|
Post by Roquefort Raider on May 21, 2018 11:53:08 GMT -5
Moving on to other matters… Why did Jean go to rescue Logan instead of Scott? Especially leaving Emma to get Scott? I don’t see that happening. If not for love, she would at least want the wronged wife’s vengeance of seeing her wayward husband having to accept her help. The main reason I can think for her to seek out Logan would be that betrayed spouses often feel at liberty, even primally obliged, to cheat themselves to even the score. And Logan is far and away the most likely candidate for that. True, and there’s the fact that writers in those days had Jean put the moves on Logan on repeated occasions; kissing him prior to Xavier leaving Earth, and here on a cover of Uncanny. (Since Jean had no interest whatsoever in Logan prior to the retcons in the back pages of Classic X-Men, I file this uncharacteristic behaviour under “these are not the X-Men we grew up with”.). This climactic arc was pretty dramatic, but I felt really disappointed to see all the new concepts that Morrison had introduced be set aside to make room for a very traditional conclusion. It was all the traditional villain in disguise after all! He will do bad things and break stuff and the heroes will simply beat him up until he’s defeated! Characters will die! I would have hoped something more original, since Morrison’s run had up to then been pretty unpredictable. Even at the end there was a noble attempt at doing things differently (with Magneto making grand speeches that nobody listens to, because dictators are so passé) but the overall impressi9n was one of déjà vu. Also... Wasn’t Asteroid X blown up in X-Men #3, with its remnants crashing to Earth? Just how many fragments of the place remain in orbit for nefarious organizations to recycle?
|
|
|
Post by badwolf on May 21, 2018 22:40:45 GMT -5
He had Asteroid M as late as X-Men #125...is that the same thing?
|
|
|
Post by rberman on May 21, 2018 22:59:22 GMT -5
Also... Wasn’t Asteroid X blown up in X-Men #3, with its remnants crashing to Earth? Just how many fragments of the place remain in orbit for nefarious organizations to recycle? Yes. It's actually in X-Men #5. (#3 was Blob's debut.) Magneto's rocky satellite breaks into fragments which break free of Earth's orbit. The X-Men escape in a shuttle, which Magneto then summons back to orbit to rescue him and his brotherhood. But hey, if he made one rocky satellite base, I'm sure he can make another. It's not really an asteroid if it orbits Earth, though.
|
|
|
Post by Roquefort Raider on May 22, 2018 4:46:04 GMT -5
He had Asteroid M as late as X-Men #125...is that the same thing? Yes indeed, and that was used again in X-Men #3 (vol. 2, the Jim Lee series that started with multiple covers). But as rberman says, Mags could always create other bases if need be. In the case of the Morrison story, though, it just sounds like someone forgot about those issues!
|
|
|
Post by rberman on May 22, 2018 6:15:24 GMT -5
Excursus: Xorn is Magneto?In his memoir Supergods (2011), Grant Morrison discusses his appreciation for the cyclical structure of Alan Moore’s Watchmen series, which encourages repeat reading to disclose new layers of structure and information which the first-time reader is not prepared to absorb. Morrison himself spent his early career writing (and drawing) 1-5 page stories for British anthology publications. So he’s no stranger to the twist ending, and ought to be good at coming up with twists that stand up to scrutiny. The revelation of new X-Man Xorn as original X-Man antagonist Magneto must have been incredibly controversial, bringing up a variety of conflicting emotions: First up: “Aww, I liked Xorn.” He was a standout new character, even though we didn’t see much of him. We wanted more. He was different, with a pacifist, contemplative nature and a power set that had both defensive (healing) and offensive (star inside his helmet) elements. Losing an interesting new character will always be sad, regardless of the circumstances. For that matter, the notion that Quentin Quire was just a pawn of Magneto lessens the power of Quentin’s story as well. Second: “Ugh, Magneto again?” Morrison has had a great record of bringing new (at least, new to comics, if cribbed from European pop culture originally) ideas to the table, so it’s against type for him to return to the wellspring of all X-Men villains. I can’t begrudge him wanting to try his hand at a Magneto story, though. His final purpose in using Magneto turns out to be quite subversive when we get there. Third: “Waitaminute…” as we mentally or physically review everything we already knew about Xorn. He was born and raised a Chinese peasant. He has a star inside his head. (We saw it! Exposure to it incinerated two peasants, and it formed a giant ball of plasma which threatened to expand and engulf the world! Xorn also used the heat of that star to light a campfire, and to kill Quentin Quire. How did Magneto fake such a giant heat signature?) He