Record: Grant Morrison

He’s overrated, and his criticism of Frank Miller on Newsarama was in poor taste, one more reason why his work will do quite well for scrutiny. So, what did he do that makes the list here? It’s mostly from his take on X-Men that this comes from.

• He regurgitated the Phoenix farrago, had Cyclops utter a nerve-wracking sentence as if Jean were the Phoenix, warning her that she could “lose control” again, then started giving Jean Phoenix-style powers again under the claim that it was a “rogue manifestation”. Boring! Also uncalled for.
• We get a stereotypical villainess in Cassandra Nova (and why did she have the codename of minor superhero Richard Ryder?). If you don’t know how she sliced a scientist named Trask to death, you won’t want to know even now. Filthy!
• Morrison’s depiction of Magneto was one of the most obnoxious, crass abuses of an already misused character I’ve ever seen. It’s bad enough that Magneto may have caused tons of deaths in the early 1990s when he disrupted the earth’s magnetic fields, but this was going way too far.
• At the end of his run, Morrison then “kills off” Jean, while turning her into the Phoenix again. The scene then shifts into a future time where some astronauts on the moon find a “phoenix egg”. Is that supposed to imply all hell breaks loose? And Cyclops seems to disavow his love for her too.

As far as his work on X-Men is concerned, I don’t like it at all. It’s got nothing to do with the fact that some comics writers from Britain (Morrison, Millar, Jenkins) are not really to my tastes (2000 AD was never my cup of tea either), but rather, that his whole idea of what mutants, metahumans, aliens or any other kind of lifeform are supposed to behave like or be like is numbingly wrongheaded. The same goes for his regurgitating of storylines we don’t need anymore.