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Jiro posted:Does Logan still have those "hot claws"? When did he steal powers from Pete Wisdom? Nevvy Z posted:I think i read last thread that that was actually phoenix logan just showing up to troll everyone No, Wolverine (the present-day Wolverine) had HOT CLAWS in Soule's Return of Wolverine mini-series, I think that's their only real appearance. quote:Persephone hints that Wolverine's hot claws are a side effect of his resurrection. Because she effectively turbo-charged Logan's dormant healing factor when she resurrected him, that added energy has begun manifesting as heat. The catch is that, because the hot claws draw power from Logan's healing factor, they reduce his ability to heal while active. They make him more deadly, but also more vulnerable to harm. https://twitter.com/CharlesSoule/status/1098293626780545024 This, as opposed to Pete Wisdom having "hot knives" as a mutant power because Ellis though it would be funny to work a drug joke into his Excalibur run.
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Oct 30, 2019 20:57
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The first superhero comics I ever read were several bankers' boxes of my dad's old comics which spanned roughly 1965-1974 so as a kid I never really understood why people thought the X-Men were cooler than the Fantastic Four/Avengers/Hulk/Dr. Strange/etc. etc. etc. and the only 1980s X-Books I ever bought were whatever New Mutants comics I thought looked cool because of Bill Sienkiewicz or Brett Blevins or eventually Rob Liefeld artwork. Later I started buying X-Factor back issues drawn by Simonson or Art Adams. I think the first issue of "X-Men" I paid money for was the one with the Jim Lee gatefold cover. Me and literally everyone else buying comics in 1991.
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Nov 17, 2019 08:40
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The "Madeline Pryor is the Red Queen of the Hellfire Club" stuff popped up in Fraction's X-Men run in 2008, not the mid-90s, and I don't think extended beyond an arc in that book. I don't think I ever read the mid-90s stories where Shaw and Pryor hung out, but she was apparently his "Black Rook" in those stories. Edge & Christian fucked around with this message at 00:02 on Nov 21, 2019 |
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Nov 20, 2019 23:59
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Yeah, so far (and we're in early yet) the Dawn of X books are in what I consider the good level of shared universe where they'll address things like "we can't ask Illyana about this problem, she's off on trial in space" and if you want to read New Mutants for the full story, great. If you don't, just know Illyana is off in space on trial so she won't be popping in to give opinions about Fallen Angels for now. This in contrast to the 1990s style where one issue of the book you're reading is "LET'S TALK ABOUT X BABY" part 3 of 14, and then the next issue of the same book is LTAXB part 9 of 14 and the third issue is an AFTERMATH issue the expectation is that you bought all 14-25 comics to get a linear story about the characters you're buying the books for. As the X-Books stand right now, if you want to know the Story of Kate Pryde, Red Queen, you can get all of it in a linear fashion in Marauders. Xavier was shot in X-Force and it'll get referenced in other books, but I assume the story will resolve itself in X-Force 1-4 or whatever.
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Nov 21, 2019 04:40
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Looking it up, she throws the name out in Cable & X-Force #11 but only as some sort of ill-conceived "undercover" alias for providing a distraction as a "mutant menace". I has assumed it was a weird rib on Moondragon's original alias being [DOCTOR] MADAME MACEVIL  I guess it might still be, just one made by Dennis Hopeless, not Ben Percy.
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Dec 19, 2019 19:36
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Whoops, I just remember Sage saying it and assuming it was in X-Force, not New Mutants. I read both back to back.
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Dec 19, 2019 19:59
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Pixie is literally talking to them through the slime in the first page of the book and both Shaw and Cyclops get sprayed in the face with the slime (that's described in the comic as being a mutant-power-neutralizer) so it does in fact seem like a stretch to assume that it suffocates everyone to death. There are all sorts of ice/forcefield/slime/energy fields/superscience liquids people use as weapons in the Marvel Universe that let people breathe because [super science reasons]. There are (to my knowledge) zero oceans or building-sized slabs of rock in the Marvel Universe that normal humans can breathe in.
