The New X-Men HC Volume 1 Review

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Reviewer: Jesse Baker
Story Title: “E is for Extinction” (The New X-Men #114-116), “The Man in Room X” (The New X-Men Annual 2001), “Danger Rooms” (The New X-Men #117), “Germ Free Generation” (The New X-Men #118-120), “Silence: Psychic Rescue in Progress” (The New X-Men #121), “Imperial” (The New X-Men #122), “Testament” (The New X-Men #123), “Super Destroyer” (The New X-Men #124), “Losers” (The New X-Men #125), “All Hell” (The New X-Men #126)

Written by: Grant Morrison
Penciled by: Frank Quitely, Igor Kordey, Ethan Van Sciver, and Leinil Fracncis Yu
Inked by: NA
Colored by: NA
Lettered by: NA
Editor: Mark Powers and Mike Marts
Publisher: Marvel Comics

The Marvel Universe is in a state of untold upheaval. The entire population of the island nation of Genosha, including its leader Magneto has been wiped out by an army of hybrid Sentinels bred in the midst of the jungles of Central America. Mutant birth rates are at an all-time high while an entire generation of young mutants are reaching adulthood and crying out for revolution and retribution for the crimes committed against their kind by humans. Existing mutants are finding their bodies mutating even further than before and suddenly discovering new powers that they never had before. Human rights groups are reports of anti-mutant policies in countries such as China where babies born with the X-Gene are killed at birth while those mutants who somehow avoided being killed at birth are locked away in military bases for decades in order to be used as potential weapons of mass destruction against other countries in the event of war. Fanatical cult groups are sprouting up across the globe practicing a perverted philosophy of vivisection and surgical addiction in order evolve themselves to the level of mutants. And the usual suspects of mutant super-villains such as Mr. Sinister, Apocalypse, Sabretooth, Mystique, and the Hellfire Club are either dead, in federal custody, or hiding in some dark corner of the world and wondering how they fit into this brave new world that is unfolding right before their eyes.

The X-Men themselves have their own problems as they find their life’s work suddenly changing before their eyes. Both Storm and Shadowcat have left the X-Men due to their growing disillusionment with Professor Xavier and his methods. Colossus and Psylocke are dead, sacrificing their lives so that others might live. The brilliant Beast has found his body mutating against his will into an inhuman beast form completely devoid of human features. And the nefarious White Queen has been brought onto the X-Men team in order to help Professor Xavier with the most important task of his life: teaching a new generation of mutants who are coming into a world where the traditional “Xavier/Magneto” axis of what mutants are supposed to be no longer exists.

“A new generation of mutants is emerging, that much is certain. They will be called freaks, genetic monstrosities. They will be mocked, feared, spat upon and accused of stealing human jobs, eating human food, taking human partners… But they are emerging in the inner cities, the suburbs, in the deserts, in the jungles. And when they emerge they will need teachers, people who can help them overcome their anger and show them how to use their strange gifts responsibly. They will need us.” Professor Xavier

As the X-Men finish preparations for the reopening of the Xavier’s Institute of Higher Learning, a sinister figure by the name of Cassandra Nova has begun work to reactivate a hidden Sentinel Master Mold prototype. Meanwhile the X-Men also must deal with a new cult of humans calling themselves “The U-Men”, a group of fanatics who vivisect mutants and attach their limbs and organs into their human bodies in order to gain super-powers. As the X-Men deal with this two-pronged assault, Professor Xavier makes a bombshell announcement, coming out of the closet on live television. Revealing that he is a mutant and permanently exposing the school to the world as a home for wayward mutants, the X-Men find themselves under siege as anti-mutant protestors swarm the X-Mansion and the media, who begin accusing the school of being a front for the training of an army of mutant warriors bent on world domination.

So when Xavier, upon coming out, makes the announcement that he was now leaving in order to go on vacation with his alien lover, the Shi’ar Empress Lilandra, the X-Men begin to be suspicious as to something being wrong with Professor. But it’s not until he leaves that the X-Men make a shocking discovery: a mortally wounded Beast and a catatonic student in the morgue with the still living body of Cassandra Nova, who should be dead after having her neck broken and shot in the forehead.
When Beast comes to, he makes a shocking announcement: Cassandra Nova not only has switched bodies with the Professor but is also Xavier’s evil twin sister who he tried killed while in the womb. Now Cassandra has control over Xavier’s body and mighty telepathic abilities, which she has used to enslave the entire Shi’ar Empire to carry out her sole goal in life, to destroy all mutants.

