The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1584: Uncanny X-Men #212, December 1986

Where to start with this one?

When this comic came out, it skyrocketed in price. According to all the sources I can find, this is the first time Wolverine and Sabertooth face one another. Sabertooth was originally introduced as an unpowered assassin in Chris Claremont's Iron Fist, and subsequently found his way into X-Men history via this crossover. Claremont has gone on record saying that Sabertooth was always meant to be Wolverine's father, and the dialogue in today's issue really does reinforce that. Wolverine's expositional captions reveal that the two have a history together, a subtle retcon, but page 14 of the story gives us their first published meeting.

I think that even by this point, I was getting sick of Wolverine. I wonder if anyone's done any work on Logan's dialogue in 80s X-Men comics in comparison to the clipped style of Frank Miller's Dark Knight. I really think Wolverine, and the way he was depicted in the early to mid 80s, influenced the Grim'n'Gritty (TM) aesthetic that overtook comics in the wake of Dark Knight. Regardless, even this early into my X-Men reading I noticed the ridiculous over-exposure of the X-Men's resident Canadian. He's still overused and over-rated, IMHO, but there's a lot of people out there who love him to bits.

What else? Rick Leonardi's guest pencils on the issue are just beautiful. He reminds me of Halo Jones' Ian Gibson, though with a more American inflection. His ability to communicate movement in a static frame is just amazing. This comic includes, even outside of the Wolverine/Sabertooth scuffle, some beautifully-drawn action sequences. And the characters have extremely expressive faces, something not always in evidence, particularly in the more violent era of superheroes that this issue heralds.

Another interesting thing about this crossover in general is that after that first, violent foray in X-Men 210-211 and X-Factor 9-10, most of the story is aftermath. The Morlocks, for the most part, are dead by the time we get to the crossover issues and the rest of the main series story. The Marauders are vanishing back to wherever they came from, mopping up a few final stragglers. Like I said in an earlier post, it's the teams reacting to a level of violence that they have a hard time resisting at the beginning. Now, later into the story, it's about them returning to the scene of the crime to see if there's anything left that they can do.

"Coulda chopped you smooth as sin while you were dreamin', bub!"

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1577: Uncanny X-Men #210, October 1986

Aside from reading the "Age of Apocalypse" back in the first year of the project, they've been mostly absent from my writing. I started out liking the team, but they just became too mired down in continuity, and too mired down in their own metaphorical nature. I picked this issue up and was struck by the fact that Marvel basically tries to commit genocide against a group of people every few years with the X-Men. What if we instead tried showing a world that doesn't hate and fear them, but accepts them? Perhaps then life might imitate art for a bit.

Despite that, I loved, and still love, this crossover. I think it was one of Marvel's first bit crossovers, and the GCD lists it as the first X-Men crossover issue. That's a dubious honour, considering some of the crossovers that followed. This one, though, unlike many of those that follow, seems very personal. There's something intimate about the way the Marauders cut a swath through the Morlocks. It's got a claustrophobic setting that bleeds out into everything about the comic. This is my era of X-Men, when I discovered the mutant corner of the Marvel U and found a metaphor blunt enough to speak to my 12-year old brain.

Enjoyable as it is, I will say that Chris Claremont's style in this series has not aged well. Colossus has waaaaay too many internal soliloquies, as do, honestly, all of the other characters in the book. There's so much exposition that, really, doesn't need to be there. Contemporary comics allow that the reader has some experience of the world, and some intelligence, and don't spell everything out for you. I wonder what it would be like to remaster some of these old stories into contemporary aesthetics.

More massacred mutants tomorrow.

"What I wish, comrade Piotr Nikolievitch Rasputin -- what I really want -- is a super hot fudge quad-scoop sundae bananarama split with all the trimmings."

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 998: X-Men (, Uncanny) Annual #12, 1988

One thing I love about this era of Marvel is all of the Art Adams annuals we get. But, ye gods, Claremont's dialogue is just terrible. The use of the thought bubble has gone out of vogue in comics these days, and I really think that it was the Claremont X-titles that signaled its death knell. There's just too much. A comic panel is meant to move fairly quickly, especially an action one involving superheroes. So if we have a huge diatribe in thought holding our attention as someone is flying through the air, it makes all of the action seem like it's in slow motion. I'm sure have much more to say about this when I get to reading the voluminous run of Uncanny that sits in the collection.

But, y'know, on the other side of things, there's Art Adams. He's up there for me with Frank Quitely as one of the artists who really grasps the stylized ridiculousness of the superheroic form, but manages to tell compelling stories using it nonetheless. His Jonni Future stuff for Tom Strong's Terrific Tales is beautiful to behold (and self-consciously hyper-sexualized), and the ways he makes these characters move connotes a sort of grace that one expects of mythic figures - even when they're falling over or making fools of themselves!

Story-wise, there's a few more connections to the other annuals in the crossover, but not much. I'm glad to have read the Avengers issues recently in which Terminus destroyed the Savage Land, as this comic made much more sense this time around.

To be continued.