Barbelith Underground > Comic Books > The Geeky X-Men Thread

Alright. This is where things start getting more complicated.

During the Brood storyline, Charles Xavier believes the X-Men to be dead, and takes in a new group of teenaged students who are called The New Mutants. They get their own series, and live in the mansion with the X-Men. The cast of the New Mutants during its first few years include Cannonball, Mirage, Wolfsbane, Sunspot, Cypher, Karma, Magma, Colossus's sister Illyana (aka Magik) and the alien robot Warlock. I'll gloss over the events of their series as I go along with the X-Men chronology.

After Paul Smith leaves, John Romita Jr. takes over as the artist on The Uncanny X-Men. The focus of the series during the Romita years is increasingly "street level" and dark. During the beginning of Romita's run we get a mixed bag of adventures which range from stories featuring Mystique's Brotherhood to a Doctor Doom storyline to this crazy story about an ancient magical villain who remakes the world. Nothing too special at first, but things do start to get interesting when Rachel Summers pops up in regular X-Men contuinity. She joins the X-Men as a junior member, but keeps her identity a secret from Cyclops and Madelyne, who is pregnant with Scott's child. Rachel Summers is a very angsty character, and is very selfdestructive. She eventually is nearly killed by Wolverine and disappears.

Magneto is tried by an international tribunal, and Charles Xavier is hurt and sent off into space to live with Lilandra and the Shi'Ar. He decides to make the reformed Magneto the new headmaster of the Xavier School, which no one is very happy with.

Scott and Madelyne have their child, Nathan Christopher Summers. Within a year, Scott finds out that Jean did not die on the moon (she is found in a cocoon beneath Jamaica Bay by the Fantastic Four), and abandons his wife and child to form a new group called X-Factor with Iceman, Angel, and Beast. The original premise of the X-Factor series was convoluted and mis-guided - the original X-Men were pretending to be a group of mutant hunters, but were actually seeking out mutants and taking them in to be trained.

And then everything changes...

During the final story of the Romita Jr era, a group of vicious mutant assassins called the Marauders appear in the Morlock tunnels and mercilessly wipe out nearly every mutant in their path. The X-Men attempt to stop them, but Nightcrawler, Colossus, and Kitty Pryde are severely wounded in the battle. X-Factor also encounters the Marauders while investigating the attacks, and Angel is wounded so badly that his wings must be amputated. Magneto decides to join the Hellfire Club, and the British telepath Psylocke joins the X-Men.

Over the next year (during which Marc Silvestri takes over the art on The Uncanny X-Men), the X-Men search for the Marauders and pick up some new members to replace those who were hurt during the Massacre. Havok, Dazzler, and a character named Longshot join the group. We find out that the Marauders were working for a mysterious villain named Mr. Sinister (aka Nathaniel Essex), but we still don't know why.

Eventually, the X-Men (at this point: Storm, Wolverine, a recovered Colossus, Rogue, Havok, Psylocke, Dazzler, and Longshot, along with Madelyne Pryor) sacrifice their lives to save the world in Dallas, but are brought back to life by the mystical being Roma. The X-Men decide that it is for the best to let the world believe them to be dead, and relocate to an abandoned town in Australia. During the Australian period, the X-Men visit an island off the coast of Africa called Genosha ("A green and pleasant land...", says the travel brochures), which unknown to the rest of the world is enslaving mutants and benefiting from their labor. The X-Men liberate Genosha.

Around this time, Nightcrawler, Kitty Pryde, and Rachel Summers start a new British version of the X-Men called Excalibur with Captain Britain and his girlfiend Meggan. You don't need to know much about Excalibur, really. Almost nothing of consequence occurs during the entire run of the series, except for when Rachel Summers leaves the group and goes back to the future.

Meanwhile, Madelyne Pryor is changing. She is slowly developing psychic abilities, and strikes an alliance with demons. Yes, demons. Demons who have some kind of aliance with Mr. Sinister. This all leads up to a big crossover event called Inferno about which I honestly cannot recall all of the details. It's sooooo convoluted and difficult, it is exactly the kind of thing that people are talking about when they put down late-80s X-Men comics.

