New Mutants #1 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers are for the digital edition.
THE NEW MUTANTS: This is, technically, the fourth volume of New Mutants. The first is the original series which ran from 1983 to 1991 and featured the X-Men’s junior team. The second ran from 2003-4 and featured one of the trainee classes from the Morrison-era school – it’s the one that introduced characters like Elixir and Hellion. Volume 3, a reunion of the original team, ran for 50 issues between 2009 and 2012 (very few of which, to be honest, have stuck in the mind).
There’s also a few minis, all of which also feature versions of the original line-up. The launch of New Mutants in 1983 was effectively the point where the X-Men became a franchise. It’s interesting that this is the X-book that gets its opening arc co-written by Jonathan Hickman, along with regular writer Ed Brisson – though it’s this week’s X-Force that gets the deluxe edition treatment and seems to have the more important plot points. Hickman previously wrote both Cannonball and Sunspot in his Avengers run which, to be honest, I still haven’t read. Hickman’s idiosyncratic style of emphasis is quite noticeable in this issue’s dialogue.
COVER / PAGE 1: The cast for this series, mostly comprising classic New Mutants characters from the original line-up. That’s Mirage and Cypher at the top, Karma, Chamber and Wolfsbane on the next tier down, and Mondo, Magik and Sunspot at the bottom. Chamber and Mondo both come from Generation X, a later trainee book. They’re a slightly odd inclusion here, because the New Mutants long since outgrew their original role as the junior team, and what holds them together these days is basically a sense of family from that period of their lives; Chamber and Mondo don’t form part of that family.
While Karma, Mirage and Wolfsbane are wearing versions of the classic black and yellow X-Men uniform, they’ve dropped the X-Men logo itself. Magik, always a slightly more tentative team player, sticks with her Chris Bachalo costume.
PAGES 2-4: Wolfsbane recalls being reborn into the Krakoan utopia.
Wolfsbane. Wolfsbane was one of the many characters killed during Matthew Rosenberg’s run, immediately prior to House of X – specifically, see Uncanny X-Men vol 5 #17. Naturally, she’s been brought straight back. For what it’s worth, the flashback we see here doesn’t seem to match the way the process was shown in House of X #5 – in that issue, the cloned X-Men emerge from their pods, and then Xavier downloads their minds back into them. Wolfsbane seems to emerge already formed. Chances are it’s just an error, or maybe Xavier has just continued to refine the process since HoX #5.
Krakoa. Once again, everything is for the best in this best of all possible islands. Since everyone seems to find the place wonderfully utopian, presumably this takes place before X-Force #1.
Karma. Xi’an Coy Manh was also last seen in the Rosenberg run, also as a member of the makeshift X-Men team. She quit in Uncanny X-Men #18 to spend more time with her family. Her prosthetic leg is from injuries suffered in battle in New Mutants vol 3 #12 (part of the Second Coming crossover), but it does make her an unusual example of a character on Krakoa who is carting significant amounts of technology around.
PAGES 5-7: The recap page and the credits, all as normal. The small print reads “Let’s go to space, good times in space.” The title is “The Sextant”, which is explained later in the issue. A sextant is a sixth of a circle, or a measuring device of that size.
PAGES 8-10: Cypher experiments with getting Mondo to commune directly with Krakoa, with mixed results.
Cypher. He’s been very prominent in the Hickman run so far, as the one character who can speak directly with Krakoa thanks to his language powers. Telepathy works on Krakoa up to a point, and Cypher has apparently built some interfaces for others, but clearly he’s hoping for a better solution.
Mondo. Mondo is an odd character with the power to absorb matter into his body and take on some of its properties until eventually he consumes it. He comes from the 90s series Generation X. However, the “Mondo” who appeared as a member of that team was eventually exposed in Generation X #60 as a duplicate created by Black Tom Cassidy; the real Mondo appeared prominently in that storyline, but it’s pretty much his only significant appearance aside from a few later cameos. He’s really being written here in line with the personality his impostor showed in earlier issues of Generation X. He has no previous history with the New Mutants, though you can see why Cypher might hope his powers would be useful.
Krakoa. Krakoa can manifest through Mondo’s body, though he “doesn’t like it very much” and considers it “a bad thing”. Since he still speaks his own language, and Mondo’s mind is locked out while Krakoa is control, this doesn’t achieve what Cypher was hoping for. But remember that in Powers of X we saw an older Krakoa occupying Cypher’s body, which seems similar to what’s going on here.
PAGES 10-14. Mirage, Sunspot, Magik, Wolfsbane, Chamber, Cypher and Mondo have coffee and decide to go into space to get Cannonball back.
The Akademos Habitat. We’ve seen this name before, and it seems to be simply a residential area of Krakoa. The identical houses are presumably grown from the pods we’ve seen mentioned before. This neighbourhood seems to be grouped into six parts, which might explain why it’s called the sextant. There’s some sort of public building in the middle, which might be important in the future. The New Mutants seem to be sharing a home together.
The sixth generation of homo superior. Mirage seems to mean this very figuratively (and really more closely linked to the narrative than to anything within the Marvel Universe). Her six generations of mutant society are (1) ancient mutants like Apocalypse; (2) the modern elders, like Professor X and Magneto; (3) the era of the Silver Age X-Men; (4) the era of widespread mutant numbers; (5) the first mutant communities, i.e. the X-Men’s school turning into a real large-scale boarding school in Grant Morrison’s run; and (6) Krakoa. Sunspot puts the New Mutants at stage 5, though surely they’re really stage 4.
Mirage’s claim here – in line with good Krakoan patriotism – is that the preceding incarnation failed because they were trying to build mutant communities using human institutions; mutants can only make real progress by building their own culture. It’s a mutant version of Audre Lorde’s “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” argument.
Cameos. We see a number of mutants in passing as Sunspot and Mirage walk through the Sextant. The clearly recognisable ones:
- Glob Herman, talking to some guy with a blue head and a stick.
- Monet St Croix, who we saw in House of X, along with two small child versions of Penance. These are presumably Monet’s younger sisters Claudette St Croix and Nicole St Croix, who have gained the power to turn into Penance at will in the same way that Monet showed in House of X.
- The blonde guy wearing a Hellions uniform and talking to a group of other characters is Bevatron. He’s about as obscure as X-Men villains get – he’s a late-period member of the original Hellions who debuted in New Warriors vol 1 #9 (1991), just in time for the entire team to be killed off in Uncanny X-Men vol 1 #281 (er… 1991). Evidently he’s been restored from back up.
- The woman in the niqab is Dust, who’s been shown on Krakoa before.
- The big rock guy is, of course, Rockslide.
Fauna. Credited here with making the coffee beans, Fauna is the green kid who was seen travelling to Krakoa in House of X #1. Quite why a character called Fauna has got flora-based abilities is less than clear, although maybe that’s what Mondo is hinting at in suggesting that there’s something dodgy about this stuff. It seems to taste good, though.
