{"id":4000,"date":"2018-01-09T22:14:31","date_gmt":"2018-01-09T22:14:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4000"},"modified":"2018-01-09T22:14:31","modified_gmt":"2018-01-09T22:14:31","slug":"x-men-grand-design-1-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4000","title":{"rendered":"X-Men: Grand Design #1-2"},"content":{"rendered":"

Grand Design<\/em> is one of the stranger X-related ideas in quite some time. \u00a0Planned for six outsize issues, it’s Ed Piskor\u00a0re-telling the first three hundred or so issues of (Uncanny<\/em>)\u00a0X-Men<\/em>. \u00a0These first two issues cover the Silver Age.<\/p>\n

Now, three hundred issues in around three hundred pages is going to be seriously compressed. \u00a0But Piskor’s best known work,\u00a0Hip Hop Family Tree<\/em>, is essentially documentarian, and there’s a similar vibe to this. \u00a0Yes, there’s a framing sequence to set up Uatu as the narrator, but that largely serves to explain why the focus remains on the big picture rather than the small details. \u00a0More to the point, though, roughly three hundred issues basically means the end of the Claremont run, and if there’s one thing that Claremont was very good at, it was creating a sense of a grand saga.<\/p>\n

So the point of this exercise – beyond simple tribute – seems to be to shift the emphasis away from the details of individual stories and to tell the story of the big, dominant themes which run through that era. \u00a0Of course, Claremont didn’t actually come onto the book since 1975, when most of the cast was replaced, but it was still an era of superhero comics based on the notion of a grand continuing uber-story, and which treated its history in that way. \u00a0This didn’t die with Claremont – it persisted for most of the nineties – but it petered out by the time of the Grant Morrison run. \u00a0It’s not something that’s easily re-created now, given the stop-start nature of X-Men history over the last 15 years or so, and the sheer unwieldy bulk of a continuity stretching back to 1963 (and being spammed with new content month after month).<\/p>\n

Part of the appeal here is the style, with aged-looking pages and a balance between an indie feel and a more conventional Marvel style. \u00a0There’s a great attention to detail in the panels, which helps to fill out what could otherwise have been very clipped and narrative-heavy scenes, and give more depth to the characters. \u00a0And there are some good little comedy beats in there as well.<\/p>\n

But for someone who’s already pretty well immersed in X-Men continuity, what’s more interesting is the extent to which Piskor is not doing a straightforward summary of the series at all. \u00a0That’s not just because of the incorporation of a large number of continuity implants – the first issue doesn’t even reach X-Men<\/em> #1 because it’s so busy incorporating a whole load of flashback material (including the late-sixties back-up strips about how the team was formed). \u00a0Rather, Piskor is changing a lot of the details, in a way which might not be altogether obvious to readers taking the catalogue of end notes at face value.<\/p>\n

This is not to say that anything big has changed. \u00a0Quite the opposite – the point seems to be that nothing big has changed, but that a lot of the small details have been hammered into line so as to better serve precisely the same big picture, or just to get rid of stuff that was no good. In short, it’s a summary of the X-Men\u00a0<\/em>as it would have been if the creators had known where they were going all along, and had steered clear of some of their dodgier ideas. \u00a0But at the same time, little or nothing is truly new, simply revised.<\/p>\n

At this point there’s a risk of degenerating into a catalogue of minutiae, but let’s take a few examples of how Piskor is, on the whole, tying things together rather more neatly than the original, with a few subtle changes.<\/p>\n

In Lee and Kirby’s version, Xavier loses the use of his legs in battle with Lucifer, and the fact that nobody ever uses Lucifer despite his theoretical “arch-enemy” potential tells you all you need to know about what a mediocre bad guy he was. \u00a0Piskor – much more sensibly – just cuts that out entirely, and simply has Xavier injured in the same cave-in where Cain Marko becomes the Juggernaut. \u00a0That requires Xavier’s trip to Egypt to meet Amahl Farouk and a young Storm to take place before his military service (Claremont had it after), and means that Xavier is now in a wheelchair by the time he meets Gabrielle Haller (in the original, he wasn’t). \u00a0It’s an obviously better sequence.<\/p>\n

