The X-Axis – w/c 14 July 2025
ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #29. By Alex Paknadel, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. Right, so the story really is just that the island is run by people who hate mutants, and somehow they’ve got their hands on a symbiote? That’s… not very interesting, honestly. There’s the occasional glimmer of a story about how some people might see mutants using their Krakoan drugs for political leverage, but really it’s just the usual in a slightly different location, isn’t it? If it’s doing something more than that, I really don’t get it – and I’m afraid this is a story where I’m getting less interested with each chapter.
EXCEPTIONAL X-MEN #11. (Annotations here.) Since the book is set in Chicago, it was only a matter of time before Eve Ewing brought in Ironheart. Here she seems to be picking up on a dropped plot from her Ironheart run six years ago, though it’s simple enough to repeat the set-up for new readers – the original story pretty much just established Tank as a mysterious guy who was interested in small portals for some unclear reason, and then never got back to him before the book was cancelled six issues later. Remarkably, this means we get an actual action sequence for the second story in a row, something that hasn’t exactly been common in this book – much as I like its focus on character scenes, it’s odd to see everyone talking as if the kids have proved themselves on the strength of a single encounter with Mr Sinister and that time they helped to evacuate a shop.
The character work is still the strength here, to be honest – for both writer and artist, since the reveal of Tank isn’t helped by some wonky anatomy. But the dynamic between Ironheart and the kids works, with Ironheart acting as if she’s the star and she’s meeting some mildly annoying bit part characters who won’t go away and let her get on with the plot. And Kitty’s complete inability to comprehend relationships in the real world works nicely for her.
X-MEN: AGE OF REVELATION #0. (Annotations here.) Surprise trailer issue for the upcoming event, which in practice means it’s a bonus issue of X-Men. We’re doing the full Age of Apocalypse homage with the line being put on hold and replaced with rebranded issues for the duration of the event, which feels like it risks overkill – the original event only had eight books, and this one is doing 16, so… I mean, if it doesn’t work, it’s going to be a long few months.
Still, I like MacKay’s set-up here. It’s a dystopian alternate future, and in plot terms it’s sort of an inverted “Days of Future Past”, with the X-Men making contact with the past Cyclops to try to stop the mutants taking over the world. This issue is closer to what Heir of Apocalypse seemed to be setting up for Doug Ramsey, but it gains a lot from coming out after X-Men #19, which undercut a lot of that and suggested that Doug was heading somewhere else. And that context makes me a lot more interested to see how we end up here anyway. If you’re coming to this issue without reading X-Men #19 first then it may well land differently. The religion/language stuff seems potentially interesting too, though we’re already in danger of pushing it so far into the territory of de facto magic to be paying lip service to both. Humberto Ramos is in relatively restrained mode here, though he’s also a smart choice of artist in sending the message that we’re not going too grimdark with this dystopia.
I can’t help feeling I’d be keener on this story if it was just an X-Men storyline, though, or at least a smaller crossover. Sixteen tie-ins is the sort of thing that makes my heart sink a bit, no matter who’s announced as working on them.
DEADPOOL / WOLVERINE #7. By Benjamin Percy, Robert Gill, Guru-eFX & Joe Sabino. My god, this storyline is still going… although not very fast. I’m running out of things to say about this series because the issues don’t really change: it’s a glacially paced story filled out with extended action scenes, which is fine up to a point, but we’re now into the second trade and it still doesn’t feel like things are really going anywhere very fast. And for a book seemingly premised on the idea that Deadpool and Wolverine are interesting characters to put together, it has remarkably little interest in actually doing so. Not that I necessarily disagree – I think the pairing is hugely overexposed – but it feels like a book designed to work around its premise, which is just weird.
GIANT-SIZE HOUSE OF M #1. By Jackson Lanzing, Collin Kelly, Francesco Manna, Edgar Delgado & Tom Brevoort. I hate House of M. I’ve always hated House of M. It’s a decent high concept wasted on plotless filler which just kills time for eight issues until it gets to the “No more mutants” bit. As a place for Kamala to visit, though… this kind of works. Kamala either doesn’t know about this bit of continuity or doesn’t recognise it, and jumps to the conclusion that she must have somehow dreamt up this mutant-supremacist reality. While the plot of House of M (such as it is) tries to play out in the background, we get a bit of discussion of whether this is actually a world worth resetting, given the alternatives – now that it’s here, why should the mutants give up a mutant-supremacist world if the only alternative leads to Orchis? And, in fact, a big chunk of the issue is devoted to Kamala’s reaction to the post-House of M 198 storyline, which is the bit people actually remember, even if they think it was a blunder. (And it was.) I’m actually starting to buy into this as a tour of mutant history for Kamal as a semi-outsider who’s genuinely learning something from the experience, and Manna’s art does a nice job of replicating the House of M vibe, down to the “no more mutants” fadeout.
