I've always been a little afraid of reading the X-Men. It's mainly due to the huge amount of history involved with them. The X-men have been around in some form since1963 and like most comics from that point they have a huge amount of back story, and rightfully they should. The X-men story just seems so much more complicated because of the rotating cast.
The X-men roster has been re-organized, re-started from scratch, shuffled and divided so many times even wikipedia can't keep up with them. People have switched sides from good mutants to bad with a surprising regularity. I have no idea who Gambit or Angel/ Arch Angel are really working for right now.
I'm the sort of person who really likes to know as much of a back story as possible for the books I read. With a lot of characters its incredibly easy to sum up a character's history and major motivations. Batman and his supporting cast can each have their major points explained pretty easily. I once asked an X-men fan to tell me what the whole story with Cyclops and Jean Grey exactly was, and he felt I wouldn't be able to understand it without a complicated chart.
I've read some of the stories, I was really impressed when I borrowed Joss Whedon's run. I even collected Warren Ellis' run because I've always been entertained by what he does. The main draw of these stories for me so far has been that they haven't largely addressed the teams complicated past.
Marvel does have a type of solution to this problem. There are the X-men Essential books available. Now you can even subscribe to their online service. Unfortunately both of these are a little costly when you look at the number of Essentials you would need to buy, or the amount of time you would spend online reading each individual issue. From my understanding Marvel hasn't put ever comic they've ever written online, so that's not even a good way to go about it.
Still, I have my own idea as to what would help people like me who want to like/ read more X-men but feel it would be too difficult. My own idea is to do a few issues as a limited series that tells the abridged history of each major x-men milestone and change that has happened. I realize a lot of that has happened on Wikipedia and so many other fansites, but it would be nice to have it come from the creators. Marvel can let us all know which stories are still in continuity, get the perspective of the artist and writer at the time putting in their notes as to why Beast turned blue, and whatever else is considered a major turning point. And if Marvel thinks this seems like a lot of work, imagine how we feel.
Comments
UnshavenMarc Wed, Mar 10th, 2010 at 11:19 PM See, this is where a guy like Geoff Johns shines. Rather than "dump" essential reading into an abridged version, Johns' has built his career distilling back-story into digestible chunks. He did it with Hal Jordon. He did it with Barry Allen. I'm sure given the chance (i.e. A FAT chance) he could do the same for the X-men.
Now, it's safe to say as both your studio mate, and friend of 17 years that the "real reason" you've not dived into the X-Men is your level of interest in them as a whole. You thrive on lush back-stories and like to "go back" to collect series of things that spark your interest. I think it's the X-Men's dilluted team structure and the lack of a "hook" character you enjoy reading that really keeps you off the X-Men bandwagon.
As a fan only of Whedon's run though, I'm in your boat on this. But I openly admit... I just don't care about the "mutants" because the day and age of them being an allegory for socially unaccepted is just ... dated. And there's no real hook for me ever since.
bsokol Thu, Mar 11th, 2010 at 10:02 AM
The best example of X-Men's incomprehensible team structure takes place in the Secret Invasion X-Men mini-series, written by Mike Carey and drawn by Cary Nord. The teams are so confusing that one or both of these men couldn't even keep the team straight within a single issue. I think it was issue 4, I could be mistaken, where Angel is seen fighting at the beginning of the book. At the end, X-Force arrives to help the X-Men, and ARCHangel arrives with them. I don't know if that was Nord using Angel as a random background character not realizing the error, or if Carey had written it to be drawn that way, but it just proves that even creators, and editors for that matter, can't remember where characters are supposed to be.
The other obvious example is the fact that Wolverine can be on four teams simultaneously while also carrying on two or three solo missions, and apparently no one at Marvel finds this odd.
Then you add to that the random characters and different versions of existing characters that now suddenly exist in 616, thanks to Exiles.
I tried and mostly failed to keep up with X-Men in the last few years, and it is a serious effort. It was fine for a while, if you just pick one or two titles and stick with them, that was manageable. Then, in the last few years, they started doing constant crossover events in all X-Men titles, which makes it nearly impossible to keep up with everything, even when you buy the trades, like I do.
Personally, I blame all this on House of M and to a lesser extent Deadly Genesis, but I'm sure the problem goes even further back.
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