Looking back on E for Extinction

[CRaymond]

NXM is my Bible. Not perfect or easy to swallow, but still an utterly amazing ride. One of the only times Morrison really stuck the landing.

[Jackraow21]

His Jean was honestly the last time I loved Jean.

I’m trying to remember but nothing really jumps out at me regarding her during this run, other than dying multiple times. I recall Logan killing her, and then Magneto killing her again. But cannot really recall that chapter. Like I said, I need to go back and reread it. I do remember her being pretty cool in one of the Ethan Van Sciver drawn issues, where she catches a sniper’s bullet that was intended for Xavier or something. And she’s wearing a green Phoenix T-shirt underneath a black trench coat.

[Veitha]

NXM is my Bible. Not perfect or easy to swallow, but still an utterly amazing ride. One of the only times Morrison really stuck the landing.

I loved NXM!

E is for Extinction was one of the first X-Men comic books (if not the first) I ever read. Nostalgia plays a part in my love for it, but I think it really is an amazing run.

[davetvs]

Damn, this is the best summary about why E For Extinction is awesome.

Anyway, Morrison has always been into fast pacing, as he DC work clearly shows. The point of the massacre being quick is precisely to show how dangerous the wild sentinels are and the tragedy of the whole thing. 16 million people wiped out in an instant is quite terrifying.

The scene with Trask and Nova is interesting, because the dude is so hesitating that you start to wonder if he would give the order to kill so many people, but then Nova talks about his thoughts on mutants and then he's freaking dead. So you can't really sort out your feelings for the guy and not seeing him do the deed makes the scene better for me, or else I'd just kind of cheer for Cassandra for killing him lol

Beast makes jokes because he's coping with the horror, but I guess that doesn't go well with everyone. I can see real people doing that, though. About Emma, I think it was the fault of the diamond form that made her less empathetic.

The general point is that Morrison is definitely not for everyone. I fell in love with his dialogue and his pacing at my first read, but I can sincerely understand why others would hate it.

My thoughts exactly. No run since Morrison's has topped his for me. We'll see where Hickman shakes out when he's done but for now he's great too. Claremont deserves all the praise he gets for his character work but I've always preferred writers who deviate from the status quo of the book/team to do something different with the franchise.

His Jean was honestly the last time I loved Jean.

His Jean is why I love Jean so much.

[nandes]

The emotional impact of the Genosha massacre only really comes later in the run, in the issue where Lorna gets rescued by the X-Men and we hear all the voices Magneto recorded from the killed Genoshans. One of the best X-Men issues of all time tbh.



Also Morrison's Jean was the best, yes. She was essentially second in command to Xavier and her scenes with him and leading the school are what made me like her as character. Percy's Jean in X-Force kinda reminds me of the way Morrison wrote her (even if she hasn't been the main focus of the book so faR)

[Zelena]

The nation looks like its wiped out in minutes.

That, I find stupid, considering how paranoid Magneto has always been. No defence system? No planes? No radars? The Genoshans have been completely surprised? They were supposed having built an advanced society.

It is like they have been waited to be slaughtered to become the symbol of mutant martyrdom.

[CRaymond]

So do any of those of you that really dislike a particular arc, motivation, element, or otherwise want to ask any of those of us that do like it, about those parts?

I think it’s a big significant run that’s ALWAYS ripe for discussion, but I feel like these threads do nothing but divide its participants into camps.

[Zelena]

So do any of those of you that really dislike a particular arc, motivation, element, or otherwise want to ask any of those of us that do like it, about those parts?

I think it’s a big significant run that’s ALWAYS ripe for discussion, but I feel like these threads do nothing but divide its participants into camps.

Dividing people seems to be an X-men thing lately… I suppose that, at this point, the best thing would be to ask the OP his intention.

[SiegePerilous02]

It's pretty much the only main X-Men run I've read after Claremont's original run (which tops it overall, and includes stuff like New Mutants) and the current Hickman stuff. And I'm not planning on reading much else before or after it. It largely works as its own self contained run, so i'm not bothered if it contradicts some 90s stuff I'm likely never going to read anyway (it all looks convoluted and dull).

The only issues with it I have are some of the artists, the death of Jean (though the lack of resurrection is the fault of Marvel editorial) and Magneto's portrayal. But even the latter isn't that bad when you remember he's being influenced by Sublime, who is ramping up all his worst traits. ALL they had to do was resurrect him and purge him of Sublime's influence, instead of this stupid Xorneto nonsense.

I’m trying to remember but nothing really jumps out at me regarding her during this run, other than dying multiple times. I recall Logan killing her, and then Magneto killing her again. But cannot really recall that chapter. Like I said, I need to go back and reread it. I do remember her being pretty cool in one of the Ethan Van Sciver drawn issues, where she catches a sniper’s bullet that was intended for Xavier or something. And she’s wearing a green Phoenix T-shirt underneath a black trench coat.

She's pretty much the MVP of the Cassandra Nova arc. Owning the hell out of and humiliating the U-Men, giving some awesome speeches when hosting the human press at the school and winning over some hearts and minds, using her fists to take out Manta, being a great leader, housing Charles's entire mind and scattering it into all the mutants in the world, and generating a Phoenix raptor to scare away the disembodied Cassandra from Cerebra, etc. Plus while she's killed at the end of the run, she returns to take out the Big Bad and "amputates" the bad future.