The back-up strip here, by Saladin Ahmed and Martin Coccolo, seems to be just a set-up for an upcoming Wolverine arc, based on Wolverine’s Chicago gangland connections in decades past. It’s really more of a trailer than anything else, and while I guess it fits the back-ups’ theme of hidden events from the past, it does so in a way that’s a bit routine where Wolverine’s concerned. Ostensibly the link to the main story is that this is one of the memories that Wolverine recovered as a result of House of M but come on, you could say that about vast chunks of mundane history.
Ah, but the facet that’s missed is that Orchis was galvanized by Omega Sentinel travelling back in time from the dystopian future created by Krakoa, where all other robots and humans were extinct.
I still think Life Six is the one that is the true alternative. The lesson to take from evolution is that everything dies. Baseline humans had their time. Mutants had their time. Post-humanity was the future, but in the end, it is the Machines that we created which are the only ones meant for immortality. There’s somehow something reassuring in knowing that everything has its time, and in the end, something we created will remain.
We really need a storyline which is nothing except different characters going backward and forward in time trying to prevent the (insert side)-supremacist dystopian future. “The humans have taken over! Send back a mutant!” “The mutants have taken over! Send back a robot!” “The robots have taken over! Send back a human!” “The humanoid mutant robots have taken over! Send back a dog!” “The insects have taken over! Send back an Ant-Man!” They all meet up on present-day Earth-616, really confused. Maybe in the end, it is the beavers who inherit the Earth, and all of this was their plan all along to eliminate all other competition for Beaver World.
For once, I think a better alternative is a future where Xavier’s dream works. There’s truly this utopian future somewhere ahead. Either an “evil mutant” or one of the few disgruntled racist asses from the future attempt to travel back in time and prevent the actually utopian future from occurring. That seems like it’s be more interesting at this point than “Bad Guy has conquered the world…again.”
Who’s the fire guy with Iceman in House of M? I’m guessing it’s supposed to be Sunfire
Re: Giant-Size House of M 1:
Lanzing and Kelly seemed to forget that Kitty and Kamala were on the same team during Fall of X. Kamala says “Kamala Khan? Maybe you’ve heard of me?”
The problem with this series is that it forces Kamala into roles that should be filled by other characters. In Giant-Size Dark Phoenix Saga, we had Kamala comforting Jean instead of Scott or Storm. And in this issue, we had Kamala comforting Kitty after the Decimation instead of Ororo or Logan or Peter or Rachel or Kurt.
One thing to note Laura appears in New Avengers 2 this week. And we got to see in that issue that everyone DOES remember Dr. Strange- they just don’t remember where he went. (Which is probably the simplest way to play the whole “Strange is trapped in Asgard and nobody remembers Asgard” thing.)
“the original event only had eight books, and this one is doing 16”
Is it more than 16 actual issues? AoA was 8 books times 4 issues each, so 32 issues (plus extras).
Giant-Size House of M was certainly a recap of House of M. Maybe that was just a much a criticism of the previous issues as this one, but this one felt more so to me. Could be because I also always thought House of M was rubbish.
Dave-Yes, much more than sixteen issues. There are two bookends, an anthology one-shot, then fifteen minis. Marvel is leaving the event purposely open-ended, acting like this is the new status quo, but of course that’s not the case. I am going to guess AoR will last for four months. So, that would be 63 total issues. At $5 a comic.
A lot of fans were angry that Magik didn’t get her own series for Age of Revelation. It was especially annoying since by all accounts she was selling better than Storm, Phoenix and Laura Kinney: Wolverine and they all got series during Age of Revelation and she didn’t.
It does seem like they have something planned for Magik since they mentioned that she died but the Darkchild didn’t stay dead.
But even if Magiks series restarts in January, she’ll have lost three months of momentum. I can’t believe that Breevort would be stupid enough to put one of Marvel’s most popular new series on hiatus for 3 months for no real reason.
