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Post by The Spider on Jul 13, 2009 3:29:08 GMT
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Post by SPS on Jul 13, 2009 15:31:33 GMT
I have been an X-Men fan since I was 7 or 8 years old. I grew up with the TV show, and eagerly awaited it every Saturday morning. X-Men got me into comics, and Generation X had me eagerly going to K-Mart (back when they still sold comics) every month for the latest adventures of Chamber, Synch, and the rest. The X-Men had me hooked, they were different, weren't always pretty (though the non-pretty ones were the exception rather than the rule), and were flawed. The soap opera aspects had me hooked even at a young age.
Yeah I liked the main line but I was always a spin-off fan, as while nothing happened in the spinoffs, I was greatly entertained by books like Gambit, Generation X, and Excalibur, Gambit in particular is the character that gets me coming back more than ever.
I pretty much stopped reading X-Men in 1999 right around the time I got into video games. I returned for Chuck Austen's run (I was hearing bad things about Morrison), and stuck for awhile, going wherever Gambit was. But then M-Day happened, and I haven't picked up an X-Men comic since. That was the moment that I officially wrote the X-Men line off for good.
Now that the history is done, here are my reasons why the X-Men have failed in the past few years:
1. Joss Whedon: I know what you're saying "Joss Whedon's first arc was good though". To that I say no it was utter rubbish. His run sums up pretty much everything that is wrong with the X-Men. Astonishing X-Men was supposed to be the flagship title. A flagship title sums up the entire line. Guess what Astonishing said: "We miss Claremont and are afraid to try anything new!" Instead of capitalizing on Morrison's run, Marvel went back to status quo lane. Claremont is gone, get over it.
2. Undoing Morrison's run: Should need no explanation but at least Morrison's run was going places. Yes I agree Nazi Magneto was a bad idea, but come-on, the guy watched 16 million people die! You would be cranky if you saw that happen! I could only imagine where Morrison would have went after this (which from what I understand, was a return to colorful costumes at least) possibly creating a mutant registration act again, very similar to what Marvel would do two years later with Civil War I imagine, except with a bit of Morrison's twist.
3. M-Day: Do I need to say more? "Too Many mutants Quesada?" Let's do the math: Let's say that Genosha was half the mutant population, which was listed as 16 million. That means the worldwide mutant population was at least 32 million before it happened. Using current world population figures that means that the mutant population was 5 tenths of a thousand of the world population. That is not too many, and in fact that can be considered a worldwide minority. Then picking an arbitrary number of 198, which is probably closer to 168 counting all the deaths of the past few years (which I'm pretty sure would be close to the survival threshold for humanity). I have no background in biology and I'm certain that mutants are dead within the next 20-30 years. I could go on and on about how only the pretty ones kept their powers, which is like saying guess what: "We're all white on the inside, even though you were once black". Logic does not apply to M-Day. Perhaps what Quesada should have said is "No More X-Men".
4. Lack of direction for...ever? I can only seem to recall that the spin-offs had any sort of direction, where the main books just drift along. Aside from the Morrison Era. Most people would say: San Fransisco isn't a direction it's a location. Again no logic here.
5. Too many hands in the pot AKA-editorial interference: This has been prevalent since the X-Men hit it big, I don't need to say anymore.
6. Static main cast- Someone mentioned this in the topic and I agree. Cyclops, Beast, Emma, and Wolverine have been with the team for nearly 10 years. It's time to give them a break. In fact build some of the other characters up as franchise players. I'm certain with the right writers any character can be good.
7. Static plots- This is a problem with the premise- Most premises allow for different variations on it. Not the X-Men. But oh well there can't be anything done with it so oh well.
8. Overexpansion of the line- Wolverine and Deadpool have two books each. This pretty much makes my point because the spinoffs are having spinoffs now. Too many spinoffs weaken the line. Okay this is nowhere near as bad as it was around the turn of the century but still it's pretty bad.
I know it seems like I'm in love with Morrison which I kind am, because under him the X-Men had some direction. So here is a list of things that while perhaps impossible could very well save the X-Men franchise:
1. Undo M-Day- Quite simply without undoing this you are killing the line.
2. Give it some direction- I repeat a direction is not a location.
3. Give it a break- Yep that's right. Cancel Uncanny X-Men, X-Men: Legacy, Astonishing X-Men, X-Force, X-Men at the beach, and whatever other books happen to appear. You can keep Wolverine, Exiles and X-Factor because they are so far on the fringes that it doesn't matter. Then make people wait and salivatate at the idea of the X-Men returning, get a big name writer (NOT Millar or Bendis), and you'll have a major hit. Hey it has worked with Thor, Hal Jordan, and even the X-Men themselves before. So why wouldn't it work again?
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Post by Gray Lensman on Jul 13, 2009 23:27:02 GMT
Looks like it could be interesting, Spider, thanks.  I've followed the X-Men, on and off, for way too long to mention. Suffice it to say that I remember Claremont's first run pretty well... well enough that I'd be annoyed with these books if I thought them worth the effort of reading. It just seems like this franchise has been so micromanaged in the past decade that nobody has been able to do anything worthwhile with it. So I'll throw my own observations into this... 1) M-Day absolutely needs to go. While I can understand that the mutant origin has often been a creative cop-out for some writers, Quesada's cure was vastly worse than the disease. 2) While there were a lot of good ideas in it (secondary mutations, growing mutant minority, Magneto as a cult figure), Morrison was overall very uneven at best. The problem was that Morrison had a keen grasp of the science fiction, his characterization was often incoherent. The problem now is that Marvel kept the bad ideas and ditched the good ones. 3) The line is too large, and most of the books lack a coherent story direction. I suspect the micromanagement of the line has much to do with this, because bad writing and the incoherence of the line has been the only constant factor in the past decade. 4) There's vastly too much character damage been done. I guess Marvel could just hand-wave Chuck Austen's entire run into the void, but I still can't point to very many X-Men that haven't been ruined through bad storytelling in recent years. It would take an entire maxi-series to undo even a fraction of the continuity and characterization snarls, and attending to those means cutting down on forward storytelling. 5) What do the X-Men really stand for now? At one time, it was very clear what their vision was... but it seems like those principles have been cast aside. They don't integrate with humans very much except by circumstance, they're willing to kill when they wouldn't before, and so forth. They need to find their center, and stick by it. 6) Do the X-Men have any credible villains left? At all? Anyway, I think I'll leave it here for now, save to say that I don't think there's a simple analysis or a simple solution to a problem that's been growing for nearly two decades now. Not to say there aren't any good stories at all, but there are far too many problems at the editorial level that need to be addressed before this franchise can regain any credibility. |
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Post by Terrordar on Jul 26, 2009 20:11:04 GMT
The characters are all basically personally more deplorable than their villains. They are all cheats, adulters, sociopaths, and seem to often have a bitter contempt for their fellow X-men.
Its like reading a high school drama, with superpowers, and people who are full grown adults who never take responsibility for anything wrong they do.
X-men was my favorite Marvel comic for years, years. But even before Morrison the slip was already happening. After? And especially with the runs after that atrocious monstrosity of a run, the characters are irredeemable. They largely personally sicken me as human beings (though thankfully they aren't human, lol), and I don't read the books anymore as a result.
I can't think of one X-man anymore who I can generate respect for.
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