Chamber. Chamber was another casualty of the Rosenberg bloodbath, dying in Uncanny X-Men vol 5 #18. Evidently he’s been restored from back up, but it seems that this body, just like the previous one, couldn’t handle the amount of power it was trying to contain, and has blown a big hole in his front, covered up here by bandages. He still enjoys the smell of coffee.
Magik was in the X-Men at the end of the Rosenberg run, and there’s not much to say about her. That’s her magic sword stuck in a tree trunk.
Cannonball. The founding New Mutants were Mirage (as Psyche), Sunspot, Karma, Wolfsbane and Cannonball. Cannonball isn’t here because he married Smasher and settled down in the Shi’ar Empire during Hickman’s Avengers run. (By the way, the other characters who joined the New Mutants during their classic run – before they merged with the X-Factor trainees – were Cypher, Warlock, Magik and Magma. Cypher and Magik are here, Warlock is represented as a part of Cypher, but Magma is conspicuously absent. She was in the Age of X-Man crossover, so there’s no obvious reason for her to be missing.)
PAGES 15-18. The New Mutants hitch a lift to the Shi’ar Empire with the Starjammers. The Starjammers’ Krakoan gate is already causing trouble.
The Starjammers. We saw them visit the X-Men, and get their Krakoan gate, in X-Men #1. As previously mentioned, they’re interstellar pirates.
The Shi’ar Empire. Mentioned repeatedly in Hickman’s run to date, and evidently going to be important somewhere along the line – so this story may not be quite the side jaunt that it first appears.
Krakoa. More warning signs that all is not as it seems with Krakoa. Mondo finds it “itchy” to absorb bits of Krakoa and actively wants rid of it. Cypher has brought a gateway flower with him – presumably so that they can get back again, since the Starjammers are only taking them some of the way – and it seems to be magnetically drawn to the existing gateway. (Even allowing for this, it’s surprising that someone as important to the whole Krakoan project as Cypher was allowed to go into space – his absence, and the other X-Men’s inability to communicate with Krakoa Prime, might matter.) More worrying yet, the Krakoan gateway wants to terraform the garden around it, and it’s killing the Starjammers’ other plants. Not sinister at all! Mondo absorbs the return flower in order to keep it safe, in the broadest possible sense of “safe”.
PAGES 19-21. Everyone watches Magik sparring with Raza, and she cuts off his robot arm.
They’re pirates, this is the kind of thing they do. Although as we’ll see at the end of the issue, the New Mutants are starting to seriously annoy the Starjammers by this point.
PAGE 22. The Starjammers arrive at the Benevolence space station.
We find out more about Benevolence in a couple of pages time. It seems to be new. EDIT: As pointed out in the comments, Benevolence was mentioned in Powers of X #1 as the place where around 8,000 mutants were living in the “Year 100” timeline. It was described in that issue as “a converted transit station located on the fringe of Shi’ar space where it has long served as a buffer between the Empire and the wild space spawning grounds of Brood breeding territory.”
“A very reputable space lawyer.” More of this guy at the end of the issue.
PAGE 23. Data page in the form of the Starjammers’ wanted poster. The members are listed bottom left – Cr’reee, the one with the tiny price on his head, is Ch’od’s pet. The comedy list of crimes is self-explanatory.
“Assault (Phermonal)” presumably has something to do with Hepzibah, whose people communicate by smell. The name Hepzibah was supposedly given to her by Corsair, because he couldn’t pronounce her real name (see: communicate by smell). It’s a reference to the character of the same name from the Pogo comic strip, the idea being that they’re both skunk women.
PAGE 24. Data page about Benevolence. Contrary to what the Starjammers are telling the New Mutants, it’s a repository for material too dangerous to be allowed anywhere near the Shi’ar Empire proper.
The King Egg. A ludicrously over the top piece of foreshadowing (which is the joke, of course). In particular, the King Egg should apparently be kept clear of alien biomes (like the Starjammers have) and “interstellar pheromone production” (which is presumably what Hepzibah does, I guess). “Superguardian protocols” means calling out the Shi’ar Imperial Guard, which is where Cannonball might come into all this.
PAGES 25-35. The New Mutants ignore the Starjammers’ instruction to stay behind, go exploring, and realise the Starjammers were lying to them. The Starjammers have completely lost patience with these clowns, so they take the King Egg and dump the New Mutants with the Shi’ar authorities.
Largely self-explanatory, this. Part of Corsair’s miscalculation is that in trying to trick the New Mutants into staying on the ship, he tells a tale so awful that the New Mutants, as good little heroes, feel obliged to try and help. The Starjammers, meanwhile, are actually acting like the pirates that they’re always claimed to be, even though in practice they’re usually closer to swashbuckling heroes. They also seem to be in something of a rush to meet their employer, which is another reason why they leave the New Mutants to it. Their destination, Pshor Prime, is new.
“Judgy fundamentalists.” Corsair seems to make up this nonsense on the fly, after asking the New Mutants what the worst thing they can imagine is, and getting this answer from Wolfsbane. It’s a reference to her extremely religious upbringing in the Western Isles, which was played on extensively in the original New Mutants series. (Corsair also throws in the “four arms” answer given by Chamber, and the New Mutants still fall for it.) Corsair is probably plucking the names Nuwabi’ka and Kaliwaki out of the air.
Sharra & K’ythri are the well-established gods of the Shi’ar Empire. They actually showed up in Thor a little while back.
PAGE 36. Data page on Sunspot’s “really good space lawyer”, in the form of an advert. The art is taken from Rocket #2 (2017), and this is Rocket’s lawyer from that issue, Murd Blurdock. At least, he would have been Rocket’s lawyer, if only he hadn’t had to run off and fight ninjas instead.
Murd is an Echomelian – a race of blind reptiles who make brilliant trial lawyers because their echo-senses let them read everyone’s heartbeat. Now, those things on his face might look to you like eyes. But according to his partner Froggy Nelson, they are in fact “scars” from when he was “struck by radioactive originium as a child and lost his echo-senses – forever!” Despite this, Murd is “still a great lawyer – supernaturally good! Almost as if he can tell the expressions on a jury’s faces through some unknown ‘visual sense’… But that’s crazy talk! The only Echomelian with that ability is the violent vigilante known as Seeing Being – the Sentient Without Self-Preservation!”
Oh yes… the place names in the bottom right.
- Chandilar is the Shi’ar Empire’s capital world.
- The Aerie was the Shi’ar’s original homeworld.
- The Maul is a ring of inhabited asteroids, previously seen in Uncanny X-Men vol 1 #277.
- Timor is Ch’od’s homeworld.
- M’Kraan is presumably the location of the cosmically-powerful M’Kraan Crystal.
