CBR: When Words Collide - Nov 16, 2009

[CBR News]

Reflecting on some of the major comic book events of the past decade, Tim discusses the good - and not-so-good - when it comes to Grant Morrison's controversial run as the writer of "New X-Men."


Full article here.

[Bevbos]

Definitely on the list... although I'm personally hoping that X-Statix is also up there.

[Karl O'Neill]

That was a cool article.

Morrison's run is definately the only x-men run I can rate really high. It's also the only run I personally own after all these years of collecting x-men comics.

1) The Magneto stuff was great, It resonating with me so much. Who would listen to an old man for so long?

2)Cassandra Nova was one scary assed villainess. I loved the connection to Prof x as well.

3) I hate that Marvel retconned so much of Grant's run. DC clearly reaped the benefits of morrison coming back to dc's great pathenon of hereos.

4) Loved that emma frost became more relevent and important and way cooler than jean grey.

5) Thew costumes and their way of thinking felt real to me. They are not super heroes. They were rescue workers for their own kind.

6) Fantomex and dust are two welcome characters.

[rev sully]

Tim,

I am going on the record saying I have no problem with any part of Morrison's "New X-Men" run. I read the "Manifesto" in the 1st publishing of "here comes tomorrow" along with Annual 2001 and read it serialized until Chuck Austin post-Xorn/RELOAD 2004. wow. I didn't even know "who" Grant Morrison was. I knew that the killer line & Hamlet reference in Genosha with Jean and Beast..."I make up for this thin wrists with a really buff mind". I hope that comes close.

All the art grew on me.
Even Kordey.

I love Fantomex. I love the saturation of Wolverine's character...one thing they could not retcon out of the series. From "Assault on Weapon Plus" to killing Jean on the asteroid and taking Xorn's head & still not smelling Magnus on him...heh...

But the Best Bad Guy Line Ever candidate here; Cassandra Nova-infected Prof. X says to his soulmate Empress Lillandra, "you were bad in bed." I got goat all over me from throwing it right now...

crea shaakti,
Rev Sully

[theSuperAlbino]

I've never read Morrison's New X-Men but you certainly make it sound like an interesting read. I might pick the trades up when I get the chance.

[invasionforce]

Um, no. There are DC readers and Marvel readers and there are DC writers and Marvel writers. Grant Morrison is a DC writer. His imagination is made for DC because it is more fantastical, more extreme, more head-in-the-clouds, less realistic, less logical. Marvel is grittier, more realistic. Mutations are random. Why should Angel’s mutation follow the pattern of a fly, e.g. she pukes on her food and then slurps is up, she lays eggs? Why should Beak look like a bird? Why should Mammomax look like a bipedal elephant? There is no way Magneto should have been able to “short out” (or whatever it was he did) the Phoenix. When Jean Grey first met Magneto as Phoenix, she walloped him with a telekinetic blast and then taunted him saying, “What now, oh mighty master of magnetism?” Phoenix should scare the hell out of Magneto and have him fighting for his life. Sometimes I felt that Morrison did not quite understand the X-Men and was writing them as though they were the JLA. Having said that, his run did have some successes. Cassandra Nova is a great villain, although having her battle Xavier in the womb was very DC. Morrison raised the profile of Emma Frost, making her more of a bitch with a heart of gold than ever before. I love the way Emma outwitted Cassandra Nova, but I would have liked to have seen them have a psychic battle first.

[FunkyGreenJerusalem]

Um, no. There are DC readers and Marvel readers and there are DC writers and Marvel writers. Grant Morrison is a DC writer. His imagination is made for DC because it is more fantastical, more extreme, more head-in-the-clouds, less realistic, less logical.

Sucks that he logically took New X-Men to the next level then...

Marvel is grittier, more realistic.

You're talking about the time the stretchy guy and the man in the metal suit cloned the thunder god to try trick the legend from world war two, who is thirty-something, that he was wrong to argue a bill?

Mutations are random. Why should Angel’s mutation follow the pattern of a fly, e.g. she pukes on her food and then slurps is up, she lays eggs? Why should Beak look like a bird? Why should Mammomax look like a bipedal elephant?

Because they aren't really random, and there are plenty of other mutants - all of them - whose mutations don't make much sense.
It's just that instead of creating a couple, and writing stories for them over and over, Morrison brought in a lot of new mutants, so it was more noticable.

[FunkyGreenJerusalem]

New X-Men was the last book I regularly collected in the singles, before switching to trades - it was a perfect serial in that respect.

I think it's biggest achievement, is having various characters called Sublime appear throughout the book, until the final arc, where a character explains that Sublime was a gene that was fighting back against mutants - and so many people on message boards don't even seem aware of the name.
Brilliant!

[NickFury90]

As I said in another thread, I've also been doing a similar re-reading of Final Crisis and New X-men. I really liked Here Comes Tomorrow, in a big, pretty, fun "Days of Future Past" kind of way, and it does have its cool moments(Rover's "death" and comeback, every time Dark Beast opens his mouth to spout out his awesome dialog, the GLC-like Phoenix Corps), but I also feel that Planet X was such a sudden climax, and this really isn't a resolution. I mean yeah, Cyclops gets with Emma to go on and change the world, but all the other plotlines just stopped in Planet X and weren't really mentioned in Here Comes Tomorrow. Still, my favorite X-men run and I re-read it annually.

And for the record,

E for Extinction > or = Riot at Xaviers > Planet X > New Worlds(the 3-issue Fantomex intro, the Xorn story, Angel kissing Beak issue, all that stuff) > Here Comes Tomorrow > Assault on Weapon Plus > or = Imperial >>> Germ Free Generation.