Anyway, Madelyne becomes the "Goblin Queen" and tries to get her child back from Cyclops and Jean Grey. In the process, she and the demons corrupt the X-Men, turn Manhattan into a demonic nightmare landscape, and X-Factor and the X-Men are reunited. X-Factor believed the X-Men to be dead, and the X-Men thought that Jean was dead, if you've been keeping track. Madelyne dies at the end of the story, and things kinda go back to normal for a brief period of time.

The most important thing about the Inferno story is the revelation that Madelyne Pryor is indeed the clone of Jean Grey, created by Mr. Sinister, who has a scientific interest in the offspring of Jean Grey and Scott Summers, and created her in hopes that Scott would sire a son by her. We learn later on that Mr. Sinister has a history working for Apocalypse, and that Sinister had the Morlocks killed because they were mostly the failed results of his scientific experimentations with mutation.

After the X-Men return to Australia, they slowly fall apart but not before meeting the obnoxious teenage mutant Jubilee. Longshot leaves the group to find himself, Storm appears to be murdered, Wolverine runs off, and the rest of the group are sent off through this mystical device given to them by Roma, the Siege Perilous. The Siege Perilous transports the X-Men to different places on earth with no memory of who they are, and often transforming them.

This next period of the X-Men is a really shitty time for the series - it mostly involves Banshee and Forge (a mutant who can invent anything who we met back during the Romita period) searching for the missing X-Men while Wolverine and Jubilee have some small adventures. Wolverine and Jubilee find Psylocke, but she has somehow come to possess the body of an Asian ninja woman. Yeah. It's pretty dumb, but Psylocke gets waaaay more confusing later on.

Rogue turns up in the Savage Land, and begins a romance with Magneto. Now, if you're ever confused as to why Rogue can fly and has super strength in the comics, it's because she stole those powers from a superhero named Carol Danvers, along with significant chunks of her personality. When Rogue was sent through the Siege Perilous, Danvers was cast out of her mind, but Rogue somehow retains those superpowers, which is unfortunate, I really think Rogue is better off conceptually with only the absorption powers.

As for the rest of the group, Colossus pops up as an artist in Manhattan, and Dazzler ends up in Hollywood or something like that.

Around this time, after a long period of fill-in artists, Jim Lee takes over as regular artist on The Uncanny X-Men. As it turns out, Storm has been reverted to a child state by two villains called (I kid you not) Nanny and The Orphan-Maker. She meets up with the Cajun mutant Gambit. One thing leads to another, and a new group of X-Men is formed - child Storm, Wolverine, Jubilee, ninja Psylocke, Gambit, Forge, and Banshee. They go off into space, and are reunited with Charles Xavier.

Meanwhile, artist Rob Liefeld has taken over on New Mutants, and that comic is changed fairly radically with the introduction of the gun-nut soldier from the future, Cable. Cable becomes the New Mutants new mentor, and molds them into a paramilitary strike force.

Over in X-Factor, the group is fighting an incredibly powerful villain named Apocalypse (aka En Sabah Nur). Apocalypse is the man responsible for transforming Angel into Archangel - he turned Angel's skin blue and gave him new living metal wings with razor sharp feathers. Apocalypse captures Cyclops's son Nathan, and in the end of the story, Nathan is infected with techno-virus and sent off into the far future with a red haired woman named Askani. We don't find this out for a while, but when Nathan is in the future, he is raised by the Askani cult (led by Rachel Summers), and becomes Cable. Cable goes back to our time in an attempt to stop Apocalypse.

The next big crossover storyline between the X-Men, X-Factor, and the New Mutants is called The X-Tinction Agenda, in which the X-Men are attacked by the Genoshans and the X-Men once again liberate Genosha.

After this, another storyline reunites the X-Men on Muir Island, Xavier is one again crippled, and X-Factor and the X-Men unite as one large group of X-Men. They fight and defeat Magneto and his Acolytes, and so ends the original Chris Claremont run on the X-Men.

For the next year, Jim Lee and fellow artist Whilce Portacio come up with a series of truly forgettable stories before they leave to form Image Comics with Rob Liefeld, Marc Silvestri, Erik Larson, Jim Valentino, and Todd McFarlane.

The next three years or so are absolutely horrible, and I will write about them a little later on.

Matthew Fluxington

22:21 / 06.05.03

Okay. Let's see.

X-Men writer Fabian Nicieza wastes a lot of time making Psylocke even more pointlessly complicated, but I can barely explain that and it's not very important.