She also has some great lines. "We have more important things to do than worry about whether our glowing eyes frighten the Republicans!" And some awesomely mythic ones when she's in Phoenix mode. I love Morrison's Jean, I don't care that he killed her. It just spared her from being in some dull, directionless crap until now anyway. If I was her, I'd want to peace out and avoid the X-Men storylines of the past decade or so too lol.

[Vishop]

New X-Men was a decent comic but last arcs were a bit too ludicrous especially with Magneto/Xorn retcon. It was too much of a mess.

[spirit2011]

Here's the thing: there weren't millions of mutants before Morrison. It was always just a random scattering, barely more than the X-Men and their villains. Maybe, all over the world, including all the Genosha mutates(which are distinct from real, natural mutants) we were talking a few hundred thousand individuals at most, and most of them had been dying of the Legacy Virus just an arc or two before Morrison's run. He inflated their numbers tremendously, even factoring in his killing half of his new population. So, essentially, the millions of Genosha mutants were completely unknown and uncared for. Did any named mutants die in Genosha besides "Magneto"?
.

The genocide is more of a plot device than a worth exploration. Morrison also didn't wanted Avengers and other Marvel books to explore this, so impact was even smaller than it should be

There was some plans to make Gambit be on Genosha and kinda of die, he would lose his body and be a energy and Rogue would be all sad about him trying to make him come back.
That is big bullet dodged. Seems hard for some writers accept sex positive and independent female characters.

New X-Men was a decent comic but last arcs were a bit too ludicrous especially with Magneto/Xorn retcon. It was too much of a mess.

The retcon wasn't Morrison fault, But the rest was really a mess

Dividing people seems to be an X-men thing lately… I suppose that, at this point, the best thing would be to ask the OP his intention.

Morrison run was the beginning from the modern X-men problems

[Captain Buttocks]

It's hard to understate just how different NXM felt at the time. The X-books had spent most of the late 90's stumbling from one editorially-mandated crossover to another, and following the utterly meh "The Twelve" storyline and the somewhat rushed Eve of Destruction, Morrison felt less like a shot of adrenaline and more like 300lbs of enrichened uranium straight to the eye sockets.

His run is, for me, fantastically uneven, giving fuel to his fans and detractors alike. There's more characterisation than, say, his JLA run, but he just cannot resist putting oddball stuff in for the sake of it. One thing I would say though, compared to Ultimate X-Men written by the other Scottish writer (whom Morrison nowadays cannot stand) I always felt Morrison liked and respected most of the characters and concepts (*cough* Magneto perhaps not *cough*), and wasn't just being a sneering "lookit me" Brittish Comics Writer. He admitted in his book he was pretty upset to find that he had inadvertently upset Chris Claremont, and I think to this day he refuses to countenance working at Marvel due to how miserable he felt over his frustrations with Jemas and Quesada and the way things were communicated at Marvel.

The Xorneto thing - I remember Morrison at a talk in Edinburgh in 2012 saying he left them an opening to bring Xorn back even though he always intended Xorn to be Magneto, and although he didn't read the issues where they retconned it the explanation "sounded weirder than anything I would write".

I always considered E is for Extinction to be one of his better stories (I think Assault on Weapon Plus was my overall fave due to crazy Bachalo art) and given how hard we find it to process big events (one death a tragedy, a million a statistic) I'm reasonably happy to not have had a Bendis-esque six issues of the X-Men telling each other how sad they are over re-used panels. That said - I could totally understand if there were people who wanted that, however given that several concepts had to be gotten rid of either ahead of or just as he took the book (Legacy Virus, Genosha, Magneto for a bit) it seemed like a reasonable way of doing it, even if it was patently clear that it looked like Lobdell (or at the very least the UXM 393 artisit) had been told to bump Magneto off before Morrison got there.

Now - Murder at the Mansion - there was a storyline that I could happily forget ever existed.....

[Vishop]

The genocide is more of a plot device than a worth exploration. Morrison also didn't wanted Avengers and other Marvel books to explore this, so impact was even smaller than it should be

There was some plans to make Gambit be on Genosha and kinda of die, he would lose his body and be a energy and Rogue would be all sad about him trying to make him come back.
That is big bullet dodged. Seems hard for some writers accept sex positive and independent female characters.



The retcon wasn't Morrison fault, But the rest was really a mess

I know it wasn't Morrison's fault. It was Quesada's. I hate his guts.

[Vishop]

That, I find stupid, considering how paranoid Magneto has always been. No defence system? No planes? No radars? The Genoshans have been completely surprised? They were supposed having built an advanced society.

It is like they have been waited to be slaughtered to become the symbol of mutant martyrdom.

Was the worldbuilding of Genosha has been explored in comics b4 ? Because if it's not then It was fair for Morrison to do that.

[Captain Buttocks]

Actually just remembered something:-

In Morrison's original pitch (it's at the back of the original trade) he wanted for his team, to play an important role in the book....

Moira MacTaggert. He was told no ("dead means dead"), and thus ended up with Beast. A curiosity in hindsight, given how she is key for Hickman!