The Confabulator Cafe

Tag: Uncanny X-Men

  • Shaking the Tree

    If you know all the visual cues you’ll understand this. If not, sorry. Image attribution.

    Can you name the original X-Men? Do you know who the first members of the Uncanny X-Men (the second team) were and how many are still in the group? All right, how about the Reavers? Or the New Mutants? What about Generation X?

    My point being that as a reader, anyone who followed the far-ranging cast of characters created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in the 1960s taken by Chris Claremont in the late 70s and expanded beyond any scope or definition of Reason into the 90s had to have an inclination toward keeping literally hundreds of mutants straight. Fortunately there were visual cues. Unfortunately, not every artist interpreted those visual cues the same way.

    But there was a lesson there for young Jason as he aspired to his own dreams of writing. (Sorry, the Claremont pretentiousness sometimes slips over the levee. <cringe>) The lesson was that for a reader to enjoy a story with an enormous cast, the author had to have a kind of shorthand that immediately cued the reader. Sometimes it’s the way a character talks, or a catchword or phrase. Or maybe it’s patois that’s stylistically disguised as “accent” ala having an English character say “Eh, wot?” That’s all in the writing.

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  • Counting Down from Dee to Aay

    Each team member gets their turn at Magneto. How they get there is a subplot. Art by John Byrne. Image Attribution.

    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…)