quillon42

No problem at all; I enjoy talking about the good old days regarding Marvel. I have a soft spot for the 1980s personally because I started reading/collecting in 1989 or so, and that was about three years before the X-Men hit the mainstream and everything went downhill from there IMO. I don't want to sound "get off my lawn" sanctimonious regarding the stories from the 1980s and earlier, but there was just this...magic to the medium (meaning, the comic industry generally as something just at the fringes of mainstream culture but not drowning in it as it has been since the 1990s and on, as well as the medium of newsprint as against glossy)--yes, the glorious smell of the newsprint, and the fledgling nature of the industry, the fact that it didn't feel like such an obnoxious, financially opportunistic powerhouse without a soul. I think that something like Marvel's "What The...?" series captured that old school soul perfectly; I've only read a few issues of What The, but it had a joking around, palling around feel to it that made everything feel like play--it even lampooned Inferno itself for God's sake. I don't know if they ever had What The after the late 1980s or early 1990s, but I think it would come off as anal and as forced as everything else in Marvel today, if it were done. Let me give a quick digression (from the X-Men, that is) of an example of how Marvel has ruined itself in the last decade or two: The Hulk. The dynamic was classically that you had Bruce becoming the monster, then his monstrous or superpowered enemy, and then there were the masses of humans against which these beings were measured. It would go Hulk, like Leader/Abomination/Modok whoever, then the humans of Rick, Betty, Talbot, Thaddeus Ross, Marlo Chandler, okay. NOW, EVERYONE's a monster, we have Hulk but then A-Bomb and not Rick, Red She Hulk and not Betty, Harpy and not Marlo, in addition to Korg and all these other beasts/beings. When there's too many beasts and not enough humans (like the old phrase "too many Chiefs and not enough Indians") in this series, the story's classic dynamic of "a couple of outcasts against a human populace backdrop" is totally upended, and I think this is a bad thing because I feel the quality over quantity of superhuman beings in The Hulk, as against the masses of supporting character humans, was what made the series work. That's just one example of how Marvel's just become something so unpalatable anymore.

The X-Men franchise has also of course gone to hell, firstly through SO MUCH oversaturation. Yes, in the 1980s there was Uncanny X-Men, Classic X-Men, X-Factor, Excalibur, New Mutants, technically the X-Terminators and Fallen Angels. But both you and I know there must be like, what, 25 or so different X-series now? And many of them are $3.99 American (I live in the USA), a dollar more than most other comics. And don't get me started on what they've done with the X-characters I can appreciate what Morrison did in breaking some new ground per se in like 2001 or whenever, but I want Scott and Jean back together so badly because I feel they are as much an OTP (one true pairing) as Bruce and Betty, Peter and MJ, Reed and Sue, and...I'm trying to go for five...Steve and Peggy? Jane and Donald/Thor? I don't know. If you'd like to see, I'm discussing this right now with another DA artist named Devilkais right now, about how Scott's character has generally been so far fallen and needs to be redeemed (although I feel there have been some small, small things that are a little okay about his changes). And I'd love Madelyne back, as I might have said before, either as a good guy again or as a bad guy (in my heart I'd like the former because she deserves it).

But Marvel has taken everything to hell with its .1 issues (Uncanny X-Men 534.1 or whatever, all the "get the point" issues coming out now), overcapitalistic crossovers every year like they are WWF pay-per-views, and yes, terrible splashes of images in place of story such that you are now paying five times as much as you did in the 1980s for something that takes five times less time to read. I would like the afterlife to consist of a pseudo-Marvel company coming out with stuff that has the newsprint, as well as the story/character feel, of 1980s Marvel perpetually As a last thing here for now, Marvel, one could say, had to do what it had to do, as it supposedly was going bankrupt in the 1990s. But (and again, at the risk of sounding "get off my lawn" curmudgeonly), I honestly see the mainstreaming of the X-Men as the "underground" rock band you loved as a teenager, which you then hated as it "sold out" to the mainstream, or Frankenstein's monster, which Frankenstein wanted so badly to create, and the moment it was created (here, the moment the X-Men hit the mainstream, at least the teen mainstream in 1992 with the Animated Series...then the adult mainstream in 2000 with the live-action movies), Frankenstein/you were horrified at the monster that was created. I watched the Pryde of the X-Men pilot in 1989 and wanted an X-Men series like Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends so badly; what I got in 1992 left me like "What the hell is this crap?!" I don't know why; it just did--perhaps it was because it was accompanied by all the slickness of the glitzy new Jim Lee X-Men series, which was Image-Comics-like in its production, as well as the slickness of other overly stylish artists like Liefeld etc....in addition to the fact that by 1992, the X-Men were SO all over the place that there all of a sudden was no place you could go to get away from them. I would enjoy continuing this discussion some more as well. Keep up the great artwork.