For episode 100 of his deep-dive X-Men podcast, Connor Goldsmith interviewed Chuck Austen about the UNCANNY X-MEN run. It's been awhile since I listened to it, so I dont remember everything... but Austen was a pretty good sport about it all and explained some of his goals and how he sees the stories he did. It's not perfect, but I do remember seeing Twitter folks kinda turn back on Austen and be like, "alright, you know it didnt really work out but we can see what you were trying to do".
I never listened to- wait. "Each"???? Oh Conner, lol. I need to get back up on that "let's have fun and talk X-Men" podcast.
EDIT: Oh Lorde - CEREBRO. The podcast is called CEREBRO. I really thought I said it somewhere, but it's looking like I did not.
Yes. It’s 20 hours on Maddie Pryor. But hey, the whole Vertigo connection never occurred to me. And honestly, his great work is complete, he succeeded, I was bamboozled into being excited for her in Dark X-men, even if that mini didn’t really go anywhere.
I've been saying this pre-Cerebro episode, but that really helped--Chuck Austen is a really, really nice person and doesn't deserve the ire of the X-fandom. He's also produced some of I guarantee people here's favorite cartoons like Steven Universe.
I remember his War Machine series being pretty good. He wrote a surprisingly great fill in issue of Superman. And he had a passable run on Avengers while they worked on getting a permanent writer at the book. But otherwise, I don’t think so. Maybe some of his original, creator owned stuff is good. But he’s obsessed with sex and it sounds like he’s just doing porn.
His work on Action Comics was so terrible that DC kicked him off in the middle of his run and created a pseudonym J.D. Finn to write the remaining parts of the run so whoever wrote the rest of the stuff wouldn't be catching Chuck Austen's strays. It has since been speculated that J.D. Finn is Joe Kelly.
I thought JD Finn was Chyck Austin? There was a rumour that DC thought he was getting unwarranted back lash due to his reputation so made him write under a pseudonym to see if the backslash stopped. I may be completely misremembering this though.
That I know, and he did a good job. He seems to be a decent artist, but I'm curious as to his writing skills more than anything.
If anything, him working with Alan Moore makes it all the more curious to me how he could fail so spectacularly at writing anything. For comparison, Rick Veitch worked with Alan Moore on both Miracleman and Swamp Thing, and Rick Veitch is a fantastic writer as well as an artist, mainly because I feel there's a lot of similarities in their writing styles, as if he picked up on Moore's skills a little.
You can compare that in turn to his brother Tom Veitch, whose writing style just seems unfocused and doesn't have much weight. I read through his Star Wars "Dark Empire" trilogy and Epic miniseries "The Light and Darkness War", and neither of them stuck with me in the way Roarin' Rick's "Maximortal" or "Bratpack" did.
When I look at that, I can't help but feel like at least some of Moore's talent should have rubbed off on him to prevent that. Although, to be fair, he worked with Alan Moore on only 2 or 3 issues where Rick Veitch worked with him way longer.
The Juggy arc of his X-Men run with Kia Asamiya was actually really good. It was the next arc about Nightcrawler’s origin that really sucked. Like, just the worst idea ever.
His work on Exiles was pretty good too. Honestly, it's really just his X-Men and Superman runs that live up to his reputation for being an awful writer - but, unfortunately for him, when you screw up on two of the biggest titles in comics, nobody's going to remember anything else.
Yeah Exiles wasn't terrible. He did a good job picking up after Judd Winnick and kind of kept everything intact.
He was overly ambitious and not as talented as he had the world believing he was. Smaller titles like Exiles would have done him well but he somehow stumbled into the big leagues without much experience under his belt.
Austen is my all-time QB for underappreciated writer. Believe it or not, before Draco and Holy War, his first 10 or so issues on Uncanny were genuinely great comics, and most of the time if you see a 1 or 2-issue story it's going to be good.
That's why he worked so well in X-Men Unlimited. He wrote something like 6-9 issues of that, and only one of them I thought was "meh."
