by the fans for the fans

(we don't have a comics section on this site, do we?)

Long story short: I started to collect X-men comics with cross-over X-tinction Agenda . I stopped collecting because of Age of Apocalypse. Not so much because of this one story, but because of it aftwerwords becoming the standard for X-comics: each story started to revolve around people getting killed. As if criminals no longer killed as a means to get rich and/or powerfull, but for the fun of it or as a goal itself.

(I still love the series - but I pretend it ended directly after Fatal Attractions

(I'm really pissed that in the last two decades, this seems to have happened to almost every comic book villain, not just in Batman or X-men stories)

A couple of years ago, I discovered out that Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld and a few others had been given carte blanche to re-vamp the X-comics, early nineties. Not many artists get such an opportunity with a long-standing succesfull concept. But after two years, this was no longer enough, so they founded Image comics. Spoiled brats!

(Face it: Jim Lee's work on Wildstorm titles was nothing but a repeat of the stories he had written earlier at Marvel.
Same thing with 'Heroes Reborn', halfway nineties.
As marvellous as he is at drawing, as a writer, he turend out to be a one-trick pony).

I just found and read this article this afternoon.
Turns out it weren't just the 'creative geniuses' who ruined what I loved about the X-men (by making Apocalypse the cental arch-nemesis): it had been editor Bob Harras all along (whose writing on the Avengers wasn't good either).

And one of those spoiled brat artists wasn't just too 'good' to bother with keeping deadlines: they made him editor in chief!

Yes, the idiot behind 'Avenger's disassembled', 'Civil War' and Spiderman's 'One more day'.

stason.org/TULARC/art/comics-xbooks/65-W...s-Why-did-Peter.html

Sorry for this long, non Robotech related post.
But face it: if 'the house of ideas' could slip up this badly, HG suddenly isn't so exceptional any more.

The guy who brought us "Carnage" in the Spidermaniverse went on to create Spawn after being told to tone it down a notch.

Was Carnage created by Todd Macfarlane?

If so, they first gave him his own Spider-Man title for a year before leaving Marvel.
In which the stories were indeed rather bloody.
Unless you mixed up two artists?
Have to admit I read Spider-Man, but never collected it, so don't ask me who wrote or drew what.

My guess, in retropect, those drawers (or is it 'pencilers'?), got their inspiration in drawing and writing from manga. Both the visual style and the rather violent storytelling seem to have derived from it.

This article, also on uncannyxmen.net, covers Rob Harris' influence on the X-franchise. Me, I wish he'd never became editor.

uncannyxmen.net/secrets-behind-the-x-men...lords-and-armageddon