I don't know either. Then again I only read it a month ago and that was just once. I'll probably have to read it all again at some point.
I think the problems come from the Xorn/Magneto thing. But in hindsight, Marvel was wrong there. That's like the next Spider-man run revealing that Kindred isn't Harry and is instead some Demon named Kindred.
You also have to look at the fact that it's a run that ended 16 years ago, meaning that some of the context of waiting month to month has been lost. Now we can just read it in one go like it's a Netflix show.
I do wonder how People will see this run in 10-20 years, if it gets the same treatment or if People will just see this as a forgettable run. Time is the best critic in my opinion.
I also want to state I do enjoy here comes tomorrow a lot, I think it's a worthy ending to Morrison's run. I don't feel it does anything too offensive. It brings elements from the first half back.
Even through for me, Riot at Xavier's is a personal highlight.
I was actually collecting New X-Men, Uncanny X-Men and X-Treme X-Men upon their initial release and for whatever reason I actually did not like New X-Men at first. It wasn't until the middle of the Imperial story where I decided to really give it a chance and I liked it a lot. New X-Men was certainly leaps and bounds better than Uncanny X-Men and as much as I enjoy Claremont, X-Treme just seemed like a bit of a chore. And Yes!!! - Riot at Xavier's was a fantastic story. It's funny that so many people hate the second half of Morrison's run when Assault on Weapon Plus was recently referenced upon and expanded upon.
If the way it's criticized now is any hint, some controversial moments will be more disliked over time, Dust was just a meh character who clearly shows Morrison didn't research about Muslims much, and Emma raping Cyclops and that being treated as a simple love triangle is disgusting.
Granted, I don't remember much of it, hopefully it's just those two as as controversies, and the other disliked stuff are just bad writing.
I remember people for some reason thinking Morrison haphazardly pulled the Xorn reveal out of nowhere, as if he hadn't thought it all out, when in actuality the clues were all there. Personally I disliked the ending because of how rushed it seemed to me, in spite of all the major events that were happening as a result of 'Xorn' revealing himself.
"He's pure power and doesn't even know it. He's the best of us."-Matt Murdock
"I need a reason to take the mask off."-Peter Parker
"My heart half-breaks at how easy it is to lie to him. It breaks all the way when he believes me without question." Felicia Hardy
I just read Amazing 53.I really dont know where this is going,but i dont care i loved it
The problem with Morrison is multifold.
1) Xorn was cool. Xorn was intended to be a fake identity, with a fictional concept and backstory but readers and editors loved the entire stuff about him. A mutant with a dying star in his head, who writes Chinese poetry and so on. People liked that so much that the reveal that there never was a Xorn was seen as shocking to them. The issue that Morrison devoted to Xorn's poetry journal was quite good, and too good for it to be accepted as a simple misdirection. So Marvel feeling that they had a great new character and persona wanted to somehow make that personality still usable so you had that bizarre retcon to absolve Magneto and a version of Xorn, so that they could use the Xorn character and a Magneto not totally gone beyond use.
2) The second thing was Xorn being Magneto all along, was that the entire run started with the annihilation of Genosha, where Magneto presumably died. Now readers might have expected that Magneto would survive, but the way Morrison set up the return was just ridiculous. There was the issue where Magneto apparently in his final moments set up an elaborate recording or black box to store the final thoughts of Genoshans, and gave that amazing speech which felt in-character for Calremont's take on Erik.
So that right there was two strikes against Morrison's big reveal. The big misdirection he set up as fakes, came to have a lot of emotional resonance and weight behind it. A good example is The Judas Contract story where many readers liked Terra a lot, but when the reveal dropped that she was some evil girl all along and had no deeper motivations and reasons, and Slade being a statutory rapist is supposed to make him sympathetic (because Terra was that evil a girl that apparently she seduced him or such)...that fans didn't like it (and that's why adaptations tend to make Terra more sympathetic and tragic than the original story intended).
3) The third strike is that...Planet X is a bad story. Having Magneto return from the dead as a psycho drug-addicted mass murdering terrorist and making a mockery of some 20 years of character development and iconic stories and so on, that would never have landed well. It's not out of character for Magneto to experience Genosha, survive, and come out of it as an avenging villain and bad guy...but the way Morrison did that had no tragedy or poignancy to it, acknowledged nothing of what came before. It took Cullen Bunn's wonderful Magneto series, and Hickman's current run, to give us Magneto's experience of Genosha and how it shaped and affected him and transformed him.
There's some similarities between Kindred/Harry and Xorn/Magneto, in that Spencer has manufactured a second identity around an established villain. He has arguably reversed character development to have him backslide into a villain. The difference is that Kindred was always established as a villain from the get-go. There was never a sense that he was a cool good guy like Xorn was introduced so convincingly. He was a villain under wraps (heh...lame pun...get it wraps because of the bandages), and Harry Osborn unlike Magneto isn't quite an iconic and beloved figure in the same way. And Harry Osborn's turn to villainy is still grounded by humanity (for instance the fact that he cares for Mary Jane, tries to get her out of the way and calls her an innocent). He's also shown in the last issue to care for Normie. So it's not like Harry went insane and decided to murder his family and so on.
We've gotten so many Elseworlds of Batman...but we never get the obvious one, what if Batman's parents were poor or simply middle-class? Have Thomas Wayne and Martha be doctors struggling in the poor district of Park Row and so on. How would that version of Bruce have become what he became without all that wealth and stuff. It would be cool to see that. Or you know have Batman lose his company and wealth, have him brought low like Daredevil in BORN AGAIN (where Matt Murdoch goes from middle-class comforts to being homeless and living in the slums). We see bits of this in Nolan's THE DARK KNIGHT RISES but it half-a--ed it.
Last edited by Revolutionary_Jack; 11-20-2020 at 06:17 PM.
"He's pure power and doesn't even know it. He's the best of us."-Matt Murdock
"I need a reason to take the mask off."-Peter Parker
"My heart half-breaks at how easy it is to lie to him. It breaks all the way when he believes me without question." Felicia Hardy
That's true. Again this proves my point, Morrison's New X-Men run is an outstanding example of a great and influential run building to terrible conclusions and still commanding value in spite of how badly it ended.
The same could be said of JMS but BACK IN BLACK, the last full story he had control over is a flat-out masterpiece.
I'd say Sins' Past is JMS' Planet X, a story with no lasting real-estate.