The X-Axis – w/c 25 August 2025
X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #34. By Tim Seeley, Edoardo Audino, KJ Díaz & Clayton Cowles. One thing I like about this book is its enthusiasm for remarkably low-key real-world settings. We’ve had an influencer convention, we’ve had the Outer Hebrides (kind of), and now we’ve got an English seaside town with a community of retired spies. It’s not even going for Portmeirion, it’s going for cosy crime. That said, does the plot here actually make sense? The idea is that we’re meant to buy into the idea that the break-ins were committed by the Changeling in his villain personality, and Banshee certainly does, but… um, when? Because he was in America when the regular cast found him, and then he was in Ireland, and then the break-ins were already in the news, so… when do people think he sneaked off to Somerset to do some light burglary? Still, it’s a nice looking book and I do appreciate that it’s doing something different.
X-MEN #21. (Annotations here.) With “Age of Revelation” approaching, I assume that X-Men is currently engaged in a bit of deck-clearing and a bit of set-up for the upcoming story. Specifically, if this is going to be an alternate future story, then I suspect it needs Jen Starkey to be heading in the right direction before we jump there. And so this is a sequel to issue #4, where Jen and some of the X-Men go back to Detroit and dispose of the eminently expendable Upstarts. Actually, the Upstarts put up a reasonable fight here, despite being made up mostly of bit-part characters from X-Statix – but they do have sensibly useful powers, so sure, I’ll buy that the X-Men can underestimate them and that Jen gets to have her moment as a result. I’m less convinced about Juggernaut killing Ocelot – yes, logically you can argue that he’s been involved in previous schemes where he seemed pretty relaxed about a body count, but that was a long time ago, some of it’s been attributed to the influence of Cyttorak, and besides, he was never a Wolverine or a Sabretooth. I know it’s meant to be a shock, but it doesn’t convince me. Still, good work here from Netho Diaz, who gives us a decently worked-out action scene and really sells Jen snapping.
PHOENIX #14. (Annotations here.) This feels like it’s trying to drag things out until the crossover, to be honest. The last issue set up the idea that Jean has to reabsorb Sara to save the universe (for reasons), and I quite like the fact that Jean’s response this issue is that, no, she won’t be doing that. That feels more interesting than just having her not be able to bring herself to do it – though the book tries for that too. But for the most part the book seems to be marking time with some elliptical exposition from the In-Betweener and a flashback that doesn’t really seem to have anything to do with the rest of the story. Maybe it’ll tie into something in the next issue, but it just seems out of place here. It’s a good fit for Roi Mercado’s art, though – he’s an interesting choice for this book since his art doesn’t play to the standard cosmic tropes at all, and that works much of the time, but something a little more down to earth feels more natural for him.
DEADPOOL / WOLVERINE #9. By Benjamin Percy, Joshua Cassara, Guru-eFX & Joe Sabino. This doesn’t appear to have been solicited past issue #10, which would normally be the end of the second trade, so I assume we’re nearing the end. How on earth we ended up with ten issues for this storyline is beyond me. Joshua Cassara does get some showcase opportunities in this issue, though, in a sequence of Apocalypse telling us about his scheme to create a disaster and then repopulate the world with mutant clones once the Earth as healed. It’s almost comically utopian, which of course is the point. Other than that… well, look, if you thought Deadpool and Wolverine were the idea pair to bring back decompressed storytelling then this is the book for you, I guess.
WOLVERINE & KITTY PRYDE #5. By Chris Claremont, Damian Couceiro, Carlos Lopez & Ariana Maher. The final issue and, well, I couldn’t honestly say it ties everything up in a satisfying way. A lot of it works, though. The mind swap thing with Kitty Pryde and Ziggy Trask, where they inexplicably become friends halfway through issue #4, makes a lot more sense when it’s clear that Claremont is going for the idea that their identities are blurring together – and he gets that across very well. Couceiro’s art continues to impress me, and I really hope we see more of him somewhere else. On the other hand, the thing with the snow samurai doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense to me. Claremont clearly has some idea about it being a mystical entity connected with the Yashida clan which Mariko has to embrace but… what on earth it’s got to do with the rest of the story, either plot wise or thematically, is completely beyond me. Nonetheless, viewed in the round, this mini has been a pretty successful Claremont-era throwback – vastly better than the previous Claremont mini Wolverine: Deep Cut, and much more worthy of his name.
