Read Uncanny X-Men!

Would you believe I pulled an all-nighter just to try and catch-up with some of my reading? I did. Couple of things, though:

1. I also completely (re-)organized my entire comic book collection.
2. I always end up doing this. If you were to visit, you'd see notes everywhere which say things like, "1 hr.=Weirding, 1 hr.=Reading List," etc. The theory is, if I spend only one hour a day working on each of the many projects I have going, I would advance all of them a little at a time without getting burned-out, and things would actually get done because this would become part of my daily routine, etc. Yeah, it... it never gets done that way. But there are a lot of notes!

Anyway, I got an absolutely monstrous shipment of comics last week which forced me to lug all of the boxes upstairs to file them and figure out what I've got. I sorted boxes by title (X-Men and Daredevil have their own boxes), then by larger affiliation (New Mutants and X-Force in the same box), then by event (I only have a handful of crossover issues from titles not regularly affiliated with the comics I collect [notably, Marvel Mutants]; they are inserted in most logical, chronological order - which I discuss below), and so forth. Some of the relationships are tenuous, but they make sense to me, and I'm the one who needs to know where to find them, so it works. I haven't taken an inventory yet, but that's the next step.

Now, if I could honestly stick to any of the goals I set, I would do either one box per day or put a daily time limit on it and get it done over several days (like the cards posted all over the house suggest) - but I can't stick to any of the goals I set... so I'm literally just going to put an index card outside each box for every title within, inventory them whenever I get around to it, and move the boxes as they are catalogued. Did I mention this is an issue because 11 of my comics boxes are methodically lining the walls of my living room right this minute? That's what prompted me to hurry up and finish filing my collection:

A friend enjoyed a few of those newfangled oat sodas I've heard so much about, and comics from all eras, titles, financial ranges, characters, et.al., were tightly circled in the middle of the floor, around where I'd been sitting - where they have been since last Thursday or Friday - and I had this very specific, mental image of him losing his impaired balance and falling exactly right - so that he managed to completely destroy 4-5 boxes of comics and still severely damage the other six or seven.

I swear to Crom, the boxes were placed so as to not just facilitate such a tragedy, but openly encourage it! It was as though I'd lined them up like Dominoes and placed a short stack of $100+ comics in slippery, mylar bags exactly where you needed to step to get to anything else in the room (since boxes and bagged books blocked all other pathways). And this is the kind of guy who, in his "drunken stupor" really might decide to "just go with it" and make a great, big splash - then jump-up and say "Taa-daa," etc. (Which would be kinda funny in most other situations.)

What? Oh, X-Men!

Yes, I spent the whole night reading last year's run of Uncanny X-Men (#501-513) and while it starts off incredibly shaky, the Dodsons give an impressive short run early-on, allowing for a very smooth hand-off back to Land. While Land's work is exceptional, his over-reliance on stylization results in lackluster sequences, most notable in combat exchanges. It is very clear that he drew many panels from posed photographs. His work on the latter half of the cycle shows improvement in pacing, but a lot of that credit is owed Matt Fraction, who takes over full scripting duties from Ed Brubaker at this same time.

The whole Jack Benny camera-mugging in the low 500s was really creepy, because they were not only breaking the fourth wall, they were inexplicably smiling like that chick at the end of C.L.O.N.U.S.! I mean, WTF was that all about? Anyway, once Fraction and Land take over, even the cutaway bon mots further the story. Fraction does a concise rundown of each character's information the first time s/he enters the book, including the character's current mood. It is startlingly effective, though Fraction uses it mostly to blur the chronology. The Uncanny X-Men reads fast because Fraction's brevity is so precise, and this action in the story compensates for the lack of it in Land's sequences.

I also liked that Uncanny X-Men directly incorporated its Annual into the continuity - as Annuals usually contain stand-alone stories unrelated to the current storylines (in the 80s-90s, this was usually because they tied-in to over-arcing storylines running through several Annuals from different titles); Uncanny X-Men Annual #2 examines the story from Emma Frost's POV, which forms a bridge between the title issues in sequence. It provides the wealth of background detail Fraction's concise and clever captions cannot communicate. You can read the title right through without losing the story, but the Annual provides the depth, elaborating on all the interplay and connecting the storylines.

SPOILERS

And the storylines are completely recycled - several of them have been recycled many times over! I had a foreboding that it would be this way, for some reason. I really hope some of these storylines are being presented so they can be concluded; how many times do they have to face Dark Phoenix? Seen it, done it - four or five times now - did it with her daughter, did it with her son, and did it with the original Dark Phoenix so many times, there's nothing left of her but a lock of hair! THEY KILLED THE WOMAN DOWN TO A TUFT OF HAIR, YET SHE STILL COMES BACK - all Dark and shit. Every few years, every writer. Over it.

The siege on the base was absolutely awe-inspiring! In all my years of reading Uncanny X-Men, I've never once been literally scared by the Baddies! Fraction planned the attack in great detail, and those chicks waltzed right into the team's new digs and put them all in check within a matter of minutes - long enough to accomplish their goal! Of course, the muties just plain wrecked them in the long run, but the X-Men still took a wallop! Great read.

Anyway, I am loving the current incarnation of Uncanny X-Men and strongly recommend it.

© C Harris Lynn, 2009