Early on the X-men are disbanded, but for x reasons Wolverine has to put them together, and ends up as their leader. Wolverine leading the x-men sounds silly, but the show actually shows the problems with it, and as it progresses shows how he grows as a leader.

Rachel might enjoy my blog, which takes an issue-by-issue look at the much-maligned '90s era of the X-comics. I try my best to present the information clearly for anyone who's not familiar with the source material, and make notes of when new ideas, characters, and concepts are introduced.
You can find it here...
http://notblogx.blogspot.com/

Whereas Morrison tends to absurdly overthink things, and drown comics in SA nostalgia (see JLA, All-Star Superman, 52, Seven Soldiers, Batman, WildCats and X-Men if you look at prior runs, even Zenith for the ’60s Brit obession in Phase 3) or make them incomprehensible to any poor new reader who dares pick them up (see The Invisibles, The Filth, Final Crisis).

I think it's easier to look back now and throw shit on JLA - personally I enjoy it more now than I did a decade ago (isn't it shit we can say that?) - than it would have been at the time... it really helped pull superheroes out of the shit heap that was the late 90's. It dared not to be Watchmen.

Also, I'm not sure where you get silver age from New X-men - he outraged most of it's haters by daring to bring up - and finally finish off a lot of the same old songs that people had been writing for them since Claremont (who in turn had updated what Lee and Thmos had done).

Also, The Filth and The Invisibles aren't incomprehensible at all.
They aren't easy reads, but they are good, and they do make sense.

All Star Superman is the only blatant love letter to the silver age on that list.
Seven Soldiers and Batman are more exercises of joining the continuity of back then to the modern day.
Seven Soldiers is taking what were basically dead concepts and bringing them back, whilst staying true.
Batman isn't great, I'll grant that, but it's not to the silver age, it's to every era of Batman ever, Golden, Silver, Dark etc.

Just note, I haven't read the one's I haven't commented on, but surely he couldn't have done a worse job on Wildcats than Alan Moore - his first issue was good, but the rest was utter shite.
There was no characterization at all, it was just plot, plot, plot - most of which didn't even make sense, but people think is great due to an interesting twist on who the villain was.
I can't believe he did a worse job than Moore.
(That said, Moore gets props for actually finishing his run).

But Emma Frost was a murdering mind-raping racist all from 1979 to the early 90s.

Yeah, but Professor X also wanted to get down and dirty with a teenager in the 60's, Cyclops married a girl who was identical to his dead girlfriend, and then ditched her with a kid the second the dead girlfriend came back from the dead, Rogue 'mind-raped' and stole the powers of a superhero before becoming a good guy, but you're cool with that...

He's not worse than Hitler, he's just not very good at writing IMO. Good British writers include Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman and Warren Ellis because they can write outside their comfort zone and still try to make things with new readers in mind, even if their originality has dropped a small tad. I think this about them even though sometimes I don't agree with them, because they do their job well.

Whereas Morrison tends to absurdly overthink things, and drown comics in SA nostalgia (see JLA, All-Star Superman, 52, Seven Soldiers, Batman, WildCats and X-Men if you look at prior runs, even Zenith for the '60s Brit obession in Phase 3) or make them incomprehensible to any poor new reader who dares pick them up (see The Invisibles, The Filth, Final Crisis). I admit that saying I had no respect for him as a person was a stupid thing to say but my temper was running very high on things unrelated. I still think he's not good.

FunkyGreenJerusalem, I wouldn't have a problem with Scott and Jean splitting up, or with black leather and a full mutant student body. These are minor things that can be done fairly easily without fraying the battered logic that holds the title together... hopefully in a way so it makes sense. But Emma Frost was a murdering mind-raping racist all from 1979 to the early 90s. Compared to how Rogue and Gambit were presented in their first few years (likeable but with a hint of tragedy and mystery) it's a bit like the Avengers just letting Norman Osborn join them, pre-Secret Invasion when he was still a loon.

Hey, I know Marvel owns them. But I think Marvel is acting dumb, so...

I may be mistaken, but I think that in Rachel's timeline, Jean/Phoenix didn't die on the moon, but was rather depowered by the Shi'ar (as per Claremont's original script), and Rachel was conceived sometime after that.

