It’s Monday yet again, so welcome back to another This Week in Marvel Unlimited post! In the “new” column, it’s a fairly big week for the War of the Reams crossover, with the main book hitting #4 and three crossover books joining the service. Of those, the one I find most interesting is Giant-Man #1, The premise intrigues me: The All-Mother, Freyja, needs a team to infiltrate New Jotunheim. How do you do that? Get four characters who can grow to giant size: Tom Foster, the current Goliath, Erik Josten, the former Thunderbolt called Atlas, Scott Lang, the current Ant-Man and Lang’s friend Raz Malhotra, the current Giant-Man.
Elsewhere Spider-Man: Life Story #3 becomes available, Uncanny X-Men and Age of X-Man continue their parallel tracks, and MU readers get a chance to check out The Immortal Hulk #17. There are a few others, of course, but those are the ones that caught my eye.
As often happens, the most interesting part of the week for me is the back catalogue. This week we get fifteen issues of Classic X-Men… kinda.
So, the year is 1986. The X-Men are the cast of the most popular comic-book in North America. Chris Claremont has been writing the book for 11 years. Back issues are hard to come by, and expensive when you do. So Marvel sees an opportunity: a reprint series that will allow current fans to read the older material at a reasonable price.
The thing is, Marvel’s comic books had changed during the eleven years that had gone by since Claremont began his run. Specifically, the page count was now higher than it was in 1975. So, in order to pad out the books, (and to entice readers who may have already bought or at least read the originals to buy the reprints) Marvel included new X-Men stories written by Claremont. Each story was set around the same time of the reprinted issue, filling out details or showing things from a perspective not seen in the original book.
Now the thing is, all of those originals are available already in Marvel Unlimited. So the Classic X-Men books now available (and those issues on the service before this week) only have the new stories. They don’t have the reprints. There are holes in the collection of Classic X-Men, but a lot of those holes are because not every issue of the reprint series had new stories in the back.
It makes for an odd read. I’m one of those people who eagerly picked up Classic X-Men. I only really got into comics in 1983, so being able to read all these older stories that were referenced in the X-Men was great! The back-ups often dovetailed nicely into the main story. One particular favourite was Classic X-Men #26, reprinting the first appearance of Alpha Flight. In the original issue (Uncanny X-Men v1 #120) Wolverine is wandering in Calgary. As was normal for comics of the time, we got to “hear” his thoughts courtesy of thought balloons. At one point, he wonders if “Cracklin’ Rosa” is still running her “social club”. That was published in 1979.
The backup in Classic X-Men #26, published nine years later, took that inconsequential line and from it spun a fairly amusing tale of how Banshee’s work for Interpol resulted in Wolverine getting into a memorable brawl at “Cracklin’ Rosa’s.” The story is almost evenly split between a night out at Harry’s HIdeaway, where the tale is being told, and flashbacks to the events at Rosa’s.
Now, the reason I’m going into so much detail is this: With the backup happening just a page or two after the reprint of Wolverine’s musings, it was easy to connect the two. Without the original story, reading the backup loses something, in my opinion. Still, it’s great to be able to read that stuff without digging into my longboxes (I still have my run of Classic X-Men.)
I don’t know how much more material there is to reprint from Classic X-Men; Marvel eventually stopped adding new material when the length of the originals reached “modern” page counts.
See you here next week!
Tags: Comic Books, Comics, Marvel, Marvel Comics, Marvel Unlimited, This Week in Marvel Unlimited