Travis Hedge Coke
Patricia Highsmash
Mutant Thoughts:
Examining New X-Men, the Early 21st Century, and Ourselves
Pt. 18
by Travis Hedge Coke
From 2001 to 2004 Grant Morrison (The Invisibles, Batman and Robin) and team of pencilers, inkers, letterers, editors and colorists, including Phil Jimenez, Mike Marts, and Frank Quitely made a comic called New X-Men.
Revitalizing the X-Men as a politically savvy, fashion-forward superhero soap opera, New X-Men was published by Marvel Comics as the flagship of a line wide revival.
Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely, Tim Townsend
Part 18
Rabbit’s Moon
Long, long ago, or a few days a go, or tomorrow, a homeless, hungry person was talking to three animals; a fox, a rabbit, and monkey.
“I am hungry,” said this person, “Could one of you please help out?”
The fox thought a bit, then went and grabbed a fish out of the river.
“Here!” declared the fox. “A fish!”
And, that was good.
Their stomach still grumbled, and the monkey thought they could help, so they ran up a tree or went down to the market and brought back three apples and a pear.
And, that was good, too. The person did not even eat all of it, but shared with the monkey and the fox and the rabbit, because share and share alike.
“I am sorry,” they told the three animals, “but I am still so hungry.”
The rabbit wanted to help so much, but the best the rabbit could do was collect grass. You cannot ask a human being to eat grass that has been in a rabbit’s mouth.
“Take the grass,” said the rabbit. “Make a fire.”
Phil Jimenez, Andy Lanning, Grant Morrison
I’m trying to avoid making a smoking grass joke here, but the fire grew bright and hot, and then the rabbit leapt into the flames and cooked up nice and good.
When New X-Men wrapped up, it did not stop with Grant Morrison, but extended for a few bizarre issues that felt like deliberate efforts to undue any subtlety and a lot of growth.
Not too long after, I was about to move into a fixer-upper with a group of friends, attend a new school, focused on a new degree and a new career path. And, my mom was hit by a student dramatically trying to prove a point to her boyfriend by driving straight down a steep hill into a parked vehicle, leaving my mama with a broken back, a broken neck, a brain injury and need of a live-in assistant. I was a terrible assistant, and I will never make it in a medical profession, but we both moved to Michigan, a new place for us, and I committed, there, to a degree program mirroring her own field, as a writer. I took classes I needed and I took classes that were right next to hers, so that I could get up and check on her once in awhile, while she taught.
Even in recovery from her injuries, my mother was brilliant, and while she lectured and oversaw workshops, she helped me put my life in a new context and in a better order.
New X-Men became, once again, X-Men, or “Adjectiveless,” as it was often known, with Peter Milligan coming on to do some top notch horror and satire that I love and to be jerked about by crossovers, events, and editorial silliness, which I assume was no fun for him. It’s a run, like New X-Men, dear to me, but if I wrote a book about it, somebody would tell me it had its problems.
Every comic has its problems. Like us.
Milligan and Morrison once committed to a comic about a comic and a day in which anything that happened in the day would happen in the comic and anything in the comic happened that day. It has never been published and Jamie Hewlett only drew about half.
That happened a few years before New X-Men began, but Milligan had written X-Men-related comics by then.
That is life. That is people, that is us, that is comics, and that is life. There is flow, there is ebb, there are twisty bits and annoyances and what you consider the highlights can depend on how close to or far from them you can get.
The rabbit in the story is resurrected by who turns out not to be a super hungry homeless person, but someone divine, and they tell the rabbit, in thanks for their selfless and dramatic gesture of cooking themselves, they give the rabbit the moon. And, so, the moon, smoked a cool gray by the fire, becomes home to the rabbit, who is up there still, eating rice cakes and having a chill time.
Andy Lanning, Grant Morrison, Phil Jimenez
At the denouement of New X-Men, Jean Grey does not sacrifice herself, but is murdered, once maybe by collaboration, when Wolverine stabs her so she can resurrect as a more powerful cosmic entity and bring them back to Earth, but then, more permanently (but not permanently) by Magneto, who was just being a dick.
But, after being reborn in an egg on the moon, Jean Grey, confused, abused, disconnected, cheated on and lied to and manipulated, looks on the whole of the universe, the whole of space and time, and decides her widower and his lover, who she was colleagues and sort of friends with, should move on in life, together, as a couple.
