the cruellest month 03

As nearly two-and-a-half decades have passed since the release of Uncanny X-Men #394, the events surrounding its release matter, though mostly in a background/historical sense. They explain a little of the why of the choices made. Shed some light on possible significance. Give a flavour of what it was like to anticipate the broad, sweeping reshaping of the line only to read this comic and your stomach sink a little. But, that’s not the comic that sits on my desk. Too much time has passed and it now sits by itself. Before I can confront the comic divorced from its time and place, a thought: context doesn’t only include what came before.

Thinking about the lack of an ‘after’ for Uncanny X-Men #394 to confront has me wondering what question did it (seek to) answer... After all, it’s not like Joe Casey’s entire writing career has been devoted to telling what happens after. Sometimes, a story is just a story, as it were, not some exploration of a metaphysical question of the goings on after most stories end. Perhaps, I’ve been wondering, is Uncanny X-Men #394 less about what happens after and more about what is going to happen next. Not an answer, nor an introduction... an overture? A preview rather than a story.

As I said yesterday, it contains a cast of X-Men that mixes the rosters of Uncanny X-Men and New X-Men, a somewhat baffling-in-the-moment choice to kick off the joint Morrison/Casey era. It deals with a young mutant antagonist that would never be seen again. The interpersonal drama teases a longstanding subplot brought to the forefront yet would not be followed up on directly for quite some time. The tone isn’t actually wrong exactly. It’s a comic about surfaces and images and pop eating itself and, most importantly, vitally, the issue ends with a simple message that cynically-yet-accurately sums up all that would follow (and came before):

Despite the politics and messages and metaphors, what X-Men comics are really about most of all are the X-Men.

“SOME THING NEVER CHANGE.” / “HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME”

You can run down the litany of moments in this comic that happen, after a fashion, in the much-lauded Morrison run. From the marriage tensions of Scott and Jean to the self-destructive mutant youth that idolises Magneto to the obsession with what the media says to Jean and Logan kissing as the world ends... you may not love the way it’s all put together, but it’s all there. What’s fascinating, to me, is how this issue seems to bask solely in what the other book would be doing. It is an overture for the successful (creatively, critically, financially) X-title and, as such, reveals the tentative doubts of its writer. It’s New X-Men without the soul, I suppose.

Look no further than the young mutants looking to the elder mutant terrorist as a role model. Casey gives us Warp Savant, a tattooed and brash newly 18-year old, whose mutant power is to transport matter into his own head. He strikes out without cause or message beyond “I’M A MUTANT AND I’M EVIL!” There’s no pathos or tenderness or nuance or subtlety to Warp Savant. I nearly wrote “He doesn’t even get a proper name,” but that’s actually the point. He only has his mutant name, that he chose, and is one big blinking symbol of the mutant that glorifies in being different, separate, other... everything that Quentin Quire would eventually come along and champion while wearing his MAGNETO WAS RIGHT tee. Except, Quentin found out he was adopted and wanted to impress a girl and eventually became an X-Man too. He was relatable and fully formed in a way that Warp Savant could never be. (But, he also outsurvived his creator and went on to be a character in many issues of X-Force, so there’s that.) If he wanted to be really edgy, he would’ve worn a WARP SAVANT WAS RIGHT shirt... right about what? Exactly.

And doesn’t that just sum up this comic’s place within the context of what followed? Yeah, it looks a bit similar. You can technically point to moments in New X-Men and obnoxiously yell “Casey did it!” at Morrison... but so what? To what end? “Pop eats itself?” Okay, got it. What else have you got? It’s a simple message yet thematically sound for both titles moving forward. After all, even if Casey ‘did’ it, he was only following Lee and Thomas and Claremont and Lobdell and Kelly and Niecieza and Simonson and Davis and Seagle and whoever else wrote X-Men comics before this. It’s all repetitions and recurrences that reinforce the essential truth of these comics. They spent so much of the previous decade becoming these impenetrable mazes of continuity, purposefully opaque to the point where all meaning was lost... so, what comes after? X-Men comics about X-Men comics, which come before more X-Men comics about X-Men comics.

