House of X / Powers of X
But is it any good?
Pretty much everyone would agree that the X-books needed a shot in the arm. House of X and Powers of X are certainly that. People are talking again, in a way that they haven’t been talking in years. Not only that, they’re talking about the plot. Jonathan Hickman has begun his X-Men run by bringing out the high concept ideas from the off – Moira’s multiple lives, the mutant island of Krakoa, the apparent immortality through back-up copies – and for the most part, people have bought it. In both senses of the word. So, as an opening arc, job done. Nothing in the X-Men has produced this sort of reaction since the start of the Grant Morrison run, back in 2001.
A book like this is inevitably going to divide the audience to some degree. For one thing, it’s very different in tone and focus, which means it’s not necessarily what attracted some readers to the X-books in the first place. And more fundamentally, this is the sort of story where you either trust that it’s heading somewhere, or you don’t – and if you don’t, you won’t be having much fun with this. But so far, for the most part, Hickman seems to have kept people on board.
On a closer inspection, the actual content isn’t quite as radical as it might first seem. Everything Hickman is doing is built from long-established X-Men elements. The mutants’ inevitable subjugation by machines was a standard plot element for decades after “Days of Futures Past”. The mutant island has been done before with both Genosha and Utopia. The X-Men as radicals was done, in however ill-defined a fashion, by Brian Bendis. Professor X has had a cloned body before. The Phalanx are less central to the X-Men mythos but they’ve been firmly part of it for decades.
None of which is to say that Hickman isn’t bringing something new. On the contrary – he’s displaying the existing elements in a new way and bringing something different out of them. That’s what makes it recognisably an X-Men comic, despite the drastic shift of style with the data pages, and the pushing to the margins of most of the familiar characters. That and the art – Pepe Larraz and RB Silva don’t have Hickman’s profile, but they’ve done excellent work on these two books, both in a suitably familiar Marvel-superhero style. If the writing is going to go flying off into weird and unfamiliar places, then the art is able to anchor it in something more recognisable. And if the writing is going to shoot up to a scale where conventional characterisation gets shoved aside, the art can help to keep things more reassuringly human.
But Hickman is the designated auteur for this series… which is interesting in itself, because House of X and Powers of X are not merely the introduction to his X-Men run. They’re the introduction to an entire line of X-books built around the set-up that he establishes here. And most of those, of course, won’t be written by him. We’ve not quite had this before – other X-books reflected what Grant Morrison was doing, in terms of turning the school into a Hogwarts-style academy, but they never seemed to be part of an overall grant plan. The nature of Hickman’s grand plan seems to call for a bit more co-ordination than that.
And these two books are all about the grand plan. I’ve seen it said that these are really just one book, and certainly they’re billed as two series that are one. But at the same time, structurally they are two different parallel narratives. House of X is the present day and the establishment of Krakoa. Powers of X is the bigger picture, with the four time frames ascending through (most) of the issues, setting up the grander mysteries of the story. Yes, they’re part of a whole, but they’re different strands within that whole. One of the oddities of superhero comics is how the need to accommodate spin-off titles led to this sort of parallel structure becoming commonplace.
A better complaint is that House of X and Powers of X aren’t stories. This is true, and not just in the sense that they’re the opening act of a bigger picture. Things happen in House of X – Krakoa is established, the X-Men raid the Orchis Forge and destroy the Mother Mold, and dead heroes are restored to life from their back-up copies – but you’d struggle to say that they happen in a way that feels like a story with a start, middle and end. In fact, the establishment of Krakoa takes place largely off panel. Powers of X is even more scattershot, and makes essentially zero sense if you try to divorce it from the bigger picture.
But neither book is really trying to operate as a conventional story. This is an exercise in establishing a very different new status quo, and setting up some key concepts for the upcoming series, and then carefully arranging a whole armoury on the mantelpiece for future reference. Twelve issues of this would not normally work (and if you don’t buy into Hickman’s bigger picture, it won’t work for you). It holds together by hurling huge ideas at the reader, setting up a puzzle, and building trust that that puzzle is all going to pay off.
Which is very necessary because, well, we’ve all been here before with great mysteries. The thing about mysteries is that while they’re still longing, you can project whatever you want onto them. You can believe that the pay off will be worth it. History is littered with puzzle box stories that fell apart when the reveal had to come, and all the speculation about where it was heading had to be replaced with a rather underwhelming reality. Remember Lost? Remember Bruce Jones’ Hulk? Marvel in the 90s got by for years by stringing out mysteries and convincing readers that it would all pay off in the end – and to be fair, the major plots were usually resolved, but not necessarily in a way that satisfied anyone.
