2002-10-03 - 11:59 9.m.

The letter X

Hello boys and girls! This entry is brought to you by the letter X.

Heh. Well actually it's Thursday (oops again) and that means it's time for another bunch of comic reviews! Actually, I'm going to do it a little differently this week. Technically it's going to be a review of just one book, namely

Uncanny X-Men #414

...but more than that I'm going to talk about the two main X-titles, namely the original series (Uncanny X-Men) and the newer book, simply called "X-Men," or sometimes "Adjectiveless X-Men" to differentiate it. Although it's rather sobering for me to consider that this "newer" book is now ten years old. And I still have a big pile of the first issue! There were seven million of them printed, making it the best selling comic ever, and also totally worthless. But I digress.

I used to be a huge X-Men fan, but just about anyone who was reading comics in the late 1970s was an X-Men fan. In 1979 Uncanny X-Men was the shit, mainly because nearly everything else WAS shit! The late 1970s was a real trough for the U.S. comics market. Anyway, the X-Men were so huge that Marvel was able to turn them into a huge franchise that is still going strong twenty years later. Why do you think that is? I'll answer that question later.

Earlier I said that I USED to be an X-Men fan, but that's not really the case any more. There have been to many years of hackwork, repetitious stories, pointless crossovers... well, you get the idea.

What got me thinking about the X-Men was the fact that my grand reorganization of my back issue stock has reached the end of the Marvel alphabet, and I'm finally dealing with the letter X. Considering how seldom "X" is used in everyday words, it's pretty funny that more Marvel comics start with that letter than any other.

As I was going through the runs of X-Men and Uncanny and I looked at the covers and remembered what was behind those covers, I ruminated on why I don't really bother to read the X-Men any more. There are just so many cheesy covers that all look alike, for example: "Welcome to the X-Men [INSERT YOUR NAME HERE], Hope You Survive the Experience!" Yawn. Because these two books have always been cash cows they weren't allowed to get as wretched as nearly everything else Marvel was printing during their Bankruptcy years (1994-98) still, they were pretty trite.

Perhaps X-Men was allowed to become so repetitive because it was so popular. After all, nearly every Marvel book has had an "improve or die" imperative at one point or another, except the X-Men. However, when I read the last year or so of both titles (while I was supposed to be working!!) I was blown away. There has been a quantum leap upwards in quality.

The reason why is pretty obvious - about a year and a half ago writer Grant Morrison was handed these two titles and given carte blanche to do just about anything he wanted with them. On one level this was unnecessarily risky because the two core X-Men books were already top sellers, why tamper with that? On the other hand, Morrison has had a very good track record recently - a couple years ago he took DC's tired old Justice League and made it the #1 selling comic for a while, and it still sells at about X-Men level for us, even five years later. Not too shabby. So giving him these books could also be viewed as a no-brainer: Morrison is a superstar comic writer.

Well, also Grant Morrison is a nut and a weirdo. I mean that in a good way! Weird is good! Normal is boring!

One of the consistent themes in Morrison's writing is how people who are weird and/or different live beneath, and often in conflict with the "normal" world around them. You can see this in his Doom Patrol, his Invisibles and on and on. Since this also is the underlying theme of the X-men, it's easy to see why Morrison would be a good fit for this book. The fact that the characters he's dealing with are so recognizable keeps his bizarre stories grounded and understandable while Morrison keeps trying to push the boundaries of just how different "different" can be. Believe me, Morrison needs some grounding because sometimes his stories are almost impossible to understand or identify with. Some of his most indulgent stuff just seemed like gibberish to me, almost produced with a random word generator.

The "high concept" of the X-Men has always been "Mutated teenagers with strange powers trying to save a world that only hates and fears them." Generally, "Mutation" was shallowly interpreted as a metaphor for adolescence. Your body is going crazy, and the whole world seems like it's against you. This winning combination of angst and paranoia (and teenage empowerment) is what made X-men a smash hit. What young person couldn't identify with that?

However, Morrison seems to be interpreting it more broadly, namely that "mutation" is a metaphor for our uniqueness as individuals, our core of weirdness if you will. Society at large seems to be happier with cookie-cutter people, and the individual has to fight against that with all their might to not be swallowed whole. The X-men books are Grant Morrison's wild and crazy celebration of diversity.

There's also a lot of darkness here - plainly Morrison doesn't see the individual triumphing over society all the time, or even most of the time.

In a recent storyline, the X-Men suffered a terrible catastrophe. There is a country in the Marvel Universe called "Genosha" which is literally a country of mutants. However, due to an attack by some super anti-mutant robots called Sentinels, Genosha was almost totally wiped out - sixteen million mutants died in an instant, including Magneto - the major X-men anti-villain. That's about half the total mutant population of earth, and they died while the X-Men looked on in helpless horror.

You don't need to be the sharpest fork in the drawer to see that this is a metaphor as well, an allegory for the terrorist attacks of 9/11. How are the X-men handling this holocaust? Not at all well. They each seem to be slowly going insane in their own unique way.

All of which is damned interesting. However, while I'd have to rate this new X-Men as a critical success, I really couldn't call it a sales triumph. After an initial sales surge, the books settled down to a sales level that was slightly lower than before. I guess too many fanboys and fangirls were confused by all these "deep" stories.

Oh well, their loss.

Good grief! In all my pontificating I for got to review the actual comic! Ahem!

Uncanny X-Men #414

This issue focuses on Northstar, a character that we haven't seem too much of in the X-Men. He was the first openly gay character in the Marvel Universe (and oh, what a ghastly story is "coming out" was) but Northstar's big problem isn't that he's gay, it's that he's an arrogant, unlikable asshole.

Professor X tries to recruit him as a teacher for his mutant school, but Northstar is having none of it. However, he changes his mind when he has an encounter with a boy whose developing mutant power is that he explodes almost without warning, and he can't control it. The boy winds up killing himself with his mutant power, and Northstar is helpless to stop it.

While there is something kind of arbitrary about this story (surely there must have been SOME way to save the kid that didn't involve having Northstar FLY HIGH IN THE AIR with Exploding Boy, but it was still a good story, and it actually made Northstar seem like not quite such a jerk.

Grant Morrison didn't write this particular issue (he can't do EVERYTHING) but it was still pretty good. Not up to his usual level of weirdness, though.