- Chr’yllalisa is the homeworld of the Starjammers’ medic, Sikorsky.
PAGES 37-38: The trailers. The Krakoan reads: NEXT: LAWLESSNESS AND DISORDER.
Except Cyclops, Jean Grey, and Wolverine were the stars of the Grant Morrison era of X-Men.
It’s hard to know exactly what you want when Morrison’s run checked all the boxes of what you want to see in a X-Men story, yet you did not like the Morrison run on X-Men.
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Also, you have to figure in other things for sales figures.
The comic book market was at its peak in the early-1990s, with X-Men #1 being the top-selling comic of all time.
That was the speculator boom, when everyone thought that every comic was going to be worth thousands of dollars in a couple of years.
So, people were buying ten copies of certain comics, so they could retire early.
The speculator bubble burst somewhere around 1994 or 1995.
The sales on all comic plummeted.
Marvel’s model of publishing comics was completely unsustainable, and eventually Marvel had to file for bankruptcy.
Coming out of the early-1990s comic speculator boom, the sales on comics were falling.
The sales on X-Men began to drop after Onslaught.
The Seagle/Kelly era had poor sales by the standards of what a X-Men comic had been selling prior to the speculator market collapsing.
Marvel execs didn’t understand that the comic market was never going to recover back to the levels that it hit during the early-1990s.
So, the Seagle/Kelly run was considered to be a failure.
Marvel was in panic mode.
They wanted to see X-Men sales back around where they were prior to Onslaught.
Instead, the sales on comics kept decreasing.
Yes, if you look at Morrison’s sales figures, they don’t look that impressive in isolation.
However, you have to look at the historical context.
Morrison was the first creator who saw an increase in sales on taking over the X-Men since the Scott Lobdell days.
Yes, Morrison’s sales figures weren’t that high compared to Seagle/Kelly, but the market was completely different by that point.
Morrison’s sales figures were considered high by the standards of the overall comic book market at that time.
Morrison’s X-Men was #1 on the sales charts too.
It’s just that all comic books had begun to sell less than they had been selling.
The comic book market has been on a pretty steady decline for over 25 years now.
It’s not that Hickman’s X-Men is not sustainable.
It’s that comic books as a medium are unsustainable in the long term.
@Michael – “I wonder how all-inclusive the resurrection protocols will be”
I’ve been wondering that about the S.T.R.I.K.E.’s Psi Division telepaths killed in Alan Moore’s run on Captain Britain, including Betsy’s lover Tom Lennox.
“There’s already way too many people on the island with nothing AT ALL to do”
A version of this has been a problem with the franchise since at least the beginning of the Morrison era — there are way too many X-Men, and nobody’s come up with a palatable way to write a bunch of them out. Part of the reason nobody has ever been able to revive the Claremont magic is that his entire run only had in the range of 25 or so X-Men (many of whom only briefly), and organically moved characters in and out to keep the cast manageable. It also only rarely engaged with New Mutants and X-Factor. There were also seemingly way fewer mutants in general at that time, which made for a very different context for stories about anti-mutant bigotry.
^”No More Mutants!”.
It’s part of the sprawl that takes place when Marvel decided to put all of their eggs in one basket for years and years.
They had a guaranteed best-seller in X-Men comics, so they had to publish as many X-Men titles as possible.
So, there needed to be enough mutants to fill up multiple team books…X-Factor, X-Force, Excalibur, Generation X…
Plus, new writers were going to want to add their own mutants to the cast after Claremont was gone.
As the years roll by, it continues to add up, especially when no mutants are ever allowed to retire or stay dead.
What the appeal was to X-Men during the Claremont days (and the positives that Lobdell aped from Claremont) was the feeling of a family.
Not a traditional family like the Fantastic Four.
A family as in a place to belong and feel safe.
The X-Men stood for more than a metaphor for minorities, they represented anyone who felt like an outcast.
The X-Men were outcasts. It didn’t matter why, they just were treated that way by a majority.
They found a family of their own where they could feel like they belonged.
I think, for a lot of people, the X-Men felt like friends. People they really knew.
As you get too large of a cast, you lose this feeling of familiarity.
It’s no longer like a close family.
It’s like living in a country (apt for the current Hickman run).
Also, I think that many writers have gone too far in trying to make obvious statements about mutants being a metaphor for a minority.
They’re no longer mutants, but are (wink, wink) “mutants” (but really you’re supposed to read them as LGBTQ people).
That’s perfectly fine, however, you can write stories that feature actual LGBTQ people, not a ham-fisted metaphor (psst, most gay people can’t shoot lasers from their eyes, which may make people have a reason to think they’re really scary!).
Claremont certainly had important stories about the persecuted minority in society and the real harm of hatred.
For a majority of his stories though, it was more important to just see that mutants were outcasts trying to find a place to belong in society.
That can resonate with racial minorities or LGBTQ peoples, very much so, but it resonates with a far larger amount of people too. People who may feel like they don’t fit in anywhere, but are part of a majority.
Overall, I found this first batch of issues to be a big letdown after HoX/PoX. In fact, I went back and read HoX/PoX a second time to just to see if I was crazy for buying into the hype (maybe) or if there was a drop in quality (yes).
But really, my biggest problem with Dawn of X is if you list the sheer amount of stuff that Hickman set up, these books play off maybe 20% of that. The rest is just sitting there off to the side until… when? 1 year from now? 2 years? That’s a shit ton of money and patience to ask the readers to have.
Instead of addressing the HoX/PoX threads, which I enjoyed and completely renewed my interest in X-Men as a franchise, these new books are off in space, or Otherworld, or setting up even MORE mysteries and dropping them (Kitty can’t walk through doors and then it’s immediately shrugged off by all the characters). None of which I find very interesting as stories in their own right or even as detours from the larger narrative.
Here’s my personal ranking that no one asked for.
1. X-Men. Will continue to buy for now. I’m doing this simply because it seems to be the only book that will most directly address threads/mysteries that were set up in HoX/PoX and Hickman is writing it.
The rest I’ll catch up on Unlimited. Didn’t like any of them enough to continue buying.
2. New Mutants – This was fine. I enjoy these characters, I’m glad they’re back from the dead after their horrible cannon fodder treatment by Rosenberg, but the story seems completely disposable.
3. X-Force – meh. Appears that it will attempt to deal with the logistics of Krakoa. I just may not like the answers. The “Xavier is dead!” cliffhanger is so dumb and muddled because we don’t know how invested we should be in this Xavier. We haven’t seen his face. He could be a clone or someone else entirely. I’m guessing in this issue it was Quentin Quire since he was on the cover and not in the book and has the same powers, because it did seem careless of Xavier to go there himself, but that doesn’t make things much better and only raises more questions.