Much of Hickman’s success in these first 12 issues comes from building trust that he absolutely knows where he’s going. There are mini reveals to start the ball rolling, which give the sense that big and unexpected things will happen here, and that it’s all been carefully mapped out. This is a world building exercise, even if it’s being built from pre-existing elements. In recent years it’s often been difficult to try and set up grand continuity-based mysteries because the approach to continuity is so lax that you can never really tell whether discrepancies are plot points, or not meant to matter, or just got overlooked. Hickman somehow manages to avoid that trap, despite his stories containing a bunch of things that seem to clash with established history – as should be obvious from some of the annotations. He does it partly by making clear that he’s intentionally revealing a hidden history, but also by throwing in enough continuity minutiae to send a message to the likes of me that, yes, he knows.
It works for Hickman. Will it work for a whole line? There’s something of a cult-like vibe to Krakoa in these twelve issues, a sense that it’s all a little bit too good to be true – even before you get to the inherent creepiness of killing characters and restoring them from back-up copies, or the obvious hints that all is not as it seems. What happens when other creators have to tell stories there? Hickman’s set-up goes some way towards providing a solution to that problem, since it’s clear that the inner circle of the Quiet Council know more about what’s going on than the average citizen of Krakoa (and Xavier and Magneto know more than the Council). So writers using those other characters can simply take Krakoa at face value.
But the general aura and style of the place under Hickman is so distinctive that you have to wonder whether it can survive the range of depictions from other creators that it’s about to experience. We’re going to get more conventional character work, we’re going to see Krakoa in a less stylised way, and I wonder how that’s going to work.
I’ve got this far without even starting to discuss the themes of the series – largely because this is twelve issues of set-up, and while Hickman is raising big ideas, precisely what he has to say about them remains nebulous right now. On that level, these are things that remain annotation-fodder for now. Whether it all comes together is a question that will only be resolved in the future; at this stage, it’s just about convincing us to come along for the journey.
There are certainly big ideas being put into play, though – though still ones with a clear precedent in the X-books. We’re back to the idea of mutants as the next stage in evolution; and like Morrison, it’s taken at face value here, instead of being just a device to explain why some people have super powers. But Hickman seems to be rejecting the idea that that makes mutants the future, on the basis that the future actually belongs to the machines. Quite why only the humans that should ascend to posthumanity, rather than humans and mutants both, is not exactly clear to me at this stage, but it’s early days.
Linked to all this are issues of group identity and individuality. In building yet another mutant island community, Xavier is creating a society that insists that the most important thing about everyone there is the fact that they’re a mutant. It’s a perfectly understandable view for a persecuted group but whether it’s a healthy end point is another matter entirely. Hickman is playing the old trick of repeating the same basic idea at different scales – that’s the basic conceit of Powers of X, though actually using the powers of ten for notional time frames probably caused more confusion than it was worth. At the grand, universal scale, society becomes a collective in which the individual is lost; at the level of Krakoa, national/mutant identity is displacing individuality; and at the level of the individual, copies are treated as interchangeable.
In that light, the somewhat marginal space for character work in these two titles makes sense. There is characterisation in here, but it’s on the margins, because this is a story being told at the level of society rather than individuals; or rather, the very marginalisation of individual characters is a big part of the point. It’s another thing that I suspect will change pretty rapidly once the line as a whole gets up and running, potentially diluting the coherent tone that Hickman has developed on these two books; perhaps it was a smart move to give him a clear run on these early issues to get it all going. You can’t have that many monthly books all taking place at the society level. We’ll be back in more conventional territory soon enough, even if it’s not in X-Men itself.
Hickman’s new status quo may be built from pre-existing elements, but the end result is novel. It’s not the island, but simply the fact that in Hickman’s set-up, the mutants have the upper hand. That’s what makes this different from Utopia, which was a refuge for the last remnants of mutantdom. It’s not exactly like House of M or Age of X-Man either, since both those stories came closer to just removing the humans from the equation. The result seems to pitch the X-Men somewhere between Attilan and Wakanda.
These aren’t really two stories. But they are a convincing statement of intent that the X-Men are going somewhere both different and interesting.
The end of Hickman’s Avengers was a perfect summary of what had become of the Marvel superheroes. They weren’t heroic anymore.
