I recently managed to get a copy of the third OHC of Morrison’s New X-Men after a mere 20 years of looking (well, to be fair, for a lot of that I wasn’t actively looking. It was about nine months of having a saved search on eBay that finally sorted it). And I read them all this past week or so.
It has been an absolute age since I’ve read any of these – 15 years at least. I’m not sure if I’ve read the contents of the third OHC in other formats before. Some of it was familiar, some of it I might just know from osmosis. Anyway, upshot was a lot of it was unfamiliar. Overall, I quite liked it, but it does have significant flaws, which come to a head in the third volume.
First is Fantomex. I just don’t like the character or any of the Weapon Plus stuff. Retconning Wolverine into being Weapon Roman Numeral X? eh, fine, whatever. Tying that into Captain America and Nuke? Sure, I guess. But then having The World with an artificially sped up time-field and forced evolution yadda yadda yadda. Just bollocks, frankly. And it doesn’t entire make sense. If the Weapon Plus program is about creating “super-sentinels” (which, as a retcon, make no sense for Wolverine) why are they speed-evolving people? That’s just making mutants. Bleh. And Fantomex is just annoying in his “oh this is so cool,” element. Like all that stuff in his first appearance where he’s “hello, I Fantomex, the most famous thief in ze world!” and then he takes Jean and Xavier to his cool hideout that has his blind mother in a recreation of his old house inside a cliffside lair – which is surface level kinda cool – but then it all turns out to be nonsense because he’s only been out of The World for about 12 hours? It doesn’t make any sense and doesn’t get away with that on just vibes, imo.
The other big problem I have with it, on a similar note of not making sense, is Xorn being Magneto. Now, the actual Magneto story that it ends up with is pretty cool. I like that he’s completely unable to lead a movement, disconnected from the people he seeks to lead/rule and better off a slogan than a person. That’s all great (though I can see why Marvel almost instantly undid it, because there’s not much room for the character to go from there, frankly). But even reading the series with the fore-knowledge that Xorn is Magneto doesn’t make that make sense. There’s not really any clues to pick up on (apart from maybe the micro-sentinels being used to fix Xavier’s spine). The history and life of Xorn is too well fashioned to hand-wave it away as just “a fiction created with the help of my followers in China”. For that to work, Magneto would need to a) see the Sentinels baring down on Genosha b) record all the dying thoughts of Genoshans as they died while c) not dying himself having d) decided to not do anything to stop the attack nor make any very public attempt at retribution then e) secretly flee the levelled city without being spotted and hotfoot it to China where f) he set up, seemingly from scratch, an old prison with a mutant guard and several mutant prisoners where he could g) hide out as Xorn so that h) Sublime’s U-Men (who he had no real way of knowing about) could turn up and vivisect the other mutants in the fake prison and try to do the same to Xorn but i) be stopped just in the nick of time by the X-Men who then j) offer him a job so that k) he can manipulate students into an uprising.
That’s a more convoluted plan that the Joker has in the Dark Knight and apparently it was all concocted in the moment he saw a load of Sentinels about to destroy his entire city. It just doesn’t hang together. Xorn is too well crafted as a typical Morrison-esque character to then feel like a facade (to say nothing of the question of skin tone, given Magneto is white and Xorn would presumably have been Asian). It’s especially galling in the reveal when he taunts Xavier (and the reader) with something like “an iron prison? A man with a star for a brain? I can’t believe you didn’t work it out, Charles!” as though a guy with a star for a brain is too silly to have been real, but oh sure, Fantomex is on the level and a ancient sentient bacteria colony is fine. It’s really playing with fire for a writer like Morrison to throw out “I can’t believe you fell for that silly lie!”.
The other thing that struck me reading it is the similarities to Millar’s Ultimate X-Men in various ways (and not just that they both settle on Magneto’s big doomsday plan being flipping the Earth’s magnetic poles). It’s understandable given they worked together/had a mentor-mentee relationship, but there is a similar tone to the dialogue between them, although it’s very much a case of Millar being the poor imitation of Morrison. One thing I always hated about Millar’s writing, even when I was into his work, was the clunky way he’d name-drop things; “Xbox” like an 80s America parent using “Atari” or “Nintendo” to mean all video games, is one that always sticks out. Morrison kinda does that as well at times, but without sounding so utterly artificial. They have similar takes, broadly, on Xavier as well, though Morrison’s feels more well-rounded than Millar’s.
The other notable thing about New X-Men is art, which is all over the place, frankly. Quitely is nominally the main artist. I love his uniform designs (I still think it’s Jean’s best outfit in particular) though I have to admit I’m not a huge fan of his art generally (which is not to say it’s bad, it’s just not for me). I find it more palatable in the Riot story, where I think he’s being inked by someone else. The other artists used to fill in for Quitely are a mixed bag. I remember there was a lot of negativity around Igor Kordey’s work at the time. I can kinda see, as it’s stylistically very different to Quitely’s so doesn’t really mesh well. It’s rushed AF in places too (which is because Kordey was given barely any time to do it). A better fit is, unfortunately, Ethan Van Sciver. Say what you will about the right wing fuck but he can draw well. He disappears after a while though and his place in the “rotation” is taken by Phil Jiminez, who is the best artist of the bunch, I think. The refined style of EVS but with better artist chops (EVS’s background characters can often look janky). Things take a turn for the worse in the third volume, again, though. The Weapon Plus arc, which I was already pre-disposed to dislike is drawn by Chris Bachalo, who I just find so hard to read for little reward. Then the final arc (a tiresome apocalyptic future thing) is drawn, or rather etched, by Marc Silvestri, who is kind of the opposite of Bachalo in terms of line weights and general style, but also just as unpleasant to read.
The final thought I have of this is how long a shadow it’s cast over the X-Men books. It’s weird because as soon as it was done, Marvel went about undermining and contradicting it – Austen did a couple of issues where he somehow didn’t seem to get that Ernst was Cassandra Nova IIRC. There was a series about Xavier rebuilding Genosha with a not-dead Magneto (who I think even tried to claim it wasn’t him in New York). The “real” Xorn showed up a little while later. And yet, thematically, the X-Books have been doing a lot of the same stuff since. I can see the roots of pretty much all of Gillen’s work in here, let alone much of Hickman’s.
And yet no-one will bring back the outfits!
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