I’ve loved comics since before I could read them on my own. Growing up, I had a filing cabinet full of comics.
One of the drawbacks of having comics as a kid is that kids aren’t good at taking care of things and I read my comics until many of them fell apart. But just because they were ripped and cover-less doesn’t mean that I didn’t love those books. When my family moved from the Bronx to Miami, I threw many of my old beat up comics away and only a handful survived the move.
Since, that move I’ve established a new collection, long boxes full of comics are piled up in my home-office and dozens of trade paperbacks line the shelves. Nowadays, I find myself reading each comic and filing it away and maybe reading it once or twice more, if I’m particularly wowed by it. But the comics from that filing cabinet the Bronx, I read over-and-over again, the panels are burned into my brain. Where they better comics than what currently comes out or do I remember them fondly the same way a girl in her late 20’s remembers the Backstreet Boys, not because they were good but because they were popular during her formative years?
I’m determined to find the answer. None of my comics were particularly special, most were single issues, not worth much money. I decided to find as many as I can on Amazon, Ebay and conventions and pick them up, not to send them away to get graded but to read them and see if they hold up to my childhood memories.
I am Matt Masdeu and I am the Re-Collector!
My favorite story was “The Hand From Nowhere” it was 50s Batman at its most ridiculous and it’s typical pre-Crisis Luthor. He goes out of his way to come up with an overly elaborate scheme , involving fake aliens and a giant hand to steal something that could could have been stolen in a more traditional fashion and cost a lot less to implement the plan.
Banshee rejoins the X-Men only to discover the team has been replaced by an army of techno-organic beings known as the Phalanx! He assembles a ragtag team of X-Men, mostly made of prisoners lying around the Mansion. He, Jubilee, the White Queen and Sabretooth set out on a mission to protect the next generation of mutants!
In the eyes of Stephen Lang, the Phalanx is his last ditch effort for humans to defend themselves from mutantkind. All while selling it’s soul and threatening mankind itself. He sees humanity as so threatened by mutants he seeks to link up each of them to overpower them once and for all. The only sacrifice would be our individuality, making man slave to the new techno-overlord. The totalitarian overtones are pretty apparent and you could see the idea of giving up freedom for protection is common theme today, maybe more than in 1994.
This is 80s X-Men at their best. There’s relationship drama, Cyclops has ditched his wife for his his first love, Jean. His brother takes the scorned wife’s side and falls for her. But then you get the out-of-this world twist that she’s trying to sacrifice their son to a demon just to get back at Cyclops. All the wild sci-fi soap opera that Claremont-era X-Men stories were known for are here.
