The X-Men Kind of Suck

[Something Amyss]

To me, you just summarized pretty much every comic book ever since ever.

Thing is, by any metric, I think X-Men stand out here.

 

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

To me, you just summarized pretty much every comic book ever since ever.

Thing is, by any metric, I think X-Men stand out here.

I feel, possibly because X-Men was my starter collection and favorite all-around stories, that the series wrote the book on how to, or not to, retcon anything. I mean, yes other comics do it too, but X-Men just takes a lot of batshit crazy backdoors to keep characters alive. Sometimes they feel like it was supposed to happen that way, like there was a plan, other times they pull that shit out of their ass.
Eventually I've come to doubt my own past because of how much X-Men I read, the history changes and I start to wonder if I remember my childhood all wrong.
Any reader of sufficient length can understand one thing about Wovlerine prior to his memory fix, remembering the history canon is subject to being totally misremembered or completely untrue.
The retcon is strong with the X-Men. Trying to keep up with canon, to quote Wolverine: "Its like tryin' to squeeze 5 liters of brain juice into a 1 liter jar, bub."
Something like that.

 

[happyninja42]

To me, you just summarized pretty much every comic book ever since ever.

Thing is, by any metric, I think X-Men stand out here.

Eventually I've come to doubt my own past because of how much X-Men I read, the history changes and I start to wonder if I remember my childhood all wrong.

From what I've read/heard about how memory actually works, you probably are remembering your childhood all wrong, not just about comics. xD

 

[Something Amyss]

Any reader of sufficient length can understand one thing about Wovlerine prior to his memory fix, remembering the history canon is subject to being totally misremembered or completely untrue.

Well, I mean, you say that, but you could all just be suffering from false memories.

Joking aside, did you ever read What The!? I enjoyed quite a bit of it for its run. It spoofed a lot of the common tropes in comics, especially Marvel (and that was part of the fun, that they would poke fun at themselves). They parodied Wolverine and to a broader extent the X-Men in a comic that ran from the late 80s to the early 90s. And it was pretty clear they were aware of how absurd their expansion pack/revisionist history was. By the early 90s. I mean, I read a lot of comics in my youth and followed a lot of retcons without blinking but...yeah, the X-Men were just a cut above.

Not that they couldn't have good comics, but that they really stood out for this stuff even to fans of other comics. Evewn Silver-Age fans. >.<

 

[JimB]

From what I remember reading recently, there is a general comment going around comic circles that Marvel Comics is placing significantly less focus on creating quality xmen/mutant stories as they don't own the cinematic rights to them. The plan, as I understand it, is to bump up the popularity of other superpowered beings, which in all ways but name are mutants. This will give Marvel the opportunity to use those characters in place of actual mutants in the cinematic universe and make more dolla dolla bills.

The story I heard a few years ago (from my comic shop guy, though I didn't ask where he got his info from, so grain of salt this all you like) is slightly more complex: When Marvel sold the film rights to its characters, the company was in bankruptcy, and the studios who bought the film rights used Marvel's desperation to leverage additional considerations in their contracts, like getting a percentage of any merchandise with the licensed characters on them under the argument that the films would be at least partially responsible for the characters being popular enough to sell merchandise. The way I heard it, Marvel wants the rights to their characters back, and now that they have Disney's war coffers to borrow from, they're trying to starve out the movie studios by burying the characters and selling no merchandise to make the deals not profitable enough to bother sustaining.

I can't swear any of that is accurate, but it's the way I heard the story.

 

[GebGuy]

From what I remember reading recently, there is a general comment going around comic circles that Marvel Comics is placing significantly less focus on creating quality xmen/mutant stories as they don't own the cinematic rights to them. The plan, as I understand it, is to bump up the popularity of other superpowered beings, which in all ways but name are mutants. This will give Marvel the opportunity to use those characters in place of actual mutants in the cinematic universe and make more dolla dolla bills.

The story I heard a few years ago (from my comic shop guy, though I didn't ask where he got his info from, so grain of salt this all you like) is slightly more complex: When Marvel sold the film rights to its characters, the company was in bankruptcy, and the studios who bought the film rights used Marvel's desperation to leverage additional considerations in their contracts, like getting a percentage of any merchandise with the licensed characters on them under the argument that the films would be at least partially responsible for the characters being popular enough to sell merchandise. The way I heard it, Marvel wants the rights to their characters back, and now that they have Disney's war coffers to borrow from, they're trying to starve out the movie studios by burying the characters and selling no merchandise to make the deals not profitable enough to bother sustaining.

I can't swear any of that is accurate, but it's the way I heard the story.

That is very interesting if it is true. And I am one hundred percent ok with it.

 

[Kingsman]

X-Men is actually one of my favorite comic books now. I know, that sounds weird. Hear me out on this.

I used to try to take the X-men seriously. For the life of me, I couldn't understand what the hell Marvel was allowing Bendis to do with its characters. Nothing Beast has done for the last five years has made ANY sense. Characters break up romances for good reasons, then jump back into equally stupid- if not resurrected- romances shortly afterwards. Things happen, and they have no explanation or reason behind them. People stage interventions and have feuds, but are unable to reasonably articulate why. EVERYTHING that was dialogue or plot- all of it- was bad.

Then I got it.
X-men is a satire on bad comic book writing.
Once you start reading the books this way, they all become absolutely, gut-bustingly hilarious. Take a look at the last issued book of Bendis's run. Scott announces he there's going to be revolution, and months later, he directly states he's finally just then figured out what the hell he was talking about. He does this while speaking to, apparently, every mutant on Earth, all organized in Washington D.C, somehow. Bobby reveals himself to be gay right after getting a "mental hug" from Jean. Beast, who was once a being of philosophy and reason but has been pursuing some vendetta against Scott for the most asinine of reasons that any pair of adults could work out in a long sit-down and discussion, just gets into a car and drives off, a look in his eyes and on his face like an alcoholic trying to escape the pink elephants. Young Jean (lol, time travel) gets into a relationship with... I think it's young Hank? And, while it's revealed that Young Scott watches their first kiss together, I swear to God, you can *hear* the orchestral sting of manufactured drama. If you took anything in the X-Men plot seriously, these sorts of holes would collectively drive you insane with bewildered rage. Taken as comedy, this stuff is absolute gold.

I look forward to the next X-Men books now. They are things of beauty in their own disastrous fashion, like that Charlie Chaplain film where he builds a house.

 

[Kingsman]

From what I remember reading recently, there is a general comment going around comic circles that marvel comics is placing significantly less focus on creating quality xmen/mutant stories as they don't own the cinematic rights to them.
The plan, as I understand it, is to bump up the popularity of other super powered beings, which in all ways but name are mutants. This will give marvel the opportunity to use those characters in place of actual mutants in the cinematic universe and make more dolla dolla bills.

Yeah, I understand it similarly.

They're not sabotaging them (Anymore then they've sabotaged anything by letting Bendis touch it.).

I don't think you can do yourself any service here by passing off just how astonishingly low-quality Bendis's run of writing for the X-men was. The entire thing, front-to-back, was a mess of unresolved and anticlimactic plots, characters written so inconsistently as to be insulting, and dramatics that made absolutely no sense whatsoever... to say nothing of involving mechanics which defy all suspension of disbelief. I read that last issue he made and it legitimately had me laughing until I was in tears, it was so amazingly ham-fisted and poorly done.