What Will the NEXT Era of the X-Men Be?

All this discussion about the X-Men canon really begs this question - Just which of the X books out right now really has the potential to be similarly canonized? Which one will people look back on fondly and think "I fucking loved that run!" instead of regarding it as another bland series of status quo changes and battles?

The most obvious choice would be the current run of ASTONISHING X-MEN under the helm of the new creative team, Warren Ellis and Simone Bianchii.


Before I begin, let me just say that Marvel's conception of ASTONISHING X-MEN is genius. And I'm not just talking about Joss Whedon's run.

Somewhere along the line, somebody at Marvel got the bright idea that all the best runs of the X-Men (ie: the three runs I mentioned) combined the best creative talent in the industry with some editorial leeway and permission to tell stand-alone stories that don't have to mingle with company-wide crossovers.

So when ASTONISHING X-MEN was created under this premise for Whedon and Cassaday, the idea behind the book was that they were just going to be the first creative team operating under these conditions, not the only team.

This was a big solace in the years preceding the close to the Whedon run on the book. Many fans like myself were paranoid we'd have to back to reading mediocre runs on books like UNCANNY X-MEN. Seriously, if even writers like Ed Brubaker (writer of SLEEPER, CRIMINAL, and now the two-time Eisner winner for BEST WRITER) can't make the book interesting to read, then who can?

There was a lot of speculation as to who at Marvel would take over. Frankly, a lot of their star talent was either busy or not apt to take it.

Brian K. Vaughan would have been an excellent choice. Among all the comic book writers, he's possibly the most similar to Whedon in terms of writing style, and for that reason it's no surprise that he was hired to write for LOST. Unfortunatley, he's pretty well finished with comics, so he's off the table.

Mark Millar could have brought a really cool character focus along with big plots to the book, but he already had a lot on his plate with FANTASTIC FOUR and WOLVERINE. Guy hasn't been known to take on more than a couple of books at a time.

Bendis is the most obvious choice for just about any Marvel project. However, he was the most swamped of them all. To boot, he's never written team books very well, and his run on ULTIMATE X-MEN was no exception.

Brubaker was writing UNCANNY X-MEN. Would have been weird for him to jump right into writing ASTONISHING.

Jeph Loeb may have been a possibility in the discussion, but I'm of the opinion he should be kept away from the book by a large, poleax wielding Frankenstein monster. Loeb isn't a very good writer, and if people don't realize that from reading ULTIMATES 3, then, well, I just have no faith in people at all.

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Really, there just weren't many choices available. Marvel needed somebody critically acclaimed, somebody that could take the book in a bold direction and wasn't afraid to take on such a widely viewed title. So Marvel called the one writer that could make it happen.

Chuck Norris.

Except Marvel realized that past the irony value of the decision, it would have been a really bad idea. Plus, Norris insisted during the phone call that the book take a Christian direction. Thankfully, that was overruled.

So Marvel instead called up Warren Ellis, the critically acclaimed writer of PLANETARY, the gritty, noirish FELL, and the multiple Eisner winning, Patrick Stewart favorite TRANSMETROPOLITAN.

Personally, I think it's a real testament to Joe Quesada's shrewdness and amiability with creators that they have Warren Ellis working for them in any respect at all. He's not only one of the most irritable people on the planet, but he's also one of the most vocal critics of corporate comic publishers next to Alan Moore.

But at the same time, there was a real risk in this decision. Warren Ellis has been critical of major corporate comic publishers for a reason.

The guy despises superhero comics.

Wasn't raised with 'em, doesn't like 'em, doesn't want anything to do with 'em.

And go figure - during many of the times he's written superhero comics, his lack of passion for the subject matter has really shone through.

Don't get me wrong - some of Ellis's Marvel work was awesome. His Extremis storyline for Iron Man might be the single best Iron Man story I've read and I firmly believe it should be the basis of the third Iron Man movie. His run on ULTIMATE FANTASTIC FOUR was simultaneously well paced, filled with interesting ideas, and had fun character quirks all at the same time and still stands as some of the best stories told in the Ultimate universe. And for as relentless and over the top as his run on THUNDERBOLTS was, the stories were were full of unexpected twists and turns and featured a team dynamic with such incendiary chemistry that it probably took every ounce of Ellis's restraint not to indulge the most rational course of action and just have the team members outright murder each other.

