Just a few years ago I unloaded/donated all my Excalibur issues…except for any done by Davis!

I would love it if one day Alan could come back and do Excalibur again, w/the same team line-up. Hey, if they can bring back the original Alpha Flight and New Mutants, why not this?!?

The first issue after Alan Davis left made me cringe and the issue reviewed here provoked the same reaction. I couldn’t believe that after all Alan Davis had done to make this book readable (and it was at the top of my read pile while he wrote it) that editorial allowed for it to be completely deconstructed (in between issues, no less).

Um, yeah, I also have to agree with this quote. Alan Davis did some amazing work on Excalibur, picking up Chris Claremont’s loose ends and crafting some amazing stories. Then he abruptly left, and it was all downhill from there. The year between Davis’ departure and Warren Ellis coming aboard was pretty dire, aside from a couple of semi-decent stories by Richard Ashford… well, I liked the Annual he wrote. But, yeah, #75 is smack dab in the middle of one of the lowest periods of quality on Excalibur.

AND, so this isn’t a total lobdell/x-bashing thread, I thought the “Operation: Zero Tolerance” story was actually pretty good – though for the life of me I can’t make heads or tails of Bastion’s origin (revealed WELL after the character lost prominence in the stories), or who the hell killed Graydon Creed, or…Huh. Maybe “Operation: Zero Tolerance” wasn’t all that good, either.

It was the 90′s. Comics were selling for all the wrong reasons. And the market almost collapsed as a result.

Man, I’m glad I dropped reading the X-books about this time (I realized that not only had things gotten too messy, but they were NOT going to get any simpler) because Excalibur #75 sounds like crap. Man, what a shame, because this used to be one of the best Marvel books of the time; the Davis run embodied FUN for its own sake, unlike today’s emo writing everywhere. Meh.

I don’t know which ignoramus came up with that concept, but it may mark as the lowest attempt to make a character new and hip for the nineties ever. Thank goodness Lobdell would be off this book in a matter of months.

This should be a lesson to all publishers to avoid major re-boots.

Maybe, but as you already said you had dropped most of the books you were buying. The readers that have been lost to major re-boots could only be a fraction to the slow attrition of readers due to apathy. At least major re-boots get new readers in, even if they don’t stay. I’m willing to bet that Marvel would do another Heroes Reborn if they thought they could get 90s sales again.

I wonder how many other readers Marvel or DC have lost because of stuff like this.

(It’s a miracle I continued reading Spider-Man after One More Day. I guess since it was the only series I was buying regularly at the time, I just didn’t have the heart to abandon it. And of course, after a few issues it was obvious that it was better than it had been in years, and that they were keeping the history as intact as Quesada would let them, so I wasn’t too upset then.)

This should be a lesson to all publishers to avoid major re-boots.

Man – is THAT ever quoted for the truth! I remember picking up Lobdell’s first book after Davis’ – with Meggan all emo kinda…merging…with the waterfall and thinking…’the hell?!’ We find out PRIOR to the issue being held that some kinda disastrous time thingie happened off camera allowing Lobdell to obliterate EVERYTHING Davis had established and allowing the 90′s X-madness to creep into an otherwise awesome book.

Craptacular.

And the artwork segue wayed into the bad 90′s over crosshatched and weirdly over muscled heroes. Everything that Davis did to make each character unique and distinct had been heaved over for the hot new look. ARGH.

Ok…that felt good. I’ve waiting nearly 20 years to vent that. LOL!

I am SOOO grateful that Marvel is reprinting Davis’ stuff in their Visionaries trades.

And I have to wonder how much of the rise in sales on the Lobdell books were because of the fact that at that time you couldn’t read just one X book. You had to read all of them to make any sense of the story. What little sense there was, that is.

2) The Nicieza-Lobdell run of the X-Men books makes up the bulk of my collection, and while I have the standard Fond Childhood Memories, it’s only thinking about it now – Joseph, Onslaught, pointless Shiar stories – that I realize, “Oh my god – those stories were probably terrible!”

3) As a high school student, I got the opportunity to interview Mark Waid, and I asked him what he would’ve done different about his X-Men run. His response: “First, I would have killed Scott Lobdell and buried him in my back yard. Second…actually…everything would’ve been fine after that.”