spent decades locked in solitary confinement. He was being sold by his mutant jailer to John Sublime, who was going to hack him into pieces and then graft those pieces onto U-Men. He went to a monastery in Tibet and performed feats of healing. (We saw him bring a bird back to life!) He absorbed the plasma-based Shi’ar Superguardian G-Type into his hands, killing her. He saved Lilandra’s life when she jumped off a balcony while insane. He healed all the X-Men from nano-Sentinel infection. He healed Xavier’s paraplegia. He investigated a dead puppy in Mutant Town, found a devil-child, and tried to protect him from the police, then sat and ate noodles philosophically and sadly after failing at that task. Magneto claims to have done all these things. Does that make sense? Survey says…. Ehhhhh. Faking the healing of the X-Men by destroying (metal-based?) nano-Sentinels in their blood, OK. Fake-healing paraplegia by controlling said nano-Sentinels? Faking having a star inside his head? Fake-resurrecting a bird? Fake-knowing Cantonese well enough to fool native speakers? Faking an ancient prison deep inside China? Especially when a plot point was that the jailer Ao Jun wanted revenge on the world for being forced to spend his whole life guarding Xorn? Nah. I can respect misdirection in a story. Morrison did it well in the Bishop “whodunit.” But we just know too much about Xorn over the last three years for this revelation to ring true. It feels like a cheat, a cheap shock, a last minute idea even. But it wasn’t a last minute idea. Morrison’s published story notes show that his overarching concept for his entire run of New X-Men was “Magneto infiltrates the X-Mansion in the guise of a new team member.” Fourth: “Well, maybe…” Morrison did lay some clues. How did Magneto become a cult figure among the students? Who called Quentin Quire to tell him he was adopted? How did Xorn overturn the U-Men’s armored car? Why does Xorn wear nothing but metal chains for a shirt? Where did the nano-Sentinels come from? (We assumed Scott and Logan had brought the infection back from Ecuador, but maybe not.) Xavier was able to walk after Beast injected nano-Sentinels into him and then Xorn “healed” him; that was really just Magneto causing the nano-Sentinels to somehow support Xavier in walking. Who put Esme Cuckoo up to her plot to murder Emma, and whom was she planning to meet after dropping out of school? Who was the mole inside the mansion? Who planted explosives on Beast’s plane? At least these plot elements make sense with this Magneto reveal. We had a whole focus issue that seemed to show a peaceful internal monologue by Xorn, but if you read carefully, it was actually an essay that Xorn wrote for Xavier, just another part of Magneto’s ruse. Quicksilver had cautioned back in #132 that it would be really clever of Magneto to play dead. The destruction of his utopian home in Genosha certainly gives Magneto something to be enraged about. But his anger is misplaced; the culprit wasn’t humans, but rather Cassandra Nova. Fifth: “But no…” I can’t make sense of the revelation that the anti-mutant Weapon Plus program, which has been active since the Super Soldier project back in WW2, is operating out of Magneto’s old asteroid base, apparently with his cooperation. Would they and Magneto work together? Would Magneto bludgeon Sage with a handgun at such close range that she could smell his male pheromones, when his power allows him to control metal objects from a distance? Would Magneto call his nano-creatures “Sentinels” and give them little Sentinel helmets, especially when a Sentinel exterminated his utopia of Genosha? Nope. It just doesn’t work for me. But here we are. Xorn is gone, and Magneto is here. But I’m also not surprised that later writers retconned a, “Nope, Xorn was a real person, because…” to rescue this intriguing character.
|
|
|
Post by Icctrombone on May 22, 2018 8:06:20 GMT -5
Moving on to other matters… Why did Jean go to rescue Logan instead of Scott? Especially leaving Emma to get Scott? I don’t see that happening. If not for love, she would at least want the wronged wife’s vengeance of seeing her wayward husband having to accept her help. The main reason I can think for her to seek out Logan would be that betrayed spouses often feel at liberty, even primally obliged, to cheat themselves to even the score. And Logan is far and away the most likely candidate for that. True, and there’s the fact that writers in those days had Jean put the moves on Logan on repeated occasions; kissing him prior to Xavier leaving Earth, and here on a cover of Uncanny. (Since Jean had no interest whatsoever in Logan prior to the retcons in the back pages of Classic X-Men, I file this uncharacteristic behaviour under “these are not the X-Men we grew up with”.).I didn't have a problem with Jean attempting to fool around with Logan because it's a common thing for a women , or man, to look for affection when their relationship with their partner is on the rocks.
