Pop Culture is Dead to me: The all-new, all-different X-Men?

Once upon a time, if you wanted to talk about mutants, explore the X-Men or find someone to champion something that was already big, I was your man. When I say I had a direct line to the man in charge of the X-Men in the 1990s, I wasn't lying. I even wrote a 'Beginners' Guide to the X-Men' for Marvel UK (which is a vignette for another time). I produced popular fanzines about them; I interviewed creators; my reviews were used as editorial tools. I even had an article in Time Out about... me and my mutant fixation.

There was a point in my comic collecting life where I possessed, not only every single X-Men comic, spin-off, one-shot and cross-over, I possessed every single comicbook that was in some tenuous way linked to Marvel's X-Men universe (which was part of their entire Marvel Comics Universe and not just restricted to what we see on the big screen). Every single comic - even comics which featured no mutants at all, but had characters in or stories that crossed-over into known Marvel Mutant History. I was that sad. The thing is, this was an attainable target in a world where collecting comics was extremely expensive and circumstances had pushed me into a collecting corner, so sticking with the X-Men seemed to be something I still connected with. The point is, by the year 2000 I had pretty much every single comic that I could shoehorn into my carefully researched (and various other peoples) Mutant timeline.

If truth be told, I started to fall out of love with the X-Men in the mid-1990s, when an arguably already bloated franchise of comics exploded into almost double the amount with a fraction of the quality. Because X was a family of comics, you almost felt obligated to keep up with what your third cousin twice removed was doing, even if it was as dull as dishwater and had cost you a couple of quid. The thing was, none of the spin-offs really addressed the reason I was an X-Men fan; they didn't do what this fanboy wanted, tie-up the loose ends of the last 30 years, instead they just added to something that didn't need adding to. They were prepared to change almost everything (yet again) for the of sake massive sales and the promise of a gold reprinted issue #1.

There was a time when I'd have to explain to people who the X-Men were; despite their comics being the best sellers in the USA and UK, this was pre-internet, CGI, video games and still sneered at as something losers were into. It's difficult in this day and age to explain the appeal for a comic with such a (behind-the-scenes) chequered past. The X-Men were created in the early 1960s by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and the concept of the mutant was introduced to Marvel. Marvel had their superheroes, who became that way through cosmic rays, gamma radiation, radioactive spiders, super soldiers enhanced by serums and playboys in iron suits; mutants were born with a gene that made them 'better' than normal humans, therefore made them different. In 1963, the world knew profoundly of prejudice and the first appearance of the X-Men reflected this and as the comic limped along during its first few years, there were very few reasons to imagine it would one day become such a phenomenal success. The analogies to civil rights in the USA were an ad hominem at best.

By the time I got into the X-Men it had just been cancelled by Marvel, it had never exceeded a million sales, like many of the other books and it spent best part of its 66 issues as a bi-monthly (6 times a year). The X-Men wasn't the first Marvel Comic to be cancelled, but in an era where Marvel comics were like Marvel heroes - ever-present - it felt odd it had been. This is also where it gets complicated but only if I want to give you the ins and outs of a duck's arse - which I don't; the important thing was after March 1970 and for five years nothing new was published in the X-Men comics.

During the preceding years, with cancellation imminent, the X-Men started doing some unusual things. Initially, an innovative comics creator called Jim Steranko was given a couple of issues to have a play and the results were, for their time, quite staggering. For some people it gave a glimpse into how the X-Men look - somehow otherworldy. And then it was back to the same old average comicbooks which ultimately saw it get the axe. To cut a long story short, by the time Stan Lee's number two, Roy Thomas, took back over writing the book, it needed a miracle to save it from extinction. Arguably that miracle was delivered, even if sales at the time did nothing to reflect it. Thomas returned to the main theme - a bunch of teenagers with special powers in a hostile world fighting evil mutants and the rest of the world while staying decent people. This was the premise for the X-Men.