But still - a big weakness in Ellis's writing is that he can be just outright stale.

His miniseries ULTIMATE HUMAN (aka ULTIMATE IRON MAN VS HULK) - stale. Every issue fluctuated from being heady dialogue about mutations and technology, completely beridden of any character stuff like endearing dialogue or introspective moments, to large, quiet issue-length fight scenes, without revealing much thought as to pacing the two concepts.

His MINISTRY OF SPACE featured a cool, Philip K. Dick-esque alternate history reimagining of Britain if it had been the leader of the race to space and the moon. But alas, these really cool concepts were overshadowed by a sense of sterility that pervaded the book Character development and interactions were kept to a bare minimum, a need-to-know basis. Flashy events and images popped up on the pages, but I couldn't help but feel like "Yeah... so what?"

GLOBAL FREQUENCY, his 12 issue maxiseries about a global call-and-response organization, featured 12 stand alone stories with completely different characters and situations around the world, all having to do with responses made by the Global Frequency organization. Every issue seemed to fluctuate between being a big, John Woo-style fight scene, with fists flying and guns blazing but almost no story or dialogue, to dialogue-heavy big ideas with slow pace, little action, and stale character interactions.

These two highly polarized situations have one thing in common. They both lack an emotional climax. They leave me with the same response:

"So what?"

Actually, this kind of dichotomy would probably be fitting of many of Ellis's stories. It sort of reminds me of an old joke: "God gave man a brain and a penis and enough blood to only operate one at a time." Ellis's stories fluctuate from being completely cerebral, dialogue heavy, full of big sci-fi ideas, to being completely visceral, with fast action and intense fight scenes.

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So just how will his run on the book turn out?

Best case scenario is that it's like his ULTIMATE FANTASTIC FOUR run. It's fast paced, has neat ideas but is balanced by fun character interactions and witty dialogue. It has the characters we all know and love behaving in the ways that made us fall in love with them in the first place, but thrown into new sci-fi territory that Chris Claremont was never smart enough to write. It's a slam dunk and everybody adores it.

Worst case scenario is that it's as sterile as a mule. The said characters we all know and love, yadda yadda, are all made by banal by haughty conversations and extensive dialogue about sci-fi concepts about the X-factor gene and other concepts that Ellis will dream up. We all collectively yawn and get nostalgic for the lightheartedness and fun of the Whedon era.

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We're three issues in (four counting the first issue of the Ghost Boxes miniseries), and sadly, the latter description is much more apt.

Very little has actually happened so far. A mysterious dead mutant body was discovered in the first issue, there's been discussion about this Ghost Box that allows people to travel between parallel worlds, and now the idea has been introduced that something is traveling between parallel worlds killing mutants.

But there has been no action, the dialogue has felt dense, the pacing slow. The only thing it's had in common with the Whedon run is the lateness in the release schedule.

Of course, it could just be that he's just taking his time positioning the pieces and that the rest of the run will turn out to be awesome, or dare I say, astonishing? Hell, Whedon's run wasn't even that good three issues in.

In the meantime, however, I would bet money that this won't turn out to be the 4th volume of our theoretical X-Men canon.

So what will the 4th volume/era be?

Maybe it won't even feature the top tier, most familiar characters.

Maybe it will be YOUNG X-MEN. A book that features newer mutants that are still discovering their powers not only makes for a fresher character dynamic, but it's also more true to the X-Men ethos. After all, if the mutant gene arises in teenhood and can happen to anybody, not just scientists experimenting with cosmic phenomena and radiation or subjects of military experiments, then we should probably see more stories about nobodies that turned into mutants that are novices with their mutant abilities and throw in some more teen angst for good measure, which is exactly what YOUNG X-MEN is in terms of formula.

But really, I have no idea.