On the other hand, there is a Foreshadow Variant for Magik 10. All the other series that got Revelation series- X-Men, Uncanny X-Men, Exceptional X-Men, Storm, Wolverine, Phoenix and Laura Kinney- had Foreshadow Variants. So it looks like Marvel has something in mind for Magik.
I wonder if Illyana is going to become the new Sorcerer Supreme. Strange is currently trapped in Asgard and One World Under Doom is ending in November- it doesn’t look like Strange is going to make it home by the time Doom is defeated. The only other sorcerers appearing in One World Under Doom are Maddie and Wanda. But neither of those has been trained by Strange himself- Illyana has. And Doom has cast a spell to ensure that Dormammu will invade the Earth if the heroes overthrow him. So I wonder if Illyana dies in X-Men 22 and Maddie and Wanda resurrect her as the Sorcerer Supreme to stop Dormammu. And then we get a new Magik, Sorcerer Supreme series.
House of M is one of those stories that shows how Bendis is ill-suited for mega-crossover events. Half of House of M is just running around getting the characters back together, half of Secret Invasion is the main characters wandering around the Savage Land, most of Age of Ultron isn’t in the Age of Ultron, and most of Event Leviathan is detectives standing around talking about said event. Mega-crossovers are inherently high concept, and high concept doesn’t interest him. Who wants to write about something as boring as the entire world being invaded by shape-shifting aliens when you could write about confused people in a jungle?
I’m pretty sure the late Peter David never explained Layla Miller’s plot convenient memory restoring powers, but I don’t recall anyone ever complaining.
Another problem with Bendis writing event books is the same problem he has writing team books: there are more than two characters. Bendis learned to write dialogue from Ernest Hemingway. Unfortunately, he never mastered the art of differentiating personalities. So, once you get more than two characters involved in a conversation, it quickly grows apparent that almost everyone is speaking in the same voice and style.
“House of M”
What a piece of crap that was, and the last crossover event that I actually read before dropping comics entirely just shortly after Decimation.
An alternate reality where everyone’s deepest wish was granted. And rather conveniently, no character’s deepest wish directly conflicted with any other character’s deepest wish. You’d think something like that would happen. A scenario where one character’s wish was irreconcilable with another’s (e.g. Person A wished to be happily married to person B, but person B’s deepest wish was to be happily married to person C), but I don’t recall the series running into or even addressing such a possibility.
Or maybe someone comes back from a utopian future to guarantee its existence.
Brevort and co. haven’t learned yet that what I think is really killing the line is not its quality but its quantity….giving us *another* callback to Age of Apocalypse so soon after the last callback is problematic, but could work…but demanding we commit to 16 books a month for the full story for how many months as it runs out is way, way too much for most comic fans.
I really think that the X line should pare down to four, maybe five books and see what works *rather* than carpetbombing us with titles that are half-thought out.
Giant-Sized HoM worked as a comic about characters and their ethical choices, mostly because it included the consequences of those choices. I didn’t like the original miniseries or the Decimation, but this issue was a good use of those contexts.
“I really think that the X line should pare down to four, maybe five books and see what works *rather* than carpetbombing us with titles that are half-thought out.”
I think Brevoort would also be happy with this, but I think it is the exact opposite of what they asked him to do.
More than once in his newsletter he talked about the fact that Marvel necessarily has to produce a certain number of monthly titles in order to sustain the whole production machine. The fact that they have entrusted the most “expandable” franchise to the most senior editor with the most contacts in the industry makes me believe that they want to maintain that threshold precisely with the mutant titles, knowing that there can be a large turnover of titles and that if one series goes bad there are always other potential leads.
In recent times, moreover, spin-offs of classic heroes have dropped a lot (Thor with only one monthly title, nothing dedicated to Loki, Angela, Beta Ray Bill or other Asgardians… The two Captain America spin-offs with only one monthly title…. Iron Man who from this month will be completely absent with his own title until Age of Revelation…)
Yeah, as Avengers titles were multiplying, the X-books were contracting, and now Marvel is trying different tactics to get the opposite to happen.
I suppose the bump in popularity from the Avengers films couldn’t last forever. But without a corresponding bump from some external source, it seems like getting the X-line to maintain an expanded number of titles is an uphill battle.
