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Geoff Klock's
Geoff Klock's (geoffklock.blogspot.com) has great X-Men news, photos, videos and more
Tuesday, Jan 26
Uncanny X-Men #253
The story cycle from issues 246 to 252 saw Claremont steadily narrowing down his cast of characters, to the point where Wolverine was the only one left. Logan is even referred to as “the last of the Uncanny X-Men” in the opening splash pages of issues 251 and 252, just to drive the sense of fina...
Tuesday, Jan 19
Uncanny X-Men #252
Jason Powell. Chris Claremont. The epic issue by issue X-Men conversation continues. At the end, only two men will be left standing. Claremont will be one. Jason Powell will be the other. And I guess we will all be standing around and occasionally saying stuff as well. There is a lot to talk about.]
Tuesday, Jan 12
Uncanny X-Men #251
Here, Wolverine faces images of: Kitty Pryde, his former sidekick; his villainous reflection, Sabretooth; the grinning demon Ogun, whom he killed in the “Kitty/Wolverine” miniseries; and an inhuman monster in the form of the Brood queen.
Tuesday, Dec 22
Uncanny X-Men #250
Compared to other multiple-of-fifty anniversary issues that comic-book creators love to make a big deal out of – Claremont being no exception – Uncanny X-Men #250 arrives with little fanfare. A caption reminds us that it is the 250th issue, but apart from that it feels much less like a turn...
Tuesday, Dec 15
Uncanny X-Men #249
The Savage Land, another classic X-riff, is reprised here. Neal Adams’ Savage Land mutates are brought in as the villains, a development seeded in X-Men Annual #12. There’s something very poetic about the way the classic settings and characters start returning during this phase of Clare...
Tuesday, Dec 8
Opinion: Uncanny X-Men #248
The main villains of Uncanny X-Men #248, Nanny and the Orphan-Maker, are rather unremarkable. A recent addition to the X-mythology courtesy of Louise Simonson in X-Factor, the villains boast both a dubious aesthetic appeal (an egg with legs and a man in generic comic-book armor) and an e...
Monday, Dec 7
Mainstream Comics Are Increasingly Lame (it's not just Tim Callahan and Chad Nevett)
Between the ages of 15 and 20 I read all the X-Men books for five years -- right after Claremont left: Age of Apocalypse, and Generation X and Onslaught, and Stryfe. Then I matured by moving beyond the brand and to the writers. I was in a new decade and the shift made sense. Suddenly I did not care wh...
Sunday, Nov 29
Uncanny X-Men #247
Sidebar: Thanks go to Neil Shyminsky for helping to inspire some of the above, particularly the Reavers-as-stand-in-for-Marvel Editorial. Whether intended or not, the idea of the X-Men scattering across the globe in order to escape the Reavers is quite attractively read as a metaphor...
Tuesday, Nov 24
Uncanny X-Men 246
Thus, it’s no accident that the villain of issue 246 is a Sentinel. Satisfyingly, Claremont also brings back Nimrod, one of the major plot-danglers left over from before “Mutant Massacre.” Nimrod was originally rather blatant in its derivation by Claremont from two sources: Alan Moore’...
Friday, Nov 20
Johns v Moore, and comfort reading
I do think Johns fails at bringing forth any big ideas, like Moore, Morrison, Miller, or the complexity of an Azzarello, Ennis, or Ellis, but I think he's really great at what he does do -- delivering the pure essence of characters in fun stories.
Thursday, Nov 12
Alan Moore on Blackest Night and the reusing of ideas in comics
I thought I would throw this out to the blog and see what you guys thought and if any of you had been keeping up with the Blackest Night crossover. Also, Moore seems to be bemoaning the idea of building upon old story ideas but, isn’t that what superhero comics have always done? Geoff and I have d...
Tuesday, Nov 10
Uncanny X-Men #245
Another complaint about Claremont (there are so very many) is that his brand of superhero feminism was less than it should have been, because he “cheated” by making his female characters into powerhouses. A letter was published in Uncanny late in the run, opining that Claremont had only t...
