X-Men Gold
X-Men Gold is an anthology one-shot with former X-Men writers revisiting the title. Chris Claremont and Bob McLeod provide the main story, which plugs in somewhere just before Scott married Madelyne; everything else is pretty much a vignette, and a few only really work if you take them as deleted scenes.
It surely goes without saying that Claremont defined the X-Men in the 70s, 80s and even the 90s (since even when he left, the style didn’t drastically change until the Grant Morrison/Joe Casey relaunch). His task here is a thankless one and he pretty much confines himself to doing a nostalgia routine in which a classic X-Men line-up appear in a classic kind of X-Men story. Once you’ve decided to go down that route, I might have gone for an artist more directly associated with the X-Men than Bob McLeod, but hey, he co-created New Mutants, so close enough.
Even so, their story really boils down to two 80s creators doing the 80s hits. There’s even an entire page of Rogue explaining her angst points to Kitty Pryde. People say things like “You did good against the robots.” There is a plot, which involves beating some Sentinels in China, but that’s really just the background for the old hits. And hey, what else were people looking for? This is not the place to try something radical, and the story delivers what anyone could sensibly have expected from it. Whether that’s something you have any interest in reading, you probably know for yourself.
In the rest of the book…
Stan Lee scripts an odd little scene by Louise and Walt Simonson with the Silver Age X-Men, in which the boys race to the Danger Room to win a date with Jean. The whole thing doesn’t end so much as slam on the brakes, and can’t make up its mind whether Jean is playfully flirting with the whole team or desperately besotted with Scott. It does have lovely art, though.
Roy Thomas and Pat Oliffe spend their 5 pages on Banshee meeting Sunfire shortly before Giant-Size X-Men #1. This is actually quite fun in humanising the early Sunfire, but you’d struggle to call it a story.
Len Wein and Jorge Molina give us Wolverine, in the middle of Giant-Size X-Men #1, thinking about how he could kill the rest of the team. This is quite a good idea in theory, but runs up against the problem that you need some pretty good explanations of how he’s going to beat the more powerful members of the team, and the story doesn’t have them. Wolverine’s going to deflect Sunfire’s plasma blasts by “angling my claws”? Really?
Fabian Nicieza and Salvador Larroca turn in a strange vignette of Xavier and Magneto ruling a paradise together. The pay-off is that this is supposed to be Magneto’s last thought before Xavier wipes his memories in X-Men #25, but if you don’t recognise that story, it’s probably next to incomprehensible. Still, if you do get that context, it’s a strong idea.
Oh, and the opening editorial says there’s a bunch of previews of current X-Men titles in the back. Despite that clear statement, the digital version doesn’t contain them. Not that I greatly care, but if you’re going to cut them from the digital version, probably best to skip the earlier mention of them, okay?
It’s a comic for nostalgists and completists, but then again, the remit probably made that inevitable.
Ahh… Bob McLeod. Decent enough penciler, but the worst inker I’ve seen next to Vince Coletta. Butchered the hell out of pencils by John Byrne and George Perez back in the day.
Honestly the book is indicative of where the X-books stand now for better and for worse. I guess that the best option for the main story was to spin the wheels Claremont-style. But my biggest complaint is that the line as a whole has been languishing for the past few years without a clear mission statement, which always seems to trickle down to the artificial increases in X-books without meaning or purpose. I would have been more appreciative if, rather than a bunch of half-moments interspersed in continuity, someone had actually done a story that attempted to make a broader argument for what the X-Men are now. Maybe that’s my nostalgia talking, but missing that chance (particularly when Claremont was at one point cognizant enough of the work to at least give us a tacked-on mission statement in the dreck that was X-Men: The End) is a disappointment.
I kind of wish they’d left the previews out of the print edition too. I picked it up at the store, flipped it open, saw Firestar arriving at the school from Amazing X-Men #1, thought “oh, it’s another reprint sampler” and put it right back on the shelf.
Not including the previews is a strange decision when they are, I’m assuming, for books that you might then choose to buy, digitally. I’m assuming because I haven’t found out anywhere what books are actually previewed.
The preview content is Amazing X-Men #1 and the current issue of Uncanny X-Men (#14).
I was quite upset by the previews. I bought the book without looking through it, and thought, “well, that’s quite a bit of content”.
Then, I read the introduction and flipped through the book. I thought, “OK, there’s the Claremont story…and where’s the other stories?”. I came across the reprints, then thought about the cover price again.
Then, I flipped through more slowly, and found each of the stories, minus the Stan Lee one. I check the intro again, “Yep, a Stan Lee/Louise Simonson story”.
Until I sat down and actually read the book, I was convinced that my copy was missing the Stan Lee story.
I expect a few short stories, not a short story and a bunch of vignettes.
It’s 2013 and they’re writing stories about the token girl being a trophy.
The Magneto story was worth the price of admission for me. Bastion holding the “Onslaught is coming sign” was a nice touch. The Claremont story was fun, and in a perfect world, Paul Smith would have drawn it. Traditional monthly super heroe comics are an insular and dying art , but books like this really make me smile.
“It’s 2013 and they’re writing stories about the token girl being a trophy.”
Si, that’s what I was thinking. I thought maybe they’d subvert it somehow but then…
And I agree that the Magneto story was worth it. Good stuff.
“two 80s creators doing the 80s hits”
It didn’t really feel that way to me, it felt more like “two 80’s creators doing the filler bonus tracks”. This is the sort of story that would have run in Marvel Fanfare or one of the weaker Annuals.
The Lee/Simonson story really was painful — obnoxious and sexist, but also bad on the storytelling merits. Really nice art, though, and better than Simonson’s recent Hulk work. The Magneto one was a terrific vignette, but it took a minute to put the pieces together. Makes me want to go back and reread Nicieza’s X-Men run.
I’ll buy this issue in 12 months when it’s $1.99.
I want to see Nicieza back on the X-books.
Someone make that happen!
He is perfect for mutant stories. He manages to balance comedy and character development while exploring the kind of underlying themes that have made the X-books interesting.
Stan Lee’s story was not good, but it was also not entirely unlike much of his early Marvel work.