Why You Are Oh So Wrong About Grant Morrison's New X-Men

[BIGREDROBOT]

So let's duke it out here. The topic: Grant Morrison's New X-Men. Some people think it's the logical evolution (see what I did there?) of the series that sets up Homo Superior for a whole new century/millennium. Other people don't get it or think it's not all that great.

Those people? The second people? Those are wrong people.

LET'S FIGHT!

[Koltreg]

First off: I know my X-men from the animated series in the 90's, Evolution in the 00's and the 2 good X-men movies along with skimming. My X-men timeline is
Apocalypse is born and stopped
Fast forward
Magneto and Charles are friends and then split
First class stuff
Magneto goes crazy attacker
Sentinels!
Xavier and X-men fight Magneto
Hellfire/Phoenix
Space
????
Schism

I get what Grant Morrison is going for about the advancement of the mutant culture from this inclusive group into this full blown culture. Honestly if that was more of what the story was about that would be cool. Like in Supergods he talked up that.
I think the series is a bit weird to read as a person who has their own view of the X-men universe.
The first thing we see is this massive extermination of the mutants and then suddenly, to me at least, the world is like "Hey shit, there are mutants. We gotta hate on these people". For me though I am confused because you already have Sentinels that were sent to kill people. And Magneto did stuff I thought. And people are all like "What, Charles Xavier is a mutant? Whaaaaaat?" I mean I guess my lack of understanding of where this takes place in the universe is part of my issue.
And then that whole scene where Cassandra Nova took over Xavier and was on the Shi'ar ship just really bugged me because it just seemed like a really awkward several issues because I get it, Nova is trying to get the Shi'ar to attack Earth and start wars while Xavier got trapped in her brain in her mind.
It is just it takes so damn long to go anywhere and the story didn't do much for me at that point.
And then you get to Fantomex and it is suddenly "Oh we got a global X-men team and some super brain mutant" and they throw this too fast in a way.
My biggest issue is the pacing. I stopped after Fantomex but that is my beef. I like Morrison but the X-men I read was just off and I had no real idea what was going on for a universal setting, at least linearly.

[Jay Kay]

Morrison's Nex X-Men was my first exposure to the X-Men in comics form, so yeah, I totally love it.

[deebeemonster]

You haven't made it to where everything's been leading, Koltreg? Come on, man. Just finish it! You're missing out on a pretty spectacular end (right before the end that goes total Morrison on you)

Really the only thing I didn't care for in this series was the constant "Scott feels bad because of this Apocalypse thing that I'm never going to read." I didn't like it because it kept calling back to a specific thing that happened outside of this series and seemed more like "HEY KIDS REMEMBER THIS" rather than "Scott feels bad because of things that happened within this story." Again, this is a minor complaint.

But everything else really requires no continuity knowledge, just an understand that Prof Xavier has a school that teaches mutant kids. And not a school that just has Gambit and Wolverine playing b-ball. Not that there's anything wrong with them playing b-ball, just that why call it a school, ya know?

The Act of Genocide was on Genosha, one island country, not the entire world. And humans were hating on mutants because the people were terrified of becoming minorities to mutants. In Morrison's run, he took it a foregone conclusion. If mutants are popping up, then they're going to keep popping up until the only people left in the world are mutants. It wasn't that old trope "We hate mutants because they different." It expanded into a far greater fear. So many mutants were around, that trope was now "We hate mutants, because we're scared that we're the the last humans."

Side note, people are all Inconsistent Art, Inconsistent Art. Yes, I'm sorry it's not Frank Quitely 24/7/52/12 But I love all the art in this series. Yeah, all of it. I'll put myself out here and say that Igor Kordey's art is some of my favorite art in the entire book. His art is fantastically ugly. I also don't understand why people just hate on Silvestri's art. It's great!

[BIGREDROBOT]

Also, you skipped the Annual, which introduces John Sublime and his post-genetics followers, Xorn, and the establishment of the X-Corporation.

[Koltreg]

Is it fair to say that a series is good if I need to read all the way through it to enjoy it though? I mean I will read through it all now but there seems to be something awkward.

