COLUMN: Why Can't Marvel Let the X-Men Evolve? | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

With X-Men ’97 releasing on Disney+ and with Deadpool and Wolverine looking to be one of the biggest movies of the summer, it seems like a good opportunity to talk about Marvel’s merry mutants.

Of course, it’s also a pretty crucial time for the X-Men in the comics as well. Marvel are in the process of winding down “the Krakoa Era”, a bold departure from the traditional X-Men status quo that was launched by writer Jonathan Hickman and artists Pepe Larraz, R. B. Silva, and Marte Gracia five years ago this July. The company is looking to launch From the Ashes, which appears to mark “a return to a more traditional status quo for the X-Men.”

To be fair, these two factors are not unrelated. One suspects that this comic book continuity reset is motivated by the demands of corporate synergy, as the publisher looks to line-up their print output with the looming big-screen adaptation. This is how it has always worked. In practical terms, the comic book publisher is primarily of value to Disney as a factory farm for intellectual property, research and development for concepts that become billion-dollar blockbusters.

Writers like Chris Claremont have talked about how the publisher marginalized the X-Men brand in their shared universe while Fox held the movie rights. As Claremont framed it, “Why would we go out of our way to promote a title that will benefit a rival corporation's films when we could take that same energy and enthusiasm and focus and do it for our own properties?” Notably, Hickman’s relaunch of the X-Men brand coincided with Disney’s acquisition of Fox.

This sort of meddling is still commonplace, as demonstrated with the character of Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani). In the comics, Khan was introduced as an Inhuman at a time when Fox owned the rights to the X-Men. However, when she was introduced into live action, in the wake of the failure of Marvel’s Inhumans, she was revealed to be a mutant. This change has since been backported into the comic books, in order to ensure consistency across the brand.

Last year, there was a controversy over the decision to kill off Kamala Khan in the comics, so that she could be resurrected as an X-Men character. According to writer Cody Ziglar, the decision came from Kevin Feige, the head of Marvel Studios, to cement that synergy. Ziglar remarked on the absurdity of fans blaming writer Zeb Wells for answering “the call of Daddy Feige.” Naturally, Marvel Studios disputes this account of events, insisting that the decision was made by comics editorial staff.

This gets at one of the paradoxes of comic book culture, particularly fandom around the Marvel Cinematic Universe. For years, Feige has cultivated a reputation as somebody who protected the comics from the film industry, famously smuggling comics on to the set of Bryan Singer’s X-Men. In reality, Feige was always more of a movie guy than a comics guy. Remarking of his influences growing up, he mused, “Comics were not high on there, actually. It was the kind of movies based on comics.”

Indeed, it’s telling that so much of what Marvel Studios has done with the X-Men brand since Disney’s acquisition of Fox is rooted in nostalgia for earlier mass-media adaptations than in actually engaging with the comic books themselves. For all that fans might complain about how “Fox failed the X-Men” or list the “glaring issues” with the studio’s management of the franchise, it’s very clear that there is a deep-rooted affection for those adaptations and desire to invoke them.

Ms. Marvel used the theme of X-Men: The Animated Series. Evan Peters was cast in WandaVision, evoking his work in X-Men: Days of Future Past and X-Men: Apocalypse. Patrick Stewart reprised the role of Professor Xavier in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Kelsey Grammer returned to play Beast in The Marvels. The only theatrical release from Marvel Studios this year will be Deadpool and Wolverine, starring Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman, rumored to be stuffed with cameos.

Ignoring the frustrating hypocrisy of this approach, which simultaneously argues that these adaptations were betrayals of the brand while ruthlessly mining them for easy nostalgia hits, it gets at one of the big challenges facing the X-Men as a brand in the modern franchise age, where the comic books are inherently secondary to the films and television shows adapted from those original comic books. It becomes hard for the comics to evolve, as they always have to line up with the films.

At its core, the X-Men franchise is about evolution. It imagines its superheroes as a separate species, a genetic deviation from human kind granted incredible gifts. To be fair, this concept began as a shortcut for co-creator Stan Lee, who balked at the prospect of coming up with separate superhero origins for every hero and villain. As he confessed, “I figured, hey, the easiest thing in the world: They were born that way. They were mutants!”

Indeed, it took a while for the X-Men comic to find its feet. Despite the work of writers like Lee and Roy Thomas, along with artists like Jack Kirby and Neal Adams, X-Men did not enjoy the immediate success of contemporaries like The Amazing Spider-Man and Fantastic Four. In fact, the book very quickly degenerated into reprints of older issues, before a last-ditch effort was made to revive the title with Giant-Sized X-Men, written by Len Wein and illustrated by Dave Cockrum.

That monster issue introduced a new team of X-Men, and relaunched the monthly title under writer Chris Claremont. Claremont would effectively oversee the X-Men line for the better part of two decades. He wrote the main title, Uncanny X-Men, but he also launched several spin-off series including New Mutants and Excalibur. He worked with artists like Cockrum, John Byrne, Paul Smith, John Romita Jr., Bill Sienkiewicz, Frank Miller, Alan Davis, and Jim Lee, among others.

