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 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.