Welcome back to another installment of Mutantversity! Mutantversity is your home for all things X-Men. In Mutantversity, I, your loyal X-Men tutor, will look at all the things happening in the mutant universe. Each month, I’ll look at a handful of titles and rotate around each month. Some months, we’ll do something a little different and this is one of those months. As a longtime X-Men fan, I find myself sometimes feeling like I’m trapped in a cycle of repetition. For every new character or truly new storyline, there’s a revisiting of some sort or a back track to what’s familiar. In the current state of things, this is hard to ignore so this month, I want to look at the X-Men universe in its current state and talk about this turn towards the familiar.
Kitty Pryde and Colossus are getting married, Professor X is young and in charge of a team, Jean Grey is alive, Logan is on his way back and the time displaced original five are probably on their way out. It seems as if the X-Men universe is reverting back to a very familiar state and that’s concerning to me. When a franchise becomes driven by nostalgia and not by its history, things become stagnant and hollow. With Marvel’s so called “Fresh Start” coming in quick, I think it’s time to bring that fresh start to the X-Men but not by stepping backwards and falling into old patterns. Endings need to be had, mantles need to pass down and it all needs to stick. The last few months in the X-Men universe have brought changes and announcements of changes but how many of these changes are really new and how many are falling back on old habits? Let’s investigate.
Death and rebirth has been such a crucial part of the superhero genre as far as Marvel and DC go. A character is never truly gone forever. Despite it being an alternate universe take, even Uncle Ben has come back before. With the X-Men, death and rebirth is ingrained so deeply into things that Jean Grey is a character basically centered around that. Since the Claremont era, X-Men has been a soap opera with superheroes. People fall in love, they beat up bad guys, they die and come back. This is a part of why I fell in love with these characters. There’s always some grander drama at the center of it all compared to the Avengers. On top of saving the world we also had to wonder if Rogue and Gambit could somehow make things work. There are new students at the school who need to be taught but there’s also a love triangle happening between Jean, Scott and Emma oh and one of Scott’s kids from the future is here too. Honestly, who doesn’t love that?
Nostalgia for many people is a bad word. I don’t see it that way. Nostalgia can be a ton of fun because looking back fondly on the things we loved when we were younger or new to the medium fills us with a happiness that is very unique. Memories are attached to this and it’s hard to recreate this feeling which is probably why we try so much to do so. With the X-Men in particular, we seem to try harder to recreate that feeling. For many readers, Kitty and Colossus is a pairing they can’t imagine not existing so this upcoming wedding is something they’re completely here for after so many years apart. For some, the return of Professor X is exciting because he’s younger now and can do different things. For others, it’s Jean Grey’s return that excites them because it’s another opportunity to do something new. However, here’s where we stand with these things: Jean Grey is carrying on Professor X’s mission without changing it too much to fit today’s world, Professor X is still on a power trip and the Kitty/Colossus pairing never really addressed any of the major issues the couple had. Elsewhere in the X-Men universe, you have Logan coming back and Laura reverting back to her old code name of X-23, and the time displaced original five are languishing in “X-Men: Blue.” “Iceman” was canceled and “Generation X,” a book completely focused on new/young characters was canceled just as it was getting good. These don’t feel like fresh starts but it’s all about sales at the end of the day.
Continued belowX-Men fans are pretty fickle and I say this as a huge X-Men fan. We love these characters and we will defend them to the end of time and I don’t mean to rain on any parades of anyone who feels the X-Men books are going through some good stuff at the moment. There is a lot of good and even in the stuff I’m picking at, I see a ton of good in them. I love “X-Men: Red” despite the fact that it doesn’t quite feel like something entirely new for Jean Grey. I think “New Mutants” is off to a really fun start and I still think “All-New Wolverine” is the best X-Men title in the last 10 years. However, the X-Men universe needs to get to a place where we can accept losing characters. We need to get to a place where we get excited about the exploration of the biggest theme in the entire franchise. This is a part of the Marvel Universe that deals with people wanting to eradicate them from the Earth. People want to kill them for their appearance and their powers and so often this is framed through pretty white people. Not every story needs to be an allegory for racism but it would be nice if Marvel brought in talent who could tackle that in a way that doesn’t feel so dated and insensitive. It would be nice to see a book like “Iceman” last longer than a year. It would be awesome to see the X-Men in stories that aren’t all action packed. I want to see creators come in and play around with different genres while still retaining what makes these characters these characters. For example, what if we got a horror book with Magik or a southern gothic mystery with Gambit or even a Game of Thrones-esque drama focused on Emma Frost and the Hellfire Club? We can do these things out of continuity and see the franchise have some fun in this giant sandbox. There’s room for everything and everyone.
As fans and consumers, we have the power to make these things happen through what we buy and what we talk about. We are a fickle bunch but we need to do a better job at embracing new characters and risk taking stories. We need to not dwell on the familiar or the things that bring us that nostalgic feeling we all seem to be chasing all the time. The X-Men franchise, so far in 2018, has really focused on bringing back a lot of the old guard and I firmly believe there’s a place in the middle where all these things can exist and where longtime readers and new readers can be happy. The past can inform the present, but it shouldn’t be the present.