At the start of the post-Claremont era we meet a man named Bishop, who is a crazy cop/soldier from a mutant paramilitary group called the XSE from the future. In Bishop's time, the X-Men were destroyed by one of their own. Bishop suspects Gambit, for good reason. Bishop is extremely violent and self righteous, and the rest of the X-Men are very wary of him. They should be - he's a powerful, musclebound gun nut, and quite possibly a total maniac.

Colossus ends up quitting the X-Men after he loses his family, and he joins up with Magneto. Post-Claremont Magneto is a raving lunatic, and every bit of subtlety and nuance that Claremont had added to the character had been pissed away. Anyway, in a big showdown with the X-Men, Magneto removes the metal from Wolverine's body. As it turns out, Wolverine's claws were part of his skeleton all along, so he now has bone claws. In response, Xavier completely erases Magneto's mind.

The next big thing is something which can be loosely described as a story called Legion Quest. Legion is David Haller, Xavier's bastard son. He is extremely powerful, and very much insane. For some reason, he goes back in time and murders Xavier before he starts up the X-Men, and rapes his own mother while he's at it, I KID YOU NOT.

This leads us into yet another alternate reality - for four months, all of the X-Men comics are temporarily cancelled and replaced with comics taking place in the Age of Apocalypse, a world without Charles Xavier. It's a pretty dire dystopian future - Apocalypse rules the world, Magneto is the leader of the X-Men, good guys are bad guys and bad guys are good guys. It's a world gone maaaaaad! Apocalypse is overthrown by Magneto and the X-Men, and somehow history is rearranged so that everything is back to normal. A few characters from the Age of Apocalypse find their way over to the regular X-Men world, but they aren't very important.

Cannonball from the New Mutants and X-Force graduates to the X-Men, and another mutant who appears to be a young musclebound amnesiac version of Magneto joins the X-Men. His name is Joseph, and he is an example of everything that was wrong with the X-Men in the mid-90s. Scott Lobdell admits that he introduced him to the story without working out his backstory or giving ANY thought to how the character may fit into ongoing plots that he'd already introduced without having any endings in mind.

As time goes on, we find out that somehow when Xavier erased Magneto's mind, some bizarre hybrid of the two was created, the evil being known as Onslaught. Onslaught took over Xavier's body, and he ended up being the X-Traitor that Bishop was talking about for all of that time. Onslaught causes a lot of trouble, but he's eventually stopped. This sets in motion the Operation Zero Tolerance storyline in which the US government brings back the Sentinels, and hunts down the X-Men. Xavier is captured, the mansion is destroyed (Again! I haven't mentioned it every time, but this is at least the third time that the mansion is destroyed.) There are more details to this story, but it isn't necessary to get into them. You get the idea, trust me. Do you really need to know that the head of Operation Zero Tolerance is a pink-skinned guy with glowing eyes that everyone for some reason believe is a human being, and he turns out to be Nimrod (a special super sentinel from Rachel Summers's future) reincarnated after being sent through the Siege Perilous waaaaaaaaaay back when the X-Men were still in Australia? No. Not at all.

Psylocke changes yet again, this time after being wounded by Sabretooth. She somehow develops mystical powers having to do with something called the "Crimson Dawn." She gets a facial tatoo, and can now teleport. Why? No particular reason, really. I think Lobdell was bored and the artist at the time, Joe "Playstation" Madureira just wanted to make her look more like a video game character than she already did. Poor Psylocke. When Claremont finally kills her off in the second issue of X-Treme X-Men, it is definitely something like euthanasia.

Anyway, while this is going on, some other X-Men are out in space, but eventually end up on earth and meet up with Magneto (but they don't know it is Magneto, and besides Joseph is with them and they assume that he's Magneto even though he's much younger and can't remember being Magneto). The disguised Magneto gives Gambit a "trial" and it is revealed that Gambit was working for Mr. Sinister and was involved in the Morlock Massacre. The X-Men kick him out, and the Lobdell/Nicieza era comes to an end.

Steven Seagle takes over Uncanny X-Men with artist Chris Bachalo, and Joe Kelly takes over X-Men with artist Carlos Pacheco. The small handful of Kelly/Pacheco X-Men comics are excellent, but a completely insane editorial staff comandeers the series, and starts dictating the direction of the stories to the writers, even though Seagle and Kelly have spent several months setting up storylines in their respective series which they must now abandon even though they've ALREADY BEGUN.

