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To get this back on track...
Oxtail Pig: "I don't hold with all this "Grant didn't take the X Men anywhere" stuff. For a start, he actually PLAYED the evolution angle - something sorely neglected in the X Men of yesteryear, in favour of the racism stuff (which quite frankly was getting soooo tired). Not only that, but he turned the institute into a school for the first time ever; added a huge dose of wonder, otherness and horror to the idea of mutation; brought a sense of humour to the book and injected all the stale, old ideas - Sentinels, long lost relatives, Xavier's dream, The Phoenix...blah - with a huge dose of fun and imagination. And those he couldn't (Magneto), he offed.
There was a genuine attempt over the course of Morrison's run to reappraise and reimagine.
And I don't care about whether or not he played the science hard. That's just a question of taste."
First up, the X-men's history/continuity has never just been about racism - it's about all negativism in society, all prejudices and bigotry. The racism card has been heavily played by the makers of the recent movies, becasue it's the most resonant one in a wider context - but the X-kids were geeks, outcasts, and misfits of all different kinds. There are parallels with the Holocaust/anti-semitism, sexism/chauvinism, homophobia both active and passive, amongst others, all throughout the X-men's history.
The institute may not have been a school for a while, but that's not to say it's never been one - almost the entire of Claremont's run (which was a long one) showcased the entire life of the X-men, inside the school and out. The New Mutants were all students, and they had their own comics intrinsically tied in with Uncanny X-men continuity, and sharing the same writer. That comics ran for 100 issues. It's not recent, no - but it's a huge part of the comic's history.
The injection of fun, etc - that's a matter of taste. Personally, I found a lot of his 'ideas' to be hasty rehashes of other ideas, a lot of which had been used in X-men before. The secondary mutation thing? Yeah, that was a new one - and not a particularly well thought through or
well executed one, either. A lot of wasted potential in that. Same as his handling of Magneto - we get him 'reimagined' as a Bin Laden-style terrorist - a failed politico turned doomed drug addict and rather thick megalomaniac. Which ignores decades of continuity which had established him as the King Lear tragic king/fool archetype, forever, let down by his bloodthirsty associates - and ignores it for no good reason. Why not use someone like Mr Sinister, who'd work far better in the 'history-has-passed-me-by' fuck-up mould than Magneto? If Morrison can't use the guy, he has no obligation to use him - but to rewrite the entire character just because he has no place for him is a stupid fucking waste and smacks of Morrison's usual florid egotism.
Finally, you may say that the slender grasp of basic evolutionary and genetic theory is 'a matter of taste' - I tend to think it's 'a matter of laziness'. He's just extrapolating all his old theories and high-concept ideas about the evolution of Mind and World onto the genetic mutation template, and leaving them there without adequate explanation or research into how they might actually apply in the world of the X-men. It's typically cavalier, and smacks of his current attitude to all his work - "ah, the fans will lap it up, 'cause it sounds pretty Invisible, doesn't it?"
I'd say it was disappointing, but I haven't expected much from him in some time... |
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