“What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this stony rubbish?”

the cruellest month 02

Uncanny X-Men #394 came just over a year after Chris Claremont’s full time return to the X-Men franchise. It’s heavily rumoured that he had ghostwritten some of Alan Davis’s run in the lead-up to his return in X-Men #100. To say that Claremont’s return to the franchise practically synonymous with his name in many fans’ eyes was met with a muted reaction is a bit of an understatement. Despite pre-release hype, the actual comics did not live up to the legend of Claremont’s previous X-Men work and, while he would continue to carve out his corner of the X-Universe (right up until today), his interests were decidedly out of step with the average reader – and new Marvel editorial – tastes. He was well-regarded enough to warrant a new ongoing series, X-Treme X-Men, to continue his particular strand of X-Men comics, but the two main titles would go to Grant Morrison and Joe Casey.

Morrison as a choice to take over an X-title made a lot of sense. They had already done some work for Marvel’s Marvel Knights line, an imprint contracted out to Joe Quesada and Jimmy Palmiotti that had been so successful that Quesada was tapped to be the new Marvel Editor-in-Chief. Prior to Morrison coming over to do Marvel Boy, they were pretty much a DC-writer exclusively. However, by the end of their JLA run and The Invisibles, Morrison had threatened retirement, upset over the perceived similarities between The Matrix and the planned ending of The Invisibles (at least, that was what was presented at the time in the pages of Wizard that my teenage self gobbled up as gospel). Their jump to Marvel was quite the coup and, since it had initially been for Quesada, that the writer who revolutionised the Justice League all the way to a top-tier comic after so long as a bit of an afterthought taking on Marvel’s biggest franchise that had been languishing in the mire of continuity and irrelevance was Big News. Joe Casey, as he himself admits, was sort of just along for the ride, taking advantage of a big opportunity that came hot on the heels of taking over Adventures of Superman. Who would say no to writing Superman and the X-Men at the same time? How many have been given the chance? Never mind that he didn’t really have any strong desire or ideas...

When you look at a writer’s body of work, patterns emerge. For Casey, the most predominant pattern that I’ve always noticed is that his best work typically answers the question “What happens after?” The ‘after’ is variable... it could be what happens after the war ends? What happens after Bruce Wayne quits being Batman? What happens after Doom Patrol breaks up? What happens after enlightenment? (Another big pattern is “What happened between the panels of old Stan Lee comics?” though he hasn’t indulged that one in quite a while...) He’s always shown an interest in exploring what happens after the story typically ends, wanting to venture off the grid as it were, seeing where things go into uncharted territory.

With taking over Uncanny X-Men, there was no ‘after’ there. No pressing question, no brand new territory to explore. There was just... the X-Men. The human/mutant problems. A whole pile of continuity and the franchise’s most popular writer just shunted to the side and a decade of rampant editorial interference that fucked over some friends of his and none of that is a particularly compelling status quo from which stories spring. Grant Morrison had a desire and a concept for how to propel the X-Men forward in new and exciting ways. Joe Casey had a desire to not blow a big opportunity that would be great for his career. (Spoiler: he did not succeed.)

With that in mind: Uncanny X-Men #394 also had the weird ‘honour’ of being the first issue of the Morrison/Casey run. Despite being two separate titles that may or may not connect directly, since the inception of X-Men, both it and Uncanny were treated as a singularish creative vision. The writers positioned as a collective duo that, while doing their own thing, were also joined at the hip where, presumably, their creative plans would happen in concert. Moreover, Casey, always being mindful of marketing optics, knew that there was an element of hype of the two of them taking over the titles. While Morrison was the star of the show, Casey was the rising star, and being left to make the initial statement, he kinda whiffed it through good intentions and overthinking it.

Only four X-Men are in the comic, two that would exclusively appear in New X-Men (Cyclops and Jean Grey), one that would exclusively appear in Uncanny (Angel), and one that the two titles would share (Wolverine). This group would literally never recur in either Uncanny X-Men or New X-Men. They face a one-off threat that would never recur. It was largely predicated on intercharacter drama that would continue in a different form in New X-Men. Basically, Casey tried to do a bit of a big introduction, but wound up delivering something akin to a fill-in issue... that would be judged as the first impression of their collective new era on the X-Titles. As a result, it didn’t take too long before New X-Men siloed itself off as a singular creative vision and Uncanny X-Men became a bit of a maligned afterthought, never quite able to find the juice until the very end when it was too late. And, then, Casey was gone after around a year and a half just like the franchise’s greatest writer immediately preceding him.

the cruellest month 01

I forget where I read it, maybe in something by Chuck Klosterman or maybe in a random column in Spin two decades ago, but, someone put forth the theory that the reason why we listen to the same songs again and again isn’t out of enjoyment necessarily, but in an effort to somehow figure out or ‘solve’ the song, that something about it is unresolved in our mind, so we listen again and again in an effort to finally have it make sense. Every year or so, I reread Uncanny X-Men #394 in the hopes that this reread will be the one where it all clicks, I can finally declare the comic solved, and, maybe, write a nice little piece where I explain what everyone else (dis)missed, including the folks who made it.

