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Underground > Comic Books >

Uncanny X-Men #444

Yotsuba & Benjamin!

15:28 / 26.03.04

To recap:

Flux: The first seven pages of the Davis/Claremont Uncanny X-Men was pretty good! I want to read more.

I can't believe he brought back Rachel Summers. That's nuts!

Me: Orzechowski?

CAPITAL LETTERS??

May ye be in heaven a half hour a'fore the devil knows yer dead.

And then the penny drops:

Me: EWWWWW!!!!

It's Chris Elipolous.

TOTally just biting off of Orz. Like, literally just scanning Orz's letters and turning it into a font. My God that is so nauseating.

Here's the preview in question.

Now, am I crazy to find this completely fucking disgraceful? I'm rarely one for fatbeard, H.E.A.T.-esque ranting, but they're basically taking one man's art form, I'm assuming against his will, since there was no credit, and using it for free. That is so clearly Orzechowski's style and so clearly not Elipoulos'.

OMFG WTF?

This is so not like me, really, but something's got to be done about this.

Yotsuba & Benjamin!

16:36 / 26.03.04

Yotsuba & Benjamin!

17:23 / 26.03.04

Well, I just heard back from Mike Marts on the subject. (My, that was fast) Apparently it's Chris' font, modeled after Tom's work. Tom and Chris are friends.

Still, kind of skeevox, wouldn't you say?

17:33 / 26.03.04

I wonder if they'll explain how Rachel Summers suddenly shows up or what?

Very funny to see Emma playing baseball in a traditional Claremontian "X-Men family picnic & baseball game" scene.

But will the story be good after this famous baseball bit that tugs at all our fanboy heartstrings? At least it will look good as drawn by Davis...

I feel like it's not skeevox (fun word, though!) if Orz gave his approval on it. It is a little weirding me out, though... Orz has done lettering on other recent Marvel titles that wanted to evoke an "old school" feel (like the Evan Dorkin/Dean Haspiel THING mini a while back - it was a fun little old-school story, Dean and Evan are very cool guys, though - but I digress...). I just hope this isn't depriving Orz of work he would otherwise have...

You have Mike Marts' e-mail? Or you wrote to the general X-office lettercolumn email?

Yotsuba & Benjamin!

17:35 / 26.03.04

Er, no comment.

Yotsuba & Benjamin!

17:37 / 26.03.04

Yeah, see I can imagine Tom thinking it was cool, but its not really even a homage. It's his letters. This is realy the first time something like this has happened, where computer lettering literally replaced someone else who was living and able to do the work for no recompensation.

I use ComicCraft fonts all the time, love them, and they are clearly the artwork of J.G. Roshell and/or Richard Starkings. But I paid them for the privelege of, basically, "reprinting" their work.

20:10 / 26.03.04

Is it me or do Farmer's inks look kinda weird? They look ... chunkier, not quite the grace he put into his Excalibur work, I feel.

But maybe it's just the scan quality.

TBH, this looks totally retro to me. I can't possibly imagine buying it.

Which is too bad. Ten years ago this would've been my dream team on Uncanny.

Spyder Todd 2008

14:42 / 29.03.04

No, no, no, NO!!!!!!

Rachel was MINE!!!!!!
I was going to write an X-book, and bring in Rachel at the end of my third issue after I blew up half of London!!! Me!!!!! First I got Joss What'shisface"IcreatedBuufyI'msogreat" taking Kate Pryde and not doing shit with her, (She was going to lead my team! I was going to make her interesting, damn it!!!) and now THIS!!!!!!!

Sorry for the overly prejugdice post. I'm uber pissed. Even though Marvel hasn't told me I could write it yet, I'm still pissed when I have mega cool ideas and then someone else gets to them first....

Matthew Fluxington

15:20 / 29.03.04

Rachel came back in this month's issue of X-Treme X-Men. I'm not sure about the hows and the whys, but she's now stripped of the Phoenix and Askani baggage (which is a good thing.)

Without all of that nonsense, I'm glad to have her back. I really liked that character a lot as a kid.