Thomas recruited hot new artist Neal Adams, and for the rest of the title's original run, we were treated to 9 comics of superior quality (albeit one of them wasn't drawn by Adams, his replacement was more than adequate). The way Adams (and Steranko before him) designed their pages was nothing like Marvel had ever done before and Stan Lee really didn't like it, but Thomas, who had been given more power after Lee withdrew from editorial duties, got it through and not only did the X-Men really begin to tell its story, comics changed as well; they began to grow up and reflect what their long-standing audience was thinking. The irony of those defining Adams X-Men was they looked fantastic but because Roy Thomas wasn't particularly 'adventurous' with a lot of his stuff, they were lightweight in the literary department. I think the Adams issues set a precedent with the X-Men; if they were ever to return they would need to be done differently.

For five long years (I was only young), the X-Men were off the menu - Marvel wouldn't even reprint the decent stuff as they produced issues #67 to #93 as reprints from the mid-1960s. Then something happened and as this isn't what this blog is about, I'll get back on track, otherwise I'll get bogged down.

In 1975, Marvel brought back the X-Men. And they did it in what was at the time a very risque move - they introduced us to a bunch of never-before-seen heroes and a couple of familiar ones and called them the X-Men. The familiar faces were Cyclops, Marvel Girl, now simply called Jean Grey and others popped in briefly before disappearing off to their own comic adventures (Iceman, Beast, Angel were all in other teams) and Professor X was there leading this new team of international X-Men against new and interesting villains, oh and there was a Canadian who had appeared in the Hulk once. It was a hit. In a pond that felt it had been stagnating throughout the 70s, the X-Men really was a breath of fresh air and because of accidentally shrewd promotion and a stroke of storytelling genius, it became a hit almost instantly.

There was a real buzz about the book on both sides of the Atlantic and by the time a writer called Chris Claremont and and artist called John Byrne were in the middle of their award-winning run, the X-Men was Marvel's runaway success; rivalling Spider-Man and the Hulk, but it required a path to get there and that sequence of stories needed to be special.

You know the story, you've seen the films. The background bollocks is something I've always found fascinating about the X-Men and why it took on an almost mythical status - this was the most successful English language comic book of all time. In a time when comics were at a real low, the X-Men almost single-handedly jump-started the entire comics industry. No shit. In business terms, the X-Men was what all comics aspired to be.

There is no coincidence that I pretty much stopped reading the X-Men around the year 2000. Trust me when I say I find it difficult to actually put a finger on it, but I must have made a conscious decision to stop buying the few remaining comics I collected. That whole period was ... difficult.

Also in 2000, the X-Men film came out. A big-budget superhero film. All-star cast. Patrick Stewart in the role he was born to play. What's not to like? Oh and in the intervening years Wolverine had became one of the top 5 superheroes in terms of $$$$. X-Men was going to be huge and with state-of-the-art CGI this was going to be the start of something big... I had the misfortune of catching a chunk of the first X-Men film recently on one of the outer ITV channels. It's dreadful. I mean, it's not, but it is. In terms of comparing the first three X-Men films to the last 6 or however many there have been, they're all fucking Citizen Kane, but compared to the battle sequences in say the Avengers films, the ones in X-Men are more akin to Batman 1966. The thing is it was 2000 and a lot was to happen in the ten years or so when the MCU got into its stride. Fox stayed as close to the real thing as we could have hoped, and while they buggered around with X-Men comic continuity to suit their film's narrative, in terms of authenticity it at least had a tide mark. By the time they basically ate themselves Ouroboros fashion, everything X-Men made little sense if you analysed it.

The other night, I knew full well what I was letting myself in for. The wife did. We both did. We watched X-Men: Dark Phoenix.

We'd suffered all the ones before this, we had to go for the full house. And watching it is the reason for this blog. The preamble was designed to show you that while the X-Men's adversity was from both sides of the fourth wall, it won through with good stories, soap opera-like plots and excellent art, plus it gave you a feeling of belonging to - as schmaltzy as this sounds - an extended-family drama. The thing is, that era ended in 1991, when X-Men ruled the world.

Without sounding like an X-Men elitist because whoever reads this and has read the X-Men will cite examples outside of this generalisation; let me explain. The X-Men started, in earnest in the late 1960s when imminent cancellation meant caution was thrown to the wind. That emergence continued through its mid-70s relaunch, when the writer - Chris Claremont - introduced a sense of family and soap opera.