Anyway, the X-Men at this point are Storm, Wolverine, Scott, Jean, Beast, Archangel (who for no apparent reason has his feather wings again, courtesy of Scott Lobdell), Iceman, Cannonball, Joseph, Rogue and three new characters that Lobdell introduced just before he left - Maggott, Marrow, and Dr. Cecilia Reyes. Marrow is an angry Morlock survivor, Maggott makes little to no sense, and Reyes is a pacifist doctor who didn't even know that she was a mutant until Operation Zero Tolerance outed her. She can project a small force field around her body, and desperately does not want to be around the X-Men, and hates the fact that she is a mutant. She's a pretty interesting character, but she is unfortunately swept under the rug by the moronic editorial staff.

When we talk about the Seagle/Kelly issues, we can only really consider what they were working towards - Seagle was working on reintroducing the Phoenix to Jean Grey and Cyclops was about to come up with his own redefined version of Xavier's dream. Kelly was going to focus his X-Men series on the newer members (Maggott, Marrow, Reyes, Cannonball, Joseph plus Beast in a Prof X role). They stick around for a little while and play along with their editors in the interests of being professional. They are forced to eliminate nearly all of the characters in their casts, bring back Gambit even though it doesn't make any sense, and bring Kitty Pryde, Colossus, and Nightcrawler back into the cast. At least that last thing is a good thing - poor Nightcrawler and Kitty had been wasted over in Excalibur for about a decade. So at this point the X-Men are Storm, Wolverine, Rogue, Kitty, Colossus, Nightcrawler, Gambit and Marrow. Xavier returns to the cast as well.

After Seagle and Kelly finally quit, Alan Davis is brought in to write the two series for a year and illustrate the X-Men series while Adam Kubert draws Uncanny X-Men. During his storylines, Magneto becomes the president of Genosha and declares war on the world. The Joseph thing is finally sorted out, but I can't remember exactly what he was. Joseph dies, so it's not very important.

There's a big Apocalypse storyline that makes good on a stray line of dialogue that was written in the early 80s and analyzed to death by X-Men fanboys. The storyline is called The Twelve, and it is only notable for a) having Apocalypse putting the adamantium on Wolverine's skeleton again b) getting rid of Apocalypse once and for all and c) apparently killing Cyclops, who Apocalypse possesses before being killed. As it turns out, Cyclops survived, but it did his head in and that's where Grant Morrison takes over the character.

Before Cyclops returns, Chris Claremont returns to the X-Men for a year of some of the worst X-Men stories ever written. Somewhere along the line, Claremont lost it. Completely. His writing from the mid 90s til fairly recently is unbearably awful, and there's really nothing like it. It's this special unique kind of bad writing that only Claremont can do. There is almost nothing worth mentioning about Claremont's first year back on the X-Men - Nightcrawler becomes a Catholic priest, Cable joins the X-Men, for some weird reason Gambit and Rogue are leading the teams (even though several characters far more qualified are still in the group - Storm, Jean, Wolverine, Beast, Nightcrawler). A new guy named Thunderbird joins the team (though he has nothing at all whatsoever to do with the Thunderbird from Giant Size X-Men #1), Xavier returns again, Moira McTaggert is killed by Mystique, a new species called The Neo pop up but they are just pointless and confusing. Besides, they are all murdered by Magneto in the last story before Morrison and Casey take over the franchise.

After Claremont is removed from the series and given his own X-Treme X-Men title, Scott Lobdell returns to the X-Men to wrap up some storylines before Grant comes in. During this brief period, Colossus dies as I mentioned earlier, Cyclops returns to the X-Men, Kitty quits the team and goes off to college, and the X-Men battle Magneto in Genosha AGAIN. This story is especially awful given the pacing and the circumstances of Magneto's defeat, but hey, let's not bother with that. The story ends with Wolverine apparently disembowling Magneto, who of course dies again two issues later in E Is For Extinction.

That brings us up to Grant Morrison's New X-Men (which is retitled from just plain X-Men with Grant's first issue), Joe Casey's terrible Uncanny X-Men, and Chris Claremont's messy X-Treme X-Men.