Doktor

One other thing to actually keep in mind that was a 1-step-removed change in the industry was the end of the Wildstorm division at DC. Keep in mind where pretty much ALL of the big Marvel creators of 00's came from: They all got their big breaks working on the Wildstorm stuff. Ellis became the "guy that could reinvigorate a flagging title/idea" for Marvel because of his work on Stormwatch/Authority/Planetary. Millar went from being "Morrison's assistant writer" to the guy that could generate big sales when he took over the Authority. Joe Casey showed he could explore totally different ideas of an existing property with what he did on Wildcats. Brubaker got his big break on Point Blank/Sleeper/Authority: Revolutions. Bendis was the only one without a Wildstorm connection. After that, Hickman & Fraction & some of the others came in from Image & shadowed those guys, but the big guns of Marvel's writing staff were all guys that got their big breaks & made their names on Wildstorm stuff. Or they came over from Vertigo (BKV & Jason Aaron). But they all got their big breaks working on non-mainstream or non-big-2 titles. But most of the problem these days is that all of those writers have left mainstream superhero books OR they've decided to work on their own stuff exclusively or they've moved on to hollywood work

He got a promotion so that he could do some actual comics work again (tho he really hasn't), and so that he could be more involved in the Marvel Studios side (back when there was a creative committee) and pushing/creating a lot of the non-Marvel Universe work that they were doing at the time. Axel was JoeQ's right hand man at the time, and he got the first call-up when Joe got promoted out of the day-to-day comics operations. And yes, it was a poor decision.

Well, cowards and insufficiently_thoughtful_persons generally can't defend their cowardice or idiotic statements.

well, considering that Marvel's "statement" didn't include any sort of apology, and only a comment to remove it from future reprinting, the cynical side of me is starting to win out. Tho now that I'm thinking about it since it's a fairly anti-semitic reference, if Ike finds out about it, he might step in on this one & just can the dude himself.

Not only does he have more kids then John Stamos on that one episode of Law & Order SVU, but this one is Ultimate Wolverine's kid.

As much as the cynical side of me says "they'll probably embrace it" as well, I think he might get his fired for this one.

They tried that. That's where all the SJW-types inhabit & they've tried to appeal to them with all of their diversity initiatives & while we have no idea if it's impacted their digital sales, we know it's been a net negative on their print sales.

NEED MOAR PICTURES!

It's definitely storm & Cable. That's the exact costume Storm wore in XXM and you can see Cyclops visor hanging around Cable's neck. This was just after the whole The Twelve story & he was wearing Cyclops visor around his neck in UXM in memory of his (though to be) dead dad. There's no more guessing needed there. I cannot comment on whether it was published in any way though. Even as a house-ad or anything.

Yeah. It was most likely an unused cover, but I wanted to avoid using any guess-work as a definitive statement. *edit* Tho I was mistaken. Lienil Francis Yu was the artist on XM at the time. Larocca came over to UXM and followed one of the Kuberts on UXM.

You're correct, sir. It might not have been a cover, but it's unused art. That was Larrocca from right before X-Treme X-Men launched, when Storm & Cable were both on the X-Men during Claremont's "Revolution" run. This was the tail end of the run before Claremont got replaced so they could do a few filler issues by Scott Lobdell before Morrison & Casey were about to start their runs. Claremont's return got aborted on both X-Men & Uncanny X-Men quickly. He returned on UXM 381 (and XM 100), did 6 issues to get his run started, got interrupted by the Maximum Security event with 387, did the 1-month Dream's End X-over storyline in 388, did a filler-issue/breather issue in 389 and then got replaced on 390 by Lobdell for 4 issues before Joe Casey took over the title. He DID get to take Larocca with him from XM. He was sorta running both titles as interconnected but with 2 different field teams. Larocca was the regular artist & cover artist for XM, not UXM at the time. It was very likely that his editor pretty much scrapped any romantic entanglements he was introducing at the time and they scrapped this cover since the whole direction of the X-line was getting a drastic overhaul with Casey & Morrison taking over the 2 main titles.