EMMA FROST: THE WHITE QUEEN #3. By Amy Chu, Andrea Di Vito, Antonio Fabela & Ariana Maher. So to keep Emma sympathetic in her Hellfire Club days, we’re doing Emma versus the Hellfire Club – and bringing up all the insecurities about her family from the Emma Frost ongoing. I like the idea that, based on her encounters with them up to this point, the X-Men also register among her mental hang-ups at this point, even if she doesn’t show it. And in some ways this isn’t a bad way of bringing out the aspects of Emma that were consistent back to the Hellfire Club days. There’s some really nice art on this too, in a restrained sort of a way, though Di Vito’s hallucinatory monster deserves its splash page too. I still can’t help feeling something’s lacking in this mini, though, and I suspect it’s the fact that we’re doing a story set in Emma’s villain days that would prefer not to talk about her being a villain.
“DEADPOOL / WOLVERINE #9”
That should be Deadpool/ Wolverine 8, Paul. I know that you want it to be over quickly but we still have two chapters left.
Director Talyn seems like another version of Percy’s previous character, Jun Wei. I think Percy wanted to use Jun Wei but editorial interpreted that weird scene in Exceptional X-Men 5 as Kitty killing Jun Wei.
Re: Emma Frost: the White Queen 3- I’m not liking that Shaw and Tessa sent normal goons with an inhibitor collar after Emma. There’s nothing stopping Emma from using her powers on them BEFORE they get the collar on her, which is exactly what happened.
You know, it should have been a smash hit banger to revitalize the X-Line after X-Men 97. Whose bingo card was it that the line faltered so much?
Uncanny X-Drew and I discussed this in the entry for Phoenix 14 but we might want to discuss it here since it has to do with the X-Men in general. Bleeding Cool reported that the Age of Revelation might last until February.
However. as pointed out on CBR, the trade paperbacks for Age of Revelation are coming out in April:
https://prhcomics.com/book/?isbn=9781302968397
https://prhcomics.com/book/?isbn=9781302968403
https://prhcomics.com/book/?isbn=9781302968380
That would be pretty quick if Age of Revelation ends in February.
Moreover. the trade paperbacks total 1.192 pages. There are 16 miniseries plus probably 3 one-shots. So if you assume that the crossover lasts 3 months, that’s 51 books. 1,192 pages divided by 51 books is about 23 pages. So the math seems to indicate that the crossover is 3 months long.
In other news, Avengers 29 is out this week. Kang warned the Avengers that they would have to encounter several Tribulation Events- such as the King of Magic, the Cannibal Culture- before finding the Missing Moment. But this issue reveals that thanks to Myrddin’s meddling. that is no longer the case. (The King of Magic wasn’t; Doom?) It looks like MacKay’s run on Avengers is ending early. (I’ve heard rumors it’s ending with 34/ 800.) I wonder why MacKay’s run is ending early- is it just so he’s free for Nova? Or is it something else? And what will happen to Storm once MacKay is no longer on Avengers?
@Uncanny X-Drew: Not to beat a dead horse, but the *instant* Tom Brevoort was announced as the incoming editor, it would’ve been crystal-clear to anyone familiar with his track record.
Brevoort is weak when he’s editing against his own creative sensibilities. He’s a traditionalist. It was odd to see him still in place as an Avengers editor when we were getting Avengers in flavors of New, Mighty, Secret, Dark, and Academy. Several years earlier, he was actively brushing aside fan requests for a WCA revival because he felt that having more than one Avengers title would dilute the appeal of the main title.
He’s a “less is more” guy. He’s not a big franchise guy, regardless of what we’ve seen his name attached to. I figure that’s just a case of him having to side with his corporate responsibilities when they conflict with his own creative sensibilities. I remember him being largely respected by readers during the Busiek run at least.
This may sound like I’m defending him, but I’m agreeing he shouldn’t be the showrunner here. IMO, the X-Men needs someone at the helm who genuinely loves the idea of milking the shit out of a franchise. Because at least such a person is likelier to have a strong, clear vision of how to accomplish that successfully.
@Moo: But the evidence would seem to run to the contrary – for all that Brevoort may *say* he’s a “less is more” guy, in practice it’s just as you point out: his name has consistently been attached to market-flooding, mindless expansions of his respective lines, with no real planning or foresight.
Case in point: despite half a dozen cancellations inside of a year, not only does AoR have *sixteen tie-ins*, it’s a fair bet Brevoort’s going to launch/relaunch another dozen titles once it’s done. Doubling down is all he knows to do.
@Moo @Diana
I think there’s a wider issue in terms of the number of titles. I think there’s a publishing target. This probably comes from beyond the EiC.
@Diana – For the record, I haven’t seen Brevoort literally say the words, “I am a less is more guy” but that is nonetheless my read of him given how he insistent he was that Avengers remain a one-team, one-book franchise back in the days when Busiek was still writing it.
