We all fall in love sometimes. Comics fans are passionate beasts, loving deeply these strange and silly things we turn to month after month. Often, we’ll fall out of love for a while. Maybe that character we follow before all others falls under the reigns of a team we can’t get behind. Maybe you don’t spend time with your favorites for years and wonder if you’ll ever get back into the welcoming arms of your favorite corner of comics again.
But we always come back. I could never quit my beloved X-Men any more than you dedicated Superfans or Daredevil stans could give up the characters you love. But I came close. After AvX, the X-line was hard to love. Poor plots, misunderstood characters, and constant drawn-out events that never ended up being all that good drove people like me away. By the time IvX rolled around, I was so sick to the teeth of my own favorite superheroes. It was five long years of hard times for mutantkind (and I know for some those hard times extend anywhere from ten to twenty years longer).
The drought finally ended this year with X-Men Red. Jean Grey put together a team of like-minded mutants to revive Xavier’s dream after it was beaten, burned, drawn and quartered, broken, bent, and well & truly buried. Together with Nightcrawler, Wolverine, Honey Badger, Storm, Gambit, and a host of mutant freedom fighters, she wasted no time returning from the dead and setting mutant/human relations right.
She patched up broke hearts after the Death of Wolverine, personally rebuilt mutant/Inhuman relations, and left the floundering worlds of X-Mens both Blue & Gold to their own devices (stealing about half of the Gold roster as she did). Her team established their own mutant colony under Namor’s benevolent domain and immediately went to work fixing a broken world.
Ever battling a world that hates and fears them, the Red team faced down a Cassandra Nova, an incredible psychic entity who would weaponize that hatred on a grand scale. The world over, fears and prejudices were manipulated into racial hatred, the kind that brings people out of their houses with tiki torches, the kind that hatred crimes are born from. It was the X-Men book for our times. Each issue felt prescient and current. X-Men Red made me hopeful for the future.
And now it’s over. This week’s X-Men Red #11 is the last we’ll see of this crew. Tom Taylor took the base of hope and rebirth he built in All-New Wolverine and made it into something extraordinary. Artists like Mahmud Asrar and Carmen Carnero brought these adventures to beautiful life. Things aren’t beautiful because they last, I suppose.
They say not to mourn for issues lost but to celebrate the issues we got, and perhaps that’s right. The new Uncanny relaunch was always going to upturn the line. Searebro was never going to survive Namor’s current quest for world domination. At twelve issues (annual included), this is going to make a tremendous hardcover someday alongside shortrun beauties like Vision or Nextwave.
It’s all over but the crying. Pour one out for my favorite X-book since the original Astonishing. It’s going to be one hell of a finale.
I love X-Men Red. It is a pity that little articles are written about them. But thanks for your article. This is a find. Interestingly read!