Because the title was a second-tier property and because Claremont stayed with it for so long, he enjoyed a tremendous amount of freedom. As Alec Foege noted of the author, “In his mind, Claremont was writing the Great American Novel about complex characters who just happened to fly.” Under Claremont, the scope and the scale of the X-Men stories expanded. They grappled with aliens, demons, social issues, ninjas, and more.

Under Claremont, the X-Men didn’t just offer “the illusion of change.” The comic frequently upended its status quo. It introduced new characters and wrote out old ones. Villains like Magneto were allowed to evolve in interesting ways. The team could move to Australia. They could be stripped of their memories and powers, cast through the Siege Perilous. Claremont was allowed to spend years building to dramatic pay-offs and narrative twists, embracing a complexity rare in superhero comics.

This felt like a fitting approach to the X-Men, a way to distinguish the brand and the characters from many of their contemporaries, including other teams like The Avengers and Fantastic Four. Under Claremont, the X-Men became a comparatively literate and ambitious – and even mature – mainstream title. The flagship title, Uncanny X-Men, was the company’s highest-selling title for 17 years, between 1982 and 1998.

With all of this in mind, it’s no surprise that the X-Men were among the first of the properties to make the leap into the modern comic book movie boom. However, this turned out to be something of a mixed blessing. It became increasingly clear that there was only so far that the comic book publisher would allow the X-Men to evolve before they had to be reset back to default factory settings: the classic line-up operating a school while being “hated and feared” by humanity.

The comic occasionally took big swings. Writer Grant Morrison and artist Frank Quitely launched New X-Men, a bold title that promised to deliver on the potential of evolution within the X-Men brand. Morrison proposed a mutant culture, dabbling in issues of racial identity that extended beyond the classic persecution with pitchforks and flaming torches. This was the X-Men for the 21st century, with Morrison even ditching the classic uniforms for something more modern.

Morrison took big swings with New X-Men, imagining a mutant “baby boom” and a demographic time bomb. There was a promise that mutants would supplant humanity. They ended their run by killing off the characters of Magneto and Jean Grey. It was a bold departure from what came before, an evolutionary leap forward for the title. It was one of the most exciting titles that Marvel ever published. However, when the run wrapped, the publisher immediately began backtracking.

Magneto was not only resurrected but – through an incredibly convoluted continuity – exonerated of the atrocities that he had committed. The costumes came back. Desperate to get back to the idea of mutants as a persecuted minority, Marvel depowered millions upon millions of mutants to reset the status quo. The mutants were largely contained and quarantined. It was deeply, deeply frustrating, because it felt like there was a moment when the X-Men could be exciting and refreshing.

Something similar happened with Jonathan Hickman’s relaunch of the franchise in House of X and Powers of X, which imagined the mutants creating their own society on the island of Krakoa. It was an ambitious high-concept, grappling with thorny issues of identity and nation-building, exploring the concept of power and culture. It was something new and daring, a rare big swing for a major comic book property. Of course, that status quo lasted less than half-a-decade.

For all the criticisms of Fox’s management of the X-Men brand, there were rare moments where the studio delivered on that potential. Noah Hawley’s Legion is far more formally ambitious and thematically rich than any of the television shows produced by Marvel Studios, and it’s unlikely anything that interesting will be allowed to happen with the brand again. It’s impossible to imagine Marvel Studios doing anything as compelling with its characters as James Mangold did with Logan.

Of course, this is just how comic books work. There is a default mode for most characters, and they inevitably revert to it. There have been all manner of clumsy continuity resets for characters like Spider-Man or Superman. However, the X-Men brand feels like something separate. Historically, it has enjoyed a greater degree of freedom to embrace bold artistic directions, which fits thematically with the franchise’s focus on evolution as a concept.

It’s particularly frustrating because part of what makes comics so useful to these large corporations as intellectual property farms is their potential to generate new takes and ideas. On X-Men: The Animated Series, Bishop (Philip Akin) was introduced just two years after he first appeared in the comics. This constant cycle of resetting continuity and the status quo is one of the reasons that these comic adaptations end up recycling old stories like The Dark Phoenix Saga or The Black Costume Saga. Maybe it’s time to see Krakoa or New X-Men?

To give credit where it is due, the recent animated X-Men ’97, despite being a sequel to The Animated Series, has drawn fairly overtly from both New X-Men and the Krakoa era. Recent episodes evoke the opening of Morrison’s run. Naturally, it remains to be seen how this will play out. As shows like WandaVision and the first season of Loki demonstrate, Marvel Studios has a history of promising bold swings only to pull back at the last minute. There’s also the fact of showrunner Beau DeMayo’s departure from the series.

With the release of Deadpool and Wolverine in July, there will have been fourteen live action X-Men movies released in theatres over the past quarter of a century. It seems inevitable that Marvel Studios are going to go back to some variation of the school and the classic line-up, which isunlikely to combat general audience fatigue with superhero movies. So much is riding on Marvel Studios’ X-Men adaptation, why not take the opportunity to let them evolve?