Grant Morrison Ruined the X-Men
November 6th, 2009 by david brothers | Tags: chris claremont, grant morrison, Marvel comics, new x-men, x-menGrant Morrison ruined the X-Men when he wrote New X-Men.
No, really, it’s true. Look at Marvel’s moves after he left the book. The very first thing they did was launch X-Men: Reload, a branding and soft-relaunch initiative that saw Chris Claremont put on Uncanny X-Men, Chuck Austen placed on the last two issues of New X-Men (where he cleaned up plots that were already perfectly clean), and Joss Whedon hired to write what turned out to be one long love letter to the glory days of Claremont/Byrne Uncanny X-Men.
Later, they reduced the total number of mutants to the low three figures, a huge change from Morrison’s population of millions.
Morrison pulled the X-Men into the modern day, not even the future, and Marvel’s move after he left was to immediately dial things back to 1982. It’s a baffling decision, and one that’s hamstrung the X-Men ever since. Whedon’s run went from mildly entertaining to stone cold stupid with a quickness (Space bullet, Professor Xavier in a truck, too-cute dialogue, pretty much everything after issue 12, though granted John Cassaday was awesome throughout), no one remembers Claremont’s run despite the Alan Davis art, Peter Milligan’s run was a non-starter, Brubaker was a tremendous mistake, and Matt Fraction’s run is a little too cute and sandbagged by Greg Land. The best X-Men run since Morrison left was the first year or so of the Mike Carey/Chris Bachalo/Humberto Ramos X-Men, which managed to match the writing with the art and tell a solid story. It was good, however, not great.
New X-Men was great.
“No question, bein a black man is demandin'”
The X-Men have often been seen as a metaphor for oppressed peoples, with black and gay people being the most common ones cited. Morrison looked at this metaphor, looked at real life, and updated the X-Men to reflect that. Being a mutant became cool in the same way that being black is cool. You can buy clothes and music made by mutants and be down. You can even hang out in Mutant Town after dark to show how open-minded and cool you are.
At the same time, that only goes so far– no one wants to be black, or a mutant, when the things go down or the cops show up. So when Xorn visits Mutant Town and ends up witnessing the death of a young mutant? The humans react the way they always have: with fear and bigotry.
Morrison turned mutants into a subculture, a logical extension of what happens when new elements are introduced into society. They were still oppressed, but they actually had some kind of culture to go along with their oppression. He gave them their own Chinatown, their own Little Italy, and made it a point to show that mutants, while not entirely accepted just yet, were more than just mutant paramilitary teams. There were ugly mutants, ones with useless powers, ones with hideous powers, and ones who just didn’t really care about the X-Men.
These Are The Days of Our Lives
The soap opera was a huge part of the draw of Claremont’s, and everyone else’s, X-Men, Morrison included. However, where the previous soap operas tended toward being the status quo (Rogue and Gambit’s will they/won’t they, Scott and Jean’s alternating marital strife and bliss, Storm being aloof and faux-queenish, Iceman being an idiot), Morrison took them and forced actual change.
Jean Grey embraced her amazing powers, rather than being afraid of them and found true peace and confidence. Wolverine goes from a beast of a man to a man who has figured out how to keep the beast under control through discipline and poise. Emma Frost found love. Magneto found out what it really takes to change the world. And so on.
My favorite change, though, is Cyclops. He went through something horrible and traumatic, and after, he didn’t feel the same. He felt like he didn’t measure up to the storybook romance that he found himself in, and was worried about not being perfect enough for his (in his eyes) perfect wife. And it hurts their relationship, they grow apart, and he eventually finds someone else.
It’s a bad thing, but at the same time, believable. His friends warn him off, tell him he’s being stupid, and he still does it. And when the missus finds out, what’s he do? He leaves to get drunk. He reacts poorly to a situation he simply doesn’t know how to handle, and ends up adventuring with Wolverine.
And you know what? It works. It pulls Cyclops away from being the stick in the mud, generic leader type he’d been for years. He even sticks to the Marvel blueprint: he struggles with a personal problem, makes a poor decision, and somehow ends up sticking the landing.
Grown Man Business
Grant Morrison made the X-Men grown-up. He eschewed stereotypical supervillain stories until the tail end of his run, and even those stories were layered with a depth of character and nuance that kept them above generic megalomania. When Magneto nearly destroys New York as the culmination of his big plan, he’s forced to confront the fact that the personality he created to further his plan, the healer Xorn, is better liked and more effective than he could ever be. No one wants Magneto any more. Magneto is old and busted, Xorn is the new hotness.
That’s what Morrison’s New X-Men run was about: the new. Mutants as subculture, the changes Beast has gone through, Wolverine fighting against his true nature, Jean loving herself and her powers, and Magneto joining the X-Men and doing more good than he ever did before. All of that is pushing the X-Men toward the new.
The X-Men, moreso than any other franchise, needs to be on the cutting edge of culture. The oppression metaphor practically requires it. Morrison put them right out there, threw a bunch of new ideas and philosophies into the mix, and created something amazing.
And ever since, Marvel has run screaming from it. Major developments were dialed back, retcons applied, and hands waved. The X-Men line, post-NXM, has been, to be kind, a complete mess. It’s finally found focus recently, but New X-Men? That was years ago.
They would have been better off embracing it wholeheartedly, rather than depowering all the mutants, reinforcing 15 year old status quos, and generally putting out bad comics. Morrison laid the ground work for a whole new generation of X-Men comics. We could’ve seen the tales of a new class of New Mutants who had no interest in being soldiers, explored mutant subculture in-depth, examined how humans react to having a brand new and vibrant subculture evolve right under their noses, or even just shown an X-Men team that didn’t solve all its problems by hitting things really hard.
The seeds for all of this are right there in New X-Men. But, we’ll never see it. Marvel got to the end of NXM, recoiled, and ran in the opposite direction. Now we’re just left, once again, with re-runs of our grief. The potential for the X-Men to be more than they were, and are, is gone. It’s sad, but it’s true. After New X-Men, the franchise took a hard turn into a brick wall.
Marvel hasn’t totally run from it, though. You can still buy the series in three handsome softcover volumes. I absolutely recommend it. It’s definitely my favorite X-Men story.
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I agree with a lot of your points. Morrison truly did force these characters to grow up, bringing in a lot of the ugly stuff that comes with adult relationships (Hank getting dumped by Trish Tilby was brutal). However, you can’t ignore that a lot of this run is hamstrung by embarrassingly awful art. Igor Kordey is capable of great work, but his rushed art on the Imperial arc is unreadable.