Imperial loses points for the boring second act stuff where Nova goes over the same "I'm reallly evil" beats and inconsequential fight scenes, plus the worst freakin' rushed artwork I've ever seen in a Marvel/DC title. The Quitely finale issue is greatness though and a good end to the first year of the run and the Cassandra Nova saga. Germ Free Generation has the weakest bad guys(with an even weaker motive) and more HIDEOUS Kordley artwork(for the record, I really enjoyed his work on the Fantomex New Worlds arc).

[Liam K]

Great article. So great, I just had to chime in.

New X-Men and Grant Morrison got me back to reading comics (that and Daredevil by Bendis and Maleev).

Here's random stuff I remember about the run:

1.) The Xavier Institute started to feel like a legitimate school. Hallways and schoolyards overrun with students, flight class with Archangel, faculty meetings, etc.

2.) Grotesque, bizarre or just plain odd mutants finally got to be in the book. But yeah, only the pretty mutants get to be X-Men.

3.) Revitalized characters: Morrison showed a new dimension to Cyclops, Beast and Emma Frost. We owe Morrison for all the gorgeous women dressed up as Emma Frost that show up at comic cons. I even liked how he handled Wolverine.

4.) Cool concepts like wild sentinels, harvesting of mutant organs, the mutant drug 'Kick' that had to be taken in via an asthma inhaler (a funny visual, I always thought), Mutant Town, The World, the Phoenix Corps, etc.

5.) A truckload of new characters: Cassandra Nova, the U-Men, 'Xorn', Sublime, Fantomex, The Stepford Cuckoos, Martha Johansson, Mermax, etc.

6.) The 'Beast is gay' controversy which was actually Morrison mocking the then-current trend of having a token homosexual character on a superteam.

7.) Magneto as a 'junkie' made sense. Hated the 'Xorn' retcon. I don't know why it was so controversial that Marvel had to retcon it (oh yeah, the movies had come out). But didn't Chris Claremont in 1991 write Magneto becoming dependent on Fabian Cortez' power-ups? And wasn't it shown that Magneto's powers were waning through the years?

With regards to story arcs that seemed out of place, I think it was an attempt to show the diverse kinds of stories you can tell in a (superhero) comic book such as the X-Men, i.e. 'Murder at the Mansion' was a murder mystery, 'Assault on Weapon Plus' was an action adventure flick ("These three guys get together in a bar and..."), 'Here Comes Tomorrow' is dystopian sci-fi in the tradition of 'Days of Future Past' and the 'Age of Apocalypse'. (And hey, maybe 'Riot at Xavier's' was the Xavier Institute as Hogwarts. Hah!)

Overall, this was Morrison pushing the envelope on how an X-Men story can (and should) be told.

Cheers.

[krushjudgement]

Great article. I think the points are valid.

I'm another guy who got back into comics because of Morrison's New X-Men. It was such a perfect moment. That cover with Cyclops walking at the camera in silhouette with the team behind him just killed me! I had to know what was going on in that comic.

Marvel has driven Uncanny X-Men into the ground. These days it's either too cannibalistic of the past or too un-planned. It seems like X-titles try to have the fervor of Morrison's run without the tight scripts.

I love the X-Men but I can't take much more of these plodding story lines.

(Exceptions are David's X-Factor and most of Carey's X-Men Legacy.)

Also, X-Statix was the best! What a great time the early 2K's were for X-Men.

[Smakk9]

Another great column. The Morrison run helped get me back into comics but I still have to lean on the Claremont/Byrne/Cockrum years as the best run of the X-Men. For one, without that run, Morrison would not have had the template to write his story. Also, in my opinion, the fact that the Morrison run was more recent would make it hold up much better than the Claremont/Byrne years. But I enjoyed both and definitely appreciate Morrison's take alot more now than when I read it the first time. The final arc does bring the whole run down a bit though. I would have liked Phil Jimenez to stick around instead of Marc Silvestri.

[downlikecharlie]

Spot on, man. I've been a lifelong X-Men fan, and I stopped reading for about five years until Morrison's run. I wish New Warriors hadn't screwed up the Special Class so badly.

[Kick-Ass]

Tim's article is wrong again, no surprise. This is the easiest, most obvious to disprove yet.

Astonishing X-Men is the greatest X-Men run of all time. And the "Best Marvel Comic this decade." Not Morrison's. His X-Men is a close 2nd.

I have only 2 problems with Morrison's run. 1. When they killed the mutants, they didn't show it. No dead bodys. That story beat is nearly completely skipped. It's as if there is no real terror or consequence seen on the page. It's only told to you. Very ineffective. There needed to be at least 3 pages dedicated to the moment to have an impact. 2. Igor Kordey's art is horrificly bad. Ruins the story. Otherwise, it's an excellent run.

It can't top Whedon & Cassaday's run, not by a longshot. That is page by page the highest quality Marvel comic ever produced this side of Amazing Fantasy #15. It's a 25 issue story arc of perfect craft. Story arcs in issue #1 conclude in issue #25 in astonishing fashion.

Read it again. The Worldbreaker storyline is phenomenal, especially when the motivations for it all are revealed in a twisted and sad way.

But yah, it's obvious. Morrison's X-Men is the best? They're all gonna laugh at you. Don't make yourself sound any more foolish. You're making your biases waaay to obvious at this point. That's just bad writing.

[comicum18]

Great, Great run!!!
I couldn´t get in the x-men, no matter how much I tried (except for the movie, which was great for a first movie), but Morrison made what I thought was impossible.
That was the period were we experienced a rebirth of Marvel as a whole (it was the time wen Joe Q took over as EIC). We had several great runs (many of which deserve to be in your best of decade list).
I´ll just name a few:
ALIAS by Bendis and Gaydos
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN by JMS and JR jr
DAREDEVIL by Bendis and Maleev
HULK by Bruce Jones
great times indeed