Yes. If you look at the sig on the cover, it says "after Byrne Austin"

DC very recently saw their DC YOU initiative fall flat on its face. That's probably what convinced them to forget the political junk & just stick to superhero comics.

Well, with the King Arthur film, I'm just looking at that as payback for sticking Matt Damon in early Imperial China and Tom Cruise in Imperial Japan movies.

Without getting into politics, it's essentially the same approach that 1 of the 2 major US parties has tailored their campaigning in the past few years: cater to every minority demographic & try to take advantage of the changing demographics while ignoring the majority, thinking that when you add up a 1% population group here & a 3% population group there & a 15% population group there & everything else, it'll total up to a majority. It hasn't worked out very well thus far there either because the math just doesn't work yet. Maybe it will in a decade or 3, but not yet.

The sad thing is, all of this was foreshadowed if you followed Tom Brevvort on Twitter & Tumblr. He was talking about a "lack of diversity" for years on there. He's been talking about how to "solve the problem of new readers being intimidated by high issue #'s". He was talking about how events were where they made their money. He was talking about the X-Men being a problem because of movie rights & how there was no incentive for Marvel to push X-titles when FOX would reap the rewards for readers seeing the movies. All right around the time he was getting promoted to "VP of Publishing". All of these forced-diversity/event-after-event/relaunch-any-title-with-an-issue-#-above-12/etc initiatives came about after he got promoted. He needs to go back to just being the Marvel in-house continuity cop that he did a mostly OK job with for a number of years.

Then here's the new Iceman series that literally only exists because he's gay now. I have no interest in buying it because I thought that change was dumb & pointless & a whole series about that change is dumber & pointless-er. But I bought the out of both the Midnighter series & the Midnighter & Apollo series. (And I bought every Authority & solo Midnighter title before this too) But Marvel is starting to get like Hollywood where they can't see the difference because it's too hard to explain. All they see is "well, they're gay, so you should like this character now because we made them gay too" and don't get that one was organic & essential to the character & has been there since the beginning & the character is interesting regardless of their sexuality, while the other is "look, it hits that checkbox now too! So you should like this!"

This is a very good point. I'm still a little torn on this issue. Especially as a completest and someone that loves long-form storytelling (I was a Claremont X-Men guy growing up). Deciding if I want to read IDW's Spider-Man and Marvel's Spider-Man and DC's Spider-Man or whatever & then hope to maintain something even approaching continuity that isn't just headcanon is the biggest foreseeable downside. IDW or DC might write a better Spider-Man series than Marvel for a time, then Dark Horse and then Jim-Bob's Meth-Lab Publisher (I made that one up) might do a better series for a while. And I'd like to maintain some degree of continuity over time, but I know that's something that I'd totally lose if copyright protection expired.

I'll have to check mine. thanks for the heads up.

Not really. All the decent writers quit to go either work elsewhere in Hollywood, on creator-owned Indy stuff, or got burnt out on working on Marvel's stuff. Millar does almost all creator-owned or Hollywood. Same with BKV. Brubaker is done with superhero comics & is doing indy & Hollywood. Ellis is back over at DC rebuilding the Wildstorm universe from scratch. Bendis is still writing whatever he wants but is also essentially "upper management" now. Hickman wanted a break from Marvel & is working on indy stuff only. Morrison is doing whatever Morrison wants (and I think there's still some bad blood with him and JoeQ). JMS has been doing Hollywood again for years. PAD is still around but not really doing anything with Marvel. Fraction is more interested in writing a fictionalized version of his sex life with Kelly Sue. And that's just the writers. The artists are trash these days too.

I'm still waiting for Franklin Richards to have a full-on "Bobby Ewing stepping out of the shower" where he wakes up from a fever dream & we find out that everything since about 3 weeks before Civil War 1 was Franklin having a nightmare.

