Grant 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.

I wanted to revisit and expand on the “HEROES DON’T KILL” post from yesterday, since it prompted some conversation.

My biggest problem with HEROES DON’T KILL as a hard-line rule is that it stems from the days when comics were meant for children and suffered under the tyranny of the Comics Code. Heroes must be pure and heroic at all times, and killing was right out. For children, that’s fine. Simple morality tales are an easy way to introduce the social contract. What’s racism? Racism is bad. What’s war? War is bad. And so on.

The problem is that comics grew up with their audience, and writers started stretching the limits of believability in an attempt to appear grown up. Every time a villain broke out of jail, he’d have to do something worse to top the previous story. Joker evolves from the Clown Prince of Crime to the Thin White Duke of Death, and every breakout spreads death and decay by the dozen. Norman Osborn goes from a guy who killed a girl once and wanted to run the underworld into a scheming plotter capable of faking several deaths, ruining even more lives, and torturing whoever he likes.

At a certain point, in the quest to give heroes something to fight against, the creators of these comics have made the heroes look like failures. Batman: Arkham Asylum, the recent video game, is an excellent example. No matter what he does, or who he rescues, nothing he does matters. You can idly rescue a couple of asylum patients and workers in the game, but when you re-enter that area, whoops, look at that, they’re dead. Sometimes you get there in time to see an inmate beating their brains in, but it’s too late to save them. It makes Batman look inept, like all he can do is stand there in his long johns trying to hold back an unstoppable tide of pure evil.

It’s not any better in the comics. Villains break out of jail, murder a few people, go after the hero, and then go back to jail. Eighteen of our months later (if we’re lucky, and we usually aren’t) and they do it again. And again. And again. The body count rises, the hero thinks about all the lives that have been lost and feels bad about it, and then does the exact same thing again. Lather, rinse the blood off your hands, and repeat.

What’s even worse is the sliding scale of acceptable killing. Sentient beings from computer monsters to aliens? Murder at will. However, a guy who has, over the course of maybe six months at most, shot down an airplane full of civilians to see if a hero would catch it, ordered the death of several American citizens, hired mass murderers and villains under false pretenses, engaged in military actions in foreign lands, and placed scads of people who are loyal only to him in various sensitive places in the federal government? That guy is strictly off-limits.

See? Ms. Marvel is three things here. Creepy, smug, and a hypocrite. Why is it okay to kill aliens and not humans? Is that where “Thou shalt not kill” stops? “You weren’t born in Peoria, you’re fair game?”

It’s the hypocrisy that bugs me more than anything. When Hawkeye says that the Avengers should kill a man who has killed Spider-Man’s girlfriend, kidnapped his child, ruined the life of a good friend, created a vicious cycle of hate that infected Peter’s best friend Harry and his son, faked Aunt May’s death, and tortured Spider-Man for days… Spider-Man’s reaction, realistically, shouldn’t be to whine about how heroes don’t kill ever ever ever no matter what.

I’m not saying that all heroes should be bang bang shootem up all the time. That’s stupid. There are several perfectly good reasons not to kill someone, and killing would ruin the charm of certain characters. I don’t think Superman should ever kill anyone. Spider-Man, as the ultimate street level everyman hero, probably shouldn’t kill anyone, either.

(though back when i cared about that sort of thing, i realized that the one instance where spidey would kill would be if and when norman snaps, kidnaps MJ, or maybe Baby May, and it’s his last choice. he’d do it, and he wouldn’t feel good about it, but he wouldn’t regret it, either.)

But, to pretend that heroes should never kill, while their enemies continually up the ante and stack atrocity on top of atrocity and shoot past irredeemable and on into genocidal… you start to notice the guy behind the curtain. That’s when you realize just how the sausage is made and start caring less and less. Black Adam has millions of deaths on his resume. Vandal Savage destroyed Montevideo. Deathstroke’s blown up Bludhaven, and, along with Cheshire, nuked the capital of Qurac. Mongul destroyed Coast City.

At some point, you have to weigh your peace of mind and so-called moral high ground against thousands upon thousands of lost lives. And sometimes… it’s worth the sacrifice.

And that’s why the hard-line HEROES DON’T KILL is childish to me. It’s applying a black and white morality to a situation that doesn’t fit it any more. Back when Spider-Man was created, Doc Ock was killing people mainly by accident. Green Goblin just wanted to run the mob. Now? Now villains completely undercut the hero by simply existing, and every time we get one of the “I’m better than you, I don’t kill” scenes, or the scenes where the hero fights hard to save a villain’s life so that he can sleep soundly at night… well, I roll my eyes.

All I want is to see some nuance and maturity when taking on the idea of heroes killing, rather than heroes with barely a leg to stand on preaching directly at me. It’s not clever, it’s not smart, and we’re not children. Garth Ennis got it with his portrayal of the Punisher. It’s not even hard or really very complicated. Sometimes, the hard choice, the bad choice, the unreasonable choice, is the best possible choice to make. Sometimes you have to do bad to do good.

