Interregnum: There Is Only Secret Wars
It’s been a while since we’ve had any updates with the X-Axis, for fairly obvious reasons. The entire line is currently doing Secret Wars tie-ins, and so the entire line consists of stand-in miniseries which are presently halfway through (aside from Magneto, which is doing a “Last Days” tie-in).
We’ll deal with the individual Secret Wars X-books in due course, but this seems like a good time to throw out a few thoughts on the line and the crossover as a whole, if only to open a comments thread for it.
Now that we can see where it’s actually going, it seems that Secret Wars isn’t going to be doing any sort of sweeping line-wide reboot, and certainly isn’t going to be picking up the “threat to the timeline” stuff from All-New X-Men which, with hindsight, sits pretty oddly alongside a line-wide story in which the universe is destroyed and, presumably, remade with that flaw intact.
Instead, the model here seems to be the original “Age of Apocalypse” crossover, in which all the X-books were put on hold for four months and replaced with stand-in titles bearing varying degrees of resemblance to their notional parents. Some of those books got to do things that were important to the main plot; others got to kill time for four issues with What If…? stories that were tenuously tied to the main plot by some sort of side quest that played peripherally into the finale.
Secret Wars takes this basic format and applies it to the whole line, using the standard technique of modern Marvel event books: the core story is contained in a single miniseries, but at the same time, the premise of that story is pressed into service as a backdrop or springboard for a whole load of solo stories. This, fundamentally, is what Marvel seem to be looking for in a crossover concept these days: something that has big margins for other people to work in.
In theory, Secret Wars provides maximum flexibility in this regard, because its central concept is a patchwork world consisting of stray bits of a multitude of alternate Earths. It’s the Multiverse in physical form, with the difference being that instead of the other worlds being on the other side of a dimensional barrier, they’re just over there, a bit to the west.
The tie-in books seem to be bracketed into two types. There are the ones which actually make use of the patchwork nature of Battleworld by giving prominent roles to the Thors, or interaction between domains, or whatever. Then there are the books that are confined to individual domains. These ones – which cover most of the X-books – are basically stories designed for alternate worlds, with some polite concessions being made to Secret Wars, most obviously a search-and-replace on “God” and “Doom”.
It largely hangs together if you’re prepared to concede the basic premise that it’s an artificial world which is only being held together through Doom’s efforts, which include some sort of global mind-control designed to make everyone think that it’s always been this way, and to accept it as it is. Presumably this is why Doom wants to minimise people travelling between domains – to keep the contradictions manageable. That said, there are problems even within this set-up – most obviously, there doesn’t seem to be a very consistent line about the degree of interaction that exists between domains. Sometimes Doom is rigorously prohibiting any involvement, sometimes people seem unaware that other domains even exist, sometimes they seem to have trading relationships, and off on the side somewhere, Ghost Riders says there’s a global TV network. (Who’s watching it?) Maybe the idea is that the level of interaction varies between domains depending on what the locals can handle without violating the rules of their story – if your world was ready to take the idea of inter dimensional travel, then you’re ready to speak to the guys over the wall – but it’s not exactly clear.
At any rate, we have here the current form of Marvel crossover taken to its logical extreme – an event where anything can qualify as a crossover, just as long as it isn’t in continuity. There’s pretty much nowhere further to go from there, unless you’re going to do a crossover called Shit Happens.
In “Age of Apocalypse”, the end result was that the event (or at least its core books) told a fairly coherent self-contained story, and the upshot was that the status quo ante was restored with a few extra refugee characters running about as new cast members. The end result of Secret Wars looks at this stage to be similar; characters like Miles Morales and the Old Man Logan version of Wolverine get folded into the regular Marvel Universe, and perhaps we’ll get a bit of tinkering around the edges of continuity to remove stuff that’s really problematic to reverse in any other way. But basically the effect on the X-books will be pretty minimal.
This makes the last year or so of X-books look even weaker in hindsight; they don’t even seem to have been marking time for anything in particular, but just desperately filling the pages. On the other hand, unlike (say) Silk, the X-books do find themselves in the happy position of seeing this hiatus fall before an editorial and creative shake-up. It’s a natural place for a season break to fall, and may well end up serving as a palate cleanser before normal service is resumed.
