At the urgings of John Voulieris, I am starting a thread to alert people to the latest installment of my "Claremont's X-Men" reviews. I've been doing this for a while, going all the way back to X-Men 94, Claremont's first issue. I'm now up to #223, the review for which just went up today:

http://geoffklock.blogspot.com/2009/05/ ... n-223.html

Anyone who wants to read and discuss, post away!

(All the old reviews are archived on the site as well ... nearly 150 blog entries now ... in case anyone likes them enough to go back and re-read. I've devoted a lot of words to this project, and the plan is to keep on writing until I hit X-Men #3 from 1991. At which point maybe I'll start blogging about the new "X-Men Forever" comic.)

Good stuff Doot! Eager to follow your blog as you review these classic comics!

The Demon Bear/Naze connection is a great example of Claremont's writing...subtle connections that are not needed to enjoy the story but reward long time readers.

Later on during the Jim Lee run..i think issue 274...the Shadow King is in the astral plane and we see reflection of his past bodies like Amahl Farhouk..we also see Naze/Adversary....so was the Shadow King one of the dark gods that Naze worshipped/was part of? Or the other way around..interesting speculation and Claremont was indeed a master at sparking reader's imaginations...long term mysteries...connections between characters...he engaged the reader in a subtle way and got everyone talking..

People would complain that they wanted explanations...and it was good to get some once in a while..but it was also cool to let mysteries simmer and it definitely got people taking about the Xmen...better than the plain vanilla comics that explained everything and hit you over the head with their clunky writing (I am looking at you John Byrne).

I never noticed that panel in 273 until someone pointed it out to me on a message board.

It is an interesting question: What is the connection between the Shadow King and the Adversary? Were they the same being?

There was this one really obsessive Claremont fan on a message board (I cannot find it anymore, sadly), who had put a ton of thought into that and other questions left from Claremont's run. He had this whole kind of unified-field theory explaining all of Claremont's loose ends. It was mad, and brilliant. The Shadow King was kind of a key component -- the theory being that the S.K. was indeed also the Adversary, and possibly a few other mysterious evils from the run.

It is an intriguing theory, as the two characters (King and Adversary) kind of leap-frogged over each other during Claremont's run.

I'm slowly going through my X-Men run as well, but The Extinction Agenda is incredibly hard to trudge through. It may be that I'm reading the X-Factor and New Mutant issues alongside the Claremont/Lee issues of Uncanny, because the artwork in New Mutants & X-Factor is incredibly awful when compared to the art in the X-Men issues.

That's true. Although the New Mutants issues shouldn't take you all that long, since Leifeld tended to only draw about three panels per page ...

Doot - if you can find that fan's post - please post it here - I have my own theories on CC's old plot threads and love to hear other people's.

CC did mention "dark gods" in numerous series of his...the Ngarai worshipped them..as did Kulan Gath...as did some villains from his sword and sorcery stuff...I think the Shadow King and Naze were linked to some Dark Gods or part of the same primal evil being...again its cool that it did not need to be spelt out...it lets us speculate and have fun.

Robert - in general I stop reading New Mutants after CC left the series (issue 54 I beleive)...downhill after that...!

Never knew you did these reviews and that you've been doing 'em for two years! I'm reading them from the beginning now.

Sweet!

I didn't know about them either. Good work, Doot!

Doot - another set of villains that were thematically linked like Naze/Shadow King were the hounds, Mojo and the Shadow King:

Rachel was a hound in the future - in the True Friends mini she travels back in time and encounters Farhouk/Shadow King who probes her mind and sees her hound form which he likes and then adopts to his own slaves in his future/our present (circa UXM 266 - Gambit's first appearance) - nice little chicken/egg paradox there - especially if you consider that the government that the shadow King was influencing at that point may have adopted the hound persona from him!

Plus we get these otherdimensional entities like the alien slave traders (CC's second brief return run on UXM around issue 390) and Mojo - both big fat guys (like Shadow King) who enslave mutants and aliens as sort of hounds...are they all linked? otherdimensional shadow king creatures? Influenced by him as a dark god? even Spiral who works for Mojo takes an interest in Rachel to remake her...(to bad we never got that Rachel mini by CC and Leonardi)....lots of cool links there that are not explicit but get the mind going...what do you think?

Posts by a guy who usually goes by 'David R.'

The man has been logging Chris Claremont's posts for YEARS, and is a wealth of info on CC's aborted plans, some of which may be coming back for X-Men Forever, I guess.

Fascinating stuff, and a true benefit to the community, from a historical perspective.



Loving the reviews, Doot.

Would love to see you go a bit further than #3 though, to see what you thought of the change of writers. I'd also like to see what you thought of Uncanny, with.......Fatal Attractions or Bloodties as your jumping off point?

What's with the way those reviews are posted within another guy's blog?

Prowl - do ou have a link to David R's posts?