|
|
|
Post by rberman on May 22, 2018 18:08:54 GMT -5
Well... I have learned a lot writing this thread, and much of my information has come along too late. For instance, I just now put together that the Stepford Cuckoos come from John Wyndham's 1957 British sci-fi novel "The Midwich Cuckoos," in which the children growing up in a town all have blond/blonde hair and belong to two hive minds: one for boys, and one for girls. The book was twice made into a film called "Village of the Damned." I wonder whether it was Morrison or an American editor who suggested making them "Stepford" Cuckoos in homage to Ira Levin's 1972 book (and the subsequent 1975 movie) about a town full of housewives who act very oddly. So yeah, more sources of Morrison's inspiration. I knew the Stepford part already, but not the Cuckoo part, which being British was really the part upon which he was drawing. Morrison made the connection clear in his concurrent series The Invisibles Vol 3 #5 (January 2000):
|
|
|
Post by rberman on May 23, 2018 7:17:21 GMT -5
New X-Men #147 “Planet X: Magneto Superior” (November 2003)
The Story: Magneto has completely taken over Manattan, with giant metal tentacles erupting from the ground to cause destruction and terror everywhere. He’s still chafing from the time he spent pretending to be the passive Xorn, whom he considers a weak simpleton. The Special Class are by his side, as well as Esme Cuckoo and Toad. Angel seems dedicated to this father-figure, and the moron Basilisk would follow anybody who told him where to go. Beak and Ernst are listless and fretful, and Martha Johansson, the brain in the jar, is as inscrutable as ever. Magneto is too high on Kick to orate effectively to a throng of mutants, but at least he can disassemble the bridges connecting Manhattan to other boroughs, symbolically burning the bridges between mutantkind and humanity. Charles Xavier is imprisoned in a bacta tank that blocks his powers. My Two Cents: And that’s it for this issue! A completely X-Men-free issue of X-Men, except for one panel of imprisoned Xavier. It’s very decompressed, with six double-splash pages and three more full or nearly full page panels. One of the reasons: Morrison was already splitting his time, surreptitiously planning a return to DC Comics to write Seven Soldiers. Morrison recalls: So yeah, Morrison’s mind was already on other things, which partly explains the plot-lite story arcs that characterized his last nine issues of New X-Men. This issue does give us plenty of characterization, with lots of interactions between Magneto and his chief acolytes to show that he’s megalomaniacal but also befuddled, off his game as a result of his Kick addiction. His helmet may be protecting him from Esme’s psi powers, but she’s doing her best to become indispensable to him through sex appeal and supplying his drugs. And, as we’ll discuss when the dust settles, there’s a layer of meta-commentary underlying this whole arc. Morrison is also using this story arc to belatedly tackle one of the early 21st century’s defining moments: The bombing of the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001. First off: Morrison is a bit of a weirdo, raised in a fecklessly peacenik “protest everything” household yet as an adult pursuing a lifestyle of rock and roll hedonism, drugs, transvestism, and occult practices which serves simultaneously to feed his senses, look for meaning, and provide grist for his creative process. During a hashish-fueled journaling session after scaling a mountain to meet a guru in Kathmandu (yes, this really happened), some sort of switch flipped in his brain, and he became convinced that he now has super powers, including the ability to expand his mind into the “fifth dimension,” allowing him to see connections in the world to which the rest of us are oblivious. This includes the ability to write himself into his comic books (OK, lots of writers have done that) but also to actually affect the course of his own life by the stories that he writes. For instance, in The Invisibles, his stand-in character King Mob contracted a face-eating bacterium; soon after, Morrison himself was hospitalized with a life-threatening staph infection. It was only after Morrison wrote the cure for King Mob (and also, you know, got a bunch of IV antibiotics himself) that he was healed from this terrible disease. When Morrison submitted his brief to Marvel Comics about his New X-Men concept, the story didn’t go this far. He just knew that Magneto was going to infiltrate the X-Men, turn some students to evil, and do something else nasty. In his second issue, when the Extinction Sentinel comes to wipe out Magneto’s island home of Genosha, part of the attack included a giant rocket/plane shaped like a fist (but you would never notice it was a fist unless someone told you), plowing into the tower where Magneto was sitting, followed by massive destruction on a city street that looks a lot like Manhattan’s Times Square: And the very next issue, dated September 2001, opens with Jean Grey-Summers and Hank McCoy sifting through the rubble of a fallen metropolis, looking for survivors. Even the “New X-Men” costumes looked like search-and-rescue gear, bulky, with lots of pockets, and fluorescent