Not much sucks more than having a great artist under a terrible writer, unless of course it's a great artist (John Cassaday) co-writing with Ben Raab, and making your favorite character look like a schmuck.
And Ben Raab...man, I don't want to say I hate the guy, but god I hate him. I don't know if he was given an editorial fiat to clearcut everything cool Warren Ellis did on Excalibur, or if he did it himself, but he rode that book into the ground. I'm sure Raab's a good guy and doesn't eat puppies, but I have the same level of distaste for his work that others have for say, Chuck Austen's. Austen at least had brief shining moments of not-total crapitude.
Of course, Raab and Austen may have freed hundreds of readers from a mindless completism, from that stupid primal impulse to buy a comic like Uncanny X-Men month in and month out regardless of the quality of the product. (True, by bottoming it out, but still...) So, don't think of them as hacks, think of them as emancipators. Seriously, it's very much like comics readers didn't realize that they didn't have to buy a particular comic if they weren't enjoying it, until these guys.
Man, out of all the comics I've lost or sold over the years, I still have a ton of these. And almost uniformly, they reek. It just occurred to me, and I probably wouldn't since I'm a huge packrat, but could I even get rid of them? Or are they like hazardous waste comics, potentially toxic to anyone that might want to continue reading comics in the future? Like lead poisoning or something, like leaving the Draco or the Drago or whatever the hell it was somewhere where kids could read it would permanently put them off comics.
It also staggers me to think that about the same time as the first X-Men movie, the comic was going into a long doldrums. And right about now, with the third Spider-Man movie out, I can't remember the last time I bought a new issue of the regular Spider-Man comics, at full price anyway.
I think I blogged too many good comics lately, so this has been from X-Men/Alpha Flight #1. This copy has a quarter sticker on it, but I have a sinking feeling that I paid full price for it back in 1998.
Hooboy, you are preaching to the choir, my friend. As a former Marvel Zombie, I now look back at my life in some wonder. When did X-men become so terrible, and why didn't I notice it at the time?
ReplyDeleteI won't even go into what they've done to Nightcrawler, who is still one of my favorites.