However, at the time, it’s highly doubtful Brevoort had anyone above him suggesting (or demanding) he do otherwise. Bill Jemas didn’t seem to particularly care enough about the Avengers to pay it any mind.
That all changed later on of course, I don’t believe the “market-flooding” was his idea. Again, I think it was a matter of him having to appease his masters (corporate responsibility above creative sensibility). I’m sure he had quite a bit of say on *how* to flood it, and that might be the problem, because that’s not really him playing to his strengths.
I don’t regard him to be a terrible editor. I just see him as a poor choice to head up large franchises.
@Domixt – Absolutely. That’s one of the things I had in mind when I was speaking of his corporate responsibilities.
Looks like I come from the opposite perspective.
The way I see it, it is -because- higher-ups will insist on milking the wheel dry that someone like Brevoort who will not simply follow the path of least resistance and repeat the 1990s strategy of mindlessly doing so is necessary right now.
Also, it is because the Krakoa Era lasted for so long and appealled so much for so many long time X-Fans that going the other direction is necessary, lest the line becomes too esoteric to be effectively capable of renewing its core readership. One of the benchmarks that I use is the reaction for “Sins of Sinister”. It was an impressively arcane construct of self-referential complexity that might as well have stamped a seal of warning on its covers to keep the non-initiated away. There was no point in attempting to follow it if you did not feel confident of being up to date on your long time fan credentials. A segment of fandom feels reassured and rewarded when reading that kind of book, but that can only happen at the expense of less committed, less experienced readers. As I remember it, reading the reaction to “Sins of Sinister” made me conclude that the Krakoa Era had to end soon; that then-current editorial would have a hard time dealing with that ending; and that the same segment of fandom that praised SoS would have a difficult time dealing with the post-Krakoa era. I may be projecting from current perceptions, at least a bit.
Marvel Corporate decision makers won’t allow the X-Books to become evergreen, eternally accessible as the Archie properties, that is a given. Not in the foreseeable future.
But if they don’t attempt to balance their obvious and understandable willingness to simply sell as many books as they can in the short term without a second thought with the equally real and ultimately more consequential needs to farm some new writers and new potential book carriers at least every few years, they will be harming the line’s middle term viability.
Despite Brevoort’s well deserved reputation as a traditionalist, generally speaking he is actually being the one helming the risk-taking here – and being duly chastised for that.
Then again, there was no way forward after the Krakoa Era that would please most readers. Quite a few felt (IMO correctly) that it was a rare period of genuine change and opportunity for books and plots that aren’t often possible otherwise. But the flipside is that it made specific choices that would eventually require complex mixes of resolution, reversal and changes of focus. After a full five years of commitment to that era, there was no simple, clean way of phasing away from it.
Frankly, I feel no nostalgia whatsoever for the “Fall of X” period. I distinctly remember longing for a meta-level choice to simply declare that Krakoa was no more instead of subjecting us to that intolerable succession of stories that wanted to present themselves as memorable but instead were simply unreadable, unending and undecipherable. It would not surprise me too much to somehow learn that Jordan White wanted to poison the chalice for Brevoort before leaving, even if subconsciously. Now _that_ was flooding the line. But then again, there was not a whole lot that could be done to provide a satisfactory end to that era without also committing to some sort of resolution to the line as a whole. For good or worse, it was a daring new era with huge and long-lasting repercussions.
I think this current era is making plenty of mistakes, some of them serious. Some are clearly calculated risks taken for a good reason (Phoenix), some are basically necessary if unglamorous housekeeping chores (to an extent, the X-Men Unlimited Infinity plots), some are perhaps unavoidable concessions to the reality of a wider shared universe (the current deluge of Ultimate, Wolverine and Deadpool books with dubious justification for existing – and which to the best of my understanding have little if anything to do with Brevoort’s decisions), some are genuine miss-steps (the recently concluded X-Factor, the still ongoing Storm) and some are simply necessary gauging of whether certain book ideas have traction, to which extent, and how exactly readers and critics react to their published forms.
Brevoort has made it plenty clear in his Substack that he fully expected some books to fold and others to succeed. At this point that is not a flaw, but a feature. I wish X-Force had been given more of a chance and that the current Storm book had been nixed before publication. Others will have their own complaints, different from mine to various degrees.
I wonder if Claremont intended Wolverine and Kitty Pryde as a rebuttal to Kitty’s edgelord portrayal by Duggan, specifically the part where she gets swords from Ogun somehow with a note that she couldn’t ignore her true self (to be like him). In this series, she explicitly rejects Wolverine’s and Ogun’s path.
