To be fair you never use this standard in real life. Sentimentality is never guided by the supposed worth of the person in question or necessarily what they ever did for you. We care whether a person lives or dies as part of an abstract comparison between the presence and absence of an individual. Objectively or subjectively we look explicitly at the effect of a person on the world, and we desire to see what happens when he vanishes. It's not really whether or not I would have a drink or a meal with Cyclops or see movies with Scott Summers that matters, but when it comes to the Hero, what fate of the world are we risking should the hero not even be present to fail? If we care at all for the characters who love the hero, surely Jean or Emma or a character we do like would get it in the very soul for seeing their friend, for whom we care nothing supposedly, fall.

I like Cyclops, I don't know what's wrong with you, but even if you don't care whether he dies, for the story to grow organically his death will effect you.

Either way, editors picking on his stuff and running with it kinda misses the point just as much as ignoring the stuff he set down does.

Just the same there have been better ways than the roads the X-office took in stories afterwards.

The Next Story, the Post-Morrison comics should have done different directions, but Joss Whedon took between six months and a year to tell a single story, and his Astonishing title run was supposed to be the successor to the Grant Morrison run and spirit. Then you had Chuck Austen, who is creative dillhole.

Then there is Chris Claremont, about whom I have nothing to say.

How can you blame the X-editors for not reacting appropriately, they hardly had the writing staff apropriate to pick up after The Last X-Men story.

"The X-MEN are every rebel teenager wanting to change the world and make it better. Humanity is every adult, clinging to the past, trying to destroy the future even as he places all his hopes there."

And you call yourself a Grant Morrison fan?

You shame us all Mr. Reed. You shame us all.

*Supposedly, Vertigo does a lot better, proportiately, in sales to the UK. It doesn't seem unreasonable to think Morrison's X-Men got a bigger bump in UK sales.

You’ve heard of too much of a good thing, right? In terms of character flaws, that’s where Morrison’s Cyclops falls. I don’t expect characters to be perfect, nor do I want them to, but I want them to be halfway likable as well. Otherwise, why the hell would I want to follow their lives issue after issue? Why should I care if they live or die?

Because "likeable" and "interesting" are not synonyms. For a perfect example of this, see the subject of Bill's latest 365 column, "The New Adventures of Hitler". A fascinating, deep, haunting character study starring the most irredeemable, unlikeable, villainous characters the world has ever known.

If you need your main character to be a hero, that's a limit you've imposed on yourself, and doesn't negate the quality of works which exceed said limit.

Oh, and by the way, too much of a good thing? That's called bliss.

You first say "given the small but notable decline in sales during Morrison’s stay," and when we look, there really WASN'T a notable decline in sales during Morrison's stay. It sold around 100,000 then dipped down to 92-95,000 for five or so issues, then went BACK to around 100,000 BEFORE the end of the run which had bigger sales bumps that probably had more to do with an anniversary issue and Silvestri than Morrison.

So now it's that he should have sold MORE? That doesn't seem to be particularly fair.

As for the other books not selling, that really doesn't have to do with Morrison's book, does it? But yeah, the Progressive X-Men era only had the one sales success (Morrison's run), but it's not like sales have been better since (except Whedon sells a lot more comics than Morrison - damn, Astonishing sells a lot of copies).

Wow.

Feel free to rip on the book if you think it is bad, but the book was pretty plainly a sales success.

Like Astonishing X-Men - bad or good, Astonishing X-Men, like New X-Men, has been a sales success.

Perhaps Astonishing X-Men has gone down in sales from the early issues, but it still sells very well for Marvel. Same with New X-Men. It may have sold less than it did in the beginning, but it still sold very well.

Throwing out the last few issues (as of course #150 would have a sales bump, and of course the Silvestri issues would have a sales bump, so I won't count those), the book was still selling over 100,000 copies.

It DID dip down to the sales level of the previous run for about five issues in the mid-130s (down to the 92,000-95,000 level) but quickly corrected back up to the high 90,000s-low 100,000s. I have no idea why there was that brief sales dip, though.

Astonishing, by the way, is nuts. I can't believe how well it sells. It is, well, astonishing.

Gosh darn, it Morrison really lost sales!

You've heard of too much of a good thing, right? In terms of character flaws, that's where Morrison's Cyclops falls. I don't expect characters to be perfect, nor do I want them to, but I want them to be halfway likable as well. Otherwise, why the hell would I want to follow their lives issue after issue? Why should I care if they live or die?

There are many stories I love in serial superhero comics where characters are challenged, do bad things under pressure, and are basically put through hell. Frank Miller's Daredevil: Born Again, the Iron Man alcoholism stories, and Cyclops' nervous breakdown in early X-Factor all come to mind. But all those stories showed the characters' inner strengths in the end, because they came out the other end stronger for it, and atoned for their mistakes. In New X-Men, Cyclops doesn't ever take accountability for his actions and atone for his sins, he just goes from being defined solely by Jean to being defined solely by Emma.

Other fictional characters who are scumbags often at least get some kind of redemption in the end.

It has everything you say you love about comics, and it still holds up perfectly. GET IT NOW.

Thoughts and feelings aren’t good or bad, as any credible therapist will tell you, but actions are. And Scott made some profoundly terrible choices in New X-Men.

Yeah, that was the point. I'm starting to realize what the real issue is here. You didn't LIKE Cyclops under Morrison. Not the way he was written, but the character himself. God forbid a superhero should not always be heroic. Especially one that never asked for their powers. It's not like that's in the historic mighty marvel manner or anything.