I'm really looking forward to this Claremont/Davis thing after reading the first few pages. It reminds me of mid 80s X-Men in a good (surprisingly non-retro) way. I think this could be pretty fun. It's not going to be much like what Grant did, but it may be a return to form for Claremont, which I welcome.

15:26 / 29.03.04

Actually, I think you'll find that Kitty, Rachel and the ruins of London (or in my case Manhattan) were mine. The pitch for the first three X-Tribe stories ('Atomic', 'Elemental', 'Compound') was in the bag and ready to go to Jemas when the 911 attacks happened and I lost all glee for Selene's ziggurat of human skulls amidst the smouldering Manhattan skyline.

By the time I came back to the idea all of the obscure bit-characters I wanted to use had been reintroduced to mainstream continuity.

And, as a bonus, I had a thought the other day:

All of these characters really, really are Claremont's. He made every goddam one of them and he should really have them. Yeah, there are doubtlessly other writers (eg. the Mozz) that can handle them better. But in the 76-92 block he must've written close to 300 issues of x-related comics. That's close to the entire Cerebus run in size. It's kind of fooling ourselves to think that any other writer can dispute his claims on X-Men, however middle of the road the comic has nowadays become.

(And, yeah, I *have* heard of Lee & Kirby. But neither they, nor Roy Thomas nor anyone really managed to capture the X-Men gestalt pre-Claremont.

Pity about Len Wein though.

Murray Hamhandler

17:38 / 29.03.04

Yes! The inclusion of Rachel Summers might just be enough to keep me buying this book on a regular basis. She was always one of my absolute favorite characters in the X-books, and it's an absolute shame that they did what they did w/her after Davis split Excalibur. I'm all in favor of ditching that post-Davis nonsense.

17:49 / 29.03.04

Didn't they bring Rachel back in an arc of Cable a while ago? Something about her drifting in the timestream (because the Askani future was wiped out), and ending up trapped at the end of time. At the end of it, she was back in the present.

Spyder Todd 2008

18:19 / 29.03.04

See, I was all set for how I'd bring her back. After Kate convinced X-Man (you heard right, X-Man. But nowadays he'd proclaimed himself the new mutant messiah and he's running a church in Mutant Town) to help her, she went to London to continue assembling her team. In mid assemblage, a meta-emergency comes up and Kate and her team (X-Man, Quicksilver, Multiple Man, and a new character I created called Despair) rush in to save the day. And London is being destroyed by this weird choronosphere thing, and it turns out there's Trevor Fitzroy (the Choronomaster) in the middle, whose being used as a conduit for Phoenix to pull herself back into this timeline since her alternate-universe mother is dead now....

and it was all part of a much bigger storyline that would cover two years. And now I'm annoyed.
And I know Claremont virtually invented the X-Men. That doesn't mean he's the best writer that's ever been on the series.

Uatu.is.watching

18:23 / 29.03.04

Threadrot continues...

If anyone out there wants to post a brief history of Rachel, I'd love to see it. I stopped reading UXM shortly after they ended up in Australia, and I had jettisoned Excalibur long before then. What's her story?

Matthew Fluxington

18:58 / 29.03.04

Rachel Summers is from the Days Of Future Past story from the end of John Byrne's run on the title. She's the daughter of that timeline's Scott and Jean - a world where Jean never died. Rachel was made to be a mutant hunting "hound" in her future, which traumatized her severely.

She ended up trapped in the past with significant memory loss, and ended up at the Xavier School. She was involved with the X-Men for a while and dealt with some pretty heavy angst as she realized who she was and realized that she would never be born in this timeline. She kept her true identity a secret from Cyclops to save him the pain.

She eventually started to manifest the Phoenix force. She went rogue for a little while, and her story with the X-Men ends with Wolverine severely wounding her after she nearly kills Selene. Rachel wanders around, slowly dying, but is taken away by Spiral to another dimension.

Rachel's story could end here, and it'd be just right. But no...it carries on.

Rachel was a part of the Excalibur team for a few years, and eventually lost her bond with the Phoenix in that comic. It's all complicated, and I didn't read it, and it's all going to be edited out of regular continuity in favor of Grant's Phoenix anyway, so don't worry about it.