Now that we’ve seen the first wave of announcements for Marvel’s revamp, and the October solicitations, it’s striking how few X-books there are. Of course, “few” is a relative term here. When I started reading the X-books, there were three of them. But to put it in perspective, the February 2015 solicitations had All-New X-Men #39, Amazing X-Men #17, Black Vortex Alpha, Cyclops #10, Magneto #15, Nightcrawler #11, Spider-Man & The X-Men #3, Storm #8, Uncanny X-Men #32, Wolverines #5-8, X-Force #15, and X-Men #24 – a total of fifteen X-books.
The October solicitations, which straddle the end of Secret Wars and the start of the Marvel Universe relaunch, offer Age of Apocalypse #5, Extraordinary X-Men #1-2, House of M #4… and that’s it. Of course, that’s an odd month, and the complete “All-New All-Different” line promise more – All-New Wolverine, All-New X-Men, Extraordinary X-Men, Old Man Logan, and Uncanny X-Men. But that’s still only five books. Granted that we can expect some double-shipping, and that one suspects there are more announcements still to come, it’s still a significant scaling back in the size of the line.
This, let’s be clear, would be a good thing. If the driving force here is Marvel’s feud with Fox over the film rights, who cares? The line has been overextended for years and a depressingly large proportion of the line has consisted of blatant page-filler. If Marvel’s approach to the line has finally shifted from “how are we going to fill eleven ongoing titles” to “how many titles does the market actually want”, so much the better. Jeff Lemire is a good writer, even though nobody would claim that his superhero books are his passion projects. Cullen Bunn’s promotion from Magneto to an X-Men title is welcome, though pairing him with Greg Land seems extraordinarily ill-advised. I’m not especially sold on Dennis Hopeless, but I gather he’s done better work off the X-books. It would be going too far to say that any of the announced post-Secret Wars X-books look like surefire winners. But most of them at least have possibilities. (I struggle to imagine anyone overcoming Greg Land, quite honestly.)
In the meantime, we have the X-books in a rather strange What If…? Greatest Hits mode, which I’ll come back in the coming months. What’s abundantly obvious, though, is that the trawl through the X-archive for potential springboards has turned up a seemingly endless string of dystopias. There are a couple of exceptions, most obviously X-Men ’92 (the animated series), but a general grimness prevails. It’s more than a little same-y, and it would be nice to think the X-books had some other moves in their playbook beyond “unremitting misery with no end in sight”. Hopefully this is something the revamped line will try to move forward from, rather than taking as a template. We’ll know by the end of the year.
I’m not sure why anyone would be surprised that Bendis’ “time is broken” storyline has gone nowhere; it’s Bendis, that’s what he’s been doing for years.
I hoped the Secret War tie-ins would not only re-tread of the X-Men’s greatest hits, but offer insight into the line post Secret Wars. I am glad Old Man Logan is coming to the main universe instead of original recipe Logan. I am probably being impatient, but by the time Secret Wars ends the line will have been on hitaus for 5 months (unless there are further delays). Though my wallet enjoys the break.
I just hope the X-line has a direction post Secret Wars. I remember when the line was haphazardly chugging along post Joss Whedon and House of M.
I’m enjoying Secret Wars so far. Not everything is good but there are more hits than misses.
Something went wrong the X-Men line post Utopia. Schism was an interesting idea even if it didn’t lead to many good stories, but now I’m not even sure what the status of mutants is. When the 5 lights arrived, the question was were we going to see mutants returning. We got our answer and then mutants started to return – but they seem to be returning at a very slow rate.
Cyclops’ revolution seems to have come to very little. The whole “Time is Broken” thing seems to have come to nothing. Legacy and X-Force were good books but they were also pretty marginal. Magneto has also been good but it seems to have no impact beyond its own pages.
It seems that the new status will be Mutants versus Inhumans. As with the Time is Broken and Summers’ Revolution ideas, it’s kind of promising but will the writers do anything with it and if they do, will the rest of the line acknowledge it?
So in the upcoming releases it says we are getting an issue of Uncanny this week. Really? It’s still going? I thought we were down to #600.
The time is broken storyline will be moved to Guardians now along with the mysterious character from the cover of New Avengers 1 that was revealed to be Dark Beast. You know the character that was hyped up to have been behind the scenes of everything since disassembled but you know, wasn’t.
I’m enjoying most of these as mindless fluff. None of them are doing what Age of Apocalypse did which was point out the importance of Xavier to the stories, there are no real character pieces. ( maybe Inferno but that Colosus seems kinda one note.) In the end they will all have the same theme that these characters are heroic no matter what the story is.
