[MUSIC PLAYING]
NICK LOWE: X-Men has some of the greatest collaborations
in comic book history.
There's beauty in collaboration.
And new X-Men show that off as well as anything
in the history of comics.
Marvel is the House of Ideas.
It's the house that Stan, Steve, and Jack created.
But every now and then, there comes a voice.
GERRY DUGGAN: It's hard to say exactly
what would drive a creator towards their magnetic north.
When Morrison and Quitely were working,
I think comic books was primed for a new take
on the superhero comic.
It was a new millennium.
What does that mean for our heroes?
In 2001, Grant Morrison was already one of the biggest
writers in comics.
I think it was towards the end of his JLA at this time.
The thing about Grant is that he brings the most insane ideas
to the table, at the same time makes
them so cool and fun and funny.
I was super excited from the get-go.
I was already a huge Grant Morrison fan.
He had a tremendous impact on me as a comic book reader,
as someone who wanted to write comic books.
I still worship at the altar of Grant.
NICK LOWE: He'd already had so much cred.
But he'd never really worked at Marvel.
As I understand it, when Joe Quesada and Mark Powers was
the X-Men editor at the time, went to Grant,
they wanted Grant to be Grant.
And from what I understand, he turned in his manifesto.
Here's where mutants are now--
no longer the minority.
They're quickly becoming the majority.
They are the next step in the evolution.
And they won.
They're gonna be hated and feared
not because they're weird different--
which they'll still be.
But they're hated and feared because they're taking over.
And that was one of those huge ideas
that Grant put forward that was so cool.
It was everything a comic should be.
It challenged your ideas of what a mutant was.
And all of a sudden, we were talking
about sentient viruses and just really,
really cool, out-there ideas.
NICK LOWE: It was Grant's idea to call it
NEW X-MEN, and the idea that the "new"
is like a mirror image of the "men" at the bottom.
And, like, that is so clever and so neat.
Nearly everything Grant does is amazing.
But when he and Frank work together,
they both level each other up.
GERRY DUGGAN: Grant and Frank Quitely together
was absolutely what I wanted the X-Men
to look like and feel like.
Looking up at the shelf, I'm seeing, you know,
Grant Morrison, X-MEN, this amazing cover
of them striding out towards the reader
with their faces in shadow.
They look like aliens.
They look kind of strange.
These are not sort of superheroes.
They're something else.
They're something kind of sci-fi.
Love the looks of every one of those characters.
I like that everything felt very fresh and new
even though these were a group of characters we knew so well.
Seeing Wolverine with no shirt and the jacket
and the dog tags, that was exactly
the wolverine that I wanted.
Frank Quitely is quite possibly the greatest comic book artist
alive and maybe of all time.
His work is so perfectly composed
to show what the action that is happening is,
whether that is an action-packed panel or a quiet panel.
There is an elegance and a simplicity to it.
He does dynamics like no one else.
Frank's action doesn't always come right at you.
It is often going across the page.
Simplicity plus the complexity of the details
that he's doing to me is what makes Frank Frank.
I would pore over these pencils because they
were so delicate and so powerful at the same time.
As an intern, it was my job to open up the boxes,
take them to the copier.
I'd make two full-sized copies and then two small copies,
and they'd send it off to the inker.
On the sly, I would end up making
three full-sized copies of the stuff that I loved the most.
And I was like, I don't know what this story is at all yet.
And then it came out and it hit me like a ton of bricks.
These amazing covers, and just looking at every line
that Quitely had drawn.
That might have been the first time I'd really
felt like costumes had been designed after an era of, like,
spikes and chrome and dark blades on everywhere.
you looked at that and you could see
exactly what he was going for.
It was like a rescue organization.
NICK LOWE: The weirdness of the faces
sometimes, the body shapes.
And he brings these super weird characters
into it that fit best with X-Men than anybody else.
X-Men is supposed to be weird and strange.
And that is Frank's art to a T.
I think Frank Quitely is one of those guys that was
born to draw weird characters.
And he drew some super weird ones in the X-Men.
Some of my favorite mutant characters, favorite X-Men
are the ones who can't just put on a hat and coat
and go out and walk among humans and blend in.
Glob Herman can never do that.
Beak can never do that.
And I loved those super weird characters, especially
the class of the Misfits.
While it was totally new, it was still X-Men.
It was still cyclops being Cyclops, just pushed further.
The idea of secondary evolutions,
you've seen that in Beast, in Cat Beast.
Cat Beast is the greatest form of beast.
Wolverine, Jean, and Professor X, and then Emma Frost.
Emma Frost is a diamond, secondary mutation,
living up to her true potential because she is the greatest.
I'm a sucker for reformed villains.
And this semi-reformed villain was perfection.
AL EWING: Month after month after month,
always the first thing, always the first thing I read.
This came out, X-Men was the most exciting book.
It was the most exciting book Marvel was doing.
It was like the most exciting book anybody was doing.
A lot of the things that made X-Men special when Jack
and Stan did it in the '60s was the metaphor for things like
the civil rights movement, subcultures on the road
to becoming cultures.
And so what Grant was talking about
was that a lot of these things that were subcultures
aren't subcultures anymore.
They are the culture.
The work was so good you couldn't argue with it.
I got super into it, and it felt like the world did, too.
I think it was the most successful
the X-Men had been in a long while.
And it set things in motion for years to come.
Grant was able to come in and strip things down to really
zero in on what it meant to be a mutant and what it meant
to be a part of the X-Men.
I think that's a really, for me, super, super definitive
take on those characters.
NICK LOWE: It changed the way that mutants were hated
and feared and made them care a little bit less about it
and not fret so much about it.
You can't touch us, anyway.
We're too cool.
AL EWING: There's something about:
They're hated and feared by the world they just want to protect
and that carries very strong ethics.
Sort of the teenage mind, the young mind.
Sometimes it's a metaphor.
Sometimes it's been more of like a thematic connection.
Hatred, persecution, persecution of minorities,
persecution of anyone who doesn't fit in.
I think all kids on some level feel a connection to that.
I don't think there's a single person
who reads comics who feels like they fit in everywhere.
We all feel like we're outcasts.
And the X-Men are the ultimate outcast superheroes.
And whatever element about yourself
makes you feel like you don't fit in
or society doesn't like you, you immediately feel a kinship
and a bond with the X-Men.
That's what the X-Men tap in to.
And it shows us this better way.
Unless, of course you're listening to Magneto.
And then it shows you a worse way.
Don't do that.
NICK LOWE: So much of what made Marvel amazing
in the '60s was Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko's weirdness,
their crazy ideas.
And Grant got back way more to that strangeness.
It was the first time that it stepped fully out of the Chris
Claremont, John Byrne, Dave Cockrum,
Paul Smith, Jim Lee shadow.
It tore it up and yet put this puzzle back together
that still looked like X-Men.
It was still X-Men, it was just like you'd never seen it before
and maybe better than ever.
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