I can’t believe someone is actually publishing this X-Men fanfic

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]Guys, I cannot believe the comic that I'm holding in my hand right now. I get sent quite a few comics. It's one of the great privileges of doing what I do. And I got this package from Abrams, not from Marvel, from Abrams, which is an independent publisher. And they publish a lot of really interesting stuff. When I opened this package, I think the last thing I expected to see was X-Men fanfiction. And not just any X-Men fanfiction, but X-Men fanfiction by John Burn. So, let's do a bit of history and then we'll talk about this book. Why is this book such a big deal? It's a big deal because it's by John Burn. Now, if you're watching this channel, you probably know the name John Burn. He is one of the most legendary creators in comic book history, notably as an artist, but also a writer in his own right. So, let's look quickly at at Burn's history and why this is important. Burn bounced around a bit at Charlton Comics, but he was brought into Marvel mainly by Chris Claremont. Chris Claremont was sort of an upand- cominging writer and when there's a gap on Iron Fist, he brought Burn in. And I think you can see right away that Burn just has this energy in his artwork, this cleanness, this Christmas that just set him apart. And so he would do some Marvel stories for a while, but then he got called up to the big leagues to join Chris Claremont, who had originally brought him into Marvel on X-Men uh with issue 108. Chris Claremont along with Dave Cochram had made X-Men like the number one book at Marvel. And it is one of, you know, the most legendary runs in comic book history. And I'm biased here.

[00:01:26]This is like the book that got me into comics. In the '9s, Marvel started doing these phone books of like 25 issues that were like $15. And as a kid who couldn't afford a lot of comics, this is before manga, being able to get this many comics for $15, that's how I stretched my allowance. And I had been into the cartoon show. I grew up, you know, with the Marvel with the X-Men cartoon show.

[00:01:49]And finding out that there was like a better version of it with incredible art and incredible storytelling and more mature than what I've been seeing on TV, but with all those same characters, like that blew my mind. And so this is still like the most cherished book. Like if there's a fire, I'm saving this just because it means so much to me personally. Eventually I got the second volume and further volumes. And of course today I've swapped, you know, those out for the the color the omnibuses here. Um, and so I definitely recommend this run so strongly. I'm going to make a whole video about it.

[00:02:18]But like Burn's art with Claremont's writing is just what X-Men is. It's the balance between the two of them that makes them so special. They are the Lennin McCartney of superhero comics. I mean, not any disrespect on Stanley and Jack Kirby and anybody else, but like this to me is the run that redefined superheroes because you take Claremont's tendencies, which were very soapy. He was very concerned with the interiority of these characters. And it's a point of parody now where there's just huge thought balloons of people very angsty like walking in the woods. But like Claremont cared about the X-Men like they were real people. And Burn just loved action and loved the poppiness and his drawings just have this tremendous amount of energy. And a huge part of that is the Christmas and originality of Terry Austin's inks, which were very different than kind of the brush heavy stuff that everybody had been doing before that. After a couple issues of working together, Burn actually starts taking like a rack contour, you know, shared credit with Claremont for the stories. They're working in the Marvel method, right? So, they would come with a plot together. Burn would draw the whole thing and then Claremont would come in and add the dialogue over top.

[00:03:21]And this is not Chris Claremont writing, you know, this is a collaborative book.

[00:03:25]And you see, you know, more and more of Burn's influence is it feels like this is a book being laid out by an artist.

[00:03:31]This is, you know, camera movement and pacing and like, you know, scenes like this are just peak comic storytelling for me. Like the way the motion is flowing, your eye is flowing through the page. We have these different compositional elements, this slow zoom out. Like it is a visual storytelling, but then of course you've got Claremont's writing on top of it and this real care for the characters on top of the the burn action. But over the course of this run, there would start to be tension between them. And I think, you know, they both had very clear visions of what this book should be that no longer aligned. People like to cite this panel, so I thought it was worth showing. Burn draws this image of Colossus easily pulling this trunk out of the ground and and Claremont adds this text of like by Lenin either my heart will burst or my and my steel body crack. Like it just making it more of a struggle for him. So there's this starts to be this tension and this disconnect between the art and the writing. And also just like Claremont's tendency to cover a lot of the art and do a lot of storytelling via text. And that's that's just Claremont's style. You know, it is what it is. Despite their differences, like they continued to just crank out hits. You've got the Dark Phoenix Saga, arguably one of the most iconic superhero stories ever. And then, you know, Days of Future Past, which is if equally sets like another whole standard for the whole time traveling, X-Men, the future, the the post-apocalyptic stuff, bringing all these new flavors to X-Men and really making X-Men like the defining comic of Marvel comics. Like, it's still weird for me as like a child of the '9s that the Avengers are so popular because when we were kids, like when I was reading comics, like the Avengers were the dorks. All the cool kids read X-Men. and they read X-Men because this was the energy that honestly people were still drawing on in the '9s after Claremont and Burn had long departed from the title. And to a degree they're still drawing on today.