I mean, who am I to comment? I said that the X-Men should most definitely NOT go to space, and all three runs that I described as landmark runs in the series ALL featured either the X-Men going into space or featured some cosmic elements.

So for all I know, all my speculation could be wrong.

And that "astonishing" joke I just made? Ugh... terrible.

Related To My X-Men Posts...

Shortly after finishing the three X-Men posts, I found this article in one of the CBR blogs in which a veteran X-Men reader gives long and detailed explanations about the X-Men continuity in response to questions from younger people reading the books after seeing the movies.

A lot of it centers around the same stuff I talked about - what Claremont was doing with the book, how it changed when John Byrne joined, how creativity faltered considerably in the 90's, and how both Morrison and Whedon have revitalized it of late. There were also several explanations of the origins behind ideas used in the movies.

Worth checking out.

The Three Eras of the X-Men Part Three: Joss Whedon and John Cassaday's ASTONISHING X-MEN Run

Third and final installment!

JOSS WHEDON AND JOHN CASSADAY'S ASTONISHING X-MEN RUN
*ASTONISHING X-MEN #1-24 and GIANT-SIZE ASTONISHING X-MEN #1
*Can be found in ASTONISHING X-MEN trade paperback volumes 1-4 and ASTONISHING X-MEN deluxe hardcover volumes 1 and 2.

As you can tell from the last article, Grant Morrison's run with the X-Men characters was pretty epic. It featured possibly the most status quo changes to not just the X-Men, but to any Marvel book. The run was critically acclaimed, sold like hot cakes, everybody was happy. Right?

Well, the X-book editors (over-controlling and nefarious proponents of stagnation for the X-Men, but that's another story) were feeling anxious about how many changes were made. Or perhaps they were just trying to reassert some control. Regardless, Chris Claremont was put back on the book for the 17th time, all the characters were superheroes again and put in flamboyantly fabulous costumes, and most, if not all of Grant Morrison's changes were undone or forgotten about.

Sales dropped, fans were confused, and the quality of the writing plummeted.

For all practical purposes, Grant Morrison's run never even happened. The book regressed to what it was before, and the NEW X-MEN run felt like nothing but a dream of what the X-Men could be.

Times were bad. Something needed a change. There needed to be a fresh look for the book. Somebody who could write the characters really solidly but without muddling the book with tons of new character introductions. Something with familiar ideas and characters but without being too indebted to past continuity. Somebody to bring a fresh look to the book that isn't too derivative of the NEW X-MEN run.

Enter Joss Whedon and John Cassaday, who helmed the revamped ASTONISHING X-MEN, a run magnificent enough to qualify as the third volume in the X-Men canon.

Whedon and Cassaday managed to hit the Goldilocks spot of the X-Men (the G-spot, if you will) of being "just right" about everything. The run was both character-driven and plot-focused, felt classic and yet pushed in new directions, was respecting of both the superhero origins as well as the mutant focus, was in continuity but not burdened with references and back history.

Within the first issue, Cyclops gathered the team and introduced the whole premise of the book. The team would be superheroes again, they would don their costumes again, but as a PR gimmick. When the X-Men were all wearing black uniforms, they looked like a rogue biker gang. By appearing like the Fantastic Four or the Avengers and by stopping typical supervillain crimes, ordinary people will see the X-Men and perhaps mutantkind itself as agents of good.

In essence, it was a superb wedding of the first two eras of the X-Men.

On one hand, you have Claremont who writes the X-Men as superheroes without any explanation. On the other, you have Morrison who dispensed with the superheroism altogether and said that the primary focus of the X-Men is mutant rights and protection. Whedon came along and saw the common ground: that by being superheroes, the X-Men advance and protect the image of mutantkind.

The characterization that Whedon hit on the book was the best ever seen on any X-Men book. While Claremont and Byrne grew many of the characters from square one to the positions we see them in today, and Morrison wrote the characters as very complex and threw them into adult situations, Whedon hit the dynamic of a great television drama. The conflicts were passionate and heated, the romances were loaded with sexual tension, and the banter was always witty and top-notch. It really doesn't get much better than this.

