I know this has happened before, but I'm back after a long hiatus from this blog. Life managed to get in the way again, though hopefully this time I won't stop posting after a week. Like last time, I have plan for how I'm going to put up regular content, and I'm hoping this will give me incentive to stick around.
Basically, I'd like to examine a topic no one seems to have touched in a while, and that is Chuck Austen's X-Men run. Like Liefeld, the internet loathes him and I don't really understand why. I constantly see his name brought up as the one guy that makes Lobdell's run look decent, which is odd to me because not only am I a huge fan of Lobdell's X-Men work (especially the Joe Madureira issues and Generation X), but from the scattershot issues of Austen's run, I didn't think he was that bad either. His work clearly had flaws, but he did get some things right: Juggernaut joining the team, Fishboy, he brought Havok back into the fold, he worked with some talented artists and he had a pretty good grasp of dialogue.
Specifically on the artists point, he was the one guy who seemed to see the direction pop-culture was going in at the time, which was anime and manga. I'm a huge Joe Madureira fan, so I love the blend of X-Men and anime/manga. Seeing a writer make the attempt to bring that look back by working with artists who either had a background in it or had a style reminiscent of it gets a huge plus in my book (it also helped that the artwork these guys produced was, in my opinion, very good).
However, my assessment hasn't even taken into account the context of the times in which these issues were released. From the time Austen took over until he left was also around the same time of the anime explosion in the United States. I was a die-hard Toonami and Shonen Jump fan, both of which I believed reached their peak viewership and readership from around '02 through '06 or so. You can't deny that both of those venues took something whose primary audience in the US were kids and cult fans, and turned it into a pop-culture phenomena for a while. Austen, who is also a fan of the genre, saw this and tried to tap into this market by applying it to the X-Men. It had worked before with Madureira, plus the X-Men as a concept are much more open to a wide variety of interpretations than any other comics franchise (it's part of why I like them so much - there's so much you can do with them and it still feels like X-Men), so I'm shocked that it didn't really catch on. I'd much rather see the UDON-style Salvador Larocca of Austen's X-Men v2 issues doing art on Cable and X-Force than the Larocca that drew Fraction's bloated Iron Man run.
Austen was, I believe, a man that was much smarter and more talented than people give him credit for. I'm not saying he was on the level of Aaron, Morrison or Claremont, but there is a huge disconnect between the reputation his run has garnered and the actual quality of that run. I have recently come into possession of the issues of his that I'm missing, and it's given me the idea to do a series of reviews on this highly controversial run. I'm hoping that by reviewing it on an issue by issue basis, I can maybe do something to remedy this.
Before that though, I'd like to put up my thoughts on the past year or so of the past years worth of X-Men books and my take on the news that Joe Madureira will be drawing the new Inhuman mini-series; I'd like to get those posts up by the end of the week, but who knows if I'll get around to it? Part of the reason I'm doing this is because right now I'm at school and I don't have access to the issues I'd need to start doing my reviews. The other part is that I have a lot to say about the current X-Men books and good ol' Joe Mad. Once I have those topics out of the way, I want to get down to business.
I'll be back soon.
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