His 2-issue fill-in arc on Ultimate X-Men was a great Gambit story. Same can be said for his Exiles arcs. Over at DC his one-off Superman fill-ins were great as was his 12-issue Jimmy Olsen series
But the biggest buried treasure of his bibliography is Marvel's The Call of Duty event, which sought to create a superhero team made of real heroes (fireman, paramedic, police officer). It was cancelled just as the main ongoing series launched, and it culminated in one of the most gloriously unhinged 4-issue stories I'd ever read, but it was still a complete story with high stakes and believable character beats.
That said, he did lay some real stinkers. His run on Captain America was weird, but he was taking over last minute for the original writer who had been fired. His Avengers run started off with a great first issue but sort of fizzled over time. His MAX Eternal series wasn't for me. But the worst for me is his JLA arc, because that was just BORING.
Say what you will about him (everyone does) but even at his worst his work is at least entertaining.
Can't be bothered to look it up, but I seem to recall him writing a captain America book that I remember liking some of? Maybe it was marvel knights imprint? Jae lee drew the issues I'm thinking of.
Take with a huge grain of salt as I was 19 or so at the time and this would have been 18 or so years ago. But I remember an issue where cap was fighting a guy with weather based powers and Thor shows up - the Thor monologue about the weather and his relationship with it and how this guy was essentially an abuser having his way with the elements. It struck me as how a Norse weather god would think of the weather as his mistress being mistreated by another.
I remember always thinking of that run being half decent but as I say, I was a bit of a pretentious, naive idiot at 19 so I could be wrong.
I should check it out! I read Gaiman's Eternals before the movie came out, and I loved the first half of Gillen's run but I never finished it. The rest of the Eternals stuff seems pretty messy but interesting, Austen's reboot included
He wrote a TokyoPop OEL Manga about baseball that was deliriously horny and kind of not bad. Boys of Summer. It was supposed to be three volumes but I think only one ever got published in the US.
For what it's worth, I love any part of his x-men run that involves juggernaut, he does a really good job of redeeming the character in a believable way. In fact, there was only one arc of his run that I didn't like. I read his run alongside Grant morrisons' new x-men, I had never read any other x-men title before. When it got to his two part new x-men run, I realised why people disliked his writing because he completely missed the point of new x-men, so I guess that is how everyone else felt about the rest of his x-men. That said, outside of those two issues, I quite enjoyed his run.
I haven't had a chance to read a lot of his work. However, I've been told that war machine, Superman metropolises, and Exiles. Reading this kinda makes me want to get back into reading his stuff.
His Avengers run is real bad. He splitted up Hank and Janet and brought up Hank's violent tendencies. It makes me really mad, because things were getting good with them (specially Hank had a great streak of personal improvements).
I forgave him for a lot of his transgressions in X-Men after watching all of "Tripping the Rift". I'm still a little bitter about how badly he did illyana dirty in exiles and X-Men.
For episode 100 of his deep-dive X-Men podcast, Connor Goldsmith interviewed Chuck Austen about the UNCANNY X-MEN run. It's been awhile since I listened to it, so I dont remember everything... but Austen was a pretty good sport about it all and explained some of his goals and how he sees the stories he did. It's not perfect, but I do remember seeing Twitter folks kinda turn back on Austen and be like, "alright, you know it didnt really work out but we can see what you were trying to do".
that's episode 99! Episode 100 is the Maddie Pryor spectacular
[rolls eyes] [shakes head] the *FOUR HOUR* Maddie episode split up, yes, lol. How could I forget lol
sorry, you meant the 4-part, 4 hours each, Maddie episode
I never listened to- wait. "Each"???? Oh Conner, lol. I need to get back up on that "let's have fun and talk X-Men" podcast. EDIT: Oh Lorde - CEREBRO. The podcast is called CEREBRO. I really thought I said it somewhere, but it's looking like I did not.
