What Little I Knew I Blame On John Byrne
Sadly lost to the trashbags of time are the many, many pages of my teenage tribute to Chris Claremont, John Byrne and the X-Men’s “Days of Future Past” saga. Like many a fanboy, I was “inspired” by the dystopian future shown in those two classic issues of Uncanny X-Men where older versions of our familiar characters all get killed by giant personalityless Sentinel robots, and decided that the best way to honor that inspiration was to write and draw a long, pointless version of that story that pretended to be the events leading up to everyone getting killed. In reality, it was more like “13-Year-Old Graeme Tries To Ape John Byrne Art The Best He Possibly Can While Having Nothing Much Happen Storywise,” but, hey. I didn’t know any better at the time.
I admit, I’m not sure how many pages this epic ran – in my memory, it was easily more than a hundred, filled with unevenly-ruled panels of a slightly-older Wolverine saying things that were only slightly different from what he’d said in any particular recent issue of Uncanny, normally saving one or more characters from Sentinels by destroying them in some entirely-unexplained and badly-illustrated manner. The writing, such as it was, was exactly what you’d expect from someone who’d just become a teenager and had read too many comics – Action-packed and lacking in almost any shred of common sense, and with a pessimism that managed to be both naive and all-encompassing. The same thing happened over and over again, something that characters noted in unconvincing world-weary tones as I parrotted someone else’s fake version of life experience, a photocopy of a photocopy of a painting done from imagination instead of observation.
The story never got finished, of course; like the Image artists ahead of me, I got bored of the X-Men and went on to create my own nothing-like-the-X-Men-okay-yes-they-are characters, and told very X-Men-like stories with them for awhile, before Vertigo and Alan Moore took my still-teenage creativity into odder territories. If I was Walt Simonson, this’d be the point where I’d tell you how this embarrassing slice of fan fiction ended up being the inspiration for my upcoming run on an X-title, but I’m not; instead, I’ll just admit that it amuses me to remember that the time period (and title) of this pointless depressathon was 2008, and that one of the most embarrassing parts of the whole recollection is realizing that part of me genuinely expected the world to have become a robot-led, graffitied dystopia by then.
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