The book also had a sense of classic adventure that I forgot a Marvel book could even achieve. Big splash pages of the X-Men fighting giant monsters, strategic clashes with alien overlords, to my favorite conflict of all - the X-Men fighting themselves. The book consisted of 4 story arcs, with the first three being discretely divided by their own villains and themes, with the fourth packaging all of the ideas of the third up along with the X-Men as they're sent into space.

Yeah. Space. So what?

At this point, I should probably point out the irony that in my initial manifesto on the team, I mentioned that the X-Men should not go to space, and yet all three eras of the team that I considered the finest all had some elements of space travel or aliens.

However, like the Phoenix saga of the Claremont/Byrne era, the X-Men were completely out of their element on this one. The book almost confesses to the rule by showing how ill prepared the X-Men are while dealing with an alien war on a planet they'd never even heard of before.

The final story arc that I'm referring to was called UNSTOPPABLE, which serves as a reflexive reference to the book's own momentum and pacing at this point. Many other possible titles, like BADASS, RUTHLESS, or FUCKING AWESOME, could all suffice and ably refer to the story's content, themes, as well as your reaction after reading.

I know this feels like an enormous copout, but I really wish I could describe the events in the story that elicit these reactions. Unfortunately, the events themselves are so cool and unique that it would really, really spoil the story. So instead here are a few brief teaser snippits: Colossus is finally written like a three dimensional character instead of a dull gentle giant, the X-Men avert a world-scale disaster that is both appropriate for the team and unpredictable in execution, and Cyclops is given complete and total redemption from being the boring leader that wears tighty whities to finally being recognized as some kind of badass military genius.

And to top this whole sundae off with whip cream and a cherry is John Cassaday's incredible, incredible art. If you've ever wondered what it was like to grow up in the 60's and discover comic books through the imagionation of Jack Kirby, to look at big images of monsters, time travel, anti-matter rays, and intergalactic space ships - all of these images previously unrealized visually at the time and yet are staples of comic books today, John Cassaday's clean and sharply drawn artwork somehow has a way of renewing the awe of these images, making you experience them for the first time, giving you a real sense of awe. Read his work on PLANETARY and you'll see what I mean.

He also combines this sense of inspiring, larger than life visuals with very keenly drawn physical expressions. Characters' facial expressions just look genuine. He's so good at expressing subtext and nonverbal communication that it makes you wonder why his writers use any text at all.

If it were possible to physically interact with intangible concepts and ideas, I would fuck John Cassaday's art. I wouldn't fuck one of his characters, I wouldn't fuck him, I would fuck his art itself. It's that gorgeous.

As much as I'd like to close with some kind of witty, journalistic one-liner, I think it's more relevant to close with a recommendation. Read THE ASTONISHING X-MEN. It's stellar.

The Three Eras of the X-Men Part Two: Grant Morrison's New X-Men Run

Here’s the second installment, in which we talk about:

GRANT MORRISON’S NEW X-MEN RUN
*New X-Men #114-154 and New X-Men Annual #1
*Can be found in New X-Men Omnibus hardcover collection, New X-Men Ultimate Collection volumes 1-3, and New X-Men trade paperback volumes 1-7.

Flash back to 2001 for a minute.

The Bryan Singer X-Men movie had just come out. The property was completely revamped, with black leather outfits substituting for the colorful campiness of the comics. Xavier’s Institute wasn’t just a superhero training camp and X-Men hangout, but a very literal academy for hundreds of young mutants from all around the world. The characters felt real, and showed that mutant powers are in many cases just as much a curse as they are a gift. Mutants and the oppression they experienced was close to home.

Comic book fans were initially skeptical about the new look, but the filters that Singer put the X-Men through weren’t just an attempt to get a mainstream audience. They also succeeded in telling a good story, a story focused exclusively on mutants and not on wannabe Avengers heroics or adventures into space or whatever.

And simultaneously, everybody remembered how much they liked the X-Men. They remembered how much the concept resonatese with people, and a few of them (like me) went out and re-watched the old X-Men cartoon from the 90’s or picked up X-Men comics.

