The passing of New X-Men

what really struck me was this really did read like a novel. The whole thing was completely self-contained, it took everyone through a clear ARC (using that word as it's MEANT to be used, not just as sufficient issues to fill a trade paperback), it ASKED questions and then ANSWERED then, and it was BRILLIANT. Structurally it was FAB, especially reading from the start when "white hot" and "Are these words from the future?" keep popping up all over the place.

And the bit where Cassandra Nova looks out of the page and says "I've been having dreams about you", that got SCARIER the second time around.

So yes, I thought it was the best thing I've read in YEARS. When it's all TradePaperbacked UP I reckon this'll be sat next to Watchmen soon enough as the comic people wave around to prove it CAN be good.

the "new" was a joke, right? cuz

virus = riff on the story that killed off colossus
xorn = riff on joseph
last arc = riff on days of future past
phoenix = phoenix

i liked the odd couple lines that admitted this, although i have trouble remembering what they are

fnarf

i like it but i don't think it's the apogee of comix or anything (despite what i said above, haha).

Last issue = AWESOME (at least that's my memory of things at the time)

I finally read all of Morrison's X-Men, and I have kinda of mixed feelings about it. I really like how Morrison made these old characters fun and interesting again, and some of the ideas he put there about humans vs. mutants, mutant culture, etc were really quite cool and interesting. However, I think the pacing and plotting in the comic was often quite badly done, making it sometimes difficult to read and lessening the overall enjoyment of the whole thing. I know Morrison is often guilty of this, but this was (alongside the third volume of The Invisibles) the worst example of this deficit in his writing style. It seems he's sometimes unable to spread his ideas over a manageable whole and instead wants to spit them all out as fast as possible, so it feels like there's no room to breathe.

I really liked the interaction between the characters in New X-Men, and it was nice that Morrison put most of the emphasis on that. X-Men has always been at it's best as a sci-fi soap opera, so maybe there should've been more of that and less of Morrison's cosmic theories of gene pool war and whatever. I thought "Planet X" worked nicely as a climax to his run, because despite all the megalomaniac scheming it was really about the characters. However, I think Morrison's way of compressing his stories kinda worked against him here, the whole arc could've easily been a few issues longer and put more emphasis on stuff like Magneto's/Xorn's old students rebelling against him, Magneto realizing what he's become, etc. I wish the whole Magneto/Xorn duality would've been addressed more, the idea of Xorn being his good side would've been worth investing more space than a couple of throwaway pages.

The final story arc felt at times like it was gonna dive deep into the worst kind of Morrison cosmic mumbo jumbo, but the resolution of the whole story with Jean/Phoenix did kinda save everything. Plus the robot love and jealousy between than one guy and the Sentinel and E.V.A. was well played out. However, I think the whole Morrison run left a few unanswered questions, I thought I could ask them here, in case some of you might know the answers...

*What is/was Cassandra Nova anyway? A new kind of post-mutant species, or an evil astral twin of Charles Xavier? Because the story seemed to imply both.

* Did Magneto plan for Scott and Wolverine to go into space and for Jean to follow them? Because he says something to the effect that he's gotten rid of all the X-Men, but I thought Wolverine and Phantomex and Scott going after the Weapon X program had nothing to do with him?

* Why did Magneto try to frame Angel for the murder of Emma Frost, if Angel was gonna be part of his new Brotherhood, as shown in "Planet X"?

* In the beginning of X-Men 2001 annual Xorn was shown sitting inside the Chinese prison even before the X-Men knew anything about him. Was Magneto already inside the Xorn helmet at this point? How did he know the X-Men would find out about Xorn and come rescue him? And why did all those Chinese guys think he'd been inside the prison for years, if he hadn't? It really felt like Morrison only came up with the idea that Xorn=Magneto somewhere halfway during his run, not right from the beginning.

* If this Sublime thing was some sort of parasite residing in all human DNA, why did it bind itself to Beast's body? And why did it want to destroy all living things, if they were it's growth platform? Also, even if Jean changed the future so that Beast doesn't inject himself himself Sublime, doesn't it still live elsewhere?

It's been a while, so I would have to re-read to answer some of your questions. With respect to questions about Xorn, though, you need to be specific: do you want them answered in terms of theinternal logic of Morrison's run, or do you want them answered in terms of actual Marvel continuity. Because if it's the latter, I'd advise reading the Wikipedia entry on the clusterfuck that is Xorn.

wow @ that wikipedia page

Yeah, I've understood that whatever "Xorn" was was changed after Morrison's run, but the character doesn't seem constant even during Morrison's run. I mean, the way Xorn is introduced seems to contradict with Magneto later saying that his whole backstory was fabricated.

Actually, that third volume of the Invisibles (with the Jiminez art, I think?) is where it really gets going for me!

okay I read most of that at the time and I have no recollection of some of it (they killed Alpha Flight?????)

