Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"THE X-MEN ARE BACK! BETTER THAN...uh, almost ever...", December 28, 2002
Like many people, I stopped reading the X-Men a long, long time ago - around the time Chris Claremont brought back Jean Grey for the umpteenth million time. Lost my faith and interest, but I still occassionally thumbed through an issue just to see what the latest farce was (the most ridiculous being Wolverine regaining his adamantium skeleton - just as the character started to become interesting again).Then - coinciding with the release of the (generally well-done) movie - I heard Grant Morrison was taking over the writing on the book. I picked up his first issue, and right from the start you knew he'd put in his time rethinking and recreating the X-Men. New costumes; new, more adult problems facing the characters (such as the strain between Scott and Jean's marriage, the Beast's quest for identity); and, oh yes, the little matter of the genocide of all the mutants on the island of Genosha - including Magneto (Morrison has stated he has no doubt Marvel will revive the character someday - but not while he's doing the scripting). The plot twists from this point are fantastic, and there's no turning back from some: the public revelation of Xavier and what is really going on behind the doors of his school, Logan and Jean Grey resolving their sexual tension once and for all (long over-due), Emma Frost suddenly becoming the absolute most interesting character in the series. The drawbacks? As every other reviewer here has mentioned, it's the art. Frank Quitely's work is indeed fantastic - a welcome change from the bursting muscles and heroic facades of the past - but the others who fill in A) disrupt the continuity, even if they had been Quitely's equal (or at least in his style), but B) they're not: Kordey's pencils are, as virtually every reviewer has stated, poor, sloppy, amateurish. I don't know if he was given like 14.8 hours to get the job done, but it sure looks that way. On every page. In every panel. Still, it's a good read despite these flaws; and I'd recommend it higher than anything else going on in mainstream comics right now. A very brave, interesting, and necessary change of pace for Marvel's most popular title.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This book is awesome!, June 18, 2008
Grant Morrison's X-Men run is probably the best X-Men run in the last decade. Ironically, it's a little different than other classic runs... and that's what makes it so special.
Without spoiling anything, Grant changes the status quo with the X-Men without really changing core concepts of the X-Men. His stories turn the entire framework for the X-Men on their face. The stories are well-plotted, and this collection really does read like one whole story. There's lots of nice character moments, as well as character arcs that get started here and will be expanded upon in vol 2 & 3 of the collections later on this year.
The only faults with Grant's run are the art and some of his 'big ideas' that sometimes don't seem to pan out. Because of scheduling problems with these issues, Frank Quintly did not draw every issue... so often times you will see different art styles every issue as multiple artists contributed to keep this book on schedule for the regular issues. Nonetheless, most of the artwork is good and the storytelling makes up for this.
This is really awesome work though. Seriously, if you haven't read it - do so. It's better than any of the new TPB's coming out. It contains so much core ideas that make the X-Men what it is today that it's really worth reading.
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12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
New X-Men, Volume 1, May 30, 2003
I'm not your typical comics reader. I collected and read them religiously from ages 10-17, but pretty much quit cold turkey, other than the occasional, brief period of renewed interest. When I saw the first X-Men movie, I was impressed that the producers were able to make these previously-byzantine characters accessible and cool. I picked up one of the countless monthly X-Men titles, to see if their creators were keeping up with this standard. Of course, they weren't; but a few months after the movie, Grant Morrison took over the New X-Men series, and in many ways the comic became more cool than the movie itself.Morrison is a good writer, and his Invisibles series is one of the few that I've read all of the way through. One thing that always gets me is that Morrison is one of those guys who thinks he's too cool for his own good; while this came off as grating in his previous books, it mostly works with the X-Men. Maybe it's due to the way he reimagined a previously-boring character: Cyclops, refashioned by Morrison and incredible artist Frank Quitely, is now a leather-wearing bad-ass who, in my book, looks cooler than Wolverine will ever be. Morrison saves most of his best lines for Emma Frost however, a new addition to the X-Men roster whom most fans will love. Another character Morrison introduces to the X-roster is Xorn, a mutant healer who looks like the mascot for a heavy metal band. This hardback book collects Morrison's first year on the title, along with the 2001 annual. The stories are generally arranged in arcs, with the last one, Imperial, mostly the best. One thing the book suffers from is the lack of Quitely; the man takes so long to draw a page that Marvel must always have back-up pencilers in the wings. And the unfortunate thing is that one of these back-ups, Igor Kordey, is perhaps one of the sloppiest artists I've seen. The occasional page is okay, but in general Kordey can make the average character look like a monstrous ghoul. The other back-up, Ethan Van Sciver, is mostly very good, but incomparable to Frank Quitely. Quitely draws half of the stories in this collection, though, and his work here is among his best, just as good as his art in Morrison's Flex Mentallo mini-series. Morrison's stories are great for readers new to the X-Men. In fact, his goal seems to have been grabbing the attention of fans of the film, people who had just been introduced to the characters and might like to see something more of them. You don't need to know very much about the X-Men's history at all; a nice change from the old days, in which you had to keep up with countless back issues just to understand one page of the current issue. Morrison's stories do in fact feature subplots that carry from one story arc to the next, but the main storyline always predominates. In short, the issues featured in this hardback are cinematic and feel like the two X-Men movies on paper. In fact, Morrison's stories are more edgy than future films could possibly ever hope to be. So even if this isn't on the same level as near-literary masterworks like Alan Moore's Watchmen or Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns, Morrison's 2001-2002 run on the New X-Men is great reading for X-film fans who wouldn't be caught dead in a comic store.
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