Marvel’s X-Men Universe Has Two Major Problems Right Now (And They’re Ruining The Comics)

The X-Men are one of the most popular superhero teams in the world, propelled into that position by awesome stories like “The Dark Phoenix Saga” and “Age of Apocalypse.” To celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of “Age of Apocalypse,” Marvel is recreating it with the first mutant’s chosen heir in “Age of Revelation,” showing a potential future much like the original alternate timeline, where mutants rule under Revelation’s iron fist. However, while this is a cool event to pay homage to one of Marvel’s best, it shows the two major problems with the X-Men. The X-Men are stuck in narrative loops, and their cast is just too big.

While reimagining a new version of “Age of Apocalypse” is a great way to honor its anniversary, this is far from the first time Marvel has gone back to that old future. In fact, the X-Men seem stuck in seemingly endless cycles of repeating the same stories over and over again. Alongside that, with each repeat their cast only grows, introducing new awesome and beloved characters. While that sounds great, all it does is inflate the X-Men to the point that no one gets the shine they deserve. I love the X-Men, but these problems are getting out of hand.

The Same Stories for Sixty Years

Repetitive storylines are nothing new in comic books. In fact, they’re a staple of the genre, and for good reason. If you’re going to tell never-ending stories with the same characters, having formulas you can fall back on just makes sense, and a lot of the time these make for great stories. The problems emerge when those storylines get repeated too often with too little variation, which is what always happens with the X-Men. How many times has mutantkind almost been wiped out in an attempted genocide, pick themselves back up, then get almost genocided again? Off the top of my head there’s Genosha, the end of Krakoa, M-Day, and the Terrigen Mist cloud. All within the past twenty years.

Even the Krakoan Era, which is lauded for breathing new creative life into the X-Men brand, was far from the first time a mutant nation was established and then ripped apart by human intervention. For the X-Men, it’s either always dark futures that must be avoided or humanity trying to wipe them out. At this point, both of those storylines have become so overplayed that they’ve lost all their impact. One mutant genocide is a tragedy, but four is just redundant. We’ve just been recycling these plots, and because of that they’ve gotten predictable and boring. The X-Men have stopped charging forward as champions of change, and so they’ve lost that credibility and vibrancy they once had.

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A Cast of One Hundred Thousand Isn’t a Cast

While the repetitive stories are an issue, the other major one is that the X-Men have no focus on a core cast. The team was at its most popular when they were effectively a soap-opera as much as a superhero comic, showing a strong, tight cast of characters going through life and growing together. Since then, literally hundreds of new mutants have been introduced, and all have become X-Men. While it’s awesome to see the cast grow with characters that deserve to be loved as much as the old ones, it’s gotten to the point where there’s no focus anymore. Teams can only have so many people at a time, and so multitudes of favorite characters are left to languish.

There’s a veritable army of characters who’ve been X-Men, and yet the team only has ten characters on it at a time at max. This creates several problems, from shelving beloved characters that don’t fit the narrative they want, to leaving fans wondering why the rest of available heroes don’t help out the team. Obviously, not every character has to constantly be addressed, but the X-Men have more heroes than any other available to them at any given time, and when they’re not on the team it’s like they don’t exist. There are a few essential “main characters” that are always focused on, but the rest are left out in the cold.

This character overbloat can be attributed to Marvel and DC as a whole, given how many heroes get introduced versus how many can support active runs, but it feels worse in the X-Men because the team centers itself around community and a sense of family. Look at how many X-character books there are, how many different teams X-teams there are, and say that this doesn’t feel more like its own universe than pieces of a whole in Marvel. The X-Men have gotten so big that they’re collapsing under their own weight, literally unable to focus on every character they want to. Having more comics is never a bad thing, but when the same storylines repeat across every X-Men book, it gets stale and overwhelming.

The X-Men are one of Marvel’s best and most supported teams. They once stood as the most popular hero team in the world, but now they’ve definitely fallen from their glory days. This constant pandering to nostalgic stories and way too many characters are the root issues that keep the X-Men from having an identity. If they want to stand at the top again, they need to evolve past it. What do you think? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!