It should have ended a lot sooner. As it was, very little of it reached the heights of HoXPoX. Though Si Spurrier's books exploring their new faith with Nightcrawler were definitely the most interesting.
I was always upset that after ‘Inferno’ basically ended with Doug pretty much pulling a big damn heroes moment and revealing that he’s been keeping tabs on Prof. X the whole time, he then just got sidetracked for the rest of the era.
This is what I've always thought about Morrison's run, it just has a sort of mean-spiritedness to it. It isn't horrible, but it just hits all the standard X-Men tropes (Sentinels, Shi'ar, Magneto attacks!, Phoenix) while making them as dark as seemingly possible.
I think the strongest part of their X-Men run was the world building seen or even just hinted at outside of the school - NYC's Mutant Town neighborhood, Magneto as a Che Guevara-esque icon, mutant punk bands with names like Sentinel Bait and Nothing Can Stop the Juggernaut, etc.
Just a shame Morrison fails to follow through on it by making Magneto regress to "a daft old terrorist" (Morrison's own words) who is just a silver age villain.
So true. Usually if Morrison falls apart for me, it's when they're not putting the connections of ideas in their head onto the page. Here they just went so... basic.
Aspects have grown on me...the school stuff, the gritty soap opera. My taste in art has change a lot and I can see the beauty in Frank Quietly that I did not see at the time (I thought he drew everyone purposely ugly...I was dumb).
But it also feels unnecessarily edgey and Xorn/Magneto was stupid.
That last arc with Marc Silvestri, tho...in some ways it's maybe the worst of the run, but in another way...it's the most DC comic Marvel has ever done, because it's basically an ELSEWORLDS book! I'm surprised that Marvel doesn't frame it like that...a standalone graphic novel outside continuity.
Cassandra Nova and the Mummundrai are offputting ideas to me personally. I don't really love Nova as a villain or concept. The 'tried to strangle each other in the womb' thing was way to 90s Vertigo for my personal tastes in an X-MEN book.
But I was frankly way more into X-TREME X-MEN at the time...and still am!
I think it's the best work that Salvador Larrocca ever did in terms of art, and it's the most Claremonty Claremont has ever Claremonted (outside of X-MEN FOREVER, which is a WILDLY self indulgent masterpiece to me!).
XTXM with the team finding a new role as peacekeepers/cops for their own people, was the first time I'd found his work interesting or relevant for years.
Of course Marvel decided to go in a completely opposite direction before it ended. Stupid 198.
That truly is Claremont's self-indulgence era between X-TREME, FOREVER, the various THE END titles where he gets to write his own endings and eventually GENEXT... 2010s Claremont is a lot more humble with much softer stuff like NIGHTCRAWLER (massively underrated book)
Aughts Claremont is my guiltiest pleasure. ^___^;;;
I can see the way in which it might be offputting, particularly to modern readers, as it is all wildly self-indulgent and even with the modern sensibilities brought to them in terms of aesthetics, his style is somewhat archaic, but...
It's a strange period for him and not entirely successful to me, but it does have some wild swings for the fences. Him getting together with Byrne again is absolutely wild given what happened between them in the 80s.
...I've really come to appreciate that he's STILL out there taking BOLD SWINGS, bringing in new ideas, and that humanistic, earnest, character-first approach that I feel like a lot of modern superhero stuff is missing at times (which is why the Zdarskys and Norths etc are cleaning up).
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But it also feels unnecessarily edgey and Xorn/Magneto was stupid.
But the rest, yeah... there's not enough passion in it for me and some of the sci-fi concepts are terrible ideas (John Sublime...)
I think it's the best work that Salvador Larrocca ever did in terms of art, and it's the most Claremonty Claremont has ever Claremonted (outside of X-MEN FOREVER, which is a WILDLY self indulgent masterpiece to me!).
Of course Marvel decided to go in a completely opposite direction before it ended. Stupid 198.
I can see the way in which it might be offputting, particularly to modern readers, as it is all wildly self-indulgent and even with the modern sensibilities brought to them in terms of aesthetics, his style is somewhat archaic, but...