Blue & Gold: Musings on Marvel's Flagship Sister X-Titles

“Nothing ever stays the same. It’s the very nature of mutation.” (X-Men: Blue #18)

This post is about catching up with Marvel’s dual flagship X-books: X-Men: Blue and X-Men: Gold. Both books embody the classic narrative techniques of X-Men, jumping from crisis to crisis while relationships (and bodies) continually transform. Yet in terms of quality these books couldn’t further apart. Blue has been my favorite mainline X-book since it’s debut and Gold has been little more than a by-the-numbers rehash of a general X-Men formula. I'm interested in how both books' creative teams deal with the constant call-backs and nostalgia-dominated narratives of the current X-Men milieu.

In 2015 Marvel relaunched all its X-Books only to do so again less than a year and half later in spring of 2017. This second reboot had an official name: ResurrXion. I wrote a bit about ResurrXion in my post about Iceman. Any Marvel reader knows that these constant company-wide reboots are an insufferable reality of modern-day Marvel Comics: the constant stuttering of titles driven by the desire for sales (#1's sell better). On the upside I’ve heard this likened to contemporary television where a season may run for 8 or 10 episodes and go on hiatus for an undetermined amount of time. This new reality allows a creative team to produce a great run of 16 or 24 issues neatly sealed off as a single entity. The Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino run on Old Man Logan is a good example. But just as often it makes continual reading a chore, producing a multitude of titles that never really get off the ground, never hit their stride, or get cancelled due to under performance, like Iceman and Gen X. It’s even harder to stay plugged in when these books suck or are simply mediocre. This problem is exacerbated as one is forced to follow a staggering number of overlapping titles that are constantly ending and beginning over again. Several plot lines in X-Men: Blue require you to read several issues of X-Men: Gold (which is nothing new in superhero comics). If X-Men wasn’t the series that I’ve been invested in since childhood, then I'd probably walk away from Marvel altogether until they sorted their shit out.

I’ll begin with the best. X-Men: Blue was a welcome surprise as the best-written and drawn book of the mainline X-Titles (which includes X-Men: Gold, Gen-X, Weapon X, Cable, Iceman, and Jean Grey as well as the continuation of the 2015 titles All New Wolverine and Old Man Logan). Blue is written by Cullen Bunn, who previously penned the mediocre-at-best Uncanny X-Men, which ran from the 2015 reboot until ResurrXion. Uncanny followed a team of bruisers (what the current Weapon X is now) and was primarily a continuation of the themes Rick Remender established in his amazing run on Uncanny X-Force (2010-2012), both share a similar tag-line of something about super-threats requiring equally dangerous solutions or some such War on Terror nonsense (but seriously the Remender book is among the greatest X-Men runs of all time). Bunn’s Uncanny was a dud for a number of reasons: it was clunky out of the gate, rushed through character introductions (a common problem in Marvel team-books), suffered heavily from Marvel-mandated cross-over events Apocalypse Wars and Inhumans vs. X-Men, and squandered a number of fascinating characters by having too many story arcs revolve around similar issues of former villains being untrustworthy (Archangel, Magneto, Sabretooth, eventually Monet, et al). It didn’t help that the book featured the garish digital coloring and inking that renders all pencil work as a generic sludge lacking in depth, clarity, or style. I was ready to write Bunn off after reading the entire run.

His work on X-Men: Blue has been phenomenal, especially considering the break-neck tonal shift from Uncanny. Bunn achieves a fluid transformation of narrative and character that recalls the format established by Claremont during his storied run. Relationships and character development happen on the fly as the team is constantly bouncing from dimensions and time-periods. Where one caper ends another takes off without warning. Little seeds of characters and events are sprinkled throughout and slowly germinate into compelling adventure stories, villains, and team crises. The artwork pops the books has a real sense of urgency.

The a great example of this structure can be seen in how the team is frequently picking up new members. Continuing the adventures of the time-displaced original X-Men from the 1960s (taking off where the 2015 title All New X-Men concluded), Bunn crafts a careening adventure serial that finds depth in the cast-away duplicates of the X-Men franchise. The book revels in its misfit nature: five out-of-time superheroes struggling to get home or to find a place in the modern day while dealing with being duplicates of their contemporary selves. Along the way they pick up two more doubles: Jimmy Hudson, who for all intents and purposes is another Wolverine (the son of Wolverine from the Ultimate X-Men comic book series from the early 2000s) and Bloodstorm, the vampire Storm that first appeared in Chris Claremont’s run in the late 1970s and early 1980s and again in the Mutant X title from the late 1990s and early 2000s).

The most recent arc, Cross-Time Capers, follows the team as they leap through different time-periods on a mysterious time-machine created by Magneto. The coordinates have been preset and the X-Men find themselves in the 2099 period, the 1990s era of Generation X, and in the last issue they end up in the Silver Age period of the 1960s. Each of these issues is an opportunity to loud up on references to now classic X-Men plot lines. What is worth noting here is how well Bunn accommodates these endless references to X-Men’s past incarnations, which often last only a single issue.