Actually, that third volume of the Invisibles (with the Jiminez art, I think?) is where it really gets going for me!

Jimenez art was in the second volume, I can't remember anything by him in the third one.

The art in the third volume was mostly by the guy who did Kill My Boyfriend. I like his style though, it's not his fault the story sorta goes from a cool surrealist paranoid sci-fi thriller to Morrison's meditation on Zen Buddhism or whatever.

okay I read most of that at the time and I have no recollection of some of it (they killed Alpha Flight?????)

I think this happened somewhere else, or at least it didn't happen during Morrison's run.

philip bond's art is the best part of the whole thing, he is gangsta.

I need to re-read the Invisibles. I remember vol 3 really suffering from being cut back from 25 issues to 12 so Morrison could punt it out before the year 2000.

I've not really heard that before - how would it work, considering that he, er, didn't get it out before then?

I'm sure this has been discussed here before, but if you compare Morrison to someone like Alan Moore, Moore is a better comic writer in the formal sense. He can do proper plotting, pacing, and characterization in his dreams, and he never succumbs to the sort "I haven't got the patience to make all this stuff part of an interesting plot, so I'll explain it all in a few pages" wordiness Morrison sometimes does. At his best Morrison can be great at plotting and characterization, but often it feels like he can't be arsed to. His work feels like the thoughts of a manic-depressive in comic form: sometimes he has the patience to build up a plot properly, sometime he just wants to get all of his ideas out as fast as possible.

I think Morrison's comics are really at their best when makes the effort to marry his Big Ideas with proper plots and characters (like in Volume 1 and most Volume 2 of The Invisibles, the better bits of New X-Men and Doom Patrol and Animal Man, etc); when he doesn't, the stuff is often boring to read (like in the last arc of new X-Men, most of Volume 3 of The Invisibles, the space issues of Doom Patrol, etc). But I guess the ups and downs are also part of his charm as a writer, you never know what you're gonna get. Maybe this time it's a tightly plotted suspense story, or maybe it's kind of a meditation on the nature of time and space, but constantly following the tried and trusted conventions of storytelling doesn't seem to be his thing. Which I guess is both his strength and his weakness.

I guess Morrison's manic nature as a storyteller also explains, why he often just leaves plot threads and open questions dangling in the air without ever returning to them, like the ones in new X-Men I was asking about in my first post. Someone like Moore would never do that, he always wants to tie all the threads together by the end. I think Morrison even makes a self-conscious reference to this in the New X-Men story arc where Phantomex is first introduced. By the end of the story Phantomex reveals that his whole backstory of an French super-thief was made up, actually he'd only just escaped from the Weapon Plus program. And Jean then asks, what about his sci-fi mansion they just visited, and the old woman who was supposed to be his mom? And Phantomex just smiles, and answers "What old woman?". So this is Morrison saying, sometimes it's better to just keep the story rolling than to try to make it totally cohenrent. Which is true I guess, but it can be infuriating as well.

There's something refreshing about that, I think. Something pure and pulpy.

Oddly, I think Vol I and II of The Invisibles (with the exception of the first couple issues) are plotless blather, and afterwards is where it really starts to get interesting. But you can't really complain about Invisibles lacking a structured plot. It's all structured plot. And the fact that GM also seems to be making it up as he goes along seems pretty remarkable.

I know The Invisibles is all structured (though there still are a few loose ends that are never resolved, but they're not significant in any sense), but in the first two volumes Morrison still manages to combine his personal philosophical ideas with a interesting suspense plot, whereas in Volume 3 it feels more and more like he's just lecturing the reader. Don't get me wrong, there are still bits in Volume 3 I really liked; it is kinda cool how he does manage to pull it all together, and the last few pages of the wole story work great, even though I don't totally agree with the sort of philosophy he's trying to propagate in Volume 3. I guess it was inevitable the last volume is different in tone than the first two ones, because the whole point of the Volume 3 is to get beyond the dichotomies introduced and developed in Volume 1 and 2. But i still think it could've been done in an more interesting and gripping way, storywise.

you want loose ends, manic structure ... what about the OLD X-Men?
Chris Claremont would drive you crazy. Building up intense plots involving Phoenix and then ditching them entirely with no resolution ever.

yeah, all my favorite morrison is the stuff where he manages to buckle down and tell a coherent story (and i include New X-Men in this category).

I've read Claremont's X-Men, that's how I got hooked into superhero comic when I was a kid. I wouldn't compare the two of them though. The thing with Claremont was, he was always building these big, intricate background plots and dropping hints of things that might happen in the future, but it often took him so long to actually get these plots to conclusion (if he ever did) that he seemed to have forgotten some of the things he'd hinted at, and never returned to them. Whereas Morrison is more like just too impatient, he comes up with story ideas all the time, and then wants to quickly move to new story ideas without necessarily thinking whether there was something left unresolved in the previous story. I think his New X-Men is a prime example of this, though it's still a great read.

