Classic X-Men #7: Shaw and Frost

It's not always obvious what Classic X-Men's back-up strips are trying to do. Some of them provide characer moments that fill in gaps (we've had the lovely Scott/Jean silent backup in #6, and Thunderbird's funeral in #3). This one seems to be more for the continuity wonks, as it provides some backstory for how Sebastian Shaw and Emma Frost took charge of the Hellfire Club; and how Michael Rossi came to be alive to turn up in New Mutants.

But that's not all that's going on. In the main books being published in 1987, the X-Men are on the verge of an alliance with the Hellfire Club, and therefore Shaw and Frost's reputations need to be repaired. This story shows therefore how they were taken for mugs by the original Black King Ned Buckman, who is the real evil mastermind behind using the Sentinels to kill all mutants. Shaw and Frost had merely wanted the Sentinels to give them a good going over, or something, in some odd scheme to identify the X-Factor.

Shaw and Frost are betrayed by Buckman, and use that as the excuse they need to assassinate him and his cronies, and install themselves as the new Lords Cardinal.

I'm not sure this ultimately works. They're still too closely associated with the Sentinel program after this is supposed to be set for it to be blamed entirely on Buckman. But at least it's going in the right direction.

Wolverine: First Class #1: How about "mute girl"?

Wolverine: First Class looks like one of the innumerable Wolverine spin-off titles of 2008, but is a little more distinctive, being a "Wolverine and Kitty Pryde" team-up book. Wolverine is nowadays known for his double-acts with young girls (Kitty Pryde herself, then Jubilee, then Armor, and now maybe Idie?), but in 1980, he was still a gruff loner, who hadn't even told his colleagues his real name.

The first issue (by Fred Van Lente and Andrea Di Vito) is set right between #138 and #139, and depicts Kitty's first mission. She's been sent by Xavier with Wolverine to investigate a new blip on Cerebro. Wolverine protests, and it's only by Xavier blackmailing him by threatening to withhold help in recovering Wolverine's suppressed memories (something that in fact had not been introduced into the comic yet) that he goes along with it. This is all bit arbitrary by Xavier, and while he is a bit of a reckless bastard at this point, I'm not sure I believe it.

The scenes on the plane journey are amusingly awkward. This is Kitty's first time in her costume, and she isn't sure whether to pick "Phantom Girl" or "Phase" as a codename. In West Virginia, they quickly track down Michelle, whose mutant ability had been causing trouble, and suggest that she could attend the school.

That's the problem with this story set here, of course. Michelle will get sent to Muir Island and pops up again in #6, but there she disappears from continuity entirely. Presumably she gets depowered on M-Day? Who knows?

Classic X-Men #17: "A Taste for Vengeance"

So, remember how I said that the last story, issue #111, was all the better for opening in medias res, without bothering to explain how exactly the X-Men got captured and brainwashed by Mesmero.

Guess what the back-up story in Classic X-Men #17 does? It shows us that.

The way in which Mesmero managed to bring Jean Grey under his thrall was by... walking up to her on the street. That's it. He may as well be bloody Hypnotoad. Then, he decides to see what else he can do other than get her to wait on him hand and foot. Because what Jean Grey totally needs here at this point in her arc is an attempted rape story retconned in. It's made clear on panel the attempt never gets further than the mindcontrol failing. Annoyed at that, he gets Jean to tell him where the X-Men live, and goes to pay them a visit.

There he goes and Hypnotoads them, one by one. Wolverine is the last to hold out, but he falls in the end. And then, Mesmero has effectively won. He's succeeded where many have failed before: he has defeated the X-Men utterly. And he's bored. So, then he gets the idea to set up the circus.

Classic X-Men #2: First Friends

As noted previously, in X-Men #94-#95, we saw the team become less diverse ethnically. We also saw it become more male. There were 2 female X-Men in the pre-Giant Size #1 team, but both Lorna and Jean leave, leaving only Ororo. She could therefore be seen as doing double duty as the token woman and the token non-white character; and it means that it's not going to idly pass the Bechdel test without trying...

The backup feature in Classic X-Men #2 sorts this out by giving Jean and Ororo some interaction. Ororo visits Jean's new apartment (which she's sharing with Misty Knight, who by a strange coincidence is also a superhero - we'll come to that later).

Jean immediately takes Storm shopping. Because of course she didn't think to bring any civilian clothes, only her superhero costume (?).

Among the things that Storm does not properly understand are large metropolitan areas and the nudity taboo. I'm not sure I buy much of these, given her later backstory. You don't grow up in Cairo and then be massively astonished at the size of New York City. Not even Cairo in 1975. The wealth of it all, perhaps... And the clothes thing, just honestly...

We get a nice comparison between Jean's telepathy and how she can feel with all those voices, versus Ororo's claustrophobia. But I'm not sure it makes sense to dump that to us several issues early... Obviously there's a limit to what they can do in these backup strips, but still, it's a bit of a waste of a dramatic revelation later. Having said that, it looks like it's structured to assume you already know? Neither one thing nor another, these.

