Robserecaps Forty – From Jim Lee to Plan B!
I’m gonna try and stay on the Rob if he’s back! This week, he’s talking about two of his ‘favorite’ subjects, Jim Lee, who he purposely edited out of an image of the Image founders and the X-Men, which he feels the current House of X stuff has damaged the franchise. Let’s dive in!
- We start by the Rob calling the X-Men the former heavyweight of comics, but is still Marvel’s best seller
- The Rob is gonna tell the story (eventually) of how close was Jim Lee to returning to the X-Men, highlighted by the clever title of this episode which the Rob mentions a four or five times
- In retelling his personal comics history, the Rob mentions Alan Ritchson, who started his genre career as Aquaman on Smallville, Hawk in the Titans HBO Max show and now, Reacher
- Since the Rob’s kid, Chase, is in the movie biz now, the Rob needs to watch his mouth about studios, but not Warner since they are not looking to option any of the the Rob’s catalog
- The Rob does state he does have a project that will be announced in early spring that the Rob has been sitting on for over a year because of the writers strike
- As a follow up from the last episode, the Rob states all the Alphas have gone from comics in the last 20 years. The Rob states he can name ten alphas, gets to five quickly, struggles to name eight and eventually gets to ten
- The Rob mentions Larry Stroman as one those Alphas, citing his run on X-Factor getting him a book, Tribe, at Image. A book that was cancelled after four issues and citied by Image president Beau Smith at the time as the type of book Image should not be publishing
- 13 minutes in, we finally get to the topic at hand
- The Rob states “you are welcome to vehemently disagree with me” which is a clear lie
- In the Rob’s opinion, House of X (“House of Ten, whatever”) should have been a one year event like Heroes Reborn or Age of Apocalypse and everything revert back to normal afterwards
- The Rob mentions some book called “13 Lives” by Claire North (might not be her real name) about a reincarnated time traveler but first…
- TANGENT! The Rob cites Lee Majors Six Million Dollar Man as inspiration for Cable, stating he would fake sick to skip church to stay home and watch the show
- Five minutes later, we’re back on track, the Rob gets the name of the book right, ‘The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, citing stories about Hickman plagiarizing this story for House of X on sites like Bleeding Cool and Comic Book dot com and it’s weird. *Editorial* It feels like the Rob is reading this info for the first time, like he’s distracted. The Rob keeps calling the book ’13 Lives’ or ‘Harry North’ a book he claims to have read before
- The Rob claims that the Moira MacTaggert aspect of House of X was not revisited due to legal issues about similarities to the book
- With House of X ending, it was time pivot to something new, which is something old, Jim Lee!
- After Dan Dido was let go from DC at the start of the pandemic, Jim Lee’s job (more on that later) was in question. The Rob has 10 people (executives, producer pals) to verify 100% that Disney/Marvel was making a play for Jim Lee
- The Rob does state that Jim’s work on Uncanny X-Men is not only Jim’s best work, some of the best work in comics history
- When the Rob was doing his three new 52 books, the Rob was making TONS of money for it, but gave it all up to spend more time with his kids
- We do get a peek into a normal day of the Rob
- 8a-10a drew
- rode the bike for an hour
- lounged around and took a shower, took some meetings
- 12p-1p drew
- 1:20p to 2p lunch
- 2p-6p drew
- rest of the day, watched Fargo, watched the Lakers and recorded the podcast
- The Rob doesn’t know what Jim Lee does for DC but knows Jim will draw X-Men again
- Next time, the Rob will reveal DC’s plans for this year! We do not get that review of the milkshake place, tho 🙁
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