I love me a good head sleeve but I love me some fully exposed Scott even more.
.... you know what I'm sayin.
#KeepCyclopsCircumsized
#NoHood
#NoSleeve
#ThisWentTooFarTooFast
I recently read a lot of X-Force and Excalibur and various other 90's books that I didn't read at the time(I had an Uncanny subscription and would pick up X-Men books as necessary). I think the post Liefield X-Force was pretty interesting. You had the kids in this place of not exactly trusting Cable or Xavier/the X-Men, and they were up against SHIELD for a bit too there. I liked that disenfranchised youth angle. RicStar also got its start here, which is my favorite part of this run. I also liked how deeply they mined the Deviant/Eternal mythos, and the direct connection of mutants to the Celestials. That thread is almost lost in all other runs. Bears further exploration, even if it does muddy the mutant metaphor a bit in terms of real-world analogues.
Early Excalibur(Claremont/Davis's) was fantastic(if ever so slightly pre-90's). I mean, a tight core cast of 5, and then just, embarrassing amounts of creativity being poured into the supporting cast and various locations(especially in the CrossTime Caper). By the time Lobdell took over, I started losing interest. The latter run with Ellis became a standard super-spy/super-soldier/superhero book, basically European X-Men, which may be what Excalibur was to a degree the whole time, but the mythical, otherworldliness was lost in favor of a more tactical quality, which made the original run so unique. A modern X-book could definitely mine this niche.
As for the main X-Books, I think the 90's did their best to keep the Claremontian magic going, so they did a lot of soap opera elements, and had a lot of focus on the characters themselves. They were successful for a few years, but ultimately things did spiral out of control in the later part of the decade(I myself quit reading at the time before the Twelves story concluded). Modern books could learn the lessons from this trial; develop the entire cast simultaneously, pack each issue with information, and make each story 'count' by building on each issue(this is the forgotten concept of continuity). I think editorial putting the artist ahead of the writer(the whole Claremont/Lee debacle) was a huge blow to the franchise in its entirety, and while modern comics don't seem to be repeating that particular beat, something was lost there. The writer-artist synergy is vital to a book, and even if artists need to rotate in and out due to burnout or scheduling or what have you, modern books think it's fine to switch up artists every issue or so, and have vastly different styles follow one another, and that just breaks the flow too much.
What the 90's did well, overall, would be presenting the reader with a catelouge of books that each had a defined niche, but all worked together as a whole picture. You had X-Force, Excalibur, X-Men, Uncanny X-Men, X-Factor, and Generation X for your main team books, and while they all were doing their own things, characters would pop inbetween books, and the yearly x-overs would tie them into each other for a few months a year. It was a cohesive presentation. Theses days you have four main X-Men books, but they might as well be taking place on completely different planets despite the fact that killer robots and politics are in 3 of them. Arc to arc there is barely any continuity. Characters get reset or even resurrected with little or no explanation. It is a mess.
Let the flames destroy all but that which is pure and true!
I bet KeepCyclopsCircumsized is someone's username somewhere.
Considering my favorite character was most famous for wearing a sort of miscolored "thrift store Robin" outfit back then, I think I'll pass on the '90s costumes returning.
Jubilee.jpg
I would like to see her in something different from the mostly black outfit now that her "goth phase" is over, though.