Also, the inclusion of some character that seemed put in only to push the plot along or are just there to seem “cool” (Fantomex for one) pulled me out of the story.
It would be interesting to see what Morrison’s plans for the future were for the X-Men, since they were obviously ditched. Though I think his New X-Me run was flawed, what he could have been setting up for could have been a new evolution for the Marvel Universe.
Still, I haven’t read this stuff in a long time and I think I’ll be pulling it out again tonight.
@Jason: Yeah, the art was 1/3 great, 1/3 passable, and 1/3 awful.
Fantomex is one of my favorite characters from the run, if only because he is quite clearly Wolverine 2009. Where Wolverine was used as a kind of surrogate Clint Eastwood, Dirty Harry, grizzed war vet kind of hero, Fantomex is the smooth, suave, and flashy hero that action movies pushed hard over the past ten or fifteen years. Neo in The Matrix. And that’s not even mentioning the circumstances of his birth. There’s some interesting commentary going on there with Fantomex. It’s way deeper than “Oh he’s just the cool one.”
I’ve read an interview that said he had an arc coming up where a human joins the school and several of the mutants are like “ew.” But then it turns out he can play the violin/guitar/sing (something like that) better than anyone else ever has, and they experiment with the definition of mutant some. Marvel wanted the costumes back, so that probably wouldn’t happened in Morrison’s run, rather than Whedon’s.
I was happy enough reading the Grant Morrison run but the godawful redesigns rendered in manky art tainted it so utterly.
@david brothers: Agreed on Fantomex. The DR-TL one-shot could have sucked (thankfully it didn’t) but I still would have gotten it cause it was Fantomex’s big return to the Marvel Universe, I want an ongoing by jason aaron about this guy now, he nailed the character
random thought: an UDON Wolverine story by Jason Aaron about hatecrimes in the deep south? UDON people. who thought this would be a good idea?
Yeah I completely agree. New X-Men was like a bucket of cold water been thrown over you. After so long of the same old same old, the X-Men were moving again. Emma Frost was cool and people ‘got’ Cyclops. Then for 80% of everything to be wiped, that was just criminal, and since then not even the return of Archangel has made me pick up another X-book.
I recently sat down and reread this whole run and really enjoyed it, but was disappointed at times due to wonky art. I liked Jimenez’s stuff, but others weren’t so good. And then along came Austen, and he nearly made me quit comics altogether. Glad to see Fantomex return.
To say nothing of the costumes… I was so pissed when they put Wolverine back in that damn yellow and blue.
You know, Chris Claremont more or less said the same thing when he was interviewed in Comics Creators on X-Men:
“It happens too often where storyline and characters that have been introduced are forgotten as soon as a new creative team takes over. Guys come in with agendas. Grant Morrison came in with a Manifesto that outlined thirty-odd issues of New X-Men. This is what he’s going to do and basically what he did with a couple of tweaks along the way. The problem is that at the end of the thirty-odd issues, the canon was left in ruins. Grant doesn’t care. He’s off writing Superman. Someone else comes in and does his twelve issues before moving on. Everything is done in neat confined boxes that are great in self-contained compilations.”
I don’t agree with this, however. Saying Grant Morrison ruined the X-Men is kind of like saying Frank Miller ruined Daredevil with Born Again. It took a few years, but Daredevil eventually hit his stride once again (either during Kesel’s, Smith’s, Bendis’ or Brubaker’s run– depends on who you ask). I think the same thing could happen with the X-Men; it may take years, but eventually a run will come along that will rank up there with Morrison’s tenure and Claremont’s original run.
If there was anything that ruined the X-Men, it was House of M. Sure, the franchise had done plenty of backpedaling before then, but “no more mutants” sort of dashed any hopes of someone continuing from where Grant Morrison let off. At least in the near future.
@Gokitalo: “Guys come in with agendas. Grant Morrison came in with a Manifesto that outlined thirty-odd issues of New X-Men. This is what he’s going to do and basically what he did with a couple of tweaks along the way. The problem is that at the end of the thirty-odd issues, the canon was left in ruins. Grant doesn’t care. He’s off writing Superman. ”
Claremont coming with the extra sour grapes! The canon was left in ruins? Because it wasn’t stuck in the same holding pattern it’d been in since Claremont hit his stride?
And Miller didn’t ruin Daredevil, mainly because Marvel put Ann Nocenti and JRjr on the book right after him. DD went through a dark period for a fair few years, but it was more of a slower decline than a trip right off a cliff like the X-Men had. What happened to the X-franchise is similar to Brubaker leaving Captain America and Marvel hiring Howard Mackie and Scott McDaniel to tell a bunch of stories straight out of 1985.
Yar, Chris just sounds a tad bitter! I mean, if New X-Men had ended with Emma and Cyclops deciding NOT to reopen the school, then Claremont’s comments might have made a little more sense. However, that’s not what happened. In reality, Grant gave future writers the chance to rebuild the school (and the X-Men, for that matter) any way they wanted. Which they really didn’t take advantage of. Sigh…
Good point about Daredevil going through a more gradual decline; I forgot that Nocenti’s run (which I haven’t read yet, but I’ve heard good things about) came after Born Again. Still, maybe the X-Men will pick up again someday.
You know, the X-Men are kind of going through a second ’90s right now. Apocalypse, Stryfe, X-Man and X-Force are back. Crossovers have returned. Oh, and Wolverine’s family tree is now starting to rival Cyclops’. Daken, X-23, Sabretooth and Romulus, meet Cable, Rachel, Havok and Corsair.
I dunno, Wolverine having a kid and a clone isn’t that bad. He’s been around so long and he’s such a randy little sod, you’d half expect him to have about a dozen bastard children and thirty-or-so grandkids(or would that be great grandkids?).
I agree with Claremont. Magneto’s most interesting in his anti-hero persona and I’m a guy who can’t stand anti-heroes. Making mutants into a subculture doesn’t work because mutants don’t exist. Things like Little Italy and Chinatown in the real world? THere’s a real Italy and China. All the mutant subculture really did was embrace the western world’s pop culture.
The current X-men canon would be better off if Morrison’s New X-men had never been written.
Agreed, Brothers.
Grant Morrison’s run wasn’t good just for the content within, but for the solid base and storytelling engine he put in place for the future.
Claremont’s comments can apply sometimes. I hate it when every writer comes on a title and decides they’re going to do their take on a character, thus ruining any consistency of content or characterization, defeating the purpose of an ongoing franchise in the first place. Batman has a certain personality and has stories that operate in certain ways. There’s all the room in the world for new content, no need to retread old ground over and over, but there’s no reason for everything to be scrapped just because there’s a new writer this week.