It’s not hard to make Emma sympathetic during her Hellfire Club days, show her teaching the Hellions and helping them get control of their powers. This series of putting Emma and Shaw against each other is out of place for the time period it’s set in; they were close allies.
There are two ways this series can redeem itself. One is that it is Tessa putting Shaw and Emma against each other (and would fit in with the retcon that she’s a deep cover agent of Xavier). The other is that Noor is really Astrid Bloom with a different haircut and she’s trying to get revenge on Emma (and will end up in that telepathic coma again).
I had a friend in college who disliked how Emma got retconned into being a self-made woman. As he put it, Shaw was the self-made man, and Emma was the blue-blooded heiress. It made for a contrast in their origins and changing it to Emma doing it on her own, while making her a more sympathetic character, removed that.
Thinking about it, the Hellfire Club’s Inner Circle split up a lot of spheres of influence. Shaw was the industrialist who was in constant contact with politicians. Emma the blue blood with the technology firm with the Massachusetts Academy shaping future generations. Leland had the legal sphere and probably a certain amount of political influence. Pierce was the mining/resources businessman. Von Roehm had the society connections. Emmanuel Da Costa would have been an industrialist but with a sphere of influence in South America (and in the modern version of the Hellfire Club probably wouldn’t have been part of the New York Inner Circle). I never really consciously thought of that, but it was a division of many of the top industries of the day.
I don’t think there’s anyone that could do a better job than Brevoort (I have no opinion on Brevoort, himself, one way or another). Not because he’s doing a good job with the X-line, but because he’s in an unenviable position. Marvel higher-ups wanted a more “back-to-basics” direction for the X-titles and they required the editor to flood the market with X-books. Neither of those edicts is going to set the comic world on fire in 2025. Comics cost too much. Comic book sales have been declining for years. The market cannot sustain the sheer amount of X-material being churned out. Sure, Brevoort might have made some over-confident comments when “From the Ashes” was launching, but he was being a company man. An editor doesn’t remain in the job at a corporation for as long as Brevoort without learning to please the corporate bosses. So, I’m not sure how you follow Krakoa without eliciting a yawn of “been there, done that”. Maybe with a handful of very strong, creator driven titles; but that’s not what Marvel (the company) needs, as Marvel is struggling to maintain over 51% of the marketplace. If they drastically cut back their line without something as strong as Hickman’s HoX/PoX/Dawn, it’s going to cut into Marvel’s market dominance.
Brevoort has little choice but to make desperate decisions as the line eats itself. Throw out another big event with a ton of titles, but it only lasts for four months. Then, relaunch the line with twelve (or so) more books starting with a new #1, which gives Brevoort another ten months to plan what to do next. This is an era for quantity over quality.
I probably can’t blame Brevoort for the glut of X-books or the poor transition from the Krakoa era to FtA. If the creative teams behind the FtA books didn’t know how Fall of X was going to end while they had to start the new round of comics, there are multiple parties to blame.
My issues with Brevoort are the shoddy storytelling choices and general quality of the line. I did not enjoy most of the books I sampled for 1-3 issues. I kept hoping some of the other comics would get better (e.g. X-Factor, Uncanny X-Men), and they didn’t. I’ve commented before about how plots that didn’t make sense (e.g. Rogue’s conflict with Cyclops) and/or took me out of the stories (e.g. Ms. Marvel stopping a mob with an earnest speech in NYX) have been allowed to go through when they should have been hashed out before the scripts were finalized.
That said, the line could still turn around given the right creative teams and a better sense of direction. We’ll see what happens post-Revelation.
@Chris V- I think that SOME of the problems with this era have to do with Breevort’s specific flaws.
First, he lacks knowledge about the X-Books. Thus, we have Bobby claiming to have grown up with Kitty, Sophie Cuckoo claiming to have been a classmate of Empath and Cyclops objecting to Rogue taking teenagers along on a rescue mission despite having taken teenagers along on rescue missions himself on multiple occasions. Obviously, the writers share the blame but still…
Second. by his own admission, he favors solo books over team books. What made the X-Men unique as a franchise was that it was primarily a team-based franchise. Breevort’s attempts to create team-books have no been well thought out, Three of them were cancelled by issue 10 and the fourth was DOA because the writer thought it was an ongoing and the higher-ups thought it was a limited series.
Then there’s the fact that some of Breevort’s ideas that have been introduced into the X-books have only been halfheartedly pursued by the writers. Wolverine’s series starting with him in the wild was Breevort’s idea and that was quickly forgotten about. Magneto being in a wheelchair in MacKay’s book was Breevort’s idea and as a result Magneto is often hardly used in MacKay’s book. Storm operating out of Atlanta in her own book was Breevort’s idea and as a result Storm hardly spends any time in Atlanta.
