{"id":2279,"date":"2013-11-17T14:47:34","date_gmt":"2013-11-17T14:47:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=2279"},"modified":"2013-11-17T14:47:34","modified_gmt":"2013-11-17T14:47:34","slug":"x-men-gold","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=2279","title":{"rendered":"X-Men Gold"},"content":{"rendered":"

X-Men Gold<\/em> is an anthology one-shot with former X-Men writers revisiting the title. \u00a0Chris Claremont and Bob McLeod provide the main story, which plugs in somewhere just before Scott married Madelyne; everything else is pretty much a vignette, and a few only really work if you take them as deleted scenes.<\/p>\n

It surely goes without saying that Claremont defined the X-Men in the 70s, 80s and even the 90s (since even when he left, the style didn’t drastically change until the Grant Morrison\/Joe Casey relaunch). \u00a0His task here is a thankless one and he pretty much confines himself to doing a nostalgia routine in which a classic X-Men line-up appear in a classic kind of X-Men story. \u00a0Once you’ve decided to go down that route, I might have gone for an artist more directly associated with the X-Men than Bob McLeod, but hey, he co-created\u00a0New Mutants<\/em>, so close enough.<\/p>\n

Even so, their story really boils down to two 80s creators doing the 80s hits. \u00a0There’s even an entire page of Rogue explaining her angst points to Kitty Pryde. \u00a0People say things like “You did good against the robots.” \u00a0There\u00a0is<\/em> a plot, which involves beating some Sentinels in China, but that’s really just the background for the old hits. \u00a0And hey, what else were people looking for? \u00a0This is not the place to try something radical, and the story delivers what anyone could sensibly have expected from it. \u00a0Whether that’s something you have any interest in reading, you probably know for yourself.<\/p>\n

In the rest of the book…<\/p>\n

Stan Lee scripts an odd little scene by Louise and Walt Simonson with the Silver Age X-Men, in which the boys race to the Danger Room to win a date with Jean. \u00a0The whole thing doesn’t end so much as slam on the brakes, and can’t make up its mind whether Jean is playfully flirting with the whole team or desperately besotted with Scott. \u00a0It does have lovely art, though.<\/p>\n

Roy Thomas and Pat Oliffe spend their 5 pages on Banshee meeting Sunfire shortly before\u00a0Giant-Size X-Men<\/em> #1. \u00a0This is actually quite fun in humanising the early Sunfire, but you’d struggle to call it a story.<\/p>\n

Len Wein and Jorge Molina give us Wolverine, in the middle of\u00a0Giant-Size X-Men<\/em> #1, thinking about how he could kill the rest of the team. \u00a0This is quite a good idea in theory, but runs up against the problem that you need some pretty good explanations of how he’s going to beat the more powerful members of the team, and the story doesn’t have them. \u00a0Wolverine’s going to deflect Sunfire’s plasma blasts by “angling my claws”? \u00a0Really?<\/em><\/p>\n

Fabian Nicieza and Salvador Larroca turn in a strange vignette of Xavier and Magneto ruling a paradise together. \u00a0The pay-off is that this is supposed to be Magneto’s last thought before Xavier wipes his memories in\u00a0X-Men<\/em> #25, but if you don’t recognise that story, it’s probably next to incomprehensible. \u00a0Still, if you do get that context, it’s a strong idea.<\/p>\n

Oh, and the opening editorial says there’s a bunch of previews of current X-Men titles in the back. \u00a0Despite that clear statement, the digital version doesn’t contain them. \u00a0Not that I greatly care, but if you’re going to cut them from the digital version, probably best to skip the earlier mention of them, okay?<\/p>\n

It’s a comic for nostalgists and completists, but then again, the remit probably made that inevitable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

X-Men Gold is an anthology one-shot with former X-Men writers revisiting the title. \u00a0Chris Claremont and Bob McLeod provide the main story, which plugs in somewhere just before Scott married Madelyne; everything else is pretty much a vignette, and a few only really work if you take them as deleted scenes. It surely goes without […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2279","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-x-axis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2279"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2279\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2281,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2279\/revisions\/2281"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}