Tuesday, Nov 3
Opinion: Uncanny X-Men #244
Thus, this issue and the next comprise an opening one-two punch in Claremont’s attempt to get his characters out of the pressure-cooker and let them live, and breathe. The villains (a parody of Ghostbusters, portrayed by writers of the Wild Cards series, to which Claremont contributed a...
Tuesday, Oct 27
Uncanny X-Men #243
Still, it contains some intriguing turns. Psylocke, for example, wonders whether “the changes [to the X-Men] wrought by ‘Inferno’ … were more than cosmetic.” This is a fascinating development that Claremont will kinda-sorta explore over the next few months before dropping it (perhaps...
Tuesday, Oct 20
Uncanny X-Men #242
Jason Powell continues his issue by issue look at Claremont's X-Men. An especially good entry here, in its look at Cyclops and Havok.] Dazzler: “Red’s in trouble.” Longshot: “Theirs or ours?” Dazzler: “Theirs. Could probably use a hand.” Longshot: “What’d she ever do for us?”
Thursday, Oct 15
Uncanny X-Men #241
Note: The full “secret origin” of Madelyne – her ties to Phoenix, etc. – is never given by Claremont. He leaves it to Louise Simonson to reveal in X-Factor #38. But we do get a lot of it here, and I still maintain that “Inferno” works perfectly well to explain the long-running mysteries, certain...
Tuesday, Oct 13
Opinion: Planetary 27
It's not that I don't enjoy the hell out of some mad-science / gorgeous-nonsense but a little bit goes a long way: this is a lot of undigested material, like an essay in comic book form. Drums even illustrates his lectures -- not too helpfully I thought -- with a magic pen writing on air, but it w...
Tuesday, Oct 6
Uncanny X-Men #240
So begins “Inferno,” the 1988 X-Men fall crossover. This is the one everyone hates. To sum up the history at this point: 1986 was the year of the first X-over -- “Mutant Massacre,” a flawed but entertaining comics event built around a suitably momentous occurrence in the franchise’s histor...
Tuesday, Sep 29
Uncanny X-Men #239
As to the X-Men vignettes, the most notable among them is the practice session among Colossus, Psylocke and Rogue, a bit that accomplishes several dramatic goals within the span of only a few pages. First, it’s established that Rogue and Carol’s personalities now switch in and out regula...
Tuesday, Sep 22
Uncanny X-Men #238
Claremont followed that example for years. Here, in the conclusion to the four-part Genoshan story, the author spends a massive percentage of the available 22 pages dwelling on Madelyne Pryor’s development into something otherworldly – it’s all less to do with Genosha and more to do wit...
Friday, Sep 18
The Regurgitation Of Kitty Pryde
It is scalable biz once again, I'm afraid, and therefore part of the same problem. The stupid money, that can make lazy writers of any of us. Get In, Get Out, Get Over...I can think of many a comics writer who might as well have that translated into Latin and tattooed on the inside of his ear: many a co...
Sunday, Jul 12
X-Men Annual #12b
From there, we proceed to a sequence in which Mojo creates one X-Men spinoff after another. Note that in 1988, the amount of X-Men spinoffs could still be counted on one hand. Though the writing was on the wall, the franchise was still relatively contained, and would not proliferate to absur...
Tuesday, Jun 23
Jason Powell on Uncanny X-Men #227
Silvestri and Green’s X-Men look cooler with each issue. Check out Colossus on Page 2, panel 3; Wolverine on Page 14, panel 6. Geoff, tell me these aren’t “pop sexy” X-Men! Wolverine: “Strikes me, Ororo, your ‘Plan Omega’ may have worked after all. If everyone figures us dead ...”
Tuesday, Jun 16
Jason Powell on Uncanny X-Men #226
As Patrick has already pointed out, the middle chapter of “Fall of the Mutants” – a double-sized issue – sees Claremont tossing out ideas and allusions at a schizophrenically breakneck pace, with almost every turn of the page revealing some new wrinkle. Alan Moore and Grant Morrison are g...
Tuesday, Jun 9
Jason Powell on Uncanny X-Men #225
Containing an extraordinarily high incidence of thrilling moments in the space of only 23 pages, Uncanny X-Men #225 is a fantastic slice of superhero fiction. At this point, it seems certain that Claremont, Silvestri and Green can do no wrong.
