And you know, given all the love in that room for Peter David's X-Factor, that would be fantastic Spotlight episode fodder, one you could probably even polish off in the space of a single episode. And at least one of us has been reading this very, very recently. Just puttin' that out there. :-\"
Thank you @elsiebub for brilliantly articulating my thoughts and saving me the time. I found it pretty tough to hear what I consider one of the greatest runs on a comic ever to be so thrashed! I actually really enjoyed Here Comes Tomorrow, which is a What If story... it's Jean seeing what would happen if Scott and Emma's relationship falls apart, and actually it ties up soooo much of what happens in the run, it just doesn't spoon feed you;
*Sublime is revealed as the big bad, from operating the Umen, to the spread of Kick, he's controlling Magneto (through Kick, his aerosol form), and he takes over Beast.
*Cassandra Nova never left the school, she is imprisoned in the Shiar super guardian Stuff and Re-educated and rehabilitated. She continues to appear throught the later half of Morrison's run as Ernst.
*the cuckoos are revealed as being weapon xiv
*Quinten Quire becomes the mutha lovin Phoenix!?!! So awesome
I also want to stick up for his transformation of Beast, which is done for story and character reasons. Hank's suffering from his new mutation is heartbreaking in places (as is his relationship with the freakish Beak) and is all foreshadowing for his eventual decline andvreliance on Kick. Then Bendis decides he likes old Beast better so changes him back for no good reason and people hail him as a champion...
And on a different note, ive been loving All new xmen, until the introduction of X23. Chris mentioned how great Bendis' attention to historical detail is, it seemed like he's never read the character. Ever. It's so jarringly off. Whoever edits that book needs a slap.
I'm a huge X-Men fan. The 90s animated series introduced me to them, and I quickly got sucked into the comics during the Nicieza/Lobdell period, then went back and read as many back issues as I could get my hands on. At the time Morrison came on the X-Men, I had read probably just one or two of his JLA trades. I have always been a bigger X-Men fan than Morrison fan. And it was Morrison's X-Men work that made me a fan of him as a writer.
So now you know a hardcore X-Men fan who loves Morrison's work. Will I say it's the best run on the title? Absolutely not, that would be Claremont's initial 17-year stint. But it IS a close second.
A lot of the criticisms made by the CGS crew of Morrison's run were a bit baffling to me. Morrison actually showed a lot of deference and understanding of history, it was just much more subtle and nuanced. Magneto was out of character in Planet X—that was the entire point, he was being controlled. Which brings me to another point—Sublime, who was the major villain in Morrison's run is barely given a footnote. In fact, he's not even discussed in relation to Morrison's run, but rather in relation to Uncanny X-Men, where he never even appeared. And even then, you mischaracterized him as a human supremacist when that's not what he was at all.
The Magneto/Xorn thing was really quite simple—it was future writers who screwed it up. Morrison also did have a one-line explanation about why there weren't any other heroes in New York at the time. But really, the lack of cohesion between titles can hardly be counted as a fault of Morrison's when that's the job of editorial.
I've gone into plenty of detail about Morrison's run elsewhere, like in this Yahoo Voices article. I also provided a method to fix all the damage that was done to Xorn over at Fanfix, so I'll just refer people to those instead of going into it again here.
I will address a few other complaints about Morrison's run brought up in this episode. The first is the notion that this run was supposed to take place in the future. I never once heard that mentioned anywhere, and I was a voracious reader of all the various comic news outlets at the time, including an X-Men Special Wizard released prior to the launch of Morrison's run. I think there's been a misconception here of Morrison's run because he said in press that one of the things he was going to introduce was the idea of an extinction gene which would cause the human race to be wiped out in the near future.
The second complaint is the objection to freakish mutants. As others in this thread have pointed out, Morrison was not the first to do this. There have been a number of freakish mutants introduced over the years. I'm a little shocked that the notion of trying to be creative with mutant abilities is considered a bad thing.
Third is how Morrison introduced all these new characters to the school instead of bringing in any of the established mutants. Well, it was a school. All those other mutants had already graduated. The youngest of the mutants were the Generation X crew and they were either active X-Men (in the case of Chamber) or they were snatched up by Joe Casey for Uncanny X-Men (Jubilee, Husk, and M). Morrison did use a lot of other mutants as well, he established that they were working with the X-Corporation across the world. Why would they go from being active-duty field operatives to students?
Overall, I was very disappointed that Morrison was being criticized for ignoring continuity when he actually didn't. Especially when compared to Bendis' Avengers run, who was given a total pass on his grossly out-of-character writing. I was also disappointed that Mike Carey's excellent run on X-Men and then X-Men Legacy was virtually ignored.
Wow, for an era that wasn't so good in some respects, the number of responses to the Spotlight seems to be quite a lot! My response to this era is sort of like Jamie. I read some things but didn't have a complete run of anything, not even Astonishing. Like most people, I though Claremont's attempts to return to form were lackluster. I more or less enjoyed the Morrison run. It was just kinda weird fun, I suppose. Sometimes incomprehensible, but at least not boring. Okay, that's it for me. Thanks for the Spotlight. Who's next? Will it really be the FF?
I loved the episode, this era was when I was tapering off the X-books, just too many to keep up with, so this episode was great as a cliff notes to where I dropped off.
A lot of the chatter here is about the Morrison run, but to be fair the CGS crew didn't ready every single X-book, so it's kind of rough to be critical about what was left out when there were probably 5-10 X books a month coming out. Not many people can read that many books of just one team.
