10 Years Later, It’s Time to Give This Maligned X-Men Series Another Look

The X-Men are about to become the most talked time in pop culture again. Marvel’s merry mutants have made their way to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and they are about to become the next big cinematic superteam. People are going to start going over the history of the X-Men with a fine-tuned comb and they are going to discover a lot. Just wait til they start asking why everyone in the Claremont run is getting tied up and everyone seems like they are in love with everyone else, regardless of gender. The team’s history has some of the coolest stories and characters you can imagine. They also have stories and characters that are more of an acquired taste, as well as those that are bad. It’s going to be interesting to watch the rest of the world discover the ups and downs of X-history.

This is going to lead them, inevitably, to the days of the Inhumans push. The series Infinity ended with the Terrigen Mists being released into the Earth’s atmosphere, which led to Inhumans starting to pop up all over the place, taking the mutants’ thunder. Eventually, in the days after Secret Wars, it was revealed that the Mists were toxic to mutants, leading to the X-Men to have to do something they never had to before. This led to Extraordinary X-Men, a series written by writer Jeff Lemire with artists Humberto Ramos, Ibrahim Roberson, Victor Ibanez, and numerous fill-in pencilers. This series is one of the most maligned of the last decade, with only X-Men Gold usually ranked below it by the fandom. However, it’s a series that I always enjoyed and after a re-read, I think it’s time for all of us to take another look at this series.

Extraordinary X-Men Was a Victim of Its Time

So, behind the scenes at Marvel in the mid ’10s, the idea to take the X-Men to another planet to start their own mutant colony was being shopped around, with Uncanny X-Force/Uncanny Avengers writer Rick Remender pitching a new series set on another planet. However, Marvel didn’t want him to do it, for whatever reason, and he ended up leaving Marvel and going to Image full-time. Extraordinary would see Lemire taking up the idea to an extent, except instead of another planet, he put the X-Men in Limbo, with Magik teleporting the Jean Grey School into Limbo. The book was going to be about the X-Men dealing with saving mutants and all of the insanity of Limbo, with the team consisting of fan favorites – Storm, Magik, Iceman, Colossus, Nightcrawler, Old Man Logan, and the teenage Jean Grey.

The book’s first story arc kicked off with the reveal that the Terrigen Mists were bad for mutants and that Cyclops had died in an attack on the Inhumans that everyone hated him for. Jean Grey had left the teen X-Men and being a superhero in general to get away from her destiny. Nightcrawler had witnessed something horrifying that had taken him away from the X-Men, Colossus had been in seclusion for years after the whole thing with the Phoenix Force and the power of Juggernaut, and Old Man Logan was just getting used to a new world. The rest of the team was shellshocked to a various degree and the opening story arc was honestly pretty cool, setting up the new character relationships and attitudes, as well as positing some cool mysteries.

Lemire is a master of character, so putting him on the X-Men, a team known for starring in superhero soap operas, was a great idea and at first, there was a lot of this. Fans wanted to see how Lemire handled the team’s downtime in this terrible situation and how it would all shake out. However, there was a huge problem with the book and it’s that Marvel was not interested at all in letting it become a comic that fans actually wanted to read. The book ended up being caught up in an endless cycle of crossovers and mini events, to the extent that the comic never really felt like it had a chance to breath. It felt like Lemire had set up a cool little sandbox, but Marvel never really let him play in it.

However, going back to this series, you’ll find a lot of cool stuff. The Old Man Logan and Jean Grey relationship was a lot of fun and thankfully wholesome, with Logan watching over Jean and the two of them hanging out like Logan did with Kitty or Jubilee. Magik had her own subplot, meeting another mutant who demonic powers made her a danger to everyone and trying to help her change her fate. Lemire was able to capture Storm’s resolve as everything fell apart around her, shaking her confidence, and while you can argue that making Nightcrawler into a grimmer version doesn’t really fit the character, he looked cool and it was a change of pace to see him in a new light.

During this time, Lemire was doing bang-up, character-focused work on Old Man Logan (Vol. 2) and Moon Knight, so he was certainly capable of that kind of work, which is what fans wanted from this book. There are shadows of that throughout the series’ 20-issue run, but just shadows. It was one of the shortest X-Men series ever, something of a sprint through a status quo that fans wanted to end as soon possible. It’s grim at times and the crossovers can get annoying (“Apocalypse Wars” is the best of them, giving us the first extreme version of Glob Herman), but there’s still a lot to like about it. A lot of fans hate this series, which isn’t fair. It’s definitely doesn’t deserve a lot of praise, but it’s not as terrible as everyone would have you think.

It’s Not Perfect but Extraordinary X-Men Tried to Keep the Flame in a Hurricane and Somewhat Succeeded

I’m going to be honest with you – I have no idea why I re-read this series. 2016-2019 are a really dark time for X-fans, especially the Inhumans push and its aftermath. Extraordinary X-Men was always a book I liked but was vaguely disappointed in because it never really got a chance to be an X-Men book. It had the set-up, but Marvel never let the characters or the plots breath, never let us explore this new status quo. Going back to this era of the team can be very depressing, because it was honestly a really bad time to be an X-Men fan. It kind of felt like Marvel was going out of its way to mess with your favorites.

I think that’s a big reason why so many fans hate this series. It reminds them of a time in X-history when things felt like they spiraling into the darkness. If you divorce this series from its status quo (well, as much as you possibly could), this would just be a pretty standard X-series that came and went in under two years, something we get a lot of nowadays. It’s not this terrible series, it’s a book from a dark time in the team’s history that can be depressing in the extreme, but still had its charms.

5 Marvel Heroes Who Were Everywhere in the 2000s (Then Vanished)