And what did we find?

Colorful costumes that looked horribly goofy and outdated by modern standards (Cyclops’s question in the movie: “What do you prefer, yellow spandex?” to Wolverine echoed really strongly through this), literally half of the X-Men members serving as horsemen under Apocalypse (who really doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the X-Men or mutants), cover stunts with Wolverine and Jean Grey making out, and Cyclops jumping over a shark on water skis.

You can never make too many jumping the shark jokes.

In comparing the movie to the stories in the comics on the shelves, a very strange irony was presented: It felt almost as if the comics were a perversion of the movie, rather than the other way around.

Marvel subsequently realized that the X-Men badly needed a makeover. The comics on the shelves were actively turning away the casual reader curious about Marvel comics after seeing the X-Men movie.

Enter Grant Morrison.

If Marvel had just added his name to the covers and didn’t even have him write the thing, the sales still would have jumped around 30%. They could have been content with just that. But instead, they gave him full editorial control over what he wanted to change.

The results were obvious. Grant Morrison turned this
(Cover to X-Men #113)

Into this:


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Morrison’s first and most obvious change probably went a lot like this:

Grant Morrison: Hey, if the movie is more popular than the comic, why not make the comic like the movie?’

Marvel Executive: Brilliant!

And thus, the costumes were gone. The X-Men all wore black leather jackets somewhat similar to the movie, but with giant yellow X’s on them. Wolverine no longer wore the silly looking Batman helmet, Cyclops no longer had those completely unnecessary packs on the front of his body (just what did those hold, anyways?), and Jean Grey no longer looked like some kind of alien.

Marvel Executive: Sounds good. Where do we go from here?

The next most obvious thing was to contradict the assumption that the X-Men are superheroes. There’s no need for them to fight Whirlwind, The Red Skull, Mysterio, Doctor Octopus, Apocalypse, Mojo, or any other supervillain that doesn’t really have any preoccupations with mutants.

So Morrison followed suit and made the book about mutants and only about mutants. No more filling in for the Avengers while they’re out of town. The X-Men are strictly a mutant defense, espionage, and relocation group.

Marvel Executive: Okay – so we’ll make a book that stars mutants strictly about mutants. Interesting, but I like it.

The Xavier institute was thus populated from wall to wall with mutant children, many of which were creations of Morrison’s that were being introduced for the first time. Like the movie, various members of the team acted as instructors at the institute.

Additionally, the readers were given a long overdue look at what it’s like to live in a world with mutants. A whole mutant ghetto in New York called Mutant Town was introduced. Mutant subculture like fashion and music was talked about by the students of the institute. Mutant teenagers had their own mutant role models and ways of thinking about the world.

Why didn’t’ anyone think of this earlier? Seriously – my train of thought is derailed by my confusion at this.

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While all of these changes are rather cool, they all come second to the stories that Morrison told with the characters and concepts over the course of the run.

While it may have seemed like that the visual makeover from costumes to generic outfits and the refocusing from broader superheroics to more limited mutant related activities stripped down the nature of the book, the ideas presented in the stories only served to expand them to points nobody thought were even possible.

To put it simply, there was no shortage of what Morrison is popular for.

Big ideas.

There were so many big ideas over the course of the run that I’m really hard pressed to find some aspect of the run that wasn’t provocative.

The run began right off the bat with Beast’s discovery that mankind is on the verge of extinction. It was quite simple – mutant genes were propagating like crazy. Mutants were clearly the future of the human race.

And yet, before you can even really soak in what this means for the future of the book, mutantkind’s biggest stronghold, the independent island of Genosha, is obliterated and several million mutants die instantly in the genocide.

The X-Men fight against the catalyst behind all of this – Xavier’s twin sister Cassandra Nova, who exhibits telepathy that is so powerful and so frightening that Xavier himself, a man that embodies peace and non-violence, carries a handgun with him to shoot himself in the head in case Cassandra ever infiltrates his mind.