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Dec 20, 2019 03:01
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BrianWilly posted:She talks to them with her last breath before her air runs out and she begins to suffocate to death. None of the other encased mutants make any other sound, even as the shots pan over to show them in their final terrified moments. quote:*shrug* Just telling you what the issue shows. I’m sure there’s any number of fictional reasons why that slime might not literally kill people in the exact way that it looks like it’s doing, but none of those reasons were offered in the issue (the fact that it neutralizes powers would make it more dangerous to certain mutants, not less), so I’m not going out of my way to imagine those reasons for the writer much like I don’t think criminals are shooting rubber bullets or blanks or whatever whenever Spider-Man or Captain America are under fire. Because *shrug* just reading the comic *shrug* but I assume Cyclops and Sebastian Shaw got murdered and resurrected off-panel too, because I can only go by what I see in the comic and they're on the ground not moving and they've got slime on their faces, I know I can't get knocked across a field with slime on my face without dying. This has to infuriate you with how many people are resurrected with zero explanation -- not even with the mutant MacGuffin resurrection that the X-Men have -- in like literally every superhero comic book on the stands. I know Daredevil's been killed off like six times in Zdarsky's run alone.
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Dec 20, 2019 04:15
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Nice shrugdown
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Dec 20, 2019 04:49
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Based on Marvel's solicitations, they're doing Dawn of X trades that collect an issue of apiece of X-Men, X-Force, Marauders, Excalibur, Fallen Angels, and New Mutants. They've solicited six of them so far, and each one costs $17.99. They'll be coming out January through March. Also in March, they solicited regular ol' trades like X-Men by Jonathan Hickman v1 Marauders by Gerry Duggan v1 Excalibur by Tini Howard v1 It's just those three so far for March, but Amazon has them for the other books due in April/May. So the Dawn of X trades are in addition to, not in place of the traditional trades. They got announced sooner because the first one (collecting all of the first issues) is supposed to be out in a few weeks. It's silly but doesn't seem to be disrupting the regular/more sensible way of collecting the books.
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Dec 20, 2019 18:12
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I can't tell if I'm missing an in-joke but the artists' names are Rod Reis and Joshua Cassara if anyone wants to search for examples before checking out the books. Ron Reis is a former professional wrestler best remembered as THE YET-AY, a mummy who dryhumped Hulk Hogan back in the 1990s, possibly the original fucky thot enforcer for the Dungeon of Doom.  I don't know who Josh Casserly is. I am also realizing that I know Ron Reis's last name is pronounced "reese" but I've been pronouncing Rod Reis like "rice" for the past decade.
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Jan 14, 2020 06:11
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No one gets the green light to introduce a new character or write a high profile book until they successfully revitalize 1) Rusty and Skids 2) Feral and Thornn 3) Sinsear 4) Shard 5) Jesse Bedlam Get twelve issues out of them and then maybe we'll trust you enough to give more important characters like Random or Graymalkin their time to shine.
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Jan 17, 2020 22:45
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Skwirl posted:He's shown up on Krakoa,hasn't he? Like in the background at some point? Also Jay's Cyclops one-shot is part of the Marvels Snapshots line and apparently takes place while Young Scott is still a kid in the orphanage, if that affects anyone's feelings about the eras of Cyclops. Not X-Men related, but I'm kind of curious about Evan Dorkin's Human Torch one-shot, which is supposed to take place at his high school reunion? I know I tied myself in knots upthread trying to parse out how old everyone on the X-Teams are meant to be, so it's almost on topic. Edge & Christian fucked around with this message at 04:39 on Jan 22, 2020 |
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Jan 22, 2020 04:36
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Skwirl posted:Johnny Storm and Peter Parker should be the same age, Cyclops should be like a year older, the rest of the O5 should be the same age as Cyclops or slightly younger, of course with the current resurrection protocol physically most of the X-Men are probably in their mid to late twenties, outside the X-Men, Johnny has probably spent the most time either time displaced or in another dimension where time flows differently and all of the big heroes have died and come back to life at least once and the current Marvel universe was created by a 10 year old boy using reality warping powers he didn't really understand, magnified by an insane former super villain's reality warping powers. - Cyclops's apparently involves him as a kid at the orphanage while "the rise of superheroes" happens, suggesting he's still a kid at the orphanage when the FF/etc. start heroing, which as you've pointed out should be happening after Xavier recruited him. - Namor's is set in 1946 so you know, whatever. - Captain America's is set in the aftermath of the 1970s Jack Kirby "Madbomb" storyline, and is supposed to deal with how that story affected the Bronx, and given Mark Russell's track record is just going to take place in 1976 because [lazy gloss of real world history] - The Human Torch's one is his ten year reunion, which doesn't really break Johnny's character (though it will be