Grant Morrison’s New X-Men Annual (Part 1 of 2)

[This post is part of a series of posts looking at Grant Morrison's New X-Men run issue by issue; to read the other entries, click the New X-Men label at the bottom of this post. ]

This will be a two part post about the Annual: I have too much to say about the introduction of Xorn, so that will be relegated to the next installment of this little series.

The artwork by Lenil Yu is beautiful -- he does a great job with both sexy and monstrous, and he should have been considered as the regular artist on this book -- he would have been great. He has an especially good effect of "cutting out" his characters from the background and isolating them as pure images, which is a great device on Morrison's attempt to make the X-Men sexy.

Emma, especially, always looks great in his hands. I don't have anything to say about the book's "sideways" format, except that I like it and would like to see it more often.

Scott taking a vow of celibacy the the beginning of this issue is exactly the right direction to take this character -- play up his sex life and him being a zen jackass about it. Once again, it is just wonderful to be in new territory with this character and this book: on no previous X-Men issue could this even be a topic. The whole thing feels more adult, and it should. Morrison is forcing these characters to grow up. Even better, he plays with the idea that Scott sleeps with Emma. The X-Men is always called a soap opera, but it has never felt more like one than with Morrison, and much of it is fantastic.

Sex is brought up twice more in this book, both time to great effect:

Wolverine: So ... you need some company after this gig?
Domino: Can't hide from the man with hypersenses, huh? No strings animal passion, Logan, and you're paying for the drinks.
Wolverine: The Professor hands out platinum credit cards to his teaching staff.
Domino: First things first, honey ... Ninja business.

It takes only a split second to realize why his hypersenses are telling him she wants to have sex, and right in that moment you know the X-Men should never go back again. We don't lose the ninja stuff, but it's working on a fun, sexy, and dangerous new level.

Right on the next page is a much darker sexual moment, when Xorn's jailer reveals that "My fantasy is to have two white girls wrestle in crude oil until they suffocate like gulls on the beaches of Kuwait," a fantasy he admits to accomplishing later on in the issue. There is a lot packed into that sentence, including an instant grasp of his character, a revealing suggesting about the West and its quest for oil, and a realization that this is not so much a new fantasy as the unspeakable base structure under sexual fantasies of, for example, mud wrestling: beyond a "safe" demeaning of women lies the fantasy of killing them.

Violence is also brought up a notch, as the X-Men bomb a facility in China from a plane: "So we're allowed to do stuff like this now," says Wolverine; "Let's see who complains," says Scott. The whole thing feels fresh, both for the readers and the characters, and it is exhilarating. Freedom is a hard feeling to create on a book with continuity like this.

And finally we have the introduction of Mr. Sublime, and the U-Men. Morrison's is a genius for coming up with the name "U-Men (human)" to oppose to "X-Men (mutants)" -- it's hard to believe that no one thought of that before -- and I can't help but love their outfits, designed to shield them from the "fallen world," the gnostic catastrophe creation.

But Sublime himself is the leader of a self-esteem cult, which is the kind of theme we expect from the book before Morrison got it -- angst and self-esteem are the wrong topics for Morrison's new direction, they can only hold back his pop sexy post-humanism. Sublime is the only thing in the first four issues that felt off to me, a hold over from the old guard. I just can't buy into him as a bad guy -- the 1980s media savvy slime-ball villain concept is dumb, like the villains on Columbo (a show I love by the way). Also vaguely troubling is his "transsexual language" about being a "third species" (like the third sex) -- third species is post-humanism stuff, and should be associated with the good guys, surely. Something very small has gone wrong, but it will grow exponentially as we continue.

Free Form Comments

Self-promote, anonymously criticize, random thoughts, questions: go.

For my part, I have a question, which you can answer anonymously if you like -- what do people around here do for money? I find many people avoid listing their occupation on their blogs, and it has made me curious.

Oh, and Robert Anton Wilson died.

Grant Morrison’s New X-Men 116

[this post is part of a series of posts looking at Grant Morrison's New X-Men run issue by issue; to read the other entries, click the New X-Men label at the bottom of this post. Sorry for the low quality pictures. I assume most people reading this have read the run.]

Oh, this is certainly my favorite comic book cover of all time.