It was the culmination of what had started with Civil War.
Tony Stark was suddenly a fill-in for George W. Bush.
How could anyone take him seriously as a hero anymore after Civil War?
Steve Rogers was still written as a totally idealistic figure.
He refused to support Iron Man’s plan to sacrifice every other world in the Multiverse just to save Earth-616.
Cap believes so much in preserving life that he was willing to sacrifice all life in the Multiverse, rather than join in a plan that involved putting the lives of people he knew above everyone else in the entire Multiverse.
However, the problem became that the two opposing ideologies were more important than anything else.
The two would rather fight over their differences, instead of join together and come up with a solution to the “incursions” which didn’t involve killing billions and billions of people.
Because of that, everyone was supposed to die.
The Marvel Universe didn’t have heroes anymore.
As if to prove this point, it wasn’t too long before we saw Steve Rogers become a fascist.
That seems to be a recurring theme in Hickman’s comics.
Individuals refuse to come together to fix a common problem, and instead would rather fight until the very end.
We’re seeing it as a major theme in his X-Men run too.
Humans and mutants continue to escalate their cycle of hatred and difference, and we now see that it leads to a horrible future for everyone.
Hey Paul,
Any chance you could do mini reviews for the first issue of each book when they launch? I’ve been having so much fun seeing everyone’s reactions weekly to HoX/PoX, it would almost be a shame to then have to wait six months to talk about any of this again when the initial arcs wrap up.
Basically, I’m being selfish and don’t want the party to end. 🙂
@Alex Hill
I don’t think I ever read that interview, but that always seemed apparent to me… though I didn’t remember Bendis’name was only on the first arc of the DeVos.
@Job
I knew my love for Peter David’s X-factor would be ridiculed. But it’s always been one of my favorites. I think the focus on Jamie and that team really held that book together. It was never just a bunch of talking heads where any two characters’ dialogue or viewpoint could be swapped. I think it did have a strange ending, dovetailing into the all-new all-different relaunch. But I loved it and I am currently reading it through for the third time from beginning to end. But yeah, that first issue is pretty great and probably better than anything that can after it.
On Morrison’s run… I understand that it’s genius and I do both love and respect it. But I also feel that it got so caught up in the Big Ideas that at some point it seemed almost as haphazard as the decade of comics that followed it. Almost every arc was a completely different direction than the arc before it. We’re at the school, then space, then back to the school for a bit, then in Europe, now it’s Wolverine and Cyclops on a mission with Fantomex, now Magneto is back with a bug evil plan, and now we’re in the future. It was quite a ride but there are a couple of issues that feel like filler or at least a little dull compared to what came before and where he was headed. And all the ideas that were introduced that are listed above are are bigger ideas than anyone has probably introduced since, but I always feel like he left too much on the table never fully exploring half of those ideas. While reading it I always assumed he would follow up on some of those things by the end, but never did. Now looking back, I’m assuming he was just doing what any good writer would do in serialized fiction, leaving more story to be told for other writers to pick up and go somewhere with. But none of the creators that followed did much with his ideas, and when they did they were always so bland compared to Morrison that no one really enjoyed it anyway.
When compared with Whedon’s run, I think Morrison’s lacks that tight self-contained story that Astonishing had. And while Morrison’s was more unique and surprising, I think the reread of Whedon is more rewarding in some ways. I think it’s clear the Whedon had the whole breakworld plot outlined from the beginning and every storyline built to a complete conclusion. I never bought for a second that Morrison had planned the whole Magneto/Xorn thing from the beginning. I definitely don’t think any breadcrumbs are left for us to follow to that conclusion and because of that it feels cheap to me. Honestly I think that one reveal sours the whole thing to me a bit.
I think Morrison’s Allstar Superman series was a perfect series from beginning to end and possibly the best comicbook of the last two decades. When I reread New X-Men now, I wish it were moe like that I guess.
I know it’s maybe not the popular opinion, but that’s my take on it.
One strange and crazy thing about HoX/PoX is it effectively recasts the x-men as The Neo, a collective of people born with powers who due to their minority status and self-segregation created a unique tribal/religious/cultural identity.
Didn’t see that coming.
I’m pretty sure that Morrison did not originally intend for Magneto to be Xorn, no.
There’s the scene when they first meet Xorn, and he brings a bird back to life.
My memory is pretty hazy, but it was something like that.
Morrison obviously did not intend for Xorn to be Magneto at that point.