Okay, and this Chad fellow, too.  For those of you unwilling to scroll down two entries, I’ll re-post David’s entry in full:

Chad Nevett on New Avengers #58:

Yeah, here’s the thing: not killing bad guys doesn’t make you better than them, it makes you a fucking pussy. It makes you responsible for everything negative they do after that point. No grey areas, no moral questions, no debates about what’s heroic and what’s not. […] I hate superhero comics for pretending that letting villains live is somehow the morally superior thing to do, because it’s not.

If you listened to the Fourcast! this week, and you should have, you’d know that I agree with every word Chad says. I wanted to have a longer excerpt, but it’s a pretty short review. Go read it.

Chad and David both seem to agree that in comics heroes should be able to occasionally kill villains.  I agree, with specific exceptions, with this general idea.

Where we differ crucially is what ‘killing’ means.  To quote Chad:

Should they kill every mugger ala the Punisher? No. Should they kill Norman Osborn when the chance arises? Um, yeah.

‘Killing’ someone encompases a variety of different concepts, from pre-planned murder to accidental manslaughter to legitimate self-defense.  I think that, if the situation were to arise in which a hero had to kill a villain in order to save the life of that villain’s intended victim, they should, morally, kill the villain.  That’s killing someone.

Killing Norman Osborn, or the Joker, or whoever else, when ‘the chance arises’ is not just killing someone.  That’s an execution.  There is a very distinct meaning to that, and there are very different consequences for it. Read the rest of this entry �

You can read the first four issues of David Lapham’s Stray Bullets here, completely free. It’s one of my favorite series, with issue 7 being one of my favorite single issues ever.

Hopefully SB comes back soon. You can get volume 1 used off Amazon, but most of the series is out of print.

Chad Nevett on New Avengers #58:

Yeah, here’s the thing: not killing bad guys doesn’t make you better than them, it makes you a fucking pussy. It makes you responsible for everything negative they do after that point. No grey areas, no moral questions, no debates about what’s heroic and what’s not. […] I hate superhero comics for pretending that letting villains live is somehow the morally superior thing to do, because it’s not.

If you listened to the Fourcast! this week, and you should have, you’d know that I agree with every word Chad says. I wanted to have a longer excerpt, but it’s a pretty short review. Go read it.

Greg Rucka and Matthew Southworth’s Stumptown opens with two gunshots and ends with a revelation. What lies between those pages are clever world and character-building, a problem to be solved, the introduction of multiple threats to Dex, our heroine, a couple of reveals, and an all-around fine grasp of craft.

Stumptown feels like Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’s Criminal. Not in tone, of course, since Criminal is positively lurid at times, but in a more nebulous way. It feels like a book these guys are doing because they believe in it and enjoy it, rather than being paid by someone else to tell new stories about old characters. Though I will say that the lettering does remind me of Criminal, with its ragged edges and raw look.

Rather than resembling Criminal‘s “No way out but the hard way out” world, Stumptown feels much more like a Chandler novel, and Dex fits an oft-quoted Chandler piece:

The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor — by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.

Dex is flawed (she gambles), but she is also honest and caring and a woman of honor, as we see over the 35 pages of Stumptown. When confronted with someone who is scared, she reacts in a way that a hero should. Dex is just a little offbeat enough to seem real.

The characters Dex encounters in the book show that she’s been around for a while. It paints a picture of a shared history without being overbearing or too cute about it. Ansel, her brother, is well known around town, and many characters express concern about his welfare. It actually comes off a little like they don’t quite trust Dex all the way and want to be sure that she’s actually taking care of business. I like that Rucka left it open enough to give us some wiggle room to figure these things out.

The art’s good. Not great, but good. It’s pretty raw and scratchy, and reminds me quite a bit of Michael Gaydos. Southworth excels at conversation scenes and the use of space, giving Stumptown a very tense and claustrophobic feel. Places look and feel real. There’s a wide shot on a rich man’s house that looks excellent. However, Southworth’s not so great on action scenes, though those are few and far between in this issue. The scenes look a little too stiff, a little too posed, for my tastes.

I really like Southworth’s willingness to let the character’s faces do the acting. A crinkled eyebrow, slumped shoulders, and a sheepish smile go a very long way with me. My hands-down favorite panel in the book is the one where a character steps back into a doorway after leaving a room and places both hands on the doorframe. It speaks volumes.

Stumptown #1: it’s a good read and a good start to the series, with an engaging script by Rucka and solid art by Southworth. I could go for a more kinetic feel to the action sequences, but this doesn’t seem like that kind of book so far. If you like the feel of Gotham Central or Alias, this is basically what you’ve been waiting for since both of those were cancelled. Fans of Criminal should also be pleased, though this one’s on the opposite side of the law.

…is three months away. I know.

I’ve had a revelation over the past few months. I don’t really have any interest at all in doing another 28 day marathon talking about black people and comic book characters/superheroes. I just don’t care, for a variety of reasons too deep to go into today but which will undoubtedly leak out over the next few months.

However, that doesn’t mean I don’t want to represent. I just want to do it differently than I have before. Comics, and real life, shouldn’t be about the characters. It should be about the creators.