Claremont introduced and then wove a network of subplots into things of labyrinthine beauty, many of which may never have been concluded, that made other comics seem terribly stuck in a formula. The writer realised the audience wanted something more than just the illusion of change. Many of these subplots led directly into remarkable stories; the seeds of future stories were introduced; forewarning became common and the X-Men became a serial comic. I also mentioned good marketing and luck earlier, well, it was more likely editorial bravery and going against the accepted norm. What made the X-Men 'different' is in its first relaunched issue, made people sit up and go, 'Oh, hello?' was that one of the new team - Thunderbird, a native American - was killed, only 3 issues into his hero career. He was (and remains) properly dead, not Marvel 'dead'.

So it was always a case of expect the unexpected with the X-Men and this duly played out with the Dark Phoenix Saga. For a few years, this was the most cataclysmic comic event since the death of Gwen Stacy in Spider-Man. Jean Grey, very early on in the relaunch had saved the lives of the rest of the team in the space shuttle and as this was #100 and we'd already had a death, when it appeared that Jean dies at the end, us comic fans were like - would they do it again and with, you know, one of the originals? What followed was a maze-like journey that saw Jean Grey become Phoenix - reborn from the shuttle crash - essentially a mutant bestowed with a shitload of cosmic energy. Just how powerful she was got hinted at, but we're talking the power to see off Thanos with his Infinity Gauntlet in the time it takes you to tie your laces. Planet destroyer strong.

With great power comes great megalomania and Jean's human psyche couldn't handle it. In a massive great galactic court room she's found guilty of genocide - she took her powers to the other side of the galaxy and destroyed an entire planet to see how powerful she really was. It all goes tits up when the X-Men decide to prevent the galactic court from executing her and after a big emotional fight scene, Jean sacrifices herself to save Scott and is blasted into atoms by the Ultimate Nullifier. End of. And for a number of years, Jean Grey stayed dead dead, not Marvel dead.

It was, at the time, the comicbook equivalent of The Lord of the Rings or the Harry Potter saga; the paper version of what we've just had with Avengers: Endgame, played out over and across 27 issues of a comic and taking over four years to complete, it was proper soap/space/opera and had The X-Men films followed that route from the off then I might not be sitting here writing this...

In many ways, this is when the X-Men stopped being a brilliant comic and simply became very good. I see little said about the following issues, which were equally as devastating for different reasons and as the team came to terms with life without Jean, the family grew and greater intrigue and stranger intergalactic hijinks ensued. It stayed top for nearly a decade.

But in terms of how the X-Men stories relate to the cinema, Jean Grey (aka Marvel Girl) is always pretty much going to be the lamest looking superhero in the entire comic publishers oeuvre. Visually she's a red head who stares at things; she might move her hands - or stand in a pose that is slightly odd. Oh and she reads minds... All great things to visualise in a visual medium. She wore a lot of short skirts and spent much of the '60s looking like a bemused Texan housewife forced to wear a silly costume.


And this is why I think the new and improved Marvel Cinematic Universe might have bitten off more than it can chew with the X-Men franchise. By all means play with the Fantastic Four toys; that's a given, but maybe leave the mutants to disappear into history or until it can be done properly.

Forgive me if this precis is incorrect, but we had three X-Men films, we then had a rebooted X-Men franchise utilising some existing characters but messing around with roles, characters, etc. Then we had a weird Wolverine sideline before we returned to three more utterly contemptible examples of how not to make a superhero film, that finished up at Dingy Phoenix with Sophie Turner proving once and for all she's Sansa Stark and only Sansa Stark. She can't act, she makes Rupert Grint look like Olivier. Building a film around a reasonably attractive red head with zero charisma, nil charm and no acting ability whatsoever is a tall order, which is why Dark Phoenix feels like an ongoing epilogue with periods of threatened, but unmaterialised, menace.

It felt like events happened so the next events can happen, so the next event... can you see where I'm going with this? It's held together with a flimsy nod to the comics and a race of aliens who SHIELD would dispatch between crap episodes. To call the film flimsy would be an insult to flims.

