When I was growing up Chris Claremont and John Byrne (with Terry Austin, Glynis Wein and my favorite letterer EVER Tom Orzechowski) were taking comic books to new levels that are taken for granted now. Their run on Uncanny X-Men from 1977 – 1981 shaped how comics are made forever. What did they do? They built up anticipation with subplots that would run over the course of several issues as a ‘D’ or ‘C’ story of a couple of panels or one page or so and then graduate it to a ‘B’ story for a couple of issues before it became the ‘A’ story. The one featured on the cover.
It was classic soap opera storytelling but it was NEW. Well, not absolutely new, but they did it in a way that was so fresh it appeared new. I suspect they learned it from what Paul Levitz was doing as he was writing his classic Legion of Superheroes runs and he did the same thing. Anyway, that’s enough about comics for the nonce. (I always wanted to use ‘nonce’ in a blog post. Check that one off my list.)
This is what influenced me in storytelling, these amazing comics that took me places I’d never been before, told me stories in ways I hadn’t seen before. That particular run, Uncanny 108 to 143, made me want to make comics. I wanted to draw like Byrne (with Austin) and write with the style of Claremont but I didn’t know how. I didn’t know what to do. It took me years to realize there was a secret I hadn’t picked up on and even then I wasn’t sure how to go about discovering it. (more…)