It’s been a while.

This, of course, is a happy side effect of Marvel deciding to have two line-wide break points in 2015 – at the start and end of Secret Wars – giving nice long breaks where everything’s in mid-storyline and I can put my feet up and recharge.  Because the current relaunch has rolled out so slowly, we should get back to a more regular schedule from here on – Uncanny X-Men launched this week, just as Extraordinary X-Men is about to finish its first arc.  Soon we’ll be back to five regular X-books – Uncanny, All-New, Extraordinary, Wolverine and Old Man Logan.

That’s still taking us back to the levels of 1989.  For better or worse, after a long period of treading water, it does feel like the X-Men are entering a new phase of their history – one that’s going to be based around adjusting to reduced circumstances in more ways than one.

I’ll talk about the individual books as we get to them, but let’s look at the bigger picture.  The line-wide angle for mutants after Secret Wars is that the Terrigen Mists are apparently going to wipe out mutants by poisoning and sterilising them, so the mutants are all being driven into retreat, and, oh yes, everyone hates mutants again, like they did before and pretty much every year since 1963, but this time extra-specially so.  Meanwhile, the Inhumans are in the ascendancy instead, and I guess by implication we’re meant to take it that Marvel’s typical bigot on the street isn’t so bothered about them, given how especially fired up he apparently is about mutants right now.

I say this is the line-wide edict.  Actually, thus far, only Extraordinary and Uncanny are really working with it (and both are making it the core of their series).  All-New X-Men and All-New Wolverine are… yeah, pretty much ignoring it.  But Marvel as a whole are big on it.  It’s being used in Uncanny Avengers (which, no, I still don’t regard as an X-book), and New Avengers (where Sunspot’s a regular character), and even Squirrel Girl has gone to the trouble of dodging it by making her Not A Mutant After All.

So Marvel are really quite keen on it.  Why might that be?

Obviously, it’s not because it’s a good idea.  Because it isn’t, for a variety of reasons, of which more in a bit.  No, we are in the sodden drizzle of corporate synergy here.

Now, to be clear, I don’t subscribe to any sort of conspiracy theory that Marvel are trying to kill the X-books, or some such thing.  If you’re trying to kill an imprint, you don’t put the likes of Brian Bendis on it, or Mark Bagley, or Humberto Ramos, or even Greg Land.  Nor is it quite as simple as saying that Isaac Perlmutter, who hates all that is good and fluffy, hates everything where Fox have the film rights.  Yes, he axed Fantastic Four, but that book wasn’t selling.  Do you see him dialling back on Deadpool comics?  No, me neither.

It’s a subtler issue.  All else being equal, Marvel quite understandably see more value in the properties where they can co-ordinate across media, and the X-Men don’t fall into that category.  And since they like the mutant concept but can’t use it in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, they’re trying to plug the Inhumans into that gap, and that, due to the aforementioned corporate synergy, leads to the Marvel Universe Inhumans being repositioned similarly, which, well, kind of shoulders the X-Men aside and forces them into a different role.

There’s a looming problem here, which Marvel is kind of hoping will go away.

The looming problem is that we’re a couple of years into this whole Inhumans push now, and the comics-buying public remains stubbornly unmoved.  On the most recent sales charts, for November, Uncanny Inhumans #2 limped in at number 59 (estimated sales 41K), compared to Extraordinary X-Men #2 at 24 (estimated sales around 65K).  Not exactly great sales by X-Men standards, but even less of a market endorsement for the Inhumans.  Marvel must know it, but it’s not putting them off.  The philosophy seems to be: you can take a horse to water, and if the bastard won’t drink, you shove a feeding tube down its throat until it learns.

Please note, though, that the fact that Marvel are sticking doggedly by an idea that the public isn’t initially going for is not, in itself, a bad thing.  On the contrary.  The Marvel and DC Universes are both gerontocracies, dominated by superannuated properties which have stubbornly refused to move aside and make room for new ideas.  The X-Men have no right to exist, and a strong case could be made that in a truly healthy market, the book would have ended in 1988 or so and been replaced by something entirely different.  It’s long overdue, you could argue, for Marvel to start pushing some different concepts at the expense of the old guard – as they’ve been doing with Guardians of the Galaxy or Ms Marvel.

But Inhumans isn’t a new concept; it’s an equally elderly one which has never been able to carry a series, and is now being clunkily re-tooled into a cross between the X-Men and Game of Thrones in order to dovetail with Agents of SHIELD.  So we find ourselves in an awkward mess where the Inhumans (who aren’t very popular) are trying to be the X-Men (which they were never designed to be), forcing the X-Men (who used to be very popular but that was a while back now) to find a new role for themselves.

