The ’90s were the decade of the X-Men, but the end of it and the beginning are very different times. While the team’s three flagship books – Uncanny X-Men, X-Men (Vol. 2), and Wolverine (Vol. 2) – were still the best sellers in the industry more often than not, sales in the latter half of the decade couldn’t match the first. The stories were still good, but fans were tired of the way nothing important ever really happened and the way the books were often just replaying the hits of the ’80s and early ’90s. The ’00s were looked at as a new era for the team and would end up being one of the most interesting decades in the group’s history.
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There are amazing ’00s X-Men stories, but that doesn’t mean that the decade was perfect. Marvel made a lot of mistakes with their merry mutants in the first decade of the 21st century. These are Marvel’s seven biggest X-Men mistakes in the ’00s, missteps that should have been avoided.
7) The Beginning of the Grimdark Era
The early ’10s gave readers loads of grimdark X-stories and it was honestly a depressing time to be an X-Men fan. However, this actually began in the late ’00s. The depowering of the mutant race changed the tenor of the X-Men comics and suddenly every threat to the mutant race was one that could destroy them all. X-Force (Vol. 3) was the first indication that things had changed. While the series is generally beloved and quite good, it was the first indication of how dark things were going to get as time went on. At first, grimmer X-stories were fun, but the future would show why fans hate these kinds of stories when they go on for too long.
6) Evil Xavier
Professor X is the founder of the X-Men and for years was portrayed as the perfect mentor, a man whose dream of unity made him akin to a saint. However, the ’00s would change that with two different stories – “Danger” and X-Men: Deadly Genesis. The first revealed that the Danger Room had become sentient, with Xavier learning this and basically enslaving it. The second showed that there was a team of X-Men that tried to save the original team on Krakoa that no one knew about and Xavier was the reason, wiping them from everyone’s memories after their failure and recruiting the All-New, All-Different team. This was the beginning of evil Xavier, something that fans have hated for years now.
5) Kitty Pryde’s Astonishing Ending
Joss Whedon and John Cassaday’s Astonishing X-Men was a blockbuster and is still a favorite of many fans. It was basically just Claremont X-Men in the modern day and it focused on Kitty Pryde. It brought her back to the team for the first time in years and it ended with her phasing a giant bullet meant to destroy the Earth. However, she had to stay on the bullet in order to keep it phased so it wouldn’t keep destroying planet as it flew through space. It was a heroic sacrifice, but it felt like a waste of a character who fans had gotten reattached to. It’s a mystifying decision and would lead to a rather dumb story where Magneto was able to bring her back to Earth (which had to ignore physics to work).
4) The Second Claremont Run
Chris Claremont is the greatest writer in X-Men history. His 16-year run on the team built them into superstars, creating everything that fans love about the team. After the books had started selling less in the late ’90s, Marvel decided to bring him back for another run with the team. Claremont’s second run on the X-Men was a huge failure, despite the excitement that fans had for it. While I do enjoy the 18 issues he wrote, most fans don’t. It was old school Claremont at a time when fans didn’t want that kind of book and they voted with their wallets.
3) Chuck Austen
Chuck Austen is the worst writer in X-Men history and yet he wrote the team for three years across both Uncanny X-Men and X-Men. Austen was a favorite of Marvel editors after his work on Elektra and U.S. War Machine. His time on the X-Men books have some good in them, but it’s mostly garbage honestly. This isn’t some modern re-evaluation of the book, either; fans hated it back then too, but they kept buying the books. It proved that the publisher didn’t care about story quality or fan outrage as long as books sold, which would cause even more problems for the House of Ideas in the years to come.
2) Pushing Grant Morrison Out of Marvel
New X-Men is the greatest X-Men series of the 21st century, all because of writer Grant Morrison. Morrison moved to Marvel in late 1999, writing the Marvel Knights miniseries Marvel Boy and Fantastic Four: 1234, and would be given X-Men (Vol. 2) in 2001. Retitled New X-Men, the book saw Morrison take old X-tropes and make them new again, taking them in directions they hadn’t been. However, the Scottish scribe is known for wanting to do their own thing and not listen to editors – it’s often in their contracts that editors can’t change their work. Morrison’s book SuperGods revealed that they were having weekly shouting matches with editorial and went back to DC in 2005. Readers were robbed of the best X-writer since Claremont, all because Marvel editors thought they knew better than the industry’s greatest writer.
1) House of M
House of M was sold as the first crossover between the New Avengers and the Astonishing X-Men and ended up beginning Marvel’s marginalization of their mutants. The story saw Scarlet Witch making a world where mutants ruled the planet and would end with her depowering the vast majority of the mutant race. This story pushed the X-Men into the grimdark era and served to undo everything that Morrison had set up for the mutant race. It honestly felt like a fit of pique over them leaving Marvel, making an already bad story worse, which is impressive because House of M is mind-numbingly terrible even before the ending.
What was Marvel’s biggest X-mistake in the ’00s? Leave a comment in the comment section below and join the conversation on the ComicBook Forums!
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