7. Grant Morrison And Various Artists On 'New X-Men' (2001 - 2004)
Grant Morrison is undoubtedly one of the greatest writers in the world and also one of the most polarising. Over his career he has touched virtually every major character in the DC Universe and has done weird and wonderful things with most of his creative runs. One of our favourite Morrison runs is New X-Men, one of the rare times he worked for Marvel Comics. Morrison was tasked with restoring the X-Men to critical acclaim the year after the release of the first movie. and New X-Men was the first time the characters costumes were redesigned to be more in line with the silver screen incarnations. Gone were the garish blue and yellow spandex outfits, replaced by black leather and biker jackets (albeit with some yellow still in there). This cosmetic change helped give the book a brand new feeling and the art of Frank Quitely, who drew the majority of the run, was completely unlike anything seen in the pages of X-Men before. Quitely has a style all his own, beautifully realistic at times and yet also not realistic at all, a style that is hard to pin down. But it most certainly wasn't the traditional superhero artwork that X-Men fans had been used to. Morrison's run cherry-picked another element of the movie and made it work in comics: previous to this, Xavier's School For Gifted Youngsters was mainly a mansion for the X-Men to hang out in that was routinely blown up by supervillains. Morrison made it a proper school, with hordes of young mutant students and he repositioned some of the X-Men as teachers. This idea is still held up in X-Men comics today. Morrison also created some lasting characters like Xorn, a Chinese mutant with a star for a brain and a creepy metal mask with glowing blue eyes, and the Stepford Cuckoos, psychically linked quintuplets who trained under the morally questionable Emma Frost. He brought his subversiveness to the X-Men, but never let it get in the way of a good story and it is definitely one of the best runs of the 2000's.