It occurs to me that there are two obvious thought processes that might have led to the current direction.  One is “If the Inhumans are going to be the X-Men, let’s make the X-Men the Inhumans!”  So the X-Men take the mutants off to become a hidden race in their own little haven.  There’s a certain poetic appeal to that, though there’s also a big practical problem, which is that the classic Inhumans formula isn’t all that popular.  The other is that they’re trying to be meta and play off the idea that the readers know (or at least think they know) that the X-Men are being shouldered aside by the Inhumans, by making that into the plot.

Either way (or neither), that’s where we are.  The X-Men are going to be Inhumans Classic for the foreseeable future.  Is it going to work – at least as a short-to-medium term idea until Marvel bow to the inevitable and get the Inhumans out of their system.

As a concept, it certainly makes the heart sink.  It’s not just the fact that being the Inhumans never really worked for the Inhumans either, or the fact that you can see the editorial strings – in fact, not only can you see the strings, they’re practically bedecked with fairy lights.  It’s also been clumsily set up.  The Terrigen Mists were released back in 2013, which makes it far too late to suddenly declare them a threat to mutants.  And the whole idea that sterilisation means there will be no more mutants simply doesn’t make any sense under the ground rules of the series.  Why wouldn’t existing mutants continue to manifest at puberty for 13 years to come?  Why aren’t new mutants being born to regular humans, just like always?

It’s also far too similar to the “no more mutants” storyline that came out of House of M, which was a few years back now, but by no means outside the statute of limitations for repeating a story in which (i) mutants face extinction, and (ii) the remaining ones all end up living together in a little haven.  And it’s not like the previous storyline was even any good – in fact, it was chronically bad until people like Mike Carey came on and starting trying to wrangle it into coherence.  The concept of mutants as a small band on the verge of extinction isn’t really very interesting; it breaks most of the central metaphors that give the book its appeal.  (This, again, is a long and complicated topic for another day.)

But the oddity of the X-books launched so far is that while the concept is pretty bad, the execution thus far is reasonably good.  If we politely turn a blind eye to the art on Uncanny X-Men for the moment, the X-books have a very strong line-up of talent right now, and the books are making an effort to avoid some of the pitfalls of recent years, keep the tone light (except in Uncanny, which is the X-Force book, so fair enough), and extend an olive branch of goodwill to sceptical long-time readers.

So there’s a conscious effort to bring out some familiar concepts and villains to establish continuity with the past.  All-New X-Men turns out to be a cheerful teen hero road trip book which pretty much couldn’t care less about the Terrigen stuff so far.  It’s a neat little thing, which reminds me of the Moore/Pollina X-Force stories from the 90s, and that’s a pleasant surprise.  All-New Wolverine, with X-23 as the new lead, has lightened her up too – if anything, a bit too quickly, but hey, a post-moping X-23 is certainly a more enticing prospect to read about.  Uncanny, well, that’s where we’re going to town on the darkness, but it’s a book fronted by Magneto and in some ways carrying on from his solo series, so what do you expect.  And Extraordinary is, you know, the actual X-Men, actually doing something about the problem.

This is important, because it’s where both Bendis and the “No More Mutants” arc went wrong – in giving the actual core X-Men nothing to do, even when something dramatic came up that plainly needed solved.  This time round, there’s a sense that the X-Men are really looking for a solution and that maybe they’ll find one.  Unexpectedly, Lemire’s stories, for all that they have to work with the dodgy premise, and despite a couple of questionable elements that I’ll come to in future posts, have the sense of the X-Men as a family on the ropes.  They’re closer to the spirit of Claremont than anything we’ve had in ages.  There’s something about the feel of the book that I really like, even when there’s a lot of more concrete things that look dodgy.

I still don’t like the direction but, and very much to my surprise, I’m pretty pleased thus far with the opening shots from the relaunched books.  So far, it’s overcoming my antipathy to the Inhumans.  How sustainable that’s going to be, well, that could be another matter.  They’ve persuaded me, or at least got me to consider the possibility, that this can be made to work – or worked around – for a year or two.  The line looks healthier than I expected, even if that comes with a big asterisk and a footnote reading “despite the central premise”, which is a hell of a caveat.

But they’ve persuaded me to give it some time.  As the books start wrapping up arcs over the coming weeks, we’ll see how this pans out.