Highway 62

I said you were a natural! Congratulations! You have proved yourself a master of precognition. Either that or you’ve been paying attention, since I’ve mentioned my love of Grant Morrison’s run on New X-Men in my very first column here. Or was it my second? Either way. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Grant Morrison’s take on the characters and their world was the freshest I’d seen since Chris Claremont’s best work on the title (pretty much anything before issue #200 is great, minus some clinker stories in there).

Grant Morrison and his mad ideas (though nowhere near as mad as stuff that he put forth in The Invisibles and The Filth, which I was reading the same time I got into his X-Men run), plus a fair bit of editorial leeway made for not only characters who seemed substantial and surprising and depthy, but it also made for a world that felt more fully-realized than I’d seen in a mainstream comic.

Instead of portraying his mutants solely as outcasts whose personalities were defined by soap opera conventions, Mr. Morrison created a world that mutants played an active part of. He more fully explored the possibilities and realities of human/mutant interaction than just about any writer on the book I can think of. Though I must admit that I haven’t read any of Joe Casey’s run, which I understand covered some similar territories. Instead of neat delineations between humans and mutants, we had porous interfaces (and not always pretty ones at that.) Mr. Morrison put forth the idea of an actual mutant subculture with related fashions, celebrities and even drugs.

He also explored transhumanist movements/philosophies, such as those espoused by Sublime and the U-Men, people who were interested in surpassing humanity (through body modification/grafting rather than giving up their actual humanity through genetic manipulation.) Sure, some of it is reminiscent of a lot of the stuff that folks were talking about in 1990, in the heyday of Mondo 2000 and the like, but it’s territory that hasn’t really been explored in comics. Typically we get a lot of the freak with a human soul sorts of stories, but not a lot of the reverse.

In Mr. Morrison’s X-Men, there was a feeling of a worldwide struggle for the rights of mutants, with riots in the streets of Europe as well as misguided teenagers waging war on their peers, a rebellion of X-kids against X-Men. Finally, we get the ultimate in mutant revolution, a drug-fueled Magneto attempting to destroy New York and flip the earth’s poles.

But what we see in that is the failure of the mutant/human struggle. Magneto is ascendant in a moment in time where his triumph is less than meaningless. He can’t even impress the New Brotherhood of Evil Mutants with this victory. Instead, he’s revealed as the ultimate evolutionary throwback, a dinosaur whose aims no longer fit into a world that has passed him by.

Plus he used the Imperial Guard in his second story arc. Yes, I’m a total geek. But I can’t tell you how pleased that I was when I saw them, even if they were the villains of the piece. Mr. Morrison was unafraid to go cosmic in the face of Marvel’s perhaps most conservative period (in terms of insistence on ‘real-world’ superheroics, certainly; though there was a fair bit of editorial freedom that we’re not seeing today.)

What struck me most, however, about the abovementioned “Imperial” story arc was not it’s use of obscure Marvel characters. What got to me was the story’s humanity. In the face of ultimate human evil/cruelty/sadism, Jean Grey stands it down not with the power of the Phoenix and by incinerating it, but she strikes it down with the power of its own isolation and loneliness. And instead of simply destroying/locking the villain away for another day, Xavier and company set about re-educating and re-creating this force into something positive.

I could go on about the ideas touched on and nearly immediately discarded, like iridescent butterflies that only live for a day. But I won’t. Better that you actually read those in the stories themselves.

As much as Mr. Morrison was looking forward and sideways, he always rooted his characters firmly in their pasts (though he managed not to be bogged down with the minutiae of continuity). The characters, though startlingly different at times, never acted in a way that was inconsistent with previous portrayals. Well, either that or I’m not trying to reconcile all of Cyclops’ personal hangups over the years.

Unlike a lot of modern reinventions, Mr. Morrison wasn’t content to just work with old characters and slap a new coat of black leather on them. He actually (gasp!) created new characters and put them in play in the world. I’m not just talking about throwaway villains here. I’m talking about a whole cast of characters who played crucial roles in the stories and who felt like they had lives beyond the panels that they took part in.

And I know that I’m in the minority here, but I love the “Here Comes Tomorrow” storyline that’s currently running in the books. Yes, the storytelling is rough compared to what’s come before, but everything in it is just so crazy (plus it manages to make sense, even if it’s crazy Morrison-sense) that I find myself totally enthralled with it. Will everything be explained? I have no clue (and it’ll be tough to do, even in a double-sized issue). But at this point, I almost don’t care. Besides, he’s doing his nod to the Dark Phoenix storyline (termite people = blue asparagus people, natch).

Many people have come down on Grant Morrison for “reinventing” rather than actually inventing, particularly in his mainstream superhero work. But I think that the reinvention of all of the X-tropes has come off without a hitch (okay, maybe the art teams rotated a tad too much). He’s made works that succeed on two levels. On the surface, you can read them as straight-up crazy superhero action/melodrama. Or, like Alice in Wonderland, you can read the commentary that’s running in the undercurrent.

So, it is with great sadness that I will head down to the comic shop in a couple of weeks and pick up New X-Men #154, and end 20+ years of buying Marvel comics (minus a relatively long break when I wasn’t buying much of any comics). I’ve seen nothing else that has much to offer me at this point. Sure, there’s an occasional cover that looks enticing, but the contents usually end up turning me off.

It’s okay, Marvel. We’ll always have Howard the Duck. We’ll be able to share our cherished memories of Strikeforce: Morituri. And in those dark hours before dawn, I’ll read through my Essential Dr. Strange and Fantastic Four and remember better times.

Better times indeed.