By CHRIS RANDLE [Back to the World] – Occasionally, stylistic changes in an adaptation filter down to the comics themselves. (This happened more often in the days before the film industry hungrily farmed pamphlets for new intellectual properties, and before many cartoonists conceived entire works as pre-storyboarded Hollywood pitches.) When X-men ditched spandex for black leather ten long years ago, the characters did the same on paper. The forced convergence ended up fitting neatly. Writer Grant Morrison was taking charge of the X-books, and shifting their decades-old allegory of minority persecution (complete with an analogue of apartheid South Africa) to a story about human evolution and mutanthood as the ultimate modish subculture. He made the uniforms even more punkish and brutalist as part of his project. It was fitting in a cosmic sense too: the ’80s X-men, with Storm channeling Grace Jones, must be the most fashion-forward superhero comics ever. As Bryan Lee O’Malley once noted, they were au courant by decades. Style is a mutant power.
Continued at Back to the World | More Chronicle & Notices.
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