—————————————
I’m a fan of Morrison’s run on X-Men, but I do find it pretty hit-or-miss, and one of Morrison’s weaker series.
Once again, like with Hickman, I am finding the potential in what Morrison did with mutants.
There was a whole world of interesting stories for writers to tell going forward after Morrison.
The X-Men no longer needed to forever live in the shadow of Claremont and “Days of Future Past”. The book could finally move on.
(I adore Claremont, but I adore Claremont for his stories, not because I think that the stories told by Claremont with the X-Men were the only types of stories that could or should ever be told about mutants.)
Instead, House of M happened, and Marvel decided that was the more interesting direction to take mutants…
Yeah, New X-Men is a great X-Book but it’s not even in my top 20 for Grant Morrison. Easy to appreciate its ambition but deeply flawed and slightly superficial in execution. This was also an era when Marvel was fine with lousy fill-in art on a flagship title to avoid delays – a policy they overcorrected a bit with Whedon/Cassady.
Also, Morrison had Xorneto planned from issue 1 – the twist is explained in his proposal for the series, which is reprinted in some printings of the 1st tpb. There are at least a couple of clues through the run. For a healer, Xorn never does much actual healing – he levitates the dead bird and temporarily fixes Chucks spine with the nanosentinels. There’s also Quentin Quire’s death, when Xorn reveals his face to QQ then has some cryptic dialogue, which reads quite differently when you realize he’s not trying to heal him but delivering the coup d’grace.
But I think the Xorn twist was more effective as a gut punch than as a plot twist. Magneto explains he deliver created Xorn to be as simpering, non-threatening and blandly likable as possible… and the reader realizes they got suckered in just like the characters.
One last thought on Morrison – has a character ever been as totally neutered as post-return Quentin Quire? Morrison’s QQ was a really nasty and unglamorous picture of misguided teen rebellion, a coked-up wannabe-punk shouting meaningless rhetoric, drawn by Frank Quitely to be almost tangibly sweaty and greasy.
…and then Jason Aaron turned him into Draco Malloy. And I actually like Aaron’s version, I just wish he was a new character instead of a PG-rated dilution of the original.
If you want more Paul, he was just on our pod talking about hox/pox, loads of old x stuff and some rasslin talk.
http://Tinyurl.com/winter81
Re: Arrowhead
Hey, was that fill-in art comment a dig at Igor Kordey? 🙂 I never got why people didn’t like his stuff; I love it! Maybe it’s just people were expecting Quitely and were disappointed when they didn’t get him?
Re: Mark Coale
Thanks! I’m going to check it out.
@ Arrowhead.
Yeah the Magneto was definitely part of the original Morrison pitch – There’s no doubt it was planned from the beginning and the clues left along the way show how carefully it was laid out.
@Brent
“I knew my love for Peter David’s X-factor would be ridiculed.”
No ridicule at all. It’s just that I wanted to like the book a lot more than I did, but I kept reading it because there was enough to like. And part of the charm of its aimlessness is that you never knew where it was going to go. I absolutely hated all the magic/supernatural stuff, though, and I don’t understand why PAD got so enamored with it toward the end.
“Almost every arc was a completely different direction than the arc before it. We’re at the school, then space, then back to the school for a bit, then in Europe, now it’s Wolverine and Cyclops on a mission with Fantomex, now Magneto is back with a bug evil plan, and now we’re in the future. It was quite a ride but there are a couple of issues that feel like filler or at least a little dull compared to what came before and where he was headed.”
“When compared with Whedon’s run, I think Morrison’s lacks that tight self-contained story that Astonishing had.”
I don’t think Morrison is ever concerned with writing self-contained stories. He usually manages to put the toys back in the box after he’s done, more or less, but he’s quite adamant on maintaining the serial ongoing nature of the characters, which . . . you know, it’s true, they’ll keep going after him, and he tries to play that up in different ways each time.
Absolutely. I actually didn’t like Morrison’s run at the time of release and I dropped it midway through, which is how I’ve reacted to pretty much all of Morrison’s work, and then I come back and enjoy it a lot more after the fact, after his long-running subplots and themes pay off in the end, and you get better focus of what goals he had in mind.
And Morrison is on record saying that his plans did go off the rails, something about a depression brought on by 9/11, which says quite a bit about his penultimate story with Magneto. He said he had big plans for Dust that never got developed. And it’s public knowledge that his initial pitch involved a lot of characters he didn’t get to use, like Colossus, Moira, Rogue, and Gambit.
