I Am NOT the Beastmaster: The Not-New, No-Different Dave Cockrum

And I mean that in the nicest way possible.

I've been reading a lot of Dave Cockrum's work lately. (And, regrettably, I've been reading a lot about him - Dave is ill, and friends and fellow artists have organized a benefit volume to help him.) Thanks to a bargain deal on some Essential X-Mens, I've been immersing myself in vintage mutants - the Claremont, Cockrum, and Byrne years. It's been fun to revisit those stories, some of them etched permanently into the collective memory of every comics fanboy, others pleasantly rediscovered, and still others I never caught the first time around. It's a blast to reread the the Proteus story (which is the de rigeur story that everybody praises when they're saying Dark Phoenix is too de rigeur, although the Proteus tale really is that good) or to finally see how that Doctor Doom story ended.

I don't have much to say about the Byrne years (and really, what else needs to be said?). The real treasure is rediscovering Dave Cockrum's second run as artist, when the book has so clearly just passed its peak but still isn't quite past its prime. Those issues are thick with references to Jean Grey and the Dark Phoenix saga - again and again, Claremont torments the fans with hints of driving Storm power-mad, or killing Colossus - suggesting that even he recognizes he's just done something that will define the X-Men forever, and that he isn't likely to repeat the phenomenon. On some level, he knows the show's already over.

These are the stories that happen after the main act, after Pembleton or Richie Cunningham has left the cast. The lame duck stories. And yet despite that relative (only relative) inconsequentiality, they're still quite good; the Doctor Doom/Arcade story with the team of four back-up X-Men is a particular favorite, with some of the most beautifully inked artwork Cockrum ever did. The big Magneto story in issue 150 would turn out to be a pivotal turning point in the character's evolution (one so pivotal that he's pivoted on it ever since). And Kitty's fairy tale was a fan favorite, if I recall correctly, though lord knows why. (Apparently anything with Kitty in it was everybody's favorite, to judge by the number of times per issue all the other X-Men think about how much they love her. It's the Dubya phenomenon, I suppose: call somebody "charismatic" enough times and the name is bound to stick.)

I have a particular soft spot for the Brood storyline, beginning with the issue where Colossus apparently dies in a New York street brawl with Deathbird. That may have been the first issue of the X-Men I ever saw, one shown to me by a slightly older cousin one Christmas Eve, which would mark it as the beginning of my gradual (and ultimately temporary) conversion from a DC fan into a Marvel one. But it's also a well-made story, one filled with all the colliding plotlines and Lucas-style space opera and separate teams of mutants running around believing each other to be dead that were the bread and butter of the Claremont X-Men. To a certain extent the classic Claremont X-Men plots were supposed to be a mess, and this one is beautifully so.

It's a shame that Cockrum didn't get to see the Brood plot through to its (loopy) conclusion. He turns in great artwork on that issue where poor Carol Danvers becomes Binary (a move that, even at the time, you somehow knew wasn't going to stick) and then he's gone, replaced by Paul Smith.

Now I was and am a huge fan of Paul Smith's artwork. The first X-Men comic I bought was his third issue, the conclusion of the Brood plot where the X-Men face off against the New Mutants. (This was another Christmastime loaner from my cousin, which I then had to run out and buy). Smith's gorgeous, clean-lined artwork, noticably more European than Cockrum's, was perhaps also more in keeping with the then-dominant Byrne/Perez style, and yet reading those issues in retrospect, and en masse, proves quite jarring. Watching the comic shift from Cockrum to Smith in mid-story is like watching the 1970s lurch into the 80s overnight. The Zeppelin fades down and suddenly it's all Nagel prints and Duran Duran albums.

Of course, the stories had been in X-Men Eighties Mode for a while - everything starting with Cockrum's return, possibly even with "Days of Future Past," has that aura of meticulously detailed irrelevancy that would dominate the book after the great arc of Jean's death. And this was the era when Claremont truly began amassing his great bank of dangling plots, stories so pointless he never bothered continuing them beyond the first issue, which he would nevertheless reference incessantly. (This is, ultimately, the only terrifying thing about Belasco and Ilyana.)

But the sudden shift in art from Cockrum's garish, outre science fiction - remember those alien costumes the X-Men would always wear? - to the slick Smith makes the change official: the seventies X-Men are gone, "All-New" and "All-Different" no more. Now you get just a few more good plotlines - the Morlocks not among them, nor Storm's "shocking" makeover, but the Silver Samurai and the Madelyne Pryor/Mastermind masterpiece, which promised to finally lay Jean Grey to rest once and for all, only for Shooter and Kurt Busiek to scotch that one up - and then it's on to John Romita Jr. and it's all over. The X-Men will lumber on like some great thunder lizard that doesn't know it's dead yet, and we lumbered along with it at the time, but now we know - we don't need to go buying up any of those back issues.

So I raise my glass to Dave Cockrum. Overshadowed in comparison to Byrne, who certainly did some beautiful team-book artwork, back when he was not yet a loon, but who also just had the good fortune to be there when the book would define itself for all time. Destined not to be the Proteus guy, the Dark Pheonix guy, Cockrum was instead the custodian of their fame at the last moment when the X-Men were really, truly good.

(You can find the second Cockrum run in Essential X-Men Volume 3, available wherever fine nostalgic adolescent reader-identification fantasies are sold.)