4. Marauders – I have the same question(s) as everyone else. Why a boat? The Hickman podcast interview suggested because Duggan wanted to do a pirate book and that’s why a boat. Not a great reason. Why this team? Who knows… maybe will be revealed with time. Kitty door mystery was incredibly annoying to me.
5. Excalibur – Again, I find myself agreeing with everyone who said that this could be taking place at any time in X-history, the lineup is completely random and Apocalypse seems like a different character from HoX/Pox. Sure maybe this is the Age of X continuation for him… but you’d think HoX/PoX would take priority.
6. Fallen Angels can’t even take this book seriously based on the title, character lineup (can’t stand Young Cable) and solicit.
That’s 1 out of 6 for the Dawn of X launch that I’ll continue to buy. A pretty horrible batting average. Although I was a lapsed reader before this, previously buying zero titles and just checking Unlimited here and there, so maybe Marvel will still qualify that as a win.
The big question everyone seems to be wrestling with is how much rope do you give Hickman/ et al. I personally think that 1 issue at $5 is enough (after already buying HoX/Pox). I wouldn’t blame anyone for dropping these books based on what we’ve seen.
@Chris V: Morrison had most of the main characters, but his tone was shit in my opinion. Very drab and cynical and nobody felt like themselves. I feel like he had a decent handle on, like, maybe Beast and Xavier and Emma and that’s probably about it. I disliked his run for many reasons, but the tone was all wrong, it took itself entirely too seriously, was no fun at all, most of the characters felt like themselves, Fantomex plays the world’s two best telepaths for patsies just because it’s what the story needs, etc. Stuff like that. Very strongly disliked it, and I think in the long run it was a bad decision to let him revamp the books, despite how bad Claremont and Alan Davis were. The Xorneto reveal stands in my mind as the stupidest thing I ever in a comic book until perhaps this cult stuff. Everybody from the characters to the readers is forced to play very, very stupid in order to buy it. Then Magneto goes and uses actual gas chambers (WAY too on the nose). Morrison later apologized for how unnecessary some of that was, explaining that he was going through rough times personally.
I’ll say again that this run provided a perfect jumping-off point for me because I just didn’t recognize much of anything anymore, and I’d been reading the books rather addictively since I was a boy. I understand he gave the books a shot in the arm, but I also feel like he shot the warm, familiar family tone in the face.
Also, I just read your comment about family and find it highly ironic. If what you saw in Morrison’s run felt like family or anything like the familiar X-Men, we’re just so far apart on that. It was a book full of cold, cynical people who seemed to dislike each other.
@ASV: The issue of too many characters is much less of a problem when they’re free to circulate through the world like normal people (which, again, is what mutants really are). If you wonder why you haven’t seen Magma, for instance, she’s on vacation. Maybe she’s in college or she’s following one of her passions and trying to live a normal life. On Krakoa everyone seems to just be hanging around doing mostly nothing, and there’s thousands of them. It’s not workable. It doesn’t make sense. There really isn’t an excuse for most of these characters not to be featured (particularly when there’s action, and there’s bound to be a whole lot of it), and by sticking pretty much all of them in the same place you’ve eliminated basically every excuse why we’re not going to see nearly as much of them as we logically should.
I’ll also add that nobody has really tried paring down and distilling the cast. Most writers prefer to clutter up the canon with their own (overwhelmingly redundant and forgettable) pet characters. One of the perhaps two things I appreciate about Dawn of X is that writers have been discouraged from introducing new X-Men.
“I’ve been wondering that about the S.T.R.I.K.E.’s Psi Division telepaths killed in Alan Moore’s run on Captain Britain, including Betsy’s lover Tom Lennox.”
Were they mutants? Or were they classified as “human” psychics? It’s just like when SHIELD would roll out their psychic divisions back in the day– can you have naturally-developing telepaths and precogs who -aren’t- mutants, but just people with psychic powers? (Survey says… sure, but how- are they different from mutants, Inhumans, and the like?)
I’ve also said I enjoy seeing something different in comics too.
Morrison’s run didn’t have all the elements I loved about Claremont, but neither did anyone else, including returning Chris Claremont.
I enjoyed Morrison’s run on its own merits.
It felt like a breath of fresh air, especially after stories like Onslaught and Operation: Zero Tolerance.
If you think Morrison’s run took itself too seriously, you seriously need to reread it.
Morrison’s run wasn’t perfect, and I have problems with aspects of it…especially Morrison’s Xorn reveal and characterization of Magneto.
Michael-Mutants are born with their powers.
Inhumans gain their powers through exposure to the Terrigen mists.
Human psychics have a latent ability, much like Dr. Strange was able to master magic.
It takes work and practice, but it’s something that some humans have the ability to master with time and effort.
Unlike mutants, they won’t materialize their psychic powers at a certain age.
If they never had the right circumstances and spent the proper amount of time learning, they’d never show any psychic powers.
@Adam: You seem like a great barometer for my instincts regarding HOXPOX. It sounds like you liked it less upon rereading it (which is pretty damning; usually it’s a better and more cohesive experience to read a story all at once), but more to the point I don’t think one enjoyable/intriguing miniseries was the point, and I really believe this is all just a desperately misconceived idea. I feel like there will be a lot of Adams out there who thought it was all interesting until they figured out that it’s really not that interesting and the mysteries are all either chalked up to poor characterization or simply won’t be worth the wait.
I kind of understand the excitement and interest through maybe the first half of the series (i was initially pretty confident that Xavier was up to no good and everyone was being manipulated), but when it turned out that the status quo we were suddenly introduced to in the first issue was just “What you see is what you get,” the entire miniseries ended up not accomplishing very much.
@Chris V: Took itself too seriously might not be the best phrasing. Perhaps a better way to put it is that it tried so desperately to be very adult and was devoid of joy and warmth. Literally the most fun thing about the entire run was the cover of Xorn looking at a hamburger, and of course Morrison was sure to negate it (and negate Xorn, whom I actually liked quite a lot) with that preposterous switcheroo. I’ve read the run enough. It’s not good and it’s not very “X-Men.”
I mean, the riot? Five snot-nosed kids who are supposed to be the X-Men’s students turn absolutely everything upside down? Wolverine stands still in a hallway to intimidate an enemy telepath and is conveniently dispatched. Scott and Emma just waltz into Sublime’s office and are swiftly incapacitated. Chuck and Jean need to be reduced to drooling idiots in order for Fantomex, who is instantly identifiable as shady, to seem formidable? The absurd Magneto infiltration. All of the characters acted like complete goddamn idiots at absolutely every turn. It was insulting to read.
How does Cyclops manage to insert OR remove ruby quartz contacts? And how could he blast through them? It doesn’t make sense. None of it makes sense. The whole thing was a lazy collection of half-baked ideas that needed editorial guidance or at least one voice willing to rein Morrison in.