First of all, this IS the company that keeps Nick Spencer on the payroll. So forced diversity is their bag now. The guy is a hack But second, this whole forced diversity initiative has been one big game of trying to use a few market forces in concert with each other to keep their juggling act in the air long enough to create a 'new normal" The old normal had a lot of white male characters. The "new normal" they hoped to create was a new normal of a multicultural, multiracial, multigendered universe. So the question became "how do you change that much in a short period of time?" and the only solution is the one they've tried. But it hinged on 3 things. A theory, a market pattern, and an immutable law of the market: 1) the theory was that there is a huge untapped market that don't buy Marvel books because the characters in it don't look like them or have different bits between the legs. The idea was to replace the sizable chunk of the old readership that would jump ship due to these changes with this new untapped readership and then grow it over time due to the changing demographics of the western world. The risk here was that they didn't really have any proof that this theory was true except for anecdotal evidence from a handful of actors or writers that claimed that they wished or their kids wished there was a Spider-Man or whoever that looked like them. This doesn't mean that any of them would be willing to buy it or that they'd support it or they'd support the other titles that a change in something like that would impact or if the black boy would be interested in the accompanying change to turn another character into a white woman or a transgendered amputee or whatever. This is the reverse application of something that the social justice crowd calls intersectionality. Most people that subscribe to intersectionality do so to almost a religious level. But additionally, this whole theory of an untapped market has been proven to be demonstrably false or at least not as willing to actually spend money as they claim they are when making demands on Tumblr/twitter/facebook for more diversity bingo checking characters. Or they were unable to fill in the losses of long-term readership nearly as quickly as they expected. Like bad political polling, their forecasts were wildly wrong. 2) the market pattern they were hoping to utilize was simple: New #1's or character changes or re-titling or whatever get short-term sales boosts. Events get short term sales boosts. This is a demonstrable market pattern that stretches back decades. When you replace a character, even knowing it's temporary, it bumps stales. Relaunches bump sales. Events bump sales. But they're short-term bumps. 3-6 issues get a boost & then the boost fades & the true sales numbers settle back out. Done well, it can lead to higher "new normal" sales numbers in the long-term. Done poorly, it leads to a new normal sales average below pre-event numbers. So they did a LOT of them to hide the otherwise lagging sales. The idea was to prop up the sales while the target demographic showed up. 3) the law of diminishing returns. This is what they were racing against. They could re-launch or replace or stick an event in to get those short-term bumps in the hopes of buying time while this untapped market finally shows up. Except they lost this race. Like a cocaine addict, the relaunch/replace/event cycle would produce bumps in sales that would diminish over time. The more frequently they're done, the faster that the law of diminishing returns kicks in. The hope was that they could get to establishing the "new normal" of the Marvel Universe BEFORE the law of diminishing returns kicked their . If what would normally be temporary becomes long-term for long enough, AND enough of the audience is new enough that this is what they're used to, then it becomes the "normal" for the now shifted demographics of their audience. The problem was that the "new readers" either don't exist or didn't show up in enough numbers or fast enough before the law of diminishing returns made even events & character changes & new #1's no longer a viable strategy to prop up what would have otherwise been very lagging sales for a few years if they would have done this organically over time. Marvel also is falling into the same trap that DC did for a long time, in thinking that the mask was more important than the character wearing it. Or that for ever Wally West replacing a Barry Allen, there are 500 Lady Octopus replacing Doc Ock & that kind of change only really works with years or decades of organic change to groom a character to take over a mantle.

Got my ASM set today & it's nice enough looking. I picked up a print with it & they shipped it together & the set shifted & came loose in the package. So I got really lucky they weren't damaged. The A cover is maybe a 9.6 but the other 2 are 9.8 candidates

20% increase in print run. 5% less of a discount. I might hold off on these now that I think about it. I like them & my X-Men completism is driving me nuts & screaming "BUY ME" but I don't know.

Nah. It's not gold. It's nice but will require at least a reasonable amount of restoration & could be very nice, but it is still missing some important bits & is only partially usable even after its been restored until the missing brackets & plates are replaced. But it's still nice. It could be very nice once it's pieced back together & restored. But in the shape its in, it's not really worth much more than the OP paid for it. This isn't a flip for profit piece. This is a buy, put in the elbow grease to restore it & then flip for profit piece. But if the OP doesn't have the skill or the time or the desire to do the work required to make this piece into something more valuable, then really it's really not worth much more than he paid for it. It was a good price because it had potential to be very nice. With work. Without work, it's still a nice price but not for flipping.