Claremont is wrong this time because the X-Men needed a new launch and a new definition at the time Grant Morrison provided it. They should have continued on with his storytelling base. Accessibility and mass appealing content for a general audience was just one building block of a developing structure. Read Grant Morrison’s manifesto for the X-Men. What they were building was supposed to be a entertainment media cornerstone, like a new album from a pop singer or the newest episode of hit network TV show. Maybe the format needed to be developed still. Maybe availability needed to be expanded. But Morrison provided what his role required: again, accessibility and appealing content.
Marvel dropped the ball on the rest, and because it didn’t all form at once, they scrapped the whole structure and retreated back into their little comic-shop-lame-storytelling-1982 hole. They should have taken what Grant provided and continued to develop their product.
But it’s not like they’re businesspeople.
Enjoy your 5 figure sales, Marvel.
And I’m not saying Morrison’s content was perfect. But it all needs to be developed as it goes on. Maybe Mutanttown doesn’t work. Fix it in tweeks as you move forward. Maybe 22 page pamphlets don’t work, and maybe what they could have tried next wouldn’t have been perfect either. But step forward and fix it as you go.
The whole thing puts me in mind of Les Miserables; someone bravely trying to instil change and revolutionary new ideas, only for the same old boring pattern to fall into place all over again.
In the end, what did Morrison ruin that was so vital? The only things I can really think of are Magneto and Scott/Jean, both of which hadn’t been used to tell a worthwhile story in a long time. Morrison’s new status quo was expansive. You could still tell old school X-Men stories, but there was also all this potential for new kinds of stories that were still in the original spirit of the X-Men. And given how much Claremont transformed the X-Men (mostly for the better) it seems like the height of hypocrisy for him to complain about Morrison.
Great article DB.
I highly rank Brubaker but I’ve not read his run on uncanny. I’ve heard a few people disapprove of it though. What did you (and my fellow commenters) dislike about it?
I did borrow the Deadly Genesis TPB from my local library though and I quite enjoyed it, not my favourite X-Men story, but still entertaining.
The really neat trick about Morrison’s run is that he managed to do this re-invention while essentially re-telling a number of the classic tales from the Claremont/Bryne era X-Men (and a bit after). I always thought that if he’d stayed on the comic, he’d have continued in that trend and we’d have been able to see his developments through the end of Claremont’s initial run on the title.
Now I just need to decide if I want to part with my lovely hardcover omnibus which is apparently worth over $200, now (and buy the three softcovers as replacement?) or hold onto it because it’s really damn awesome.
med-sin! makk bettuh!
great, I’ve been thinking about that scene with xorn and the big mutant baby, but know I can see it.
Great article. It sums up exactly my feelings on New X-Men and the direction the franchise has taken since that point. I actually have said the exact words “Grant Morrison ruined the X-Men for me” when someone’s asked if I’m following whatever the current storyline is. But I just can’t step backwards. I followed Whedon’s run because he’s Whedon, and I did enjoy it… but at the same time, it felt like trying to go back and enjoy the music or movies I was into before my tastes matured – I could still enjoy it on a familiar, nostalgic level, but it had become impossible to ignore its flaws, impossible to not hold it up to a higher standard than I would have before.
And on a purely aesthetic point, I *really* miss the uniforms. Wolverine back in bright yellow and Cyclops in a full-body condom pretty much obliterated my ability to take those characters seriously.
I am of the firm belief that Grant Morrison is the greatest comic writer of all time. This article only goes to reinforce that belief.
Awesome.
Claremont is right, from his perspective Morrison DID ruin the book for whoever came after him as part of the unspoken contract is that the status quo be returned to as it was.
He ruined it for anyone concerned with continuity, concerned with consistency with what came before, for anyone who doesn’t want a creator’s “take” on characters but rather the characters, month in and month out.
Is what he did vital? Yes, it’s vital AS YOU READ IT. Afterwards? Who cares?
I doesn’t matter that no one picked up Morrison’s ball and ran with it, It’s fine with there being only three collections of that book, of that time.
There isn’t a need for any more.
“Claremont is right, from his perspective Morrison DID ruin the book for whoever came after him as part of the unspoken contract is that the status quo be returned to as it was.”
This unspoken contract sounds kind of insulting for writers, as it suggests that they’re unable to work with anything new. You know why Daredevil has been one of Marvel’s best books through Bendis, Brubaker and Diggle? Partly because they said “fuck this” to whatever unspoken contract you think exists and decided to move forward with stories instead of retell Frank Miller again.
Morrison didn’t ruin a single thing. What? Because he took Magneto off the table? How many times has Magneto been killed off anyway?
“He ruined it for anyone concerned with continuity, concerned with consistency with what came before, for anyone who doesn’t want a creator’s “take” on characters but rather the characters, month in and month out.”
This makes absolutely no sense. Morrison’s run followed directly on from previous X-Men continuity, with Cyclops affected from being possessed by Apocalypse after the last big dumb X-Men event, with Magneto in charge of Genosha, bla bla bla, etc. etc. It was pretty consistent with what came before. Not only that, but it brought in so many new things without contradicting or taking away anything that had come before.
Also, any time you read a character you are reading the writer’s take on that character. Sorry to burst your bubble there.
“There isn’t a need for any more.”
what does this even mean?
it means that three years of anything is enough.
I think seth is saying that you don’t need to read one thing forever
You know, I really like the story that you describe here, and all I can say is that it doesn’t remotely reflect my experience of reading the book. When you tell me the story of what happened in the run, I can nod and say, “Yeah that’s cool,” but those aren’t the things that stood out at me in the individual storylines; it wasn’t an art issue, either, it’s that the way Morrison wrote the interactions of the characters, they just don’t work for me as believable people. Whatever the ideas in the story, I don’t think they’re executed well, dramatically speaking. My criticism is very subjective, and it’s honestly been years since I read most of this stuff, so I probably can’t match you detail- for-detail, but that’s my general impression.
I do agree that a lot of the X-Men stories to happen since then haven’t been as good — though I am a fan of the Whedon run; I think his work really addressed some of the character problems that I saw in New X-Men, particularly re: Scott and Emma — though his character work there has been pretty much ignored by subsequent writers.
So Seth is saying we should read basically the same thing with very little real variation for decades and decades, but three years of new ideas is…’enough’?
Well now, he never said you had to read the rest 😉
@Stig: He’s saying that thee years of new ideas, of one writer’s voice being see through to completion, is plenty, and then it’s time for more new ideas. Not that we should stay in Claremont Land forever, I don’t think.