Thursday, May 21
Jason Powell on Uncanny X-Men #221
Claremont knows how to have fun. A case in point are the Marauders – an agglomeration of super-villains, no one of which has a particularly compelling personality or superpower, yet who collectively made such a delightfully chilling impression during the “Mutant Massacre” storyline. N...
Thursday, May 14
Jason Powell on X-Men Annual 11
Claremont is being as clear with his implication as he can in a Comics Code-approved superhero comic, but the writing between the lines is not hard to read. As blogger Patrick puts it here, Logan and Ororo are “friends with benefits” – and seemingly guiltlessly too, despite Logan’s pledge...
Thursday, Apr 30
Jason Powell on Uncanny X-Men #217
Consider the crisp alliteration of “silver-slashed obsidian,” the tactile imagery of a voice “glazed into a rich contralto.” Claremont’s narrative voice has more in common with a classical poet than, say, Stan Lee, which is perhaps why superhero fans so often deride his talent as a word...
Tuesday, Apr 7
Jason Powell on X-Men Annual #10
That brings us finally to X-Men Annual #10, wherein we learn that Betsy (re-christened “Psylocke” by Claremont) is actually transmitting everything she sees at the X-Mansion to Mojo’s dimension via cameras in her bionic eyes. When the issue begins, the X-Men are fighting Magneto as par...
Thursday, Mar 5
Jason Powell on Uncanny X-Men #202
This is not quite using superheroes as metaphor, but there is definitely a unique energy in what Claremont accomplishes with the oblique sexuality of the Colossus/Shadowcat idea shown here. Like the asymmetry between Xavier’s mutant power and Magneto’s, which Geoff so cannily observ...
Tuesday, Jan 27
Jason Powell on New Mutants Special #1
All these elements combine for a boisterously exciting yet well-controlled story whose inevitable climax – all nine characters unite to take down the villain – comes together expertly, in a rush of pure narrative adrenaline. This is superhero comics as they ought to be – sheer, efferves...
Tuesday, Jan 6
Comics Out Friday January 2nd 2009 (Umbrella Academy, Final Crisis: Secret Files, and Morrison's Batman))
Final Crisis: Secret Files. I call Shenanigans. Grant Morrison and J.G. Jones are listed on the cover and Frank Quitely was promised in the solicitations. Actually Morrison is listed second on the cover out of four names making me think he was the second most important person contributing -- a...
Thursday, Dec 18
Jason Powell on The Kitty Pryde & Wolverine Miniseries
This is another example of Claremont creating more story threads than he can possibly keep track of. Wolverine-as-family-man is an intriguing idea, and Claremont surely intended to explore the notion further in future X-Men comics or Wolverine miniseries ... but instead got sidetracked...
Thursday, Nov 20
Jason Powell on Uncanny X-Men #182
In almost any Claremont superhero comic, the extraordinary circumstances work metaphorically. Here, the very comic-booky premise – a reformed super-villain finds her psyche invaded by the mind of a superhero she once fought and beat – is simply a heightened version of the prosaic phen...
Tuesday, Nov 18
Jason Powell on Uncanny X-Men #181
The story’s epilogue also harkens to the past. Since Uncanny #181 is the first issue to be published in 1984, Claremont takes advantage of the date, deliberately alluding to the alternate history related by the adult Kate Pryde in “Days of Future Past” (Uncanny #141). In a panel from that st...
Thursday, Nov 13
Jason Powell on Uncanny X-Men #180
Having apparently struck upon the idea months ago to end Colossus and Kitty’s relationship, Claremont made the odd decision to lay much of the emotional groundwork for the idea in issues of New Mutants rather than X-Men. New Mutants #’s 13 and 14 see Kitty palling around with a fellow teen c...
Tuesday, Nov 11
Jason Powell on Uncanny X-Men #179
Claremont also confronts the X-Men (both the characters and the overall franchise’s premise) with their own hypocrisy here, several times. Callisto shames Kitty at having exploited the trust of Caliban (the Morlocks’ other tragic character besides Leech), and Kitty in turn chastise...
