|
THE CREATORS: Written by Grant
Morrison, with regular artist Frank Quitely. Yeah,
right...
THE FILL-IN ARTIST COUNT: A mighty
eleven out of fifteen issues.
WHAT HAPPENED IN 2002: The return of
Cassandra Nova; a Xorn solo story; the Fantomex storyline; the
return to Genosha; a rather out-of-place seeming issue in
Afghanistan and Mumbai; and the debut of Kid Omega.
 The flagship of the X-books, and still the
highest seller, Grant Morrison's New X-Men continues to
set the agenda that the other X-Men titles follow. Even
Chris Claremont, without getting drawn into the book's
storylines, has started to define his spin-off team largely by
how they relate to the events of this book.
The big relaunches of titles such as this
took place in 2001, and accordingly 2002 has been largely a
period of consolidation for the X-books. New X-Men
set out its stall fairly clearly last year, and 2002 has
largely been a period of Grant Morrison exploring the new
playground that he's established.
The year gets off to a strong start with
the conclusion of the Cassandra Nova arc. The main
function of Cassandra was to provide an excuse to drastically
shake up the X-books by outing Professor Xavier and expanding
the school. She allows all of these overhauls to be done
relatively quickly, without the awkwardness of having Xavier
simply wake up one morning and decide to change his entire
modus operandi. Cassandra's defeat, and the return of
the real Professor X, completes that transformation, and
brings the status quo into line with where Morrison wants to
be.
The Fantomex and Weapon Plus arc was a
little more questionable. Morrison may simply have
wanted to avoid going into another major shake-up straight on
the back of the last one, but this storyline did feel like he
was just using the X-Men as a vehicle for ideas he'd been
wanting to get around to doing at some point. Fantomex,
a curious cross between Storm Shadow and the French pulp
character Fantomas, is an entertaining "one step ahead"
antihero, but what he's got to do with the rest of the book, I
have absolutely no idea.
 The current "Riot at Xavier's" storyline
seems to be on the right lines, though. After giving
readers several months to get used to the X-Men's cuddly
liberal education policy, and presenting it in an
unquestioningly good light, Morrison pulls the rug out and
asks whether they're going about things in completely the
wrong way. Some purist Morrison fans tend to argue that
New X-Men is diluted Morrison, in comparison to
extraordinary torrents of weirdness such as his current
Vertigo project The Filth. This misses the point
that Morrison positively wants to work in the mainstream -
it's part of his creative agenda - and Morrison exploring
themes about youthful rebellion and education in New X-Men
is just as important to his work as a whole.
The big drawback this year, however, has
been the alarmingly unreliable artwork. Igor Kordey, an
excellent artist, did his career no real favours with some
ugly-looking rush jobs at the beginning of the year. In
fact, Kordey has drawn more issues this year than the book's
supposed regular artist, Frank Quitely - while drawing every
issue of Cable and Soldier X, and the complete
Black Widow miniseries on top of it all, inking his own
work throughout. It's pretty amazing that anyone could
produce such a vast volume of work, but the end result was
still some ropey issues of New X-Men. Ethan van
Sciver and Keron Grant have picked up other issues, with work
that's been perfectly okay, but hasn't really enabled the book
to develop much of a visual identity.
If they can resolve that problem in 2003,
the writing should guarantee another good year.
back |
continue |
