Old Shit Sundays Presents: Generation X Part One by Scott Lobdell and Chris Bachallo
Although my abrupt departure from comic buying in 1997 means I don’t have the ends of the runs of all the x-books I was collecting as a teenager, this week I’ve decided to reread the entire Generation X series, with the intention of buying the books I’m missing along the way. According to my research the series ran for 75 issues, ending with an interesting collaboration of Brian Wood and Warren Ellis, two of my favorite writers currently writing for comics today. Apparently if I’d have stayed around another few years before becoming a destitute pot head throughout the end of the nineties, I’d have some rather nifty early work of those gents. As a side note(and just to get it down before I lose the notes I wrote down) I have the first 29 issues, so I can start buying the issues I need while reading, essentially, the first two and a half years of the book uninterrupted. To have the full run I need issues 30 and 34-75, though the latter issues may be hard to come by as they’re probably worth a bit of money considering the rather illustrious and successful writing team that, for reasons unbeknownst to me, still couldn’t save the book from cancellation.
Anyway, I decided to do this the right way and read the introduction to the team via the Phalanx Covenant: Generation Next, which is spread across two issues each of Uncanny X-Men and X-Men, which introduces the new characters, most of the children, and grounds the already known(at that point, 1994) characters in a relatively interesting continuity. The first thing I noticed was Andy Kubert’s Pencils in one of the books, he and his brother Adam were veritable superstar artists when I was a kid and Marvel was pumping out those collectible comic book cards with compartmentalized biographies on the backs of them and new art on the front. They both did a large amount of new art for those cards, all of which I still have somewhere and eventually would like to aspire to organize them into a display of some kind, but I digress. The Kubert’s art was, seemingly, a significant cut above most of what’s being put out today. It was very comic-book oriented, over the top and cartoonish, a serious step away from the cartooned-realism of Jack Kirby, but it was GOOD and worked for the stories they were helping to tell. It seems that most of Marvel’s books today are helped way too much by photoshop and computer graphics instead of actual traditional penciling and inking. The art made me reminisce to the days of old. The writing, though filled with many references I have long forgotten and those incredibly ugly little side bar notes that Joe Quesada has banned, worked, but seems almost sophomoric and amateurish compared to the comics being produced today. So the writing is much stronger, the art is much worse. I guess I can live with that.
After reading the set up, I delved into the first story arc of the series, issues 1-4 of the actual Generation X comic. I was shocked and pleased to see that my fervent habit of putting all of my comic books in boxes with bags and boards to protect them immediately after I had finished reading them worked rather well. Virtually all issues were in near mint condition aside from the first double-sized chromium cover issue, which had obvious scratches on the chrome cover. It was nothing so deep as to damage the actual color, but quite noticeable nonetheless. The foil cover made me laugh upon immediate inspection, noting that one virtually never sees insane marketing ideas like that now that the comics market has considerably downsized. There are two things I associate with 1990’s era comic books; foil/crazy extravagant covers and muscle/mammary gland/crazy ass gun overload, the Rob Liefieldization of the art industry, if you will.
The arc is mainly trying to set up a story involving the mysterious Emplate and introduce an essentially(with the exception of Jubilee, Sean Cassidy and Emma Frost) unknown cast. Scott Lobdell does a really good job pacing himself over these four issues, fundamentally establishing the book as a character-drive teenage relationship drama with super hero overtones by the end of the second issue. There was a scene in issue two that really instantly reminded me why this was my favorite comic book as a teenager. There’s a spread of Skin and Husk sitting in a recreation room playing scrabble and they’re basically insulting each other turn by turn with their scrabble letters. Skin will spell “Hick” and Husk will spell “loser”, while they argue over which words aren’t words at all. I distinctly remember sitting on the floor of my living room with these issues spread out on the crumby blood red carpet, headphones lightly playing Foo Fighters to block out my fighting family, my entire teenage life was wretched and I lived inside these books. I remember wishing I could be a student at the Massachusetts school this all takes place in, playing scrabble and having friendly verbal fights with the other students, but never incurring the level of brutal physical bullying that I received at my actual school. Books like this really lent themselves to maintaining my sanity while developing a rich appreciation of characterization and a strong verbal narrative. More than anything, as a kid these books made me feel less alienated and rereading them now, at 26, is really just as enjoyable, in some ways for the exact reasons they did in the 90s.
At this point in the book the cast isn’t really brought together as a whole, but are being established as little duo cliques and solo stories in Lobdell’s tiny little compartmentalized characterization strategy that really shines. Bachallo’s art is fantastic, a really crisp, sharp and clean pencil style with bright colors and busy wooded backgrounds mixed with the occasional indoor shot of the school and all of the accessories you’d expect to find in a school. Issue four is a Christmas issue of sorts, although Christmas isn’t really dealt with, instead you just get to see lots of Santa hats and snow and the characters express a general Christmas spirit, which greatly lends itself to the ongoing character-driven narrative that Lobdell is building. After issue four, I distinctly remember, it was the Age of Apocalypse for about four months. I’ll be curious to see if issue five, which was written a third of a year later, maintains the same kind of continuity of characterization after such a gap. I certainly hope so, thus far this reread has been nothing but a joy.
