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Did Grant really drop the "superhero shit" or does he in fact have a huge fondness for it, and spend a large amount of time writing it? Funny, that.
As we've agreed before, no, Grant didn't drop the "superhero shit." He wrote a three-year-long superhero plot involving Their Greatest Enemy Back From The Dead!, A Horror From The Farthest Reaches Of Space!, and other classic superhero tropes. I don't think anybody flat-out denies that there was no superheroic material whatsoever in Grant's take on the X-Men, because there was a lot of it.
What I AM arguing is that there are a lot of things that WEREN'T overtly "superheroic." There were no secret identities for the core team. There was an emphasis on the details of education and culture/society-building and the realities of actual adolescence, not adolescence-as-metaphor in the Stan Lee mode. There was a retreat from flamoboyant costuming towards a practical look. There was action, adventure, and superpowers, yes. But that doesn't automatically make it a superhero book. Is THE X-FILES superhero fiction? Lots of superpowers there, including in several recurring characters. Were those characters superheroes?
Again, it's about the framework, what the story chooses to emphasize. We can argue all day about what Grant emphasized, but I think his run was steeped in superhero tropes (and let me reiterate that I enjoyed them -- I yelped aloud at Jean's death from Logan's claws, I do value superhero opera as a form of entertainment) while emphasizing ideas that come from outside that stylistic line. We'd like to see somebody pick that ball up and run with it, and allow us to see the X-Men interacting with each other and trying to build their world amidst some stories that don't involve A Plot To Kill The Humans! or A Plot To Kill The Mutants!. But instead we've got flamboyant costumes and A Battle Royale Against A Mysterious New Threat!
Suedehead, you're right that a lot of comics try to pretend they're not about superheroes while incorporating only the most tired "fringe" ideas and concepts. But those comics don't give us Mutant Town, or Kick, or The Special Class, or The X-Corporation, or Telepathy Class, or a teenage pregnancy, or any of the dozens of other great ideas Grant threw into the X-Men stew that could, under a talented writer, be expanded into fruitful directions that have nothing to do with superhero action plotting. Your argument shoots fish in a barrel because it refers to work that dresses itself up in outside trappings as a marketing device that establishes "legitimacy," and not as a lever towards experimentation with genre constraints.
Again: I LIKE SUPERHEROES! They're a lot of fun, and I loved Grant's take on the X-Men as superheroes! I just wish somebody would try treating the X-Men as if they were something else for a change, because I think the potential for really interesting stories is there and I hate to see potential get wasted. I'm perfectly happy to watch these characters drink tea and teach teenagers how to read minds for several issues at a time, while occasionally facing problems of the non-Let's Have A Big Fight! variety, because I love them so much as characters and "people" that I know it could still be interesting. And if you want to attack that on "commercial" grounds, then keep in mind there's only about two hundred thousand people reading X-MEN worldwide in the first place these days, and most of them have likely been doing so for over a decade and there's very little that could ever make them stop. |
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