And this is within the course of like, three issues.

The run is 42 issues long.

Despite the crazy propagation that had taken place, the entirety of mutantkind is up against a wall during the duration of his run. Genosha was the first step in the obliteration of mutants – the disbandment of the X-Men is the next.

Slowly, over the course of the run, we become introduced to a whole slew of villains that both the reader and the X-Men have never seen before. They’re not necessarily more powerful than previous mutant nemeses like Apocalypse or Magneto, but that’s not to say that they can’t hurt the X-Men in ways that they couldn’t, whether it’s by means of propaganda in the mainstream media or even uprisings within the institute itself.

And behind all of this is a plot and a villain that is so unique and so completely unprecedented not only in the history of the X-Men, not only in the history of Marvel Comics, but in the history of storytelling itself.

Up to this point, the X-Men villains that made the most sense fit into one of two groups: 1) Humans that want to kill mutants and 2) Mutants that want to kill humans. I suspect that if Alan Moore were to write the X-Men, he would write a villain that fits into one of these groups.

And yet, Grant Morrison, a real genius when it comes to lateral thinking, comes up with something that doesn’t fit into either of these categories and strangely, it ties the whole series together.

I really can’t bear spoiling what that is. I think I’ve already spoiled too much already. Let me just say this: Conceptually, it’s brilliant.

However, if there’s a major flaw in his writing, it’s that while his concepts are very smart, his execution of these concepts can be rather… rough.

Much like Philip K. Dick, Morrison is almost smart to a fault. At times, there are just too many ideas, too many new introductions, too many characters, and too many weird workings for the reader to really comprehend at a normal pace. Certain storylines, most notably the Imperial and Assault on Weapon Plus will make the average reader say “Hey! Slow down!” I mean, it’s hard enough understanding the concept of how time can be liquified before you’re given the long-kept secrets of the Weapon X program.

Additionally, while it seems as if Morrison has discarded a majority of the X-Men continuity, there are actually several metatextual references to the past history of the book. I’d really like to say that have read many of the older X-Men stories would be able to pick up on these rather easily and note “Oh, the reason why this sequence is suddenly so campy is that it’s a throwback to the 70’s years on the book and demonstrates how outdated this character is.”

But hell, I’ve read stacks of X-Men issues and still don’t pick up on a lot of what Morrison is talking about. You have to be some kind of Marvel continuity scholar to really understand what he’s saying in certain parts of the book.

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Among the most needed changes in the book, however, was a really fresh take on all the characters. Morrison found some way to take the characters we all know and love, characters that have been written about for decades now, and portray them in a way that is true to who they are but still feel distinctive and human.

I could go through and describe what he did with his characters one by one, but I doubt I could top his own descriptions of who they are, as taken from this CBR interview:

‘"Professor x - the headmaster," explains Morrison. "A man with big ideas which aren't always understood by people who ain't as smart as himself.
"Cyclops - repressed, utterly noble, brutally hard on himself
"Jean Grey - tries so hard to be good she sometimes forgets to be human.
"Emma Frost - sexy, devious, villain-turned-hero, the ultimate self-made woman,
"Beast - brilliant, witty, bipolar scientist.
"Logan - dirty zen brawler with heart of gold and a hint of desperate vulnerability."’
And there you have it. Cyclops was still anally retentive, but you understood his good intentions and didn’t think of him as a total douche.

Beast was always portrayed as a worldly happy-go-lucky renaissance man, but in this run you see a real sadness and loneliness to him.

Wolverine was always historically portrayed as arrogant and hostile, constantly challenging Cyclops for leadership of the team as well as playing the whole lone wolf, Clint Eastwood type character. What’s always been illogical about that is how a man so deadly, and most of all, a man almost 200 years old, would ever threaten a 20-something guy with a goofy looking ruby visor over his face instead of just killing him and taking leadership of the team.

So instead, Morrison completely revised the rivalry between Cyclops and Wolverine. It’s not about leadership: Wolverine doesn’t want to be the leader. A man who constantly craves solitude likes himself really shouldn’t be in a position of constant demand and dependence. He’s old enough and wise enough to understand this.

