News Stream: September 2006 Archives

Blog Newsarama tipped me off to this amazing set of message board posts by Paty Cockrum (wife of Dave Cockrum, co-creator of the 80s X-Men, Starjammers, etc). An outspoken lady, to be sure--she gives her some strong opinions on Joe Quesada, John Byrne's recent troubles at DC, Grant Morrision's X-Men run, etc. There's also an interesting speculation about Excalibur getting yanked away from Chris Claremont. Apparently, Claremont was laying the groundwork for Magneto's early mental illness, saying that Xavier himself had caused it. But forget about this stuff, what I really liked to read was Paty's memories of the 70s Marvel Bullpen:

Roy Thomas was great! He was sometimes brilliant...he was sometimes infuriating! Once I wrote a fan letter to him on a roll of toilet paper cuz I told him the story he had written was only fit for the toilet... and then I rolled it back up and mailed it off in a box and he told me he unrolled the toilet paper and read every word of it. Later we did a merchandising project in which we did a comic story or two on a roll of toilet paper for kids to read while they were on the john!!!

Huh, I think I remember seeing the Marvel toilet paper. Didn't one of them have the Hulk? Hulk Smash! when you take a big shit. Nuff said.

This week's All the Rage has a particularly juicy tidbit for fans of the Claremont\Byrne X-Men. A fan discovered that a sketch pad he bought from Byrne contained plot notes for several issues of Uncanny X-Men. Future issues that extended way beyond the point when Byrne left the series! No matter what people think of Byrne today, I still think his contributions and collaboration with Claremont on X-Men, Iron Fist, Starlord, Marvel Team-Up, etc., produced some of the best superhero material ever made. Here's one event that never happened, involving Mariko, Wolverine's Japanese girlfriend:

Sabretooth attacks Mariko as a way of getting to Wolverine. He brutalizes her beyond imagining. (Nothing sexual. This is sheer animal violence.) He leaves her for dead, torn and bleeding in an alley.

Click on over to Labour Day Rage to see the what Wolverine would have done next. Nuff said.

Technorati : John Byrne, Wolverine
Del.icio.us : John Byrne, Wolverine
Ice Rocket : John Byrne, Wolverine