Readers have debated and speculated over what it means for Grey to have made that move. Is it commentary on real life events? Are those events global, universal, or specific to the writer? Is it meta about the state of X-Men comics? About the comics business? Is it representative of the sacrifice of women in fiction, of wives and girlfriends in fiction? Is it just what happens to Jean because Scott or Emma are more important?
A number of readers have maligned the New X-Men take on Grey, and while Morrison has never named her as a favorite, the run really does show her so much love. And, the art? Look on any page from Frank Quitely, Phil Jimenez, or Igor Kordey and tell me they aren’t showing her love.
Quitely gives her hairstyle after excellent hairstyle, defining a whole set of gestures for Jean Grey beyond, possibly, what any previous artist had done for her.
Phil Jimenez draws the definitive Jean Grey, human, powerful, vulnerable and kind. Cosmic.
When Emma Frost thinks she and Jean Grey are in her, Emma’s, mind, Grey tells her, no, they’re in hers. Simultaneous to those events, in that confusing psychic realm, Grey’s husband seems unable to leave the psychic realm, or at the least, to uncertainly leave it.
Grey suggests that Cassandra Nova believes the universe is entirely she and her brother who is also her, and when we see Jean Grey cultivating the universe, tilling emotions and weeding for toxic infections. That is her world. She might deny it, until near the end, but this is why a variety of psychical defenses allow characters to run circles around the most perceptive and aware in that world. Psychically-shielded characters (Xorn; Fantomex) or those with camouflaged thoughts, like Quentin Quire or EVA, characters who can shut off or warp parts of their minds (as Emma Frost’s diamond form can impede her psychic abilities but also tamps down her emotions, preventing depression or nervous collapse), all catch telepaths, prognosticators, and tactical thinkers by continual surprise. No one’s fault, because there is no satisfactory gauge for reality or truth in the X-Men world.
It is not worth worrying if others are lying but you cannot tell. Is it destiny or choice, freewill or manipulation?
My mother’s injuries were extensive, her brain injury was impossible to grapple with. It was impossible to grasp. She could lecture brilliantly, articulately and thoroughly, and she could come home and yell at me about the horrible prank I was playing by trying to convince her that there were both fingernail and toenail clippers in two different sizes. She could turn mean or panicked in a moment, and “friends,” colleagues, who either of us may have thought we could trust simply took advantage or left her without assistance.
The rabbit, in the story, is resurrected to a heaven on the moon. That heaven has smoke damage. It has age. Like Cockaigne, the heaven of the moon is one of easy food and leisure. In our second lives, we hunger.
On our way up to Michigan, a respected institution of a human being invited my mother and I to stop by, and when we did, they pushed her into sanding their bathroom wall.
The only healthy way to approach life, in that world, is not to be constantly suspicious and desperate to be at all times fully perceptive, but to acknowledge that personal intent, your intent, is what most matters, and even that you cannot be too sure of. You just try to do good, and to make do.
One of the lessons radiant on all levels of New X-Men is that anyone can betray you. Anyone can sacrifice themselves for you. Both those people can be the same anyone. Any one of us can say that Charles Xavier, Emma Frost, Scott Summers, Xorn are good teachers or bad. Good influences or bad.
Hank McCoy is desperate to entertain students, to impress them and impress upon them their value, but how is he as a teacher? We lack evidence.
Xorn inspires Angel and Beak and belittles them. Xorn, as Magneto, inspired Quentin Quire, and Magneto, as Xorn, murders him. But, Xorn is an extreme. Xorn did some good, but Xorn was imaginary, a disguise, a trick. What about Xavier?
Sainted, beloved Xavier, who steps down eventually from his position as head of the school which bears his name.
Charles Xavier only lauds Angel and Beak after his prize student, the student he champions and worries is a monster, goes on a full bore fascist frat boy rampage during the school’s open day. Xavier sees so much of himself in Quire, this intelligent, passionate, frustrated white boy with psychic powers. Xavier cannot indict Quire even when Quire is brutalizing people, a bully, a bigot. Because he’s a snappy young white boy.
Sometimes you’re the fox, sometimes you’re the rabbit. Sometimes, you are the fish or the grass.
New X-Men is the rabbit in the moon story, except that everybody gets brought back to life. We all get the moon.
Marc Silvestri, Grant Morrison