@Steve: and yet Bendis cited Miller has his biggest inspiration for DD and even gave the eisner he won for DD to Miller.
That’s true, but Miller didn’t out Daredevil’s secret identity to the public at large, nor did he make Matt the Kingpin of New York. Bendis certainly used some elements of Miller’s work, like Eletra, Ben Urich and, most notably, the enmity between Daredevil and Wilson Fisk. Yet he used them to tell his own stories. In fact, Brubaker’s run might’ve been even more Miller-centric: Bru even brought back the mighty Turk! Oh, and he had Matt’s love interest suffer a terrible fate.
As for Seth’s comments (which I’m surprised have gotten this much analysis, but I suppose it’s flattering, in a way!), I think he’s just saying that what comes after New X-Men doesn’t really matter, since we’ll always have New X-Men to go back to. In three years, we had about 14 stories that formed part of one giant “mega-story” (Grant Morrison’s always been fond of superlative prefixes :p). This during Marvel’s decompression era! I’d certainly love to see more well-written X-Men stories with new ideas, but until then, there’s plenty of New X-Men I can go re-read.
The weirdest thing about Igor Kordey’s (horrific) art was that I remember a lot of reviewers at the time kept talking about how good it was.
Wonderful write-up. It’s really too bad New X-Men had so much working against it: can you even imagine how legendary the run would be had Frank Quitely done art for every issue? I personally think the story falls apart a bit after Magneto comes into play, but considering how long and otherwise fantastic the series is, this is certainly forgivable.
Igor Kordey was great.
like a less cartoony Risso.
I really liked the “stick in the mud, generic, leader type” Cyclops and think that version of the character would recover from being possessed by Apocalypse, so Morrison’s version of Cyclops felt very off to me.
If Igor Kordey is a great artist, he never showed it on X-Men. His stuff was unintelligible mush, and looked very hurried.
“Marvel hasn’t totally run from it, though. You can still buy the series in three handsome softcover volumes. I absolutely recommend it. It’s definitely my favorite X-Men story.”
they also released the entire damn arc in one single hardcover.
@John Foley:
thats because he had to finish those new xmen comics extra quick after FQ missed a deadline.
his art was very solid to me, even those rushed ones had a realism a solid feeling.
Good stuff, a very interesting reading of Morrison’s stuff and everything Marvel (didn’t) do with it. And I agree, it really is too bad that Marvel went back to the same old stuff (and I actually like the same old stuff, but something was really lost here).
I’m surprised at that comment by Claremont. I assumed that he at least somewhat liked Morrison’s New X-Men, because of the way he made Cassandra Nova the big bad at the end of X-Men: The End.
Now that I think about it, I wonder if we’re ever going to see Nova again. She had this big introduction in New X-Men, was the main villain of X-Men: The End, and Whedon used her as the villain in his third arc of Astonishing X-Men, and then… nothing at all. Kinda sucks, she was pretty awesome.
My favorite comic writer with my favorite cast of superheroes. Its was fresh, it was fun, it was bursting with new ideas and great scenes. And after 3 years it was over. I have the New X-men Omnibus, the Astonishing X-men Omnibus, and thats it. Everything afterwards has been such a huge step back, with the constant crossovers, darkgrittydark violence, way too many characters that never get proper paneltime, and ugly artwork(although those rushed Kordley issues during Morrison’s run were AWFUL).
Oh well. At least we still have New X-men.
I could not possibly agree more.
I believe that since Claremont first “left” the X-books in the early 90’s, the entire franchise has suffered a mother of an identity crisis, with the only exception being Morrison’s work.
Now, all remnants have been clusterfucked away. Fraction is not doing a credible job, and his dramatic lateness in turning in scripts is having an even more dramatic impact on who handles the art and how it’s done.
I am not that much of a nostalgic though, I mean I won’t say that Claremont wrote the best X-stories, but his own bi-polar willingness to play along over the past 15 years or so is not helping things either.
I remember reading somewhere that Igor Kordey was actually a very last minute replacement for New X-Men and only had a limited time to work on them.
Morrison’s New X-Men run is probably the high point for the x-titles. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m sure Claremont and Byrne’s run were excellent at the time, but they’ve aged horribly… (in fact I’d say that Fraction’s run on Uncanny right now is almost the anti-claremont in terms of storytelling, tossing away the hackneyed descriptions of characters and instead giving us pop-up blurbs that are both witty and informative.)
But Morrison’s run had so many ideas and concepts that could have added so much to the x-men mythos and Marvel disregards (or cherry picks) them whenever they feel the need. Imagine what the X-Titles would have been like if they took the Daredevil approach (mentioned above) and not done what they’ve done? Would it have destroyed the x-universe, and by extension the marvel u?
It might be interesting to note that one X-Men title DID, in fact, follow up on Grant Morrison’s run in a worthy way. New X-Men: Academy X, by Nunzio DeFillipis and Christina Weir, was all about the next generation of mutants–they didn’t want to be X-Men, they didn’t want to be superheroes, they wanted to learn and build their own lives. It was about friendship, where being a mutant was the situation. I think that it was the perfect successor to what Grant Morrison had built, and a true example of how the franchise could’ve flourished.
Unfortunately, House of M came along and changed everything, and while I did like what the new creative team did with the title–the children were forced to grow up and adapt, to set aside their dreams just to survive–it was very, very different.
I read the whole New X-Men Omnibus this year and it just did not click with me. I loved the idea of a mutant subculture. But the characters did not work. they weren’t sympathetic or even interesting, which made it impossible to be interested in their conflicts.
Angel? Not interesting. And if you’re looking for a new, young girl to hang around with Wolverine, Whedon did it better with Armor.
Quentin Quire? Annoying.
As I said, some great ideas, but they didn’t work for me.
Great article, David.
In Igor Kordey’s defence, he was also working on another book at the same time (Cable or Soldier X). So the blame goes to the editors here, and lest we not forget Frank Quietly’s inability to contribute on a monthly basis. No one’s slating his lack of contributions I see. Still, Morrison’s story was strong enough to pull you that you could overlook the art issues (to me, anyway).
As for my view of New X-Men: totally loved it. Just full of wild ideas, strong character work and a sense of ‘X-Men’ as a science fiction concept. It was wonderful to see a writer and HIS vision let loose on the book, rather than the vision of editorial (of which the X-Men books are always usually dictated by).
Jeez, will Chris Claremont get over it already? He’s had his time on X-Men and his most recent run is proof you can’t go home again. He’s ruined more characters than Bendis.