Okay, now you’re just picking at nits. Forget his contact lenses. Let’s talk about his glasses. Not his visor, his glasses. How do they even stay on his head without being strapped on? Ruby quartz doesn’t absorb his beams. It only blocks them, preventing them from getting past. But as they’re concussive beams, the force of them hitting his glasses ought should send them flying if they’re not firmly secured to his head.
I’m not nitpicking. It’s a dumb idea that almost seems clever but just doesn’t work. Morrison’s run was littered with this kind of stuff. Also, the ruby quartz doesn’t physically “block” his blasts, it tints the lights so that the eyes are tricked into thinking they’re already blasting. I don’t want to come off like too much of a snob, but you really should know that.
Source? Because I don’t see that in either version of the OHOTMU that I’ve checked. Nor can I find it anywhere online.
Nor does that even make sense. It tints the light? By that logic, his lenses shouldn’t even need to be made specifically with ruby quartz. Just glass with a stain that tints the light similarly should do.
The problem with making a case that humans with “latent” powers aren’t mutants is that it contradicts what we know about how mutant powers work in the Marvel Universe.
Take Polaris, for instance. Her backstory has been retconned to hell, but she was originally portrayed as gaining her magnetic powers from a machine. And if you don’t like that, there’s still the matter of her latent super strength.
@Dazzler.
That’s not quite correct. I DID enjoy HoX/PoX quite a bit on the 2nd read overall. I stand by my original opinion that when you add it all up, it is the best X-Men book I have read in a very, very, long time.
What was frustrating about the 2nd read is that I was reminded of how many ideas Hickman was throwing at us that were dropped. I liked a lot of them, some were bad, but they should be followed up on either way. That’s just basic storytelling. Instead, we get Morgan le Fay.
Maybe I’m impatient, maybe they are “writing for the trade,” but my only option is to support it with my money or not. And it is very hard to support something that will, in the end, cost hundreds of dollars before reaching a satisfying conclusion.
I suppose I should have known this going in. That’s what I meant about how I bought into the hype.
Hickman openly stated that this would take years to tell. But he also admitted in an interview that his Avengers was bloated to the extreme because of the corporate desire to crank out issues and the work suffered. I guess I thought he learned his lesson and would make these issues count.
Your 2nd point I agree with. There will probably be a lot of frustrated readers now, or in the end. I hope I’m wrong.
There have been *countless* instances of the visor being described as blocking the beams.
Remember Cameron Hodge’s ruby quartz armor, anyone?
Regarding the visor, I’m just referencing the official explanation. Mistakes are made all the time, I’ve even seen his optic blasts written as though they weren’t concussive. I’m just isolating one of many Morrison ideas that seem almost interesting at first glance but simply don’t work in execution. The tinted light thing is the official explanation. No reason why the exact same color couldn’t be reproduced. Nobody has ever made it a plot point that Cyclops must go long periods blindfolded because he can’t get the right glasses, so that gripe is moot.
@Adam: My premise here has always been that comparing this work to the last 15 years when the franchise has been deliberately hamstrung doesn’t move me very much. I’ll be interested to see how you feel about the whole exercise after more time has passed, that’s kind of what I’m saying. I feel like in the end, that one well-written miniseries won’t have been worth all of this. “The best the X-Men have been in decades” is like talking about the best case of constipation you ever had.
From the Official Handbook:
“Due to a head injury, Cyclops is unable to shut off his optic blasts at will and must therefore wear a visor or glasses with ruby quartz lenses to block the beams.”
“The tinted light thing is the official explanation”
I’ll ask again: source? Where is this official explanation? If this is X-Men 101 stuff that I really ought to know, then you should be able to point me to it easily enough.
@Dazzler
“’The best the X-Men have been in decades’ is like talking about the best case of constipation you ever had.”
Tough, but fair.
How has the X-Men franchise been “deliberately hamstrung” for the past 15 years?
Disney didn’t even buy Marvel until 2009.
Then, it took a few years before it seemed that Marvel went out of their way to try to kill fans’ interest in the X-books, and tried to replace mutants with the Inhumans.
Bad editorial decisions were made before that point, yes, but that’s nothing new for Marvel or DC.
I’d say that House and Powers was the most interesting that the X-Men has been since the Grant Morrison days.
You didn’t enjoy the Morrison run.
So, I guess this is the most interesting that the X-Men has been since Chris Claremont’s original run on Uncanny X-Men ended.
I’ll try to find my source for the Cyclops thing. It’s something I was acutely aware of in the 1990s.
Deliberately hamstrung for the last decade, I guess accidentally hamstrung for the previous five. We won’t agree on this point, but I think Morrison’s run being such a departure Wass ultimately disruptive to the franchise. Regardless of how you feel about the run itself, I hope you can at least concede that the whole main cast was totally incompetent throughout. I believe the run is accepted as a dissection of the X-Men and I found it overall more insulting than amusing.
@Dazzler
How official could that explanation be if you can’t just point me to it right now and I can’t find it myself within Marvel’s official handbooks or by Googling it? Just so you know, if this turns out to be something that you read on the back of a SkyBox trading card, I’m tossing it out as inadmissible.
Anyway, my point with bringing up his glasses in the first place was that all comic book science is basically crap anyway. Take Wolverine. Last time I checked, the official explanation for his adamantium not killing him was still “because healing factor.”
Well, he should be dead anyways. Blood cells are produced within the hematopoietic stem cells that reside in our blood marrow. Our bones therefore need to be semi-permeable in order to allow those blood cells to pass through to our bloodstream. So, if our bones were completely encased in anything, be it metal, glass, or plastic, we would die. An advanced healing factor wouldn’t prevent this.
How do I know this? Because I’m a biological genius? No, because it’s literally the only thing I learned in high school that I can still remember today. As soon as my bio teacher explained it, my immediate thought was, “Wow, Wolverine should be dead!” Sadly, that’s how school went for me. If I couldn’t relate a lesson to the Marvel Universe, it didn’t stick. Consequently, I never graduated.
Cyclops’s eye beams are blocked by the ruby quartz itself. See the explanation of how his visor works in the 80s Handbook, and X-Factor vol 1 #23, where Cameron Hodge wears ruby quartz armour in order to fight Cyclops.
There’s a lot of aggression being thrown ol’ Dazzler’s way about something I read over 20 years ago. It’s possible I was wrong, and it’s possible the official explanation changed, as often happens.
The bottom like is that ruby quartz contact lenses make no sense in any level. The idea doesn’t work. He could neither put them in our take them out, and he can’t blast through them. It’s among a plethora of Morrison ideas that are new and seem almost interesting but nobody thought them through.
At this point I’m mostly waiting to see if Chris V is at least willing to admit that Morrison wrote the X-Men like incompetent fools throughout.
