“Brought to you by those folks who were late with their deadlines.” That’s funny. I was just complaining about the quality of Paul Smith’s artwork on this Judgement War storyline, conjecturing that perhaps he was rushing to meet the schedule of an ongoing series. And now we get this not so subtle jab from the editors on the first page of this comic book about someone not meeting deadlines. I wonder who they were talking about? I mean, do you think the script writer or letterer was having trouble meeting the schedule? I doubt it. The long pole during the production of a comic book is almost always on the actual artwork of the comic, and by extension, the artist. In this case, legendary X-Men artist Paul Smith. Seems my hunch about him rushing his artwork in order to keep up might have been correct. A damn shame. To be fair, most of the X-Men comics being published at this time had made the jump to bi-monthly publication. Not only that, but the similarly paced New Mutants Asgardian story line I read before this also had a side story plopped down right in the middle of it, so maybe I’m jumping to conclusions. One thing’s for sure. I’ll never know real story. Since I’m never going to think about this again as soon as I stop typing about it. (X-Factor #47 – Nov 1989)