So, a request. Help me out. Drop a comment here or email me with the names of black writers, artists, colorists, editors, whatever. Superheroes, webcomics, mopey comics, indie comics, coloring books, whatever. I want to know. Also, specify if they are actively working or if they’re a classic creator and where I can see them in action.

I’m not exactly sure what I’m doing next year, but I have a vague idea. So, help me help you by helping me gather information. I don’t/can’t read everything, so no suggestion is too dumb or too obvious.

Except I guess Priest or Hudlin or McDuffie. Don’t recommend those guys to me. I already know about them.

Let’s get it.

but he writes the best Superman this side of Grant Morrison.

From JLA/Hitman, a two-issue miniseries that came out a couple years back. Words by Ennis, art by McCrea. DC, get to trading the rest of Hitman asap and include this, thanks.

–Brendan McCarthy Spider-Man. Click or else.

-I have a hate relationship with horror movies, but this essay by Lauren Davis over on io9 about what makes great horror is excellent.

I have to confess, it’s very hard for me to watch horror movies. It’s not that I don’t enjoy the occasional scare, and it’s not that I’m worried about ghosts and monsters following home (although I will confess to a mild fear of zombies). No, it’s just that when the body count starts rising, I start feeling, well, sad. I don’t come out of the theater pumping with adrenaline; I’m too distracted thinking about the people who died and the loved ones they’ve left behind.

Absolutely a must-read.

-You know what’s more exciting than Marvel joining Disney or whatever it was that happened to DC? The Comics Journal reorganizing. Good interview at CBR:

Groth: I see this is an opportunity to create a true web version of “The Comics Journal,” to in effect combine the virtues of both the web and print as I understand them, which is to say, a single “place” where readers can come and expect a consistently intelligent, idiosyncratic, combative, and occasionally clashing conversation about comics and cartooning. Over the past few years I’ve noticed smarter critical commentary on the Net, but it’s scattered all over the place, buried in the usual mountain of frivolous, tepid, dimwitted, unreadable fanboy drivel. There’s no single website you can visit and anticipate a range of interesting sensibilities on an equal footing, so one of my goals is to distill the best criticism and journalism we can into a single site.

I’ve never actually read an issue of TCJ, though I’ve kinda always meant to. I expect to be alternately infuriated at and elated with the content they come up with. Don’t let me down, guys! (Also if you could make past issues, like TCJ 298 for example, available as PDFs for people who don’t really have room in their tiny San Francisco apartments, that’d be great. Muchas smooches.)

-Savage Critic doubleheader! Jog goes in to great effect on the art in the Greg Rucka/JH Williams III Detective Comics (and JHW3 is the coolest initials in comics since edex), and David Uzumeri drops some bombs on the writing.

My own feelings on ‘Tec are complicated. I like the art more than the story, which feels a little pat, so I don’t buy it monthly. However, once the hardcover drops? Ooowhee. I’ll be on Amazon like a shot.

-Tucker Stone looks at comics criticism and kicks some knowledge:

Comics doesn’t have Tastemakers, maybe they did once, but that time is gone. It’s always been a fractured landscape anyway–initial chunks of comics criticism doled out in fanzines or fan clubs, with the occasional academic polemic turned out for audiences in the low hundreds–and the Internet was able to finish the job of fracturing quicker than it’s been able to on music and film. We all do it, you, me, the guy at the store–reading only those who agree with us up until they say something we don’t like, we burn bridges, blog ourselves, trusting no one. After all, That Guy likes Guggenheim’s Blade series–what’s he know? That Girl’s favorite comic last week was some manga about dating–all the smart kids know it was the GI Joe/Cobra Special!

His point about controlling the critique that exists is a good’un.

-Keeping it in the family, Nina Stone has a beautiful slash brutal takedown of Gotham City Sirens.

Mr. Gag Reflex is apparently not over being dissed by Joker, and so the plot is about him taking his breakup feelings out on Harlequin, the Joker’s ex-girlfriend. I don’t know how this completely relates to the issue before, but maybe it means that the Joker and Harlequin aren’t actually over. To be honest, I don’t really care if I ever find out. It took too many pages of overwhelming art to tell this story. Let me explain.

Really, it’s good. Click thru.

-The Funnybook Babylonians want you to call in and leave obscene messages listener mail. Ask question, share an anecdote, and they might just play it on the show. Tell them I sent you.

I usually never dress up for Halloween- didn’t as a kid, had no interest in it as an adult. This year, though, I was shanghai’d into it by Ron Richards of iFanboy and James Sime of Isotope. So, you know, I put on a costume. It wasn’t my fault, they would’ve killed me.

Esther, however, actually enjoys Halloween. She was supposed to come over to record an episode of the Fourcast! this past Saturday. Imagine my surprise when I opened my door and saw, not Esther, but Clark Kent! And in the process of changing to Superman, no less!

Later, I went to a party. While there, I saw not just Superman, but Superman hanging out with The Shade! And wait, Han Solo was around, too? Luckily, Chunk Kelly was on hand to photograph both the teamup of three titans and dynamic duo.

My buddy Star St. Germain also had a pretty awesome costume. We somehow managed to see each other once the whole night, so no pics of us together.

If you got costumes, let’s see ’em.