Uncanny X-Men #273

[history79]

Comments

[zylly]

That’s the thing that’s always gotten me about the Australia era. It’s one thing to have let the world at large think they were dead. But it was outright cruel to Kitty, Kurt, Illyana, and the rest not to tell them.

[icon_uk]

I mean it's not like Illyana could come to any harm by losing contact with her best friend (who is stuck a medlab in Scotland), a close team-mate who tended to act as moral compass dying pointlessly AND her beloved big brother apparently dying live on television.

I mean what could possibly go wrong with a conflicted demon sorceress who was raised in a hell dimension feeling emotionally abandoned?

[zylly]

Why, absolutely nothing! It's totally, totally harmless and will not come back to haunt them in any way at all!

[katefan]

Honestly that was the beginning of the end for me where the X-Men were concerned. I also didn't like how every X-Man's power was malfunctioning because Claremont seemed to think what the team needed was even more angst. I hated the concept of Genosha, hated how Havok hooked up with Madeline, hated how before that Cyclops completely abandoned his wife. God how I utterly hated this entire era for turning characters I liked into complete bastards.

Oh, and I hated how aliens invaded the Earth, ones that liked to implant eggs into super powered people, and the X-Men didn't see fit to warn the Fantastic Four or Avengers. The Brood invading Earth could have actually been a really good crossover event but it seemed Claremont didn't want people playing in his sandbox.

[zylly]

While I think it eventually recovered, I do agree and generally consider the nadir of Uncanny to be pretty much everything from the Mutant Massacre to the end of the Muir Island Saga. There's just so much crap and bad decisions going on during this period.

And I could go on for days about how the decision to bring Jean back and poor writing in response to it damaged Cyclops as a character to the point where I'm not sure he ever recovered (it's why I love teen!Scott so much).

From what I understand and have pieced together in various interviews, it's always sounded like there was a lot of friction between Claremont and the rest of the writers/editors. I've often wondered if some of the powers that be weren't mad that an upstart title like X-Men was eclipsing what they thought "should" have been the flagship titles like Spider-Man, Avengers, and FF.

[katefan]

Oh absolutely, Scott's character never recovered from abandoning the wife who looked just like his old girlfriend to be with his old girlfriend. And it just kept getting worse, with him cheating on Jean with Emma.

I can imagine jealousy naturally occurring but I think it had more to do with Claremont's success rather than the tools in which he used. Too perhaps he had a lot more creative freedom than other writers did. From what I understand each editor/writer relationship is different, which I guess is why Mark Waid's run on X-Men was what I heard unremarkable because he was operating under a lot of editorial mandates. I'm sorry I don't have any links to confirm that, just what a friend told me after listening to some blogs.

Maybe the whole exile to Australia thing was Claremont unconsciously exiling himself from the rest of the MU, distancing himself from men and women he didn't know how to collaborate with. I heard his split with John Byrne had been nasty, maybe that soured him on the very thought of collaboration with others.

[tcampbell1000]

Waid and Lobdell were working on the X-books at the same time, and it quickly became apparent who was more willing to complicate things up Claremont-style. And that was what editorial wanted. It was apparent in the differences in their writing styles, but also...

Waid: Onslaught is the manifestation of every dark thought Professor X has repressed! Here's a panel from Stan and Jack's X-Men #2 that shows him thinking wildly inappropriate thoughts about Jean! See, thoughts like that! We all have 'em, even if they're only the briefest flickers in our minds, and that's what makes this idea relatab--

Lobdell: Onslaught happened because Professor X got tainted that time he tried to kill Magneto in my X-Men #25, soaking up the bad parts of Magneto into himself and merging them with his own suppressed urges! So this is kind of both Xavier AND Magneto's fault! Psychics, am I right?

[zylly]

That doesn't surprise me; Waid's style has always been entertaining, but very straightforward and reasonably quick to resolve any mysteries or questions that pop up. Pretty much the antithesis of what Claremont's X-Men were built on.

Waid's version of Onslaught makes a lot more sense, when you consider that had already happened once before in the X-Men/Micronauts miniseries.

[scelestus]

Nobody ever remembers or acknowledges the Micronauts/X-men crossover. Possessed Xavier's ...interaction with Dani Moonstar in that crossover should've had lasting (and damning) repercussions.

[zylly]

Granted, it's a little harder to reference these days, since a lot of the Micronauts characters are no longer capable of being used, but still. It's an important piece of X-Men history.

[zylly]

I know there was a lot of sniping back and forth from Claremont and various writers during their period.

Such as Claremont and Byrne feuding over Reed Richards saving Galactus when Phoenix had to be killed. Or Stern and Claremont over where Margali Szardos fell in the mystical hierarchy. Or Shooter's handling of the X-Men as major jerks in Secret Wars. Or the various issues that cropped up in the first Avengers vs. X-Men thing.

...So yeah, lots of feuding.

[katefan]

I imagine there was also the issue of the Kitty/Peter relationship that was an issue as well, as Shooter wrote Peter kind've cheating on Kitty and this resulting in their break up.

[zylly]

Yeah, I know that was a BIG point of contention with Shooter.

[katefan]

Teen love can be a touchy subject especially where the perceived and actual ages of the characters were concerned. Kitty was 14, Peter was at least 19 since he was able to drink at a bar in NYC and that was the legal drinking age there then.

If Jim was the editor in chief at the time the romance started then I can see where Chris might have been upset if his boss yanked the rug out from under him, changing his mind about the whole thing. But maybe Jim got a talking to from his bosses about the whole affair and had to play bad cop. But honestly if Jim signed off on it, what the hell was he thinking? I don't care how innocent the relationship was supposed to be, prudish Americans were gonna squawk.

[zylly]

I've always heard it being down to Shooter's personal distaste for it, but it's entirely possible that there's more to the story than meets the eye. Either way, I think he was probably right to end it, since it was moving way beyond a one-sided teenage crush.

[starwolf_oakley]

Genosha isn't the best concept. Aside from "mutants brainwashed into willing slavery is bad." Genosha was usually a "metaphor of the moment," with it being Bosnia in "Bloodlines" and then becoming "mutant Israel" once Magneto took it over.

[katefan]

Very true, all of it.

[tcampbell1000]

As a concept, I feel like Genosha's fascinating. Of course different countries would respond differently to "the mutant question," and some of them might even be defined by it. But you need a solid interest in economics, politics, demographics, culture, and all the other things that make up a nation to follow that up, and that is something Marvel writers have rarely taken time to do.

Plus, that "metaphor of the moment" problem has always been a little bit of the problem with the X-Men (they are every marginalized group in humanity and none of them, all at once), so it's not too surprising Genosha would end up echoing it.

[zylly]

Your "different countries would react differently" thing reminds me of Excalibur, up until Warren Ellis took over, where its basic answer to the mutant issue was "did they save the country? Yes? Then no one cares that they're mutants."

[icon_uk]

Warren Ellis continued that trend I feel, to the extent of the scene where Brian and Meggan watch the post-Onslaught mourning for the Avengers, FF, et al on TV, and muse that the hysterical reaction in the States is unlike anything that the British would have for their heroes.

Superhumans of any sort have never been the polarising force they are in the States, so whilst they've never been as adored as the Avengers, they've never been as hated as the X-Men, and they're quite happy with that.

(It was a touch ironic that that discussion camejust a year before the media-hyped furore over the death of Diana, Princess of Wales)

[zylly]

I may be mis-remembering; I didn't read too much of that era, so I'm glad to see it sounds like I was exaggerating it a bit.