A Marvel press release on Friday provided an advance preview of Marvel’s X-Men #7 from the new series by Victor Gischler. I’m not sure why the preview was released now since #6 hasn’t shipped yet, but I have a pretty good guess as Spider-Man joins the X-Men for this story arc. Many fans have been critical of the current X-Men vs. Vampires story currently featured in the title (and let’s face it they’ve been critical of Amazing Spider-Man lately as well), but this might be a way to showcase the change in focus that’s to come.

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This year’s New York Comic Con came and went this weekend (10/8/10-10/10/10), and this is a tough one to write up. In a word, it was overwhelming. I want to say I had a good time, but I don’t know that I came away from it with the experience that I was looking for. Thankfully, that wasn’t true for everyone here at MLD, and I did come back with a lot to write about.

The Show

Saturday was impossibly crowded. Reports indicate that 97,000 people attended the show throughout the weekend and it felt like every one of them was in the same aisle (Evan Dorkin sums it up well here). Attendees reported waiting up to an hour to get into the building and even to get into some of the panels. Both Saturday and Sunday were reported as “sold out,” but I’m not sure that point reflects a reasonable number for that space. Combining the show with the Anime Festival may have just been too much.

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The various X-titles have always been a mystery to me. I’ve probably read hundreds of issues of X-Men comics and I still constantly feel like an outsider when doing so. I cannot read a single issue without having tons of questions. Uncanny X-Force #1 proved to be no different. Luckily we at MLD have a resident X-pert.

Spoilers will follow…

KevinMLD: So Archangel is now like an uncontrollable repressed personality similar to the Hulk? How long has that been the case?

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It’s like 1991 all over again. In July, Marvel launched a new X-Men #1 by Victor Gischler and Paco Medina featuring a mutants versus vampires story that’s still raging on. Tomorrow, Marvel follows up that launch with Uncanny X-Force #1 by Rick Remender and Jerome Opena. It’s hard to say that this merits its own “day” in celebration of its release, but its launch certainly makes more sense than X-Men #1‘s.

Back in 1991, Marvel released Chris Claremont and Jim Lee’s X-Men #1 in the same summer as Fabian Nicieza and Rob Liefeld’s X-Force #1. Both were huge sellers with X-Men #1 at 8 million copies and X-Force #1 somewhere around 5 million in the heyday of speculative investment (X-Force also did it with only one cover compared to X-Men‘s five). While X-Force didn’t endure the way X-Men (now X-Men: Legacy) did, it was still a successful concept that was reborn coming out of 2007’s Messiah Complex storyline.

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Of all the big announcements coming out of this year’s San Diego Comic Con, it was a teaser image for the coming line of X-Men titles that grabbed most of my attention. This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise since I’m a big fan, but the image got me to thinking about the long history of ultra-wide X-Men images I seem to go crazy for. What is it about these things that I love so much?

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