The infamous "camel toe" cover. Right off the bat you have to be impressed that Marvel let them publish such an edgy cover -- this is not Lady Death style T and A, this is strange fashion-model ostensibly-sexy-and-hip but also weird, disorienting, cold and asexual. Open the book and you get the Beast, doing the Hamlet pose, but also showing off his outfit in the best fashion add way -- both these images are about the clothes. Style is everything here, which makes a lot of sense in a genre of storytelling where people have such wild outfits with the underwear on the outside (Scott Bukatman has argued, in this respect, how the 60's Batman is such a dandy, with that closet full of different Bat-suits).

Just as the Beast remarks about his own design change in 114, Jean remarks here on Quitely as well, calling attention to her "unnaturally thin wrists and ankles." Morrison is using the age old device of having characters speak the audience's complaints to win them over. He is doing everything he can to make his changes stick. Don't like "secondary mutation" as an explanation of Emma's new diamond skin power? Neither does she: "your pseudo-scientific explanations are far from satisfactory" she says to the Beast, when he tries to sell her on the idea. (As I have remarked earlier the purpose of Emma's new power is that the slang word for diamond is "ice" -- Morrison is trying to create the core team and he needs an "ice"man, just as his JLA needed a Hawkman, Zauriel; a new "Angel" will be soon on his agenda).

In the meat of the story Morrison's new theme -- his new direction for the concept of the X-Men -- is brought home in a frightening and powerful way: rather than identity politics he wants to address post-humanism, what it means to inherit the earth and make your own rules. Now he reveals that humanity is dying out as a species -- so the X-Men will be forced to confront their new role. And to make matters more stark Casandra Nova, it turns out, is to them what they are to the humans, what the early humans were to the Neanderthals (as we saw in issue 114): she is the next level above them.

And she sends Cyclops to a psychic place called the Black Bug Room, a small red cell with three giant, grotesque bugs whose heads brush the celling, and whose hats and formal capes are hanging on hooks next to them. They say "Welcome to the black bug room. Everyone has their own black bug room. This is yours, Scott." HORRIFIC. In a single panel, with no details, I am TERRIFIED. (I actually recall the idea popping up in a speech of Tara's on a fourth season Buffy episode -- the one where Tara's family shows up -- so I am pretty sure it is from some kind of mythology, even one as recent as William S Burroughs).

Emma goes to have herself valued, but has "an Epiphany, like St. Paul on the Road to Damascus." She comes back and kills Nova just as Nova gets into Cerebra. Nova gets up anyway and Charles shoots her. "Hardcore, Chuck" says Wolverine. "May posterity forgive me" says Charles. "May our dry cleaners forgive you, Charles dear." Emma says: "May God award you a medal for your uninhibited marksmanship." With a shard of glass in his head and a line of blood on his face Professor X says the famous line from the very first X-Men comic book: "to me, my X-Men."


Then he tells the world he is a mutant, changing everything for the characters as Morrison has been changing everything for the readers.

Morrison's first arc is one of his best works: daring, surprising, persuasive, and exciting on every level -- design, plot, character, and theme.

In the annual, which I will look at next time, he introduces a fascinating new character.

And then his genius ideas begin to fall apart, both quickly and slowly, depending on where you look.

Comics Out 10 January 2007

The only book I picked up this week was Runaways, which has always been a bit of a lame duck book, since I am getting it only as a background to Whedon's run. Don't get me wrong, it has things to recommend it, but, on my own, I would have stopped reading when they removed the main conflict at the end of the first run (before they started re-numbering).

I did, trolling reviews on Newsarama, find a few other reasons to hate Civil War 6 (in addition to the ones I mentioned in the comments to last week's comics out post): why is Susan's underwater breathing thing a mask with cords to her ears? Is the point of that scene really a recap? And why did Cap let the Punisher on the team after he killed to C-List villains and then freak out after he killed two D-List Villains? On the plus side I did discover the purpose of the Dr. Strange scene, and I will give it to the writers and admit I missed it -- it is to show that there will be no deus ex machina, and thus a necessary scene for building tension. Issue still sucked, even if that scene had a point.

As usual recommend, review, discuss.

From James Merrill's "Oranges" (Commonplace Book)

Segment by segment, nonetheless a mind
Made up of taste and sunlight. May the blind
Gods who drink its juice be satisfied,
Disposing gently of the empty rind.

What I like about those lines is the way the first sentence is so sweet, then in the same line it goes suddenly dark. They admit a very dark evil, but also just hope evil will unintentionally nice, since perhaps we are too small to care about. I also like how "blind Gods" is split across two lines; the appearance of the word "Gods" is more surprising, and, because it is at the beginning of the line, it is capitalized, making whether these are "gods" or "Gods" ambiguous.