For the longest time, I would have best described myself as comic book-adjacent. I went to see all of the superhero movies and I played games starring Batman and Spider-Man, but I wasn’t actively keeping up with comic storylines. I would pick up collected editions of the seminal stories (Watchmen, Batman: Year One, Civil War), but I only kept up with one or two ongoing Star Wars series that I would buy up back issues of once every couple of months.
But almost a year ago I read this article on Kotaku, a recommendation of the newly relaunched X-Men line that was still in it’s very early days. I would consider myself semi-familiar with the X-Men. I had seen most of the movies (for better or worse) and knew who the key players like Charles Xavier, Magento, Wolverive, and Jean Grey were. A major reason why I hadn’t gotten into comics more before then was that starting in the middle always seemed impossible, so I saw this as the perfect opportunity. I went to a couple comic stores in my travels to stock up on the issues I had missed already and then signed up for a subscription to get new issues as they came out.
I was not prepared for the dense maze of lore and continuity that was already present in these stories, or how weird it all could get. But that’s exactly why I’ve fallen in love with all of it.
Here are some things that happen just in House of X and Powers of X (pronounced “House of Ex” but “Powers of Ten” because why not?), the introduction series that launched “Dawn of X,” as this new line is called (spoilers ahead):
Charles Xavier and Magento have teamed up. They teamed up because Moira X is actually a mutant who has lived multiple lives and discovered that mutants go extinct in all of them. The solution to this problem involves Charles forming a bond and communicating with Krakoa, a giant island that is also a mutant. Through this connection, Charles discovers a way to use a subset of mutants called The Five’s powers along with his own psychic abilities to bring any mutant back from the dead. Because of this and some super-drugs they make and sell, they organize Krakoa into a government and become a global superpower overnight. In addition, they extend the invitation to join Krakoa to all mutants, so a bunch of villains like Apocalypse and Mister Sinister are heroes now. They also are focused on delaying humans discovering advanced A.I. robots that always lead to the downfall of mutants.
All of that happens in twelve issues. And that’s just the short version of it, there are a million details I’ve left out. From there the X-Men comics have branched out into multiple ongoing series, each focusing on a mostly seperate group of mutants with wildly different objectives and tones. While they’re not all prominently featured, there are now hundreds of named characters all on this island together.
While it can be overwhelming, confusing, and weird as hell at first, I believe that’s part of the charm and brilliance of this new line of comics. Prolific and lauded writer Johnathan Hickman writes the main X-Men series and oversees the rest of them, and he does a fantastic job of making this dense mess open up to readers. The writing uses the preexisting relationships the mutants have to not only give nods to longtime readers, but to provide context for who everyone is for new readers. You might not know who Emma Frost and Sebastian Shaw are, but their icy first interactions immediately positions them as enemies turned uneasy allies. In a way I almost prefer this way of experiencing it, as it feels like discovering part of a world that’s always been there.
The huge collection of mutants and histories means that writers have been given pretty free rein to do what they’d like as well, which leads into all of the weirdness I love. In what other collection of superheroes could you have a standard team that has fought old ladies and aliens (X-Men), a magic powered team that operates almost entirely in Camelot alongside a baby who turns into a dragon (Excalibur), and a gritty black ops team doing spy work involving evil plant people (X-Force)? No matter what your taste in genre is, there’s something for you in Dawn of X. My two personal favorite lines are New Mutants, which follows a collection of super dumb but super eager teens and young adults getting into trouble in space, and Marauders, which finds Kitty Pryde as the captain of what’s basically a pirate ship commissioned to smuggle goods and rescue mutants in need. And because timelines in comics really don’t matter at all and all of these stories take place in a nebulous void where they only slightly impact each other, it let’s readers pick and choose what they want to engage with.
It seemed like a daunting task when I first picked up this new X-Men series, but that soon gave way to a sense of excitement and fun as I realized just how wild and engaging these stories were. Most of the series in Dawn of X are either still in their first 10 or so issues or just recently beginning, so it’s still a wonderful time to get into them. It might be dense and it is definitely weird, but that’s what makes it great.