As an aside, I made the mistake of buying X-Men ’92 in print due to a better discount. It is a mistake. I found it to be bogged down with captions and balloons when you don’t get the ‘infinite’ feature.
On the whole, i’d say the Secret Wars x-books have been the weakest of the lot. For me, i dont think have been as entertaining as weirdworld or planet hulk or ghost racers or squasron sinister or a force. I think years of future past has been the best of the lot.
Generally Secret Wars works better if you’ve been following the Hickman Avenger stories, where this is the overall payoff. Regarding the FOX/Marvel dispute, it is funny that Mr. Fantastic and Doom are the main characters, considering that Marvel tries to avoid using characters owned by FOX in any meaningful way.
Marvel definitely seem to be positioning this a s the last Mr.Fantastic story. He and Sue are absent from the solicits (doom too) so when I read it I see it building to Reed making some sacrifice to restart the multiverse.
We do see from the covers for the issue twos that The Maker wil be staying as a bad guy.
It reminds me of reading Kingdom Come then getting to issue four and realizing it was the set up for Superman vs Captain Marvel.
For the months prior to Secret wars I tried desperately to decipher what it was going to be in regards of theme, plot, structure, and purpose…. Mind you I read Hickman’s run leading up to it. Now having read your thoughts and explanation, I still feel like I know nothing. Granted I haven’t read anything with a Secret Wars label on it, but it has always and even now sounds like the sugar induced ramblings of a 9 year olds’ fan fiction. Age of Apocalypse had such focus. Hell, whether you liked it or not House of My was even more focused than AoA. I was hoping somehow this would clean up continuity, instead this is like mopping up urine with a dirty diaper. Yay, let’s add more alternate reality/timeline characters! That’s going to make for some great clear storytelling and accessibility to new readers! I hate to say it but they need a reboot. Tony Stark and Forge’s origin are two examples that immediately comes to mind that necessitate a reboot. The X books have been a joke for so long. Between the unnecessary and under demanded solos (Storm?? ) and gimicky (all female X-Men) and redundant (two X-Force books??) titles out there, there’s no way the line can be cohesive.
Oh can anyone offer thoughts on how an old man Logan would fit into the 616?
Old Man Logan in 616- a man living among ghosts? Someone looking to make up for past mistakes?
“Between the unnecessary and under demanded solos (Storm?? ) and gimicky (all female X-Men) and redundant (two X-Force books??) titles out there, there’s no way the line can be cohesive.”
Yeah, but a reboot wouldn’t fix that. To get to a more cohesive situation, you need to consolidate the line to a handful of books and leave it there. Simply restarting with the same crop (which is what would likely happen) would simply re-create the situation it was supposed to resolve.
Funny how Marvel and DC seem to be better coordinated with each other than with themselves. DC’s Convergence is happening at the same time as this recycled Secret Wars and has a scaringly similar general plot.
@Odessasteps: I’d tend to agree that, at least judged as a group, the X-office has the weakest Secret Wars offerings. At least part of that may be that they’ve consistently taken the approach of just doing alternate-reality sequels to famous stories. They’re not along in that – Civil War, for example – but it’s clearly not compulsory, as some of the other books named after old stories have clearly ignored everything but the name (Planet Hulk, Siege).
I’m not surprised Bendis’ time/reality bending stories are not connected to Hickman’s. In fact, I can’t remember anybody ever promising they would be. Seems like fan assumption that people just ran with.
I remember in the podcast when Al Kennedy… or was it you Paul?… noted that the X-Men don’t or didn’t usually win.
They lost and then came back optimistically
Best SW books thus far have been Thors, Captain Marvel, Weird world, Seige, and A-Force. Granted it’s really too early to judge for most. Little Giant AvX is fun, X-Tinction Agenda and Inferno have some good moments. Overall I’m enjoying scaling back my marvel reading. Silver Surfer might still be the best thing they’re publishing. Has anyone been following the Inhuman books? Curious to see if Soule’s managed to make it work.
Can we expect a Hawkeye review now that the series has finished?
Huh. My computer ate my comment. Once more with less feeling:
I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the SW miniseries. Not only is it a great homage to the original, but it’s a great FF story. Loving it.
Glad Hickman has a page/issue limit on SW, too, since he does better work when he’s not endlessly leading up to something and instead makes things happen.
