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Colorful costumes that looked horribly goofy and outdated by modern standards (Cyclops’s question in the movie: “What do you prefer, yellow spandex?”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!”