's absolutely ridiculous. If you had any sense in your brain you'd start putting the pieces together and say "hmmmm.....Count NEFARIA.....goddamn ANI-MEN......fucking box that says PRESS ME on it and then they press it.....waitaminute....this is FUCKING STUPID!!!!"

But instead you barely register any of that, because basically you're just turning pages until the fighting is over so you can see if Jean is really going to split up with Scott and leave the team like Warren and Bobby did. Because it's a soap opera, man, and it's a damn good one, you want my opinion.

Except then Count Nefaria opens his mouth and starts spewing out the most improbable crap you've ever heard in your life. And you think to yourself; "Chris, why do you have to have them say stupid shit like that and almost ruin all the other good stuff going on here? Why can't he just say something vaguely human? Is it absolutely necessary to make me feel like an asshole for reading this every six panels or so?"

Apparently it is.

In his defense, everybody wrote like that until Alan Moore taught everybody it was OK to aim higher than 12-year-olds with Swamp Thing. Bottom line on the early Claremont issues? I recommend them. Actually, there's a lot that modern comics could learn from this stuff, because the "event" was good character interaction every month. (Or to be perfectly accurate, every other month. In the beginning, Claremont's X-Men were bi-monthly and on life support)

And the art is good, too. You go from Cockrum to Byrne to Paul Smith, and it's all quite a bit superior to what The King was putting down on his run. So my final assessment is that if you're looking for the roots of the X-Men....skip the Lee/Kirby stuff and head straight for "Days of Our Mutant Lives".

- Ryan

Chronic Sacrilege: X-Men Origins!

For reasons even I don't understand, I got a burr in my bum to read some old X-Men material. I'm not very well versed in the classics, frankly. I'm a weird bastard in that I'm an English major who has never really read any Shakespeare, and I'm a comic wonk who's never really read any Stan Lee/Jack Kirby material.

So I decided to begin my nostalgic X-Men reading with issue # 1, by the aforementioned Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. I read the Marvel Essentials black and white stuff, to be specific.

Hoo boy. Where to begin? The quick capsule review is that it's terrible. Genuinely, demonstrably horrible.

The issue begins with Professor X and his young students at the mansion. Charles runs his students through some "danger room" type drills, and they all behave like jerkwads to one another. Suddenly Jean Grey shows up, and everybody loses their goddamn mind except for Iceman, who is apparently in the closet. Even Xavier expresses his attraction toward the barely pubescent Ms. Grey, which is sort of creepy.

After some more asinine behavior, Prof. X informs the team that they must deal with a threat, which in this case is Magneto whumping ass all over this military base. So the X-Men send Magneto scurrying away, including Jean whose combat training at this point consists of being groped for four minutes at the X-Mansion. And that's that.

The script is fairly infantile. Professor X informs us that he named his students the X-Men because of their "extra power". Are you shitting me with this? And while Chuck's philosophy evolved, in the beginning there is nothing directly in the mission statement about building bridges between mutants and humans. Their job is to find "evil" mutants and pound the crap out of them.

The characters are all stock stereotypes. These are hormonally challenged teenagers at their worst. They are giant assholes raging with testosterone, and God forbid a girl enter the room - the evolutionary clock REALLY starts ticking backward.

Beast just goes straight for Jean's stars and garters and sexually assaults her first thing. This kind of thing was called "Wednesday" in the 1960s. Today it's called "8-12 years plus probation."

It was a different era then, and I guess it's fair now to make some concessions. Through the eyes of 2010, this stuff wouldn't make it past an editors desk. But it wasn't 2010, and the audience was different and the standards were different. I suppose we have to give him credit for simply trying to create "realistic" teen behavior instead of robotic stiffs. I'm sure that was a novel concept when X-Men # 1 was released.

I think it's also worth mentioning that Stan Lee was scripting about 34 books a month, and I don't care how good you are, quality is going to suffer when the quantity gets that prodigious. So it isn't entirely Stan's fault that the original X-Men stories haven't aged very well. They were produced by a different era for a different era, and he was working under significant deadline duress. But wow is it bad.


And then there's Jack Kirby. Some of you out there are thinking to yourself:

"He's not seriously going to go after The King, is he?"

Yes, I'm going to go after The King. Listen, don't take my word for it...crack open the issues and look for yourself. Look at this tank, friends, and tell me that a portfolio containing that illustration would even get a second look at Marvel today. There would be derisive laughter, and that's a scientific fact.

Look at the military figures surrounding it. Those aren't even pencils, really, those are breakdowns! And someone just said "Fuck it, we got a deadline, let's ship her out!" The pencilling work in X-Men # 1 is often rudimentary and appears to be unfinished:
That's just terrible. And I'll be more than happy to make some concessions for Kirby as well. There are panels where he's able to achieve effects with faces in a very small amount of space, it's almost magical. I'm told that Kirby's figures exhibited dynamic action that was unprecedented for the time, and I'll take people's word on that. There are certainly spots where the action has some Kirby crackle to it.

What I'm saying is, you hear the names Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, and the hushed tones with which the names are uttered suggest that if you dared to turn the pages of their work, you would barely survive the awesometude of their excellenticity. Instead, you get done reading it with the lens of 2010 and wonder how they found work.

Next up: Pot shots at Chris Claremont!