UNCANNY X-MEN #400
Okay, this one's a little tricky. One thing I do remember is that I wrote this anniversary issue and ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN #600 (for DC Comics) within mere months of each other. Two big publishing milestones at two different publishers by the same writer. As far as I’m aware, that's never been done (before or since).
It starts with a cover. In this case, a wraparound cover. Check out my terrible design sketch below and Ashley Wood’s absolutely brilliant realization/execution of my idea…
Having no regular artist at the time meant this was going to be a "jam" issue, no matter what. But it was always the plan to have some special guest artists show up, like Bacchus and From Hell artist, Eddie Campbell. I remember pitching the idea of Eddie to Joe Quesada during a group dinner one night in NYC. I must've caught him in the right mood, because he agreed to it.
To this day, I’m not completely sure why Campbell did it. Although, when I met him in person at an SDCC around that time, he claimed that he did it so his kids would think he was cool. That’s as good a reason as any.
Most of the other artists -- Ash Wood, Javier Pulido, Sean Phillips -- were also recruited by me. I figured it would be a shock to the system for the "typical" X-reader, who was probably still used to a certain, “90’s style” of art on these books. But at the time, that kind of disruption appealed to me. And I think the artists I brought in did a bang-up job on their sections.
The story itself turned out to be something of a mosaic narrative, in order to optimize the various artists drawing it. The entire issue could've been titled "Unreliable Narrators" because that's pretty much what it was. Stacy X's "confession" of her own origins was only partly true. The Supreme Pontiff's origin story was only partly true. With Stacy X, it was easy to see which parts were true and which parts weren't. With the Supreme Pontiff, maybe not so easy. And, while we’re at it, naming the big bad “Supreme Pontiff” was a fairly big swing at the time. Ash Wood refined my design to such an effective degree that I probably thought, “Hey, this might actually land…!” Ah, the ignorance of youth…
I mean, c’mon… the Church of Humanity, in general? I'm really not sure what I was thinking with that one. I know I liked the visual iconography. I liked the notion of an anti-mutant movement hiding in plain sight (or, more specifically, a pro-humanity movement in a world where mutants exist), and masked in the ornate cloak of organized religion. Obviously, it was going to hit Nightcrawler closest to home, since he was a bona fide priest.
For anyone who actually read this issue and might be curious about what happened with Nightcrawler at the end: as far as I can remember, the idea was that the Supreme Pontiff had placed (off-panel) some sort of post-hypnotic suggestion within Nightcrawler's mind, to be triggered in some unknown way in the future, probably in a manner that would lead to him betraying the team (Dark Nightcrawler, anyone?). Again, it's been a while, so I really have no idea what my specific plans for that storyline actually were. It could've easily been that I was simply laying track for future stories that I assumed I'd be able to work out later. A lot of long narrative superhero comics are written that way (as I'm sure most of you could've already guessed). A decade later, I ended up doing what I thought was a more effective version of the "alternative church" concept in my brief run on Todd McFarlane's HAUNT series.
Good times, eh...?
And despite my earlier, “Dark Nightcrawler” crack, I was generally less inclined to using my run to replay the X-Men’s “greatest hits”. There’s been a pretty solid theory positing that the best pathway to commercial success -- in mainstream WFH comicbooks -- was to look back at what worked best, elements of a series’ run that proved most iconic, resonant, popular, etc. and basically do an updated version of it. For my money, John Byrne pioneered this method back in the late 70’s on the X-Men and in the early 80’s on the Fantastic Four. In the case of UNCANNY X-MEN, Byrne was super-influenced by the short Roy Thomas/Neal Adams run that closed out the original 60’s run. Those comics featured the Savage Land, Sauron, Magneto, the Sentinels… and you’ll find those same elements showing up during the Claremont/Byrne run. When it came to Byrne’s FANTASTIC FOUR, obviously he mined the classic Lee/Kirby issues, doing his own creative take on them in order to build his own run. Byrne would often call this a “back to basics” approach, as good a term as any. Another, more recent example would be the Jeph Loeb/Jim Lee “Hush” run on BATMAN (the very definition of a “greatest hits” run).
(One could argue that current mainstream comicbooks need a little more of this type of thinking… especially considering what is generally accepted as the median age of our readership. However, as we get further and further away from what are generally considered bona fide “classic” runs of any given series… institutional memory gets more and more distant, nostalgia loses its inherent power and the ability to replay those greatest hits becomes less of an accessible creative skill set.)
Closer to home, Grant and the artists they were working with were doing essentially the same thing on NEW X-MEN, only now those “greatest hits” were generally lifted from the Claremont/Byrne run… the Sentinels, the White Queen, the Shi’ar Empire and the Imperial Guard, Magneto, the Hellfire Club, Days Of Future Past… and, even better, they were doing them in a way that felt completely fresh and new. Which, of course, was part of Grant’s initial mission statement all along. Hell, it’s right there in the title…
Understatement of the year: Grant Morrison was/is a much smarter writer than I was/is.
I honestly don’t remember the response to this issue at all. Which probably means there wasn’t much of one. Although I suppose it should be noted… to the best of my knowledge, UNCANNY X-MEN #400 was only one of two instances when a comicbook I’d written hit the #1 spot on the monthly sales chart. And that was with one cover. No variants.
That’s right, bitches… I have seeeeeeen the mountaintop!
Much more to come…
Joe Casey
USA
Loving these reflections on issues I remember and still have somewhere in a long box.
I enjoyed your Uncanny run back in the day - it felt kinetic and cool. The absolute best IMO was the annual you did with Ashley Wood in the widescreen format - great story and art that hold up today. The whole mutant drug scene just felt cool and dangerous.