The problem with spin-offs, though, is that spin-offs often hurt the sales of the mother title. Instead of a large number of readers buying both titles, what often results is that some readers only have enough money for one title and therefore the sales of both the original and the spin-off suffer. That’s why originally spinoff titles were only reserved for the best selling titles. Avengers didn’t get the West Coast Avengers spinoff until Roger Stern’s run and at point it was a top 10 title (that is, top 10 overall, not top 10 of Marvel). What most people tend to forget about Hal Jordan going nuts and being replaced with Kyle Rayner is that one of the reasons why Green Lantern was selling poorly at the time was because DC tried to put out a Hal Jordan book AND a Guy Gardenr book AND a John Stewart book and was shocked when the result was sales for all of them collapsing.
Of course, this can cause problems when they’re a multiple versions of a character simultaneously. Currently, there are two Spider-Man and two Wolverines They can get away with that because they’re of the most popular characters at Marvel. But there’s also two Captain Americas- Steve and Sam. The problem is that Captain America isn’t usually a best-selling book- there have been high-selling runs but a lot of the time it’s a mid- or low- selling book. So there simply aren’t enough readers to support a Steve run and a Sam run at the same time. But turning Sam back into the Falcon would look like a demotion and look racist.
Green Lantern has had this problem since the mid-80s. Before Len Wein’s and Steven Engelehart’s runs, Hal Jordan was the main Green Lantern. But since then, there have been multiple human Green Lanterns who different readers prefer. DC has tried to solver this problem several ways- turning the Green Lantern title into the Green Lantern Corps, having Hal, Guy and John share the spotlight. In the early ’90s, as mentioned, DC thought they could solve the problem by giving Hal, John and Guy their own titles. The problem is that between the mid-60s and Emerald Twilight Green Lantern was a low-selling title- it often was selling less than cancelled Marvel books. The result was Emerald Twilight. Finally, when Johns came aboard, he was able to reviltalize the Green Lantern franchise to the point where multiple Green Lantern books could sell well. But since he left, sales have declined and DC seems to be left with multiple low-selling Green Lantern books again.
Iron Man being canceled after 10 issues is just weird, though. Traditionally there are seven Marvel characters that usually have their own series- Spider-Man, Hulk, Captain America, iron Man, Thor, Daredevil and Wolverine, For one of those to be cancelled after just ten issues because of low sales is just INSANE.
Well, of course Marvel’s main goal is to flood the market so they can maintain that over-half percentage dominance of the market share while said market continues to dwindle.
I think what’s going on here is two-fold. First, Marvel saw that sales on HoX/PoX/DoX were very strong, but those sales started to decrease after Dawn. I think what they took from that was that the X-Men were hot again, but the Krakoa direction was too divisive. They were convinced that if they went with a more “conservative” direction that fans would flood back to the X-titles. While they did gain some lapsed fans from circa 2019 who hated the radical new direction by Hickman, they also lost a lot of fans who were drawn to HoX/PoX by the fact that it was so different and daring. Basically, they ended up back where they were during the post-Hickman Krakoa era.
So, now I see “Age of Revelation” as desperation to increase sales on the X-titles by going back to the last gasp of the ‘90s “boom period” (i.e. Age of Apocalypse). Of course, there’s absolutely no chance that sales on the X-books are going to be anywhere close to what AoA was selling. Ah, but what if Marvel launches double the number of titles from AoA?
That will be followed by another relaunch of all the X-titles from #1 hoping to get sales back where they were when FtA started. The problem, of course, is that without that draw for the X-titles, the exact same thing that happened with FtA will happen again, as most of the line gets cancelled before one year.
Re: Wolverine-He’s popular enough to carry his own solo title, but his popularity has been dropping for nearly two decades now. There was a time when Wolverine guest-starring in a comic was guaranteed to see a huge sales bump. Then, that time passed as the character started to grow passé, but he was still popular enough that a comic featuring a character called “Wolverine” starring in a comic could bring enough sales to support the comics. Now, we’ve reached the point of saturation where fans are starting to get sick of seeing Wolverine in multiple monthly titles. Laura Kinney? Failed. Hellverine? Failed. Deadpool and Wolverine? Failed. The Wolverine title is doing decent, but sales have been dropping on even that book.