I mean, Claremont’s x-Treme X-Men/X-Men Forever vs. Morrison’s New X-Men? Getouttahere!
Good on you for writing this. I’ve been sick of hearing people complaining about the Morrison run and celebrating Whedon’s return to yesteryear. I, for one, have felt the opposite, and I just knew there were readers out there who felt the same.
What baffles me about the flight away from New X-Men was that I seem to recall that the comic was selling like gangbusters. Maybe the numbers took a sharp drop in later story lines, I don’t know.
I read somewhere, maybe Wikipedia, about a lot of the behind the scenes stuff where certain voices in editorial were against a lot of the changes going on and started putting their fingers into things. The speed at which they started dismantling New X-Men after Morrison left shows they had planned to undo it for a while.
Also:
Canon is the enemy of good story-telling.
Thank you.
Honestly, I sometimes wondered how I stayed on with X-men as long as I had when I began regularly reading it in 1989. I started post-Inferno, right when Claremont decided to re-arrange the furniture. That was a very confusing time. I was on and off by the mid-90s, where by then I was old enough to hit the Vertigo books, but I did come back for Grant Morrison’s New X-Men, and there were some very maturely themed stories that were well done. From the horrific Genosha-cide (eerily before 9/11 no less) to Xavier outing himself to the whole multitude of mutants of every stripe, sometimes literally, existing in and out of the X-teams. In hindsight, many of those ideas were definitely incredible…just sad that Marvel wasted them. Meanwhile, Chris Claremont’s given a quasi-original X-Men book set in a parallel continuity where he can wipe his ass with the characters as he sees fit, and thankfully aren’t canon. Granted, Claremont in his day (that day ended just after Mutant Massacre IMHO)as well as various artists that accompanied him, spun some good tales that elevated a once cancelled series into iconic status. But he is largely guilty of also aiding in the decline of the franchise. He’s had great rosters of beloved characters, and then writes unreadable trash like X-Treme X-Men vol. 2-Invasion (the saddest moment in my life was reading this trade like I was socked with an assigned reading book I hated for 5th grade English class). Morrison was a grand improvement over his tired-by-1991 approach. Whedon was pretty good too, Austen was a fucking nightmare, Brubaker brought some good ideas to the table as well and I’m undecided on Fraction for now. But I hope someone will try to pick up on some plot point of Morrison’s someday.
You know who helped Morrison Ruin the X-Men.
Peter Milligan/Mike Allred’s X-Force/X-Statix also helped drag the X-Books books into the future. It really dealt with Minorities with Fame and Celebrity, it was a great, if NXM was Jordan then that book was clearly Rodman (where my Omnibus for that instead of Brubaker current still in print in dumb amount of versions Captain America)
and Joe Casey’s Uncanny, reading Poptopia the same time as E is for Extinction was some good comics and Casey is one of the few who can role with Morrison in his playfield.
Joe Q messed up the X-Men and mutantity over beef. And cause of that we got the boring ass Avengers watching TV and biting the X-men’s Steelo from 1995.
I agree on every point (except I loved Whedon’s Astonishing run- yes all of it).
Also, I agree about X-Statix commenter. It was soooo good. That was our little golden age and it’s just been downhill since. It sucks to be an X-fan right now.
My problem with alot of pro-Morrison New X-Men folks (I’m so so on the run) is that their analysis sounds so much better than what was actually on the page. Morrison had nice ideas, but his execution was downright awful in places. His dialogue was trying so hard to be “clever” that it was stiff in many places throughout his run. And to be truthful, most of his stories were really just updated rehashes of stories that came before.
As for the whole minority thing, I am that black person that keeps getting mentioned in this conversation about Morrison’s New X-Men and subculture. And frankly, as an African American male I’m disgusted by the idea that Morrison is the X-Writer the majority of comic fans thing got the minority metaphor right. Personally, I don’t think a single writer has ever really hit on it, but if people Morrison was the closest…dear lord. Morrison’s mutants were drug users, pathetically poor, partiers, caused alot of public damage, and didn’t seem to do much actual improving. Is that what people think of when they hear minorities?
Maybe they do. Because that’s what Morrison often comes off to me as on a personal leve. The guy trying to hard to get in with the “cool, avant garde” crowd. So it doesn’t surprise that his white interpretation of what it means to be a minority shows minorities in anything but a positive light. And it doesn’t suprise me that alot of his white fandom is loving the run because it feeds into white misconceptions about minorities and feeds into them.
And my previous post is full of errors. Apologies. Its what happens when I’m typing in the passion of the moment.
[…] David Brothers fingers another culprit with “Grant Morrison ruined the X-Men” , although you may find his definition of “ruined” different that you are accustomed […]
While meeting someone at Borders the other day I decided to read The Rise and Fall of the Shi’Ar Empire and I was really shocked at just how flat and unreadable it all came off as being when Brubaker ranks among my favorite writers these days. I found myself skipping large portions of it because it just felt like a bunch of massive two page fight scenes strung together with awful dialogue and it occurred to me that I really don’t care that much about the X-Men unless there’s an authorial voice that’s strong enough to make me care about it.
Morrison and Whedon had the juice to achieve that but I think that Brubaker just got sucked into the jet engine this time. I didn’t read Mike Carey’s run but it looked to be more stuff focusing on characters I don’t care about.
I tried to do this again a bit later with Messiah Complex and found that I had the same sorts of problems. At least Jason Aaron’s Wolverine is pretty good.
@Julian Lytle:
An addendum: Milligan’s X-Force/Statix were also comics about IDEAS and that went really well with Morrison’s run. The X-Men that currently exists isn’t coming anywhere near that stuff as I’m reading it because it seems to be getting sucked back into the ludicrous continuity vortex with all the time travel, potential futures, and Cyclops deciding that he really needs a bad ass black ops team in black and grey uniforms to slaughter their enemies instead of ‘reforming’ them.
Off topic, but does anyone get a real Kordey vibe from Philip Tan on Batman and Robin? It has the same sort of blobby, shitty, unfinished look from an artist that I at least consider to be borderline acceptable most of the time.
Morrison knows “subculture” not “minority culture” He has something to say about being an outsider and I am totally fine with his limitations. It is the responsibility of the editors to build on his foundation. There was a totally inability to show-run, to create an overarching culture to expand on Morrison’s run and build something to retain his audience. The management had multiple titles they could easily find the creators that actually understood the themes that X-Men was supposed to be about and move in new directions. I left comics because the management is totally unable to a grow, mature, innovate, or appeal to anything beyond 13yo white males.
and lately I have been reading comic blogs, they could easily get me back if they wanted to
@Brent Lambert: I’m black, too, and our anecdotal evidence differs. I’m not part of the “white fandom” that’s buying into your criticisms. Also note that I never used the word minority– that was a very conscious choice on my part.
