X-Men - MARVEL [Cartoons|Comics] #4: Come discuss your favorites within the cartoon and comics verse.

**PhoenixRising** · 11-09-2017, 09:10 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sum1 (View Post)

Hmmph.

Rorschach again?

And you also have to remember that X-Men wasn't a very popular comic when I was a kid and I first started reading comics. If it weren't for their appearances in other comics like The Avengers and Spider-Man, I wouldn't have even heard of them.

sum1 · 11-09-2017, 09:47 AM

It was already very popular by the early '80s, when you were in your pre-teens. The big jump in the X-Men's popularity was in the late '70s and early '80s. From then on they were Marvel's biggest comic.

**canflam** · 11-09-2017, 03:25 PM

By the early 1980's X-Men had already been around for almost 20 years, so I can see how they would be popular back then.

sum1 · 11-09-2017, 04:05 PM

The X-Men comic started up in 1963. Less than 10 years later, in 1970, the comic was selling badly enough that the title was reduced to a reprint title, reprinting only old X-Men stories. Then in 1975, the X-Men were revised as a team of mutants from different countries, races and ethnicities and with a distiinctly weirder vibe. That incarnation was a smash hit. Then the creative team of Chris Claremont and John Byrne took over the comic and their long run resulted in the X-Men becoming Marvel's most popular comic by the early '80s. Byrne left after that, but Claremont continued writing X-Men comics into the early '90s, when the X-Men and related comics became even more popular and dominated the comics industry.

**canflam** · 11-09-2017, 04:11 PM

Wow. I'm surprised that after 7 years of it doing not well that the comic didn't just get canceled, but glad it's lasted so long.

**PhoenixRising** · 11-09-2017, 06:15 PM

Yeah, well, like I said, I was not following comics in the early 80's due to some unpleasant family issues at the time.

I think X-Men actually got popular either around the time of the Dark Phoenix saga or shortly afterwards, in 1980, and I hadn't read any comics after 1981. I didn't get back into comics until 1984, when Peter Parker returned from the Secret Wars with that black and white outfit, and that's what really drew me back into comics. And when I read Spider-Man 252, I was intrigued by this whole Secret Wars stuff and where Peter had been during that time, so I picked up a copy of Secret Wars. There I saw Peter side by side with the Avengers, Fantastic Four, X-Men, and the Hulk, who wasn't on any team at the time. That's when I noticed the decidedly different lineups on all of the teams. Who's Rogue again? Who's that guy wearing Tony Stark's Iron Man armor? James who? Who's this female Captain Marvel? Monica who? The Wasp is leading the Avengers? And Captain America left the team, but now he's back? Doctor Doom was dead, but now he's alive? The Fantastic Four changed their uniforms? Invisible Woman isn't with the Fantastic Four because she's back at home and pregnant?

WTF happened since the last time I was here?

That's when I started collecting Spider-Man, Avengers, and Fantastic Four comics again, although I still wasn't interested in X-Men because... well, Jean Grey was dead.

I didn't follow the X-Men much prior to that, but that was when I only read the comics my mom bought for me, and she wasn't into X-Men. She was heavy into Spider-Man, Avengers, and Fantastic Four, along with Conan The Barbarian and Red Sonja. Those were some violent f

king comics.

The women were hot as well.

Then two years after Secret Wars came out, X-Factor came out, and I dove headlong into the original five X-Men.

What can I say, I wasn't a Wolverine fan. Logan just rubbed me the wrong way.

sum1 · 11-10-2017, 05:39 AM

I have issues with the Red Sonja comics. They were horribly sexist. They always had Red Sonja whining over everything that went wrong for her, the way they wouldn't have with Conan, a clear case of stereotyping a woman as weaker than her male counterpart. And her outfit was ridiculous. That outfit showed they didn't take her seriously, putting her in a scale armour bikini. I mean, when you wear armour, you don't wear it as a bikini if you're trying to protect yourself. It just shouted "sex object". The art was horrible too. Roy Thomas even recently said it made Sonja look like a one of these blow-up sex dolls, or something like that. Reading those comics really pissed me off. Contrary to what a lot of people think, Red Sonja wasn't an authentic Robert E Howard character. She was created by comics writer Roy Thomas based on Red Sonya of Rogatino, a character from Howard's historical story (set in the 1529) Shadow of the Vulture. Red Sonya in that was a Ukrainian mercenary who was fully dressed and had no supernatural or fantasy element. She was also a lot tougher in personality than Red Sonja was often portrayed as being. The most offensive thing about Roy Thomas's Red Sonja was how her strength was dependent on her not having sex with any man unless he beat her in fair combat (she'd lose her strength if she broke that rule). He claimed to have gotten that from a W B Yeats play. Not much of an excuse, that play was a case of Yeats mangling Irish mythology.

The mid '80s were a big time of reading Marvel comics for me. There's a lot of stuff I love from back then. And the X-Men were at their best then.