Ugh, sorry for the messy post. The Whedon quote and reply should be at the bottom.
@Chris V
“I’m pretty sure that Morrison did not originally intend for Magneto to be Xorn, no.”
He did. That was one of the few consistencies from his original pitch that made it to the end.
@Arrowhead
“One last thought on Morrison – has a character ever been as totally neutered as post-return Quentin Quire? Morrison’s QQ was a really nasty and unglamorous picture of misguided teen rebellion, a coked-up wannabe-punk shouting meaningless rhetoric, drawn by Frank Quitely to be almost tangibly sweaty and greasy.
…and then Jason Aaron turned him into Draco Malloy.”
It happens with a lot of Morrison creations. Even though he always wants other writers to pick up his ideas and run with them, the results when they do are always lackluster. There was that boring Frankenstein ongoing series, the negligible Klarion series, Tomasi’s super lame Multiversity storyline in Rebirth Superman, Gerard Way’s Flex Mentallo . . .
I mean, I guess Tomasi did write Damian well, once DC decided he wasn’t going to stay dead. Personally, I think Remender did the best job with Fantomex, since the character finally had an agenda that went beyond being intentionally mysterious and annoying.
@Col_Fury
“Hey, was that fill-in art comment a dig at Igor Kordey? I never got why people didn’t like his stuff; I love it! Maybe it’s just people were expecting Quitely and were disappointed when they didn’t get him?”
That’s pretty much it. Hell, Ethan Van Sciver (who’s currently a nazi shithead) was acceptable as a fill-in, because the amount of detail in his work was sort of comparable to that of Quietly, whereas Kordey was hired explicitly because he was fast (I think he was literally drawing three books at the time he was working on New X-Men). Kordey’s “fast” work is nowhere near as good as Kordey’s “normal” work.
Well, I kind of hoped that the Xorn reveal was something that Morrison made as a random decision.
It’s pretty stupid when you look at the entire story in-depth.
Why was he in China?
Why would he create this really cool Morrison-seeming mutant power for the character, and then reveal it was all a lie?
Xorn’s mutant power sounds like a mutant power Morrison would have loved to create.
It would have worked better if the “two Xorns” ret-con was Morrison’s idea.
There really was a mutant named Xorn from China with that power.
Magneto found out about him, and decided to pretend to be him.
The switch could have happened after the X-Men helped the real Xorn.
They saw that the real Xorn had healing powers.
Then, Magneto tricked the X-Men in to allowing him to “heal” them.
Morrison’s Magneto was one of the aspects I disliked about his run.
He decided he just wanted to make a statement with his Magneto story.
@Chris V
“It’s pretty stupid when you look at the entire story in-depth.”
Not at all. The only failing I feel is what occurred in parts 2 – 5 of the Planet X story, part 1 being the Magneto reveal. Planet X intentionally made Magneto out to be weak, old-fashioned, and irrational with regard to modern culture and his ability to communicate ideas. Thus, all his plotting as Xorn was ultimately for naught.
But if you merely look at the build-up through to the reveal, it works just fine.
He fabricated this identity to ingratiate himself to the X-Men, to get inside, to manipulate events from there. He inspired the riot at the school, provoked the man/mutant conflicts in Mutant Town, and tried to recruit the students from within.
All perfectly fine if there had been a story that provided satisfactory payoff to all this.
(I neglected to mention, his plot also allowed him to manipulate Xavier’s “recovery” and ultimately capture him, as well as to manipulate Quentin Quire and then snuff him out once Quire found out his true identity. The Xorn persona allowed him to murder U-Men without consequence, and to mess with Polaris and the Genoshan survivors. Almost every story really helped to further this goals.)
I’ll trust you guys, but honestly cannot see the whole Xorneto thing set up at all. It feels like a completely out of left field “twist” that came to Morrison about two pages before he revealed it.
I reread that run recently too. Isn’t there an entire issue with inner-dialogue from Xorn as he’s moping around the city? I think having Magneto secretly on the team and secretly turning kids into terrorists is a great idea (and those scenes with Xorn’s class ful of losers are some of my favorites). But it was just executed poorly. And to have Marvel sweep it all under the rug and say it was Xorn pretending to be Magneto pretending to be Xorn almost immediately after Morrison left the book made it even worse.