So when him and Cyclops trade blows with each other, it’s not really about wanting to be leader. No, it’s really more just Wolverine being a dick. Wouldn’t you make wise cracks about a guy wearing a goofy looking visor who takes himself too seriously? And yet, underneath, Wolverine tacitly defers to Cyclops and understands that he’s the real soul and leadership of the team.

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The dialogue was spry, the emotions of the characters and their interactions felt real – this book is one of the best ways to rediscover why you ever liked them in the first place.

And my favorite part of all of this was how Morrison was able to appropriate all the movie elements and still one-up them. It was like a message to Hollywood: “We can use your sex appeal and your mainstream savvy in our work. But we can also use wickedly smart ideas and gigantic visuals that you could never hope to.

“Take that Hollywood!”

The Three Eras of the X-Men Part One: The Claremont/Byrne Run

The X-Men are a funny property.

Everybody likes them.

Every Marvel comics fan has a stack of X-Men comics and maybe a poster or two, every other movie fan adored the X-Men movies directed by Bryan Singer, and just about everybody else spent their childhood Saturday mornings watching the X-Men cartoon.

And yet, despite all this enthusiasm for the property, if you go to a comic book shop and actually read a few of the current running X-Men titles or any number of back issues, you find the quality of the books just isn’t that good.

I think the moment I really discovered this when I was catching up on the classic X-Men stories by reading Essential X-Men Volume 3. While the supremely awesome Chris Claremont & John Byrne run of the book was collected in the first two volumes, the third volume is when the quality of the stories really started to falter.

There was literally one story in which Storm was bedridden with some kind of anemic sickness. All the other X-Men were so perplexed as to what was going on: She was confined alone in her room and provided with all her basic needs, and yet, her health continued to deteriorate. And what was the explanation for this?

Storm was being visited by Dracula.

I’m not kidding.

Dracula.

And all along, I thought the X-Men’s primary mission statement was to stand as forerunners of mutant rights in a world that thinks the only good mutant is a dead one. I thought the whole idea of the stories was to be analagous to the events of the civil rights movement – protecting mutants from mankind’s hate, and just as well, protecting humans from mutantkind’s hate.

What does Dracula have to do with any of this?

And this story was back in like, 1982. Can you believe it? 26 years ago and the X-Men had already jumped the shark.

I’m not ranting about this particular issue just to pick on Dracula. Pick up any other number of stories from the 80’s, 90’s, or even today, and the same kind of problem keeps popping up. Writers run out of cool ideas to spin the X-Men through, so they go for gimmicks.

Gimmicks like costume changes, Magneto being turned into a baby, the X-Men being shot into space, Magneto returning to adult form and leading the X-Men, the X-Men being shot into space, clones, clones, and more clones, mutants with even bigger powers, and did I mention the X-Men being shot into space? Because that happens quite a lot.

However, all of this ranting really begs the question: Which were the good X-Men stories?

Now, I’m no expert on the X-Men. Somebody that’s read all 50,000 pages of X-Men stories might write in and say that I completely forgot about some amazing story arc in the middle 300’s of UNCANNY X-MEN or something like that. So take this with a grain of salt.

I’m of the opinion that there three really solid eras of the X-Men – three volumes that stand as the current X-Men canon, defining the characters and the mythos of the team for years to come. These are the Chris Claremont/John Byrne run on UNCANNY X-MEN, the Grant Morrison run on NEW X-MEN, and Joss Whedon/John Cassaday’s ASTONISHING X-MEN.

Since this post is turning out to be quite long, I will just post my review of the Claremont/Byrne run for now. Subsequent posts will have the reviews of NEW X-MEN and ASTONISHING X-MEN.

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THE CLAREMONT/BYRNE RUN

*Uncanny X-Men #108-143

*Can be found in Essential X-Men Volumes 1 and 2. The majority of it is also collected in the Uncanny X-Men Omnibus Volume 1.

