Back to Rocktopia: Joe Casey’s Uncanny X-Men At 22
So, you’re Joe Casey. You’re revamping the X-Men with Grant Morrison, co-author of DC Comics’ most successful comic book relaunch of the late 1990s, the JLA. What’s more, your title’s up first, and it’s supposed to preview both of your series.
No sweat, right?
After all, this was the man who had not only written head-turning runs on titles like Cable and X-Men: Children of the Atom, but had reinvented Wildcats with Sean Phillips in spectacular fashion. He seemed like a smart choice for Uncanny, especially since he’d written — well, scripted (if not necessarily plotted) the series before.
When I went back and re-read Joe Casey’s run on Uncanny X-Men for the first time in a while, I really thought long and hard about why it didn’t take off the way New X-Men did. Heck, there’s a lot to like about his issues. The characters are faithful to their depictions at the time, continuity’s respected (which wasn’t always a sure thing in the NuMarvel era), Archangel gets reinvented in a way that I really wish had stuck, and Mystique is written better than she had been at virtually any point during the 1990s. Plus folks like Tom Raney were delivering some…
