Grant Morrison Leaves New X-Men

It's a shame he won't be on X-Men, but the DC deal sounds good to me -- I loved his JLA stuff (not to mention Animal Man).

I know Morrison leaving was inevitable, & it's the way of the world (cf. Marvel recently firing Mark Waid from the Fantastic Four to "change direction" - that is, to possibly groom the title into the family comedy type thing the movie is supposedly going to be) (&, you know, just about every other hero title), but it's disappointing, given what he's done w/ the title (making the mutants more mutant-like, making the "boring" characters interesting, shaking up the status quo in a GOOD way, etc etc). I'm gonna miss that, & I fear Marvel is going to switch to a caretaker type of writer (cf. those couple of months where Chuck Austen wrote about 15 titles).

But, yeah, Morrison monkeying around in DC's sandbox again sounds like fun. There seems to be lots of interesting stuff going down over there - Jeff Smith working on Captain Marvel (the red/yellow one), Kyle Baker on Plastic Man, the Azarello / Risso Batman arc, and stuff and stuff.

The whole cosmic thing -- everything from Galactus to Dark Phoenix to the hoary hosts of Hoggoth to Dormammu -- man, that's one of the comics' and the Marvel Universe's strong points. Where else do you find anything remotely like any of that?

... Jeff Smith is working on Captain Marvel?

Also, looky here.

(And this isn't Morrison, but there's a new Gaiman-written Endless Nights anthology very soon, in case you weren't aware. For that matter, you might like Mike Carey's Lucifer.)

what are the reprint books of his JLA called? I think I've seen them in shops, but I've been very struck by the lame art in them, and this has not encouraged me to buy them.

JLA trade paperback info is here - page down a bit. Looks like the first 6 JLA volumes cover Morrison's run.

Also worth checking out (re: Anthony's inquiry) - the first New X-Men collection (_E is For Extinction_?), _Sebastian O_ (Vertigo mini - not collected, interestingly enough), _Fantastic Four 1234_ (a neat li'l Marvel Knights mini), and ... and ... well, shit, I'd recommend just about anything he wrote. (Yeah, I'm a bit of a fanboy.) _The Filth_ (recent Vertigo mini that's finishing up soon) is probably better to approach when it's completed - it's saucy sci-fi. (Oddly enough, the only story element I can recall right now is "flying killer sperm".)

He actually spent a fair bit of time talking about emergence and other related topics. 4th+ dimensional existence, superheroic mythology, magic/magick, making fun of Alan Moore and some interplay with Mark Waid. That article is being rewritten to more accurately reflect this. But that will happen later.

After i get some sleep.

mmmmm....sleep....

Reactionary in what way, Tico?

The Grant JLA stuff I read was okay, I liked the touches of standard Grantish weirdness and self-aware humor, but I still prefer the kind of character-driven, 'serious' book that he was doing with the X-Men. The only possible way this could be a good thing for me is if he picked up a Batman title.

Btw, the only Animal Man issue I read was Grant's last issue where he puts himself in the comic as the creator having a discussion with his creation. It was meta as fuck and well done, but I didn't feel like I had to read anything else in the series.

jaysus, that sounds like something Dave Sim would do (i.e. pomo shite).

I'm curious about this li'l change - there's a bit of a Kitty Pryde / Colossus / Woverine Danger Room vibe re: the interplay between Buffy characters, & Whedon did ghostwrite the first X-Men movie script (yeah, I'll "whoop dee doo" for all the non-plussed out there - curious folks can probably Google about 76 instances where Whedon complains about Halle Berry's handling of the lightning / Toad denouement). Interesting to note that while Whedon plies his Claremont-inspired trade on the New X-Men, Chris Claremont will be doing HIS thing over on _Uncanny_ (w/ Alan Davis) (unless Marvel, in the next 12-18 months, decides to boot Claremont off the series) (again).

Which always annoyed me because there was no way that line could have been handled well, it was just stoopid. It was out of character and might have worked on a show like Buffy but in no way fit with this particular scene.

http://www.theonionavclub.com/avclub3731/avfeature_3731.html

which also contains the great line

"I did looplines for The Getaway, the Alec Baldwin/Kim Basinger version. If you look carefully at The Getaway, you'll see that when people's backs are turned, or their heads are slightly out of frame, the whole movie has a certain edge to it."

Did anyone buy Fray, that 200-years-after-buffy comic that he wrote? And be willing to talk about it?

haha what, it's Halle Berry's fault now? she only had like two lines in the movie! and i'm pretty sure one of them was "Math is hard"

you guys are all so down with the latest hip comic book newzzzz. so imprezssedd.

is x-treme x-men worth reading? is it contemporaneous with the other x-books? is it LAME like Excalibur was? Dave's comments imply something vaguely positive for Claremont's writing.

I don't read any of the other X-Men titles. They seem very, very crappy.

Dave's comments imply something vaguely positive for Claremont's writing.

I used to be a HUGE unapologetic fan of Claremont, but that's been tempered a lot by A) hitting puberty, and B) folks like Martin (& Paul O'Brien - his X-Axis site is U&K for folks wanting to get up to speed on Mutantville USA) noting that, in fact, his recent work has been lacking. I guess he's improved a bit (cf. Dan's comment on recent UXM stuff), and I am curiously interested in his return to Uncanny (& his JLA arc w/ John Byrne & Jerry Ordway - oh, nostalgia), but I would approach anything Mr. Claremont writes nowadays with EXTREME caution.

I'm not holding my breath for anything better on New X-Men.