Houdini, if you actually look at the 'reloaded' x-line, it's hardly throwing out Grant's X-stuff, but rather using every possible scrap in each title.
Okay. I can see what you're getting at here, but I disagree.
I think it's a matter of what you consider to be the baby and what you consider to be the bathwater.
Sure, they're using the Genosha destruction, Magneto, Xorn, Weapon Plus and all that stuff. But the way in which their using these things serves to sever these things from the meaning and purpose that they served in New X meN -- leaving only hollow shells.
Xorn, if anything, was a lesson on our own willingness to be deceived. The readers, the X-Men, ultimately even Magneto are taken in by the carefully crafted image of this Chinese holy man. The high point of Planet X (for me) was when Magneto reveals this and mocks us for it -- "A man with a star for a brain ... I thought it was too obvious."
Under the new administration, Xorn is not only an actual character but, ironically, even more of a stereotype. How can the real Xorn be more two-dimensional, shallow and uninteresting than Magneto-pretending-to-be-Xorn?
In New X meN Morrisson shows us a world without Magneto. He shows us an X-Men without Magneto and even glimpses of a world where the X-Men temporarily abandon their old paradigm. For a moment we get to imagine that they really are working towards peace and integration and that some progress is genuinely possible. With Mags' death-speech in 'Ambient Magnetic Fields' Morrisson shows us the power Mags can have as a martyr. Then, once he's convinced us that a world without Magneto is a better world he brings the villain back and hammers home the point that Magneto's time has passed. (While I felt there were other ways to make Magneto a decent character, ever since (New) X-Men #1 and the massive retcon which wiped away the decent man of UXM #150-250 there really hasn't been a Magneto worth saving. So I think Morrisson's critique is totally OTM.) And yet the Management have decided to save him anyway, undoing the critique of 'Planet X' and bringing us yet another multi-Magneto catastrophe.
All in all, the point of New X meN (by my reading) was to show how the X-Men could become something exciting, something new, something fresh once again. Yes, many of the plot elements of those stories are being recycled in Reload. But the manner of the treatment serves to strip mine them of their meaning and integrity, cutting away the point of Xorn, of Planet X, of Weapon Plus, and rendering them part of the "same old same old" that they were intended to replace.
Just my 2c. |
