Uncanny X-Men #337
So Doom DeLuise suggests to me, in varying degrees of frequency, that I should post more. And sure, I feel like I should. But I’m too broke with comics, and unimpressed by the current output, to pick up what’s coming out. Fine, dandy, whatever. I still feel like I should add something here, because I have too many longboxes containing nothing but X-Men – dating back to somewhere around 1981.
We can get into pissing matches about crossovers. And yes, the Onslaught debacle did nothing but pump Rob Liefeld’s ego and Jim Lee’s wallet. Let’s not even get into the non-mutant heroes going into Onslaught to defeat him when THE F***ING SCARLET WITCH jumped in so Rob Liefeld could have her in his piggest crapsmear® of a deux ex machina of all time.
After all this, after the god-awful (sorry Bob Harras) executive decisions to let the Heroes Reborn debacle happen, we still got a few good things. Daredevil was allowed to take a bigger role in the Marvel Universe. And … umm … some other s*** happened too. (I don’t know if DeLuise’s drunken rants have ended our swearing-free, family friendly-ness.) But my favorite part of this is Uncanny X-Men #337.
In the issue … nothing happens. Jean Grey makes pancakes and Quicksilver makes the table. Cyclops, jittery, accidentally pummels Beast with his optic blasts. And Logan stands out in the rain like a creepster while Xavier tries to console him. Ok, nothing.
But this doesn’t matter. Over the 40+ years of X-Men, we’ve cosmic altering events and near-World Wars. We’ve seen defections and betrayals and deaths. But here, we see the X-Men, defeated and at their lowest point, eat breakfast. And literally, the breakfast is the most important thing that happens. It’s the meal of the day.
I’ll defend Lobdell’s run until the day I die. Sometimes he skimped on action because his focus lingered in character development. But Chris Claremont was a hard act to follow, and nobody knew what to do with the team afterwards, even if it kept being the top-selling book. So here we have the X-Men eating pancakes. And say what you want about the Fantastic Four. The X-Men are Marvel’s first family. You (or a cosmic dupe) can rip apart planets, and the X-Men still love you.
So, in the midst of their leader’s “betrayal,” their prim-Englishwoman-turned-slutty-Asian becoming weirder, their flagship character losing his nose (don’t get me started,) their diametric opposite joining their team as an amnesiac (once again) and everything else that happened … the X-Men eat pancakes.
Don’t read Onslaught. Just pick up this issue, and ignore anything of its prologue and insert whatever crossover you want into it … you’ll still come out with your outcast mutants at their most human. And, personally, this is still an issue I can come to again and again, even if the same team battles the Shi’ar and tries to stop yet another post-mutant group of renegades from conquering.
I’m pretty sure that I’m the only one who swears. Everybody else keeps it in check.
Interesting post, Doominator. I’ll have to re-check this issue out (upon checking, I actually have it (downloaded)!).
Well said, sir, well said. I too have much fondness for Lobdell’s run. In addition to this issue, I’ve always really liked his post X-Cutioner’s Song epilogue in 297-Jubillee rollerblading with Prof X.
Say what you will, the man knew how to do the “post big event, touching character driven” issue better than many.
I’ve got no problems with Lobdell on X-Men, because he was the guy writing it when I first started reading it. To me, Lobdell is the barometer, not Claremont.
Y’know, Warren Ellis did a couple of great Excalibur issues that skirt around the Onslaught crossover: they had just finished their big battle, and were ready to help out, but had wrecked both their planes.