[deebeemonster]

Uh yeah for a certain group of people that didn't read all the way through:

Spoiler (Click to View)

I fucking love Xorn's arc. I remember when I opened up the issue with Magneto's reveal I was so fucking pissed off. I was enraged. ENRAGED at Morrison! How could he do this to me? To lie like that an pull the rug from underneath me?!

Then when that was done, it occurred to me this is exactly what Morrison wanted me to feel. He wanted me to feel violated by Magneto, that Magneto would create such a wonderful character and then remove him from existence was one of the most evil things I'd ever experienced in comics. And on that day, Morrison became my favorite comic book writer of all time.

[BIGREDROBOT]

(08-22-2011 04:03 PM)Koltreg Wrote:  Is it fair to say that a series is good if I need to read all the way through it to enjoy it though? I mean I will read through it all now but there seems to be something awkward.

I think you can read each arc and still have it be satisfying. E for Extinction, I think, is a tight little story that stands on its own. There are some longer-running plots that pay off if you stick with it, but I think it can be read in chucks just as well.

There are some dud arcs, namely Murder At the Mansion, but even that is in keeping with the history of grafting the X-Men into any type of story.

[deebeemonster]

I agree with BRR. It isn't that you have to read the entire thing to enjoy it, it's that the payoff for reading the entire thing is totally worth it.

Okay, some would disagree with the FINAL final arc, where Morrison goes Morrisony into some concepts (where I was at first whaaaaaat, but after re-reading it now get, so you don't have to be too smart) but the 2nd to last arc: Planet X is really the payoff.

[BIGREDROBOT]

(08-22-2011 04:25 PM)deebeemonster Wrote:  I agree with BRR. It isn't that you have to read the entire thing to enjoy it, it's that the payoff for reading the entire thing is totally worth it.

Okay, some would disagree with the FINAL final arc, where Morrison goes Morrisony into some concepts (where I was at first whaaaaaat, but after re-reading it now get, so you don't have to be too smart) but the 2nd to last arc: Planet X is really the payoff.

But even that final arc manages to check off the "dystopian future" box that any good X-Men run must have. As I will explain in my Epic Rebuttal Post, Morrison's working within the established X-Men genre more than anything during this run.

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First off, let me preface my remarks by saying the following:

New X-Men is the comic, along with Milligan and Allred's X-Force, that got me reading comics again. So there's that bias.

Secondly: New X-Men probably isn't Morrison's best or most consistent Marvel work. Go read Marvel Boy for that. No, seriously. If you haven't read that, go do that. Besides being the first Ultimate Marvel story, it's just pure anarchic Marvel comics.

Finally: I have read an ess-ton of X-Men comics, so the history thing isn't a stumbling block to me. In fact, in my X-Men canon, Apocalypse isn't the huge villain that he became in the 90's because I really lost interest in the titles once Claremont left.

But let's get started. Prepare yourself for the TL/DR-ness:

Where Morrison's New X-Men really nails it is that it has a consistent theme: change. Rather than getting all hung up on chronology, let's look at what the X-Men have meant thematically.

The Lee/Kirby, come the demon Etrigan. "Classic" X-Men are about youth. Springing to life at the dawn of the Atomic Age, they represented the sea change about to take place across college campuses in the 60's. They were the future, the generation gap, the coming acid-dropping culture war.

Then we have the Claremont era, a globe-spanning collection of colorful characters that, while over the decades he runs the book, balloons to include enough mutants to staff somewhere like five team books and some solo series. The big theme for the Claremont era is diversity. The X-Men become stand-ins for gays, "minorities," nerds, weirdos, the oppressed and outcast. They're hated and feared and mistrusted. Groups of them are forced to live underground to avoid being hunted for sport. The original X-Men spend their time as a pretend group pf mutant hunters who intercept newly-developing mutants and funnel them toward the Xavier Academy whose cover story is that they're a "school for gifted youngsters." Parents get screenings to see if their kid will be a Mutie and known mutants have to be registered with the government or face serious consequences.