I’d argue with the idea that all the mutants were drug using poor folks. There was a clear range displayed, from independently wealthy to lower class, and all of the “drug users” were villains.
Were the X-Men supposed to improve anything? They struck me more as human beings than superheroes, and they did a lot of very human things.
@Julian Lytle: X-Statix was hard body, and I wish Joe Casey had come in with a slightly tighter plan. He could’ve been great. Poptopia, as is, is good, but I don’t know what went wrong.
@one zen bullet: Brubaker is a good writer, and has written some amazing books, but his Uncanny run was very much not good.
@david brothers:
Love Bru. I just think that even his genius for dialogue was completely hamstrung by the fact that the X-Men playground is so much more editorially restricted than something like Sleeper. I admire him for not just sticking with the stuff that he is clearly really, really good at (noir/espionage/crime, just imagine him doing a Wolverine MAX story with Sean Phillips that inhabits the same sorts of grey areas as Sleeper) but it may be that mutant filled space adventure with bird people is not his forte.
I’m white, but even I can see the sort of effect that any sort of mutant culture would have on 616 given how all of the “hated and feared” ethnicities set all the cultural trends on the planet that we live on, at least in the US and Europe.
Marvel needs to leave their comfort zone of their now 40 year old storylines and move on, and really when they hit the big reset button after Morrison laid the groundwork for some actually interesting future storylines but they quickly had to run shrieking back to ridiculous costumes, time travel, X-Traitors, Acolytes, Morlocks, and all the other stuff that I find so hard to read about it.
@Shane: Actually New Mutants was the characters not wanting to be superheroes. New X-men:Academy X was when they were divided up into squads and began heavy training.
Fantastic article, David. I agree 100%.
Strangely, the book that i thought ran with the “mutants minority culture” strand the best was “District X”– the only Reload book that didn’t **** all over Morrison’s run. No one bought it and House of M made it irrelevant. ****.
To see where Morrison’s X-men could have went after he left, one only has to look at the miniseries X-men Icons Chamber. The book, unsurprisingly written by Brian K Vaughan, explores the campus of a New York University that accepts mutants. It explores people’s rational (not the irrational bullshit that’s everywhere in recent X-men books) fears of mutants, and how they would be integrated into a college like situation. There’s a character who hates mutants, but that’s because one accidentally killed his parents and crippled him (I believe, or at least it is something like that). The character actually evolves through the book, and tries to break down his own prejudices. He realises they are a little irrational but holds onto them slightly due to the emotional trauma.
The book goes on to have people get hurt by Mutants. If there are people who can shot fire out of their bodies, and do so with little discretion (probably a slight at other X-men books’ tendency) then people will get hurt, and people will die. But even on that note, it’s not only physical damage. One girl who has an ugly physical mutation as well as illusion powers, use her powers to manipulate the people around her. This unsurprisingly ends of hurting not only the people around her, but herself in the process.
It’s actually quite shocking how well Vaughan explores the idea of “mutants as minority” in the book considering it’s a spotlight miniseries on Chamber. I would almost go so far as to say he did it better than Morrison did, to a certain extent.
All I really hope, is that Marvel had the smarts to ask him to take over once Morrison was finished, but he refused to move on to the better creator owned projects we all know him for. Otherwise Marvel is stupid beyond belief, though that wouldn’t be much of a shock would it?
I know. I am late with my comment. But: It is so true. The X-Men needed to move forward, and when they finally managed to get a little, just a tiny little bit past the total, when everything was finally advanced and ready to go to a bigger stage …
…Mutants no More.
Thank you so much. Now it’s all “Days of Future Past” again. I have no better word for these decisions than: Fail, Fail, Fail!
But it’s not only the mutants suffering from that. The whole comic “industry” – consumers as well as producers – is afraid to move on. The status enver really changes. It adapts as much as it is neccessary to survive (The X-Men today are certainly somewhat different from the X-Men we’ve read in the 80s and before that), but there is no adapation even one bit more than that. In the end everything stays the same. And only yet another, more severe comic industry crash can change that, I fear.
Mutant Town is probably my favourite Marvel concept, and it sums up what I love about the Morrison run.
It’s a ghetto, a symptom of increasing cultural isolation, and yet it’s a vibrant, fascinating place. Multi-ethnic and multi-species, it’s a fashion hub, a music mecca, a place of strange and wonderful things. It’s a little glimpse of the future of the human race, not just Marvel’s human race but perhaps the end destination of multiculturalism: a place of strange fusions of different cultures and species, with nearly limitless human potential all crammed together in a few bohemian streets.
Perhaps I’m reading too much into a place that featured in a few panels, but I really, really like the idea of this whole new world, of mutants being mutants — with all that implies, exotic isolated superior creative glorious beautiful dangerous and strange — in their own setting. It’s a single throwaway idea, just a few lines of set-up for one of Morrison’s more mediocre stories, but you could get a thousand stories from that one concept alone. The first mutant politicians, Harvey Milks who can set the stage alight and set themselves on fire; mixed-mutant-human families, the culture clash between an increasingly insular and exotic mutant culture pushing the boundaries of human imagination and the ‘norms’; mutant fashion, mutant music, weird and exotic stuff that challenges the audience and inspires us to question the limits of our own conceptions. (OK, I mostly really like the mutant politicians thing.)
That’s mostly nonsense, of course, caused by typing too late at night. But I really, really like the concept of Mutant Town. And here’s the thing — that’s ONE idea. There are dozens more like it in the Morrison run — the U-Men, Sublime, the ‘five generations of humans left’ — each of which should be fuelling the entire creative direction of the Marvel Universe.
But, well, they’re not. But reading Morrison gives me that wonderful, childlike sense of infinite possibilites; there are thousands of stories that could spring from every sentence, if only there were time to write them.
@Brothers- I’d argue with you that the majority of the mutants shown were involved in some sort of deviant behavior during Morrison’s run. Not to mention, just the out and out lack of proper characterization during Morrison’s run. Xavier teetered more and more to being like Magneto with every issue and Morrison essentially started the whole “drag Xavier through the mud” movement that has carried on till today. With the exception of Carey’s fabulous exploration of the character.
And yes I would argue that the X-Men were supposed to improve things. They started off with that very intention to improve human/mutant relations. It’s in their mission statement. Whether or not that’s been strictly followed through their publication history is up for debate, but even if it hasn’t been that doesn’t give Morrison a carte blanche to move away from that. MLK was a very human person who was out to improve things. So why is it so “momentous” for Morrison to move away from that?
