Jeff asks
“Have you read Byrne’s new X-Men Fanfic book? It seems like you at least used to be a Byrne fan, even if I don’t think you’re an X-Men fan.”
The book Jeff is talking about is X-Men: Elsewhen volume 1, written and drawn by John Byrne, and released a few months ago:
Byrne was, of course, famously the artist for the X-Men title, along with writer Chris Claremont, in the late 1970s/early 1980s, leaving the book with issue #141. However, in recent years Byrne had written and penciled his own continuation of his X-Men run, picking up from where he left off, and posting the pages to his online fan forum. This book is the first of three volumes collecting these pages, newly inked and colored.
The amount of demand I had for these caught me by surprise a little, and apparently everyone else as well, as it seemed to take a while to get a new printing restocked after initial orders sold through right away. A handful of my customers seemed really excited about this release, and more power to ’em.
Part of me does wonder if it maybe could’ve sold as a standard comic book series, just reprinting each of Byrne’s posted “issues” one at a time, but I suspect the book release was a smarter move. Yet Another X-Men Series on the rack would have easily been lost in the shuffle, even one by Byrne. The hardcover, I think, gives this effort the status and attention it requires for success, making the Special Event-ness of the proceedings even more pronounced.
But Jeff asked “if I read it?” and the answer is “nope.” He’s right saying that I’d been a Byrne fan, and there was a time when I just picked up anything the man drew. I even picked up a lot of his later mini-series work at IDW (though I passed on this weird Star Trek Photoshop comics). If he came back today and started writing and drawing, say, a new solo series starring Alpha Flight‘s Puck, buddy, I’d at least give it a flip-through.
His X-Men run, though, remains bit of a blind spot for me. I mean, I’m familiar with it, I know mostly what happens in which issue, just from having handled them in-shop and read about them for decades. Sitting down and reading them all panel-by-panel is an effort I’ve not yet made.
I intended to! Marvel’s online digital library makes it easy to catch up on stuff I’ve either missed or haven’t read in a while. This is how I’m rereading so much material for the “My Fantastic Four-ay” entries, even when I have a lot of those books sitting out in the Vast Mikester Comic Archives’ boxes. I began with Giant-Size X-Men #1, the comic that started the Modern X-Men as We Know Them, a comic that, despite its importance, I’d never read. It was…certainly something, with lots of characters shouting at each other for a whole lot of pages, and it wasn’t the greatest thing I’d ever read, but I wanted to continue.
That project fell on the back-burner, though, and I hadn’t returned. Yet. Those early new X-Men comics weren’t by Claremont and Byrne, of course, so I hadn’t even reached the point where they took over. I do still want to read these, if only to fill this hole in my comic-booking experience.
As Jeff says, I was never really an X-Men fan. I read it in the mid-ish ’80s, after picking up the extra-sized Uncanny X-Men #175, because I liked reading the longer anniversary issues of titles, and then following the book for several years after that. It just seemed like if you were a comic book fan, you just naturally picked up the X-Men as required by Nerd Law. I did bail out around issue 220 or so, not returning until Grant Morrison wrote the book, where I read every issue they did and then went back to a mostly X-free lifestyle.
Thus, the Elsewhen book is mostly lost on me, picking up plotlines and story beats from decades ago that I hadn’t read…I clearly wasn’t the target audience. I did, of course, at least page though a copy and cast my peepers within. It all looks fine, with Byrne’s art appearing to be as strong as ever. I can’t attest to the writing, but it all seems reasonably professional enough.
I did spot a guest appearance by the Fantastic Four, a team that Byrne also famously guided for many years, and look, I wavered just a tiny bit. Had this been the first of three volumes picking up where he left off on the Fantastic Four title, I’d be on this in a heartbeat.
So, no, Jeff, I didn’t read this, but once maybe I finally finished reading that original Claremont/Byrne run, maybe I’ll finally get around to this, too!