I agree “ruby quartz contact lenses make no sense on any level” because a man with twin wormholes in his head that channel unlimited concussive force without pushback who cannot control said wormholes due to a brain injury received in a plane crash that he and his brother survived by blasting the ground with concussive wormhole energy to slow their descent and furthermore this unlimited concussive force is totally negated and harmlessly dissipated by his brother’s radiation absorption as well as color-specific mineral formations that do not block but exclusively transmit red light and furthermore
It was something of a dissection of the X-Men, sure.
I’m not sure why the X-Men would be considered “incompetent” during Morrison’s run.
Dissection in post-modernism doesn’t equate to character assassination.
The importance of dissection is to take apart where the book has been in the past, then to restructure it, hopefully with a new path forward to the future being shown.
Morrison accomplished that.
It was Bendis’ destructive House of M, and Marvel editorial’s even more short-sighted latching on to Bendis as the saviour of the X-line that became so problematic.
It wasn’t Morrison’s fault that future writers failed to take up his challenge to change the X-books, without just completely moving on to a new direction that bore no relation to prior X-Men tropes (mutants are an endangered species!).
“there are way too many X-Men, and nobody’s come up with a palatable way to write a bunch of them out.”
I don’t see why Marvel keeps trying complex and unpalatable fixes here. Why not just say “the book focuses on six people” and “everyone else is doing there own thing off screen, or retired”?
I think the biggest problem here was the desire some years ago to commercially brand everyone an X-Men or an Avenger, and then to combine the two teams, and have a zillion diferent military-style squads instead of a family. In the “good old days” (pre 1990s?) Marvel superhero teams were largely separate entities who maybe had each others phone number but didn’t trust them and didn’t keep up, and teams rarely had more than seven or so members. But for the last 10-15 years it seems every team has to have so member members, sub-squads, and so on the only way any villains have the slightest chance is if the heroes have a civil war and fight each other, or it’s an world-ending alien invasion.
I am thus someone pleased that the X-men seems to be going with distinct, named, sub-teams (new mutants, x-force, marauders, whatever) but fear the damage is still too great… an entire generation of writers and editors have been trained to produce a situation that just makes for poor comics.
I really liked this issue except for one little nitpick. If they have a gateway that can take them from Summer House to the Starjammer willy-nilly, why not wait until the Starjammers get closer to where they need to be, jump aboard, then transit there? If the big problem is that the New Mutants wore out their welcome, send them back to Krakoa and have Corsair pop back in and say “we’re good!”
Or if the escape plant is causing a problem, leave it on the other side of the portal, then go grab it right before you disembark the Starjammer.
DP> I am thus someone pleased that the X-men seems to be going with distinct, named, sub-teams (new mutants, x-force, marauders, whatever)…
Well, X-Men itself isn’t. Next issues are Cyclops/Frost, Xavier/Magneto/Apocalypse, Storm/Armour and Mystique.
@Chris V: What I’m talking about is how all the characters acted like idiots at all times and made terrible, easily avoidable mistakes in order to create conflict. I’d love to hear examples of the characters being smart if you can remember any.
I gave a few specific examples of their incompetence, including Cyclops and Emma just walking carelessly into harm’s way visiting Sublime, Charles and Jean allowing themselves to be played like total fools by the obviously shady Fantomex, having no control of their students whatsoever despite being supposedly more organized than ever leading to the riot, Wolverine’s strategy of standing still in a hallway to thwart a telepathic antagonist, the whole absurd Magneto infiltration (lol). Honestly, every character was written as a complete fool for no reason other than it’s what was necessary for the story to happen. That’s not good writing to me, and I thought his run was a rather naked and ham-fisted critique of the book and its tropes.
That’s not a launching point for other writers to go with, in my opinion. I wouldn’t want a biography of my life to be orchestrated by someone who clearly had no respect for me.
Two more gems: Beast, a lifelong X-Man and Avenger, is beaten to within an inch of his life by Beak, a character whose entire point is that he’s weak and useless. Jean, an Omega level mutant who was basically Phoenixed up at the time, is killed by Magneto touching her arm gently. He wasn’t even wearing a helmet. The whole cast is totally feckless and none of the conflict is organic.
I’m not sure how the Magneto reveal is incompetent, since there were absolutely no clues given.
How could anyone know that Magneto was Xorn, when there was absolutely no way to figure out that Magneto was Xorn?
It wasn’t good writing, but you can’t blame the X-Men for being caught off guard by that turn of events.
Why is none of the conflict organic? It’s the same type of conflict that has been used in the X-books for decades.
There was nothing exactly novel or original about the conflicts that Morrison chose.
—————————————-
Morrison was more concerned about what was going on in the background.
You want to critique Morrison’s writing style or characterization on X-Men. However, that’s Morrison alone.
“A launching point for new writers” doesn’t mean “write a book exactly like I did”. It means to develop ideas further.
I can see how you’d be confused about that looking at Scott Lobdell following on from Chris Claremont.
Here’s where the X-Men stood throughout the entirety of the 1990s, while living in Claremont’s shadow.
-Days of Future Past
-Humans hate mutants more and more by the day.
-Scott, Jean, Wolverine love triangle. Plus, The Phoenix.
-Magneto always be in competition with Xavier’s dream.
Morrison’s run finishes off each of the above.
Days of Future Past isn’t a dystopian future always around the corner. It’s over.
While some psychotic individuals still exist out there, more and more humans are coming to accept mutants.
Jean is dead, and Scott has moved on to be with Emma. The End.
Magneto was always a crazy Silver Age lunatic, and now he’s dead. Let him rest in peace.
You could add other items, like Wolverine now knows his origin. So, no more mysterious plots about Wolverine’s shadowy past.
What Morrison introduced in to the X-men for the first time was hope.
The idea that Xavier’s dream was actually beginning to happen.
That opens tons of new plots for new writers going forward.
They couldn’t just coast by going back to the cozy poor man’s Chris Claremont plots.
That was the importance of Morrison’s run. Not whether you enjoyed the way he wrote so-and-so, or if you thought that this story-arc was well-written or believable.
That’s not why Morrison’s run was interesting.
Also, let’s not forget how the 1990s writing style on the main X-books was set up.
Introduce a tantalizing mystery.
Take years to resolve it.
The writers have no idea what the resolution will be, but they’ll think of something eventually.
Have some sort of nonsensical or disappointing reveal.
What is Gambit’s big secret?
Who is Onslaught?
Who is the third Summers’ brother?
Who is the X-traitour?
Many more besides. I’m sure many of them were just dropped and never answered along the way.
This keeps readers intrigued in between the big yearly cross-over events.
Those were some quality stories….X-Cutioner’s Song, Fatal Attractions, the Phalanx Covenant, Onslaught, Operation: Zero Tolerance. Some even more lacklustre ones.
Age of Apocalypse was an exception, but that was a self-contained alternate reality.