@Chris V- I think the problem is that Breevort tried to run so many Wolverine books at once- Wolverine, Laura Kinney, Hellverine, Deadpool And Wolverine, Spider-Man and Wolverine. There are 11 non-limited series, non-Ultimate X-books this month and FIVE of them are Wolverine books. No other X-editor than Breevort tried anything like this and he’s wound up hurting Wolverine’s popularity. Part of the problem is that what makes the X-Men unique as a franchise is that they’re dependent on team books to a degree that no other comic book franchise is. But Breevort, by his own admission, is not very good at creating spin-off team books- he’s much better at spin-off solo books. This wasn’t much of a problem when he was editing the Avengers, since there have been only one or two Avengers team books at a time throughout most of the Avengers’ history. But it’s a major problem now that he’s in charge of the X-books. So he’s trying to compensate by making half the line Wolverine books.
Bleeding Cool’s Bestseller List is out for this week. Other than Ultimate X-Men, none of the X-Books made the top nine list. (Top NINE list?? Isn’t it supposed to be a top TEN list?) It’s not a good sign that none of them made it.
It was a small week for X-books, but Age of Revelation #0 didn’t make the list? I wonder if some retailers ended up not getting copies? I see the comic for sale at online retailers for cover price. It can’t be too scarce, regardless of what speculators were expecting. Imagine buying a preorder copy for $40 on EBay then going to the local comic store on Wednesday and seeing copies available.
I forgot to even check if ye olde shoppe I frequent ordered copies.
@Michael
Remember, Age of Revelation #0 and Astonishing XM Infinity didn’t get normal releases, they wouldn’t show up.
Otherwise:
» Exceptional has been suffering from being made an “X-Men” title all along – the market can’t support three X-Men titles a month (at least one of which double-ships, plus the disaster of Weapon X-Men), and it’s clearly not an X-Men book. It’s a New Mutants-style (but not “New Mutants”) book. And positioning it as if it was a flagship (which they did – remember the triptych advert with Uncanny, adjectiveless and Exceptional?) was positioning it for failure.
» The Giant-Size not-a-miniseries is a spin-off from a cancelled book with the same lead and writers, hardly surprising it’s going the same way, shades of “doing the same thing over & over and expecting different results”
» Deadpool & Wolverine has been litigated enough times already.
@Chris V
AoR #0 was a limited, surprise release. It’s getting a full release later, with normal ordering and a different cover(s).
The big sales boosts both the Avengers and the X-Men have seen in the last 25 years all rely on the vision of a single writer who’s willing to reimagine the franchise:
— Morrison with New X-Men
— Bendis with “Avengers Disassembled”
— Hickman with the run-up to Secret Wars
— Bendis with All-New X-Men
— Hickman with HoXPoX
Not sure why they’re relying on the editorial-driven ’90s model now. Maybe they should be looking to hire someone with a big idea for the X-books instead. Too bad Gillen is pouring all his left over X-energy into The Power Fantasy.
Or maybe they do have someone in mind, but they’re waiting to launch it in conjunction with the new X-movies. That’s coming soon-ish, right?
I’m not sure who it would be, as Morrison and Hickman aren’t coming back. While it may not have been his vision shaping the franchise, Gillen has been on the flagship X-Men title twice now. Ewing has been struggling with Thor as far as sales, and yes, it’s Thor, but it may have made Marvel reevaluate Ewing’s value. Those seem to be the only current creators who can bring in new readers.
This is just the state of mainstream superhero comics. A name creator with a vision for the franchise comes along and shakes things up, then after they leave it feels like Marvel is simply publishing the title for the sake of publishing the title for year after year until another creator happens to come along. Hickman was just on the X-Men, so it will probably be a few years before any other creator comes along with a vision as to how to reinvent the title.
I think this announcement just killed my interest in these books. Will they actually try to go back to this shaky lineup or reboot AGAIN?
@Thom H- WAS there a big sales boost when Morrison took over? It’s hard to tell, because Uncanny and Adjectivelss were still selling at the top of the charts under Claremont and during Lobdell’s fill-in issues. There was definitely a boost in CRITICAL acclaim. But I’m not sure if there was a boost in sales. Does anyone have any data?
@Chris V- Also, as I understand it, sales on All-New Venom have become disappointing in the last couple of months- another strike against Ewing.
@Michael
IIRC, there was a moderate boost – maybe 10%? Certainly not the sort of percentage Hickman brought, where sales were shockingly low pre-HoXPoX.
@SanityorMadness- OK, I found the statements of ownership:
X-Men 107- 161,790
New X-Men 121- 154,144
New X-Men 135- 184, 826
New X-Men 150- 126, 009
So it looks like there was a slight increase in sales in the early stages of Morrison’s run and then it dropped down to a little lower than it stated out.