interesting to see where in the overall MU timeline it takes place) I feel like the generally accepted thing is that the Fantastic Four (and by extension, Spider-Man) started being superheroes a little over a decade ago, which is fine for their narratives but it's also implied that characters like Kate Pryde and the New Mutants have also aged a decade or so since their debut, makes compressing everything that took place from 1961-1980 into about two years trickier, though I suppose it's getting to the point that you could try to smooth everything out to mean "one decade = 1 year" and then not look at the details about how Spider-Man went from being 15 in 1962 to graduating high school in 1965 or whatever other marker you want to pick to make this timeline stop making sense. Also you keep getting comics written by older people like the Rodney Barnes Falcon book where the (canonically sixteen year old) Patriot is trying to turn (the presumably early 30s) Falcon onto rap music acts from 25-30 years ago, while the Millennial aged Falcon keeps grousing about how the music he came up on was all Motown and the Chi-Lites, probably because the author of the book is in his 50s. Which further muddies everything, kind of like how Bendis wrote the Original Five X-Men traveling to the present from like 1965, not 2004.
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Jan 22, 2020 05:25
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So does that mean that all current Marvel comics take place in the early 1970s, or was there a behind the scenes conspiracy that meant the microchip and civil rights weren't invented until 2010?
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Jan 22, 2020 07:17
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Rogue lost the ability to control her powers at the tail end of Remender's Uncanny Avengers, she absorbs the powers of pretty much every assembled Avenger to fight off a Celestial, but afterwards can't unbond from Wonder Man and also can't touch anyone without taking their powers/mind again.
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Jan 31, 2020 00:41
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One of my favorite bits of Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe miscellany is how Gruenwald and company handwaved several incredibly goofy 'real names' from old comics as being aliases on the principle of "yeah, come on. He's a mutant with teleportation powers and it says his real name is Telford "Telly" Porter? It is obviously a criminal alias, his real name is unknown." Same with Basil Esks, The Basilisk and some other ones I'm forgetting. Blackagar Boltagon made it through the vetting process, though.
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Feb 3, 2020 06:28
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jng2058 posted:I seem to recall he grew a brain and some balls for a brief period and was the leader of the Brotherhood for awhile when both Magneto and Mystique were doing face turns. Skwirl posted:Sorry to dox you like this, but I have it on good authority your real name is Edgeagar Christianagon.
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Feb 3, 2020 07:00
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Valerie Cooper makes more sense since she's more of a mutant expert/analyst than just a generic Superhuman bureaucrat; Gyrich spent a lot of his time overseeing the Avengers of various stripes. I suppose a lot of it will be the story they want to tell, Cooper has been (generally) seen as a level-headed person who wants to play ball with mutants and afford them dignity/freedom/etc. Gyrich started off as just a bureaucrat who was kind of an rear end in a top hat/stickler, but in the past twenty years has repeatedly been a bureaucrat who secretly works with fascists and literal Nazi scientists and death robots and evil alien empires but then usually somehow gets crammed back into the "he's just a jerk who is doing what he thinks is right indelicately" in alternating stories. Regardless, the memos seem awfully casual for Gyrich missives. My leftfield guess, since Marauders is pretty Kate-Pryde-focused, is that it'll be Stevie Hunter, since the last time we saw her she was involved in politics as a sitting Congresswoman. Edge & Christian fucked around with this message at 06:57 on Feb 6, 2020 |
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Feb 6, 2020 06:54
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I never considered that the X-Desk person might be a 'reveal' prior to this conversation, so I went back and looked at all of the memos that have appeared so far. If the X-Desk is in fact an established character it will probably be one from even more left field than the guesses we've made, especially because based on last issue it's someone that Kate Pryde wouldn't even know: quote:Katherine Pryde, we met briefly once in Washington DC. You likely won't remember me, and I'm afraid I can't tell you my name, but I hope you'll believe what I am about to write, because it's true. Anyway, the biographical details that have come through in the memos are: 1) The X-Desk was living in New York City at the time of Morrison's New X-Men run "a few years ago", was aware of Jumbo Carnation's death via local media/culture. 2) The X-Desk has a sister who gave Kraokan medicine to their ailing mother. 3) The X-Desk is monitoring mutants but doesn't seem to have any ill will towards them, when they come across intel on the Hellfire Club they recommend "we immediately reach out to friendly Krakoans and alert them to the likelihood that a mass casualty event is being planned" and they have some sort of friendly contact with mutants ("If need be, I know someone who knows someone.") 4) They have "an old friend in the DEA". None of these are particularly unique, but it would seemingly at least rule out someone like Gyrich (no living relatives, can't see him keeping up with the NYC clubbing/fashion scene) or Stevie Hunter (or anyone else who is a personal friend to Kate).
