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10 Years Of Joe: X-Men Then, X-Men Now

Published Fri, 10 Sep 2010 06:00:29 -0500

When Bishop, X-Man, Gambit, Generation X, Mutant X and X-Men: The Hidden Years were cancelled in 2000, Marvel's policy was clear. Joe Quesada said;

The books were just incredibly insular… they were books for the 50-year old fan.

Bill Jemas followed up with;

I called the X-books 'comics about comics.' In order to understand the X-Men you had to have already read 100 previous books – and to understand those 100, you would have had to have read 100 before that… Marvel peaks when our characters look and feel like real world people facing realistic issues similar to (or at least analogous to) what our readers face in their real lives… The X-Men books started to fail when the characters were interacting more heavily with their own back story than with stories pulled off the front page of the New York Times.

In 2010, there are more X-books than ever before.

And New Mutants is running a story based on the Inferno storyline from over twenty-years ago. With the mutant babies seen in the X-Terminators mini-series in 1988. And not seen since. Now all grown up. And much of the first issue assumes you know who they are and what's going on and what happened in Inferno.

Which, you know, I do. Because I am one of those 50 37 year old fans…

Meanwhile Storm is off to rescue Dracula, in a Curse Of The Mutants oneshot that exists because of a bond they shared after the vampire count tried to turn her back in 1982 in Uncanny X-Men #159 – which has hardly been mentioned since…

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