Yeah, you should repost them on the Ocean Doot blog.

http://forums.comicbookresources.com/sh ... p?t=271220


He's been posting a fair bit of stuff throughout this thread at CBR. Go into his profile and you can bring up all his posts.

Otherwise I think he posts at ComiXfan (or used to, I haven't been there for aaaages)

Direct link to a list of his posts at CBR, obviously you'll have to scan through to find the relevant ones, mostly recent: http://forums.comicbookresources.com/se ... id=4046325

Thanks!

Geoff's blog gets a lot more traffic than my own would. He's the author of a great book called "How to Read Superhero Comics and Why."

I stopped reading X-Men, Uncanny X-Men and X-Force after "X-Cutioner's Song," because I thought it was so terrible.

I stopped reading X-Factor when PAD left.

Came back briefly to Uncanny to read the big 300th issue with JRJr. drawing the return of Nightcrawler.

But issue 300 was my last. I have not read an issue since, although I have read review sites just to stay informed about the broad strokes of where things went.

My general opinion is that with Claremont gone (essentially driven out by Bob Harras' mismanagement), the X-Books had an opportunity to go in a fresh direction. Instead, they just cynically tried to reproduce the cliche Claremont style without bringing any of his passion or love of the characters to it. So you still got the open-ended plot threads that rarely resolved, the melodramatic speeches, the tangled interpersonal relationships, the overall soap opera feel ...

But whereas Claremont wrote like that because that is what he liked to write, now it was a committee of editors and plotters just doing it that way because that is what sells.

X-Cutioner's Song was the final straw of stupidity for me, when it became clear that nobody had any clear idea of WTF was going on. (Mr. Sinister captures Scott and Jean, then trades them for a canister he believes contains "Summers genetic material"? I'm no scientist, but if you've got Scott Summers, don't you HAVE "Summers genetic material"?)

Anyway, Paul O'Brien has already done, I think, a pretty thorough job of documenting post-Claremont "Uncanny."

http://thexaxis.com/indexes/uncannyxmen/index.htm

Although I think he is far, far too kind ...

There was a "What If" that came out just after Claremont left, with "What if Dark Phoenix Had Not Died?" (This was in 1991 or 1992, the second attempt at doing this premise. The first one had been written by Jo Duffy in the original "What If" run.)

The new one had a plot co-credited to Chris Claremont (I don't recall who actually scripted it), and it had some intriguing hints about the Shadow King/Hound connection. Basically the idea in this story was that if Phoenix hadn't died, everything would have led to the Days of Future Past timeline. She was the key to that happening. I believe in that story we see The Shadow King turn up and turn Rachel into a Hound. (This is well before the paradox you describe in "True Friends.")

So yeah, even back then there was a connection there. And back around the 260s, the Shadow King was creating hounds even while there was talk in other issues of how the SK had government ties. So did the "Hound" creation process come into possession of the government thanks to SK?

Another connection (and this was pointed out by that same poster I mentioned earlier, who had obviously thought hard about all these connections) is the one between Mojo and Cameron Hodge, who showed up in "X-Tinction Agenda" with a big mechanical body with a tail and spider-legs, much like Mojo's chair. And Hodge had taken over Genosha, another place where we see technology that turns mutants into slaves.

AND there is also (around the 230s of Uncanny) the connection between the Genoshan technology and Mr. Sinister's! Madelyne, who was created in some kind of cloning apparatus by Sinister, recognizes something familiar in the Genoshan technology that lets them "decant" mutant babies.

So Mr. Sinister has shared technology with Genosha, Genosha was allied with Hodge, Hodge's body looks like it is derived from Mojoworld technology, Mojo took an interest in Rachel, Rachel was a Hound, hounds are created by the Shadow King, the Shadow King was also the Adversary...

It starts to become overwhelming (at least for me).

It would have been neat if Claremont had used the opportunity in something like "X-Men: The End" to bring all this stuff together in some kind of ultimate, continuity-porn, fan-fic epic on a par with Busiek's "Avengers Forever." That would have been a fun reward for longtime Claremont fans.

But then again, maybe spelling it all out would have ruined what makes it so intriguing.

Doot - I am really going to enjoy these threads:) Ill have to track down that What if issue - sounds intriguing...! And your right maybe spelling it all out would be a bad move. Better to let readers put the small connections together.

And I agree with you in regards to post CC Xmen - Lobdell and the rest of those clowns turned the franchise into convoluted crap.

Prowl - thanks for the link buddy.

I have to confess that if I ever became, like, a successful TV writer or something and was allowed to do some kind of vanity project for Marvel, it would be a series that tied up all the threads from Claremont's X-Men run. I just wouldn't be able to resist.

The What If? I mentioned is a two-parter FYI. I want to say it was in the low 30s ... ? (32 and 33 maybe?)

Part Two is not quite as interesting as Part One, frankly. (Only the first part has Claremont listed as co-plotter, which is telling). But it still is an interesting curio for Claremont buffs.