yellow so as to be easily visible in low light conditions and heavy smoke. Now, Morrison doesn’t go so far as to say that he caused 9/11 by writing a story about an airplane hitting the tallest building on a heavily urbanized island. But it wouldn’t surprise me if he believes it and is afraid to say it. Indeed, in Supergods he points out that people have been using “The World Trade Center was destroyed” as emblematic of an attack on America/civilization since the World Trade Centers first went up. Morrison specifically cites the attack on the LexTowers depicted in Superman #596, an issue which hit the shelves on September 12, 2001 and caused DC to offer a full refund to any traumatized customers: Morrison seems to have reconciled such things to mean not that it was a coincidence, and not that he caused the terrorist attack by writing one like it, but that he supernaturally tapped into something that was going to happen anyway. He’s the prophet, not the demiurge. But he also wanted to respond more directly and purposefully to 9/11 and its after-effects. Both Marvel and DC published “Superheroes react to 9/11 and their failure to stop it” special issues. How could they do otherwise? Ignoring it would be like ignoring Pearl Harbor or the Kennedy assassination. But Morrison wanted more. So here he gives us a story of a terrible attack on Manhattan. Why are all the superheroes out of town? Because, says Magneto, he has lured them away with a ruse, and then shut them out with a magnetic field. Did we see this happening in any of their respective comic books during late 2003 and early 2004? I bet we didn’t. As far as I know, this plotline was not a company-wide event like Atlantis Attacks or Inferno. Nevertheless, Magneto wreaks terrible harm upon Manhattan as a warm-up to something bigger that we’ll talk about next time. Note that rescue personnel are on the scene in the image below, which is actually in Magneto's mind's eye as he imagines stirring up a ruckus in Manhattan: Ernst is wearing a shirt decorated with a smiley face with a circle/slash “no” symbol around it. Is this a jab at the smiley face logo from Alan Moore’s Watchmen? With the sticking out tongue to make it slightly less obvious for the emoticon age.
|
|
|
Post by rberman on May 24, 2018 7:05:44 GMT -5
New X-Men #148 “Planet X: Survivor Type” (December 2003)Covers that Lie: Beast is not in this issue. The Story: Magneto, the king of Manhattan (New Amsterdam is now not New York but “New Genosha”), still seems off his game. He boasts to the captive Charles Xavier, takes a puff of Kick drug, and assures Xavier that he can quit anytime he wants to. Uh huh, sure. He’s also frustrated that he can’t attract a better breed of sycophants then morons like Toad and snarky kids like Esme Cuckoo and Angel Salvadore. No one appreciates his erudite speeches. Logan and Jean Grey-Summers are on an asteroid hurtling toward the sun. It’s too big for Jean to change its course, and for some reason breaking it into a more manageable size is not an option. Wolverine reports having dispatched Ultimaton in an off-screen battle. Jean and Logan gradually shed their clothes as the temperature climbs unbearably. Wolverine tells her about his origin in The World, bred to kill mutants. Jean expresses her regrets that the growing Phoenix Force within her caused her to push Scott away. But she also regrets that the Phoenix not growing more rapidly, because she could sure use its power now, before the sun fries them both. Wolverine holds her close and guts her with his claws. Fade to white… My Two Cents: This issue is all conversations: Jean and Logan; Magneto and his followers; Magneto’s monologue to Xavier. Magneto’s plot, he says, is to reverse the magnetic polarity of the Earth, thus radically changing the behavior of its inhabitants. This plot element was cribbed from Iain Spence’s pop psychology book The Sekhmet Hypothesis: The Signals of the Beginning of a New Identity (1995). In brief, Spence posits that every eleven years when our sun’s magnetic field rotates to opposite poles, this causes a change in the youth culture of Western civilization, alternating between “angry” and “mellow” stereotypes. 1955 was an “anger” period as exemplified by biker gangs, crew cuts and pompadours, nascent rock-n-roll, amphetamines, and caffeine. 1966 was a mellow period exemplified by hippie culture’s Flower Power, loose clothing, long hair, and marijuana and LSD. 1977 saw the rise of punk rock’s biker jackets and chains, with amphetamines again as the drug of choice. 1988 was back to long hair and Ecstasy. 