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Tuesday, April 30, 2019

X-aminations in May 2019 & December 1994 Power Rankings


Reality has been wiped clean; now it's time for the Age of Apocalypse!

After another trading card set and some additional promotional material, of course.

May 1: Unstacking the Deck: Marvel Flair Annual '95

On Sale January 1995
May 8: X-Men Alpha #1

May 15: X-Men - Year of the Mutants Collectors Preview

May 22:  X-Men Chronicles #1

May 29: Astonishing X-Men #1
May 30: Factor X #1
May 31: Weapon X #1

Power Rankings for December 1994

1. X-Men (vol. 2) #41
2. Generation X #4
3. Wolverine #90
4. Cable #20

Death brings out the best in creators, apparently, as all of this month's books are strong, with multiple series taking advantage of the looming "Age of Apocalypse" event to end things with a bang. The issue that actually triggers that destruction takes the top spot, even with some spotty art. After that, Generation X, largely ignoring the end of reality, takes #2 based on the sheer quality of craft involved, while Wolverine tells the page-busting first post-admantium confrontation between Wolverine & Sabretooth while ending with arguably the best of the "reality ending cliffhangers", Cable #20, running parallel to X-Men #41, fills in some of the emotional beats of "Legion Quest" and rounds out the top tier of books.

5Uncanny X-Men #321
6. X-Force #43

Uncanny this month suffers from being the third part of a four part story, thereby largely serving as setup (and missing out on a big cliffhanger ending). Its connection to "Legion Quest" edges it ahead of Fabian Nicieza's functional departure from X-Force, which is a suitable showcase for his ability to find the characters at the heart of the 90s excess of X-Force, is let down somewhat by the knowledge of what comes after it.

7. Excalibur #86
8. X-Factor #111

Neither of these issues are bad - X-Factor remains pretty much the standard for an "average" X-Book - but everything else this month is just that much better. Warren Ellis starts to find his voice on Excalibur, only to have it interrupted by AoA, while X-Factor concludes a pretty ho-hum story with a decent cliffhanger that, unfortunately, will be resolved off-panel and then mostly ignored.

8 comments:

  1. Was I the only who saw the cover to X-men Alpha in the ads when it first came out and wrongly assumed that Blink was a really changed version of Psylocke?

    wwk5d
    wwk5d

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    1. I feel like I immediately made the connection between AoA Blink and the one that died in "Phalanx Covenant", though probably only because WIZARD pointed it out to me at some point.

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  2. I don’t know why but your site is only working with http, not the secure https. My bookmark here is for the latter address and it just starting returning an error recently — in both Safari and Chrome. I haven’t seen the same problem with other blogs hosted by Blogger, so it could just be that your redirect got switched off unintentionally; the https option is under Basic in the Settings part of your Blogger Control Panel.

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    1. Strange; the redirect did get turned off. It's back on now, should be good.

      Delete
  3. I recently started reading the current Uncanny with issue and on as well af the current X-Force and was thinking it would be cool if we had a current X-Men post that we could comment on and discuss with the group here what's currently going on. Just a thought.

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    Replies
    1. Hmm, I've never really thought about that. I'm not sure how much I'd be able to contribute myself, as I'm perpetually way behind in my "current" reading (I'm still finishing up the Gold/Blue/Red era). But maybe having a post like that would force me to catch up. I'd be down for it as long as it maintains the civil tone we've kept up in the comments section here so far (as I don't want to have to jump in a ton and be a moderator, especially if I'm not actively involved in the discussion).

      What say everyone else? If I set up a regular "Talkback" kind of thing for people to discuss current X-books, would people use it?

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  4. Oh good, you're giving me time to try and get ahead of you! I was on vacation last week and fell behind on my reading, and I was afraid you'd be through a bunch of AoA #1s by now.

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    1. Yeah, I intentionally gave myself a lighter May - my wife and I both have our birthdays towards the end of the month, and our local two day comic convention is before that, which means I have a lot more demands on my time than usual helping with setup & whatnot a couple weeks before that, so May is always crazy. This year I decided to lean into that & go easy on the reviews instead of fighting it and trying to do too much.

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