Michael-You have to figure in the fact that all of the “From the Ashes” line fell below the cancellation threshold within a year of publication except for only Uncanny, X-Men, Magik, and Wolverine still selling enough to survive (AoR gives Brevoort a reprieve, so a book that Brevoort seems to enjoy, in Exceptional, will avoid being cancelled, for now).
X-Factor and X-Force, two team books which have usually had lengthy run, were both cancelled within ten issues also.
I don’t know how you expand a line of titles to around twenty titles without throwing out a lot of solo titles.
Brevoort hired Mark Russell to write X-Factor, and Russell is one of my favourite current comic writers, but the book failed. I don’t hold Brevoort responsible for what happened with X-Factor. The premise wasn’t bad, Russell just seemed to fail at figuring out how to make the premise work.
If there were five X-books being published, Russell’s X-Factor probably would have survived (but should it have?), but when you have fifteen other comics with mutants available to sample, Russell’s X-Factor wasn’t going to find an audience. In the mid-‘90s, a book like Mackie’s X-Factor managed to survive for over two years, and it was unreadable (Russell’s X-Factor was at least better than Mackie’s).
Like I said, I don’t think Brevoort is doing a good job. I quit reading all the X-books after Russell’s X-Factor (as I said, I enjoy Russell’s writing, so I held on hoping it would improve). I don’t see any editor being told to stretch a line to nearly twenty titles having success in today’s comic market though. A majority of the titles are going to end up failing. I predicted that within a year of publication time, only five or six of the original titles would remain, but it wasn’t based on Brevoort being the editor, but just the realities of the comic book market today.
The main portion of blame falls on the publisher as they’re the one pushing for a bloated line of X-books to sop up every possible sale which they can add to their bottom-line. A ten issue run doesn’t matter to them in the short-term if they can flood the market and stay over 51% of the market share.
@Chris – Oh, I’m not criticizing the general direction Brevoort’s taken the X-Men franchise post-Krakoa. Quite the contrary. I prefer the X-Men to mingle more with us humies.
And I also absolutely agree that he’s in a very unenviable position here. Having to churn out a glut of titles even when I know that that wouldn’t be his first choice.
It’s just that what I’ve been seeing on a book
by book, case by case basis (and I’ll mention that I’m not actually reading them, to be fair. My opinions are entirely based on the annotations, reviews, and the reactions to the material in the comments) makes me think that Brevoort isn’t comfortable with overseeing this many titles at once, and the quality control is taking a hit.
Like I said, I don’t think of him at all as a bad editor. I remember him being a lot more fondly regarded back when he was editing T-Bolts and Avengers: We’d Prefer it to be Just this One Book (yes, that was actually it’s subtitle).
But maybe you’re right and maybe there isn’t another editor who would fare any better given what’s required of them.
“The premise wasn’t bad, Russell just seemed to fail at figuring out how to make the premise work.”
Okay, but to me, this is exactly the sort of situation where the editor should be stepping in. To help the writer find a way to make it work. I don’t know. Maybe Brevoort did, but he couldn’t figure out how to make it work either. Maybe he just had too much on his plate to be able to devote time on helping Russell figure the book out.
The edict that a book only has ten issues to find an audience or it gets axed (unless the book is Phoenix) doesn’t help. It’s hard to figure out how to change the direction and convince the fans within ten issues.
Expanding the line may have been more successful if Brevoort & co. had done so in recognizable waves, like 5 books at a time? You’re still going to end up cancelling a bunch of them — especially if your original goal is 20 books — but at least the titles would have some time to breathe before they’re crowded out of the market by their own siblings.
And, yes, I still think having a head writer with a vision for the line would be a good idea. As of now, Brevoort is doing most of that work, and it’s evident he hasn’t instructed his writers to actually put some big plot points (i.e., Rogue v. Cyclops) in the scripts. I don’t think a writer would make that same mistake.
It’s entirely possible that “From the Ashes” has been Brevoort’s experimental phase — at least that’s the way he’s framed it — and post-AoR will see him focus on what’s worked so far instead of just throwing another dozen books into the marketplace. Fingers crossed, I guess.
@Thom H.: I’m hard-pressed to remember a time when having a “head writer” actually *worked* for the X-Men. Hickman quit mid-story, Bendis dragged his pet plotlines out for years to no satisfactory end, Morrison had their entire run dismantled within a two-month period after they were done… what are we actually talking about here?