Friday, Nov 7
Jason Powell on Uncanny X-Men #177
A 22-page story, “Sanction” wastes a ridiculous 12 pages on a dismally unimaginative scene depicting Mystique in training against Arcade’s X-Men robots. Romita’s choreography is stiff, and Claremont strains, but ultimately fails, to give Mystique a compelling first-person narrat...
Comics Out November 5, 2008 (A Rant About The Comic Book Industry)
Meanwhile guys like Bachalo and Ashley Wood languish without a writer to match their talents; Mignola does not even draw Hellboy anymore (though at least he found a suitable replacement). Brad told me that a lot of the best "comic book artists" do not even draw comics: story-boarding in Ho...
Thursday, Oct 30
Jason Powell on X-Men Annual #7
X-Men Annual #7 is notable for its opening, which marks only the second time that Claremont’s X-Men begin a story playing baseball. In spite of the few times the author has used this particular image, the idea – such a quintessential example of “heroes at play” – has come to be emblematic of C...
Tuesday, Oct 28
Jason Powell on Uncanny X-Men #176
Thus, Claremont is deliberately flagging up problematic moments in the story of the X-Men – moments that Claremont himself is responsible for – in order to plant the first seeds of a new kind of X-Men. In the coming years, Claremont will upset the status quo in significant ways. Valerie Coop...
Friday, Oct 24
Jason Powell on Uncanny X-Men #175
A shrewd plotter, Claremont also smartly weaves in other ongoing arcs into this climactic issue: His use of the recently-added cast-member Rogue is quite clever, as is the fact that Storm’s newfound affinity for “violent weather” becomes a key to the team’s victory.
Tuesday, Oct 21
Jason Powell on Uncanny X-Men #174
As per the title, this is an issue focused entirely on the romantic relationships among the X-Men cast: Cyclops/Madelyne, Wolverine/Mariko, Kitty/Colossus, Nightcrawler/Amanda, and Charles/Lilandra. Partly marking time so that the climax to the “From the Ashes” storyline can occ...
Thursday, Oct 16
Jason Powell on Uncanny X-Men #173
This and the previous issue make for one of Claremont’s best small-scale stories in the entire Uncanny X-Men canon, memorable enough that Bryan Singer even cannibalized it – specifically lifting the “Wolverine lets Rogue take his powers” dramatic beat – for the first X-Men film, made o...
Tuesday, Oct 7
Jason Powell on Uncanny X-Men #170
Storm’s angst seemed so gradual, and repetitious, it makes for a wrenching surprise when the actual turn is so violent and so fast. What Claremont has created is an inverse of the “Dark Phoenix” cliffhanger at the end of Uncanny X-Men #134 (exactly three years earlier), where the sudden ch...
Thursday, Oct 2
Jason Powell on Uncanny X-Men #169
But how, then, to still satisfy genre requirements? How can Claremont still utilize recurring villains, for example, but fight free of the “riff” paradigm, wherein every creator of X-Men offers a new spin on the same old chords? We get a taste of the answer here, as Claremont begins to rec...
Tuesday, Sep 30
Jason Powell on “God Loves, Man Kills"
Conceived as a comic book that would stand on its own entirely apart from the continuity of the serialized monthly, “God Loves, Man Kills” is a 64-page self-contained story by Claremont and artist Brent Anderson involving a bigoted Christian preacher, William Stryker, on a crusade aga...
Thursday, Sep 25
Jason Powell on Uncanny X-Men #168
Indeed, the scope of the characters’ ruminations and self-scrutiny is so broad that writer Mitch Montgomery, in his essay “X-traordinary People: Mary Tyler Moore and the Mutants Explore Pop Psychology,” was moved to suggest that what we are actually seeing in issue 168 is the X-Men dec...
Tuesday, Sep 23
Jason Powell on X-Men Annual #6
Geoff has noted that Joss Whedon seems to have learned everything he knows about serial writing from Chris Claremont. But the lesson in how to do a good vampire story that also incorporates teen angst ...? Clearly Whedon picked that one up somewhere else.
