Seeing the X-Men threatening to unleash the Brood on the American population and seeing characters like Kurt, Kitty, and Peter violently killing orchis soldiers was disturbing. Professor X made a dude kill himself even. One of the worst X-Men eras ever. Wolverine on the toilet would be a better concept than what we got.

"if you're an X--Men fan the last fifteen years have not been kind to you" "if you're a Spider-Man fan the last fifteen years have not been kind to you" "if you're an Iron Man fan the last fifteen years have not been kind to you" "if you're an Captain America fan the last fifteen years have not been kind to you" I mean....just....pointing something out.

"Iron Man has had a series of Kicked in the Balls runs.." That is one way of putting it!

The Betsy/Doug thing was in the Mojoverse Annuals, I don't think it was ever referred to again. But Betsy was engaged to a man between her last appearance in Marvel UK and New Mutants Annual #2. That Betsy/Rachel thing just came out of nowhere. I was confused as hell when they were just suddenly dating.

I kept expecting us to find out the xmen were actually locked up the whole time and the ones we’ve been watching are fakes

Some weirdos got involved in comic books to push their goals. They see comic books as a way to spread their ridiculous ideas. The sales decline shows that people see all that nonsense and are not having anything to do with it.

I just realized X-Men is doing a line wide relaunch with multiple teams, and Iceman isn't on any of them. Huh.

No, Stan Lee never intended Bobby Drake to be gay. I've heard that it was Scott Lobdell was the first writer to want to establish that. There are some subtle indicators in his writing but you have to look for it. I've been reading X-Men since the late '80s and, as I've stated numerous times here, I generally enjoyed it more than most long-time fans. I do think there were missteps and questionable decisions. Some series were definitely wastes of paper but I liked more than I disliked. But I also didn't think, "Well, this is X-Men now." I just looked at it as a huge story arc. I think if they had stuck with the original plan it would have been better received. Apparently, the ending of the whole thing was rushed. I've heard that the creative teams thought they had longer to set things up and create a stronger story. I would love to know the BtS stuff since it sounds pretty bad. A couple of the creators have sworn off working for Marvel again because of it.

_"Shut up and eat your ice cream"_ -- Perch

I’m in a fan discord, and everyone liked idea of Krakoa, but hated the execution. They don’t like all the weird character changes, or how unrepentantly evil the X-men have become. They’re checking out of marvel entirely. Every now and then someone will buy and scan a new issue to upload, and we have more fun tearing it apart then actually reading it. Marvel has ruined some characters for us, and no one is happy with modern Marvel.

I‘m kind of happy now that I never made it back into X-Men fandom despite some attempts. I missed out on HoX/PoX, but also on all of the Krakoan era. On the positive side, I‘m reading older Legion of Superheroes comics right now. They may not be perfect all the time, but I can enjoy them and it’s fun. So thanks for the recommendation, Perch.

I don’t think the group you’re calling the new X-Men fandom is actually new. I was on CBR for years, from around the mid to late 2000s to the mid 2010s, and at some point in the 2010s the X-Men sub forum started having a large loud contingent of users that basically wanted everything to be gay, and insisted upon things that we’re actually canon (at least at the time) being so. The Krakoa Era, or at least what it became, was tailor-made of this tiny yet vocal subset of the X-Men fandom that had a home on CBR and in the years since seems to have spread out to places like Reddit.

When you say that some stuff from the Krakoan era did a lot of damage and it will need a lot of work to undo it. Do you actually expect anyone to undo this damage? Is there anybody in the new creative team that would reasonably work on undoing damage as opposed to just move on and hope for more variant covers? I don’t know, nothing with the new X-Men announcements scream „fixing“ at all, just that Krakoa sold so bad, they had to do change for the sake of change, but without any vision. I fully expect to hear in about 12 months how good Krakoa was compared to what came next … it seems to be how things currently pan out everywhere.

Musing: a certain appeal of superhero comics is that the character could be you. Spider-Man is a fairly universal American story because he goes through the baseline experience of high school, college, and trying to make it in the world. The X-Men stopped being a comic that could be about you a long time ago. It's an incredibly elitist story now.

You don’t reboot a whole line unless it wasn’t meeting expectations. It’s clear that Krakoa was no longer viable for the X-Men. If you look at some of the writers of X-Men outside of Hickman, who’s really stayed with Marvel and gone on to have success with other books? The only one I can think of is Stephanie Phillips with "Wolf Cap" (I'm guessing she likes werewolves, so she actually tried on that book?). But none of the others have had much success or seem to be out of comics at the moment. All Marvel needs now are safe X-Men books-nothing too experimental and certainly no gay slash fic books. Just safe books that will at least keep and hold the audience they have left.

Disney and Marvel have been very busy completely destroying the brand.