@Chris V: The problem isn’t the edict, it’s that the writers didn’t *know* about the edict. Russell’s X-Factor starts off at a pace one can *best* describe as leisurely, with multiple subplots running simultaneously – that was exactly the wrong approach to take when there was no guarantee of a #11. Had he known that, he probably would’ve made different choices (and that might’ve been enough to get X-Factor a reprieve).
Ironically, it’s MacKay’s Adjectiveless (a book that probably isn’t in any real danger of cancellation) that most clearly understood the assignment: short, 1-2 issue storylines to start with, quick beats to establish the various threats the characters face while slowly building up to a larger-scale villain reveal with 3K.
@Diana – Even had Hickman not left early, he was bound to move on from X-Men eventually, at which point the Kraoka era likely would’ve ended anyway. I don’t expect the distinctive creative vision of any one writer to last beyond their tenure (with the notable exception of the Claremont default formula that makes a comeback every once in awhile). You just move on to the next writer with a vision for the line and go from there. Won’t always work (Bendis), but anything outside of safely-trodden Claremont territory is always going to be an experiment.
@Diana: I realize editorial can ruin pretty much anything by not following through on a writer’s plan (Hickman), not reining in a writer with infamous writing tics (Bendis), or coming down with buyer’s remorse (Morrison).
But having a well-known/head writer on the lead X-book at least brings some reader interest and excitement for a while, which typically translates into sales. (And sometimes — if we’re lucky — we actually get a self-contained story like Morrison’s New X-Men that’s fun to return to.)
Also, as I mentioned above, having a writer drive the line (with proper editorial oversight, obviously) means that *writing* tasks usually get done. Like, you know, showing us the big feud between “rival” X-teams instead of just asserting it.
So I guess my short answer is: word-of-mouth translating into sales and possibly more story clarity.
Diana-Oh, I agree that is completely the fault of Brevoort. It’s what Russell complained about after X-Factor was cancelled, that be wasn’t told he had only ten issues to find an audience. I was responding directly to Moo’s comment about the editor working with Russell in order to improve the book. There’s little doubt that Brevoort is to blame for some of the issues with the “From the Ashes” failure.
Thom H-I agree that dumping all those X-books on the market within a three month period was guaranteeing that the vast majority would be cancelled in quick succession. They would have had a better chance to find an audience. However, I don’t know what Brevoort was told. He might have been given the order to launch “From the Ashes” as quickly as possible to try tomake up for the falling sales at the end of “Fall of X”. Maybe not though. If that was Brevoort’s decision, than even more of the blame should fall on Brevoort.
Even in the early-‘90s, when the X-Men were at their hottest, Marvel was smart enough to roll out new X-titles at a leisurely pace instead of throwing eight or nine X-books on the market at one time and expecting them to find an audience. In today’s market, it’s dooming everything except the top three or four titles.
I just remembered 2011 when DC dumped fifty-two new #1s onto the market all at once. Doubt anyone’s going to beat that record.
At least DC had gotten a huge amount of attention for the “New 52”. It was pretty crazy. Fans hadn’t acted like that since 1993, when the comic boom crashed. People were lined up outside comic stores waiting to get in hoping they wouldn’t miss a new title selling out.
Meanwhile, the “From the Ashes” relaunch spanned the gamut from “meh” to “oh no”.
The “New 52” faced some of the same problems, in the long run, as DiDio was scrambling to try to come up with new titles to replace all the lower-tier books that were dropping like flies within a two year period.
I still wonder if Marvel didn’t take the wrong lesson from the unprecedented success of Hickman’s HoX/PoX/Dawn. Instead of recognizing a strong creator with a strong creative vision, they took it that the X-Men were extremely popular again. They reasoned that the begin in decline of sales after “Dawn of X” was because Krakoa was too experimental and divisive, rather than what naturally happens with comic books in the modern era (plus, Hickman leaving halfway and “Fall of X” being a mess). So, they thought they could push out a bunch of relatively “conservative” X-books, and fans would react like they did to the “New 52”, instead of losing a large percentage of the Krakoa era fans and only gaining back so many lapsed fans who dropped the books.
On the other hand, what else does Marvel have to rely on now? They milked the Avengers franchise for all it was worth. They had to turn somewhere to publish the amount of books they need to maintain their market share.
@Thom H.: Like I said, it’s a perfectly reasonable theory, just one that’s never found any purchase in reality where the X-Men are concerned. The Messiah Trilogy/Utopia didn’t have a “head writer” as such; and the better-remembered storylines of the ’90s like X-Cutioner’s Song and AoA were the result of coordinated writers’ summits (the late great Peter David famously gave Fabian Nicieza the idea to have Magneto rip out Wolverine’s skeleton – by all accounts, PAD had meant it as a joke).