Actually, I should probably add a smidgen of context to that “shockingly low”, because there’s a degree of warning from history there.
Rosenberg’s Uncanny wasn’t selling catastrophically, but it was distinctly second-tier rather than flagship territory, bumping around in the 40k region per icv2.
Age of X-Man, on the other hand, *was* catastrophic. By the end, the flagship AoXM book – Marvelous X-Men – was down in the mid-teens, and the wrap-up Omega issue just made it to 21.8k. (Doesn’t exactly guarantee a rousing reception for Age of Revelation, eh?)
We skip forward six months to January 2020, before The Event, and Fallen Angels was cancelled with FA #5 & 6 recording just shy of 40k in sales, with the next lowest-selling X-book (Marauders #6) at 44k, and X-Men #5 (the lower-selling of the two issues that month) selling 80k.
Point taken about Morrison, but maybe that data point was too early. In any case, I believe the rest of the examples still stand.
My general point being: if you put a big enough name on the book(s), and it seems like they have a plan, then people will pay attention for at least a little longer.
For what it’s worth, I agree that Ewing is no longer that person, although I do think at one point he could have been.
@Michael
Actually, I would compare New X-Men to Uncanny, not adjectiveless, as flagship-to-flagship. (Uncanny was the higher-selling book pre-Morrison, while NXM overtook the Casey & Austen UXM.)
The five issues of X-Men preceding Morrison’s arrival sold between 99 thousand and 105 thousand units each. Morrison’s first issue sold almost 145 thousand units. I think that’s a little more than a “slight” boost.
I tried posting exact sales figures earlier, but I think that post got flagged by this site’s anti-spam countermeasures because it was a huge copy/paste deal.
@SanityorMadness- UXM 387, the last Statement of Ownership, before Morrison took over, was 163, 839, just a little higher than the Statement in X-Men 107, which covers the same year.
@Moo
First issues never “count”. Note how when I compared Krakoa to pre-Hickman, I used the #6s not the #1s.
If you want to compare Morrison’s first issue, the best comparator was Claremont’s “Revolution” in March 2000, where X-Men #100 (according to Comichron) did… almost 145 thousand units, actually (144,878).
@SanityorMadness, Moo- Okay, I found the numbers at Comichron. New X-Men 122 sold 117,263 and New X-Men 123 sold 113, 512. So using Comcihron’s numbers, Morrison’s later issues sold maybe 10% more than the issues preceding his run.
Sales charts only reflect sales. What they do not reflect are market conditions and trends. Morrison’s run happened during a period where Marvel believed that trade paperbacks were the format of the future and really pushed the TPB format on us. The whole “wait for the trade” mentality didn’t even exist during Claremont’s second tenure because, back then, Marvel’s TPB program was so stupid, that it actually cost MORE to buy a trade collection than the individual issues.
By the time Morrison came along, that was no longer the case.
If they called Exceptional X-Men a title without the word “X-Men” in it, it would probably have been ordered at a lower rate coming out of the gate. Similarly, I remember there being a bunch of comics in the ‘00s/‘10s that had the word “Avengers” in the title, but weren’t closely related to the main title (Avengers Infinity, Avengers Academy, Avengers Arena, Avengers AI, Occupy Avengers) and several superfluous Avengers teams (Mighty Avengers, USAvengers, Avengers Assemble). Brevoort oversaw the Avengers line during that era, so I wouldn’t be surprised if he went that route going forward.
@Moo
Yes, but there were *14 months* (March 2000->May 2001) between X-Men #100 and New X-Men #114. The changes were in progress, but weren’t exactly locked in in people’s minds.
Mike Loughlin> If they called Exceptional X-Men a title without the word “X-Men” in it, it would probably have been ordered at a lower rate coming out of the gate.
Oh, sure. But it’s not just about that one title, it’s about the “X-Men” brand and its ability to sell comics. If you spam the brand, it means less and less effect. Short term gain, but long-term pain. (See also: constant #1s for two decades meaning they have less and less effect beyond the variant covers they are generally also spammed with. Which sell a few copies, but don’t get you readers, just collectors or scalpers who buy that one issue and move on)
@SanityOrMadness
No offense, but as you can’t reasonably claim to know what was or wasn’t on the collective minds of readers at the time, then that isn’t much of an argument. Point is, Marvel didn’t have a TPB program worth buying into at the time of X-Men #100, but it did by the time Morrison arrived.