I’m looking forward to Extraordinary X-Men since those are some of my favorite X-characters. Unless, of course, the mutants v. Inhumans stuff is boring which it probably will be.
I’ve gotta say, I’m as close as I’ve ever been to jumping off Marvel after about 35 years. I probably won’t – the habit is too ingrained – but I’ve never been more dissatisfied with anything they’ve done.
The Secret Wars series itself is, y’know, whatever. Not as big a deal as it’s been made out to be, but whatever – mildly interesting. Would be better if it had come out on time instead of slipping.
The tie-ins are time-wasting, schedule-filling, money-grubbing garbage. Mostly a bunch of third-rate What If? stories. I was dreading them when I thought they were 4 issues each, and now it seems like they’re longer than that (I don’t pay much attention to solicits). I’d say that I can’t wait until it’s all over, except that what’s coming after, by and large, sounds even worse.
Marvel’s gone nuts on this diversity thing, both in terms of creators and especially characters. I don’t understand the mentality of reading a book (or not) because the creators have the same genitals or skin tone as me (or not). Yeah, I’m a white male, but I’ve really never given a thought toward buying or skipping a book based on the genetics of the person writing it.
And I don’t mind a good “substitute hero” story now and then, but it just seems so contrived to simultaneously have Black Cap, Woman Thor, Woman Wolverine, Woman Hawkeye, Asian Hulk, All-Woman Avengers, Black/Hispanic Spider-Man, maybe Gay Asian Giant-Man (based on the Ant-Man Annual) (and probably some others that I’m forgetting) all happening at once. Seems like it crosses the line from “diversity” to “pandering,” doesn’t it? (And I actually LIKE most of those substitute characters, but taken together, it seems like an overcorrection by Marvel.)
I’ve been taking the “all at once” change to be heavily influenced by the movies. IE: the actors contracts will run out, and if they need to make some of these characters “legacy” characters in the source material. Chris Evans has Civil War and Infinity War left on his contract, so now they’re positioned that either Winter Soldier or Falcon can take over.
It goes the same for Thor. Hemsworth has Ragnarok and Infinity War left. Though I personally would be more inclined to replace Thor with Beta Ray Bill, since you could more easily replace the mo-cap actor. But, diversity is the order of the day.
I don’t have much patience for the “quota-filling” approach to diversity, but I honestly do think there’s something worth pursuing in presenting a diversity of characters in fiction–if nothing else, it allows you to explore a wider set of character experiences, which is generally a good thing. When all of your characters are of the same type and background, the set of stories you can tell is narrowed a bit. But then, you need creators who can tell those stories without it sounding like tokenism (see, for example, the 90s Captain Planet approach).
I’m enjoying X-Men 92 a fair bit; it doesn’t quite work because the meta-villain seems to be 90s Broadcasting Standards, which seems a little antiquated now, but I appreciate seeing a “take” on that world type, and introducing characters not in the original cartoon.
“I’ve gotta say, I’m as close as I’ve ever been to jumping off Marvel after about 35 years. I probably won’t – the habit is too ingrained – but I’ve never been more dissatisfied with anything they’ve done.”
It’d never happen again, but i honestly think the best thing that could happen to the publishing division is for Marvel to go bankrupt again. They were never more creative than back when they were emerging from Chapter 11.
Now the comics are just an R&D lab for Marvel Studios. I’m honestly surprised longtime readers still enjoy reading them at all.
Even Paul’s reviews aren’t the same. Still worth reading but, and maybe it’s just me, but I just don’t detect the same level of joy and enthusiasm he seemed to have for comics back when he was reviewing something that he really liked or (especially) when reviewing something that he really hated.
I’ve never understood why the X-Books aren’t just consolidated into one weekly double-sized book. Whether that book was formatted a la ’52’ where its technically one story each issue but different writers are focusing on different sub-plots or you have an anthology format (say one lead story then two back-ups) it surely would be better than the miss-mash of ideas that are desperately trying to justify their own existence.
I’ve got to say, I’m kind of the opposite on these things. I had been down to reading at most one Marvel comic a month for better part of the last decade, but I’ve been having lots of fun reading some of the Secret Wars books. I suspect I bought more Marvel comics in the last month than I did from 2010-2014…
“I’ve never understood why the X-Books aren’t just consolidated into one weekly double-sized book.”
