The X-Men took a long time to finally take off, but once it did, it hit the stars, and Marvel’s mutants are now incredibly popular. The creators behind it are a big part of that, of course, with names like Chris Claremont, Grant Morrison, Jim Lee, and Andy Kubert crucial to making the X-Men something unique. Then there’s the characters: heroes like Wolverine, Gambit, Rogue, Cyclops, Jean Grey, Storm, and many more, who have become the favorites of many fans. They’re married together by soap opera dynamics, and decades of compelling stories, and the one thing that links all of these factors is the X-Mansion, the home that the X-Men shared on and off for decades.
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There was always just something about seeing those characters together in one of the X-Mansion’s rooms or playing sports in the field, or hanging out at the lake. It became ubiquitous, and there’s a certain nostalgia for it, and given the nostalgia heavy X-Men status quo of “From the Ashes”, fans fairly assume that the X-Men will end up back there, especially with their upcoming Marvel Cinematic Universe debut. But it’s time to challenge that thinking, because the X-Men no longer need the X-Mansion. They’re more than their home.
Do All Roads Lead to the X-Mansion?
The MCU has changed the way Marvel’s comics worked since its rise to popularity. Most comic fans shudder at the phrase “movie synergy”, but in theory, it is a pretty decent idea; comics should be accessible to new fans, and moviegoers represent a much bigger audience than comic readers. However, while you can always find stories about fans coming from the movies to the comics, comic sales haven’t really risen at an appreciable level. That’s where the problem with movie synergy comes in; it’s editorial mandates at their most annoying, because, as all fans know, the movies are always very different from the comics.
So, that brings us to the X-Men. The X-Men’s Krakoa Era was inventive and popular, but it was quite different from the X-Men movies and TV shows, especially X-Men ’97. Its ending was sped up because of the success of X-Men ’97, with six months shaved off. “From the Ashes” didn’t immediately bring the X-Men back to the X-Mansion, but it definitely played off nostalgia, dipping into ideas and characterizations from the ’90s. This, combined with MCU synergy, has led X-Men fans to believe that the X-Men are going to end up at the X-Mansion sooner rather than later.
Fans who don’t know the comics think that the X-Men have spent all of their time with the X-Mansion as their headquarters. This is actually very far from the truth. While they’ve spent a majority of their time in the X-Mansion, there have been long periods of time where the team wasn’t there. The Outback Era saw them live in the Australian Outback for a time. They moved to San Francisco in 2007 and stayed there until 2012. From 2012 to about 2017, there was always at least one X-Men team that didn’t live at the mansion, and then we have the Krakoa Era, five years away from the mansion.
The X-Men have been quite successful outside of the mansion, and there’s a simple reason for that — the X-Mansion isn’t all that important for the X-Men. At its core, the X-Men are about a group fighting for their rights. Putting them in an expensive mansion in upstate New York never really felt right, and feels even less right nowadays. The X-Men can fight for their people from anywhere, and that’s what makes the X-Men work. Now, obviously, most people who know the X-Men know about the X-Mansion, but most of those people aren’t going to read the comics regardless of how successful any screen adaptation is.
I don’t have a problem with the X-Mansion in the MCU because most people watching those movies are going to recognize it as part of the brand. However, sending them back to the X-Mansion in the comics feels doubly wrong after everything we’ve gone through with the team. The X-Men don’t need to live in a mansion; they need to fight for their people.
The Mansion Doesn’t Define the X-Men
Every longtime fan of the X-Men has seen the X-Mansion destroyed. It’s become something of a trope; the X-Mansion gets destroyed, and the X-Men have to find a new home. Eventually, it gets rebuilt, everybody comes home, and at some point in the future, it gets destroyed again. That’s the way X-Men comics work, and an argument can be made that going back to the X-Mansion is overdue. Right now, the X-Mansion in the comics is home to an anti-prison. This is definitely building it to return.
However, the only reason it’s going to return is because of the X-Men MCU movies. The books have obviously set up the return, that the X-Men are going to take their home back and make it into a haven for mutants again. However, the X-Men just got out of a status quo where they had their own nation; going back to the X-Mansion feels like a step down. The X-Men don’t need another country of their own, but taking them back to the mansion represents a return to a simpler time in X-Men history, one that ignores a lot of what has been developed in the X-Men comics. The X-Men don’t belong in the mansion anymore, and that’s really all there is to it.
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