1999 (yet to come when Spence wrote his book) was Matrix-style leather and Red Bull energy drinks. Now, much could be said to debunk all this. You could point out how few eras Spence has sampled before declaring a new physical law. Spence is also incredibly selective in the details he chooses from each era. You could build a different case for each era in the West being the opposite of what Spence describes: peaceful civil rights marches in the mid-1950s, Vietnam in the mid-1960s, celebratory disco in the late 1970s, the lack of a discernible “mellow” period in youth culture in the late 80s, the twin shadows of downer heroin and upper cocaine over the entire period. You could point out how incredibly Western-centric, and especially England-centric, the data set is. You could identify other factors for these cycles rather than the putative effects of the changing magnetic field of the sun. The point is not whether Spence’s Sekhmet Hypothesis is true, but that Morrison believes it and has made it a part of his own professional life as he attempts to anticipate what kind of comic books to write next to ride the next wave of culture. And now he’s actually written his belief into a comic book, as the basis of Magneto’s own belief. This is why he had to make Magneto evil again, because Magneto is the Marvel villain, and especially the X-Men villain, who (augmented by the power of the upper drug Kick) can go all Sekhmet on the Earth itself, inverting its magnetic field and radically changing the behavior of everyone on the planet. (In 2003, I guess he’d be flipping people from leather fetish punks back to bell-bottomed hippies?) This is the plot point toward which Morrison has been building since he signed on to write X-Men years before. (Note that Magneto says this is an “old idea,” but I don’t recall him trying it before. Any help?) On to other matters: Let’s talk about Jean and Logan. After all that lead-up to how unbeatable Weapon XV is, and how he’s going to kill every mutant on the planet, Wolverine defeats him off-panel without a scratch? Something must have gone awry behind the scenes, so that we lost the issue or at least the pages in which this life-and-death struggle occurred. Too bad. Considering how decompressed these issues are, a little more action would have been quite welcome. On the asteroid, Morrison gives Jean and Logan the nearly-naked alone time that their shippers have been clamoring for since forever. But then he subverts that scenario; Jean thinks only of Scott, and Logan is simply embarrassed to admit his backstory. There’s no kissyface, and the only hug is a deadly one, as Wolverine hopes that the prospect of Jean dying will hustle the Phoenix Force to sufficiently awaken that he can be saved himself. It does not seem to have occurred to him how disastrous the Phoenix Force was the first time around, and how it nearly destroyed not only him and his friends but Earth and beyond as well. Is he being selfish here? Let’s be generous and say he’s delirious from getting his noodle baked by the sun. Jean explains her Phoenix Force as simply an extension of her inborn powers rather than something that came from outside of her, as is usually said. Keep track of Logan's suggestion that Jean create her own universe to fix problems in this one. This is of course what writers like Grant Morrison do. Their creation of the new universe does not erase the old one.
|
|
|
Post by rberman on May 25, 2018 6:12:23 GMT -5
New X-Men #149 “Planet X: Phoenix in Darkness” (January 2004)Marvel appears to be using inventory covers at this point, but this is a great one by Christopher Shy, so I'm not complaining. The Story: Magneto has appointed Beak to activate a crematorium to begin genocide on the humans of Manhattan. He scoffs at Beak’s observation that he (Magneto) is acting like a Nazi, then throws Beak in with the humans; this doesn’t go over well with Angel. Then Magneto kills Basilisk for his latest fart joke. Then he drives Esme Cuckoo off when she gets all “You and me babe, ruling together” and “You weren’t like this before the drugs” on him. His list of allies grows thin. Plus, he hears the voice of Xorn, calling him to a better life. Beak escapes and encounters E.V.A., Fantomex’s spaceship-symbiote whom we thought had been destroyed a couple of issues ago. She got better! There’s a mutant resistance including Cyclops, Fantomex, Dust, and the other three Stepford Cuckoos.My Two Cents: Beak continues to make a case for being Morrison’s “I-guy,” the authorial stand-in for this series. He’s a literal ugly duckling, a punk rocker with a poet's soul who eschews drugs and alcohol, as Morrison did during his teen years and early career. And here, he’s the one with the combination of bravery and cleverness to stand up to Magneto, whom he dupes into flinging him away from the center of things, giving him the opportunity to meet up with the secret resistance movement fronted by Fantomex and Cyclops. When Cyclops says he has two Super-sentinels, is he talking about Wolverine and Fantomex? Or Fantomex and the Cuckoos? It's just a dialogue gloss to justify how Fantomex and Cyclops got into Manhattan when all the other superheroes are stuck outside due to a distraction Magneto concocted. Magneto’s own background as a Nazi survivor never comes up, which seems like a missed opportunity, although WW2 was sixty years ago in 2004, and keeping Magneto grounded to that historical event makes less and less sense in modern stories, just as Nick Fury was released from his WW2 origin. I like the conflict between Magneto and his Xorn identity. It’s partly just the drugs, but it also shows that he’s having trouble compartmentalizing the role he adopted, from the hidden agenda for which he adopted it. Grant Morrison was no stranger to cosplaying various self-invented characters of both sexes and probably knows what it’s like to get lost in