Underrated: X-Men: The Shattering
This is a column that focuses on something or some things from the comic book sphere of influence that may not get the credit and recognition it deserves. Whether that’s a list of comic book movies, ongoing comics, or a set of stories featuring a certain character. The columns may take the form of a bullet pointed list, or a slightly longer thinkpiece – there’s really no formula for this other than whether the things being covered are Underrated in some way.
This week: the multi-part crossover event X-Men: The Shattering.
If I’m totally honest, my Golden Age of X-Men comics is from the mid 90’s to the early 2000’s. This wasn’t exactly when I first started reading the X-Men, that was around 98/99, but because I was largely reading UK reprints, I wasn’t reading the current comics – they were probably always a good two to five years behind what was being published and sold in comic shops depending on the story being presented in the magazine. The reprint magazine had space for three comics in it – this wouldn’t always be three concurrent issues, but was often an issue of Uncanny X-Men and X-Men that were published within the same month and an issue of Uncanny from the 60’s or 70’s). These reprint magazines are actually responsible for the weird dichotomy in my head of knowing the stories very well, but having no context for what issue they came from (yes, the reprint did tell you what comics they were reprinting, but it was much like a tpb; you don’t really notice unless you look in the fine print if the covers).
Over the years, I’ve slowly been picking up and working on completing a run of X-Men comics from issues 100-500, though my focus for years was around 250-400, but because I’ve been largely focused on Uncanny X-Men, I don’t have a lot of the issues that form the giant crossover – if I even have all the Uncanny issues (look, I was often going by cover art and price when picking books up, not sequential numbering, so I have holes everywhere in my collection), so for a story that I really want to read I’ve been picking up cheap collected editions just to be able to read or reread them. And because I have no intention of risking damaging the early Uncanny issues I own, I’ve also been looking for collected editions of The Dark Phoenix Saga and so on.
The Shattering was a story that came out just as I was transitioning away from reprints and into the single issues for most series, and so where parts of the comic is familiar to me, a lot of it is relatively fresh – or fresh enough. I’ve got an obvious soft spot for this period of the X-Men, but I acknowledge that not everybody will enjoy the way that Alan Davis tells the story here – though this isn’t the end of the story by any means because the book ends on a cliffhanger that’s already got me scouring online retailers for the next volume (my LCS didn’t have it – I picked this book up from them and didn’t see any others), because I feel the need to follow up on just how this tale ends and I don’t have all the single issues just yet.
I remember reading bits and pieces of this years ago, and was shocked at the time about the revelation on the final page; I won’t reveal it here in case you’ve never read the story and choose to, but reading the trade knowing what was coming does give you an interesting insight into what’s to come.
Oddly, despite my love of the X-Men from the 90’s, I’ve got a lot of holes to fill, which should be pretty easy given how many are in the back issue bins. After all, 90’s comics aren’t all bad, there’s just a huge number of them in longboxes across the country because so many were printed. That just makes them worth less than the comics from the 70’s and 80’s, but it doesn’t mean they’re not any good.
X-Men: The Shattering leads into The Twelve, a story I am reasonably sure I’ve never read, but seems to be full of all the characters I loved the most when I first started reading about Marvel’s merry mutants. Something I was more than happy to do with a story that is far more Underrated than I ever expected.
Join us next week when we look at something else that is, for whatever reason, Underrated.
This week I wanted to focus on one of the very few manga books I own. Batman: Child Of Dreams was written and illustrated by Kia Asamiya and was originally published in Magazine Z, before eventually being released in an English language version in 2003. At the time of translation it was common for manga to be flipped so that Western audiences wouldn’t be confused by the traditional right to left reading layout of the source material (I’m told this isn’t the case any longer), so when you’re reading the book you’ll notice Two Face is scarred on the wrong side. It’s a minor thing at best once you understand why it’s there, and don’t attribute the error to an artistic blunder.