There's also this 'Dark' thing. In the comic, the Dark Phoenix destroyed an entire world; she manipulated reality, people and things for her desire; she placed the entire universe at peril and only her humanity saved us all. She was fucking Joan of Arc, in the end! Sophie Turner's Phoenix accidentally kills Mystique in a hissy fit; goes round being (not) menacing and blowing things up without actually hurting anyone and stuff happens and she sacrifices herself for the greater good. Yadda yadda yadda. It was such a colossal bunch of pants you could lose the Hulk in them.

It's like a long drawn out version - the X-Men films this is - of my single most horrendous visit to the cinema in the 21st century. Having read all of the Philip Pullman 'His Dark Materials' books, I went to the cinema to see the Golden Compass with such anticipation that the way it was mercilessly driven from my body has actually scarred me for life. It has almost entirely obliterated my expectation gland.

In fact, while I'm here, allow me to digress a little. I saw Godzilla: King of the Monsters the other day. Two days later, my wife says, "What did you think of Godzilla then?" My reply was, 'It was a big monster movie.' The thing is, it's a big monster movie with far too many humans standing around in awe like they're not part of an elite monster-chasing task force.

I wasn't expecting anything more than big monsters knocking seven bells out of each other and that's exactly what it gives you; the fact it levers a very post-modern husband, estranged wife and daughter situation into the film in a way that loses all of its post modernism is almost a joy to behold. This is Godzilla from the Bruckheimer school of film; it has people dying with smiles on their faces because they've helped the big nuclear lizard save the day is a throwback to a bygone age that never existed. We have a meeting with King Kong on the cards (these movies make money regardless of how blindly thrown together the human bits are) in what will obviously be the two of them teaming up to battle some really old gnarly titan who used to kick Godzilla's dad round the yard. Just using their strength, guile and atomic energy coupled with an oddly-paralleling-the-original-King-Kong subplot about the girl they both have to save while her beefcake boyfriend stands around gawping like a kid at the big monsters. It'll end with the entire world being consumed by sentient jelly. Red jelly.

But, the X-Men. How does Marvel introduce them to er... Marvel? One thing about the MCU at the moment is - as a viewer - it's as transparent as anything similar; Captain Marvel aside, most of the films didn't have anything a good 23-part TV series shouldn't have. However, the X-Men, as Dark Phoenix shows, in its glory, is that characters such as the Beast (original or furry blue-counterpart), Jean Grey, the original Angel, Magneto, Professor X - are all visually dull in the Marvel Age of cinema blockbusters. Much of the reason why the X-Men worked when it did was because comic books made you use your imagination more; they prove with Dark Phoenix that they can't really do much visual that really works on screen in the way an Iron Man, Hulk or Thor can dominate a scene. The thing that made the X-Men comic work was that feeling of family which I don't think can be replicated on the big screen, in a believable way. In the X-Men, it wasn't always the physical battles between good and bad. It had a history to allow itself to suddenly become grey, doing that in an extant MCU is likely to be as believable as The Inhumans and their less than lukewarm reception in Agents of SHIELD.

The other dilemma you have with the X-Men is with the Phoenix you have the perfect foil to create an event which maybe unifies a number of divulgent multiverses. We know the next Doctor Strange film is going to touch on the idea of a multiverse; different earths all slightly different. If I had to stick my neck out, I'd say that this is your gateway film into the next Real Deal. There will be people saying that Spider-Man: Far From Home is the beginning of the next story arc, but remember, there were several loose story arcs throughout the films and what ended with Thanos - plot and non-plot films, tied together with end credit scenes to keep us hooked and that is what all these new films and series are doing; they're filling the schedules with what they used to do in the comics; the sandwich filler (Oh and Spider-Man is no longer part of the MCU at time of writing).

Marvel/Disney's policy seems to be: introduce new characters, gauge the waters for three years and then begin the Thanos process again. If we haven't seen the Fantastic Four by 2022, I expect we'll at least be introduced to them via end credits or some device. I can see it; visualise it in my head... It will be done in a familiar way; this introduction will be through the streets of our New York. It will be full on introduction straight away - classic FF battling a villain above the streets of NYC. The crowds - typical New Yorkers - will be cheering them on; our current President will be adorned on some posters and everything will be the same as the MCU except the heroes will be different. I expect that after a totally-out-there opening 15 minutes, the plot device will appear - possibly a rip in the space time continuum - that's always a good one to play with, it gives you scope.

