Jim Lee has the honour of plotting and pencilling the best selling single comic of all time. Over 7 million copies of X-Men (vol 2) 1 were sold in the latter half of 1991. This was the season I went from being the occasional reader to the avid collector I spend the next 20+ years being. To describe him as huge in the industry is an understatement.
The story of his leaving Marvel in 1992 is full of legend and myth as well as fact. One story I heard was that one of the decision making events was Marvel not paying for his wife to come join him at a convention. For a family man like Lee that was a slap from a company that he’d given a 7 figure pay day to. I don’t know if that’s true, but one thing is, he joined the other 6 and was arguably the biggest of that initial 7 stars of Image.
Jim Valentino, Erik Larsen and Todd McFarlane just had the one thing to offer. Shadowhawk, Savage Dragon and Spawn were big books and two of them continue to be published to this day. Silvestri, Portacio, Liefeld and Lee expanded their horizons a little and formed little universes around their primary titles. Lee formed the WildStorm imprint and started the whole thing off with W.:I..L.D.Cats, a mix of sci-fi and superheroes that had an interesting story wrapped in Lee’s X-Men forged style. But it didn’t end there, there was also StormWatch (international military super-heroics), Team 7 (soldiers who suffered an event that left them more than) Gen-13 (kids of Team-7) Wetworks (soldiers in metal skin fighting vampires, no seriously that’s what it was) and Backlash (a former member of Team-7 and StormWatch, trying to rebuild his life and get to know his estranged teen daughter) and more characters besides. It was getting as big and unwieldy as Marvel in places, but there was a sense it could all fit together. It had connective tissue including Team 7 and something called the Gen-Factor as well as the Kheribum/Daemonite war and there was a sense it was all one big story and so crossovers seems a natural fit here.
I came in to this series in an odd way, with the exception of Wetworks, I had read some of all of the series involved, but had fallen out of collecting them. I knew the players, but not the current situation with each. Some of the stuff here I got, other stuff I didn’t and so I was confused, that said, I did enjoy it at the time and followed several titles after the fact. In the aftermath, stuff happened in that line that made it much more exciting.
But tying in several series, their origins, extremeness and a larger ongoing story, this was the a very 90s crossover and I’m looking forward to revisiting.
My Marvel Life 