Iceman being bi (mostly gay), could have been written well if they didn't change his personality🙄 Changing his personality was why I got pissed, erasing his love for his ex girlfriend Polaris also made me pissed.

It was some random person who said it would've been really interesting, when free of persecution and even death, all of the mutants of the world find new reasons to hate each other sand segregate over new ideological lines.

I tried to read the Krakoa stories but got frustrated with how out of character everyone was. Resurrection protocols removed any stakes. From what I read (mostly from the first year) there wasn’t much interaction with humans and they lived totally segregated from humans, which is Magneto’s dream not Xavier’s. Even during Utopia there were many stories of the team interacting with San Francisco. I was rereading my mid 2000’s run recently, which I think is the last time the whole run was great. Brubaker Uncanny, Carey X-Men (one of my personal favorite runs), Kyle/Yost X-Force. It’s extremely sad to see how far the line has fallen. I haven’t had an X-Men book on my pull list since 2020, and I’m a 30 year dedicated fan of the X-Men. I’m also not optimistic that the new era will be better or a return to form. I’m trying Uncanny and X-Men, but not sure I will subscribe, especially with a $5 minimum price tag.

Interesting how the last 15 years have not been good. What could have happened about 15 years ago that fundamentally changed everything?

Stat Trek fandom is currently going through the same thing

I've read HoX/PoX and nothing else that followed. I intended to only read the subsequent X-stories by Hickman, once in collected volumes, to see if I could glean something of Hickman's original intent. But I don't know.

Worst Era ever. Reading Fall Of X was one of my worst experience in comics. Turned all the X-Men in murderers and Professor X in a villain. I never will accept that Kitty,Nightcrawler,Polaris,Firestar and others killed humans. The dream is dead the X symbol is now tainted. There's no reason to the X-Men exist anymore. I never will read a new X-Men comic again while Marvel don't make a retcon with the reveal that all them were brainwashed by Krakoa or were plant clones all the time. The franchise is dead to me. No more heroic X-Men anymore.

If he's gay in the comics now and no one reads them, was he ever gay at all?

It's something you can get passionate about.Because when they change their sexuality to cater to their stupid fanfiction the whole lore is completely ruined. These fake fans that like, these weird sexuality changes are not fans.They don't care about The franchise Gatekeep

I liked the few years of Messiah Complex to the Second Coming. Overall, it was pretty good. Im a big Cable, New Mutants, Xforce mark. So that helped a lot.

Unreadable, that’s the key word. I bought the Immortal X-Men trades on Comixology and had a really, really hard time getting through them. I’d been following the adjectiveless title and for the life of me I can’t recall a single story, just bits and pieces that happened over time. Lots of grandstanding (Storm especially), lots of meta commentary on their audience, lots of talking and hugging (ironically, people had been complaining about Claremont’s bloated word balloons for years and here we are, ten times worse). Personally I’m put off by the notion that they have their own morality now, which in truth is amorality. Kurt making up his own religion? Total nonsense. I see people on Reddit worshipping this run and I’ve noticed something; it’s almost always people that got into comics with this run. But the comics sold poorly so I doubt there are that many of those. The Krakoan era is over but I’m not optimistic because the sensibilities behind it remain.

X-men as a franchise is dead. Bendis killed it and its just been a series of muppets kicking the stinking corpse.

I didn't mind the Krakoan Age. I'm 43, so I been reading X-Men since the 90s. This is not the best Era but I feel like it's not as bad as everybody says that it is. I have a comic book channel, sem comics and I covered the last 1/3 of the Krakoan Age and most people that watched loved it. I put out a poll to see if they wanted me to cover all of it and most voted yes. So I will be covering it and the new Era from the ashes too.

Remender’s Uncanny X-Force is still my personal GOAT for X-Men.

The worst era for any comic ever. It ruined the X-men

I think X-Men as a franchise has been in pretty bad shape since Bendis took over the books. It went on a downward spiral from there, until HoX/PoX. But then, as you pointed out, pretty soon it became clear that it would not last. I wish Hickman could have executed his vision, but Jordan White chose the side of the talentless hacks who ruined the one shot the franchise had at a recovery.

There is no possible way that Stan Lee always intended Iceman to swing for the wrong team.

I believe that the Krakoa era has done brand damage to the X-Men, and you see that some of the stuff that happened during it Disney is trying to walk back of since the X-Men are being brought into the MCU. Not sure that they can really come back from this unless they ret-con the entire Krakoa era out of existence.

“Where does it stand now”? In ruins, that’s where it stands, in utter ruin, and the only thing that can be done to save it is a total reboot, scrap everything from the last decade and start over. Because there’s so much that cannot be fixed, the biggest one being that they’re all clones, I’ve no idea why that isn’t on everyone’s mind all the time.

