In the earliest days of the 2000s, the X-Men line of books had lost a bit of the luster they had achieved at their 1990s peak. Despite the landmark first Fox film, which focused on a pretty standard lineup of characters, landing in July of 2000, the comics had been distracted by a bevy of compelling but directionless D-listers like Marrow and Cecilia Reyes, and breakout characters Gambit and Bishop – notably absent from the films – had both spun out into solo books completely divorced of their team’s narrative (and, briefly, a combined book that fully mucked up the identity and purpose of Cable). Sister books like X-Force, Generation X, and the constantly misguided X-Man struggled with negligent indifference, cycling through creative teams that pulled the characters in wildly different directions.
The most damning concern, line-wide, was a consistent dropping of long-running plot lines in favor of massive new concerns. A compelling Alan Davis run worked to conclude the disheveled Twelve concept while also reminding readers of long-neglected concerns about Mystique and Irene that were important to his frequent collaborator, Chris Claremont. Claremont returned to the series he had personally defined, but his run all but dropped the ball Davis set up for him, deciding instead to introduce a bevy of new villains. Both runs neglected the long-percolating Legacy Virus narrative; X-writer mainstay Scott Lobdell wrapped up that troubling nugget with the completely left-field self-sacrifice of Colossus, which felt unprompted and unnecessary.
Jesus, Hank. Read the room.
Marvel Comics
The whole mess had become cluttered, confusing, and clumsy; none of the books were recognizable to any fans crossing over to the comics from the film. It was time to wipe the slate clean. Enter Grant Morrison, a writer as synonymous with the comic book avant-garde in 2001 as they are today. A bigger rebranding bombshell had not hit the property since Giant-Size X-Men in 1975.
Following Davis and Claremont’s classicism and Lobdell’s clunky ’90s extremism, New X-Men #114 feels almost prophetic of the future of the medium. Where overt action and massive, line-wide events had defined the previous decade, New X-Men establishes an almost quiet subtlety, a commitment to a new way of storytelling that feels like the terminal gunshot in an execution of the staid, stodgy old styles.
Marvel Comics
From the first panel, the book is undeniably (to borrow a word from Tini Howard and Connor Goldsmith) Morrisonian. The splash, by frequent Morrison collaborator Frank Quitely, features the concluding bit of Sentinel destruction with cool, detached boredom that says volumes about Wolverine and Cyclops’ world-weary pragmatism. The page tells us an incredible amount with remarkable ease and clarity: the old threats are trivial, and the heroes are competent (and, in their new costumes, hip). Even the third character – an unfortunate three-faced man cowering under the Sentinel’s disembodied hand – establishes the new, weird ways of mutation: not everyone gets concussive optic blasts or the ability to read minds. Some unfortunates get three faces, elongated limbs, or bird features.
If anything, the killbots got kill-ier.
Marvel Comics
Reopening the Xavier Institute and populating it with diverse students, Morrison re-envisions the status quo of the Merry Marvel Mutants. They are no longer a superhero team, they are a community. They are a culture, and that culture isn’t threatened by anything so mundane as supervillains or killbots (though, of course, those things figure in). They are under the threat of something the books had mostly invoked only in name rather than practice: hatred and fear. Protesters outside the gates are not the hyper-militarized Friends of Humanity or Operation: Zero Tolerance, they are average people carrying hateful picket signs that mirror the vitriolic, evil prejudice of the real world.
Marvel Comics
Where New X-Men’s contemporaries like New Avengers and Captain America were struggling with the ramifications of 9/11, Morrison was looking at events like the then-recent murder of Matthew Shepard and its fundamentalist vs advocate aftermath. Genderqueer themself, Morrison perhaps understood the fear of prejudice more viscerally than many of the writers and artists who came before. All this narratively and socially progressive coding goes a long way at confirming the X-Men’s then-covert queer parallels; no longer the ’80s, the primary threat wasn’t the HIV-coded Legacy Virus, it was the violent hate crime that continues to plague the LGTBQIA+ community.
In their book, Supergods, Morrison writes, “To undercut the confrontational paramilitarism that haunted previous portrayals, we chose to recast the X-Men themselves as a Gerry Anderson-style volunteer rescue and emergency task force, pledged to use their mutant powers to help both mutants and humans at a difficult time of transition.”
These X-Men weren’t superheroes; they were human rights activists.
The cutting-edge social storytelling was furthered by Quitely’s deeply unconventional artistic style, which separated the book further from the other Marvel books. The weirdness was rendered so fully that even the sexiness was strange, elongated, hyper-realized visual totems of exaggerated ideals. The Beast is made more beastial, and the human-looking members of the team are so individually realized that Quitely achieves something very few comic artists manage: to produce women who are not simply palette-swapped clones of one another. Jean and Emma even carry themselves differently, with Jean’s down-home girl-next-door ease contrasting Emma’s severe, manufactured, poise.
Marvel Comics
It seems a given that without the comics in New X-Men Modern Era Epic Collection: E Is For Extinction there would never have been a Krakoan Age. But these comics are the genesis of so, so much more than that; like the evolutionary transition illustrated within, New X-Men was a transition point for the entire franchise.
It may be hyperbolic to suggest that it was also the forced evolution of the superhero genre. But only just.
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