Thursday, June 16, 2011

"Much ado about Morrison"

So I figured I'd talk briefly about Grant Morrison's X-Men run. There's a lot of differences in opinion concerning how he approached the X-Men. Some loved it, others hated it, and others were left wondering what the hell happened, especially concerning Morrison's last arc, Here Comes Tomorrow. I'll admit I don't have his complete run myself. I have E for Extinction, #'s122-123, the 1st part of Riot at Xavier's, all of the Planet X storyline, and 2 parts of Here Come's Tomorrow. But I think I still got a decent handle on where he was going, and I've recently read through on-line opinions about his run, and mostly the only legitimate complaint I see regards how Morrison portrayed Magneto.

Now granted it was confusing for most to see him apparently killed off during E for Extinction, then suddenly return as "Xorn" during Planet X, and I feel alot of that stems from the later retcon job that then EIC Joe Quesada and writer Chuck Austen performed. I get that Magneto was supposedly messed up in the head due to taking the x-gene enhancing drug "Kick", and that somehow he was possessed by the spirit of John Sublime, and that made him go so far in trying to kill off so many humans and ultimately kill off Jean Grey. I guess he wanted to finally get rid of Magneto, even though even he admits he went about it the wrong way.
I'd say overall, he did a fine job doing what he was hired by Marvel to do; namely shake things up and make the X-Men exciting again. He did just that, but unfortunately it seems like Quesada felt he went too far in his changes. Here's how he felt needed to change about the X-Men at the time:
"To make the X-MEN feel fresh once more, we need to take a closer, harsher look at what's not working in this book and the comics field in general. The recent X-MEN stuff has been written in an old-fashioned, overdense style for one, and we need to update, streamline and demystify the storytelling techniques considerably to appeal to modern sensibilities."
- Grant Morrison,
from "Morrison Manifesto"
 Then Qesada went back and let things get stale again and return to the status-quo he was wanting to change so much. Doesn't make sense to me, but then that's corporate thinking for you.


Here's a link to a good article about Morrison's X-Men run by Dirk Deppey of the Comics Journal:
http://archives.tcj.com/262/e_jista.html

And here's another one too. This article runs down what happened to each X-men during Morrison's run.
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/400082/the_unofficial_guide_to_grant_morrisons_pg2.html?cat=4

So tell me what you guys thought of Morrison's run.

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