To zoom out for a moment, X-Men is currently yoked to an overwhelming emphasis on nostalgia. This has partly been the M.O. of the ResurrXion reboot, which promised a return to “what made X-Men great”. So far this meant endless references to past eras and a villain of the month format that continually returns old, forgotten, and obscure villains from previous runs. There is also a favoring of plot lines that enable constant visualization of previous X-Men incarnations. Charles Soule’s (phenomenal) Astonishing X-Men used the freedom of the astral plane to recreate famous X-Men moments and the Lemire/Sorrentino run on Old Man Logan concluded with a multi-issue tumble through time that featured iconic moments and costumes in Wolverine’s publication history. Both Blue and Gold recently featured a Mojo Worldwide cross-over where Mojo thrusts the X-Men into illusory combat scenarios where the X-Men’s costumes keep changing into older variations to suit the simulation of past X-Men events. These references are now part of the genetic make-up of the X-Books and more often feel like fleeting references rather than good storytelling.

I’m indifferent to the principle of these callbacks, despite wishing for new stories and characters. Overall, it seems as though Marvel has trapped the X-Books in this endless rehash of their greatest hits. The question then becomes which books are good at working with this new terrain. Cullen Bunn has produced the best work regarding these nostalgia trips with both his issues of the Mojo Worldwide cross-over and now the Cross-Time Capers arc. He folds everything into an over-arching theme of mutation and duplication. The dense history of X-Men comics becomes the DNA of the constantly mutating world around the characters. The characters and events are never in stasis, but constantly transforming and the struggle of the X-Men is to orient themselves to this new reality. The constant call-backs are integrated into Bunn’s themes of narrative misfits and castaway duplicate characters, thus making the adventure serial about transformation, orientation, and ceaseless change. Even the duplicates are constantly moving into new directions away from being carbon copies of their older contemporary selves.

This post is already much longer (and later) than I anticipated! So I’ll offer a few brief comments on the sister title X-Men: Gold. The book has really struggled to find a unifying theme or idea. I’m not as familiar with scribe Marc Guggenheim’s work, but Gold suffers from feeling like paint-by-numbers X-Men. It features a classic team engaging in classic X-Men scenarios, but nothing seems to pop. The iconic characters lack any of the depth that typically defines them. Gold picks up right where Extraordinary X-Men left off. Extraordinary—the flagship title of the 2015 reboot—has a special place in my heart as one of the great missed opportunities for X-Men. Written by my favorite writer Jeff Lemire—and filled with all of his key themes of dysfunctional families and childhood trauma—with artwork by Edgar Delgado and Jay Ramos, the book began as a knock-out. But as typically happens, the talent was squandered on two inane (and I mean absolutely stupid) company-wide cross-over events. The first being Apocalypse Wars, which felt like an under-cooked tie-in to the film X-Men: Apocalypse and the other being Inhumans vs. X-Men, which much like Marvel’s Civil War books, was another forced and sloppy marketing stunt that pit good guys against other guys. Despite these set-backs, Lemire crafted a nuanced book that slowly unfurled deeply felt emotional and spiritual crises for all of the character’s involved. Nightcrawler, Colossus, Magik, and Storm functioned as a complex family unit, complete with long-standing baggage and messy relationship histories.

When that book ended a one-off title called X-Men Prime (written by Guggenheim) transitioned that team into the setting of X-Men: Gold. But all of the character dynamics are lost. My criticism isn’t that it’s not a continuation of Extraordinary, but rather that Guggenheim doesn’t seem to know what to do with any of these characters, in a similar way that Bunn didn't know what to do with Uncanny X-Men (2015-2017). Issue after issue the team fights a string of forgettable villains: a new Brotherhood, a momentary encounter with Mesmero, and currently a generic space goblin named Kologoth who first appeared in the first arc and is now a major antagonist in The Negative Zone War arc. The endless fight scenes suffer from crap artwork that often leaves out crucial elements of sequential storytelling and the characters speak in constant one-liners (Old Man Logan) or platitudes that suggest deeper relationship issues (Kitty Pryde and Colossus). It lacks vision and style.

I’ll end on a bit of conjecture. It seems that part of the problem with current X-Books is that each aspect of classic X-Men comics has been extracted and isolated into their own titles. Instead of having a single book (or just a couple) that includes romance, adventure, whimsy, conspiracy, brutality, and slapstick, each of these elements is isolated to its own book. Blue, which is much more of a whimsical romantic adventure excels under its creative team, but Gold, which is limited to brutality and conspiracy, is almost always generic and lifeless. This is just one girl’s opinion. Anyway, thanks for reading.

references:

1. X-Men: Blue #16 w.Cullen Bunn p.Thony Silas Pub. Nov. 29, 2017 Read 1/4/18
2. X-Men: Blue #17 w.Cullen Bunn p.R.B. Silva Pub. Dec. 13, 2017 Read 1/4/18
3. X-Men: Blue #18 w.Cullen Bunn p.R.B. Silva Pub. Dec. 27, 2017 Read 1/4/18
4. X-Men: Gold #16 w.Marc Guggenheim a.Lan Medina Pub. Nov. 22, 2017 Read 1/9/18
5. X-Men: Gold #17 w.Marc Guggenheim a.Ken Lashley Pub. Dec. 6, 2017 Read 1/9/18
6. X-Men: Gold #18 w.Marc Guggenheim a.Ken Lashley Pub. Dec. 20, 2017 Read 1/10/18
7. X-Men: Gold #19 w.Marc Guggenheim a.Lan Medina Pub. Jan. 3, 2018 Read 1/10/18
8. image 1: X-Men: Blue #16 cover art by Arthur Adams
9. image 2: X-Men: Blue #1 cover art by Arthur Adams
10. image 3: X-Men: Gold #16 cover art by Ken Lashley