The Phoenix Force storyline starts as soon as Jean Grey’s powers emerge, as the Phoenix instantly turns round to head for Earth and all the alien races take notice. \u00a0That allows it to become a developing subplot which slowly builds from the earliest possible moment. \u00a0It also provides an explanation for the Shi’ar reconnaissance vessel which kidnaps Scott’s parents – oh, and Katherine Summers is just killed instead of being captured and killed later, which simplifies matters and also gets rid of a slightly dodgy overtone of sexual violence. \u00a0And it provides a better reason for the alien Mutant-Master to take an interest in Earth during the Factor Three arc, instead of his original “nuke everything and rule the wasteland” plan. \u00a0And it explains why the Stranger wanted to come to Earth. \u00a0And… you get the idea. \u00a0If it involves aliens or anything vaguely cosmic, it’s now probably to do with people trying to find out what’s up with Phoenix.<\/p>\n

The various anti-mutant villains – Cameron Hodge, the Trasks, Stephen Lang, Robert Kelly, Donald Pierce – are linked together by making them members of the Right. \u00a0This is one of the points where I wonder if it’s going a bit too far to tie everything together; thematically, isn’t it better if the anti-mutant sentiment is coming from multiple sources rather than one? \u00a0Still, there are some nice tweaks to Angel’s back story to take account of the retcon from 80s\u00a0X-Factor\u00a0<\/em>that he had Cameron Hodge as a confidant during his first run as a superhero.<\/p>\n

Magneto’s attack on Cape Citadel in X-Men\u00a0<\/em>#1\u00a0is conflated with the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants’ attack on Santo Marco in\u00a0X-Men\u00a0<\/em>#4. \u00a0This is a very good move because it goes some way towards answering the question of what Magneto was actually trying to achieve in issue #1; it neuters the question of why he didn’t bring the Brotherhood with him; and it makes it possible to have the Brotherhood being recruited alongside the X-Men, which works much better.<\/p>\n

The X-Men’s random fight with Count Nefaria at the start of the Roy Thomas run now seems to be presented as Nefaria laying the groundwork for a plan involving NORAD – in other words, trying to give some big-picture context to the X-Men’s other random fight with Count Nefaria at the start of the Chris Claremont run, an inconsequential story which could easily have been glossed over if it hadn’t been used to kill off Thunderbird.<\/p>\n

Ted Roberts, a short-run late-sixties supporting character who was a competing love interest for Jean Grey, is now Mastermind starting the Dark Phoenix saga ten years early. \u00a0This is a lovely way of acknowledging a dead end plot which went on for a year, and actually tying it to something bigger.<\/p>\n

The whole team know that Xavier fakes his death, and not just Jean. \u00a0Of course, in the original, they just killed Xavier and then brought him back in a retcon, which made it impossible to claim that the whole team knew all along. \u00a0But that was stupid, and the only reason to do it that way was to try and square off earlier issues. \u00a0Piskor\u00a0could<\/em> have just cut the entire thing, but then he’d lose the bit where the team “graduate” by carrying on as heroes without their mentor around, and that wouldn’t be in the spirit of the series.<\/p>\n

You get the idea. \u00a0Now, granted, once we get into the series proper, there is a bit of “and then they fought X, and then they fought Y”. \u00a0I guess that’s necessary if you want to make the point that, honest, there was other stuff in here too. \u00a0But what Piskor’s done here is a rather subtler exercise in editing the material than it might first appear, and the vast majority of his changes are clear improvements. \u00a0There are good reasons why the original comics weren’t done this way – principally, the original creators were neither perfect nor psychic – but it’s a streamlined re-telling that’s faithful to the big picture while still being built almost exclusively from the original elements.<\/p>\n

What you lose, of course, is much of the character dynamics and soap opera which were typical of the X-Men’s heyday – though, to be fair, not so much in the Silver Age. \u00a0But then we’re bringing out one particular aspect of the X-Men’s history here. \u00a0The nagging question here is whether this all amounts to anything more than an interesting editorial parlour game with nice art. \u00a0Ultimately, that will turn on whether Piskor really can bring this chunk of X-Men history together as a truly satisfying whole. \u00a0That may be easier said and done, because the X-Men\u00a0didn’t<\/em> stop in 1991, and the Claremont era ends with him leaving mid-story and the reset button being whacked next month. \u00a0We won’t know for a while yet whether Piskor can find a resolution in his source material, but it’s the point that I’m most curious about.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Grand Design is one of the stranger X-related ideas in quite some time. \u00a0Planned for six outsize issues, it’s Ed Piskor\u00a0re-telling the first three hundred or so issues of (Uncanny)\u00a0X-Men. \u00a0These first two issues cover the Silver Age. Now, three hundred issues in around three hundred pages is going to be seriously compressed. \u00a0But Piskor’s […]<\/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,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4000","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\/4000","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=4000"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4000\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4001,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4000\/revisions\/4001"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}