{"id":3214,"date":"2015-10-10T22:20:50","date_gmt":"2015-10-10T21:20:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3214"},"modified":"2015-10-10T22:20:50","modified_gmt":"2015-10-10T21:20:50","slug":"e-is-for-extinction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3214","title":{"rendered":"E is for Extinction"},"content":{"rendered":"

While much\u00a0of\u00a0Secret Wars<\/em> may be taken up with callbacks to the great crossovers of yesterday, but\u00a0E\u00a0is for Extinction<\/em>\u00a0turns its attention to Grant Morrison’s\u00a0New X-Men<\/em> run from 2001-2004. \u00a0(Strictly speaking, “E\u00a0is for Extinction” was just the first arc of his run, but you can’t really call a book\u00a0Grant Morrison’s X-Men<\/em> when Grant Morrison\u00a0isn’t\u00a0doing it.)<\/p>\n

In its way, of course, Morrison’s run was\u00a0far more significant to\u00a0the X-Men than any “event” book. \u00a0For the first time since the 1975 relaunch,\u00a0it broke with the idea that the X-Men was a single, ever-growing saga. \u00a0Not\u00a0everything\u00a0in the preceding decade had been a straight emulation of Chris Claremont – the Seagle\/Bachalo run\u00a0was in that period, for example – but it was all positioned as a continuation. \u00a0Morrison’s run,\u00a0both at beginning and end, is a break\u00a0point.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Something like this would probably have happened anyway, in due course. \u00a0The current century has seen a general move away from the idea of the Marvel Universe as an ever-growing saga dating back to 1961, partly because of the increasing\u00a0impracticality of characters trailing\u00a0such quantities of history behind them, but also due to the influx of a\u00a0generation of creators who are far less\u00a0interested in\u00a0the idea of\u00a0world-building across the\u00a0whole line, and far more concerned about the stand-alone qualities of a particular\u00a0story. \u00a0But when it happened with the X-Men in 2001, it wasn’t something we were used to seeing.<\/p>\n

I’ve heard it\u00a0claimed that\u00a0Morrison’s run was\u00a0largely reversed when he left. \u00a0This is less true than people\u00a0seem to think. \u00a0Yes, a wildly awkward series of clumsy retcons followed immediately his departure, which reversed\u00a0aspects of his climax.\u00a0\u00a0But a\u00a0fair amount of his run stuck around for years, such as the idea of the school as a fully-functioning\u00a0Hogwarts for mutants,\u00a0and\u00a0the\u00a0coupling of Emma Frost with Cyclops. \u00a0(Granted, the school can also be attributed to the 2000 film, but it was\u00a0still Morrison’s run that brought it into the comics, and also made it a public institution.)<\/p>\n

What hasn’t stuck around, though, is the relative optimism of Morrison’s run. \u00a0Previously, the well-established set-up for the X-Men was that mutants were the next step in human evolution, and so normal humans hated and feared them as usurpers, an idea that goes back to the Lee and Kirby run, but became central under Claremont. \u00a0For him, the “future of humanity” angle was less interesting than the “fear and hate” – the alternate futures that were depicted over the years\u00a0tended to suggest that\u00a0it was a\u00a0future that\u00a0would\u00a0never be allowed to come to pass. \u00a0Instead, the central metaphor in the 80s and 90s is mutants as\u00a0an oppressed minority group. \u00a0It’s not a perfect metaphor by any means, since the fact that mutant powers\u00a0were often shown as genuinely dangerous implied that humans had at least some legitimate reason to be concerned about\u00a0uncontrolled teenagers spontaneously exploding and such\u00a0like. \u00a0But it worked pretty well.<\/p>\n

Morrison seemed much more interested in the idea of mutants as\u00a0the future of humanity, which for him makes them work as a\u00a0symbol of potential and promise. \u00a0This results in entire districts of mutant\u00a0communities going about their ordinary business,\u00a0mutant pop culture being presented as a\u00a0phenomenon, and mutant artists being shown as fashionable. \u00a0Obviously the minority group metaphor is still intact here, but with less of a single-minded focus on the aspect\u00a0of rejection and oppression. \u00a0So alongside the\u00a0raving dinosaurs\u00a0who want to slaughter mutants, you have the U-Men who want to appropriate them. \u00a0It’s a take on mutants that could have worked very well if Marvel had stuck with it;\u00a0it would certainly have lent itself much better to\u00a0exploring topical themes.<\/p>\n

