They don't belong in the same breath....
Regardless of your ability to appreciate Grant Morrison's genuine, imaginative, and revolutionary work over more than twenty years releasing genre defining pieces, Jonathan Hickman has never touched Morrison, nor done the solid, mechanically sound storytelling that Morrison exhibited.
Example, Hickman has not, to my knowledge, mixed up his style in over a decade. Morrison in the 80s, 90s, 00s, and 10s is different, growing and changing as a creative.
Then there's the decompressive failures. Every Hickman comic has gotten worse as he progressively decompresses simple stories, going from a fantastic series of tied together mini-series in his early days to the bloated Fantastic Four (still solid), to the unreadable nightmare that was Avengers.
Morrison, by contrasts, has released timeless classics up until a few years ago (GL is good if over rated).
He's got an excellent track record, which is why when he's terrible he's terrible and he's good he's good. He does not have Simonson, John Byrne, and Claremonts penchant for poor to fair mediocrity over long stretches, which is a trade off that makes allot of their runs age better than Morrison's longer work.
I have no idea why you chose to tag me with these. You're responding to quotes from a post by a completely different person. I'm not the one who compared Hickman to Morrison...the other guy did.
I think your blind devotion to Morrison is making you confuse different posters on this thread.
His new X-men is not terrible. It's cringe inducing to say that.
No, cringe is having all of the X-Men characters all talk in the same voice, because the author hasn't done a lick of research on how the characters are supposed to interact. Cringe is stuff like Beast deciding he's gay in one panel, then admitting he's not one panel later, but conceding that "he might as well be gay, since he's already oppressed". Cringe is getting basic shit about the mutant mythology wrong, like either forgetting or not knowing that mutants literally don't get their powers till puberty (which renders the entire character of Cassandra Nova literally impossible, since Morrison claims she developed her powers in the womb). Cringe is turning Jean Grey into a vindictive bully who gets her revenge on Emma Frost by forcing her to relive her past trauma. Cringe would be inventing a 14-year-old's Deviantart character like Fantomex, the guntoting mutant superspy who's "fifty steps ahead of the X-Men" and has dialogue that would make Coldsteel The Hedgehog look like the paragon of subtlety. Cringe would be staging an affair subplot between Emma Frost and Cyclops to push Jean Grey into becoming more malavelont and emotionally vulnerable to her Phoenix State, only to undercut that entire subplot by having her play tonsil hockey with Wolverine behind Cyclops' back before the affair with Emma even takes place, making Jean look like a massive hypocrite. Gosh, it's almost like
not a single character in this stupid-ass run acts in-character, or something.
And that's before you get into Morrison's rejected ideas in his story pitch to Mark Powers, where he drops in such excellent chestnuts like the desire of killing Moira McTaggart only for Magneto to re-animate her corpse by manipulating the iron in her blood, or his idea to kill off Rogue and jettison her entire character history and personality to be replaced with an edgy Goth Rogue, because by
his logic, "a character with those powers would have zero self-confidence and wouldn't be sassy".
Morrison didn't write an X-Men comic, because he doesn't have any grasp of the characters, and self-admittedly has virtually zero familiarity with the bulk of their character history (something he admits in his manifesto)...he wrote a Grant Morrison comic where the X-Men have their agency, character history and personalities reversed or bent completely to service Morrison's misguided high-concept ideas. They don't drive the story...the story drives them, just like every other piece of trash he writes.
The only thing revolutionary about his run is the fact that he somehow made a comic so awful and incongruitous with the X-Men that Marvel retconned virtually everything he wrote at a speed so unprecedented, it makes
One More Day look like a pedestrian small-scale continuity reset. I have never seen a publisher race to get rid of so many bad ideas so quickly.
But they did, and thank
God for that.
Just gonna throw this out there, Chris Claremont wasn't perfect, it's okay not to like a run. I'm a mid on Morrison. His work at Marvel was 'adequate'. N-Xmen was a C. Average. It has high points...and low points. But to describe the ENTIRE RUN as TERRIBLE is a gross misrepresentation. Terrible is Chuck Austen. Terrible is Bendis...everything.
You're welcome to point out a single post where I ever claimed Claremont was perfect, or credited him solely for the golden age of X-Men storylines. You'll notice that I included Byrne and Simonson when listing people from that period--because often, Byrne would creatively tussle with Claremont over narrative ideas, to the point where he was contributing to the story with almost as much agency. Claremont, for all of his good ideas, had terrible ones, like Cyclops getting over the loss of his dead wife by hooking up with a miraculous clone
who looks exactly like his dead wife. Simonson helping make sense of the walking plot absurdity of Madeline Prior, and even making a psychological dilemma out of it, is what made
Inferno such a seminal arc of the X-Men, and helped aid in repairing a disastrous idea. Claremont also has proven exactly what kind of abysmal writing he's capable of when unchecked--as the latter half of
X-Treme X-Men and the ENTIRETY of
X-Men Forever clearly demonstrate.
But the difference is that he at least understands the characters he's writing. For every terrible idea he has, it will be in pursuit of weaving a satisfying soap opera together, and fulfilling the narrative function of the X-Men as characters. Morrison, meanwhile, treats every character he inherits like props--objects that service concepts and ideas, agency and consistency be damned. He doesn't write the X-Men as humans, because somewhere in that bald, nonbinary brain of his, he forgot how to write humans altogether. That's why his run ages like wet shit in an attic, and I have zero intention of reading it again (not that I have to, given how little continuity from that run is preserved in future, superior story arcs. Who knew "Here Comes Tomorrow" was just code for: "Get Puckered, Editorially-Mandated Retcons Incoming!").
Now, is he the worst run on the X-Men? No, I'd say Peter Milligan, Brian Michael Bendis, and Matt Fraction all had infinitely worse runs...and Jason Aaron has arguably the worst contributions to X-Men in publishing history, the damage from which the X-Books have
still yet to fully recover from.
But I'd still take a voluntary mind-wipe to purge my cerebellum of all memories of reading Grant Morrison's run...which again, I don't really have to do, since by the time I reach
House of M and the
Decimation Era in my annual read-through, the X-Men characters
themselves pretty much act like none of that dumb shit ever happened anyway.