This has not yet happened. For me or anyone else, to be fair. I’ve remained undeterred, dutifully pulling my copy of the Poptopia trade paperback from my Joe Casey shelf every year or so when the desire and memory returns. I don’t always reread it so much as flip through, skim through, letting broken images and words flit across my eyes, much like putting on a song you know by heart and don’t really hear anymore. White noise comicbook experience. And, perhaps, that is the problem, the place where I have gone awry, lost my way, I’ve wondered, lost all perspective and sense of the objective. It’s hard to know where the flaw lies. Is it me or the work? After all, there is the distinct possibility that there is nothing else there and the entire exercise is futile. Not that that has ever stopped me.

I wrote about Uncanny X-Men #394 once before, just under 18 years ago, during my first Blogathon, a 24-hour straight marathon of blogging where money is raised for charity of which I’ve done six. Long, tiring, somewhat pointless, comics criticism as public performance, it involves staying up for over a day and writing the entire time with every-half-hour deadlines. It’s an exercise in getting the work done where you’ve got not time for good let alone perfect. It’s all energy and quick-thinking and I’ve always loved that method. It’s partly why I’m drawn so much to Casey’s writing and why I selected a trio of his works to write about in that first Blogathon: energy. The man has energy and it subsumes his writing. I’ve always loved that, going back to when I was tricked into reading his first Marvel comic and it’s there in the first issue of his oft-maligned Uncanny X-Men run.

That’s part of the reason why I keep returning to the comic even though Casey himself summed it up as “Not my finest moment as a comicbook writer” and wrote “it sucks all kinds of ass.” And yet something lingers, something nags at me, and I can’t figure it out.

I have developed a process for writing that involves (re)reading the material, letting it sit in the back of my head, and, then, mad-dash writing (energy!) where I usually figure out what I really think about the work as I go. It finally dawned on me that, perhaps, that’s what I need to do with Uncanny X-Men #394. Reading and rereading and pondering and rereading and pondering on and on for decades has not been an effective process, so I will attempt to write my way into insight. All of my best ideas come at the keyboard.

I’ve never been a critic adept at longform pieces. During my academic twenties, I often struggled with professors asking “Can you unpack that?” I’m a bit too simple and prone to repetition as I stall for time. So, my preferred approach here is one of my fondest formal experiments: the month-long daily writing. In 2014, I did a series of writing titled Another View where I wrote about Age of Ultron #10 every day for a month and, then, repeated it the following year with Thanos vs. Hulk #1 (the former work is collected in book form). It’s an approach that encourages delving as deep into a work as possible, exhausting it. Playing the song on repeat for all of April as I try to solve it.

So, as a brief introduction to Uncanny X-Men #394: published in May 2001, it was the first issue released as part of a line-wide revamp of the X-Men comics. Joe Casey and Ian Churchill took over Uncanny X-Men, while Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely took over X-Men (retitled New X-Men), while the previous writer of the book, Chris Claremont, was given a new series X-Treme X-Men with Salvador Larroca. A brief plot summary (from my Blogathon post):

#394 is an interesting book in that it was the first issue of the relaunch to come out and doesn't actually feature the cast of Casey's X-Men squad really. The issue has Cyclops (Morrison), Jean Grey (Morrison), Wolverine (Morrison and Casey) and Archangel (Casey). Therefore, it's a little "pump you up" issue that doesn't do that, because it sucks all kinds of ass.

Some tattooed, newly-turned-18 mutant named Warp Savant attacks Cape Citadel, the same military base Magneto attacked in (Uncanny) X-Men #1. Why? Because he's young, dumb and ready to come alive, motherfuckers! WHOO!

His mutant power is to absorb things into his mind, which he does to Wolverine and Jean, while Cyclops and Archangel kick his ass until he decides to absorb himself or something. Oh, and Wolverine and Jean kiss.

I’m sure that I’ll explore the context and plot of the issue in more detail over the coming days (week, month). Will I actually figure it out? Will I find new, hidden depths? Will I solve the comic? We will find out, together.