Classic X-Men #1: Night and the Professor

Classic X-Men started in 1986 as a reprint series with more. They removed the adverts from the original issues, and replaced them with new material (by Chris Claremont and John Bolton). Issue #1 reprints pages from Giant-Size X-Men #1, along with a backup strip "First Night", which is set immediately between Giant-Size and X-Men #94 and makes a stab at filling in those character issues that were very rushed in #94.

We see Jean failing to get Scott away from writing his report on Krakoa to discuss things, which makes her leaving him seem much less cruel. Bobby is a bit off as he gets super-annoyed with pretty much everyone. Bits are anachronistic - Banshee gets a name (Sean Cassidy) before it gets mentioned in the series proper. We get Peter's sister's name (Illyana, which, by the way, isn't an actual Russian name - more on that when she's introduced in the series) early, and find out that he draws, that Banshee plays piano and likes country and western (something established already in the pages of Captain America).

Wolverine (who admits to being a killer) hits on Jean, and Warren steps in to defend her honour, rather unnecessarily. Both Jean and Warren are leaving the team in part because of Wolverine (Jean because she's worried she's attracted to him, Warren because he thinks he's a dangerous lunatic). Alex and Lorna, who we'd never really seen as part of the team proper in the original run, don't think they're needed any more, and are going back to college...

As I say, it fleshes out a gap in #94. It's not exactly seamless, as it uses Claremont's later characterisation of these folks, rather than how they really were being written in 1975. Not vital, but nor is it claiming to be. In short: a nice little bunch of vignettes.

But, it's just a regular sized comic - the total page count of X-Men Classic #1 is reduced from Giant-Size. How did that happen? Well, the entire bit on Krakoa has been reduced to a two-page summary. Huh.

X-Men: The Hidden Years #1-#7

X-Men: The Hidden Years is a series specifically set in the hiatus of the publication of new content in X-Men. It managed 22 issues, between 1999 and 2001, before being cancelled by the new management (Joe Quesada). It was written and drawn by John Byrne, who brought a certain authenticity to the project by having plotted and drawn the title in the late 1970s, alongside Chris Claremont.

It comes directly in the wake of X-Men #66, following up several plotlines left dangling by the cancellation - Xavier's reintroduction, Magneto's aliveness status, the continued use of the plane liberated from the Sentinels, and Bobby's crush on Lorna. One unusual mis-step is the adoption of "Havok" as a codename by Alex, which he just sort of automatically does, despite it being only having been used by Larry Trask for him so far (although Lorna does point out its origin, at least). More of a big deal is made of Lorna not yet having a name: she plays with "Magnetrix", but eventually decides against it.

It makes more meat out of Zelda and Vera. They'd been unceremoniously forgotten about since their last appearance in #47, and Bobby here ends up on Zelda's doorstep having got rejected by Lorna. Zelda, to say the least, is unimpressed at his sudden reappearance into her life, especially once he explains why.

So I can't fault it's attention to detail, at least. But is it an artistically worthwhile thing to do, to go back and insert stories between 1970 and 1975 in a pastiche of the style? My colleague SpaceSquid thinks not, considering the overall endeavour to be hamstrung by its own po-facedness and decrying it as "guff". I'm less sure. I don't give a fig that the science is laughable, the timelines don't make sense and there's no appreciation of distance. I mean, this is superhero comics. It's not like a sense of place was something that X-Men ever had in this era. So I definitely think it's intentionally imitating hypothetical 1970s X-Men. But then with the Zelda/Iceman story, it's bringing emotional reality to a situation that frankly didn't deserve it. Bobby didn't abandon Zelda, the writers did, and fixing this up by having a storyline where out-of-world ball-dropping results in in-world abandonment points that out almost cruelly, while similar bizarreness in the work itself is left unchallenged.

Ultimately, I can't think why you'd want to read it if you weren't an X-Men obsessive who'd just read the first sixty-six issues. Byrne seems to realise that people are unlikely to be that familiar with the material - hence the epic flashbacks that reviewers complain about - but having answered the question: "what is going on?" it doesn't deliver an answer to "why should we care?"

It's got nothing new to say, and we know how it's going to end ("Good news, everyone! You're delivering a package, to Krakoa, the living island!"). And, as we'll find out, it directly contradicts the interstitial material that does exist. So to the general audience it has failed where First Class will later succeed.

First Class and Sentry

[This should have been posted on Monday and that entry posted Tuesday. Oops.]

I promised a post on X-Men: First Class (the Parker comic, that is, not the film) at some point, and I never really got round to it. This is the last chance to look at it in the context that it is set, as Xavier just died (in a story that we are assured is "not a hoax"), and by the time it is revealed to be a hoax, Polaris and Havok have joined the team. So, our time with Xavier and the Original Five is about to end.

But, I'm getting ahead of myself.

