The blues is my business and business is good

California Lawmakers Head to Luxury Resort in Maui with Lobbyists Despite Covid Restrictions and Travel Warnings
November 17, 2020

Gavin Newsom Lies About Why He Broke His Own Rule and Attended a Large Birthday Party at Super-Upscale Restaurant French Laundry; Concedes, "We're all human. We all fall short sometimes."
November 17, 2020

Arlington Cemetery Cancels Wreaths Across America Over Coronavirus fears
November 17, 2020

They've got men with guns to enforce this: Pennsylvania Mandating People Wear Masks Inside Their Homes
November 17, 2020

Democrat Senator Dianne Feinstein Caught at Work Without a Face Mask On…. AGAIN (VIDEO)
November 17, 2020

They've increasingly been on the 'rules are for little people' tactic for a while but they don't even pretend anymore.  I noticed that with Obama, they just started repeating the same lines about "Fox News" when anybody disagreed with them and there was not even the slightest attempt at communication, much less convincing.  This is how a dictatorship works, repeating their mantras and shutting people up until there's a reason to order them outside.  That's why I've suspected for a while that the virus nonsense was encouraged to let them impose their will upon everybody else.

What makes them do this?  Last night I had the idea that this is what made Chris Claremont's X-Men so influential, the left behaves like the human characters but pretend they're homo superior.  They're violent, they're hateful, they're willing to destroy the society they intend to rule and claim to be persecuted.

I'm trying to think of a way to extend this metaphor because where else would I go other than Claremont's X-Men?  The "Phoenix Saga" would be the most obvious example but I can't think of any specifics other than Claremont, John Byrne and Jim Shooter having no idea what they were getting into they were well into the process.  X-Men hadn't even been selling enough to become monthly until several issues into Byrne's run although it was critically acclaimed before he became penciller which must have been part of it.  The follow-up "Days of Future Past" would have built on it as was the introduction of the Hellfire Club.

I would have to site the first storyline as where it happened.  Claremont probably had nothing to do with Giant-Sized X-Men except read it after Len Wein and Dave Cockrum finished it, although in 1987 he did claim he was present at the plotting session and gave the idea of how to beat the villain.  Wein plotted the next two-part story and then gave the title to Claremont, I assume to script after Cockrum brought in the pencils.  It was a straightforward 1970s superhero comic, mainly notable for killing one of the heroes, Thunderbird.  I'm looking through the issues now and to this day I'm mindboggled by how simplistic the stories are.

The follow-up issue was Claremont's first total issue, following the simple theme but adding Moira McTaggert and spending over two pages on a subplot which would get developed over the next few years but then just vanish.  It also had a mystical scene which works in context - Xavier trying to mind-scan the invading demon - but makes me wonder if Claremont's interests in magic were involved here.  That's something the left always goes back to, isn't it?

#97 started the storyline as we know it.  The writing is already better, there are clearly things going on which never get explained - why did Eric the Red go after Lorna in the first place and how did he know about her when he admitted to having never heard of Alex? [I can call them Alex and Lorna, we're tight like that] and the subplots begin.  Eric the Red has turned Havoc and Polaris evil for some reason, a panel shows someone watching this scene on video and someone watching the watcher on video.  There's a fight that leads to no conclusions.

Then there's the three-part Sentinels followed by the appearance of Phoenix and a two-part change of direction of the storyline, Then Magneto returns, then the subplots that have been appearing in each issue build to the cosmic characters getting together, a one-off fill-in issue plotted by Claremont and scripted by Bill Mantlo that never went anywhere, finally the two-parter that ended the storyline, Phoenix saving the universe.

Looking through it now, regardless of my reading problems, I'm still impressed by how each part was full of stuff, character building and subplots in addition to the generic fight scenes.  It all built to a cosmic finale in the way while providing one basic story after another.  Flipping through this Essential Version and the next one, the series continued along these lines.  There would start to be more subplots that never went anywhere but most did and the next storyline gave the X-Men some individual attention and wound up with them going around the world and being presumed dead.  It ended with them returning home though still considered dead by some people.  Then there was a short buildup to the Proteus story, followed by "Dark Phoenix" and then John Byrne's departure.  After that Claremont had to figure out what to do next and the series began the first of it's several major changes during his tenure.

This isn't helping me confirm that it's a major part of modern leftism but I think it is helping me try to limit the possibilities.  It had to have come from the first storyline because that did set the standards one way or another.  Before that, Claremont just wrote whatever title Marvel told him to and the X-Men were a third-rate title that had just gotten out of reprints for several years.  Comics sales were going down anyway and Marvel was trying to come up with ways to increase them, hence the Giant-Sized series.  The direct market had barely been born yet and I think that was where the series became really successful, helping regular customers and collectors.  It's out of this scope to consider how the left worked with Marvel itself (although one assumes they've been part of the recent movies), I'm just trying to figure out how the series itself fit in.

I do think it's related that Marvel rehired Claremont in the mid-late 90s and since then, he hasn't made much of any connection to the rest of the world.  He rarely does interviews and when he does, he only talks about whatever he's currently writing if there is anything or standard anecdotes of his X-Men run, never any unknown details or secrets.  My guess is that they pay him to be quiet for the rest of his life because he was in too deeply with... something.  Obviously that's where I run out of ideas.

Gotta say, there's times where I would love to just start writing fiction again, I think a lot about how to do a made-up history that would probably explain about as much as a "real" history, I just can't think of an actual story.