With the final two issues of Ed Piskor’s re-telling of the X-Men’s history – or rather, of the Chris Claremont run and the preceding material that serves as necessary background for it – we reach the crunch point. \u00a0How is he going to impose an end on a story that never had one? \u00a0And is there a point to any of this, beyond a parlour-game exercise in distilling years of stories into a single story?<\/p>\n
Let’s start with the first question. \u00a0The answer, on some level, is a cheat – but one constructed entirely from building blocks to be found in the Claremont run. \u00a0And that’s in keeping with the way the whole series has worked. \u00a0Piskor is being faithful to the broad strokes of the original stories, but he’s also more than happy to shuffle around the elements, and cut bits out entirely, in order to better serve that big picture. \u00a0One of those changes, in the previous volume, makes rather more sense now that we see how things pan out.<\/p>\n
For all that,\u00a0Grand Design<\/em> is a strange hybrid of sensibilities. \u00a0On the one hand it’s a hypercompressed indie book, on the other it’s a love letter to the X-Men. \u00a0On the one hand it’s ruthlessly editing the source material to out the big picture, on the other it’s still gesturing to stray threads from the original series that don’t especially fit in here.<\/p>\n So let’s see what gets changed here, in a story that picks up circa\u00a0Uncanny<\/em> #200, with 80 issues of the series still to go. \u00a0Storm and Forge’s subplot gets a lot of play, though Forge’s vaguely sinister tower base gets renamed “Freedom Tower”, where Claremont’s original preferred “Eagle Plaza”. \u00a0(This might be a gesture in the direction of the ironically-named Freedom Force, whose prominent role in the original issues is boiled down to a cameo where they’re still just the Brotherhood.) \u00a0Jean returns, but X-Factor – who never play into any of Claremont’s stories – simply don’t exist and get removed from all crossover stories where they originally appeared. \u00a0The New Mutants exist but get very little play (though Cable rather randomly shows up with them later on). \u00a0Excalibur don’t exist either.<\/p>\n The Morlock Massacre, as a turning point in the X-Men’s nihilistic depression, gets an unusual amount of detail for this book. \u00a0While Grand Design<\/em> typically plays out as a recap, the Massacre is given seven pages in which to play out – the sort of pacing decision that lends it added weight against the book’s established norm. \u00a0Forge’s wartime back story gets more detail than you’d expect as well – something of a forgotten corner of X-Men history, it needs the prominence here, given its key plot function in setting up the showdown with the Adversary and the subsequent Australia era.<\/p>\n The Australian era, it has to be said, fits awkwardly into Piskor’s agenda, since it’s tricky to make it feel like anything other than a weird late-period detour. \u00a0This is a problem with a lot of the material he has to work with in this book; it never exactly went anywhere, and it’s hard to tie into a larger narrative, yet it’s also too big to ignore. \u00a0He has rather more success with the big crossovers, which are pared down solely to their X-Men elements in order to keep the focus on their part in the big picture. \u00a0So we have a version of Inferno lacking not only X-Factor, but even Illyana – after all, her storyline played out in\u00a0New Mutants<\/em> and had very little to do with the X-Men. \u00a0Consequently, it’s a version of Inferno that doesn’t actually do the Inferno – there’s no transformation of New York. \u00a0Instead, it’s a story about Madelyne allying with a demon to try and recover her son from Sinister, with Scott and Jean taking the X-Factor role of a parallel search.<\/p>\n The post-Siege Perilous stuff is detour central and gets boiled down to a page, opting for the simpler approach of claiming that some characters were reborn in\u00a0other worlds<\/em>, effectively writing them out of the book. \u00a0Psylocke’s transformation is handwaved through in a panel, and most of the attention is on Havok winding up as a Magistrate in Genosha – because as it turns out, Piskor’s version of the Claremont era ends not with the Muir Island Saga, but with X-Tinction Agenda. \u00a0This makes some sense; Claremont never completed the Muir Island Saga, and everything else that follows X-Tinction Agenda is filler. \u00a0But it’s hardly a story that’s remembered as a classic.<\/p>\n It works for Piskor’s story, though, when he brings out his final grand gesture. \u00a0Spoilers, I guess: Recall, in Piskor’s version of Days of Future Past there was no time travel element. \u00a0It was just a story where the bad guys failed to kill Senator Kelly, but did manage to kill another politician. \u00a0And now we know why: everything from that point on is taking place in the original timeline that leads to DoFP. \u00a0This is very clever. \u00a0The rest of the Claremont run fits quite neatly into that structure. \u00a0Everything is getting bleaker, the X-Men are falling apart, and it all builds to a quixotic showdown against a racist nation. \u00a0Which the X-Men lose, leaving the series to end with the apocalyptic descent into Days of Future Past over a few horribly grim pages, until of course the surviving X-Men manage to send Kitty back to change history and give everyone a chance to try again.<\/p>\n That’s as close to an ending as you’re going to find in the raw material of Claremont’s run. \u00a0It never reaches a conventional resolution, but it does set up a disastrous one and establish it as the likely end destination. Piskor simply resequences it so that it really does come at the end.<\/p>\n All well and good. \u00a0Grand Design<\/em> is certainly a clever piece of editing, and Piskor’s art adds vital dimensions of detail to humanise scenes that would otherwise rush past. \u00a0The technique of setting the default page colour at offwhite, so that true white can be used for energy effects, remains remarkably effective. \u00a0And Piskor largely succeeds in incorporating characters from a wide range of eras and visual styles into something visually coherent – though Mr Sinister, played straight, is a bit of a challenge.<\/p>\n But is there ultimately a point to this, beyond demonstrating that a coherent through-line can be distilled from the X-Men stories of the 70s and 80s (and the 60s, to the extent that those later stories drew on that era for background)? \u00a0And is that something that particularly needed demonstrating – weren’t the X-Men notorious by the 1990s for having become an inaccessible long-running saga? \u00a0The appeal is somewhat akin to the\u00a0Official Handbook <\/em>or\u00a0Marvel Index<\/em>. \u00a0In as much as the story is about anything, that’s only because it faithfully reproduces the key themes of Claremont’s run. \u00a0It is, at root, an artisan\u00a0Marvel Saga<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n That’s not nothing, though. \u00a0There\u00a0was<\/em> an appeal to those books, because they did indeed convey a sense of scale, of saga, of big picture, in stories you hadn’t actually read and probably couldn’t get hold of even if you wanted to. \u00a0Even if that’s basically the level on which\u00a0Grand Design<\/em> works, with added nostalgia for those of us who read some of this stuff on first release, there’s plenty to appreciate in all that. \u00a0But it does feel like something destined to be remembered as a curio, both for the X-Men and for Ed Piskor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" With the final two issues of Ed Piskor’s re-telling of the X-Men’s history – or rather, of the Chris Claremont run and the preceding material that serves as necessary background for it – we reach the crunch point. \u00a0How is he going to impose an end on a story that never had one? \u00a0And is […]<\/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-4611","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\/4611","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=4611"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4611\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4612,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4611\/revisions\/4612"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}