Let's Talk About Grant Morrison's New X-Men
Hi, I’m David Harth, and this week, I’m totally to blame for how late this article is. Life is falling apart, I have a full-time job, depression, and another writing job with a website that doesn’t hold a candle to this one. Plus, it’s the holidays, so I’m quite busy. Or something. I haven’t even been to Disney World in a few weeks.
That’s a big deal for me.
Anyway, we meet up this week to talk about Grant Morrison’s New X-Men. It’s my favorite X-Men run of them all. Sure, Chris Claremont’s 17 years on Uncanny X-Men is the most essential X-Men run, but for my money, it’s not as consistently amazing as Morrison’s is. That, of course, comes from the fact that Claremont was writing the book for 17 YEARS, but still. Anyway, before we can start talking about the comics, let’s talk about Marvel in the year 2000 and the circumstances that brought Morrison to Marvel.
Picture this- you’ve been writing at DC Comics for years, and all you really want to do is write is Superman. You’ve written him in so many places, including in a critically and commercially acclaimed run on JLA, a book that became the flagship book of the company. You and some friends (Mark Waid, Mark Millar, and Tom Peyer) have a revolutionary pitch for taking over the Superman books, one which will upend the status quo of the Man Of Steel (here’s a link to the pitch- it’s amazing, and you can see where Mark Millar stole a bunch of stuff and gave it to Marvel because Mark Millar proved himself to be a tool- https://sites.google.com/site/deepspacetransmissions/Resources/superman-2000-proposal). And instead, DC goes with the safe choice of Jeph Loeb and Joe Kelly and keeping the status quo.
Then, you go and watch a movie called The Matrix, a movie produced by the parent company of the comic company you work for, and you notice a lot of similar ideas and designs from your creator-owned book, The Invisibles. You find out that people were passing trade paperbacks of The Invisibles around the set and that the book was an influence on the movie. They used your stuff, and you didn’t get paid for it. A movie produced by the people who sign your paychecks and publish your creator-owned stuff, which you wholly own. Your contract is basically up anyway. Maybe it’s time to go across town and work for the other guys.
This is Grant Morrison in 1999. I remember reading about it in Wizard magazine. You can look it up. This isn’t hearsay, but all events that actually happened and the events that drove Morrison to Marvel, a move that would give fans some great comics... And also be a huge source of stress and agitation for Morrison.
Anyway (yes, I use anyway as segue a lot; want to fight about it?), New X-Men.
Morrison would write Marvel Boy when he got to Marvel, a Marvel Knights book starring an alternate universe Kree soldier trapped on Earth, looking for revenge. It’s brilliant and highly recommended. I was blown away by it.
After this, he would take over X-Men, which would be rechristened New X-Men, with his frequent artistic collaborator Frank Quitely and proceed to redefine the X-Men. He would start by having Beast make a chilling discovery- that the extinction gene was active in humanity and that in four generations, humanity would be gone, supplanted by mutants. He would combine this idea with a mutant population boom and the fact that some mutants were gaining secondary mutations to present an entirely new paradigm in mutant and human relations. This was a huge change.
The book was called New X-Men, and Morrison worked hard to make it live up to the “New” moniker. That’s not to say that everything about the book was completely new- there were still Sentinels, but they were unlike anything readers had ever seen. Magneto would return to the book, but it would be in a way that was completely different from anything readers had seen before. Readers would see the Shi’Ar, but they wouldn’t be the conquering aliens they were before, but a group that needed saving. Emma Frost would become a hero.
Morrison would try to keep the threats as new as possible. He introduced Cassandra Nova, Professor X’s twin sister, that he thought he had killed in the womb. Quentin Quire and the Omega Gang, a group of dissatisfied Xavier School students, and John Sublime and his U-men, a group of humans who would dissect mutants and graft their parts unto themselves, trying to become “posthuman.” He would reimagine the Weapon X program as the Weapon Plus program.
He would focus on Cyclops, which was a big deal at the time. Usually, in an X-Men book with Wolverine in it, Wolverine would be a huge part of the whole thing, and, sure, he was central to several story arcs in this book, but Morrison did a lot of work with Cyclops. In fact, if you became a fan of Cyclops in the years after the Morrison run, it’s because of the groundwork that Morrison laid.
He would put a lot of emphasis on the school, more than it had ever had before. Instead of just being home to twenty or thirty mostly adult mutants, it became an actual school, responsible for training all of the new mutants who have manifested. It would become the epicenter of the mutant race, a safe haven for the embattled species. This would be a change that would continue after he was gone.
Basically, what I’m trying to say is Morrison came in and took a concept that was getting tired and breathed new life into it. He did this by tweaking things here and there and playing things out to their logical conclusion. For years, readers had been told that mutants were the inheritors of the Earth, though they were always presented as a minority. Morrison changed that, making readers feel like mutants were the coming thing. For the first time in years, the X-Men felt new.
Joining him would be a whole bunch of great artists: Phil Jimenez, Chris Bachalo, John Paul Leon, the aforementioned Frank Quitely, Marc Silvestri, and Ethan Van Sciver (this was before we knew Van Sciver was an alt-right piece of trash). Gone were the colorful costumes of the past. Morrison would say it was because he envisioned the X-Men as more of a team of rescue workers than superheroes, but you can bet dollars to doughnuts that it had as much to do with the black leather uniforms of the recent X-Men movie. Morrison just came up with a valid reason for it. The black leather uniforms were very cool, so it worked.
