70s-early 80s X-Men >>> mid-late 80s X-Men
>>154819034It's all bad, but the early stuff is definitely worse.
>>154819034I'm reading through the early Claremont run, just got to after Jean became Phoenix and they vacation at Banshee's castle, but Black Tom Cassidy and Juggernaut are waiting for them. It's really kino, just genuinely fun to read, and the soap opera elements are there, but aren't the focus yet, just dressing for the action, which is still the main focus.
>>154819101I don't like how grimy X-Men gets in the mid 80sWe start seeing a lot of bloat with other books too, and the main plot seems to fade away for a series of vignettes every issueI also think 70s punk >>> 80s punk and that's probably a big part of my rationale here>>154819139the Cockrum/Byrne stuff is just plain great superhero comics
>>154819620The Cockrum/Byrne era sucked pretty hard. Spaghetti-against-the-wall crap with the space and supernatural stories, clunky melodrama, and the most acclaimed arc is a turd produced from the ass of editorial whim. The only positive is that it was mostly contained in one book. Claremont's run is pretty much everything I dislike about superhero comics.The art improved when Paul Smith, BWS, Sienkiewicz, Silvestri, etc. worked on it.
>>154819034I'm currently at Inferno but yeah splitting the team and resurrecting Jean did more damage than good
>>154819034Based and agreed
>>154819896yeah nah.
>>154819896the pulpy genre fiction stuff is the absolute peak of superhero comicsthe fact that they were going from the savage land to christmas in nyc to adventures with the shiar in space is what made the rag kinetic80s X-Men is way too urban, way too NYC, and way too grounded.
the pacing of jean before the phoenix saga and her last second death was pretty unfortunate. she's gone for like 90% of claremont's initial run and then she dies almost immediately.
semi on brand stories like pic related were like drops of water in a desert. the knockoff thor shit was dreadful trying to get through.
>>154821121>the pulpy genre fiction stuff is the absolute peak of superhero comicsI disagree, but it does work sometimes. If you find a way to make it all gel, maybe by keeping things mostly episodic or by making elements fuse or coexist, it's great fun, but Claremont didn't pull it off. It was pretty blatantly pulling shit from TV and movies and poorly shoehorning these characters in it. By time I stopped reading, I still didn't care about these fucking characters.I will admit that he was given something really hard to work with. X-Men started as a very weak series, one of Stan and Jack's worst, and it was a team book. Then he inherited it with a bunch of new characters, so he had to massage them into being while juggling plots and deadlines, answering to editors and dealing with cross-title interruptions, eventually multiple titles of his own.All things considered, he did a decent job, but I still think it's a hunk of shit comic book.
>>154819034y'know had he not died thunderbird would've definitely been seen as an ethnic stereotype