The “Head Writer” format might work for a more curated line, or maybe a line where there’s less conceptual/thematic diversity among the component books – for the X-Men, it just doesn’t seem to click. After all, even Hickman only *really* managed to generate sales for his own works, books were still getting axed for low sales during Dawn and Reign of X.
@Chris V: To be fair, there are other factors that would lead Marvel to believe the X-Men were popular again – the success of X-Men ’97 comes to mind…
@Chirs V- it should also be noted that Marvel seems to have blamed a lot of the X-Men’s declined popularity on (1) the “No More Mutants” edict after House of M and (2)the deliberate sabotaging of the X-Men (for example. trying to replace them with the Inhumans) because Marvel was trying to get the rights back from Fox. And both of these things arguably bear the lion’s share of the blame for the X-Men’s decline in popularity. So Marvel’s takeaway from House of X was that as long as we don’t deliberately sabotage the X-Men and don’t institute a dumb “No More Mutants” edict, we should be fine. That turned out not to be the case.
“trying to replace them with the Inhumans”
I can’t believe they expected that to work. That’d be like trying to swap out Denzel Washington in the Equalizer franchise with the guy who played Urkel in “Family Matters.”
@Moo: To be fair, I don’t think they were counting on Black Bolt and that bunch, so much as creating a new generation of Inhuman heroes to supplant mutants – Kamala Khan, Lunella Lafayette, etc. If they’d kept that edict going for a few more years (in which the remaining mutants dwindled down to nothing), who knows, it might’ve worked.
@Diana- That probably wouldn’t have worked either. Most new characters fail. They’d probably end up with two or three characters that caught on- not enough to replace the X-Men.
Bleeding Cool’s Weekly Bestseller List is out. X-Men 21 came in 7th.
I don’t think that the “The New 52” relaunch can be considered any sort of success. It brought attention to the line, certainly. And that only served to make it more obvious and more painful that they had no true editorial vision to guide the line. It took IIRC eight years and a an even more ambiguous event to essentially announce to the readership that they are sober now.
Mutant-adjacent and relevant to the discussion:
Gerry Duggan’s West Coast Avengers, with Firestar, also wrapped up this week at issue 10, and it really looks to me as if he was planning a longer run and had to cram a lot of last minute resolution-by-exposition into his final issue. The fate of the various Ultrons, the escape of Stevil/Flag-Smasher, all of Killerwatt’s rehabilitation arc — it felt like a lot of story put on fast forward.
I really dislike this “10 issues max unless it’s a fantastic surprise hit” policy when it’s clear that writers aren’t getting the memo or writing towards that kind of limit.
Of course, it’s also entirely possible that like so many other things, it had to wrap up in time for Age of Revelation, in which case I’m annoyed at how much has to be put on hold for yet another alternate reality event.
@The Other Michael- Duggan just won’t stop trying to make Flag-Smasher happen, will he?
Duggan is writing a Wonder Man series, so it’s possible that Flag Smasher will show up there.
Regarding Killerwatt, the problem was that he never seemed like a hardened criminal, but an abused child who was unlucky enough to be recruited by Stevil instead of the real Steve Rogers.
I doubt the Age of Revelation had anything to do with West Coast Avenger’s ending- Tony will be appearing in Avengers during Age of Revelation.
I wrote on the Beat at the time New 52 was a great jumping point but also jumping off point for longtime readers who no longer had inertia buying or completist fear as a reason to keep buying stuff that didn’t really enjoy anymore.
My impression was that the Nu52 had a very successful launch, but it’s success couldn’t be sustained past the first year or so. No surprise there- 52 monthly comics are too many for almost any collector, and 2/3 of them were pretty bad. Nu52, expected to be the “permanent” DC Universe, lasted 5 years. I think DC would have pulled the plug even earlier if the initiative didn’t involve their entire line.
I see the parallels with FtA: rushed launch, editorial not making the rules of the new status quo clear, thin talent pool and several untried creators. I find it interesting to compare and contrast how Krakoa launched: there was ample time to develop the world-building and rules before launch, there was a head writer who worked closely with the editors and creative teams, the talent wasn’t well-known or super-popular (other than Hickman and Yu), and they started with a handful of titles. Not everything worked, but people got invested enough to sustain the line for about 5 years. Unless something changes for the better, I’ll be surprised if FtA and what comes after lasts that long.
@Diana: Sure other formats can work. I’m not saying they can’t. What I’m saying is that the head writer format consistently bumps sales up, which it does. And it often — not always — results in better stories than we’re getting now.