one of them. We’re told that Esme has been controlling Martha Johannson, who in turn has been influencing the other Special Class students to go along with Magneto’s plans. All this mind control is unfortunate since it removes moral agency from the plot and turns the story into “the Devil made me do it” instead of exploring how the students might realistically accept roles as cogs in the wheel of Magneto’s genocidal mania, just as regular, non-mind-controlled Germans under social pressure did in World War 2. The part about "humans don't feel pain the way we (mutants) do" reminds us of Grant Morrison's days writing Animal Man as an animal rights activist; the notion that animals don't feel pain is sometimes used to defend animal experimentation. Magneto says that he has been designed by Mother Nature to do what he's doing. Morrison's final arc in this series will show the ironic truth of those words. According to Ernst, Martha (No-Girl) has prophesied that this is all going to end badly, and I’m struck by the authorial choice that not once do we ever actually hear directly from Martha, only from various characters to whom she deigns to speak. So let’s talk about Martha, the brain-in-a-bubble that sided with Cyclops and Emma Frost against her master John Sublime back in issue #120 over two years ago, and who now seems to be equally content acting as Cassandra (not Cassandra Nova, but the Trojan prophetess of yore) on Magneto’s team. Back in 1965, Wally Wood and Len Brown collaborated on a new superhero team for Tower Comics called “T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents.” (Here is Shaxper’s review thread on that series.) The title drew from the zeitgeist, riffing on two then-contemporary spy thrillers: “Thunderball” (the James Bond book and film) and “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” which itself was riffing on James Bond’s S.P.E.C.T.R.E. nemesis. Marvel’s “Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.” had appeared a few months earlier, with similar influences. As seen above, one member of the T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents was “ NoMan,” a brain transplanted into a robot body, also possessed of an invisibility cape. This recalled Cliff “Robotman” Steele, who had debuted on DC’s freak team Doom Patrol in 1963, also a man’s brain in a robot shell after a tragic accident. These sorts of body horror stories can generate a lot of pathos of the “I used to be a man!” variety, getting plenty of mileage at the very human fear of disability and disfigurement as possibly worse than death. (See also: Doctor Doom, The Thing, ROM, and, well, most of the Marvel Universe, really.) Grant Morrison recalls his childhood reading: No-Girl the disembodied brain seems an homage to NoMan, as well as a chance to work in what’s apparently a real-life concern of Morrison that we really all are disembodied brains. He raises the possibility that our universe is just an “accelerated, digital hypersimulation we’ve all come to inhabit” on the very first page of the introduction to Supergods. You might think he’s being facetious, but I’ve seen him raise this solipsistic possibility in interviews as well. On one occasion, after saying that his work on The Invisibles was partly autobiographical, he also commented, “The Matrix is plot by plot, detail by detail, image by image, lifted from Invisibles so there shouldn't be much controversy. The Wachowskis nicked The Invisibles and everyone in the know is well aware of this fact but of course they're unlikely to come out and say it.” At one point Morrison rues not getting a million dollars of Matrix money, though I haven’t seen him offering to give a financial stake in his own work to the creators of Miss Jean Brodie, The Midwich Cuckoos, or Diabolik. Later in Supergods (p.112-4) Morrison revels in the implications of the DC multiverse, which includes the existence of Earth-Prime, the universe in which we ourselves exist and read comic books about DC superheroes. What should we call the universe in which other beings read comics about us? Earth-double-Prime? (My name for it, but Morrison shows himself quite taken with such ideas and is confident that the rest of the culture will catch up to him eventually on these matters, because Cosmologists Say So.) That being the case, I’m surprised that Martha plays such a bit part in this X-Men series, sort of floating in the background, without (after the John Sublime episode) making much difference to the story or giving Morrison a case study from which to expound on his beliefs. Maybe editorial shut him down on that? For that matter, Morrison gave Dust a grand introduction, but she does almost nothing for the whole rest of his run as author. Note that the character of Phoenix does not appear in this issue entitled "Phoenix in Darkness." She's off the radar for the moment. This student from the Xavier Institute makes another appearance as part of Cyclops' rag-tag group of insurgents. He's never given an on-page name or any powers; just really long arms. He's still wearing the same t-shirt which formerly had the names of various X-Men upside down. Now the letters are right-side up but seem to be gibberish, or an inside joke that I don't get.
