Part 2.

Part 2. DARK HORSE Dark Horse also needs to be looked at series by series. It publishes different creator-owned worlds, licensed properties and some shared settings, rather than putting every title into one giant continuity. Hellboy and B.P.R.D. share a history, but that doesn't make every other Dark Horse book part of their world. With licensed comics, the property owner's rules also matter. The older Dark Horse Star Wars books, for example, belonged to the Expanded Universe continuity that was later classified as Legends. A change like that comes from the franchise's continuity decisions, rather than a universal Dark Horse rule. Hellboy is a good example of a world with actual dates attached to its history. His arrival on Earth stays in 1944, and later adventures take place at specific points along the timeline. A comic published today can tell a story from decades earlier without moving that adventure into the present. So publication order and the order things happen aren't necessarily the same. Dark Horse doesn't impose one sliding timescale across everything it publishes. Some worlds have fixed historical timelines, while other books handle aging and continuity according to their own story or franchise rules. So that's a good reason why, with X-Men, I wanted to start from 1962. Now keep in mind I have a very rich comic history in my head. I know a lot about the Marvel comic companies, the characters, the storylines, the histories across the board, just because I've been involved in comics my whole life. But this is my first time really doing a deep read-through of X-Men and I'm not talking about just Uncanny X-Men. I'm talking about every X-title ever made, guest appearances, cameos, and it's a big undertaking. I'm not going to lie and say that it's a small thing. A lot of the casual readers are people who are just touching and going or are just even basic comic fans. A lot of them are probably going to start somewhere in the more modern period but I wanted to get the full history because what a lot of people realize is this continuity does stick. There's stuff that happens in the 1960s that molds who the characters are in the 1990s and 2000s. If you ask a lot of people about comics, about comic history, a lot of them aren't going to know the deeper nuances of some of the characters and the histories behind it if they haven't read them all for themselves. That's a big thing if you're really into comics and you want to know the whole lore. It's taken me a long time to get this far and it's going to take me a lot longer to finish the rest because I don't only read X-Men. I read a lot of different stuff. For example, little facts about the character that a lot of people won't readily know. Some will, some won't. Things like: there was almost a decade where Professor Xavier left Earth to run with the Shi'ar Empire, working with Princess Leia trying to stop a rebellion that her sister was causing. Most people would assume that Professor X has been with the X-Men the whole time but that wasn't the case. He was there on Earth throughout the 1960s and '70s for quite a while but then there was a whole decade where he was just not there at all. There are just a lot of specifics there. Another example: Banshee, at one point, used his powers to save somebody and screamed so loud that he ended up throwing out his voice for like 8 years, maybe give or take a few. He wasn't even able to use his powers anymore. There are little nuances like that that a lot of people don't know and that's one of the reasons why I redo it: so I can mentally document and know the whole storyline and have an easier time explaining it to people and talking about comic history. It's just a really fun subject and the X-Men are amazing. I'm just now in the early '90s. I'm reading Wolverine. At this moment I'm reading Wolverine #31, #32, and #33, writing the Thunderbolt storyline, kind of working through the story. I just got done with Part 2 cont..