“THEY RUN THESE STORIES EVERY FEW WEEKS. JUST A NEW WAY OF SAYING THE SAME OLD THING” is the second most important postmodern phrase that Joe Casey writes Cyclops to say in Uncanny X-Men #394. The most important is “SOME THINGS NEVER CHANGE.” On the surface, it seems bad. Doing the same things over and over again without progress is something generally considered as a negative. It’s boring. Safe. That was the not what the Joe Quesada/Bill Jemas regime was about, after all. It was about doing new, exciting, and that worked. Until it didn’t. The big successes of that time were new and exciting, but so were the big failures. (Sidebar: “No more mutants” was the destruction of Genosha writ large, so was not actually new.) I don’t think that Casey had new and exciting in him for this gig, though. I think he looked at the franchise and realised that there was no escape. Nearly 40 years of history and what new was left to say? The mutants would never inherit the Earth, the humans would never wipe them out...
“Pop eats itself” is the central theme of Joe Casey’s Uncanny X-Men run and he doesn’t do too much with it beyond point at the comics and go “See?” Cyclops’s statements are neutral when read metafictionally. They are descriptive of objective fact. Even something like Ultimate X-Men, which had just launched a few months prior to this, was hostage to the history of the franchise. It wasn’t a true clean start, picking and choosing which tidbits to keep, which to cut, which to flip on their head, which to replicate exactly... As Warren Ellis said, they were remix comics. Take the whole of the X-Men and remix it into something that looks new and exciting, but is actually a speedrun through continuity, often only working because of the way it interacts with that continuity. The target audience were the kids who didn’t read comics. The real audience were the adults who read all of the comics.
Anyone who is acquainted with these works will immediately recognise in the poem certain references to vegetation ceremonies.
If you didn’t know the plot of The X-Men #1, you wouldn’t completely understand Uncanny X-Men #394 even with the references and attempts to explain things. You’d get a sense that Warp Savant is copying the actions of Magneto, but miss out on the key fact that this repeats the very first X-Men comic. You’d miss out on the reversals that I discussed yesterday. You’d miss out on the visual allusion when Archangel first appears echoing his pose from the cover of that first issue. For the start of a brand new era, this issue’s basic concept is rooted in you understanding a comic from 38 years ago. It was never trying to be new or different. Take the cover, which Casey describes as “its most lasting legacy.”
I really put my shameless marketing hat on for that one. Ironic, in
a way, in so far as it leaned into the more interpersonal, “soap opera” aspects
of the X-Men, which I had little to no interest in at that time. Then again, I
know what sells. The Wolverine-Jean Grey kiss – again, my goofy concept – was
executed by Ian Churchill in such a way that it left a fairly indelible mark on
the mainstream comicbook landscape circa 2001.
The only reason why this cover provoked a reaction at all is because of prior knowledge. Erase any idea who the characters are and you’re left with something from a romance novel cover: a muscular man passionately kissing a thin woman while both ware tight, leather pants. And that’s not a bad thing, it’s simply not what you associate with superhero comicbooks. That you’d kick off this new era with an image appropriate for an entirely different genre of stories indicates where your emphasis actually lies. This cover is targeted right at existing X-Men readers. It’s meant to grab their attention as married Jean Grey passionately kisses (and dry humps) Wolverine. There is no background drawn by Churchill, leaving the sole emphasis of the cover to be the two. The log is even relatively small, taking up the space of the first panel on a two-by-five page layout. The cover is nothing but cheap shock value meant to capture the attention of anyone with even a passing knowledge of the X-Men and no one else, because it wouldn’t mean anything to anyone else.
X-Men comics are about X-Men comics is the message and Casey is oddly comfortable with that fact from this issue. The “interpersonal, ‘soap opera’” is entirely predicated on you knowing the history of the characters. The main villain is a one-dimensional metaphor who literally teleports himself inside his own head at the end of the issue. It’s clear from the get go that Casey had nothing new to say about the X-Men because, in his opinion, there was nothing new to say.
