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.