|
|
|
Post by rberman on May 25, 2018 23:13:15 GMT -5
New X-Men #150 “Planet X: Phoenix Invictus” (February 2004)The Story: Jean Grey-Summers has fully manifested as Phoenix, and she’s carrying Wolverine back from the Sun to the Earth in a sleek silver vessel. She cautions that she has been resurrected from the dead by the Phoenix Force, but it may be a short-term deal. They pick up Beast and Emma Frost, who have been stranded in the Pacific Ocean on floating debris ever since their plane exploded back in issue #146. As they race to Manhattan, Beast pleads with the U.S. President not to drop neutron bombs to kill every living thing in Manhattan, claiming that he (Beast) alone knows the secret to turning off the extinction gene that will kill every human in a couple of generations. The mutant resistance in Manhattan launches a multi-pronged attack on Magneto. First comes Beak, wielding a baseball bat. He’s easily subdued but manages to embroil Magneto in a quarrel with Esme Cuckoo, who feels led on and then spurned by Magneto. Then comes Fantomex riding E.V.A., shooting holes in the containment tank keeping Charles Xavier imprisoned. Then Cyclops gets to point blank range and shoots Magneto right in the face. This amazingly doesn’t split Magneto’s head like a melon, but it does shatter the helmet which protects him from psionic attacks. Esme chooses that moment to strike in revenge for being spurned; Magneto drives her metal earrings through her brain, killing her. Emma mourns her fallen protege: Magneto dons the Xorn helmet for psi-protection, which causes confusion when he presents himself to the mutant masses as Magneto. The X-Men play further mind games with him, calling him “Xorn” constantly as they battle him. This goads him into ripping off his protective helmet to prove “I AM MAGNETO.” This was just the opening that the revived Xavier needed to stagger him with a psi-bolt. Finally, Wolverine steps up to the plate and decapitates Magneto – but not before he grabs Jean Grey by the arm and hits her with the massive surge of Kick-enhanced power that he had been saving up to literally turn the world upside down. Jean does not, as the saying goes, survive the experience. Epilogue: 150 years later (?!?!), an astronaut in a pink convertible finds a Phoenix Egg on the moon… My Two Cents: After several decompressed issues, everything rushes to a conclusion. X-Men #150 is a portentous issue number. It was in the first #150, a double sized issue, that Magneto took a huge step toward becoming a nobler, more sympathetic character, and ultimately a hero for a while. This issue #150 marks a big step for Magneto of a different sort, removing him from the playing field for at least a while, by removing his head from his shoulders. If you can ignore the plot holes leading up to “Xorn is really Magneto,” Morrison does take the concept to an interesting final conclusion, as the X-Men exploit Magneto's confused dual identity to defeat him with guile rather than only brute strength. Here's a confusing point. A couple of issues back, Magneto said that his plan was to reverse the Earth's magnetic field, which moves independently of the axis of the planet itself: But now it sounds like the whole planet is going to be moved upside down. Does anyone believe Magneto has the power to do that little trick, even with Kick? A couple of other moments that don't add up. The President claims to have bombs that only kill mutants. That's absurd. It breaks the underlying premises of X-men/government interaction. Though next issue, we will see a future-weapon that only kills mutants. Also, Beast reminds us of a sub-plot that Morrison has completely dropped since the earliest issues of his run: The human race is going to go "E for Extinction" due to a genetic switch that's been flipped by Mother Nature to clear the deck for Homo Superior to rule the Earth. That plot thread got totally dropped for almost four years, and only now, in a single panel, we learn that Beast has found a cure. Again, the suspension of disbelief snaps. “Phoenix Invictus” (unconquered) is a tricky title, since she was in fact defeated. Magneto’s final strike against Jean felt a little contrived. If Morrison wanted to kill her (which he obviously did) as the next step in the Jean/Scott/Emma triangle, he could just as easily have had the Phoenix Force consume her, or