[00:05:17]Like X-Men 97 is is Claremont and Burn's legacy. You know, Marvel took most of the X-Men characters they're adding to it are coming from Claremont's run. Like this is just where comics come from. So if you don't have this run, I definitely recommend picking these up. I try and grab the omnibuses. I like reading long runs in this format and they come in print and then they disappear. Um, I've got some Amazon links here, but I think they might be sold out of both these omnibuses. Volume one's just gone.

[00:05:44]Hopefully it comes back in print soon. I know Waltz has like a couple copies as I'm recording this of volume two and volume three, which is the post burn stuff, but it's fantastic. And I think this paperback is in print if you just want to read the Dark Phoenix Saga.

[00:05:56]There's also the Marvel Unlimited. If you can binge comics, it's the most affordable option and you like reading digitally. Like I said, when I can get these, when they're in print, I grab them. But yeah, the tensions rise until 1981, and it, you know, Louise Simson, who's the editor, has to choose between Claremont and Burn on X-Men, and she chooses Claremont. The story of Claremont on X-Men for the next decade is a story for another day. So Burn leaves and he will write and draw his own run on Fantastic 4, unencumbered by anyone else. Um, I also have the first omnibus of that, waiting for a second one. So grab those if you're interested.

[00:06:28]They just had an epic collection come out. Another great run, but for me, like burn the X-Men, like that's the match made in heaven. And we know he's never going to work with Claremont again.

[00:06:38]They're not friends at this point. After 86, he goes over and reinvents Superman after the crisis with a man of steel.

[00:06:45]And he bounces around. He does a lot of stuff. He does script a couple X-Men issues in the '9s, but like, you know, you've got plotting by Wills Pertachio and Jim Lee and and it's not really a John Burn comic at this point. He does come back to X-Men in 1999 for X-Men: The Hidden Years, which is like revisiting the early like Roy Thomas, Neil Adams era of X-Men. Personally, not an era of X-Men I have a lot of fondness for. Not a big Roy Thomas fan, but that gets canceled after a couple years. And that cancellation ends Burn's relationship with Marvel. And so, I think for most of us at this point, we go, okay, you know, we're not going to get Burn doing X-Men again. That was a thing we had. We've got all our collections. I've read those stories a million times. They're among my favorites. But you know that day has gone. Somehow in 2019 this starts happening. So Burn runs his own message board of which he is the moderator and has a long list of rules you have to follow to use his message board. And he starts posting new pencils of X-Men pages. He just got the bug and and just starts doing X-Men fanfiction. And the thing is, you know, he's not working in the system. So, he's just ignoring all the continuity that came after his run. He even goes back a few issues before and changes what happened to the Phoenix at the end of that iconic story and just starts taking off in a different direction. And he's just posting pencled pages on his forum.

[00:08:09]I guess Marvel doesn't care. I mean, that's cool. Whatever the relationship is, they're not stopping him. And he just is doing it for fun. This is just the wildest thing to really happen. Like imagine if Christopher Nolan or somebody just started like making his own Batman movies in his backyard 10 years from now like without permission just by himself.

[00:08:29]Like it's just it's so bizarre. And this thing becomes like a legend. You know you can see people have made bound versions. Here's somebody sent one to Rob Lifel. So there's a couple pictures of binding this stuff. people, fans would go in and ink and color it and finish his artwork, which is so cool that you could just go in and get penciled pages of Burns artwork and just and just ink it yourself. And so for like four years, three three four years, he does this and does 30 issues, 30 regular issues, like monthly issues of his own X-Men fanfiction posted directly to his forum. That was supposed to be the end. You know, he just kind of burned out after a while and basically said, "I wrote myself into a quarter.

[00:09:06]It's not fun anymore. So that's it. I'm done.

[00:09:10]just the wildest thing, just like the wildest thing to have happened in like X-Men history until we get to today when literally somebody Abrams got permission and and inked and colored and finished all those pages and put them in a book and they're going to do it across three volumes and it's a real book now called X-Men Elsewhere by John Burn. like it's not something I thought would ever happen. And I think this is just there's an evolution happening with Marvel's publishing where we've got other publishers publishing Marvel comics already this year. I've gotten now an Abrams book of Marvel comics.

[00:09:45]I've got uh Fanta Graphics is doing Marvel comics. Like Marvel for years has been licensing the the YA stuff out to other publishers. But I think we're seeing an evolution of Marvel's strategy. And I think in light of the recent layoffs, we're going to see this continue where Marvel's becoming more and more of a licenser like Disney is with their comics. They don't they're not a publisher. Hot take. I could see them getting entirely out of comic book publishing and moving to a licensing model in the next 5 or 10 years, but that'll depend on the economy and the leadership at Disney. But heard it here first. That was a lot of preamble, but I wanted you to understand why this book is so special to me and I think special in the history of comics. We don't expect fanfiction to be done by industry legends. We don't expect that fanfiction to be published and we don't expect it to be published by other publishers. So, let's actually take a look and let me tell you my thoughts about this comic. I mean, the first thing you'll notice if you're used to Marvel trades is it is not printed like a Marvel book. It's got this matte finish. Let me put it next to this omnibus. Compare it to the burn how burn looks in this X-Men omnibus. You know, this is how I'm used to reading Marvel comics. And a lot of colorists will say that this is way too vibrant.