All in all, I just think it’s a very telling that his run is sort of the benchmark for X-men stories (at least since Claremont left the books the first time). I think it says more about how bad X-men books have been for the last two decades than about Morrison’s run… and also why people are so excited about HoXPoX.
And just to clarify, Magneto’s plan makes sense to me. It’s a great idea. But there is no detail in the story where when you read it back you say “oh, why didn’t I see that before?” You literally had no way of guessing it and he did everything he could to not let you even assume anything shady was going on. That is where I think it falls flat on the reread, if not on the initial run through.
@Brent
“But there is no detail in the story where when you read it back you say “oh, why didn’t I see that before?” You literally had no way of guessing it”
Well, this presumes two things:
1. That it was set up like a traditional mystery plot in which a reader was encouraged to guess the twist beforehand. There was no indication that a twist was coming, so there was no reason for anyone to look for one.
2. That anything weird about Xorn was supposed to tip us off. Morrison introduced so many new and interesting concepts that were often so weird at face value that there was no reason to assume Xorn was any different. Hell, Here Comes Tomorrow even told us that Sublime was a virus and Ernst was Cassandra Nova or something, and those weren’t foreshadowed in the run.
Not to mention, just a few issues before Planet X, we had Murder at the Mansion, which WAS presented as a real mystery, inviting the reader to guess who the murderer was, so even that was intentionally meant to throw us off of a larger twist.
As someone explained above, the Xorn reveal was more of a gut punch. It wasn’t something you were expected to see coming, and it changes the way you see almost all of the previous stories. That was intentional.
To some extent, one could accuse Morrison of doing with Xorn something akin to what he did with Damian Wayne:
“Goddamn you, you made me interested in this character, you made them likable, you made me want to follow their further adventures, and now at the end of your run you take them away and remove them completely.”
If you’re mad at the story because he made you care and then exploited that emotional investment, good. That’s the reaction you were supposed to have.
If you’re mad at the story because he didn’t give you the opportunity to outsmart the story, that wasn’t something the story failed to do because it never attempted to do it at all.
@ Col_Fury
Looking back, it’s a shame Kordey was slammed so hard for his work given he delivered exactly what was required – Ie get the book back on schedule again twice within in a six month period after it ran drastically behind schedule.
It’s a shame that his first four issues (the fill in New X-men 119-120 and 124-125 were clearly written with Frank Quietly’s art in mind. They also suffer from comparison when you see the pages Ethan Van Sciver (I think) had drawn already before he ran late and the book was taken off him – they’re terrific.
Famously, Kordey more or less drew Issue 125 in two days. Unfortunately that shows.
It’s a shame because you re-read New X-men 128-130, which he was actually able to devote time to, and that art is great. It’s solid stuff.
The Xorneto reveal was idiotic, made no sense at all, and stands as one of my least favorite comic book panels of all time. Everything about it was stupid, nothing about it made sense, every character ends up looking like an idiot, and that’s all the energy I can muster for that nonsense.
You absolutely can see the hints that it’s Magneto as Xorn, or at the very least that’s he’s really a villain.
I’m happy to see so much Igor Kordey appreciation. I’ve always liked his stuff, and even thought his “fast work” was better than van Sciver’s (Great Kirby, what the hell happened to that Ethan guy, anyway?). Kordey’s Cable/Soldier X and Black Widow art is just great.
Yay, Kordey! 🙂
I’m on the “Xorn reveal doesn’t work” side. The whole Chinese prison, Chinese general overseeing it, the evidence that the prisoner has been kept there for decades – none of that is ever explained. Magneto did it all with Silver Age magnetism, I guess.
By the way, having read Morrison’s pitch for the series, I’m pretty sure killing Rogue and introducing a new, movie/Evolution inspired teen goth Rogue wouldn’t have played well with the fans.
I thought I’d posted something about how this all reminds me of when Warren Ellis rebooted the lower-tier X-books in 2000ish and then handed them off to other writers to carry on where he left off, but that comment seems to have disappeared.
Er, so… this all reminds me of when Warren Ellis rebooted the lower-tier X-books in 2000ish and then handed them off to other writers to carry on where he left off.
Oh, never mind.
I was a big fan of Morrison’s X-men when it came out, but was always bugged that it didn’t go farther with its ideas.
At one point, he has Jean and Scott discuss Xavier’s plans for the beginnings of a truly unique mutant culture, which would have been an excellent direction for Morrison to pursue.
Instead, we got more Weapon X, Magneto, Jean dying, and future dystopia. I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was a missed opportunity to do something radical with the franchise (kind of like what Hickman has accomplished).
