The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 250: E is for Extinction #4, November 2015

As I started reading this issue, I wondered why Doom would ever let something like a Phoenix Egg sit around unattended considering the sort of power such things contain. Then I remembered that thing with Cyclops in Secret Wars. So, anyway, the Phoenix Egg hatches and inside is a Cassandra Nova-possessed Jean Grey, manifesting all the powers and fashion sense of Dark Phoenix.

Which, honestly, is a pretty amazing way for that showdown between Professor X (now possessing the body of Quentin Quire) and, as the title of the issue suggests, "Supernova." Though there's a divergence there, the battle between the two seems to have been fated, regardless of the version of the universe they exist in.

I've been thinking about this idea of "Secret Wars," and how Hickman is deploying it. It obviously hearkens back to the original, and the idea of the winner getting all they want, their hearts' desires. You know who gets that in this version of the story? Doom. He's got Susan, he's got Valeria and Franklin, he's got a people who fear and worship him, and a world that, aside from a few inter-zone skirmishes, the "Secret Wars," an ordered world.
But the Wars themselves, the mini-series, much as they're all nicely skewed toward telling us a satisfying story, are also providing a subtext to Doom's thinking that his world is ordered. Each of these minor skirmishes demonstrates the fundamental volatility of a collective like Battleworld. With so many versions of so many significantly-powered individuals who have vast amounts of experience with reality-shifting crises, how could Doom possibly keep things together?
Of course, in the actual series, we're seeing just how much he's not, as well as numerous other intrigues at the highest levels of Battleworld....I was going to say politics, but it's actually at the highest levels of existence in this particular reality. Doom fights a Secret War as well, and at the moment he's the only one aware of it.

But getting back to E. The wrap up is....odd. I got to the end of this series and I had a bit of a hard time telling if Burnham and Villalobos were offering an homage to Morrisonian storytelling, or taking the piss with it. Not that I'm suggesting that the two are necessarily mutually-exclusive, but things got so esoteric there at the end that I'm not sure where on that continuum the series sits. I think I'll consider it homage, with a knowing wink, and leave it at that.

It was really, really great to get a small glimpse back into that world, albeit slightly changed. A very cool era of the X-Men, and a very cool suggestion as to how it might have all turned out.

Not sure where we're going to go tomorrow. But it'll be somewhere. See you then.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 249: E is for Extinction #3, October 2015

Happy Halloween everyone!

I've only been following a couple of the "Secret Wars" tie-ins, notably the afore-blogged Weirdworld and Squadron Sinister, though I was really hoping for slightly more of the Shadows in that title. What these titles have in common, as do the series I sort of delved into (Inferno, Secret Wars: Battleworld, Battleworld Journal), is that they're very explicitly invested in the narrative universe within which they exist - they utilize the setting as a plot point, referencing the fact that there are different realms in Battleworld, having communication and conflict between those realms. Up until this point, E has only tangentially referred to this situation, with the occasional replacement of the word "God" for "Doom." In this issue, however, the Battleworld situation is made an intrinsic plot piece, as versions of Hank "Beast" McCoy from all over the planet converge on the realm of Mutopia (setting for this series) under the influence of an enhanced virus called "Sublime."

Now, it's been quite a while since I read New X-Men, and I do remember the character of Sublime in that series, a particularly grim portrayal of a human being in the Marvel U, but I don't recall him being a virus. Perhaps after I've finished my look at Waid's Flash (hey! Stop snickering. I'll get there!), I should do a read of Morrison's X-Men. I was thinking about doing his Superman, using Action, All-Star, and JLA....y'know, there's sometimes just too much to write.

This issue has been my least favourite so far, in that it seems to have been a tangent in order that the series be more fully inserted into the crossover, rather than anything fundamental to the plot of Magneto and the Phoenix Egg. Who stumbles out of that egg, or rather emerges majestically, will be fodder for tomorrow's post, but it's going to be interesting.

From a collecting standpoint, I've filed these comics in my Grant Morrison Collection. I'm impressed enough with the quality of the series that I think it deserves to be kept with its source material, a What If?, or even What Should?, and one that adds some depth and nuance to the original run. I'll admit that one thing I am excited for is to read New X-Men up to the point where the two diverge, and then see where things go in either direction. But I'm a literature geek that way.

See you tomorrow for the conclusion of E is for Extinction. I'll probably go out today and grab the last issue of Weirdworld, too, so that we can make a clean break from the "Secret Wars" crossovers. And then back to Alpha Flight, I think. Onward!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 248: E is for Extinction #2, September 2015

See, I would absolutely keep reading this take on the X-Men, for as long as Burnham and Villalobos wanted to do it. At the end of last issue, the elder X-Men rescue Xorn from a facility in which he is being used as a power source.

But....wait a minute (SPOILER AHEAD!!!!)
...
 ...
 ...
 ...
Isn't Xorn Magneto?

I know that at some point after Morrison left the title, a character called Xorn was introduced into the X-continuity. I have the suspicion that this was because so many people loved the character of Xorn, and when he was revealed to actually be the X-Men's greatest rival, it probably irked a lot of people. I know it irked me, because Xorn was awesome, but it was also perhaps one of the greatest deceptions ever in superhero comics, on par with Busiek's deployment of the Thunderbolts right up until the end of that first issue (So. Great.). But if that's the case, then who is the sun-headed Xorn who is facing off against the master of magnetism in this issue? Methinks something weird is going on.

Well, when all those Beasts show up, I guess that's obvious.

What's striking me really about this series is that it's trying very hard, and largely succeeding, in being a kind of weird, off-kilter superhero book, something that, as is well known, Morrison excels at. We can read the strangeness of the book, the visual aesthetic, everything, really, as a love letter not only to New X-Men, but also to Morrisonian superhero writing in general. But here's the thing: if you look back at New X-Men, it is pretty much the most mainstream thing Morrison has put out in superheroes. Even his JLA run, which was pretty mainstream, had weird story lines like "Rock of Ages" and "Crisis Times Five," stuff worthy of an Animal Man or Doom Patrol arc (okay, maybe not Doom Patrol. That shit was out there). The closest New X-Men comes to a Morrison story, in my humble opinion of course, was the silent "Psychic Rescue" issue. Everything else was actually pretty normal (for the X-Men) stuff.

So E is for Extinction is actually a newer, stranger take on a fairly mainstream comic written by Grant Morrison? I think we must be in for some high weirdness over the next couple of days. Join me, won't you?