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I've read it possibly in its entirety - from that issue about Vindix coming to America to take Wolverine back to Canada, to Nightcrawler's birthday party gone wrong with a trip to Dante's hell in the mix, to Collosus' sister going to Limbo, to the funeral of Phoenix, and way beyond. And don't start me with Arcade and his freaking games.
So yes, i know what i'm talking about. Perhaps you just have an emotional attachment to Claremont's run, or i'm just too grim for his whinny soap opera and thought balloons and endless narrative boxes, but i don't get the enjoyment from his run that i'm getting from Morrison's, and finally have a sense the whole book is going somewhere.
The soap opera stuff, the structure of the storylines (one story jumps into the next one, dangling plotlines that get resolved a year or so later), the characterization, interests in similar themes.
You could just be describing any Marvel title in the past 40 years, since Lee and Kirby introduced continuity: even Fantastic Four is a soap opera, stories jump into another and so on...
The subtext is the same - they are working to make the world safe, but there isn't much they can do. They do what they can, like anyone else. This isn't the Authority, the X-Men aren't fascists or terrorists. They have their school, they do their superhero thing. That's a lot.
I'm not talking about them becoming fascists - but it's about time they become more involved: like going public and opening X-corporations over the world.
Yeah, but they were there. It sounds silly to argue this, but let's pretend this is real - why would the X-Men, who are supposed to be good upstanding people say "ah, that's not our jurisdiction. We only care about mutant stuff. Tough luck."
But they shouldn't even be in space; they shouldn't be dealing with a creature like Phoenix: Claremont should have never created the Phoenix mythos in the X-Men; it didn't fit in the premise. Claremont wanted to tell it, should have waited for a chance at the Fantastic Four.
I'm not saying that the X-Men shouldn't have stopped Phoenix: but that threat shouldn't have existed in a comic book about mutant/human relationship and conflict. It just doesn't fit in the storyline.
Like Laurence says, the New fucking Mutants. The New Mutants were a regular presence is the Uncanny X-Men back in the early 80s in the same kind of supporting role that the current kids are. The class-size was much smaller, but it has been established that there are more and more mutants now, and the school needs to be bigger. Also, the Xavier school wasn't the only school for mutants back then - Emma's Massachusetts Academy was still going strong at the time.
The New Mutants were just a spin-off title, with the only purpose of making money, which is fine with me, about the kids having their own adventures; they didn't have the background presence hundreds of students have. It rarely dealth with their mutant education and training: most of the time they were in other worlds and dimensions. Same goes for Gen X and Emma's school.
Oh, right. Like the Mummudrai mumbo jumbo. And the Phoenix.
No, like Sentinels killing 16 million mutants; a genetic trigger in human DNA that will extinguish human life in a few generations; angry mutant kids doubting the 'dream'
When Claremont addressed the mutant issues, it was in a very generic way: there is a shadowy governmental organisation and it's going to kill all mutants, put them in prison. So for once he gave it a twist and sent the X-men to fight Sentinels and Stephen Lang in a space platform: same story that gave us Phoenix.
Grant's X-Men seem pretty depressed to me - they aren't constantly whining in melodramatic interior monologues, but that's really just one of Claremont's annoying stylistic quirks which have developed over time. As you go further back though Chris's writing, you'll find that he didn't really do that sort of thing very often at the series best. (Which, in my opinion, is the Paul Smith and John Romita Jr. runs.)
Depressed? How can you say that? A depressing issue is one with Kitty Pride fighting a Demon on Christmas' eve all alone in the mansion: that was depressing for me.
I see them a lot cheerful - perhpas committed is the word, though; they're committed to their cause, and more focused.
Well, I could go on all day, but the biggest one is the Phoenix.
It's a question of choice though, isn't it? Morrison chose to do a follow up to the Phoenix story: he could just have avoided mentioning it, if he wanted, and it wouldn't have hurt his run. It's not like he couldn't find more material for his stories. So i don't see it as owing to Claremont; i see it more as compliment, in fact.
I think i've seen what's the problem with X-men and related titles: it's never going to end.
Books like Preacher, Sandman, Transmetropolitan follow the basic storyline: beginning, middle, ending. They're committed to tell a story - just like X-Men; in it's case, mutant/human relationship - and go on to tell it as long as there's a story. It might take 66 or 75 issues, but Ennis and Gaiman knew they would sooner or later have to end it. They strayed a bit - Ennis more than Gaiman, i think - but eventually told a whole story down to its logical conclusion.
But X-men: it just lasts forever. It has the problem of being a superhero mainstream title with a premise: Fantastic Four, Avengers, Spiderman - those can just go on forever because they're all about one thing: fighting crime. X-men is beyond that: they have a goal to achieve and should achieve it one day, but have been on it for 40 years. Since they're the highest selling comic book, they can't just end with the humans and mutants getting along at last.
It will just go on until the industry collapses and some fill in writer like Austen has 3 issues to wrap up 40 years of storytelling with some deus ex machina... if they're ever that lucky.
So it's pointless after all for me to be here thinking Morrison's run is better than Claremont's: one day some idiot will think about a way to pretend the Genosha massacre never happened, or creating a way of some villain inducing a global brainwashing that will make the world forget the X-men ever went public so they can go back to their former status quo - perhaps even back to Australia, catch up with Roma and the Adversary again - and bring Magneto back, and invent a way to stop that DNA trigger to kill humanity, and still paying compliments to Claremont by making another rehash of Phoenix... |
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