Much later, Jean and Scott did get married, which made Rachel decide to leave the timestream in order to let Captain Britain return to where he belonged. Rachel ended up in another distant future, and she brought her half-brother Nathan to the future to cure him of Apocalypse's technovirus. In that future, she was the leader of some Phoenix-oriented cult called the Askani. Or something like that.

It's all unnecessarily complicated after she leaves Uncanny, and it's really best to ignore all of that. The character who we're getting now seems to be a return to the character who left Uncanny around #209 or so. Y'know, the good Rachel Summers.

Uatu.is.watching

20:34 / 29.03.04

Thanks Flux! I'm almost tempted to ask about the "Captain Britan returning" bit, but part of me is afraid...

Oh, the glorious excesses of the nineties!

Matthew Fluxington

22:04 / 29.03.04

Oh, I have no idea about the Captain Britian thing. I never liked Excalibur. I think the only issues of that series I ever enjoyed were a handful of Warren Ellis/Carlos Pacheco issues from the late 90s. Since almost nothing of lasting consequence (other than keeping Nightcrawler and Kitty Pryde out of the core titles) ever happened in Excalibur, it's easy to pretend that series never happened.

22:10 / 29.03.04

While I basically agree with Flux's analysis, I do want to stick up for the treatment that Rachel and the Phoenix got at the hands of Alan Davis in Excalibur.

Davis returned to that title's art chores with #42 and also took over the writing for the first time. It was very funny and he also told a really, really good "cosmic" level story which actually resolved all kinds of dreadful bullshit the comic had been burdened down with, and even served to give a meaning for why the team existed in the first place. (Which was always kind of a stretch -- classic Claremont: Excalibur band together to fill the gap caused by the deaths of the X-Men in Uncanny #227 ... and then they sit around in their lighthouse waiting to be attacked by warwolves....)

Anyway, I thought Davis did some really neat stuff, leveraging Moore's whole multiverse take on Captain Britain, Roma, Merlyn and tying the Phoenix and so on into that. He even undid some of the awful damage done by 'Days Of Futures Present' - a cross-annual sequel to (read "cash in on") the original 'Days Of Futures Past'. Of course, that good work was pretty shortly undone when Lobdell took over the title and, overall, I'm not unhappy to see it all gently slide into oblivion and turn the clock back to 1988 once again.

Nice to have Rachel back, I guess. Let's see what Claremont does with her.

08:20 / 30.03.04

I'm not gonna buy this book on a regular basis (only TPB, and if I like the first one), but I'm trully looking foward to have Alan Davis drawing it, and, besides, it looks like Claremont is once again a good X-writer. But, I must say I'm not that excited with Rachel. She's not one of my favorites characters, but I think it may be interesting to see her on the book.

I'm Rick Jones, bitch

08:30 / 30.03.04

Weep. Bad dialouge (which'll fucking sink ANYTHING for me), references to The Draco (PS JESUS), and that all pervading claremont stepford wives-esque niceness to denote friendship, which never fails to stick in my craw. I'll pass, thanks.

Murray Hamhandler

17:33 / 30.03.04

I'm w/houdini here. Excalibur was, at best, wildly uneven until Davis took over both the art and the writing. His solo run on the book, though, is definitely one of my favorite runs on any X-book. And while it may not be essential, per se, it's still definitely worthwhile reading.

All of the fucked up Phoenix stuff happened almost immediately after Davis left the book. It then became a steaming, irredeemable pile of shit until Ellis came 'round. And I'm w/Matthew on the Ellis thing. Although Ellis himself reportedly hates it, I think his Excalibur stuff is some of his best.

18:37 / 30.03.04

Rachel Summers became redundant as a character as soon as they resurected Jean Grey. Bringing her back (again) - when she has become one of the most convoluted characters in X-Men history just shows how Marvel will squander the fresh start Morrison has presented them with. What's she going to say: "So my mom from another dimension became the Phoenix and died AGAIN!" Bollocks to that.