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Feb 6, 2020 16:10
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New left-field (not as far left-field as those X-Factor FBI agents) guess: Everett Ross. 1) He was living in Brooklyn for most of the Priest Black Panther series which ran concurrently to Morrison's X-Men 2) He "knows people" (specifically T'Challa) who could get him in touch with Krakoans, but doesn't really know that many mutants, and probably hasn't spent much/any time with Kate Pryde 3) We don't know anything about his family so the mother/sister isn't contradicting anything 4) The sort of "hey I'm stuck at an underfunded desk is anyone paying attention to me?" schtick fits him better than any of the other established characters postulated
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Feb 6, 2020 16:42
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Has there been any consensus on how long Cerebro has been 'backing up' mutants? Changeling (who died in a comic published in 1968, well before the "All New All Different X-Men" formed) is the earliest one I can think of, though he's only appeared in a group panel so far so who knows how much thought was put into it. The earliest "we are talking about them and they're clearly a character with lines in a comic" example I can think of is Synch, who died in a comic published in 2000. Both of these are long enough ago that they're clearly retconning it to have mutants getting backed up behind the scenes in a bunch of comics throughout the X^0 era. Proteus is an edge case for me, since he 'died' in the Claremont/Byrne era of X-Men but his psyche survived and reappeared repeatedly, as recently as Charles Soule's Astonishing X-Men, so hypothetically Cerebro could have backed up his mind super recently (or possibly didn't have to back it up at all, since he was still alive on the astral plane). It's not really clear to me when we're supposed to assume Cerebro started backing up mutants. If they're not physically restoring Proteus's body (just sticking him in a Chuck Husk) I suppose there's nothing stopping them from continually making Shadow King new bodies too, aside from the fact that he's a real rear end in a top hat. But that hasn't stopped various other resurrections/alliances!
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Feb 8, 2020 04:14
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Juggernaut's entire post-Austen run has been crazy: 1) Got kidnapped and repowered by Mojo and forced to help de-age the other X-Men into X-Babies 2) Lost his powers again, hung out post M-Day in England with New Excalibur 3) Re-pledged himself to Cytorrak to stop Hulk during World War Hulk, failed 4) Tried fighting Skarr, got punched into orbit 5) Crash landed on Earth, found by Spider-Man, got Captain Universe powers for a minute, used them to stop earthquakes, saved NYC/the world 6) Went to jail(?) and joined the Luke Cage era of Thunderbolts 7) Got one of the evil hammers in Fear Itself, wrecked a ton of poo poo, eventually got stopped by the X-Men when Cytorrak depowered him for taking power from Asgard 8) Went back to jail, Man-Thing got him an alternate-universe Ruby of Cytorrak and got his powers back 9) Eventually that ruby stopped working so he went to go live on a farm, Cytorrak made a new ruby and Juggernaut tried to destroy it. 10) But then he took it to try to kill Cyclops for killing Xavier in AvX, but instead got buried alive. 11) Dug out, tried to kill Young Cyclops thinking it was Old Cyclops, got telported to Hell by Magik. 12) Came back, still trying to kill Cyclops, got magically trapped in his armor like a cocoon and arrested by SHIELD 13) Escapes, gets buried in concrete by Deadpool 14) Gets out of that, joins a jungle cult of Cytorrak, goes on a vision quest, gets beaten up by Thor. 15) Forgets about all that stuff, joins Magneto's new Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, finds out Magneto is really Joseph, shrugs his shoulders and joins up with Cyclops. 16) Runs into Punisher and Foggy Nelson and helps them rescue a bunch of kidnapped kids after War of the Realms 17) Magik goes crazy, crushes his ruby and depowers him, teleports him to Hell again.