declare her personality dead and depart for deep space. Having Magneto kill her, and then having Logan immediately kill Magneto, was OK but not intensely satisfying. But remember this pair of word balloons where Jean says "Live Scott" (in white background) and then Phoenix says "Live" (in black background) in this image below. They will prove extremely important a few issues from now. Yes, just those three little words. The last two pages of this issue seem to go a completely different direction. In a story that alleges to be 150 years from now, someone named “Corona” has sent two astronauts in a flying pink convertible (!) to pick up a Phoenix Egg from the moon’s “Blue Area” where Jean Grey died the first time, way back in X-Men #137. But the Blue Area is strewn with graffiti insulting both Neil Armstrong and The Watcher. Morrison is clearly setting up an offbeat story for his final four issues on X-Men. One detail which may or may not be important: In the final splash image, The Earth is upside down. Now, this may not mean anything. If you were on the bottom of the moon, the Earth would appear upside down. Is the Blue Area on the bottom half moon? According to the Internet, source of all truth, the Blue Area is supposed to be in the Luther Crater near Mare Tranquilitatis, which is on the moon’s Northern Hemisphere. This could mean one of three things: 1) Is this a reference to Magneto’s plot to turn the world upside down? 2) It’s symbolic of the world being “turned upside down” in the story to come. 3) It’s meaningless. Just something the artist threw in there, not researching how the Earth is actually supposed to look based on where the Blue Area is supposed to be. My money is on 3, but I’d be happy to find out it’s 2. Hey, while we’re talking about the Blue Area: If it’s on the near side, it would be visible to amateur astronomers, certainly to the superpower nations. Why haven’t they gone there to plunder it? We’ll have to wait until the next issue to see where this whole Phoenix Egg business is leading, but the bizarre “convertible and graffiti on the moon” introduction is crucial for what follows, which is why I’m throwing it out now. But tomorrow, we’ll first look at the thematic subtext which Morrison had laid under this entire Planet X arc.
|
|
|
Post by Roquefort Raider on May 26, 2018 5:13:50 GMT -5
Wasn’t the site of Jean’ death (in X-Men #137] crushed under Attilan a few decades ago? Morrison’s use of continuity is a little haphazard, which I don’t mind as long as the story’s good... but the old fan in me goes all “mmph!!!”
That scene where a dying Jean calls Scott her best friend is probably the most beautiful moment between those two characters, ever.
|
|
|
Post by rberman on May 26, 2018 6:31:25 GMT -5
Wasn’t the site of Jean’ death (in X-Men #137] crushed under Attilan a few decades ago? Morrison’s use of continuity is a little haphazard, which I don’t mind as long as the story’s good... but the old fan in me goes all “mmph!!!” That scene where a dying Jean calls Scott her best friend is probably the most beautiful moment between those two characters, ever. There's actually a good reason for the continuity "errors" on those last two pages. We'll start getting to that the day after tomorrow.
|
|
|
Post by Reptisaurus! on May 26, 2018 8:12:17 GMT -5
Very well researched! I do doubt that Morrison caused 9-11 though. With the advent of "Widescreen" comics, especially Warren Ellis' Authority, blowing up buildings (hell, entire cities) was all the rage in mainstream comics at the time. I think we even lost an entire country in Kurt Busiek's Avengers run.
|
|
|
Post by rberman on May 26, 2018 8:16:22 GMT -5
Very well researched! I do doubt that Morrison caused 9-11 though. With the advent of "Widescreen" comics, especially Warren Ellis' Authority, blowing up buildings (hell, entire cities) was all the rage in mainstream comics at the time. I think we even lost an entire country in Kurt Busiek's Avengers run. Yes, John Cassaday (artist on The Authority) is a graduate of film school and understands the vocabulary of cameras and the uses of different "shots" very well, influencing a generation of comic book artists. Up to this point, New X-Men has very much been in the style he popularized, but starting in two days when we discuss "Here Comes Tomorrow," we'll see a very different style in play.
|
|