Morrison had alot of great and fantastic ideas true enough, but without proper execution, respect for history and without proper characterization they fell flat just about every time.
Agree on all points David. Morrison seems to employ a scorched earth approach to franchises. At least he was honest about it when he wrote All Star Superman as “The Last Superman Story”.
And let’s stop with the Igor Kordy hate please. He was keeping Cable on a monthly schedule AND pumping out X-Men scripts a week at a time. Does anyone realize what an insane amount of work that is. And it wasn’t the tightest rendering but the panel design was innovative and served the story better than any flashy, crosshatch obsessed, Jim Lee clone any day of the week. Igor Kordy mostly left American comics because he did a company a huge favor, and was rewarded with a shit sandwich from “the fans”.
@Heard: So the fans if they don’t like something are supposed to keep their mouths closed about it because the guy is working really hard in the background? The fans don’t know that. They just go by what they see on the cover and if what they saw on the cover was shit in their opinion then they have EVERY right to complain about, especially given the price of comics nowadays.
I hate when fans are blamed for creators not having tough enough skin. When you’re in the media industry then you better damn well be prepared to get scrutinized. If you can’t handle it then don’t blame the fans. Blame your own lack of balls.
[…] concise perspective on what Grant Morrison ultimately did to and for the X-Men, please check out a recent posting by David Brothers on the 4th Letter. Unlike Newsarama, where I intentionally stayed off the boards most of the time, any and all […]
I disagree with some of your points. First of all, Quitely did most of the covers for Igor Kordy. Second: the major complaint by fans at the time was late issues. Igor got the book rolling fast enough to several issues out a month and get the book back on schedule. The complaint then becomes “wauuh the art is sloppy and rushed. Igor Kordey is a bad artist.” What? The man who drew
As to him being thinskinned, I’ll let him speaki for himself: “He earns enough to keep his trap shut and behave and his art sucks anyway! Always the same verses, like parrots. You know what, I don’t think I care so much anymore. I realized they don’t deserve me.”
And you do have EVERY right to complain, but it shows very bad taste on your part to shit on anyone for their artistic expression. Vote with your money. If you don’t like it keep your cash in your pocket.
Sorry Brent if typos and lack of hyperlinks makes my previous post unintelliable
I meant to write: . . . the man who drew this:
http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/soldierx8.jpg
is a bad artist?
Again, the logic there is flawed. If I have brought something then once I buy it I have every right to complain about it being shitty. And when I said covers, I just meant the art in the story. So my apologies for that being unclear.
And by your logic if I complain about not having any food and someone hands me some half-rotted meat then I shouldn’t complain because I at least got food. Does that make sense?
Now me, I don’t care one way or another about Kordey. I didn’t like his art, but I toughed through it. Someone else might not feel the same way about. and if that really is a Kordey quote you pulled out then he comes off as extremely arrogant. “They don’t deserve me”. Seriously, who does this guy think he is?
That’s actually a pretty cool piece of art. But like I said, I’m not one way or the other about Kordey. I’m just speaking up for the fans who may have had a problem with him.
I sort of hate this general “anti-fan” attitude that seems to exist in comics. Its like you’re not an intellectual comic fan if you don’t bash other fans and creators seem to enjoy taking digs at the people helping to pay their bills. I don’t get it.
This is entirely beside the point of the post, but the problem with Igor Kordey is that he drew objectively ugly issues of New X-Men. It doesn’t matter if he did someone a solid, or if he’s a great artist, or any of that– what matters is that he was asked to do a job, he accepted the job, and he returned subpar work. Good artists can draw bad things, and Kordey drew some very, very bad things. His work on Cable was aight to good. From what I saw of it, Smoke looked pretty decent. His New X-Men work? That work was dire.
“And you do have EVERY right to complain, but it shows very bad taste on your part to shit on anyone for their artistic expression. Vote with your money. If you don’t like it keep your cash in your pocket.”
Seriously? “You can complain, but it proves you have bad taste?” He drew ugly pictures, people didn’t like the ugly pictures, end of story. The background stuff doesn’t matter. He could have said no, he could have drawn something pretty, who cares. What matters is what’s on the page.
Yeah sorry for the thread drift. My overall point is that “bad” and ugly is highly subjective, not objective. While the execution was rushed “what’s on the page” are amazing fundamentals of design and draftsmanship behind “the ugly”. People hate on Quitely and Richard Corben because their “characters look ugly”. I’m sure you would agree with me that their wrong.
My whole point about complaining bout someone’s art is that it follows the “if you don’t have anything nice to say” rule. I know that might seem quaint in the fanworld where everyone is a critic, and even stupid on a comic criticism blog, but I never thought it was polite to declare an artist bad, even ones I dislike.
@Daniel Heard: I think we have differing definitions of polite. What you’re suggesting, never criticizing an artist’s work (and criticize is used here not to mean dissing, but the relevant definition– examining, pulling out its highs and lows) is, to me, fundamentally intellectually dishonest. If I’m talking about a work, I’m going to have to make judgments about every facet of it. Sometimes I love all of it (Flex Mentallo, Vimanarama, 100 Bullets). Sometimes I love half of it (NXM [writing], Ultimates [art]). Sometimes I don’t like any of it.
If I’m going to talk about a work, I have to convey that, and sometimes that judgment is “This is bad.” It doesn’t matter that it’s “highly subjective.” What does objective criticism mean? The art (movies, music, writing, comics, whatever whatever) I enjoy is based off my interests and experiences in life. Is there an objective grade that I can give art?
I’d argue that what Kordey drew in NXM did not feature the “amazing fundamentals of design and drafstmanship.” I’m thinking particularly of the shot of Emma Frost sitting in the chair, warped and ugly and leering at the reader. I’m not denying that Kordey can draw good things. I enjoyed what I (vaguely) remember of Soldier X. His Unknown Soldier covers were good. His New X-Men art? That was bad. He rushed it and it shows.
I don’t think that calling something bad is impolite. It may be blunt, but it’s also honest. I’d rather read someone who isn’t afraid of calling something bad because it’s impolitic than someone who tip-toes around the issue.
If someone calls Corben and Quitely bad, that’s cool. I disagree and can come up with sound reasons why. I’m sure that they can come up with reasons why they’re bad. Shoot, I could probably come up with reasons why Quitely shouldn’t draw superheroes. I wouldn’t agree with them, but they’d be logically sound.
