1) Morrison and company pretty much tell a self contained X-Men story. There are no multi-title crossovers. There are no company wide events interupting the flow of the story. People tend to forget this period of the Quesada era was relatively crossover/event free. I remember when some people were unhappy about the Marvel titles occurring independent of each other.

2) Morrison’s “silent” issue.

3) Ethan Van Sciver hiding the word “sex” throughout NXM #118.

4) Morrison telling more of a science fiction story rather than a superhero story.

5) Being disappointed in the annual. It didn’t really use the “wide screen” format to the fullest potential.

6) My favorite scene from #114-126: the Imperial Guardsman Smasher crash lands on earth, the only survivor of a massacre, warning impending doom to the earth from space, and the only response to his warnings….”Moo”. It’s revealed he’s crash landed in the middle of a cow field.

Plus, Cyclops no longer resembled a giant blue condomn and there was a telepathic whale with a Scottish accent. How are those bad things.

This is the key element: Trust. As I have often opined, G-Mo does what HE wants with characters. Not necessarily what “editorial” wants nor, sometimes, not even what the “reader” wants. Mr. Morrison is the type of person who MUST be handed the keys to something, and not told how to drive it. This works well in some cases and for some people, and does NOT for other cases and other people. That’s about all I got. No real “opinion”, just highlighting what I think lies at the heart of things: “Do we trust this man?”

I would like to see a What if? where Spider-Man isn’t lame and sells his wife for his aunt to Mephisto.

I certainly agreed with Morrison’s statement in later interviews that it’s wrong to portray Magneto as some sort of admirable anti-hero or a charming villain akin to Doctor Doom. Magneto is both a sad old man and a monstrous terrorist, and trying to redeem him is, in my opinion, basically futile.

Agreed. New X-Men, aside from Astonishing and Millar’s Ultimate run, have been the only X-books readable for me. Quesada probably wouldn’t approve of a ‘New X-Men Forever’ book. It would be too awesome for Marvel to handle. Hope the Major Spoilers crew will enjoy this!

I did enjoy most of it, but there were some parts of it that I hate. I hated the fact that Xorn suddenly turned into Magneto. I also found it annoying that while everybody used a uniform costume, Emma Frost had to be in some dominatrix outfit. Also, I lost complete interest in the 3rd act. The whole future arc felt like Grant suddenly wanted to re-write Days of Future Past. The only good thing about that was that it was self-contained.

The thing that did like about his run were that we saw the school be an actual school. Seeing the former students take over as teachers was a cool experience that I miss from the book. It set the book apart from other team books and it was fun to see them interact with young mutants. I also enjoyed the whole triangle between Emma Frost/Cyclops/Jean Grey. For years, we always had Jean Grey indiscretions with a hairy, smelly midget with claws and a bat haircut and it was nice to have her feel what it was like Scott for a change. I enjoyed the new characters introduced to the book and was sad to see some of them go the way they did. I know I’ll probably be alone in saying this, but I enjoyed the cat-form of the Beast. While it did go against the conception of what Hank McCoy was, it did make his codename sink in much better.

As for Jean Grey death… I’m torn. At first, my thoughts were “What? AGAIN?!?!?!” However, it did help one character. Cyclops. For years, writers were always fond of putting sexual tension between Jean and Logan. This, in my opinion, de-valued Scott since he always came off as the dimwitt who always forgave Jean every time she did it. Whith Jean gone, Scott was free from this perception.

There’s actually a Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 Fan Website demanding that she be a playable character in the video game.

While I love Grant Morrison’s run on New X-Men, his tenure was severely marred by Frank Quitely’s slowness and Joe Quesada’s incompetence and/or malfeasance. Quitely never should have been billed as the regular MONTHLY Artist, he should have been paired with another equally talented artist who would do one whole arc while Quitely worked on the next one. I would have recommended Walter Simonson or Phil Jimenez. What actually happened was that Quesada was always scrambling looking for WHOLLY INADEQUATE FILL-IN ARTISTS who were asked to do complete issues in a very short period of time. Igor Kordey, who was never really good IMHO to begin with, did a significant portion of the first two arcs – his arcs were some of the ugliest art I’ve ever seen. “Imperial” is practically UNREADABLE because of Joe Quesada’s Incompetence.

Fortunately, Phil Jimenez, Chris Bachalo and Marc Silvestri came on towards the end of Grant Morrison’s run and they contributed some beautiful art. My favorite arc was “Here Comes Tomorrow” the most surreal story of Morrison’s tenure – and thus the most interesting. Intelligent Bacterial Colonies, jealous genomes vying for dominance, co-incident parallel futures, Viral Consciousnesses that eat other minds for lunch, “The White Hot Room”, Megamerica, Transatlantis, Apollyon, etc. All the cool big Ideas of Grant Morrison in one story.

If I could I’d have Grant Morrison on X-Men forever. But he and Quesada had a falling out at some convention during the end of his run on New X-Men and Grant Morrison, smartly, decided to leave Marvel. There were rumors that Grant Morrison had a wild pitch for the Fantastic Four that Quesada rejected out-of-hand. I don’t blame Morrison for leaving, Quesada made the environment at Marvel unbearable.

I suspect that if Grant Morrison had been the architect of the Marvel Universe INSTEAD OF Brian “Braindead” Bendis it would have been a real golden age for that corner of the comic book universe