X-Men: First Class was published from 2006 to 2010. Despite some claims otherwise, I don't see it as a serious attempt at a continuity implant within the original run. It is functionally the Marvel Adventures X-Men title (an imprint many of whose titles were written by Parker). Mostly single-issue stories, reasonably child-friendly, and heavy on the humour.

In my review for X-Men Season One (which occupies a similar narrative space of telling modernised stories set in the O5 era), I said First Class was a false nostalgia. I shall clarify what I mean. I don't mean that it doesn't fit in with continuity - I mean that the feeling of the stories is far more what we would like the 1960s X-Men to be like than it actually was. There is a preference for multi-issue stories at this point in the run, and they are tending to get longer. The school elements which get stressed in First Class are now almost entirely absent.

That this is consciously a false nostalgia can be seen from Parker's other series, Age of the Sentry. The Sentry is a mad weird idea, and I love him mostly for the sheer cheek involved. The Sentry was originally published in 2000, and presented as a forgotten superhero created by Stan Lee. This was eventually revealed as a hoax, but the joke was that the character had been forgotten, and the Marvel universe we knew should have had the Sentry (a sort of twisted Superman analogue) in it all along, and he fits nicely into the gaps (who was Reed Richards' best man, anyway?). This has become highly self-referential and metafictional, and subsequent appearances have, for example, featured a man named Paul Jenkins, who believes he created the character of the Sentry. This, and the relationship between the Sentry and the Void (his arch-enemy) has perhaps got a bit laboured in the comics, but that's beside the point.

One of the things that the original Sentry miniseries did was have tie-in Sentry Team-Up issues, depicting the Sentry's "original" interaction with Marvel heroes (one of them was with the X-Men, or rather with Angel, which I will do in due course). We then later got Parker's "Age of the Sentry", which is a Marvel Adventures-style superhero comic, based around a hero who never actually existed. So Parker knows exactly what he's doing. Nobody could write Age of the Sentry and not be intentionally recreating an imagined silver age. In fact, Age goes one step further by introducing a golden age Sentry, popped over from another dimension in a manner similar to DC's Earth-Two...

And so we get X-Men: First Class (and then later Wolverine: First Class. Perfectly formed, but twee.

X-Men: Season One review

X-Men: Season One is the second of Marvel's first batch of "Season One" Original Graphic Novels, designed to re-tell classic characters' origin stories in an accessible and modernised way. This one is written by Dennis Hopeless, who is a newcomer to the X-Men; with pencils by Jamie McKelvie, who has previously drawn part of X-Men: Divided We Stand and a couple of issues of Generation Hope.

The book distils many of the high points of the early part of the run, and deftly weaves them together to form a larger whole. Given the mandate of writing an in-continuity update of X-Men #1-#20 or so, there's not much that can be done about the early X-Men's lack of diversity (which stands starkly in contrast to the current line-ups), but Season One picks up the device of the new girl arriving (used briefly in issue #1 and then abandoned) and runs with it, making Jean - who remained a cipher in the original comics even as the others obtained their distinct personalities - the narrator.

There are some superheroics in here, almost as a background thing at times, but this is really about the relationships. We meet everyone through Jean's eyes and the Jean/Scott/Warren triangle is explored from her point of view, something sadly neglected in the source material. We see an emotional depth to the Bobby and Hank friendship that is consistent with my growing feeling that there's something going on there (of which more on Tuesday). And Charles and Erik. Oh, poor Charles and Erik.

Jean comes to buy in to the idea of the X-Men, even as the subtext undermines the idealism a little. Part of this is Magneto and what he says - he's not quite Morrison's "mad old terrorist" here, but then there's also the brief mention of carnival mutants, which turns out to be a living, at least. The X-Men mostly have "passing privilege", so can't quite understand how disruptive they could be to these people's lives. Warren could perhaps get it best, but he's privileged in other ways. See Vaughn's X-Men: First Class where the only people naïve enough to side with Xavier are the white guys, without personal experience of how systemic oppression works.

I think this should be accessible enough to newcomers. It flits between issues and incorporates moments from them as a kind of skeleton to hang the real meat of the story off. Tonally it is a decent match for both what is going on with the characters in this part of the original run, and the shorter-arc format that's being used on the main X-books at the moment. And unlike Parker's X-Men: First Class (which I will post about here at some point), it somehow avoids invoking a sense of false nostalgia. As a project on its own then, I dub this a success.

But is that all they are after? After the final page of the story comes Gillen's Uncanny X-Men #1. This is going to be a very hard sell - with the other Season One OGN's, the status quo set up at the end of them bears some relation to a recent status quo. Fantastic Four presumably ends with those same four characters living in the Baxter Building routinely saving the world; Spider-Man is still slinging webs around NYC. But the X-Men? Only two of the characters from this are even in Uncanny, and one of them was the villain, and for unexplained reasons they are suddenly in San Francisco. So, it'll be a big jump. But one worth making.