I do think the whole Phoenix issue was resolved during Claremont's tenure with the X-Men though. I mean, wasn't the whole thing finally explained during the Inferno crossover? (Though it might've been Louise Simonson who wrote that particular issue, but I think Inferno was pretty much a collaborative effort.) Admittedly it was kind of a half-assed explanation, but then again Claremont never wanted Jean Grey to be resurrected in the first place... As far as I know it was an executive decision to get the new X-Force title launched.

Though Madelyne Pryor was introduced by Claremont way before Jen Grey was resurrected, right? I wonder what he would've done with the character if Jean had stayed dead?

Ah, thank you Wikipedia:

* The link between Madelyne and Jean Grey was originally entirely the product of Mastermind. Seeking to revenge himself upon the X-Men in response to what Phoenix did to him, he used his powers of illusion to convince the X-Men that Madelyne was Phoenix incarnate. His intent was to have the X-Men kill her, thus murdering an innocent person. The clone aspect of the character is a retcon; originally, Chris Claremont had conceived Madelyne as a device to write Scott Summers out of the X-Men and have him retire "happily ever after" with Madelyne and their child.

When asked about his plans for Madelyne's character[1], Claremont said

"The original Madelyne storyline was that, at its simplest level, she was that one in a million shot that just happened to look like Jean [Grey, a.k.a. the first Phoenix]! And the relationship was summed up by the moment when Scott says: "Are you Jean?" And she punches him! That was in [Uncanny X-Men #] 174. Because her whole desire was to be loved for herself not to be loved as the evocation of her boyfriend's dead sweetheart.

I mean, it's a classical theme. You can go back to a whole host of 30's films, 40's, Hitchcock films -, but it all got invalidated by the resurrection of Jean Grey in X-Factor # 1. The original plotline was that Scott marries Madelyne, they have their child, they go off to Alaska, he goes to work for his grandparents, he retires from the X-Men. He's a reserve member. He's available for emergencies. He comes back on special occasions, for special fights, but he has a life. He has grown up. He has grown out of the monastery; he is in the real world now. He has a child. He has maybe more than one child. It's a metaphor for us all. We all grow up. We all move on.

Scott was going to move on. Jean was dead get on with your life. And it was close to be a happy ending. They lived happily everafter, and it was to create the impression that maybe if you came back in ten years, other X-Men would have grown up and out, too. Would Kitty stay with the team forever? Would Nightcrawler? Would any of them? Because that way we could evolve them into new directions, we could bring in new characters. There would be an ongoing sense of renewal, and growth and change in a positive sense. Then, unfortunately, Jean was resurrected, Scott dumps his wife and kid and goes back to the old girlfriend. So it not only destroys Scott's character as a hero and as a decent human being it creates an untenable structural situation: what do we do with Madelyne and the kid? ...So ultimately the resolution was: turn her into the Goblin Queen and kill her off."

Claremont's original concept sounds much better than what they eventually did with the character. So maybe it wasn't always his fault the stories got so convoluted?

do we have to turn a thread about morrison into a thread about continuity

In fairness, it's a thread about New X-Men - probably the least continuity-heavy section since Claremont, but it's not unfair to explore how it did. In a way the pitch document in the first TPB suggests it's basically All Star X-Men, that it should be fairly clear to anyone who's just seen the films. Contrast X-Men Legacy, where you basically have to fill in a trivia quiz to qualify to buy the issue

I, as usual, love both the big clever stuff and the million ideas a minute stuff, and still think this is the best twist in comics.

Maybe I was thinking of Phoenix II? I stopped reading comics after high school and didn't start again til recently... There was a New Phoenix-time-travel-Sentinals plot that got ditched for the for "Mutant Massacre" mess.

You mean Rachel, the future daughter of Jean and Scott? Yeah, I remember there were some stuff about her becoming the new Phoenix, but nothing really came out of it, at least not during Claremont's run.

yeah, I had a crush on her ... one ish she took a trip on a silver ship and never came back

I think the whole Phoenix concept went kinda convoluted after Claremont or whoever decided to use it again after Jean's original death. I mean, if it's this great cosmic force, why would it care about human bloodlines and attach itself to Jean's daughter? Or mistake Jean's clone (Madelyne) for the real thing? And in Morrison's X-Men it is sorta implied that Phoenix was always part of Jean's own powers... I understand that it's an intriguing concept which appeals to writers, but there doesn't seem to have been any proper guidelines about what the Phoenix is and what it does.

Jean was dead get on with your life.

I think a lot of the Phoenix mess got sorted out over the course of the all-too-brief Alan Davis solo run on Excalibur (still one of my favorite X-Men runs). He was really good at ironing out inconsistencies and making them seem like they were intentional, rather than an artifact of writers working at cross-purposes with others or themselves.

And I just remembered that he ultimately made Widget an embodiment of Kitty Pryde's future consciousness or something. Insane!