As for the head writer format not working for a diverse line, Morrison and (nominally) Quitely’s New X-Men was running alongside Milligan and Allred’s X-Force, Winick and McKone’s Exiles, Claremont and Larroca’s X-Treme X-Men, plus Uncanny X-Men, Cable, Wolverine, The Brotherhood, NYX, a Cyclops mini, etc. Some of those were direct consequences of Morrison’s world building, but many of them were just doing their own thing and/or continuing what was already working.
Saying that the Morrison era “didn’t click” is a little far-fetched since it gave us runs we still reference today, not to mention books the X-line is still trying to emulate. Did it stick around? No, but neither has the Utopia era.
And Hickman may not have finished his overarching story, but that’s largely due to the fact that Marvel wanted to continue publishing X-books set on Krakoa. The Hickman era was so popular and sold so well that it outlasted its original writer.
In the end, I think a “head writer” format would work better than what we’ve got now because Brevoort could focus on editing instead of developing concepts and building the world. Leave that work to the people who are good at it. I’d take a new HoX/PoX or New X-Men over what we’ve got now any day.
Breevort’s latest Substack is out.
Breevort said that he doesn’t agree completely with what Casey wrote about why Weapon X-Men failed (Casey intended it to be an ongoing while the higher-ups thought it was a limited series) and that sales definitely had something to do with Weapon X-Men’s failure. But he doesn’t go into details.
Breevort also said that the Phil Urich Green Goblin series was canceled in part because Harras decided to bring Norman Osborn back as the Green Goblin. I always wondered about that.
Gosh, it’s been a while since I’ve thought about the New 52, aka “Dan DiDio is gonna Brand New Day everyone“. I think it’s lasting legacy has been … that the main DCU is still called Earth Prime instead of New Earth? That’s about it, right?
My favourite moment of New 52 turnover was when GI Combat was replaced by Star-Spangled War Stories, like DiDio was convinced the market wanted a random war anthology, and it was just a matter of finding the right title.
“Even in the early-‘90s, when the X-Men were at their hottest, Marvel was smart enough to roll out new X-titles at a leisurely pace instead of throwing eight or nine X-books on the market at one time and expecting them to find an audience. In today’s market, it’s dooming everything except the top three or four titles.”
This is something Marvel should really try to remember. AoA replaced 8 ongoing X books, and of those only Generation X was a recent addition. Cable, the next most recent, was already 20 issues in. They added X-Man after AoA, and as far as I remember that was it ’til the end of the ’90s.
They should probably have started this era with adjectiveless, Uncanny, and one side book and staggered the release of others over the next couple of years. 8 or 9 books should be a goal, not a starting point.
“They added X-Man after AoA, and as far as I remember that was it ’til the end of the ’90s.”
Aside from Deadpool, which wasn’t really treated like an X-book, the next X-book to launch was Maverick in 1997, which was cancelled in only a year.
Less books would not work for Marvel’s financial targets.
They would probably sell more individually then, but not enough, just too few readers/collectors left for that, unless they are gigantic hits, and you can’t really create those on demand.
So multiple books that lets readers multiple-dip is the only way.
The one good thing I’ll say about the New 52 is that there was – at least at first – a decent spread of differing genres and approaches. It wasn’t 52 house style superhero slugfests.
Which, honestly, at times seems to be 99% of Marvel’s output.
I did appreciate DC’s willingness to try new things in the New 52. Sure, most of them came and went pretty quickly–remember that take on the Blackhawks?–but there were a few standouts. China Mieville’s Dial H was, IMHO, phenomenal.
But trying to reboot just about everything with modern sensibilities just left everyone with Lee’s overdesigned costumes, too many contradicted elements, continuity questions, erased characters, and the general feeling of a title glut. I tried most of the New 52 initially and gave up on a lot just as quickly. It just didn’t have enough planning or cohesion to feel like they’d thought things through or committed fully enough.
That’s the problem with trying to junk 50/60/70/80+ years of comic book history–it’s hard to know what to throw out, what to keep, when trying to retain old readers and attract new ones.
This is the strength of the Absolute line–it’s compact, unbeholden to mainline continuity, unafraid to take risks, and feels fresh. I really hope they don’t screw it up by starting the inter-dimensional crossovers already.
(Same goes for Marvel’s current Ultimate line, which is pretty solid for the most part, even if I can’t get into Ultimate X-Men at all)
I agree that it was good that DC branched out into multiple genres, but there wasn’t the talent to sustain 52 monthly comics. Absolute & Ultimate are working because the Big 2 are limiting the number of comics in the lines. I don’t buy every A or U comic, but I’m getting at least 3/4 of each line because the creative teams are good, at minimum. No JT Kruls or Brett Booths clogging up the lines, just decent-to-great creative teams doing interesting comics. I