Hello all, and welcome to what I hope will be a series of posts re-examining Joe Casey’s run on Uncanny X-Men.
First of all – why Joe Casey? Well it originates from the re-examination of E is for Extinction on another thread, and my original idea was to re-examine Morrison’s run on an issue-by-issue basis, however I felt that his run was, Quite Frankly (see what I did there?) too long, too complex and too difficult to do justice to in the format I’m going to use initially. Indeed, an attempt at covering his run had been tried back in 2014 on these very boards. If this proposed thread goes down okay and maybe drums up some nostalgia from other users I may consider doing other runs in the future, including Morrison’s.
The plan is to re-examine each issue, the writing, the art, the characterisation and - in cases where it’s appropriate and we have documented evidence or statements from interviews – the backstage upheaval at Marvel and/or with the creators. As someone who was buying the issues at the time, I will share what my feelings were on each issue/story at the time, and how I feel about it now, almost twenty years later (God I feel old typing that, just saying “back in 2001” feels much healthier!).
I’m not going to look at an issue in this particular post, instead I’d like to provide some perspective on the landscape at both Marvel and the X-office at the time of Casey’s appointment. This may be very boring to you all but it does provide context.
It’s often stated that the X-books were in the doldrums prior to the appointment of Morrison/Casey in 2001, but that’s a spurious statement to make. Both X-Men and Uncanny X-Men were frequent top-selling books throughout the nineties, so financially, they were still strong books for Marvel, who had declared bankruptcy in the winter of 1996, due to a series of disastrous business decisions, coupled with the crash of the speculator market (Anyone wishing more information on this should check out Rise and Fall of the Comic Empire on the sfdebris Youtube channel, or Sean Howe's book Marvel Comics the Untold Story).
The two flagship titles, Uncanny X-Men and X-Men had spent most of the latter part of the nineties being virtually the same title flipping back and forth fortnightly, as Marvel sought to squeeze profit out of their strongest selling books. The odd daring hire aside (Kelly/Seagle spring to mind) stories were editorially mandated and status-quo-then-summer-crossover was the order of the day as everything drifted towards DoFP and the X-Men rarely got a win. Things changed when the ownership lawsuit was settled and Bill Jemas and Joe Quesada took the reigns as President and Editor-in-chief respectively. Suddenly Marvel wanted to be hip, cool and daring again, as Jemas in particular took aim at everyone and everything to establish the pair as the enfant terrible of the comics industry.
Prior to the regime change, the closest we came to any semblance of creativity in the X-line usually came from the freedom provided by the B-titles, with Fabien Nicieza producing a solid Gambit comic, Jay Faerber getting Generation X back onto solid footing following a disastrous run from Larry Hama and Joe Kelly producing a classic run on Deadpool. Howard Mackie got in on the act too, with a very promising first six issues on Mutant X, which…well… you know the rest, sadly.
With Quesada in as Editor-in-Chief, that meant that Bob Harras was out by 2000, and the X-line was lined up for an event called Revolution. Harras being gone allowed for legendary X-scribe Chris Claremont to return as writer, with some of the B-titles going under the supervision of Warren Ellis in a banner called Counter X. Sadly for Claremont, despite a hefty spike in sales initially, his run was not as well-received as his previous run, and the failure of the X-books to gain any momentum at all from the movie led to Bill Jemas decrying them as too complicated to follow (Claremont was not alone in facing Jemas’ wrath, as then-Captain Marvel writer Peter David was also subject to public ridicule).
Claremont’s run hadn’t been the success Marvel had hoped for, so new blood was sought. Fresh off the success of his Marvel Boy series, Grant Morrison made a pitch for the X-Men. On November 8th 2000, Jemas and Quesada announced big changes to the X-line. Claremont was off the main books, but would be given his own sister title, which would eventually be (awfully) named X-Treme X-Men. Morrison would take over X-Men (renaming it to New X-Men) and finally, announced as the writer of Uncanny - which would have a separate cast and remit to the Morrison book – was Joe Casey.
Casey was most widely known to X-Men for a well-received run on Cable and an excellent (but oft-delayed) mini-series called X-Men: Children of the Atom, which retold the origin of the original five X-Men (albeit not in continuity). In a shade of things to come, CotA had been absolutely plagued with lateness and ever-shifting art teams. Morrison had been a big fan of Casey’s pacifistic Superman run and seemed excited to work with him.
Subsequent to the announcement of Casey, several more changes were made. X-Man, Generation X, X-Men: The Hidden Years, Mutant X (thank God), Gambit, and Bishop: The Last X-Man were all announced as cancelled, despite the vast majority being profitable. John Byrne made his thoughts on the decision to axe Hidden Years clear on his website and has not worked for Marvel since. Additionally, X-Force would be handed over to Peter Milligan and Mike Allred who had a radical new idea for the direction of the series.
All that was left was for Ian Churchill to be announced as Casey’s collaborator on the book, and for Scott Lobdell to be brought back in to do some fill-in work to clear the decks and get rid of some dangling plots that the new direction needed removed (i.e the Legacy Virus) with the four part Eve of Destruction crossover and Joe Casey’s run on Uncanny X-Men was all set to begin with a new logo, a slimmed down line-up and a hot artist with Uncanny X-Men #394, three hundred issues since the first numbered appearance of the All-New All-Different X-Men!
How I Felt Back Then – I was tremendously excited, gobbling up Wizard preview issues and checking forums for interviews and news snippets. That said – I was desperately disappointed to see Generation X go, as I felt it was in a good spot at the time, with the Four Days story having just started with an excellent Chamber issue (of whom we shall be reading more later).
How I Feel Now – It’s strange nowadays when the entire line often gets relaunched at the drop of a hat, but fool me once, shame on you, fool me ten times shame on me. But I still got excited for the Hickman run (it brought me back to the books!) so maybe I really am the fool in all this!
If you have any thoughts on how the X-Books were at the time, please feel free to share in the thread. If you haven’t read Casey’s run – why not? If you have - do you have any fond memories of it?
Next time - Warp Savant, a new logo, legal drinking age and why I hate the word "skanks".