Alright, so I finished New X-men. First and foremost, holy crap the trades for that series are bad. Of the 7, three of them have separated from their spines due to the cheap glue, with one of those having pages falling out on top of that! I'm assuming there's crap all I can do about this since I ordered these back in October from IST and have let them sit in my backlog since then, right? Either way, I guess I'll need to replace these with nicer editions at some point, but yeah, don't buy the series in this format, people, as it's unbelievably crap.
As for the series itself, I enjoyed it for the most part, though it felt... rushed? I don't know how to put it exactly, but it often felt almost like it was missing some scenes or something. Like, things that in theory should've been fleshed out just weren't and it left things feeling weird. For example, the whole final arc (though it had a ton more issues than this) showed Magneto destroying stuff, but there were almost no scenes spent from the perspective of the people or taking time to show any of this, so it just felt like it was mostly him talking to other characters with the backdrop of him having taken over the city, but it never really felt like we got to see that so it felt detached to me. In a similar manner, Emma's diamond form feels glossed over, in that this seems to be first time it happens and she's freaking out and then just... it's suddenly normal and she's turning it on and off and I think they offhandedly and matter-of-factly mention the way it interacts with her telepathy without ever actually establishing it. Just feels weird. Also, I'm pretty sure I never saw a proper explanation for how Xorn having a star for a brain=he's really good at healing. Like, it's very matter of fact about it and it just happens, like "duh having a star for a head makes you a healer, why would you even question that?" (I get that Magneto's powers were controlling nano-sentinals to emulate that in the end, but I don't get how it was supposed to work initially).
Speaking of Xorn, anyone mind laying out that whole mess for me of who was actually who and when in continuity, and how that was all supposed to work out nowadays? (And how Xorn who was Magneto who was Xorn or whatever was supposed to be using all those powers?) Oh, and how/when did Quentin come back to having a physical form after getting a secondary mutation to evolve beyond it or whatever the hell happened there? Though I guess if either of those happened in Astonishing I should read those first, as those are also in my backlog...
And yeah, that last arc was really, really garbage. Felt incredibly disjointed and awkward, especially the whole "Magneto is taking the "special" class, and also like straight up making them be Nazis, all while taking drugs" thing. The only thing I kind of liked there was the kind of meta element of Magneto being frustrated by how much more beloved/successful Xorn was at that point, but even that wasn't exactly utilized well. So yeah, just a big old mess at the end.
Still did enjoy it as a whole, though, despite all my issues with it. Also, how many of the characters in here did Morrison create vs just reinvent, as it actually seemed to be quite a few, which is neat...
