In my continuing quest to read old comics that I probably
should have read years ago, I recently wrapped up my reading of Grant
Morrison’s early-2000s run on New X-Men.
This was preceded by my run-though of Joss Whedon’s stretch on Astonishing X-Men, which originally immediately
followed Morrison’s work*, and the combined effect left me wanting to talk
about them.
*Yeah, I kind of read
them backwards, but it wasn’t really that much of a problem.
I don’t want to straight-up compare them and say which one
is better, as they’re both fantastic works in their own right, and I love them in
very different ways (I’ll try and explain that in a bit). Some comparison
between them is inevitable, though. In
any case, the most succinct way I would compare them is: I like the scope of
Morrison’s ideas more, but I think Whedon better reached the potential of his
ideas.
The best starting place I can think of in this comparison is
in characters the two introduced. Actually, both writers introduced numerous of
characters; let’s narrow the scope to just the heroes (this discussion will
have spoilers for a decade-plus-old set of comics, so fair warning):