There were plenty of times I disliked Xmen. I don’t like Wolverine’s origin story. I didn’t like when Scott had a psychic affair with Frost. And let’s not ever talk about Chuck Austen’s run. I pretty much stopped reading after this but seriously whatever is going on now makes those eras look like Shakespeare. I keep hearing what’s going on and I am glad I didn’t jump back in. Xmen is over by the end of the 90’s.

I hope they don't forget the good stories from Dawn of X, like Fallen Angels 👀

idk about that xmen red take

House of X / Powers of X brought attention back to the X-Men franchise after years of stale, uninteresting stories. At least for me, the entire X-Men franchise was very dull after the House of M event, and even then that event was a mixed bag. I think a lot of the writers post-Hickman dropped the ball in Krakoa and I lost interest over time, but you can't say that the X-Men stories in the years prior to House of X were that engaging.

Bendis's run makes me think 1 of 3 things I have bad taste Everyone else has bad taste People hate bendis so much theybare willing to overlook some really good stuff The character work with Cyclops is really good in this book. Dont like jean though

What were the sales like? A bunch of squealing fans don't make up for poor sales... and a gang of angry critics don't outweigh good sales.

Pretty sure you will enjoy X-Force, Perch.

About two or three years ago I left a comment on one of your videos with very light criticism of the Krakoa era and someone left a reply saying "You're just a hater." I remember😅 thinking, why do you care. If you like it keep liking it. My opinion/taste should have no bearing. Just be happy you have something you like it because I got no X-Men and no Star Wars anymore.

Doing one and done stories wasn’t a problem. I know for some bizarre reason you’re very anti one and done, and some of the best comics are one-and-done stories. The Marvel GI Joe comic is one of the best team comics ever made and that’s just a series of one-and-done stories. The problem is those X-Men comics sucked. They’re badly written, Hickman‘s kept trying to do comedy and it never landed, the issues are poor paced, and they’re boring. Regardless of being one and done, if Hickman was trying the same stuff, they would’ve sucked. The Krakoa Era feels like Hickman set out to do his own Age of Apocalypse type thing, but wasn’t really allowed to fully commit, (The rest of the Marvel Universe remained unchanged) whatever his idea was (to me it feels like he was originally doing a version of Brave New World in the Marvel Universe with the X-Men [and mutant kind] on Krakoa as a take on New London) was abandoned along the way, the other writers completely lost the plot, and the whole thing went on way too long. Like Krakoa is the kind of thing you expect to maybe run for a year after the House and Powers of X comics finished...not around half a decade and then actually still be part of the main continuity even after it’s finished.

I actually liked the Si Spurrier X-Force. It had out-there weird ideas that it embraced whole heartedly. I found his Fantomex hilarious.

12:53 Nightcrawler's father wasn't a demon, just an ancient mutant. The demon thing was a retcon done by someone that wasn't even Chuck Austen. It was solved as far back as 2014 after Azazel was stopped with a basic power nullifying collar that deactivated his mutant powers. 13:03 Nightcrawler, in the state he's currently in, is worse than how he was under Austen. Because Spurrier did a worse retcon than Austen ever could, with low effort on every level and undermined everything that came before him. On top of this, he did that retcon while Nightcrawler was canonically going around pretending to be Spider-Man when all of Mutantkind and his friends were in very very deep trouble, all because of how low the sales were on any of the runs he wrote for the character.

6:27 I don’t know how you initially liked that, “no more death” is the most boring thing I can imagine, takes away all the stakes and it’s going to be nearly impossible to stop, and now you’re left with a bunch of clones. The actual X-Men are all dead, these are just impostors, and if I was reading it I couldn’t care less what happens to them.

Krakoa sucked and I’m glad it’s over. But IMO it was better than the terrigen crisis and the recent blue & gold era. Those were truly awful

Completely disagree on Duggans Iron Man. It’s been the best run of the characters in like 10 years.

I respect the Long time X-Men fans. But credit to Hickman for getting Krakoa all fans old and new talking X-Men. Everyone was talking about the X-Men, I was reading more DC at the time but, when news of the Gala and Powers of X, it gave X-Men a near Death of Superman buzz that it hasn't had in a long time.

I think it was mediocre for Dawn and beginning of Reign, but the last part of Reign and Destiny of X was great. Immortal, Red, SOS were great books. The rest I didn’t buy.

Perch, I love ya, man, but totally disagree about krakoa. Hell, I even liked duggans Iron man, and have been reading X-men comics since messiah complex. And I loved Ewings and Gillons x-men work. But to each their own, hope you like the next era more 😁

I’ve been reading since 1987 and it’s not as bad as you make it out to be. It was much different than anything that has come out before and I’m happy with that.