There were X-books I enjoyed during the 1990s too, don’t get me wrong. It just wasn’t Uncanny X-Men or X-Men.
Alan Davis or Warren Ellis on Excalibur, Lobdell/Bachalo’s Generation X, Peter David on X-Factor, John Francis Moore on X-Force…
Probably a few others.
[obligatory disclaimer that New X-Men isn’t perfect]
Competent things that Morrison’s X-Men did, that come to mind:
-Jean holds two minds in her head at the same time while suffering from multiple diseases, while fighting the Shi’ar Imperial Guard. I think that surely counts at least as passably competent.
-Putting Cassandra Nova into a synthetic body and making her into a student is probably the most Charles-Xavier thing one could do to a villain. Not maim, but politely contain and re-educate until you see he was right.
-Beast discovers the “extinction sequence” in humans, which sets the tone of the series (and its distant future).
-Xavier controls Madrox to fend off Weapon Twelve.
And given that they often fought villains like an anti-Xavier or a 3-billion-year-old virus who hates evolution, I don’t think they did too badly.
Jean being killed by Magneto at the end makes sense to me, because he’d been saving up energy for a long period of time to [insert drug-induced Silver Age lunacy here]. The art criminally undersold how cataclysmic that moment should’ve been, though.
About a few of the Morrison character bits criticized above –
Beast vs. Beak occurred immediately after an attack by Cassandra Nova that, as a reader, I found shocking in its intimacy and sheer cruelty – positing Beast would devolve into a Protozoa still trying to win back Trish with adolescent love letters, threatening to make him crap in a litter box and wipe his ass with his PhD, “How does it feel to have someone throw up on your soul, Henry?” Bringing in Beak – a student Hank had taken under his wing, who clearly reminded him of his own teenage self – when Hank was already staggered and vulnerable was the final twist of the knife.
This wasn’t Beast the X-Man and Avenger getting jobbed by a Z-level student. It was Cassandra Nova maliciously exploiting Hank McCoy’s deepest fears and self-doubts and devastating him on every level. It was a revealing and deeply sympathetic character moment for Hank, and it established Cassandra as a truly frightening antagonist – not only another genocidal supervillain, but a sadist with a Joker-like talent for figuring out your emotional weakness and ruthlessly, gleefully exploiting it.
Similarly, the riot was only very briefly disruptive because it hit the X-Men from a totally unexpected angle – a vicious, suicidal attack by their own drugged-up students. Wolverine was just standing there because he obviously expected his reputation to intimidate the kids into backing down, only to get sucker punched by a psychic assault by a kick-boosted omega telepath. And even then, the riot lasted about 10 minutes before the X-Men pulled together and then immediately shut it down.
I read the story as an analogy for a school shooting. Not a defeat by a supervillain, but a tragedy that forced the X-Men to confront how badly they’d failed their students.
Thank you. I’m glad some other people chimed in with positive Morrison defense.
I’m getting old, and my memory isn’t as great as it used to be.
I haven’t read much of Morrison since it was first released, because if I go back to re-read X-Men comics, it is usually only old Claremont material.
I had forgotten the details of some of these stories.
What sticks out the most in my mind now about the Morrison run was the meta story-telling elements.
I know there was more that I enjoyed as I read the issues though.
Also – there was rather a lot of foreshadowing about Magneto being Xorn. Paul, if I remember right, wrote a breakdown of it somewhere and there were people who put the pieces together.
The thing is, the foreshadowing was quite subtle. That someone didn’t put it together the first time does not necessarily mean it was badly executed.
The mistake with Morrison’s run is reading it as a faithful continuation of what preceded it. It wasn’t. Nor do I think it was meant to be. Rather, it was a soft reboot. Morrison implicitly de-aged the core cast and re-baselined their characterization to renew opportunities for dramatic conflict.
By the mid-1990s, almost all of the core X-Men’s character development arcs were done. Scott and Jean were married, finally bringing their long star-crossed romance to full fruition. Scott had been a proper father to Nathan, making amends for his earlier abandonment of the boy and Madelyne. He’d also long since become a confident, competent leader of the X-Men, moving past his youthful insecurities. Jean had made peace with Madelyne and Phoenix’s memories, accepted the Phoenix name and identity, and reconciled with Rachel. The love triangle with Logan, and the rivalry been him and Scott, had been put to rest, and all three were respected friends with each other.
Wolverine’s mind had been purged of the Weapon X memory implants, he had his temper under control, and was a respected elder mentor figure among the X-teams. He was reconciled with Scott and Jean, Mac and Heather, Jubilee, and Kitty.
Storm had reconciled the goddess and thief/street punk sides of her personality all the way back in “Fall of the Mutants”. Though perpetually on-and-off as romantic partners, she and Forge were on good terms. Like Scott and Logan, she’d resolved her personal issues and attained the stature of a respected leader among the X-teams.
Warren had overcome the trauma of his transformation by Apocalypse, once again embraced his civilian identity, and even gotten his original wings back. He’d entered into a romance with Psylocke who also had dealt with her transformation, reaffirmed her identity, and purged herself of outside influence (i.e. The Hand and Kwannon).
And on and on…
This, IMO, is why the X-books flailed after Lobdell left.* The organic character conflicts, both internal and external, that had driven the books for decades were largely resolved. The X-Men had grown up and self-actualized. Which, of course, is bad for drama.
Seagle and Kelly initially got around this by following in Claremont’s footsteps and cycling out older characters in favor of newer, less developed ones. But, they had the misfortune of coming on board the franchise during the nadir of Marvel’s 1990s financial problems and the ongoing collapse of the U.S. comics market. In that environment, new, relatively unknown characters were a riskier proposition, and Marvel wanted to retreat to safer IP more guaranteed to sell. So, editorial clamped down, and had Seagle and Kelly reunite the 1986 line-up (plus Gambit and Marrow). Soon after, though, the two writers had enough and quit.
Cue Alan Davis and a rotating cast of scripters to mark time for a year by tying up some plotlines and following editorial diktats. Then, Claremont came back. He, too, tried to do something new (the Neo), but it didn’t click. Then, Bill Jemas took over at Marvel, canned Harras, and promoted Quesada to editor in chief. Enter Grant Morrison.
Instead of introducing a new, undeveloped cast in place of the old, Morrison reset the core cast to a less resolved state. Jean began having issues with the Phoenix again–not just the name, but the Force itself. Scott reverted back to his neurotic, insecure, and maritally inept state from the early X-Factor days. Logan became angrier and more combative again. Emma went from being a confident, independent, high-functioning sociopath to a snarky, insecure young woman who just wanted to be loved. Voila.
This threaded the needle for Marvel by appearing to do something new and fresh, but still really just using the core X-Men IP. Morrison’s key decision was to simply ignore the preceding decade-plus of character development. This is why, to me, the “Extinction era” that followed reads to me less like a continuation of 1990s X-Men and more like an alternative to it.