Keep the Spotlights coming, may I suggest one for Starman? I know it's Shane's favorite (or one of the favorites), it would be cool to have a two part episode and talk about each issue briefly. Just an idea!
@Elsiebub I didn't care for Morrison's take in single issues, but I've also never read it collected. Don't know if it was all the weird mutants or not, but I love Doop, so it definitely isn't that I don't share spirit of "tolerance". Maybe I should read the tpb's of his run.
Keep the Spotlights coming, may I suggest one for Starman? I know it's Shane's favorite (or one of the favorites), it would be cool to have a two part episode and talk about each issue briefly. Just an idea!
Hm, maybe I will have to re-read this again and see what happens..... I would love to do it. It is my favorite series.
As much as I am a hard core Justice League fan I have to say if I could only take one series with me I think it would be Starman. :)
Keep the Spotlights coming, may I suggest one for Starman? I know it's Shane's favorite (or one of the favorites), it would be cool to have a two part episode and talk about each issue briefly. Just an idea!
Hm, maybe I will have to re-read this again and see what happens..... I would love to do it. It is my favorite series.
As much as I am a hard core Justice League fan I have to say if I could only take one series with me I think it would be Starman. :)
I'm missing the last two hardcovers...once I get them I'll start reading.
Comments
I found it pretty tough to hear what I consider one of the greatest runs on a comic ever to be so thrashed!
I actually really enjoyed Here Comes Tomorrow, which is a What If story... it's Jean seeing what would happen if Scott and Emma's relationship falls apart, and actually it ties up soooo much of what happens in the run, it just doesn't spoon feed you;
*Sublime is revealed as the big bad, from operating the Umen, to the spread of Kick, he's controlling Magneto (through Kick, his aerosol form), and he takes over Beast.
*Cassandra Nova never left the school, she is imprisoned in the Shiar super guardian Stuff and Re-educated and rehabilitated. She continues to appear throught the later half of Morrison's run as Ernst.
*the cuckoos are revealed as being weapon xiv
*Quinten Quire becomes the mutha lovin Phoenix!?!! So awesome
I also want to stick up for his transformation of Beast, which is done for story and character reasons. Hank's suffering from his new mutation is heartbreaking in places (as is his relationship with the freakish Beak) and is all foreshadowing for his eventual decline andvreliance on Kick. Then Bendis decides he likes old Beast better so changes him back for no good reason and people hail him as a champion...
So now you know a hardcore X-Men fan who loves Morrison's work. Will I say it's the best run on the title? Absolutely not, that would be Claremont's initial 17-year stint. But it IS a close second.
A lot of the criticisms made by the CGS crew of Morrison's run were a bit baffling to me. Morrison actually showed a lot of deference and understanding of history, it was just much more subtle and nuanced. Magneto was out of character in Planet X—that was the entire point, he was being controlled. Which brings me to another point—Sublime, who was the major villain in Morrison's run is barely given a footnote. In fact, he's not even discussed in relation to Morrison's run, but rather in relation to Uncanny X-Men, where he never even appeared. And even then, you mischaracterized him as a human supremacist when that's not what he was at all.
The Magneto/Xorn thing was really quite simple—it was future writers who screwed it up. Morrison also did have a one-line explanation about why there weren't any other heroes in New York at the time. But really, the lack of cohesion between titles can hardly be counted as a fault of Morrison's when that's the job of editorial.
I've gone into plenty of detail about Morrison's run elsewhere, like in this Yahoo Voices article. I also provided a method to fix all the damage that was done to Xorn over at Fanfix, so I'll just refer people to those instead of going into it again here.
I will address a few other complaints about Morrison's run brought up in this episode. The first is the notion that this run was supposed to take place in the future. I never once heard that mentioned anywhere, and I was a voracious reader of all the various comic news outlets at the time, including an X-Men Special Wizard released prior to the launch of Morrison's run. I think there's been a misconception here of Morrison's run because he said in press that one of the things he was going to introduce was the idea of an extinction gene which would cause the human race to be wiped out in the near future.
The second complaint is the objection to freakish mutants. As others in this thread have pointed out, Morrison was not the first to do this. There have been a number of freakish mutants introduced over the years. I'm a little shocked that the notion of trying to be creative with mutant abilities is considered a bad thing.
Third is how Morrison introduced all these new characters to the school instead of bringing in any of the established mutants. Well, it was a school. All those other mutants had already graduated. The youngest of the mutants were the Generation X crew and they were either active X-Men (in the case of Chamber) or they were snatched up by Joe Casey for Uncanny X-Men (Jubilee, Husk, and M). Morrison did use a lot of other mutants as well, he established that they were working with the X-Corporation across the world. Why would they go from being active-duty field operatives to students?
Overall, I was very disappointed that Morrison was being criticized for ignoring continuity when he actually didn't. Especially when compared to Bendis' Avengers run, who was given a total pass on his grossly out-of-character writing. I was also disappointed that Mike Carey's excellent run on X-Men and then X-Men Legacy was virtually ignored.
A lot of the chatter here is about the Morrison run, but to be fair the CGS crew didn't ready every single X-book, so it's kind of rough to be critical about what was left out when there were probably 5-10 X books a month coming out. Not many people can read that many books of just one team.
Keep the Spotlights coming, may I suggest one for Starman? I know it's Shane's favorite (or one of the favorites), it would be cool to have a two part episode and talk about each issue briefly. Just an idea!
As much as I am a hard core Justice League fan I have to say if I could only take one series with me I think it would be Starman. :)
(Possibly).