Probably because most comic book readers don’t have disposable income dripping out of their pores. That would cost readers the same as buying eight regular-sized monthlies. And then there’s the non X-Men comics they might still be interested in.
I would argue most comic book readers have too much disposbale income, which is how they can afford $20+ a week to buy books it now takes you 5-10 minutes to read. 🙂
“If Marvel’s approach to the line has finally shifted from “how are we going to fill eleven ongoing titles” to “how many titles does the market actually want”, so much the better.”
We should be so lucky that Marvel would make such a logical move…
And regarding Dennis Hopeless, I agree his non-X-titles were stronger. I really liked Avengers Arena and Avengers Undercover, and I’m even caring more about Spider-Woman when he writes her!
The time to make Cap a legacy character was when he came back as the boss of SHIELD, with Bucky as Cap. Or they could have just NOT brought him back then – they had the option of revealing he was time displaced rather than dead at any time.
I have no interest in Old Man Logan at all – is this seriously why they killed him off? Conversely, don’t mind X-23 being Wolverine.
It occurred to me that they could easily have had a more diverse Avengers team for years now – Wasp, Black Widow, Wanda, She-Hulk, Cage, some X-Men (like they did with Cannonball & Sunspot, and the Uncanny team), T’Challa or Shuri – the problem has been that they’ve got all these characters spread across 3 or 4 Avengers teams, rather than on one ‘flagship’.
i really miss the X-Axis weekly round up.
None of my mates collect comics and although i don’t often comment, it makes me feel like i have chatted about whats going on in the X World.
@Oscar – Same here. Those were good times.
I also miss the days of Paul’s X-Books Index. I really wanted him to cover Uncanny #94-#280
Both DC and Marvel are currently in a “throw it at the wall and see what sticks” phase, and that doesn’t say much for editorial. And as much of a social justice warrior that I’ve been proclaimed, I’m not enjoying the forced diversity coming from either company, because it’s obvious there are no real long-term plans behind any of it. They’re taking advantage of a political sea change and a shift in the zeitgeist, just like most other industries. The goal is purely money; riding a wave.
Secret Wars proper is standard Hickman: dry, dull, and not even trying for much in the way of entertainment. I’m a fan of Big Ideas as much as the next guy, but I’m not fond of seeing one or two Big Ideas played out over way too many issues. Hickman doesn’t write for the trade; he writes for the omnibus. I just wish pushing through his work was a satisfying experience. Age of Doompocalypse isn’t doing it for me.
The tie-ins have been a pleasant surprise, though. It’s basically a series of What Ifs, and I’ve always been a fan of those. I’ve noticed, though, that the further away from the Secret Wars, Game of Dooms, Thor Lantern Corps stuff these books get, the better they are. And the usual suspects (Ennis, David, Guggenheim) are making the best contributions.
Age of Apocalypse, as overly-“90’s” and extreme as it was, still holds up as a solid narrative. All of the tie-ins spoke directly to and added to the main plot, and there was very little in the way of filler. These days, the best stuff we get is basically designed to be filler.
@Dave: Mighty Avengers kind of did that, with a cast of largely of minority superheroes–Luke Cage,Spectrum, Blade, Blue Marvel, Power Man, White Tiger, Power Man, Falcon/Captain America, She-Hulk, Spider-Ma, Kaluu–but since it was, at best, the B-title to Hickman’s Avengers, it exacerbated the problem. The writer Al Ewing got some good mileage out of the racial/cultural issues that line-up allows, but it still seemed pretty bad from a larger optics perspective on Marvel’s part, putting all the minority hero Avengers on the “less important” team.
I, for one, am loving the burst of diversity at Marvel right now. (I don’t really know what’s going on at DC at the moment, nor do I really care.) I think it’s great that they’re throwing so many characters into legacy mode and pulling out black Captain America, female Thor, Muslim Mr. Marvel, etc.
Since not all of those characters are going to take off, it makes sense to create as many as possible. Once the dust settles, and a bunch of diversity-plus characters disappear for good, Marvel might be left with a cast that more closely resembles real life/their current audience.
It doesn’t hurt that they’ve got great talent on some of the books, too. Russell Dauterman? G. Willow Wilson? Yes, please.
The main problem I have with the diversity push is how quickly the majority of these characters are going to get plowed under. Marvel had their First! Gay! Wedding! a couple of years back…annnnd Northstar’s husband has literally shown up in two panels since that run ended. Avengers Academy – diverse line-up, either killed off for shock value or dropped entirely once the series was canceled. And so on and so on.