The New X-Men Volume 1 Hardcover reprints Grant Morrison’s critically acclaimed first year on The New X-Men. Collecting The New X-Men #114-126 as well as The New X-Men 2001 Annual, Morrison ditches the soap opera angst and unrealistic “shiny-happy people” image of mutants propagated during the 1990s and brings back the cutting edge social commentary of the series as well as the freak-show nature of mutant life that has been sugarcoated and ignored by most writers in the last decade. He also attempts to bring real world sensibility to the X-Men, abandoning the spandex for turtle-neck sweaters and leather coats and presents a new form of mutant, out and proud about their genetic make-up and who are no longer going to hide in the shadows or limit their days lounging around a mansion doing nothing for their fellow mutants.

“These are different times Scott. Everything is different. We can’t afford to be ashamed anymore. We can’t strap down our wings or hide our strange eyes and our brilliant minds. We have more important things to do than worry about whether or glowing eyes frighten the Republicans.” Jean Grey

The social context of the nature of mutants in the Marvel Universe gets a much needed overhaul under Morrison’s pen as he seeks to give the book a level of 21st Century sensibility. Morrison explores the nature of mutant being a culture not an analogy for race and willfully explores the concept of mutants being an analogy for homosexuality through Xavier’s “coming out” to Cyclop’s constant complaining that he doesn’t want to join in with his wife Jean’s running and kicking the proverbial mutant closet door down and serving as a poster child for mutant community in the media.

Meanwhile Grant Morrison destroys the long-standard “Magneto/Xavier” philosophical axis with the sudden and senseless death of Magneto. Killed along with the rest of the population of Genosha, this leaves a huge void in the mutant community and leaves Xavier as the default winner in their ideological war. But in death, Magneto has become an icon, a much beloved cultural figure killed at the hands of humans and their killing machines, effectively proving his point that humans will wipe out mutantkind as being right all alone. Now a martyr, Magneto has become a pop figure worshipped by the disillusioned and alienated to the point that T-Shirts bearing Magneto’s image becomes the top selling shirt for disaffected youths both human and mutants. This gives the X-Men another additional problem, as how can they go about bringing forth the dream of Xavier’s if their arc-nemesis has been murdered in a fashion that proves that he was right all along?

“…Thoughts on the new school uniforms?” Professor Xavier

“Suddenly I don’t have to look like an idiot in broad daylight.” Wolverine

Do to the laziness of the “primary” artist for New X-Men, Frank Quitely, the artwork in this collection is extremely haphazard. A total of four artists are employed in this collection as Quitely constantly fell behind, forcing Marvel to employ other artists to fill in for him.

Frank’s art is essentially his same old art from the Authority and working on the X-Men exposes Frank’s weaknesses to draw anything other than landscape spreads and explosions. The faces of the X-Men look plain and generic, especially Jean Grey and Emma Frost. Cyclops looks even more boring than humanly possible under Frank’s pen.

On the plus side is Frank’s revamp of the X-Men uniforms, as Quitely replaces the spandex uniforms with matching school teacher uniforms and leather coats. Jean Grey ditches her green and gold body-stocking for a trench-coat while Wolverine gets a realistic haircut and goes from being a midget with long sideburns and Batman-esque helmet hair and more like his movie counterpart Hugh Jackman, bare-chested and poured into a leather jacket and pants.

On the other hand, fill-in Igor Kordey’s artwork is a breath of fresh air and gives the book a dark and underground edge to it which has been absent from the X-Men for ages. He is a perfect fit for the dark and dirty story Morrison is trying to tell with the U-Men and Cassandra Nova. His interpretation of the Imperial Guard in particular are more alien and inhuman than one can imagine, as they look like the type of monstrous abominations that you might expect a creature like Cassandra Nova would use as her personal killers.

“I’ve become the perfect Faberge-Killing Machine for a reason and that reason is surely not to wave the flag of X-Liberalism” Emma Frost

“What makes you such a bitch Emma? Jean Grey

“Breeding darling, top class breeding…” Emma Frost

“We had some fun together didn’t we? When you think back, I have some GREAT photographs. I played Chopin by moonlight, you danced NAKED and fell in the shrubbery. But the truth is that I’m not interested in a relationship with a human being right now. In fact, I think I might be gay…” Beast, telling his pain in the butt, on-again off-again girlfriend Trish that he won’t take her back after she dumped him by phone after being accused of being into bestiality by the National Enquirer

