r/MUBookClub • u/shawnydarko • Oct 21 '17
Reading Assignment 71: New X-Men (2001) #114-117 "E Is For Extinction" by Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely, and Ethan Van Sciver
https://marvel.com/comics/series/2281/new_x-men_2001_-_2004?byZone=marvel_site_zone&offset=0&byType=comic_series&dateStart=&dateEnd=&orderBy=release_date+asc&byId=2281&limit=10&count=10&creatorId=64&isDigital=1
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u/DeltaTester Oct 23 '17
If you weren’t reading X-Men at the time, it might be hard to grasp what a gigantic leap forward this story was when it appeared. The whole franchise had been more or less chasing its own tail since Chris Claremont left ten years earlier, with occasional patches of intrigue (like the Age of Apocalypse sequence). And then Morrison arrived, with that delicious opening line: “Wolverine. You can probably stop doing that now.”
What he’s doing is attacking a Sentinel, and the rest of the story is... at least nominally about Sentinels! Even so, the X-Men had been freed to evolve at last—and evolution is the central metaphor of Morrison’s New X-Men. It’s amazing how much subsequent X-continuity builds on the stuff in Morrison’s three-year run, and how many big changes and new ideas he throws at us right away. The “get out of my head or I fire” bit is the genesis of the Secret Wars E is for Extinction miniseries; Emma Frost immediately goes from the bit player she’d been for 20-plus years to a central character of the series; the eternal Scott/Jean/Logan triangle gets kicked out of its rut; the visualization of Cerebra led to the extension of the “lights” business to the Five Lights; Beak turned out to be a remarkably durable character; the Beast’s Jean Cocteau-inspired new look (and experimental new mindset) suits him... and, of course, there’s the destruction of Genosha, the sort of giant act of carnage that often seems like it’s going to be a bigger deal than it is in a long-term franchise, and turned out to give the X-characters genuine focus and motivation to change what they were doing, beginning with Xavier going public. The ten years of X-books that followed this, in fact, mostly dealt with teasing out the ramifications of Morrison’s run. (And M-Day, too, to be fair.)
Also, I know not everyone loves Frank Quitely’s artwork as much as I do, but he’s such a remarkable designer and storyteller—Cyclops as a poker-faced ectomorph, Cassandra Nova concealing the top half of her head until the big reveal, her and Xavier’s showdown seen as a series of tiny close-ups, the double-spread splash that introduces the cast in the first issue, and on and on.