It’s not that I think Marvel’s targeting their minority characters or anything like that, but it does seem to indicate a lack of thought for what this new direction is supposed to do for Marvel in the longer term. Making diversity a selling point, then failing to nurture the resultant IP so that it takes root makes it really easy to get cynical about the whole endeavor.
There are worse problems to have though. I appreciate that Marvel’s at least giving it a shot, and some of the resultant successes have been gems — Ms. Marvel, the Gillen/McKelvie majority-LGBT Young Avengers, Loki: Agent of Asgard — or at least well-intentioned. I just wish it seemed like there was more in the way of follow-through with some of it.
As someone who was a fan of both Marvel and DC fairly equally for about thirty years, what I rather appreciated were the things that set them apart. Legacy characters had always been a DC thing, and I was never enthusiastic about Marvel going down that same road. It’s so Mort Weisingeresque.
On the other hand, I have to concede that there’s little else they can do in today’s industry. Nobody turns over wholly new ideas to either of the Big Two for them to own outright, which is completely understandable. That leaves them, broadly speaking, with only two options where “new” ideas are concerned: a) legacy characters or b) Frankenstein creations (putting together new franchises from spare parts lying around). Guardians of the Galaxy, for example.
@Suzene: I see what you’re saying, but I think that actually works in the long-term. For every new Ms. Marvel there’s…that one radioactive girl whose name I don’t remember? If you throw a bunch of diversity into your line, you’re going to end up throwing a lot of it right back out. But you’ll be left with the characters that really click with audiences, like Kamala Khan and Miles Morales. Isn’t it ultimately a good thing that so many non-white, non-straight, non-male characters can be axed and yet there are still a bunch doing pretty well?
They used to say in american sports that it wouldnt mean equality when minorities get hired to be managers, its when they are recycled and get hired for the second and third times.
The fact that Paul never got around to indexing the Claremont run. THE Claremont run, is a crime against – well, something, surely.
Oh, there’s another point on the diversity/legacy issue – wouldn’t it have made more sense to keep Falcon as Falcon, and have Patriot become Captain America? Might this have happened if the character hadn’t all but disappeared?
“The fact that Paul never got around to indexing the Claremont run. THE Claremont run, is a crime against – well, something, surely.”
I’d be in favor of Paul putting aside reviews for however long it takes him to index #94-280.
Same here, HR. Let’s hijack every comments section until it happens!!!
(Kidding, of course, but please please please make it happen, Paul)
Is there anywhere to access the old indices? (I am quite sure this was recently answered and that I should know already.)
He really should have gone back to the indexing when Bendis’s X-Men tenure began. It would have been the ideal time. He could have had the whole thing finished just in time for Bendis’s first plot advancement.
@Omar: Try the third box at the right hand of this window, named “Links”.
IIRC, it can be a bit tricky, though.
Maybe Paul just doesn’t feel it like anymore…
@HR
I can see it now. “And that’s the indexes for every issue of the Claremont run, and now we’ll check in on the current x-books, where the characters under Bendis’ tenure have just finished their first conversation”
I second or third the request to finish THE CLAREMONT run. I’ve had the pleasure to read quite a few issue by issue critiques as I’m sure a lot of you have (read if not written), but I would love to hear Paul’s take.
Re: diversity. Meh. I think it’s more throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. This era of comics is all about maintaining copyrights and film R&D.
I’m sure Paul would much prefer reading those comics anyway.
@Omar Karindu:
For your reading pleasure, a link to the old index: http://web.archive.org/web/20080430123654/http://www.thexaxis.com/indexes/intro.htm
Hmm.. you know, I think about the diversity for the sake of diversity trend these days, and then I also remember how Giant-Size X-Men #1 came about.
It didn’t come about by someone saying, “Hey, lets revamp the X-Men!” It was someone noting that DC, at the time, was doing a book with an international cast of characters (Blackhawks) and then saying “We should do a book like that too!”
They chose the X-Men because it was just collecting dust and they wanted to bring them back at some point anyway. But it might have been a very different type of comeback had they not used them for that specific purpose.
I don’t know if that counts as “diversity for diversity’s sake” so much as it counts as “let’s copy what the other guys are doing”, but I think it’s interesting.