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Feb 8, 2020 23:47
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Skwirl posted:Yeah, but there's literally dozens (possibly hundreds) of mutants that were at one point on one of the teams that spent a lot of time dealing with people trying to kill them. Or, especially since they have all the villains there, people who were on a team trying to kill X-Men. Half of these people are still canonically dead, I think. Or possibly not mutants.
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Feb 23, 2020 06:31
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Skwirl posted:I can't believe you forgot Longshot. And canonically dead just means "on a waiting list" given the current status quo. Characters like Mimic, Cloak & Dagger, and Adam-X have sort of jumped back and forth between being considered mutants, but Longshot never has been to my knowledge. I also recognize there is a resurrection protocol, but the reason that Thunderbird or Joseph haven't been sent out to fight bad guys is because they are "on the waiting list", not that they're sitting around.
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Feb 23, 2020 06:56
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How Wonderful! posted:Are the Neo still around? God forbid anyone think I'm clamoring for the return of the Neo but I guess I'm sort of interested in how they'd fit into this whole equation. Another thing I forgot until looking up the Neo that may be relevant to the current X-Men line (it almost definitely isn't, but who knows?): they kept dropping hints that maybe Kate Pryde was a Neo, not a mutant.
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Feb 23, 2020 17:22
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I had forgotten about that, and it's something I love/'love' about Peter David books: no matter how straightforward and grounded the initial premise is, given him 12-24 issues and the book will slide into a cosmic/theological soap opera with time travel and alternate dimensions and explorations of the afterlife and the notion of the soul. Doesn't matter if it's a government superteam or a private investigation firm, Supergirl or Captain Marvel or the Scarlet Spider, I assume all of his Star Trek stuff I've never read involves Spock's soul migrating to an alternate dimension where he is a Klingon and has to restore the balance of the universe by making a Monty Python joke.
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Feb 23, 2020 18:39
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Transistor Rhythm posted:Giant Size Jean/Emma is the most Morrison thing I’ve read in years.
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Feb 26, 2020 16:18
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Rick posted:Wait. . . does this mean Rusty has appeared?
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Feb 27, 2020 05:03
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BrianWilly posted:Now, the Avengers...there's a different story. I honestly don't mind there being friction between Avengers and X-Men, within reason. Their histories support it at this point, and honestly it's just more...well, interesting if one team is a bit more by-the-books lawful and stodgy if the other is going to be feared and hated and off-the-rails. And then there's the matter of...look, if you're going to build a world that contains the large-scale bigotry against mutants that this one does, then it's going to follow that some superheroes...well, might just be anti-mutant to a macro or micro degree. Not every single person who likes mutants is going to be a good guy and not every single one who dislikes them should be a bad guy (again, within reason). It sucks for the hypothetical hero involved who would be outed as mutantphobic in this hypothetical scenario coughI'mlookingatyouCarolcoughcough, but it would alleviate just how...well, just how wishy-washy that anti-mutant sentiments in the Marvel universe can be. I think in a speculative fiction sort of sphere like Dawn of X is kind of operating in, it makes perfect sense to have some of the heroes mistrustful/anti-mutant, just like in every Elseworlds that Superman or Green Lantern or Wonder Woman or the Justice League start taking control of the world there are both heroic and villainous