Every so often, there are individual character moments that land well in a particular issue but by and large, the thrill of reading Marvels mutant-centric comics has faded. Im still enjoying the odd moment or line of dialogue but the aggregate offering doesnt feel like must-read material anymore. Inside the fiction, the X-Men apparatus feels dysfunctional. The most fetching iterations of the franchise always had a base level of competency that made them seem formidable. All those Danger Room training sequences and coded maneuvers were a secondhand language designed to communicate that Chucks crew would kick your ass in the name of peaceful coexistence. And yeah, thered be challenges that would take the X-teams to their limits but that made it all the more satisfying when they won in surprising ways. Nowadays, the X-collective feels so ragtag and up against the wall, its hard for a reader to pinpoint what theyre good at anymore.
One aspect of it might be that the philosophical allure of the X-books has dulled. Cyclops wound up becoming the central personality of mutant-kind, pulling together their remnants into a small, defiant nation about a decade back. Even after his personality was written towards harsh extremism and he killed Professor X, he was still the irresistible vector that made mutants feel unpredictably dangerous. But Scott Summers died in an as-yet-undisclosed encounter with the Inhumans and the new X-Men status quo doesnt really have a figure like that anymore. The younger version of Cyclops doesnt want that failed martyrdom to become his future and the integration-vs-separatism debate has frittered away.
So, the older version of the man who succeeded, diverged from, and then killed Professor X is off the stage and no ones really filling the void. Magnetos leading a ruthless team of killers in Uncanny X-Men but doesnt embody the grandiose messianic tendencies that made him feel so seductive and frightening in the X-franchises glory days. Charles Xavier remains dead, with the telepathic parts of his brain transplanted into the Red Skull to give the Nazi supervillain control over peoples minds. Once Magneto became an ally of Cyclops single-minded caretaking of the surviving mutants, the ideological dialectic that generated intensity for the classic X-Men status quo died out. You could call that successful franchise evolution in that its an actual instance of meaningful change; however, theres been nothing else as compelling to replace it. The years of feuding between different factions and schools led by Cyclops and Wolverine had some great moments but that eventually ended. The interconnectedness that was once so essential to the X-franchise has withered to practically nothing and theres no good X-argument roiling through all the books in the franchise.