Morrison wouldn’t bring as much of signature craziness to book as he had his DC projects. Sure, there was still some out-there stuff, but this book is downright tame when you compare it to something like Doom Patrol. Marvel has always had different standards for weirdness than DC. That said, when you get twins telepathically fighting in utero, a bacteriological consciousness, and a drug that enhances mutant powers, you’re dealing with some Grant Morrison stuff.
A lot of the time when a writer tries to do something new with a book, they ignore a lot of the past and Morrison never does that. He pays homage to what came before, but still focuses on the things that make it all new. Take the appearance of the Shi’Ar. Usually, they would be a major player in any story they are in, but when we see them, they’ve been decimated by…. well, I won’t tell you that. Anyway, the important part of the story is the new threat that Morrison introduced. Or his last story, “Here Comes Tomorrow.” It feels like a run of the mill X-Men dark future story, but Morrison goes crazy with it in a way that no other X-Men writer has. It’s a future that feels like the future, not a destroyed version of the present like so many other X-Men dystopian futures.
Really, no other X-Men run since Morrison, besides what Hickman is doing right now, has been this revolutionary. Whedon’s run was good, but it was very much a love letter to Claremont. Claremont’s third run on the X-Men post-Morrison was pretty good, but it was familiar. At the same time, Chuck Austen was stinking up the place. Brubaker and Mike Carey were good, Matt Fraction was blah, Jason Aaron was great, but he was very much going in a Morrison-esque vein, I never read Gillen’s stuff, but I’m sure it’s excellent, and so on. None of them felt new, though. Morrison made the X-Men feel new for the new millennium.
It wasn’t to last, though. Morrison was getting into shouting matches with the higher-ups of Marvel, meaning Joe Quesada and Bill Jemas. He was writing the number one book at the company, but Morrison isn’t a writer who likes to play nice with everyone. He’s a superstar, and at Marvel at the time, he was the biggest fish. Bendis was just getting started, as was Millar. Straczynski was a big name, too, but Morrison had the sales pedigree to back it up. Morrison wasn’t going to follow the editorial edicts that Quesada and Jemas enforced, and that probably caused a lot of problems. I’ve always felt like a guy like Bendis was willing to play ball with Quesada, and that’s why he got the spot he got- he would do the whole brainstorming with the E-I-C thing and help set the line in a certain direction. Morrison would turn in his scripts and didn’t care about all of the rigmarole. Marvel has always felt more editorially driven than DC, and writers that don’t play ball get left behind.
With a guy of Morrison’s caliber, they weren’t going to fire him; that would be dumb. Instead, they made him miserable, and he went back to DC. And then they did everything they could to destroy his legacy at Marvel. They would retcon the ending of “Planet X,” completely undoing a major plot point that ran throughout Morrison’s run. Bendis would have Scarlet Witch utter the fateful “No More Mutants,” in House Of M, completely undoing the mutant population boom that Morrison set up and changing the status quo drastically. Bendis wouldn’t be done messing up Morrison’s work, either. He would bring back Noh-Varr, from Morrison’s first Marvel work, Marvel Boy, and pretty much ruin him to the extent that barely anybody has used him since. He would undo Beast’s cat mutation in the pages of All-New X-Men, and that would be that. Guys like Jason Aaron and Rick Remender would use portions of Morrison’s concepts and characters to great success. Still, for the most part, Morrison’s work was forgotten by most, seemingly by editorial edict. Hickman is doing something very Morrison-esque, but it’s only because what he is doing is so revolutionary.
So, there you have it. New X-Men is an amazing book, and the best the X-Men would be for a very long time. Morrison was able to see the potential in the X-Men that had for years gone untapped, and he mined that vein of the ore for all it was worth. It’s a shame that the higher-ups at Marvel had to be tools. I honestly think that Quesada and Jemas didn’t want this DC guy as their top writer and set out to sabotage him so they could take credit for building the next big comic stars- Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Millar, guys who had a little buzz before they came to Marvel but would go on to become two of the biggest names in the industry. I do believe that Quesada is really that petty.
Now, a word from our sponsor- so, I’m not sure what to do next in this series. I know I said I’m going to do Flex Mentallo, and I probably should have done it before this one because it came out first. However, my copy is in someone else’s garage, and I don’t know if I should do it. I want to because it’s a great book, but it’s been so long since I read it. I don’t know. The next one I’ll probably do it The Filth, which is sort of the dark opposite of The Invisibles. It’s amazing. Giant sperm attack Los Angeles.
So, join me here, in the next week or so to talk about The Filth.
P.S.- I forgot to include in here a little story I learned from Phil Jimenez. I was at Mega-Con 2005 and he was there. I ran to a booth and bought a copy of New X-Men #150 for him to sign and got in line. Dude in front of me had his two sets of his entire Wonder Woman run and Phil had just finished signing the first set when dude busted out the second set. At this point, Phil was all like, “Does anyone have just one thing for me to sign before I go to lunch?” I jumped in front of dude (getting a pretty dirty look since this guy probably wanted all of this stuff signed so he could sell it and he just got cost money) and gushed to Phil about how much I loved his work and how much Jean meant to me and that I was glad he was the one who got to draw her death. So, he told me how Morrison had originally planned on killing Jean Grey- having Magneto manipulate the Nanosentinels he had placed in every member of the team. I thanked him for the info and left a bit happier.