When Cyclops has all the pressure of everyone else's expectations, and his own, and a psychic wife that could easily snap and become a danger to the planet on his shoulders, he's gonna crack. That's what people do. And there, in the struggle to recover and prevent further cracks, is where character is built.

There's a difference between behaving exactly the same way as he always has and behaving in a similar way to similar circumstances. The former doesn't progress anything, despite whatever affection you may have for it.

Note, however, that in the past Cyclops' complaining was kept mostly to an internal monologue. His thoughts were often broody, but he kept his problems to himself and remained a strong ( if very repressed ) character. And who here doesn't sound particularly self-pitying in their heads? It was a natural way to show a character in turmoil, that didn't undermine the character because his actions were those of a strong person.

Cyclops under Grant Morrison went to Emma for " therapy ", whining about how he can't misbehave and how the spark has gone out of his marriage and whatnot. In those therapy sessions, he didn't sound like a man under terrible pressure-- he sounded like a man who was weak and spineless, looking for Emma's sympathy and even pity. Even in the early X-Factor days, when he left his wife and baby, Scott never sounded like this much of a loser.

Thoughts and feelings aren't good or bad, as any credible therapist will tell you, but actions are. And Scott made some profoundly terrible choices in New X-Men.

(Btw, Bill, what kind of weird collector’s tics have you got going on? You won’t buy Animal Man in trade — which has been complete for quite a long time now — because you’re waiting for slower-than-the-Turtle DC to release all the DP trades? That’s just messed up. Especially considering how some of their trades end up out of print.)

I honestly buy maybe four trades a year, using the rest of my comics budget up on new singles. I'm the cheapest person alive. I hate spending money, and the amount I'm shelling out for new comics disgusts me, even though I don't buy that much. Don't mind me.

But I also disagree with your theory that the "civil rights" stuff was No-prized after the fact by fans in the '90s... considering how blatant it is in Claremont's run.

Claremont was blatant about it, no question. But that wasn't what his X-Men were ABOUT. They were mutant Robin Hoods, not Dr. Kings. Civil rights just gave him a heroic cover for his otherwise self-absorbed soap operas ("Oooh, I'm so angsty, but I'm a minority, so my angst is noble and profound!") and action-adventures. In no way was anyone actually reading the X-Men BECAUSE of their civil rights preachings, it simply added flavor to what we were reading for. But then the '90s rolled around and suddenly every other sentence about the X-Men was about "The Dream," like we'd been reading 20 years of ANAD stories where Wolverine couldn't drink from a human water fountain, instead of, y'know, Wolverine stabbing people. That comic never existed. Just like the Star Wars movie about philosophy never existed and the Lord of the Rings trilogy about anti-industrialism never existed. Just because my car has a cup-holder doesn't mean it's a beverage cart, nor did the guy who installed the cup-holder expect it to be.

You read me wrong. I'm not criticizing Morrison for this, just Marvel. Of course Grant Morrison came up with a redefining boundary-shatterer, that's not the issue. It's that Marvel went ahead and let him do it to the X-Men. This wasn't the Doom Patrol, Animal Man, Marvel Boy, or the Seven Soldiers, properties that hadn't really caught on with anyone since practically Day One; this was the X-Men, Marvel's Merry Cashcow and still-beloved protagonists of many a thousand readers. You may think they were crap before Grant (and I'd agree), but apparently it was crap the audience LIKED (in theory at least--the last few years of Davis/Claremont/Lobdell put that to the test). Rather than get someone who could write a halfway decent traditional X-Men story that was somewhat faithful to what had been written over the years, Marvel basically said, "Screw that, we're going to redefine the whole thing." Except they apparently had no intention of sticking to their re-definitions, either because they didn't quite like what Morrison did or because they couldn't find a writer who could follow him who didn't pale dramatically in Grant's shadow.

All of those avenues make sense and I don’t see why different creators couldn’t tackle the ones that interest them more.

Again, it's the difference between what the creators WANT to do and what the editors ALLOW them to do. Direction, metaphor, style, tone, and pace are just as important to an editor as quality. X-Men fight the Looter? Mutants as metaphor for bubonic rats? X-Men, Merchant-Ivory style? The Untold Saga of Rogue's Genoshan Rape, in 164 parts? All perfectly workable angles, some of which (especially that Merchant-Ivory one!) might actually be quite good. But of course no responsible editor would allow any of that, at least not as the basis for an entire 5-year run as the X-flagship. Morrison's pitch relied on redefining bits of all of those intangibles, but apparently someone at Marvel thought the quality would outweigh the risk. Apparently not.

Sure, they were teens under Lee and Kirby, but the original 60s stories are widely understood to not be the franchise’s defining years. For that, most people look to Claremont and Byrne — by which point most of the characters weren’t teenagers, and they were never written that way.

They were metaphors for teenagers, not necessarily actual teenagers. And in an adult society, ANY kind of rebellion is seen as teenagerish, otherwise they'd be a respectable adult and not a rebel.

(Btw, Bill, what kind of weird collector's tics have you got going on? You won't buy Animal Man in trade — which has been complete for quite a long time now — because you're waiting for slower-than-the-Turtle DC to release all the DP trades? That's just messed up. Especially considering how some of their trades end up out of print.)

The Morrison trades have been on my to-buy list forever, but I wanted to get all the Doom Patrols before grabbing the Animal Mans. I'm weird. Haven't read beyond the second trade of Invisibles, either, so it's liked I've missed all the masterpieces. Supposedly.