The more I think about Whedon's Astonishing X-Men run, the less I like it, specifically because it ran far, far away from how Morrison had pushed the mutant concept forward in favor of the extinction threat/superheroics/spandex deal it tried desperately to leave behind.
What Morrison built his run on was actually a very different question from almost any other major X-Men run: instead of the question being "how do mutants deal with being hated and feared by a world they feel obligated to protect and integrate into," the question was "given the fact that mutantkind is ascendant and humans will be functionally extinct within three generations, how does the mission of the X-Men change and how does the world and its sociocultural strictures change along with it?" This is why you have storylines like "Riot at Xavier's," why Mutant Town gets introduced in this run (I really didn't like Marvel doing away with this), and why there are so many outright ugly and hideous mutants to contrast with the very human looking ones the comics follow for the most part. It's why the school is such an important undercurrent in the run (what does education look like for kids that can function as tactical nukes, anyway?). There was a focus on how the world was changing in favor of the mutants and how everyone adapted to it (the U-Men being mutant haters who attempted to acquire mutant powers and Weapon Plus's constant mutant experimentation, for instance. Remind you of anything?). It's telling that some of the best X-Men comics and concepts since 2004 often borrowed heavily from Morrison in one way or another (Utopia partially, but definitely Wolverine and the X-Men's school setting. Hell, Quentin Quire's even a main character there).
Even Scott's militant persona spins out of his Morrison-era drama (how does a guy deal with being merged with a genocidal tyrant for months and not totally feeling comfortable sharing his damage regarding that with his wife, particularly when he's kind of depended on her telepathy to communicate with her since they were kids? Find another telepath to talk to). And it' not as if other writers didn't gesture towards interesting ideas with it (again, Utopia being the most interesting manifestation of it, in my opinion. I never quite liked Terrorist Scott). The problem here, of course, is that they'd either retreat to some status quo when it got too hairy, or they'd use his newfound character traits as a means for promoting the real IP assets in their eyes (Avengers and Inhumans. It's one of the reasons I basically look at all 2010s Avengers and Inhumans properties with the worst kind of scorn. They could all be erased from history forever and I wouldn't care at all). And even beyond all that the militant Scott stories still dealt with that same tired-ass "hated and feared" question I thought we left behind in 2001.
The X-Men, and really mainstream comics in general, are desperately in need of new ideas, and Hickman's absolutely right when he says that most X-Men writers over the last 15-plus years have been writing nothing but stories about other X-Men stories. I'm not sure I have faith in Hickman providing a reasonable alternative (his stories tend to be soulless exercises in stringing together masses of ideas with barely even perfunctory stories, characters, and settings. The concepts are there, and the gadgets and worlds will look impressive, but nothing is developed with enough care or personality to make me give a shyt. It's just an ideas exhibition for the sake of exhibiting ideas), but hopefully it won't be any worse than the last few years of stories.
