Exploration of Grant Morrison's X-Men Blueprint: An Engrossing Investigation
The X-Men are perched precariously on the brink of change, except this time, it truly feels like they're teetering on the edge of something groundbreaking. In the comics, after years under the Krakoan Age, they're ready to rise from the ashes of sorrow once more. On the big screen, we're about to bid adieu to the Fox X-Men era with Deadpool and Wolverine in the coming summer. On TV, mutants ride high as X-Men '97 reimagines an animated classic.
Remind you of anything? It's eerily reminiscent of the turn of the 21st century when Grant Morrison was preparing to script a new generation of X-Men comics—what would eventually evolve into New X-Men in the summer of 2001. Alongside Frank Quitely and other artists, New X-Men refreshed the X-Men narrative for the current era, bolstered by the cultural frenzy the X-Men found themselves in. While the '90s were kind to the X-Men in terms of comic sales—with surefire support from popular ventures like X-Men: The Animated Series and iconic Jim Lee trading cards—mutantkind hit the mainstream heavy with the release of the first X-Men movie in 2000.
The harbinger of a new age of superhero filmmaking, X-Men was, to Morrison's eyes, a shot in the arm and a warning sign of what had to change in the comics for them to match the audience the movie captivated. "Let's target mass audiences. Let's create books we can take pride in on every level. Books that kids will adore for sheer excitement, college kids will buy for the rebel cool, and adults will cherish for the diversion, just like the movies and TV shows—just like when Stan [Lee] was doing it!!" Morrison wrote in their pitch bible for New X-Men, a text that has circulated online for some years now but gains a new significance in 2024, as Marvel's mutants find themselves at a crossroads. A comics reset and a future in Marvel's coveted cinematic universe are within sight.
Part pitch, part manifesto, Morrison articulately argues for a 21st century vision of the X-Men, inspired by the adoption of the franchise's core concepts and characters in the movie. "To rejuvenate the X-Men once more, we must take a closer, unflinching look at what's not working in this book and the comics field in general," they write in part. "The recent X-Men stories have been crafted in an old-fashioned, dense style; we must update, streamline, and demystify the storytelling techniques drastically for contemporary audiences."
This document is teeming with Morrison's thoughts on what they admired in X-Men—pointing to Chris Claremont and John Byrne's legendary run on Giant Sized and then Uncanny X-Men in the late '70s and early '80s as a touchstone ("they had the freedom to create new material, reconceptualize the old stuff that still worked, and ignore the outdated elements that had crippled the original series")—and what needed to be discarded in the '90s. "For the past decade or so, the tendency at Marvel has been hyper-conservative. Comics like X-Men have evolved from wild, explosive pop to cautious, questionable retro," Morrison contended. "...The comic has turned inward and gone septic... X-Men, despite being Marvel's bestseller, had become a catchphrase for unrefined geekery before the movie brought us another jolt of electricity."
To Morrison, the film represented much of what they sought to achieve with New X-Men's cultural and aesthetic appeal. Beyond a sense of contemporary cool that defined the Claremont era of the franchise, mutant stories that continued to position these heroes more as everyday people than superheroes, it was essential to them that X-Men felt far less like a standard superhero comic and more like a science fiction epic, something that resonates in New X-Men's eventual methods for treating staples like the Sentinels or understanding the Shi'ar Empire, yet also in how it delineated mutant culture as something distinct from humanity, both societally and evolutionarily. Above all, though? Morrison adored the designs behind those movie suits.
"The film got it almost right: I think we should opt for raw bike-style exo-rubber uniforms, perhaps military pants and wrestling-style boots... the look is brutalist and military, and the X-Men should reflect this to remain on the cutting edge of cool," Morrison writes before adding that not everything the film did design-wise quite worked for them. "I'd like to see some yellow in paneling or detailing on the costumes—if only to avoid the dull black leather look all film superheroes share—but it should be eye-catching fluorescent yellow, the type cyclists and bikers wear to be visible... X-Men is a soap opera about larger-than-life characters in the same way that Dallas was a soap about oil tycoons. The oil only provided decoration and a pretense to look fantastic."
Morrison's daring wager has proven successful, even if not every facet of their run on New X-Men escaped controversy. New X-Men endures as one of the seminal 21st century X-Men texts, a factor still felt in the comics today—and elsewhere, in creations like Deadpool and Wolverine's use of Cassandra Nova or X-Men '97's examination of the Genoshan genocide.
As the X-Men once again stand on the precipice of a mainstream embrace arguably not seen since the early 2000s, Morrison's words echo—providing a fine set of guidelines as we see where Marvel Studios and Marvel Comics take mutantkind's development next.
[1] Intriguingly, X-Men '97 delves into the complexities of leadership dynamics—something widely associated with Morrison's New X-Men era.
- The upcoming 2024 comics reset for the X-Men, akin to the New X-Men in 2001, may prospects of redefining the narrative for a contemporary audience, as Grant Morrison advocated in his pitch bible.
- Just like Morrison envisioned for New X-Men in the early 2000s, X-Men '97 reinvigorates an animated classic by presenting mutants as everyday people, blurring the lines between soap operas and science fiction epics.
- In the spirit of Morrison's aesthetic vision for New X-Men, the designs for the X-Men in the upcoming film of 2024 might gravitate towards raw, military-inspired uniforms with eye-catching fluorescent yellow accents, aiming to stay on the cutting edge of cool.
- As Marvel Studios and Marvel Comics exploit the resurgence of the X-Men in 2024, the echo of Grant Morrison's words from the New X-Men era gains renewed significance, offering guidance for the future development of mutantkind.
