Obviously, the big news for the X-books this week is New X-Men #154, the final part of "Here Comes Tomorrow" and the end of Grant Morrison's run on the title.

Starting with New X-Men #114 back in May 2001, Grant Morrison's work on this title has been setting the agenda for the X-books for almost three years.  The real significance of his work on the book doesn't lie so much in the original ideas which have been brought in, so much as in the way he's re-ordered the existing concepts to produce a different approach.

The X-books have been under the shadow of Chris Claremont's approach for so long that it's easy to forget that playing the X-Men as a soap opera team book, with mutants acting as a metaphor for oppressed minorities, isn't the only way to go with the title.  There's nothing inherently wrong with that approach, but for some twenty years it was the only one that anyone took to the concept.  And really, it's a later gloss on the original X-Men concept, which was primarily based around the idea of teen heroes in a school - the whole mutant thing was really just a way to avoid writing proper origin stories for them.

Rather than playing the mutant idea as a plea-for-tolerance metaphor, Morrison has taken it much more literally, and built the series around his ideas for the development of humanity.  For once it's been a genuine revamp of a series that really has taken it in a new direction without changing the title beyond recognition.  It's simply arranged the pieces in a different order and opened up possibilities that have been largely ignored over the years when everyone's been trying to copy the kind of stories Chris Claremont was doing twenty years ago.

Plus, it's been very entertaining along the way - albeit riddled with inconsistent art.

It would be nice to say that Morrison's run goes out on a high.  Unfortunately, it ends with "Here Comes Tomorrow."  And to be honest, "Here Comes Tomorrow" is a bit crap.

It's difficult to care particularly about the fate of the characters from this alternate future, since very few of them were given enough space to develop a personality.  Tom Skylark is a nice sketch of a character, but never has the chance to develop much beyond that.  Sublime and Appolyon remain stubbornly one-dimensional - throughout this arc, Appolyon really has nothing to do other than scream about his obsession with being made perfect.

There's no real sense of what this world might be like to live in, and consequently none of it feels real.  It's a collection of ideas loosely coalescing in the form of a future, and I don't much care what happens to it.  Some garbled storytelling (only partially deliberate) doesn't help matters either - there are several scenes here where it took me multiple re-readings just to decipher what the hell was supposed to be happening, let alone what it was meant to mean.  Pages 6 and 7 are a mess in terms of conveying the action, and page 9 is similarly baffling on a first reading.

Most of the interest in "Here Comes Tomorrow" lies in the explanations it gives for material in earlier, better stories.  One of the most impressive things about Morrison's run is the way he's created stories (until now) that hold up on a first reading, reveal further material in the light of the Xorn revelation, and now get a third re-reading in the face of an explanation of what Sublime actually is.  When I mentioned obscure John Byrne villain That Which Endures a couple of months back, I wasn't so far off the mark.  It's not the same character, but essentially a very similar idea.  To be honest, That Which Endures - which was a sentient mutation in its own right - would actually have been a better fit for the themes of the comic than Sublime, which turns out to be sentient bacteria.  But then, you can't really have the villain of the piece turn out to be a long-forgotten villain from three issues of West Coast Avengers, I suppose.

Sublime is still an interesting idea, as is the idea of Phoenix removing the timeline around her and putting Scott and Emma together in order to avoid the X-Men falling apart.  But much as I would love to give Morrison's final issue a good review, in all conscience I can't, because it's not very good.  It's of interest almost exclusively for the new information it reveals about earlier, better stories.  Entertaining information, to be sure, but stranded in a rather dull story with a needlessly oblique finale.  The previous arc felt like an ending.  This feels like a drawn-out and unnecessary epilogue.

A highly disappointing final storyline, but not one that should overshadow the overall strength of Morrison's work on this title.

Rating: C

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