Character-wise Morrison shows a good amount of knowledge of how to write the X-Men, especially Emma Frost and Beast. Shoved into the background upon her return in 1994, Emma Frost has been ignored and squandered as a character for many years in the pages of Generation X. So it comes to a great relief that Grant Morrison has decided to give Emma a spot of his extremely streamlined X-Men roster and gives her chance at having the spotlight. Emma, backed by her “Children of the Damned” inspired student groupies, is treated as a character who demands your attention. From her ultra-revealing white leather “X” shaped brassier that magically hangs onto her chest to her sexually-charged banter with the celibate Cyclops, Emma oozes sex and attitude. Her quips and insults and cynical attitude is a refreshing change of pace given the stuffy nature of the X-Men, which makes Emma the book’s POV character who’s there for readers to relate to and to be a family voice for them in the series. Also, to differentiate her from the rest of the X-Men telepaths (and to replace Colossus, who Morrison did not anticipate would be killed off when he wrote up his plans for his run) Morrison gives Emma a new power to turn herself into a living human diamond with super-strength and invulnerability with the turn off being that in her diamond form Emma loses all form of empathy rendering her the perfect fighting machine.

Beast meanwhile gets Morrison’s spotlight in terms of character development as his sudden transformation into Beast from “Beauty and the Beast” is explored. His body mutating beyond his control Beast finds his one bright light, his girlfriend Trish, abandon him in the wake of negative press coverage of their relationship, which accuses Trish of sinning against God by being in love with the animal-like Hank McCoy. Further making life hell for Beast is Cassandra Nova, who uses the Professor’s mental powers to flood Beast’s mind with dark thoughts and declarations that Hank is nothing but as a mindless animal who is more animal than freak. Despite this Beast is able to come to grips with his transformation and rise above his fears of losing his humanity, culminating with him using his trademark humor to tell Trish (who comes crawling back to Hank like she always does after she purposely hurts him while dumping him) that he’s gay. This controversial storyline would soon take on a life of it’s own as fans wondered if Beast was really gay or if he was just trying to get revenge of Trish, who proceeds to take Hank’s rejection of her do to his new-found homosexual feelings at face value and spreads it across the news that Hank’s gay, forcing Hank to go along with the lie in order to continue to make Trish suffer for years of emotional turmoil she put him through.

Wolverine and Jean Grey meanwhile get the complete and total shaft in terms of character development. Morrison recycles the now-cliché Phoenix Saga storyline with Jean suddenly manifesting the Phoenix Effect and talking in third-person while her body is consumed by fire. Wolverine meanwhile does nothing of note and aside from a brief scene where Jean clumsily attempts to seduce Logan in order to get revenge against Cyclops for allegedly sleeping with Emma, is not given any real character building moment.

Cyclops meanwhile gets treated surprisingly well as Morrison explores the dark side of Scott Summers. Scott is shown as a whiner who doesn’t approve of the new open policy of Xavier and may or may not be cheating on Jean with the seductress Emma Frost, who takes advantage of Cyclops’s self-imposed celibacy decision that has put a strain upon his marriage to Jean.

Villain-wise though, Morrison fails to deliver in the form of his new “Big Bad” Cassandra Nova. Her big secret, that she was Xavier’s evil twin, was leaked several months ahead of time and was heavily criticized since no mention has ever been made of Xavier having a twin. Furthermore, Morrison himself keeps changing her origin every other issue, as she goes from new species that is competing with mutantkind for dominance to Xavier’s “genetic twin”, to being Xavier’s evil twin sister who was miscarried and has since came back from the grave to being some sort of mystical Shi’ar entity called a “Mummudrai” which everyone meets when they are in the womb. In the end, Cassandra is more or less just like the rest of the various “God-Like” villains that the X-men face who are haphazardly written, hyped up, and ultimately disposed of when they are defeated and never seen again.

Furthermore, the use of the Shi’ar empire is another flaw as they have been over-used and represent a part of the X-Men mythos that don’t fit into what the X-Men are supposed to be in terms of being a social parable. Alien empires and their main heroes who are analogues of members of the Legion of the Super-Heroes are out of this world and are the stuff you’d expect to see in the pages of Fantastic Four or the Avengers, not the X-Men.

But on the plus side is Morrison’s “U-Men”, who are an excellent twist on the mutant/human relationship. The U-Men are a group of humans who are so envious of mutants and their powers that they seek to hunt down mutants who are chopped up and their limbs, organs, and blood are surgically attached to the bodies of the U-Men. This disturbing vivisection cult are a really new concept and offer a chilling look at the opposite side of how humanity views mutants, with such envy that they would chop off their own limbs, gouge out their own eyes, and cut open their throats and remove their voice boxes and replace them with dismembered mutant body-parts in a desperate attempt to gain mutant powers.

Finally as a bonus material, the collection features Grant Morrison’s original proposal for the X-Men, which a much more epic version of the battle against Cassandra Nova, Magneto surviving the destruction of Genosha, and the death of Rogue, who’s death would lead the X-Men learning that they have been secretly infected with Nanotech Sentinels who are now inside their bloodstream and tearing their bodies apart from within.