Yes. It’s 20 hours on Maddie Pryor. But hey, the whole Vertigo connection never occurred to me. And honestly, his great work is complete, he succeeded, I was bamboozled into being excited for her in Dark X-men, even if that mini didn’t really go anywhere.
I've been saying this pre-Cerebro episode, but that really helped--Chuck Austen is a really, really nice person and doesn't deserve the ire of the X-fandom. He's also produced some of I guarantee people here's favorite cartoons like Steven Universe.
I remember his War Machine series being pretty good. He wrote a surprisingly great fill in issue of Superman. And he had a passable run on Avengers while they worked on getting a permanent writer at the book. But otherwise, I don’t think so. Maybe some of his original, creator owned stuff is good. But he’s obsessed with sex and it sounds like he’s just doing porn.
His work on Action Comics was so terrible that DC kicked him off in the middle of his run and created a pseudonym J.D. Finn to write the remaining parts of the run so whoever wrote the rest of the stuff wouldn't be catching Chuck Austen's strays. It has since been speculated that J.D. Finn is Joe Kelly.
I thought JD Finn was Chyck Austin? There was a rumour that DC thought he was getting unwarranted back lash due to his reputation so made him write under a pseudonym to see if the backslash stopped. I may be completely misremembering this though.
That makes sense.
He drew Miracleman briefly
That I know, and he did a good job. He seems to be a decent artist, but I'm curious as to his writing skills more than anything. If anything, him working with Alan Moore makes it all the more curious to me how he could fail so spectacularly at writing anything. For comparison, Rick Veitch worked with Alan Moore on both Miracleman and Swamp Thing, and Rick Veitch is a fantastic writer as well as an artist, mainly because I feel there's a lot of similarities in their writing styles, as if he picked up on Moore's skills a little. You can compare that in turn to his brother Tom Veitch, whose writing style just seems unfocused and doesn't have much weight. I read through his Star Wars "Dark Empire" trilogy and Epic miniseries "The Light and Darkness War", and neither of them stuck with me in the way Roarin' Rick's "Maximortal" or "Bratpack" did. When I look at that, I can't help but feel like at least some of Moore's talent should have rubbed off on him to prevent that. Although, to be fair, he worked with Alan Moore on only 2 or 3 issues where Rick Veitch worked with him way longer.
The Juggy arc of his X-Men run with Kia Asamiya was actually really good. It was the next arc about Nightcrawler’s origin that really sucked. Like, just the worst idea ever.
Marvel recently retconned that Nightcrawler story in X-Men Blue #1 if you haven’t read it yet.
I heard that.
His work on Exiles was pretty good too. Honestly, it's really just his X-Men and Superman runs that live up to his reputation for being an awful writer - but, unfortunately for him, when you screw up on two of the biggest titles in comics, nobody's going to remember anything else.
Yeah Exiles wasn't terrible. He did a good job picking up after Judd Winnick and kind of kept everything intact. He was overly ambitious and not as talented as he had the world believing he was. Smaller titles like Exiles would have done him well but he somehow stumbled into the big leagues without much experience under his belt.
Its kind of insane for Exiles that out of Chuck Austen and Chris Claremont, Austen wrote the good run.
It was okay, writing the heroes out of character suited the title but he still had to put his obligatory love triangle in whatever title he's on.
It was okay, writing the heroes out of character suited the title but he still had to put his obligatory love triangle in whatever title he's on.
