Conflicted is an understatement.
Posted by irrgYou are usually able to trace back addiction to a specific moment.
For me, it’s easy enough to track it back to that moment. I also know exactly what the causes were: X-Men #1 by Chris Claremont, Jim Lee and Scott WIlliams, Uncanny X-Men by John Byrne, Whilce Portacio and Art Thibert and X-Factor by Peter David, Larry Stroman and Al Milgrom were responsible for a 5+ year descent into brokeness caused by collecting X-Men comics. Claremont “left” X-Men after #3, and I stayed. Jim Lee bailed after 11 to go off and co-found Image, and I stayed. And I kept spending.
I bailed from X-titles about 4 years later, but never strayed from spending a regular sum each month on comics. Via the X-men, I (like many of my peers) burnt a nice stack of money on Image comics, left both of those franchises behind and instead dove into some DC work (Starman, specifically) and some wacky indies and some of the Vertigo titles. I returned for two stints to the X-Verse; Grant Morrison’s run and Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men arcs. Hey, enough with the stares. It was a familiar place, and the drugs, er, books were great.
A few more jumps followed (again to the DC camp, but that’s a long, boring story) and I’d like to think that I came out as a more balanced, well-behaved junkie. Er, collector.
Or so I thought.
Early February, Marvel announced a new X-men book. X-Men Forever, written by Chris Claremont. The skinny: Chris never left. It’s 1991. Marvel is reprinting X-Men #1-3 as X-Men Forever “Alpha”. The book picks up from there.
Now, I’ve picked up more recent copies of Chris’s work. I can’t lie — It was completely lost on me. Stiff writing, overly wordy dialog and dubious plots just didn’t work for me anymore.
With that in mind, I approached the solicitation for this new book rationally: It can’t work. It’s a bad idea. Better yet, it’s a horrible idea. Disasterous. Think Catwoman (the movie). What about the last 18 years of continuity? Morrison’s run? Insulting. Awful. Yes, just plain awful.
Yet in the back of my mind, I have to wonder: haven’t we all imagined this happening to all our favorite nerd-fi franchises? Roddenberry resurrected to helm Voyager out of the Suckfest Nebula? Neil Gaiman putting the finishing touches on Sandman #242? George Lucas coming back to dir…er…yeah…uhm…
You get my drift. It’s something that hasn’t been done. It’s X-Men Forever, bitches. It’s 1991, I’m 15, I’ve never seen a girl naked, and God do I want to buy issue #1 of this series. Shoot me now.