They're also shown to be pliable adventurers. Claremont takes the X-Men to space, to Hell, to the Asgardian realms, he tells fairy tales with them, grafts on the plot of Alien and lets that play out for a bunch of issues, (seriously, that Brood issue where they're pretty much resigned to the fact that they're gonna die is just amazing) gets positively Wagnerian with the dark Phoenix Saga, tosses in ninja, samurai, dystopian futures, time-travelers, and of course a decent sprinkling of S&M.

Claremont's run is also incredibly soap opera-ish. People die, get resurrected, cloned, switch sides, possessed, turn into demons, turn Asian, brainwashed, aged, de-aged, come the demon Etrigan. come the demon Etrigan.

This all comes to a head in the beginning of the Image Age, with Mutant genesis, Blue and Gold teams, and Claremont's eventual exit from the X-Men. But by now, the formula's in place. X-Men is as much a genre as a family of series.

The 90's are all about competing with Image, trying to come up with characters that can compete in the spittle-teethed, double-sworded landscape that was the comics market. The hook of mutation makes character generation easy: just come up with a cool visual or power set and explain it as a mutation with some pseudo-science and you're gold. By the end of the 90's there are what seems like a bazillion mutants running around the Marvel U. This small group of hated and feared teenagers has become a small army of kids and adults.

Which brings us to 2001, and Singer's X-Men movie makes mutants sexy and accessible again. Morrison takes over within the first page of New X-Men 116 and triumphantly sets his flag down. He's pulling the trigger on the gun that was pulled out in the first act of Stan & Jack's X-Men saga: Homo Superior's going to have a population boom and humanity's not going to take it lying down. It's time for the mutants to mutate. The theme here is change.

But this is the X-Men, so it's always way more soapy than just that. Professor Xavier's evil unborn twin sister is really just trying to destroy her brother, first by trying to use humanity's fear of the future against them, then by taking over his body (and c'mon, Wolverine going "Hardcore, Chuck." as Cassie Nova caps her newly swapped twin is one of my top ten X-Men moments ever), then she outs her brother as a mutant, and ups the ante by using the power of the Shi'ar Empire against them.

This is all classic X-Men soap operatics, and Morrison's run was, according to the pitch, a retooling to make the X-Men relevant again in a post-movie, 21st century setting, whicle still making it undeniably X-Men-ish. So things change. Mutant culture is on the rise, there are mutant bands, mutant drugs, radical mutant punk kids. There are cults of body-modifying trans-humans, the mutant equivalent of an old nuke left locked up forever, a government experiment where time is turned into a fluid and mutants are vat-grown and engineered for use as weapons in future wars. (That's So Morrison!)

For me, the real lynchpin, the Rosetta Stone here, is Scott.* He starts off as this broken, scared guy, totally unsure of himself, totally insecure. (Which, I mean, if you look at the history of the guy, it's a wonder he's not in a psych ward, just sobbing into a pillow all day, every day. Dude's had it rough.) By the end of the book, he figures it out. He decides that, y'know, I'm not gonna be ashamed of who I am. I'm not gonna be the guy who's always beating himself up about the past. It's time I stand up and be proud of what I am and yeah, I'm gonna psychically hump the hot faux-English girl who can unravel my kinks a little. I'm gonna be okay with who I am. He's Morrison's stand-in for mutantkind. The new direction is this: mutants are here and they're everywhere and they're not gonna let you push them around, but we are gonna try and get along. We're gonna try Charles Xavier's whole "peace, love, dope" thing out and see how it works. Because there's a lot of us now and we're powerful and we're sexy and we're cool. The minority had become, if not a majority, at least a big enough percent of the population to be a force to be reckoned with.

We're here. We're weird. Get used to it.

And then Marvel editorial decided they didn't want that and culled the mutant herd back to 198 of them, eventually living on an island off the coast of California. I kind of love that both Whedon and Aaron have snuck the better Morrison bits back into the X-Universe.

But anyway, that's my defense of New X-Men. Come at me, bro.

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* It always kind of rankles when people refer to comic book characters by their first names, like they're their buddies or something, but I can't help but think of the X-Men by their first names. Is this weird?