Henchman-4-Hire

The X-Men books are a mess and they have been for years. Maybe this is because Marvel is purposefully torpedoing the comics because they don’t own the movie rights, or maybe it’s because the comic has just been a snowball rolling down hill, getting bigger and more unyielding every relaunch.

Whatever the case may be, I propose that the X-Men should copy a play from The Wild Storm comic and do some kind of big, slate-clearing reboot — to an extent.

Wild X-Storm Men!

This month, Marvel will launch ResurrXion, the latest in a long line of complete, line-wide relaunches for the X-Men. As I’ve pointed out before, Marvel does this every two years or so. It involves simply recombobulating the various characters into new teams, all with the same general purpose. Maybe there’s a new major plot point — like Evil Cyclops or mass extinction — or maybe not.

Either way, ResurrXion looks like more of the same, and that’s no way to save the X-Men. Between X-Men: Gold, X-Men: Blue, Astonishing X-Men, Weapon X, Generation X and whatever the heck else Marvel might spring on us, the new relaunch looks and sounds like just more of the same. Random X-characters plopped into random lineups to accomplish the same thing as every other X-book for the past few years.

Still no sign of Strong Guy

So I think Marvel should do what DC is doing with their Wildstorm comics, to an extent. They’ve hired comics visionary Warren Ellis to restart the Wildstorm Universe from the ground up in a new comic, The Wild Storm, with a couple different spin-off comics. It’s got all the familiar characters, but the slate has been wiped clean and Ellis is starting over from scratch.

I don’t think Marvel should go that far with the X-Men. This shouldn’t be a complete, ground-up reboot.

Instead, pare the line down to a more reasonable size, with a very, very back-to-basics approach. Don’t just throw random characters into random rosters just to fill page space. Create a solid, core team and trim off all the most recent plot nonsense. Wipe away M-Pox and even M-Day. Wipe away any contention with the Inhumans or the Avengers. Send the Young X-Men back to their own time period. No more weird time travelers or space visitors or secondary mutations or rebel factions.

Just a school for mutants, with some familiar faces on the faculty and in the student body, where a couple of them occasionally go out and save the world.

In our current climate of political insanity, with everything from Black Lives Matter to the alt-right to whatever the hell else, now is the perfect time for a comic book about a group of minority superheroes who protect a world that hates and fears them.

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