characters who rebel against the New World Order and its 'alien' ways, but the difference there is again, that there isn't 40-ish years of thinly reskinned racist/homophobic/anti-semitic speeches and villains who rail against Green Lanterns or Kryptonians, or at least not nearly to the level that there is for mutants. danbanana posted:There are obviously comic book industry answers to this- that is, Stark had his own separate book that had it's own separate stories at the time of NXM- but what a good X-writer does is stoke those comic book industry reasons into in-continuity conflict. Which they're doing really well here! As How Wonderful! so eloquently explained, this is the kind of thing that keeps the mutant metaphor relevant with these current books. It's a deeper understanding of marginalized people and their relationship to our inherently bigoted society. It would be good storytelling if someone made a point of any character asking for help or noting that [other hero] didn't respond/didn't help/whatever in a moment of crisis, it's less good when everyone just goes along in their solo books and they're all friendly for a few years and then when there's trouble you bring this up. Imagine a family member who you don't stay in close contact with and only see at holidays and exchange pleasantries with online, then when you see them over the summer and ask them to help you move some furniture they turn around and go WHY DIDN'T YOU VISIT ME FIVE YEARS AGO IN THE HOSPITAL WHEN I HAD MY CANCER SCARE, YOU BIGOT
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Feb 29, 2020 00:03
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I think Sinister was laying it on a little thick but if this means that louche camp Sinister is really sticking in lieu of Brooding Grim Mastermind as the default way people write him, I'm willing to tolerate some speedbumps. I know there was a rumor/actual reports that Fox was lining up Jon Hamm to play Mister Sinister in the sequel to the New Mutants movie that finally came out I guess? I'd be 1000% more interested in him playing the Gillen/Hickman/etc. Sinister than anything from the previous 25-30 years of portrayals of him. Quick Google Edit: HAHA THAT MOVIE STILL ISN'T OUT?
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Mar 26, 2020 03:36
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galagazombie posted:That was honestly the least icky thing about it. They spent the whole time talking up that the only thing that gives you worth is if you have super powers and that if you lack the ability to turn your fingernails blue under a full moon you're little more than a soulless animal undeserving of basic dignity.
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Mar 28, 2020 02:48
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What I always find interesting about superhero comics of the 1980s-1990s is how many writers/editors seemed to look at Claremont X-Men as a touchstone for success and their basic takeaways were "longrunning plot threads" and "lots of soap opera-y romance subplots" and in doing so demonstrate just how hard it is to do either of those very well. There are plenty of people who did their own spin on it (arguably Roy Thomas and Jim Shooter provided a solid template for Claremont in Avengers and Legion, respectively) and contemporaries of Claremont X-Men like Levitz's Legion and Wolfman's Titans did it well for stretches of time. But for every insane anecdote in Claremont X-Men, there are a dozen runs like Jim Valentino's incredibly horny Guardians of the Galaxy run which had subplots with (PG-rated) unwilling polycules and a husband and wife who were merged into one body that could swap back and forth and when their marriage was on the rocks the wife hooked up with a team member while the husband was trapped inside her body and they could only have sex in a specially treated room that replicated his magic suit that kept his body from disintegrating and was built by a fourth team member with implicitly the primary purpose of "gotta give you a chance to cuckold our teammate, buddy!" It's a very weird book and also really plays up the idea that any two characters with similar characteristics (flame hair, very tall, fat, reptilian) are going to immediately try to gently caress regardless of any other characteristic or war going on.