*On a side note, “Zero Tolerance” was the bookend to “Days of Future Past” moreso than Morrison’s run. Bastion (i.e. Nimrod), the epitome of the DOFP-timeline Sentinel technology, was defeated, and his master plan thwarted with the help of Robert Kelly, who converted from a mutant-phobe (and baddie of the original DOFP story) to an advocate for tolerance.
“Also – there was rather a lot of foreshadowing about Magneto being Xorn. Paul, if I remember right, wrote a breakdown of it somewhere and there were people who put the pieces together.”
Here it is…
“For example, take Quentin Quire’s death scene after the Riot storyline. Xorn comes in, tells the novice supervillain that they have something in common, and then unmasks for his benefit. Quire screams and dies. Oh, and the scene also has Quire saying “What if the real enemy was inside all along?” When you read it again, it’s so obvious that you wonder how you could possibly have missed the idea that Xorn wasn’t all he seemed. Or the fact that Xorn only ever healed anyone in one issue, despite that ostensibly being his power. Or the time he slaughtered a load of U-Men when he thought nobody was watching.”
There was another scene during the Murder in the Mansion storyline. When Bishop and Sage are going around around collecting alibis, they ask Xorn where he was. He says “Meditating, I believe.” The artwork had half of Xorn’s face rendered in shadow which I wouldn’t have been suspicious of if I hadn’t recently read an analysis of Pulp Fiction. The scene where Bruce Willis’s character is getting his instructions from Ving Rhames’s character to throw the upcoming fight. It’s lit so that half of Willis’s face is rendered in shadow– indicating duplicity and signaling his intention to disobey those orders.
One clue that occurred to me about Xorn was the upside-down world map symbolizing the magnetic pole reversal, but I can’t remember if that appeared anywhere before New X-Men #146.
Like Arrowhead said, there were a lot of great moments. My favorite–not only in New X-Men but X-Men as a whole–was the scene of Xavier and Jean testing her powers (floating silverware scene). I don’t think Jean had been so interesting since the Phoenix Saga. She simultaneously seemed overwhelmingly powerful and very vulnerable.
Come to think of it, Jean had a LOT of awesome moments in New X-Men besides the ones I mentioned. She caught a bullet aimed at Xavier’s head. And she dispatched the U-Men in the funniest way possible.
FUBAR-I agree with you about Operation: Zero Tolerance.
However, that’s not to say that another writer wouldn’t have come along later to redo it all over again, had Morrison not come along.
Zero Tolerance was the bookend to DOFP, but Morrison progressed the concept forward from there.
Instead of redoing DOFP again, he inverted the tropes of DOFP with the “Here Comes Tomorrow” story-arc.
“I’m not sure how the Magneto reveal is incompetent, since there were absolutely no clues given.”
That explains why it was dumb from a reader perspective.
From a character perspective, I’m talking about how he was able to infiltrate the school unvetted right under everybody’s nose, even with skin exposed, etc. The whole thing is much dumber than your average “we can rehabilitate Sabretooth” stupidity. How stupid could you be to have one of a small, tight-knit group be your worst enemy whom you’ve known for decades?
“Here’s where the X-Men stood throughout the entirety of the 1990s, while living in Claremont’s shadow.
-Days of Future Past
-Humans hate mutants more and more by the day.
-Scott, Jean, Wolverine love triangle. Plus, The Phoenix.
-Magneto always be in competition with Xavier’s dream.
Morrison’s run finishes off each of the above.”
Nothing ends, especially not in comics. The idea that his run, which was basically a post-movie diversion, could or should be allowed to do or say anything definitive about the X-Men is silly. His run was a passionless roast of the X-Men. They got roasted in every arc, and they roasted themselves. I gave examples.
This is a bit tiresome, and you still didn’t give me one example of the main characters being smart or competent.
Morrison’s run was not especially good or interesting. It’s probably the weakest stuff I’ve ever read from him and definitely the most boring work I’ve ever seen come out of Frank Quitely by five miles, which is a crying shame because it’s freaking Frank Quitely on X-Men.
Seems like you just really liked it, so there’s that. I would still appreciate an example of the characters not bumblef*cking their way into conflict after conflict that could have been easily avoided if the characters weren’t exceptionally stupid and incompetent.
CJ, I’m sorry but your answers are so bad. Jean doing a display of power is your best example, and it’s not a good example. I’m talking about them being idiots and bringing totally avoidable trouble upon themselves. Obviously they have to get out of this trouble through deus ex machinas, that’s not what I’m talking about.
If you shoot yourself in the arm intentionally but figure out how to get to a hospital before you die, I’m less impressed at how you got out of trouble than I am bewildered that you shot yourself on purpose in the first place.
Dazzler-I’ve never said that you should enjoy Morrison’s X-Men.
Why would I? If you didn’t like something, you didn’t like it. That’s perfectly fine. I can’t change your tastes.
I have said that I found it one of Morrison’s weaker series.
I am a huge fan of Grant Morrison. His X-Men didn’t come anywhere close to work like Animal Man, Doom Patrol, or The Invisibles.
You’re saying that you see Morrison’s X-Men as a horrible mistake though.
There’s a difference between “it wasn’t to my tastes and I didn’t enjoy it” versus Morrison’s run being a mistake.
I’ve been trying to point out to you the possibilities that Morrison’s run opened up for future writers.
Even if you dislike something, you should still be able to see the importance of what Morrison was attempting to accomplish.
“Nothing ever ends in comics”.
Well, a lot of readers are going to get tired of reading the same stories over and over again.
When you have someone who started reading comics when they were in elementary school and they reach maturity, and the comic is still telling the exact same story over and over again, then I think you can see why those readers would end up finding something else to spend their time and money.
There has to be evolution and growth in every medium, otherwise, it stagnates and dies.
Chris Claremont realized that fact. He wanted to continue evolving the concept of the X-Men, just as he had been evolving it since the beginning of his run.
Marvel editorial got involved and told him he had to “put all his toys back in the box”.
That was the aspect of Claremont’s run which Morrison definitely understood.
Also, my memory of Morrison’s run isn’t exact enough to know if Xorn and Wolverine were ever in close contact.
Perhaps Morrison kept the two separate.
If so, then there is no reason to think that anyone would suspect Xorn as being Magneto.
Why would they?
He was a prisoner in a Chinese prison camp…for some reason, since it was Magneto in disguise, but once again, that’s about the reader not the fictional characters.
How is it any different than the X-Men trusting someone like Maggott?
They’ve never met him before, and he seems to have some mysterious past or connection with the X-Men arch-enemy Magneto, yet they accept Maggott in to the school.
I guess that the X-Men were acting like complete idiots at the time too.
Maggott might have been Toad in disguise, and they’re just lucky that Maggott didn’t turn on them too.
It’s no different.