Instead, what we’ve seen over the\u00a0last few years – and not just since Marvel became obsessed with the Inhumans, because this goes back to\u00a0House of M<\/em> – is a strange obsession with\u00a0shutting down the idea of mutants as a potential future, and repositioning\u00a0the X-Men as\u00a0the\u00a0last of a dying breed. \u00a0Theoretically you can see why this is supposed to be interesting, but at best, it’s interesting for entirely different reasons than the ones that have worked for the\u00a0X-Men in the past. \u00a0We’re about to enter another cycle of this. \u00a0We’ll see if it works any better this time round.<\/p>\n

The Secret Wars\u00a0E is for Extinction<\/em> story doesn’t have Grant Morrison on hand. \u00a0But it does have\u00a0Chris Burnham, who\u00a0worked with Morrison on\u00a0Batman<\/em>, as\u00a0a writer. \u00a0And it has\u00a0Ramon Villalobos on art, whose work already has the\u00a0combination of\u00a0clean lines with a\u00a0slightly squishy grotesquerie that makes him\u00a0perfectly suited to homage Frank Quitely.<\/p>\n

The book takes as its starting point the idea\u00a0that this world diverged from “E\u00a0is for Extinction”\u00a0by having Xavier blow his own head off to stop Cassandra Nova. \u00a0Several years later, that results in the mutants having\u00a0ascended to the status of\u00a0social acceptance that Morrison gestured towards, and Magneto running an entirely successful school for exceptional pupils, whether mutants or ordinary humans. \u00a0Of course, they’re overwhelmingly mutants. \u00a0Mutants are superhuman. \u00a0But it’s a gesture. \u00a0Meanwhile, the original X-Men\u00a0find\u00a0their powers waning, and a younger class of X-Men graduates – the kids from the Morrison run – treating them as a bit of a joke.<\/p>\n

This is a promising set-up, playing into a theme of generational conflict that was also thoroughly present in the Morrison original (where, after all,\u00a0Magneto also ended up with a bunch of kids tailing along after him). \u00a0But the actual plot turns out to be about Magneto\u00a0secretly hiding a Phoenix Egg which appears to have been formed when Xavier killed himself, sucking in Jean Grey at the same time (because they were mentally linked or something). \u00a0Magneto wants to use its power for himself,\u00a0to ensure the complete ascendancy of mutants – even though they’re clearly winning anyway, because he’s Magneto and he still believes it’s all going to go wrong somewhere.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, in\u00a0plot terms, this\u00a0means that the book\u00a0rapidly degenerates into a multi-issue fight scene\u00a0at the school, with assorted Morrison concepts showing up for callbacks and to periodically raise the stakes. \u00a0The upshot is supposed to be that the black and white of Xavier and Nova\u00a0end up being synthesised into a balanced Grey, which is a cute bit of wordplay, but\u00a0doesn’t actually wind up carrying a\u00a0great deal of weight. \u00a0There’s a sense of scale and importance lacking here,\u00a0and it’s not clear that\u00a0there’s any real point to it beyond “wasn’t Morrison\/Quitely X-Men great?”<\/p>\n

Indeed it was. \u00a0The book does successfully evoke\u00a0that run,\u00a0with the art doing\u00a0a lot of the heavy lifting in that regard. And it’s a nice run to\u00a0revisit, not just for its own merits, but because it\u00a0represents\u00a0a path not taken for the X-books – in many ways, a\u00a0more optimistic vision of what the X-Men can be, and can stand for. \u00a0That all\u00a0gives this series\u00a0a certain charm, but not really enough to make it work in its own right. \u00a0It’s a decent enough homage, but it doesn’t really\u00a0find anything to add to the original run.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While much\u00a0of\u00a0Secret Wars may be taken up with callbacks to the great crossovers of yesterday, but\u00a0E\u00a0is for Extinction\u00a0turns its attention to Grant Morrison’s\u00a0New X-Men run from 2001-2004. \u00a0(Strictly speaking, “E\u00a0is for Extinction” was just the first arc of his run, but you can’t really call a book\u00a0Grant Morrison’s X-Men when Grant Morrison\u00a0isn’t\u00a0doing it.) In its […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-x-axis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3214"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3214\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3216,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3214\/revisions\/3216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}