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Mar 30, 2020 02:10
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A big part of that was also editorial shuffling; the book jumped around a lot between editors in the first few years (though to be fair, Marvel itself had five editors in chief in four years 1974-1978) but by 1980 Jim Shooter had settled into the EiC role and Louise Jones/Simonson started editing X-Men as of Uncanny #137/summer 1980. Jones would edit the book for the next four years before she started focusing more on writing and Ann Nocenti took over as the X-Editor. Claremont got along well with both of them, and when pressure for "more X-Men books" continued, Claremont tried to write as many as he could himself, but when he couldn't he trusted Simonson/Nocenti to write them, and they (especially Simonson) wrote nearly every X-Book that Claremont didn't through the 1980s. But then a few years after that, Jim Shooter was out and Tom DeFalco was in as EiC. DeFalco kind of felt like a "well nobody else wants to do it" pick, and pretty soon Nocenti was out and Bob Harras was in as the X-Editor. Over the next two years Harras would bring in all of the future-Image-Guys (Silvestri was already there and some of them were working at Marvel but specifically Lee, Liefeld, and Portacio on X-Men, New Mutants, and X-Factor) and push for at least one big annual crossover, which never really happened pre-Harras; Mutant Massacre and Fall of the Mutants were thematically connected but Harras started pushing for more "gotta buy them all to follow the story" things like Inferno, X-Tinction Agenda, etc. By the end of 1990, Louise Simonson had quit New Mutants and was about to quit X-Factor over being overridden on story ideas/scripts by the hot artists. Claremont took over X-Factor for a minute, but by the end of 1991 he was pretty much gone and the majority of the X-Books were being plotted by the artists with "assists" from Nicieza, Lobdell, etc. When they were promoting the "Mutant Genesis" (when X-Force and the adjectiveless X-Men book launched) in 1991, it was a sign of the times that Marvel Age ran interviews with Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld, and Bob Harras but not Claremont. Claremont was still being promoted as the writer of both "core" X-Books, Uncanny X-Men #281 was even solicited as being written by him, but he pulled out and the book was "co-written" by Lee/Portacio with literally last-minute scripting done by Byrne in I want to say 48 hours. Those solicits in general are a mess of shuffled plans probably worth its own post. And then by the end of 1992, all of those artists quit and went to form Image, so Marvel had neither Claremont etc. nor the artists they alienated all of the writers to please. The punchline to all of this is that the person who caused all of this (Bob Harras) went on to become Editor in Chief of Marvel from 1994-2000, and is now the Editor in Chief at DC.
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Mar 30, 2020 04:42
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I love making GBS threads on Bob Harras as much as the next person -- possibly more, since most people have no idea who he is -- but the bankruptcy (or ensuing issues like the film rights) shouldn't really fall on him. Marvel's Annual Net Revenues: 1988: $61 Million 1989: $69 Million 1990: $81 Million 1991: $115 Million 1992: $224 Million 1993: $415 Million 1994: $515 Million 1995: $829 Million Looks pretty good! Except in that time Marvel (corporate) went on a buying spree: 1992: $286M for Fleer 1993: ~$15M + not getting paid for their toy license anymore to get minority ownership of Toy Biz 1994: $158M for Panini Stickers, ~$16M for Malibu and Heroes World if I'm reading the annual report correctly 1995: Skybox/Impel for $150M They straight up bragged in an annual report about how they "weren't just a "funny book company" any more, and how by 1993 comics only accounted for 37% of their revenue, down from 91% when Perelman bought them, even though sales/profits from comics kept going up each year. The next year it was only 25% of revenue. But the comics division stayed profitable (even as the peak of the speculator bubble was past), what killed them was the speculator bubble for trading cards fell even harder. In the early 1990s baseball cards (not all trading cards, just baseball) were a billion dollar industry, and by 1995 it had cratered into the $250M range, right as Marvel corporate had poured nearly $600,000,000 into it. Comic sales had declined from their peak, but nothing remotely like that. All of these moves were done by Perelman and the Marvel corporate executives to pump up quarterly earnings reports (and therefore the stock prices) in order to make more money when they sold the company a few years down the line, long-term feasibility be damned. This is the same reason they did those terrible movie options, better to get paid a lump sum Q3 1994 and make that period seem more lucrative, who cares how things shake out when the movie is actually made, they wouldn't be around anymore. Which turned out to be true, just not for the reasons they thought. Some of this mentality definitely permeated down to folks like Harras who were working in the comics department, but not to the insanely irresponsible level of the upper brass, and definitely not in a way that drove Marvel to bankruptcy.