Looking back, I’m amazed I was as drawn into this run as I was. Comics from this era tended to feature really dense, expository dialogue and were crammed from panel to panel with campiness. Somehow, there was something so appealing about the characters that were being fleshed out before our eyes and their wild aventurous forays around the world that I was just able to overlook the idiosyncratic writing and presentation of the time.

The entire run was almost one big adventure – whether it was to the Savage Land, to Moira MacTaggert’s mutant research lab in Ireland, Magneto’s Antarctic lair, to Japan, home of former X-Man Sunfire, with subplots galore through the entire progression. No matter what obstacle was thrown in their way, whether it was Juggernaut and Eric the Red double-teaming them to Magneto single-handedly raping the entire team, the X-Men would conquer the challenge only to be thrown into a bigger one, with their resolve being stretched so thin it actually broke on several occasions.

And just when they thought Cyclops and company thought they got a handle on things, Jean Grey’s Phoenix powers started to attract some unwanted attention and the X-Men were sent the one place they were completely unprepared to deal with.

Yep. Forget what I said earlier about writers jumping the shark and sending them to space out of a sheer lack of ideas – Claremont & Byrne managed the unthinkable: They booted the X-Men from Earth’s gravity, right into an interplanetary war, and it was awesome.

I’m not sure what made the intergalactic orgy of the Phoenix Saga so awesome. I think part of it might have had something to do with the fact that all the characters, Jean Grey excluded, were completely in over their heads. None of them had been to space before and had any idea what to expect. None of them had the strength to compete with the might and pride of the Shi’Ar Empire.

And of course, what could top the Phoenix saga but the now legendary Dark Phoenix Saga? Before reading about it, the title left a bad taste in my mouth. It just sounded kind of lame – taking something cool and attaching “dark” to the beginning of it in a half-assed attempt to produce something new.

“Oh, it’s the Dark Phoenix! She’s powerful, but most of all, she’s dark! Fear her evil!”

And yet, the story proved to be so good that I envy anyone that read the Dark Phoenix when it came out. Because as much of an impact as it had on me, as scary and as destructive as the Dark Phoenix was, I just can’t imagine what it would have been like to read the stories at a time when superhero comics were generally innocent and when planet shattering destruction was unprecedented.

That’s right – a product of the late 70’s in comics, a perversion of a hyper-powered X-Men character, was actually scary.

It wasn’t just her powers. No, that’s a rather weak and predictable way of making an impact on a character.

It was the fact that Jean Grey’s tranformation into the world-destroying Dark Phoenix was done by way of seduction.

Even today, when good characters turn bad, it’s not uncommon for writers to go for some gimmick like “Oh, she was under control by some mind-control dude.” Instead, in this case, Jason Wyngarde aka Mastermind was slowly digging into Jean Grey’s mind, really grasping at what made her tick.

He discovered and exploited all of Jean’s inner fantasies. He tapped her desire to be a status symbol, her inner condescension and her wishes to subjugate others, and created a fantasy world that transformed and unleashed the full power of the Phoenix – a power that Jean’s psyche couldn’t uphold. It stood as a validation of that old adage about the difference between power and absolute power.

And all of this was done slowly and subtley, with the plot threads being laid down amidst other stories, amidst other events and turmoil that the team was thrown into, as if they hadn’t been through enough. Claremont & Byrne exhibited a subtlety to the storytelling that most writers today could learn from.

Their run closed with the now unforgettable Days of Future Past storyline, in which we get a glimpse of a future in which mutantkind has undergone a holocaust at the hands of mankind. Within the course of three issues, we not only see this nigh-apocalyptic future, but we also witness the downward spiral path to it caused by the assassination of a prominent American senator at the hands of the Mutant Brotherhood.

The real personal importance of this story to me is that it shows us why the X-Men matter. The X-Men aren’t just out there to save a couple mutants from pitchforks and give them a good education or even to stop the Juggernaut from crushing some children.

No, if the X-Men don’t exist, if some force doesn’t stand between humans and mutants and ensure mutual peace, then it’s inevitable that mutants will suffer a holocaust at the hands of humankind.

What a point to close a run on.