It’s a big week for John Allison fans; not only is his new comic from Dark Horse, The Great British Bump-Off, debuting in shops tomorrow, but he has also launched an X-Men fan comic on his website and Patreon. The first comic debuted this week.
“I had to move house recently, there were weeks of stress and upheaval, and I didn’t have anything on the slate that I wanted to work on in tricky circumstances – no scripts for Steeple (which was meant to be next up), no fill-in Solver story, or anything else,” he wrote. “So I made the default comic I might have made as a child – an X-Men comic. If it hadn’t worked, you’d have been reading here that I am currently taking ‘a much needed break.’ It’s not a crossover, and it’s not a joke – I tried really hard! If I make an X-Men comic, it’s not going to be a ‘the guys hang out and have breakfast’ comic. There has to be pulse-pounding† action and mutant danger. The things I couldn’t write or draw when I was 13 years old.”
“Kit + The Wolf” debuted this week on his website and new pages will appear there a few times a week. The completed comic is available for download on his Patreon. He said he does not intend to sell the comic, offering it for free like he did the Giant Days/Batman crossover from a few years back.
The story kicks off with Kitty looking for someone to go to a “Brick Springstern” concert with her, and Wolverine is the only one home. So she offers him a cassette tape of Springstern’s Minnesota to listen to. I found the fact that he’s using the X-Men in a comic but changes Bruce Springsteen’s name kind of charming myself, as Brick Springstern is a reference to an old Marvel Transformers comic.
Also his description of Kitty, as least for the era of X-Men comics he’s drawing from, is quite accurate:
I have heard Kitty Pryde described as comics’ ultimate ‘Mary-Sue.’ As the teenage every(wo)man character in comics that were made for kids, surely that’s what she was meant to be. As those comics were written by Chris Claremont, she inevitably also became some kind of ninja master after being haunted by a weird ghost samurai.
And maybe it’s me, but I would have pegged Logan as a Springsteen fan.