In shorter words, though, calling something bad isn’t impolite, and “if you don’t have anything nice to say” is a great rule for kids. Adults are allowed to be honest, because they understand that they have to support their views and tact and things like that.
F@david brothers: Fair enough. I can absolutely see the validity of every point you made. I definitely disagree with a few of them (I might’ve used the much despised Emma Frost drawing as an example of great IK art). But that would just bring us back around to your main point.
Thanks for having this discussion with me. It could have easily gotten mean spirited and ugly, but instead it was illuminating. Cheers.
@Daniel Heard: No problem, man. I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the hows and why of criticism lately, and welcome any chance to see if those ideas work in the real world.
Wow I read all of this and I’d have to side with Daniel on this. I think if people knew how hard drawing a comic book was, the fact that he did what he did in that time frame is amazing. I really had no problem with it when I bought it. I liked it. Then learning even more about when he had to do, amazed the hell out of me. So I do have a problem when people call it bad or ugly, in my mind I think “lets see you do that in a week” or ” I bet your favorite artist can’t even draw a book in month”. Most people who talk about comics in person or online have really no idea how to really critique a work, so most of the time (and this is a bit pretentious) I see them as “lames”.
@Julian Lytle: The problem with that, though, is that it means we can’t talk about anything except in the most positive of ways. I can’t talk about how the Falcons fell apart for a few years because I’m not as good a football coach as whoever follow up Dan Reeves in 03/04. I can’t talk about the OSU/Michigan game, or any Buckeyes game where they’ve choked, because I’m not as good at being on an offensive line or linebacking like any of these cats. I can’t even say that some movie I saw was boring or bad, because those guys undoubtedly have more experience in that realm than I do.
“Let’s see you do better” doesn’t work as a critique of critique. Personally, I don’t want to do comics. I like talking about them and reading them. And part of that is weighing the good and the bad, what works and why. I mean, Howard Mackie wrote a gang of comics in the ’90s, and a lot of people liked them, but I didn’t. I’m wrong for saying that when I haven’t written comics? That doesn’t make any sense, particularly when I’ve never said I could do better.
Exactly David! And Julian, you’re right what you said is pretty pretentious. It’s the same kind of people with the mindset kicked up a notch who knock comics as “pop art” with no real literary impact. But bottom line is this for me. If I spend my hard earned money on something and I don’t like it then I have absolutely every right to complain. Was Kordey going to refund every person who didn’t like his work in an effort to shut them up? Naw he got his paycheck and went on about his business.
@david brothers: Nothing in my comment says you can’t talk about it. But you also shouldn’t catch feeling when someone comments on your comments, especially when they look at it from a different angle. They way you some of you were talking is that since Daniel view was influence by the process of creating the issue that it is wrong or flawed. But its not, thats just not part of thought process when reading a comic. My critiques on an issue will change the more I know about what went into it, the same with any creative work.
@Brent Lambert: I can be those people, but I see them as art, not really “pop art” cause it really doesn’t have any of what those artists were doing in the art. Comics is its own thing. An if someone doesn’t consider them art, I’d call them a lame also. But I know I can back up what I say with art history I had to do for school and my continued looking at work.
You have every single right to say what you want, but there is also nothing wrong with someone challenging you.
None of you may want to draw a comic ever, but making a comic is DUMB hard. And to hear that your work “sucks” or whatever else is said on Newsarama or back then on the Marvel Forums doesn’t feel great either. I’d say fuck it and bounce do something else also. How about chastising Marvel for having poor scheduling for having to have some do a comic in a week. That is what sucked.
@Julian Lytle: I’m not catching feelings. I don’t mind people disagreeing with me. Other people know things I don’t and that’s always interesting to find out. It’s half the reason why I write in public, instead of sticking it in some diary somewhere. When people bring up things I hadn’t considered, I roll them over in my head and see if they make sense.
I knew the history of Kordey on NXM, and yeah, turning around an issue in a week is impressive, but that doesn’t make it any more attractive. I don’t think Daniel’s opinion of Kordey (or Quitely or Kirby or Romita or Otomo or whoever) is wrong, either. I didn’t like Kordey’s work on NXM, I liked it on Soldier X. My main issue with what Daniel said was the idea that we can’t call things bad because it’s impolite. I disagreed with that, explained myself, we agreed to disagree on a few points, done.
@Julian Lytle: Yea I understand making a comic can be hard, but so are alot of things. Fixing a transmission isn’t easy, but are you going to cut the mechanic slack if he doesn’t fix yours correctly and you break down on the side of the road? Flying a plane isn’t easy, but are you going to cut the pilot slack if he takes your plane straight into the middle of a thunderstorm when he could have avoided it? We don’t cut people slack when it comes to practical things so why should they be cut slack when it comes to entertainment?
Kordey may have had a shitty schedule, but its a schedule he accepted and he sure took the money Marvel gave him didn’t he? And I love a good debate so trust if someone wants to challenge what I say then go on right ahead. Conversation enlivens me.
@Brent Lambert:
Its more like if someone gives a mechanic 30 minutes to fix my transmission, and it breaks.
I’m going to blame the person in charge.
When Pilots mess up, usually they are fired, but you sue the airline, cause they frakked up.
Marvel should have done a better job that they didn’t have to have Kordey do it in a week. Its their bad. That’s who I hold accountable if I had a problem with it. Just like anything else in life.
@Julian:
But did that mechanic not go into that job knowing good and well he was going to be doing shoddy work?
That’s like saying all of Maddoff’s cronies should be let off the hook because the top man was responsible for rolling the ball. That’s backwards logic and lets people off the hook that shouldn’t be.
Is Marvel in the wrong for rushing Kordey? Yes. But Kordey is JUST AS MUCH in the wrong for taking on a job that he knew he couldn’t complete to a satisfactory matter. If my supervisor tells me to complete a task in a time frame that I know will produce sub-par work I am sure to let her know about it.
At the end of the day, every person is responsible for their own actions regardless of the command structure. Blaming your boss for doing bad work can only go so far and it won’t slide nine times out of ten in the real world.
@Brent Lambert: You and Julian both have valid points here, and I think this is just going to go around in circles, so let’s just call it a draw.
Agreed lol.
The real gripe is Jean Grey going away, but in Xmen lore, mutants do die from time to time.. although usually not the big characters. I am STILL angry about Magik (aka) Illyana. But in this case it’s not a question of bad writing just the negative loss of Jean… because some of use (me) just like Jean more than Emma… it does however get her out of Scotts hands and set up the future relationship with Logan.. like it should be.
For BAD writing see Joe Quesada’s Spider man. THAT is bad.