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Mar 30, 2020 05:51
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El Gallinero Gros posted:Do Marvel still own Malibu? As for the other acquisitions from that time: Fleer: acquired for $286-340M depending on how you calculate it in 1992, sold off for 'best offer' after initial asking price of $30M in 1999. Liquidated assets in 2005 which were picked up for $6M by Upper Deck Skybox: acquired for $150M in 1995, folded into Fleer a year later Heroes World: Shut down in 1997 Panini: Sold to an Italian investment group for an amount I cannot find Toy Biz: Managed to come out of Marvel's bankruptcy merged with Marvel and with their people (Ike Perlmutter, Avi Arad) in control
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Mar 30, 2020 18:30
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It's almost definitely Scott Rosenberg, not the royalties to the creators. Quoting myself from the last time this came up:quote:The likely reason that Marvel hasn't used them since isn't the creator-participation thing, which while is/was probably distasteful for Marvel isn't THAT big a deal I assume, and I believe Quesda/Brevoort/others when they say that isn't a dealbreaker. When they intimate there are "other issues" and said they don't want to air any dirty laundry, I assume it's something to do with contracts and Scott Rosenberg. Ultraverse co-creators (the ones who would be paid the royalties) seem to subscribe to the Rosenberg contract theory. In the time since I wrote this, Rosenberg also sold the rights to Youngblood (which he may or may not have actual rights to) to Andrew Rev, which is the last time he came up about a year ago. Edge & Christian fucked around with this message at 01:10 on Mar 31, 2020 |
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Mar 31, 2020 01:07
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danbanana posted:Maybe they're not publishing stories with those characters because they were loving terrible. And as mentioned, there were some cool concepts strewn between the redundant or problematic ones in the Ultraverse, I'm sure someone could do something fun with some of them. Rick posted:Is Youngblood any good? I only ever saw the adverts when I was young, I didn't have the spare money to dip into it. Slightly longer answer: maybe once or twice in 30 years if you really dig around, but mostly no.
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Mar 31, 2020 02:51
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Barry Convex posted:ah, this seems plausible, thanks. How is Platinum Studios still around? Which is why no one heard anything out of Rosenberg for five years until Rob Liefeld abortively tried to sell the film rights to his Extreme Universe to Netflix, at which point Rosenberg emerged from the shadows to declare he actually owned the rights to some of the characters because of the terms of some loan Jeph Loeb got Liefeld to sign in 2000 or some sort of bullshit.
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Mar 31, 2020 17:37
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:I’m reading a big collected edition of New Mutants now, and goddamn is it hilarious that they’re teaming up with failed marketing tie-in Team America by issue four. Professor X ditches the new mutants for three issues in order to train them in mastering their motorcycle skills. I think their toy line and comic had already been cancelled by that point. Team America was a toy line that was created pretty much exclusively because Ideal Toys didn't want to keep making their Evel Knievel toys after he got arrested for attacking the ghost writer of his book with a baseball bat; Evel was upset that the book portrayed him as a violent drug user who abused his wife and kids, and so his solution was to threaten to kill the person who wrote it. So they repainted all of those figures and made a line of DEFINITELY NOT EVEL KNIEVEL motorcycle daredevils wearing patriotic costumes. They paid Marvel to create a tie-in comics that apparently no one wanted to write or draw and it died after a year. New Mutants, meanwhile, was the first extremely popular spin-off of Marvel's top-selling book, and had sales close to X-Men for the first few years of its publication. If anything, the guest appearance was designed to prop up Team America, not the New Mutants. Why they were trying to boost Team America in a storyline that started a few months after the book got canceled, I don't know; maybe Claremont/McLeod started working on it before the book got axed. Maybe it was one of those "tie up loose ends" things Jim Shooter and Mark Gruenwald were fond of doing where a plotline from a canceled book just takes over a more popular book for a minute -- the one I always remember from my childhood of back issue collecting is when the Avengers got a guest writer for two issues to tie up loose ends from the Spider-Woman book despite Jessica Drew having never been an Avengers or really mentioned in passing in the previous or subsequent 200 or so issues. Claremont definitely had the same streak as Gruenwald for "use every part of the continuity buffalo" writing, which sometimes really paid off (digging up Sabretooth as a Marauder/Wolverine nemesis, the whole Carol Danvers rehabilitation run) so maybe he just wanted to use some chopper riding mutants and figured he didn't need to create new ones?
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Apr 5, 2020 21:49
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