- X-amining New Mutants #87
- X-amining Uncanny X-Men #381
- X-amining X-Men (vol. 2) #25
- X-amining X-Men (vol. 2) #1
- X-amining Phoenix: The Untold Story #1
I have a new piece up on Pop Heist, a guide to the "All New, All Different" X-Men in honor of their 50t anniversary, in which I pick the best story for each of the X-Men who appear in Giant-Size X-Men #1. Give it a read, and let me know which stories you think are the characters' best.
Also at Pop Heist, check out the recaps of the original animated G.I. Joe series. Informative, insightful, and hilarious, they make for great reading alongside G. Kendall's posts on the animated toy commercials. They're behind a paywall, but well worth the price of admission alone.
A couple of interviews I conducted posted last week. First is a chat with writer David Pepose for Comicon.com, talking about his Space Ghost and Captain Planet series and being "the cartoon guy".
Then, for ComicsXF, I chatted with Daryl Lawrence, who has a new book out July 1, True North, an issue-by-issue guide to Alpha Flight. It's basically what I'd like to do with X-aminations someday (in terms of turning them into a book), and I can't wait to get my hands on a copy.
Also at ComicsXF, check out Anna Peppard's great piece on the sexiness — or lack thereof — in the new Emma Frost: White Queen #1.
I've got a new Snap Into Marvel up at Comicon.com, digging into the comic book background of Dormammu and the clever way the card's gameplay requires sacrifice to effectively play the card.
New Fantastic Four trailer dropped last week; I like that they gave it a running gag with the "clobberin' time" bit that escalates throughout. Also, Thing has a beard?!? Love it.
I generally read Vince Mancini for his recaps of Top Chef, but this piece he wrote for GQ on Father's Day about being the parent of a toddler feels very relevant to this father-of-a-four-year-old. It's also really funny.
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Just as I was finishing this up, news broke that Jim Shooter passed away. As an editor, he often had an intrusive hand to the point of being detrimental — the various edicts he handed down, like when he forbade continuing stories, strike me as a level of micromanagement I don't want to see from the EiC (to say nothing of the fact that I'm generally not a fan of any "no __ ever!" kind of pronouncements). But there's also no denying his talent, as both a creator, an editor, and a manager. Even if he (implicitly or not) signed off on the original "Dark Phoenix" ending only to reverse course and demand a last minute change, his instincts were correct, and the end result is a stronger story.
He also whipped Marvel into shape as a company after a revolving door of Editors-in-Chief throughout the mid 70s, getting books out on time and shoring up narrative consistency and continuity. He is on the list of people that we can say without him, both G.I. Joe and Transformers as we know them wouldn't exist. Same for the concept of the crossover event (I'll let you decide if that's a good or bad thing). And he oversaw a number of sustained creative highpoints for multiple books during his tenure, from Claremont's X-Men to Miller's Daredevil to Stern's Avengers and Amazing Spider-Man to Byrne's Fantastic Four to Simonson's Thor.
That's all to say nothing of his contributions as a Legion of Super-Heroes writer (which he started doing at the age of 14, a fact which never gets less bonkers), or the creation of Valiant. Is it ridiculous that he had Spider-Man beat all the X-Men in Secret Wars? Yes. More importantly, was his "no gays" policy backwards, deeply harmful, and a key contribution to Marvel's long-held homophobia? Also yes.
Rarely can people be entirely defined as "good" or "bad", and as a giant in the comics industry, that is perhaps more true of Jim Shooter than most.
RIP Jim Shooter. He had his pluses and minuses, but many do and having to shepherd a bunch of chaotic creators can't be easy. I think Ike Perlmutter had some similarity in that. I lucked out that in my current run through your X-aminations that it just happened I was up to Secret Wars.
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