"This is starting to sound like a bad comic book plot"
-Spider-man
“Evil is evil...lesser, greater, middling, it's all the same."
-Geralt of Rivia
"Wow. You made Spider-Man sad, congratulations. I stabbed The Hulk last week"
Wolverine, Venom Annual # 1 (2018)
Nobody does it better by Jeff Loveness
"I am Thou, Thou Art I"
Persona
Honestly I really like the noseless, bestial, caveman era for Wolverine.
"We come into this world alone and we leave the same way. The time we spent in between - time spent alive, sharing, learning together... is all that makes life worth living." - Jean Grey
"This is starting to sound like a bad comic book plot"
-Spider-man
“Evil is evil...lesser, greater, middling, it's all the same."
-Geralt of Rivia
"Wow. You made Spider-Man sad, congratulations. I stabbed The Hulk last week"
Wolverine, Venom Annual # 1 (2018)
Nobody does it better by Jeff Loveness
"I am Thou, Thou Art I"
Persona
I liked feral Wolverine, he was like a weird puppy.
It would have been more elegant to give Maddie an heroic death saving her son than turning her into a half naked demon queen who wanted to sacrifice her son. she was a mistake, but they got rid of her in a very bad way.
- Using Wolverine less won't make the characters "behind" of him more interesting.
- Not using Wolverine actually hurts the X-men in the casual fans area which hurts the franchise overall. A X-men project is better off being to able put Wolverine on the cover or movie poster and using him sparingly than going without him completely.
I wouldn't say Claremont is overrated but I definitely agree that Claremont/Smith was the peak X-Men for me. Their storytelling was top-notch and all the plots were new and exciting.
I'm not a fan of the supposedly "deconstruction" of the title for the next few years. There is some good stuff (Rogue on Savage Land, Banshee/Forge bromance, Muir Island saga) but his writing started to get old and his decisions weren't as organic as before.
The constant changes of the status quo didn't help. We barely explored the effects of the Mutant Massacre when Fall of the Mutants happens, then we don't even use the hidden aspect of the Outback team when they go into the Siege Perilous... That means we never get to understand the point of things like Ororo becoming a child, Asian Psylocke or Longshot being on the team.
Sometimes I wonder WHAT IF we had other writers take on UXM back then. What would Roger Stern, DeMatteis, Starlin or even Alan Moore do with the mutants? It would be probably very healthy for the franchise to have another vision for the team, adding new and fresh ideas to the X-lore.
The time between the Mutant Massacre and Fall of the Mutants felt like filler to me. Obviously stuff happened but it felt more like he was biding his time till the next status quo which he wanted to coincide around the monumental 225 issue. I hated the stuff with the murder grandpas and the Adversary was an awful villian