(In my world "good" means "batshit insane," though.)

And yes Sinister does look like a Dark Colossus.

Loved it... Then came the 90s... and I left the title.. (not long after the arrival of Cable) Grant Morrison brought me back. I dropped the title again after the "Actually it was Xorn pretending to be Magneto, pretending to be Xorn"... I liked the Magneto on Drugs storyline...

Mind you I also liked Inferno...

Although I first thought Sinister WAS a Dark Collosus, then started thinkning it was his evil twin... then just thought "F&*% it"... The only difference is the cloak and red diamond thing... (don't the rest of the team get confused?!?

I quite liked the recent Colossus: Bloodlines story because it tried to reconcile that...

Also i noticed that i have strangely absorbed X-men knowledge without actually focusing on it, by randomly looking around on Uncannyxmen.net, since all these storylines are familiar to me despite having never read a comic (or storyline) which is older than 12 years.

I remember being ten years old and trying really hard to understand the Jean Grey/Phoenix/Madelyne thing or the Psylocke/Kwannon debacle. Even did little diagrams and sketches like some pint-sized quantum physics professor. It's comforting to know there were other people out there really into it too.

His pathetic attempt to drag everything back to the Silver Age is blatantly obvious to anyone who who unfortunately reads ‘All-Star Superman’ and ‘Batman’. He crushes anything remotely modern that he’s involved with under a quixotic quest to return things to the ‘old way’ and the best example is him bringing back the Phoenix force, Magneto, the meaningless death of said two characters and a hackneyed ‘evil twin’ plot that would make Paul Levitz blush.

Yeah man, and like how he got Doom Patrol back to it's roots with Danny The Street, and then he took Animal Man back to being aware of his fictional nature, had the greatest selling OGN of all time where Batman lived through a Jungian psychological nightmare - and don't get me started on his creator owned works, blatant rip offs of everything that's come before...

Seriously dude, with Superman and Batman... why wouldn't you drag them back to a time where creativity and sales were way above what they are today?

They a corporate properties that only really work when viewed for a Silver age lens - I think a lot of long time readers tend to forget that.

As for dragging New X-men's sales down... not sure that happened (except maybe when the editors seemed to refuse to believe they had to give Kordey more than a day to draw an issue).
The series not only sold well as singles, it was collected in three separate hardcovers, tpbs of each story line, a hardback omnibus (well before Marvel started doing that with other runs), and now giant sized tpbs.
You don't do that with books that don't sell.

His misguided idiocy forced the forced the X-Men out of the number one position in comics, a position they had always roughly held for about 20 years (given occasonal bumps like Image), and nowadays they are in the 20s or 30s of the sales chart

And actually, the books were down in a time when Joss Whedon, a big name writing a love letter to Claremont was on the book, and they undid almost everything Morrison had done on the book.
But seriously, you go ahead and keep on hating the guy because you either just don't like, can't understand, or feel challenged ny his work.

I *know* Emma Frost is evil

Okay, but she reformed, realized she was wrong and has turned her life around.
Like a lot of the X-men.
Like Rogue, who once put a superhero in a coma.
Or Gambit, who used to be a thief.
Or any other number of them.
You may 'know' she's evil, but the people who own and write her don't think she is.

They even had to, months later, blame her actions on “Kwannon’s sultry influence” or some such nonsense.

As that storyline went in to play pretty soon after her flirtations started, I'm pretty sure it was always intended to be because of Kwannon - I think the awkward conversation between Betsy and Jean after those story lines where they spelled out what had happened was an attempt to calm down fans who need things spoon fed to them, and still hated Psylocke for taking a shot.

(For instance Greg, when telling a new fan about what had happened in X-Men, I'd skip over the details of Kwannon, and if I had to, skip over the Cyclops affair... it just works better... although for me, that was the storyline I got into x-men on... and for some reason, hung around for awhile).

http://www.amazon.com/40-Years-of-the-X-Men/dp/B000E28UT2

Happy New Year,
Marc Patten
Former contributing Editor and Cover Art Director, Comics Buyers Guide magazine.