[00:10:49]that these colors were sort of designed to be printed on a yellowing more, you know, paper stock paper than the super gloss white that Omnibus has come in.

[00:10:58]I'm used to this. So, if you see the difference in just the white tone between these books and the finish, this is super high gloss, as you can probably see. It's a little hard to see. This is matte. It's muted. It's the printing overall is just softer, but it feels almost like a new vintage comic. It's got a unique feel and it's similar. It's not as nice as the phantoraphics printing on this. This Barry Windsor Smith book is like incredibly beautiful matte printing. I mean, this is one of the most stunning looking collections I've seen. I think this will probably be the direction we see more collections going. And this burn, you know, this is in the same in the same wheelhouse. How does it read? How is the story?

[00:11:39]I loved it. I like it gave me the joy of like reading through those old X-Men issues again for the first time. I couldn't I couldn't believe it. I mean, I felt it it feels like a time machine because I'll say Burn's 90s writing and some of the stuff he did after, you know, Man of Steel, it doesn't feel like classic comics to me. It feels like '90s comics. It feels of its era. That's okay. This feels like he's specifically trying to write with all the rules and the style of comics of the late 70s and early 80s, which is one of the greatest eras of comics, largely because of the influence Claremont and Burn had on the industry. And so looking through this, it just it's it's got that classic superhero feel. You know, one of the things I love about this era and Claremont in particular is that there's no irony. There's no winkiness. And like the sincerity of Claremont comics and the Claremont style of writing is what a lot of the like9s stuff was rebelling against. And especially when you get to like the Jos Weedenification of the MCU, I I dug a lot of that stuff. I think we all enjoyed seeing kind of the winkiness like not taking it as seriously and and now that I'm fatigued on all the irony, I'm fatigued on all the self-loathing of the MCU. Coming back to that Claremont stuff has been a real joy. And coming back to this is like new issues of that.

[00:12:57]It it's totally serious and and and and sincere in its approach to the X-Men to to burn. And just like to Claremont, these are real characters with interior lives. They happen to be superheroes.

[00:13:08]They're not winking and apologizing for wearing tights. Like it is just superhero comics at its most classic.

[00:13:15]And because it's Burn Without Claremont, you don't have issues of like Storm and Kitty Pride going shopping. It is just action, action, action, new villains, teamups. You know, you have Magneto in there, of course, like you have the big villains. You got a ton of Sentinel stuff. There's space, but it's also got the Fantastic Four. It's got the Avengers. It's just like I use the word fanfiction intentionally, which which sounds derogatory, I think, depending on what part of fandom you you exist in, but this is the work of a fan. That fan just happens to be one of the most talented artists and creators in the medium making fanfiction, and he's rewriting history. And so I actually recently reread Claremont, like the Omnibus volume three and four, which kind of cover this same period. And it's super fun to see like how their differences exist. You know, this is the Lennin McCartney of comics putting out competing solo albums, you know, 40 years apart. There's some weird stuff like Gan Gray, you know, repeatedly they talk about she's got the mental capacity of a 5-year-old. It's a choice. It's a choice Burn has made, but there's just so much to Burn's storytelling and such a solid amount of craft and kind of invisible craft that goes into the way he stages action scenes. Like, people are moving in this book. You know, when I read modern superhero comics, they can feel very stiff. Beautifully rendered, beautiful drawings, but they don't have the sense of layout and motion and action that Burn does. It's still pretty textheavy. It's not a Claremont book, but there is definitely like a text component, but it never becomes overbearing. I love the issue byisssue breakdown. There's no sense of like writing six issue arcs or writing for the trade. Each issue is a self-contained story, but part of a larger ongoing soap opera. That's something that's so great about runs.

[00:14:58]I'm going to make a whole video about why the run in a superhero comic is such a unique form of storytelling and kind of a lost form of storytelling at this point. I think I don't really read a lot of contemporary superhero comics, so let me know if I'm wrong, but like each issue builds these story arcs and builds these characters and builds these narratives, and they all come together in a very, very satisfying way across this book. It's just it's a blast to read. A huge part of me is brokenhearted that we didn't get this as a monthly book because it would have been so cool to be invested in a new X-Men story for 30 something months. Uh, but these books, you can't argue with the production quality. So, I just ripped through this thing and I thought it was so good. I was so It was like seeing an old friend you haven't seen in a while.

[00:15:42]Like, I thought I had read all of the cool X-Men comics from the '7s and now there's going to be three of these books, so 30 more issues. So, this was just a blast. I'm so excited that it exists. It's so weird, but I really hope you'll consider checking it out. It's coming out later this year, so take a screenshot and you can pre-order on Amazon or Waltz or of course, you know, at your local comic book store. I'm sure they'd be happy to order it for you.

[00:16:02]Thank you guys for watching. Please subscribe. The channel's already almost at 10,000 subscribers on the second channel, which is super cool. It was meant to be my private little experiment area, and now lots of people are watching it, but I can't be unhappy about that. Thank you to my patrons for supporting and making this channel possible.