The X-Men were once the most famous superhero team around, until the MCU domination of pop culture allowed the Avengers to take that place. The X-Men rose to prominence in the late ’70s and became the biggest seller of the ’80s and ’90s, branching out to an animated series and movies. The X-Men formed their own corner of the Marvel Universe for years, with hundreds of heroes and villains. It could be a very confusing place for new fans, especially when one saw the sheer number of of X-Men teams out there. The various X-teams have their own histories and missions, ones that have changed over the years.
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The three most well-known teams in X-Men lore are the X-Men (of course), X-Factor, and X-Force. Each of these teams have a rich history, and each of them is quite different from the other. They can definitely be confusing for new fans walking into a comic store for the first time after watching a movie or cartoon, but digging into them reveals that these mutant teams don’t have all that much in common besides being formed of mutants in spandex. The From the Ashes X-Men reboot has taken the teams back to their roots in many ways, showing off the more stark differences between the groups.
The X-Men Have Always Protected Mutants and Humans Alike
The X-Men’s story is well-known in pop culture. Professor Charles Xavier learned he was a mutant and began developing a dream of peaceful human/mutant co-existence, one that was born from conversations with his best friend and fellow mutant Magneto. Xavier used his family wealth and estate to open a school, one that would teach mutants to use their powers and become a strike team to help protect humanity from evil mutants, all to show humanity that hating and fearing mutants is a mistake. This is the bedrock of the X-Men — a group of mutants training other mutants and fighting to protect a world that hates and fears them.
Now, over the years, the X-Men have seen some changes. The biggest change came after Scarlet Witch depowered the vast majority of the mutant race in House of M. Suddenly, the X-Men had to protect the last 198 mutants on Earth, which changed their mission. Protecting humanity became a secondary concern, as the X-Men were more focused on protecting their people from humanity. The Schism era saw Cyclops’s team acting as a pro-mutant strike force, while training young mutants, and Wolverine’s team focused more on the school and superhero aspects of the group. The Krakoa Era would see the X-Men both defend the mutant nation and go back to their superhero roots, fighting to protect humanity again so that the humans wouldn’t be scared of them. The current X-Men status quo involves two teams, each doing their own thing: Cyclops’s team in X-Men is all about creating a haven for mutants while dealing with mutant threats to humanity and Uncanny X-Men follows Rogue and Gambit’s team, who strike out on their own because they don’t want to be involved in Cyclops’s war and begin training four new mutants.
X-Force Has Always Acted as the Mutant Team That Operates From the Shadows
X-Force’s history goes back to the days of the New Mutants, one of Marvel’s venerable teen teams. The New Mutants became the default team of the X-Men; the main team had become a team of adults and the New Mutants were the newest class to join the Xavier Institute. Eventually, a mysterious mutant named Cable showed up and basically took over the New Mutants, beginning the process of separating the team from the Xavier Institute. Cable was Cyclops and Madelyne Pryor’s son Nathan, back from a future that saw Apocalypse having taken over the world. Cable wanted to make the New Mutants into his strike force to prevent this future from happening, training them in his paramilitary methods. The team would leave the Institute and re-christen themselves X-Force, going underground to fight Cable’s war.
This would be X-Force’s status quo for years to come. Cable would leave the team for a time, leaving it in the hands of Cannonball, but the team would still work from the shadows and not go back to the X-Men. Ironically, when Cable did return to the team, he took them back to the school. The first major change to the team would come when Pete Wisdom, a mutant British spy, turned the team into a black-ops group. This would presage their future, but first X-Force would have a stop-off where they became a celebrity mutant team that would see members die on the most dangerous missions imaginable, eventually morphing into the X-Statix.
X-Force would fade away, but come back in the post-HoM era. Cyclops and Wolverine formed a new X-Force meant to kill threats to the reduced mutant race before they struck. X-Force as the lethal black-ops team became their main status quo, one that only changed for a short time in the pre-Krakoa era that tried to bring the team back to its roots. X-Force acted as the CIA of Krakoa, and its From the Ashes incarnation hearkens back to the ’90s — the personal strike team of a gun-toting mutant, except this time its Forge leading the team instead of Cable.
X-Factor Has Changed Multiple Times Over the Years
X-Factor has had the most change over its existence. The team began as a reunion of the original five X-Men — Cyclops, Beast, Angel, Iceman, and Jean Grey — who came back together after the return of Jean Grey. The group decided to take a different tactic to their mission of training and protecting mutants. They decided to pose as the X-Terminators, an anti-mutant group that would move in to imprison mutants that were reported on by their neighbors while fighting evil in their superhero guises as X-Factor. They eventually gained use of Ship, Apocalypse’s personal vessel, and used it as a homebase for their operations for most of their early existence. Eventually, their fake role as the X-Terminators would fade away.
X-Factor would change after the original team decided to rejoin the X-Men, and become a government mutant strike force working under the aegis of Valerie Cooper. This would be the team’s status quo throughout the ’90s, with this incarnation of the team dying out after mutants from the future tried and failed to build a time machine to take them back to their time.
The next incarnation of the team would become a superhero detective agency, before becoming a corporate mascot team. Krakoa would bring back the team as detectives, working to investigate the deaths of mutants who died in world beyond the mutant nation. From the Ashes remade X-Factor as a government sponsored team, working under X-Factor alums Archangel and Havok.