Maybe it was 9/11 or depression or the loss of Quitely as his monthly artist/collaborator, but on reread the series really does seem to descend into same-old, same-old. As if Morrison, and by extension the characters, can’t escape from the way things have always been.
I do find it quite amusing that HoxPox basically works as a an immediate sequel to Morrison’s run. Aside from Jean, Magneto and Xorn suddenly reappearing, and a few offhand references, you could put down the New X-Men omnibus and immediately pick up HoX #1 without knowing anything about the intervening years.
That’s not to say there haven’t been good and even great X-Men comics in the past 15 years, but nothing that significantly added to the mythos or changed the line’s direction in a way that wasn’t eventually reversed.
“I read X-Axis around when it formed back in the Usenet RACMX days when I worked at my LCS in high school. Good god I’m old.”
Good old RAC. Sometimes I wonder how all the old regulars are doing these days…
“I’ve often said in the past while reading a Hickman story that he should have a book where he teams up with a writer who does excellent characters and dialogue. I think Hickman is great at world-building, setting up mysteries and tying all the loose ends together, but if someone else would come in and actually flesh out the characters it could make for some really great comics.”
Wasn’t something like this the case back in the glory days of Claremont/Byrne, with Byrne’s plot- and idea-driven storytelling complementing Claremont’s characterization, or am I overestimating Byrne’s input? His solo stuff had a big-concept, shallow-characterization quality to it that’s not far off Hickman.
“One last thought on Morrison – has a character ever been as totally neutered as post-return Quentin Quire? Morrison’s QQ was a really nasty and unglamorous picture of misguided teen rebellion, a coked-up wannabe-punk shouting meaningless rhetoric, drawn by Frank Quitely to be almost tangibly sweaty and greasy.”
Amen to that. He was particularly bad in that recent West Coast Avengers series.
What do people make of this bit from Hickman’s Q&A, regarding Jean being in the green costume? What did everyone fail to figure out:
“I was pretty sure everyone would figure this out as soon as House of X #1 hit the stands. And while I’m not going to spoil the story for you, I will say go back and look at the most famous time she put this costume back on. That should help.”
It seemed like Hickman was just using the costume as a red herring.
He made sure to put in that comment about how the only thing they feared was the Phoenix or Galactus.
That was a part of the story where Year 1,000 was still a mystery, and seemed to suggest that the Librarian was a mutant.
It hinted that the mutants had to regress Jean to a point before her powers attracted the Phoenix, so that the Phalanx would be willing to come to Earth.
Then, the big reveal was that Year 1,000 saw the victory of post-humanity.
Was the last time Jean wore that costume during the Steven T. Seagle run?
Well, the one time she went back to the miniskirt was right before she died at the end of the Dark Phoenix Saga. Not sure how that applies to anything here.
Mevermind. She put the Phoenix costume back on during that Seagle story. I misremembered.
So, yeah, the last time I can remember her wearing that Marvel Girl outfit was at the end of the Dark Phoenix Saga.
So, no idea.
I’ve seen that scene from DPS posted somewhere recently as an answer to Hickman’s statement. When Cyclops sees Jean in the green outfit he’s surprised that she chose to wore it. She answers along the lines of ‘I was Marvel Girl when all this started, so I’ll be Marvel Girl when it all ends’.
From which I take it that Hickman took from it that Jean chooses that skirt when something very important happens, so he made that choice to underline that Krakoa is very important.
If so, that’s even stupider than a red herring.
It didn’t symbolize that in Dark Phoenix Saga.
It symbolized innocence.
Claremont and Byrne didn’t want Jean to die, but Shooter said she had to die.
So, they showed that they believed that Jean was now innocent, at that point in the story.
It would be neat if Jean became a mute and wore outfits to shore her emotions though.
“Hey, look! Jean is wearing that outfit. It must mean she’s in a good mood today.”
“But there is no detail in the story where when you read it back you say “oh, why didn’t I see that before?” You literally had no way of guessing it”
Funny you should mention that. I remember Paul wrote up a long and detailed explanation when the Magneto reveal first came up. He picked up on hints throughout Morrison’s run. I wonder if that is archived anywhere…
OK, I should have known that it would be online somewhere:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.arts.comics.marvel.xbooks/ELmF0_KzNxM/discussion%5B1-25%5D
Morrison’s run really wasn’t very good, it was just different and took itself very seriously. The complaint that he didn’t take any ideas further isn’t valid, I don’t think, because he never seemed to have any intention of taking these ideas anywhere. He just threw hollow words out there (mutant culture) and got praised for being a visionary so why bother fleshing things out? Fleshing things out takes work, and work is less fun than floating out big ideas you can’t follow through on.
the Summers Family … coming to ABC Family next season.
mom, dad, loser brother, intense brother, precocious kid, lovable grandpa and friends and grumpy uncle Logan.