Furthermore, I don’t know that there’s any way to tell how much of the drop off during Morrison’s run can be attributed to Morrison losing readers and how much of it can be attributed to readers sticking with Morrison but abandoning the 32-page installments in favor of jumping aboard the wait-for-the-trade-parade. I mean, I switched over to buying everything I was following at the time in TPB format roughly halfway through Morrison’s run, so I was part of that drop-off. I still saw his run through until the end, though.
@Moo- I think it’s fair to say, though, that there wasn’t a huge increase in sales when Morrison took over compared to the huge increase when Bendis took over Avengers from Austen or Hickman took over X-Men from Rosenberg, which were Thom H’s original examples. X-Men was a top selling book when Morrison inherited it- he might have increased readership by 10% or !5% for a time when he was writing it. But Bendis raised Avengers from a book that was selling in the mid-20s under Austen to a book that was selling at the top of the charts. And we’ve already discussed how Hickman improved the X-Men’s sales from the mess that Rosenberg left them.
@Micheal – Why are we dick-measuring Morrison against Bendis and Hickman? Thom H already clarified the point he was trying to make, didn’t he? His point being that bringing in a writer with his/her own distinctive vision for a series and letting them run with it seems to be a more effective way to attract/renew reader interest in a series than the ’90’s editorial-driven approach.
That’s precisely what Marvel was counting on Morrison to do when they hired him (reignite interest in X-Men) and all told, I’d call the effort a success. Perhaps undermined somewhat by the dreadful mistake of hiring Casey and then Austen to be Morrison’s back-up dancer, but I guess you can’t hit the hammer on the anvil every time.
“Of course, there’s absolutely no chance that sales on the X-books are going to be anywhere close to what AoA was selling. Ah, but what if Marvel launches double the number of titles from AoA?”
Just the latest sign that Marvel is content to keep the ‘price x quantity’ total as level as it can even if it means no. of sales dwindling down to practically nothing.
With the dwindling X-Men sales it’s kind of understandable that they are doing a crossover with DC now.
It might be the only way to keep the lights on.
For a time at least.
Ayodele said in an interview today, that Breevort told him about Age of Revelation before he handed in the script for Storm 1. So Age of Revelation was in the works from the early stages of From the Ashes. They had to adjust their plans depending on cancellations.
If Age of Revelation has been planned for over a year. then why did they wait so long to reintroduce Doug to the books? Doug’s Face-Heel Turn would have worked much better if Doug had joined Scott’s X-Men in say, issue 5, and made one wrong choice after another before finally crossing the line by mind-controlling Scott.
Ayodele caused a lot of controversy in that same interview by describing Rogue as Storm”s best friend. Many fans diaagreed.
https://www.comicsbeat.com/report-comics-sales-were-up-in-2024-periodicals-hit-15-year-high/
Well, maybe sales are fine after all.
I moved to only reading marvel through unlimited so from a cost perspective I don’t care how many extra books are in this crossover, it’s the same cost for me in the end. Quality wise I doubt they have enough to fill all those titles though.
@JCG
Does the sales chart differentiate between comic books and manga?
There needs to be a vision, but from my perspective the problem is the X-books can’t maintain a consistent one. It’s one frantic shift in premises and characterization, then three years later a radically different one, with nothing building up over time. That’s why it’s pre-2000 storylines and titles that constantly get rehashed: ‘From the Ashes’ means something to X-Men readers even now, and were now up to the third or fourth reworking of AoA. Nobody is going to revisit the Bendis time-displaced X-originals or pretty much another setup from the last 25 years because nothing has stuck. Some of the ‘distinctive visions’ have been good and others have been crap, but none of them have had the lasting impact even of AoA, let alone the first Claremont run. A big part of the X-books appeal from ‘75-2000 was the ‘Russian novel’ scope and consistency, even after Claremont quit the first time. From 2000-‘25 the line has too often tried to break from its mythos, and even in the midst of a successful Morrison run (which wasn’t as much of a break as it first seemed perhaps), there were unsuccessful departures like the Casey and Chuck Austen runs. The franchise needs growth, not just change, especially if later creators never keep the big changes the last visionary implemented.
@Walter Lawson- part of the problem is that before “From the Ashes”, we really haven’t had a traditional X-Men run since House of M. After House of M, we had the whole “No More Mutants” mess, then Marvel tried to replace the X-Men with the Inhumans, then we had Krakoa. So From the Ashes is the first “traditional” X-Men run in two decades.