Switch back to the Marvel Universe and whoever is in charge of the Avengers now that all their regular Joes have pegged it, probably Professor Hulk aided by the girl from Wakanda and Captain Marvel, looking at the same thing from the other side, Cue fight between worlds, cue common ground: Reed Richards is this world's genius, he makes Tony Stark look like a dustman and there's also Reed's nemesis who's literally just as clever but also unfathomably evil. They all team up to fix the rift, but it's only temporary, at some point in the future it's going to tear again. Dun dun dun!

The you'll get another filler film probably featuring a geriatric Paul Rudd as Ant-Man, before...

The next bit. And that's where I draw a blank. You could easily have the two worlds of the FF and Avengers merge with little or no consequences. You could reintroduce the Iron Man and Captain America from their universes and bingo, you can reboot the franchise without ever having to end it. But the mutants. Hmm...

With their best story having been done one and a half times already and neither occasion with much justice, you're kind of stuck for a starting point with the X-Men. The problem with straightforward integration is how has it been kept a secret for so long and how come the Avengers weren't aware of it? That means reintroducing them possibly in a similar way to the FF (in my above scenario), this would require two things; a starting point and a cast that can believably be seen as part of the MCU. As far as I know Marvel wants to distance itself as far away from the Fox X films as possible and this is the best possible start. Don't even acknowledge their existence and start with Wolverine, but one from the past. Forget the origin nonsense, just reintroduce the plucky little Canadian, maybe in the way he was in the comics, by bumping into a Hulk (his universe's Hulk not ours). Make his adventure somehow linked to the existing MCU but really all about his universe and end it, maybe with the introduction of Professor X.

The next X outing could be further down the line; an older Prof X is assembling a new task force to try and find out the origins of a strange rift in the space time continuum (see what I did there?) and he assembles a new team of X-Men, with flashback references to an older team that went to investigate and several were lost through it. Cut to several members of the X-Men in a world almost identical to theirs, but with an entirely different set of 'heroes'. It's up to the other two universes to try and come up with a solution to save all of them and the only thing they can do is merge the three together to prevent, say Galactus from devouring it, so we can can shoehorn the Silver Surfer in there.

The three earths merge into one, heroes and villains who didn't exist in some now exist in the only and only the superheroes involved know it has happened. Fully integrated universe and a blank slate to boot. And I'll be happy with just one million dollars (at current exchange rate) for solving the dilemma for them.

You have to make a decision about whether the X-Men are heroes or outcasts in their own universe and I think they have to be the good guys fighting the bad mutants, which, in itself, breeds an unhealthy relationship. You have your built-in prejudices almost immediately, you don't need to use a sledgehammer on it. If you make them outcasts from the word go then you miss the opportunity of an entire subplot of who is and who isn't a mutant...

Once you have an integrated Marvel Universe, albeit ridiculously huge and cumbersome you can move your toys whatever way you choose. If Marvel/Disney treats this like an ongoing experiment it will live on longer than most of us. As the first story arc in the MCU showed; using actual comicbook stories as a template is the way forward. The best comicbook stories took place in the comic books, so mine them for their rich veins of history; just so long as whenever Marvel chooses to bring the mutants back, they consider looking at Alans Davis and Moore's Captain Britain run for inspiration on how to produce bizarre, massive yet insignificant and terrifying all in one story. It would open a world of opportunity if they did and give them a couple of really brilliant villains.

As an exercise is humiliation, X-Men: Dark Phoenix was something of a nadir. Rumour has it that a lot of it was reshot, which suggests it was either considerably worse than it turned out or Marvel/Disney wanted to ensure that nothing they do in the future could possibly be confused with this mess. The fact that Fox made (was it 9?) X-Men films suggests that there's money to be made from it even now and with the full force of Disney's marketing machine behind any reboot, I expect they can treble that amount of money by simply having Nick Fury meeting Charles Xavier, covertly. The problem is down to what they do, how they do it and what story they can come up with that will be original and worthy of introducing the X-Men to a cinematic universe that isn't broken and doesn't need fixing.