Saturday, Sep 20
Jason Powell The Uncanny X-Men/The New Teen Titans Special Edition
Uncanny X-Men #167 is the transitional issue marking the paradigm shift in Claremont’s approach to writing the series. However, thanks to the vagaries of publishing schedules combined with the mysterious nature of comic-book chronologizing, a few blatantly superheroic epics fall i...
Thursday, Sep 18
Jason Powell on Uncanny X-Men #167
By his own account, Claremont’s invention of the New Mutants was something of a pre-emptive strike, to prevent a misconceived “West Coast X-Men” spin-off that would have turned the X-Men universe into something too corporate in tone for the author’s liking. Opting instead to re-emphas...
Tuesday, Sep 16
Jason Powell on Uncanny X-Men #166
Trivia: That the new X-Men’s superhero phase ends with #166 is a striking coincidence of numbering, given that the Silver Age X-Men were cancelled with #66. In a strange way, Uncanny #266 will mark a similar milestone as the first appearance of Gambit – the first Claremont X-character del...
Saturday, Sep 13
Jason Powell on Uncanny X-Men #165
Wolverine makes the surprising admission that he once, as a soldier, tried prayer himself and that it was “a mistake.” Kurt’s response is to pity Logan his lack of spirituality and his loneliness, and Wolverine replies by embracing Nightcrawler, saying, “I ain’t alone, bub – I got you.” Th...
Thursday, Sep 11
Jason Powell on the 1982 Wolverine Miniseries
In terms of storyline, “Wolverine” is cannily conceived despite its unapologetically anachronistic portrayal of Japan. In fairness, Claremont is hardly the only comics author to portray all of his main Japanese characters as honor-obsessed clichés, but that context doesn’t necess...
Tuesday, Sep 9
Jason Powell on Uncanny X-Men #164
Indeed, the seeds for the first arc of New Mutants are seen in issue 164, in a two-page sequence involving Xavier and Illyana. The latter makes some enigmatic references to her mutant power – to be revealed in the Magik miniseries that will in turn feed into the New Mutants title – while the fo...
Sunday, Sep 7
Jason Powell on Uncanny X-Men #163
In the present issue, there are distinct shades of the middle act of the Dark Phoenix Saga, wherein Wolverine and Cyclops were the lynchpins of the X-Men’s escape from the Hellfire Club. Here, Wolverine is once again the catalyst for an escape, this time from the Brood (whom the X-Men all se...
Wednesday, Sep 3
Jason Powell on Uncanny X-Men #162
1982 was an important year for the X-franchise, with the release of the first spin-off series focusing on the solo adventures of a team member. (The ongoing Dazzler series had piggy-backed its launch off of Uncanny back in 1980, so was only a spin-off by technicality). Written by Chris Clar...
Monday, Aug 18
Opinion: Jason Powell on Uncanny X-Men #156
The best part of “Pursuit” is Professor X, whom Claremont and Cockrum seem to be suddenly on a mission to make cooler than ever before. His trashing of a Brood warrior with a fist to the face is the most satisfying moment of action in the issue, and the subsequent dialogue between Charles and S...
Thursday, Jul 31
Jason Powell on Marvel Fanfare #’s 1-4 (a-sides)
To get to that point, however, Claremont first embarks on yet another homage to Neal Adams. It begins with Angel (plus Spider-Man) descending to the Savage Land and facing the Savage Land Mutates. Spider-Man leaves at the end of issue 2 but Angel sticks around, to be joined by the rest of the X...
Tuesday, Mar 18
Jason Powell on Classic X-Men #18, part a (incorporating UXM #112)
“Magneto Triumphant” is part one of a two-part story that is considered by a large number of X-Men fans to be the best straight-ahead “X-Men vs. Magneto” story. It is the last one Claremont will do – after this, Claremont begins the deepening of Magneto into a noble character, so the pure, “go...
Tuesday, Mar 11
Jason Powell on Classic X-Men #17, part a (incorporating UXM #111)
This issue, and the ones that follow it, are again best understood in Morrison’s schema of the X-Men being defined by certain “riffs.” It really does all go back to Lee-Kirby, who in their brief 17-issue collaboration on the X-Men gave us not only the basic premise (with Xavier, the school a...
