Welcome to Gaia! :: View User's Journal | Gaia Journals

No, More Mutants

For those of you keeping up with comics, you know about Marvel's House of M event. And by now, you've heard the ending. The mutant population has been reduced to its previous level--198 total.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. The X-men have been around for over thirty years now. We've seen them grow. We've seen their angst and their happiness. We've seen members come in and we've seen members leave. We've seen them die. And come back. And die. And come back. And...

Well, you get the point.

The problem with all of this is stems largely from Grant Morrison's run. I loved his run. I thought it was one of the best things to happen to the X-men since the emergence of the secondary team.

"But!" you say. "He introduced secondary mutation! He made everybody and their mother a mutant! He ignored previous continuity standards, much like that Claremont fellow you b***h about so much."

Yes, yes he did. But you know what else he did?

He changed the very premise of a thirty-year old comic series.

"Wha huh?," none of you are saying.

Morrison took the X-men from being protectors of a world that fears and hates them to being "We're here, we're queer, get used to it" in exposure. He used that "the next step in evolution" phrase brilliantly--he actually made them the next step. While it has been only what, eight or nine years supposedly since the X-men formed, we've slowly been introduced to more and more mutants as it was. It was claimed that there were only 198 mutants. How many unknowns does that leave? We'd seen tons of kids around the school. There have been tons of X-books. And the villains? Especially the villain-of-the-arc? In the past thirty years, I can almost guarantee that we've seen over 100 mutants at least. That leaves 98 unaccounted for.

Grant increasing the number increased believability. "There are 98 unknown mutants who will all inevitably end up in the Manhattan area somewhere."

Not to mention, Xavier can supposedly use Cerebro/Cerebra to locate mutants. I know that, in the comics, he typically finds them one at a time. At least, I've never seen him actually psychically look at all of them.

Yet he seems to find many of them as soon as their mutations manifest, which implies that he can find them all.

So he's only inviting certain ones to learn how to use/contain their powers? Jerk much?

But none of this has to do with how the premise changed. I just go off into tangents rather easily.

Mutants are still a minority in the Marvel Universe. There are more regular humans than mutants by far. But by increasing the number and outing the X-men, Morrison's crew wasn't protecting a world that fears and hates them.

They were working at a school to protect the chill'uns. Austen's X-men at the time? They were picking up hoookers and having relations with underaged schoolgirls, all while encountering various mutants. Claremont's X-men at the time? Scattered throughout Europe, searching for a series of books written by an old blind seer in insane code that only Chris Clar--excuse me, Sage could decipher.

I'll but she's not running a windows operating system Eh? Eh???

Sorry about that one. Anyway...

Morrison's X-men were finally taking the stand that real people take. They were more political than vigilantes. We homosexuals don't band together in strike forces to protect a world that fears and hates us with our powers of TEH GAY.

Though, funny story...

See? Tangent again, almost.

He was taking the book in a bold, new direction! Why, I dare say that there were cracks in places all over the Interweb!

By changing the nature of the world in which the X-men abide, Morrison was able to change the very way the X-men operated. Sure, they still fought the big bad Magneto. And they still won. They saved the world, Wolverine got to angst over his past, Jean got to die and come back to life. Same old same old, right? Yet...

When people look at Morrison's X-men, they focus on the change from Scott/Jean to Scott/Emma. The fact that Morrison changed the very basis of the X-men itself seems to go unnoticed in favour of "zomg hank is a kitty!!!eleventy."

Lucy brought up great points. What are the ramifications of having a mutant-only island? Of attacking this island? Were it truly a foreign country, then why would the UN (and remember, Europe has always been much more mutant-friendly, though that often depends on whether Claremont had his pill that morning) not intervene? These were things I'd love to have seen explored. And I almost thought they were going to be in X-Statix. Morrison's successor had almost an unlimited amount of directions in which they could have gone.

Instead, we're getting a return to thirty years ago (or at least the eighties). We got ******** Xorneto.

Nostalgia is often a potent factor in sales. DC's upcoming attempt to return to more Silver Age ideals is being met with squeals from all over the place. I think they're going to pull it off.

But Marvel ******** up terribly when they pushed X-men back to the basics.

Morrison's run wasn't the greatest it could have been. But it mattered. It changed things. It wasn't stale. Hell, no other "new" whatever comic has incorporated something "new" quite as well as that one did. Or quite as unnoticably, apparently.

Morrison's New X-men is my least favourite work by Grant Morrison (of the ones I've read, which admiteddly [is this spelled right? It looks terribly wrong. Admitedly? Admittedly? Admitteddly? Gragh. Whatever. You know what word I'm talking about, or you wouldn't be reading this anyway.] isn't much).

But it's my favourite of any one person's run on an X-book that wasn't early-mid-nineties Excalibur.

Also, one last note: Know how there's always the idea that X-men was a rip off of Doom Patrol?

Notice how both titles have had their Morrison-effects ripped from them like an unwanted fetus in Nevada?

I'm just sayin'...

Most of this rant was posted in the CD a little while ago (a little less than a month ago, I think) under a different name, so please forgive that. It has been edited to be current, but I may have missed something.