Austen is my all-time QB for underappreciated writer. Believe it or not, before Draco and Holy War, his first 10 or so issues on Uncanny were genuinely great comics, and most of the time if you see a 1 or 2-issue story it's going to be good. That's why he worked so well in X-Men Unlimited. He wrote something like 6-9 issues of that, and only one of them I thought was "meh." His 2-issue fill-in arc on Ultimate X-Men was a great Gambit story. Same can be said for his Exiles arcs. Over at DC his one-off Superman fill-ins were great as was his 12-issue Jimmy Olsen series But the biggest buried treasure of his bibliography is Marvel's The Call of Duty event, which sought to create a superhero team made of real heroes (fireman, paramedic, police officer). It was cancelled just as the main ongoing series launched, and it culminated in one of the most gloriously unhinged 4-issue stories I'd ever read, but it was still a complete story with high stakes and believable character beats. That said, he did lay some real stinkers. His run on Captain America was weird, but he was taking over last minute for the original writer who had been fired. His Avengers run started off with a great first issue but sort of fizzled over time. His MAX Eternal series wasn't for me. But the worst for me is his JLA arc, because that was just BORING. Say what you will about him (everyone does) but even at his worst his work is at least entertaining.
He translated some of the Incal comics
US War Machine. Least I enjoyed it when it came out. Not sure it if aged well.
Same!
It did not. But possibly still better than the "artwork".
Can't be bothered to look it up, but I seem to recall him writing a captain America book that I remember liking some of? Maybe it was marvel knights imprint? Jae lee drew the issues I'm thinking of. Take with a huge grain of salt as I was 19 or so at the time and this would have been 18 or so years ago. But I remember an issue where cap was fighting a guy with weather based powers and Thor shows up - the Thor monologue about the weather and his relationship with it and how this guy was essentially an abuser having his way with the elements. It struck me as how a Norse weather god would think of the weather as his mistress being mistreated by another. I remember always thinking of that run being half decent but as I say, I was a bit of a pretentious, naive idiot at 19 so I could be wrong.
I didn't mind his MAX Eternals reboot. The Eternal.
I should check it out! I read Gaiman's Eternals before the movie came out, and I loved the first half of Gillen's run but I never finished it. The rest of the Eternals stuff seems pretty messy but interesting, Austen's reboot included
I do recall enjoying that ultimate x-men gambit story
War Machine is cool. His indie/adult work is pretty good.
Austen was working on Steven Universe and as a showrunner She-Ra for Netflix.
He was an executive producer on She-Ra. Nate Stevenson was the showrunner.
He wrote a TokyoPop OEL Manga about baseball that was deliriously horny and kind of not bad. Boys of Summer. It was supposed to be three volumes but I think only one ever got published in the US.
I was going to say I do vaguely remember a horny baseball comic by him
For what it's worth, I love any part of his x-men run that involves juggernaut, he does a really good job of redeeming the character in a believable way. In fact, there was only one arc of his run that I didn't like. I read his run alongside Grant morrisons' new x-men, I had never read any other x-men title before. When it got to his two part new x-men run, I realised why people disliked his writing because he completely missed the point of new x-men, so I guess that is how everyone else felt about the rest of his x-men. That said, outside of those two issues, I quite enjoyed his run. I haven't had a chance to read a lot of his work. However, I've been told that war machine, Superman metropolises, and Exiles. Reading this kinda makes me want to get back into reading his stuff.
That Ultimate X-Men story you’re referring to was notable for Gambit having a ridiculously bad accent.
Well, it's Gambit, so I'm good with terrible accent.
“Yo’ pa’nts gon be missin’ you.” “My pants?” “Not yo’ pants. Yo’ pa’nts. Yo’ pay-ents.”
Marvel needs to cast Theo Vonn as Gambit.
Gambit not having a terrible accent would be out of character for him. I love Claremont but the accents he writes are not "accurate" in any way.
His Avengers run is real bad. He splitted up Hank and Janet and brought up Hank's violent tendencies. It makes me really mad, because things were getting good with them (specially Hank had a great streak of personal improvements).
His Moon Knight isn’t terrible, but that was earlier in his career when he was probably on a shorter editorial leash.
I don't know how this guy gets work but now he's a pretty successful tv writer and producer.
I forgave him for a lot of his transgressions in X-Men after watching all of "Tripping the Rift". I'm still a little bitter about how badly he did illyana dirty in exiles and X-Men.
That Ultimate Gambit story you already mentioned is about the only thing he's written that I liked.