@Dazzler
“Morrison’s run really wasn’t very good”
Oh, I’d thought it was very good, but now you’ve convinced me just by saying it wasn’t.
“took itself very seriously”
Oh boy, you’re angry at something that was explicitly enjoying itself.
“He just threw hollow words out there (mutant culture)”
He wrote an entire arc about mutant culture and the desire of some students to differentiate themselves from humans, not just physically but culturally. This was a microcosm of Magneto’s entire argument, that mutants should embrace who they are and not try to coexist with humans. You missed the entire point.
“All these apes have PhDs!”
It’s probably the greatest sit-com ever to be birthed!
Mild spoilers for X-Men #1, just in case.
Some things that jumped out at me:
Despite this being (adjectiveless) X-Men, the legacy numbering continues from Uncanny X-Men.
Was Hepzibah trying to get with her boyfriend’s granddaughter?
I noticed on the map of the Summers House that Scott, Jean and Logan have connecting rooms; the only bedrooms in the place that have doorways between them. Hmn.
Where’s Emma?
I was reading that Claremont was giving hints during his run that Wolverine and Storm were “friends with benefits”, and that Storm was also involved in an open relationship with Yukio.
Apparently, Claremont wanted to make the point that mutant relationships were based in post-human morality.
Back then, comic books couldn’t get away with anything other than monogamous straight relationships.
Re: Chris V
I think Emma’s going to be in Marauders, right?
I remember the Wolverine/Storm scene, it was in Uncanny #246. Wolverine even references the Wolverine/Havok Meltdown mini by way of his hair style. 🙂
Ugh. Saying Jean has two boyfriends because sexual taboos are so yesterday is one thing. But having joined bedrooms because when she gotta have it there’s no time for hallways? Come on.
Definitely more focus on character and dialogue. I quite enjoyed Vulcan here (a character I’ve never had any interest in or even read about before). “Pompous space warlord reduced to domesticity, and gradually realizing that he’s a completely ridiculous character” is a fun take.
I have no personal experience with polyamory, but surely the interconnected rooms are reasonable if all three are in a committed, consensual domestic relationship?
Although to better illustrate that, their rooms should be interconnected in a three-way arrangmen…
Er, what I meant to say is, Scott and Logan should also be connected, through an additional openin…
…Know what, nevermind. I’ll show myself out.
ON XORNETO:
Will definitely have a look at that post by Paul on Xorn/Magneto to reconsider, but I’m also not much of a fan of that particular twist (deliberate as it may have been). I’m thinking of the wonderful issue where Xorn, in Mutant Town, comes to the aid of an adolescent mutant who has become monstruously violent (and vulnerable). A beautiful, touching, detailed and surpising issue. More to the point, one which is entirely narrated in the first-person in a very, very specific voice and which explicitly renders some biographical details and sense of personality. I’ve tried, but I can never make this fit with “Xorneto” even if as imposture: the stream-of-consciousness breaks it for me.
Will definitely have a look at that post by Paul on Xorn/Magneto to reconsider, but I’m also not much of a fan of that particular twist (deliberate as it may have been). I’m thinking of the wonderful issue where Xorn, in Mutant Town, comes to the aid of an adolescent mutant who has become monstruously violent (and vulnerable). A beautiful, touching, detailed and surpising issue. More to the point, one which is entirely narrated in the first-person in a very, very specific voice and which explicitly renders some biographical details and sense of personality. I’ve tried, but I can never make this fit with “Xorneto” even if as imposture: the stream-of-consciousness breaks it for me.
Re: Cyclops, Jean, Wolverine living together.
It’s not that I think it’s dumb. In fact, it’s pretty consistent with the Joe Casey/Grant Morrison comics. Casey started off with that cover of Wolverine and Jean passionately making out, and Morrison ended with Wolverine sharing one last moment with Jean before killing her.
What I think is dumb is that it’s pretty much the only hook to these characters in Hickman’s run so far. All we know about them is they want to fuck each other.