Psylocke | the m0vie blog

Wolverine: Save the Tiger (Review/Retrospective)

Posted on June 1, 2012 by Darren

With our month looking at Avengers comics officially over, we thought it might be fun to dig into that other iconic Marvel property, the X-Men. Join us for a month of X-Men related reviews and discussion.

In 2009, Marvel published a Wolverine Omnibus. I’m honestly surprised that it took the company that long to pull together a large volume of work featuring the character and dump it on the market. However, browsing the gigantic hardcover, I’m amazed at just how much Wolverine-related material Marvel published before the character got his own on-going series. There was the Claremont/Miller miniseries, Kitty Pryde & Wolverine, and seemingly numerous cameos and guest appearances in books outside the X-Men line. However, Save the Tiger, a ten-part story that opened the anthology series Marvel Comics Presents, occupies a crucial place in Wolverine lore. Written by Chris Claremont and illustrated by John Buscema, it reads as something of a dress rehearsal for the character’s seemingly inevitable on-going series.

No claws for concern…

Continue reading →

Filed under: Comics | Tagged: Avenger, chris claremont, Claremont, cyclops, Jean Grey, John Buscema, Madripoor, marvel, Marvel Comic, Professor X, Psylocke, uncanny x-men, wolverine, x-men | 3 Comments »

X-Men: X-Tinction Agenda (Hardcover) (Review)

Posted on May 22, 2012 by Darren

X-Tinction Agenda makes for a potentially fascinating X-Men crossover, tying together Uncanny X-Men, X-Factor and New Mutants to tell a single cohesive story. It’s not a new approach – it was pioneered by The Mutant Massacre and Inferno – but it is perhaps the definitive approach to X-Men related crossovers (it’s still in use today for stories like Second Coming). It’s fascinating, because it sees the creative teams pick up on something that Claremont had introduced over thirty issues earlier, as if recognising a gem of an idea really deserved further development. That said, despite some decent writing and art, X-Tinction Agenda can’t help but feel like it wastes its potential, hitting on an absolutely fascinating premise and deftly tying the three on-going monthly comic books together, but ending up as little more than an explosive knock-down brawl.

The Wolv pack…

Continue reading →

Filed under: Comics | Tagged: 1990s, Cameron Hodge, chris claremont, Claremont, extinction agenda, Genosha, jim lee, magneto, mutant massacre, new mutants, Psylocke, Rob Liefeld, south africa, uncanny x-men, x-men, X-Men: X-tinction Agenda, X-Tinction Agenda, xtinction agenda | Leave a comment »

Fall of the Mutants: Uncanny X-Men (Review/Retrospective)

Posted on May 10, 2012 by Darren

Part of me does feel a little bit sorry for Chris Claremont. After all, his Uncanny X-Men run was trapped in a perpetual second act. He hadn’t introduced the franchise, inheriting it from a bunch of other writers and artists, and he couldn’t resolve it either. So, as a writer, Claremont was charged with keeping readers interested in an on-going narrative that spanned well over a decade. Occasionally, the writer would try to keep things fresh, and Fall of the Mutants represents just such an attempt. Trying to transition his team from one status quo to another, you have to give the writer credit for pitting the team against an enemy who is (effectively) God, even if it does make this chapter in his on-going saga the equivalent of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.