Marvel’s X-Men Problem: From Secret Wars To Inhumans Vs. X-Men

In the aftermath of 2015's Secret Wars, Marvel launched the X-Men in a controversial new direction. We learned that the Terrigen Mists circulating the globe had become poisonous to mutants; as a result, both the X-Men and the Inhumans were faced with a terrible problem. If the Terrigen Mists continued to spread, then the mutant race would become extinct; if the Terrigen was destroyed, then the Inhuman race would become extinct. That arc's now building to a head in the current Inhumans vs. X-Men event, which revealed that the Terrigen Mists would soon contaminate the entire planet. Within a matter of weeks, Earth would literally become uninhabitable to mutants, and no more mutants would be born. This led to the X-Men launching a desperate attempt to destroy the Terrigen, but the younger Inhumans stalled their plans. But the arc hasn't landed at all well, and there are real problems - issues that are still undermining the story. Where did Marvel go wrong? The Secret Wars Time Jump When Secret Wars came to an end, Marvel chose to set up an eight-month time-jump. It was a useful tactic, allowing them to set up a creative new status quo. Stories were advanced; Angela became Queen of Hel, Spider-Man's Parker Industries became a powerful multinational corporation, and the X-Men had left the Earth for Limbo. We soon learned that something terrible had happened in the missing eight months; the Terrigen Mists had become toxic to mutants, spawning a mysterious plague that was referred to as the M-Pox, and Cyclops had led the X-Men into a war against the Inhumans. Whatever he'd done was so bad that he was viewed as a modern-day Hitler, a man who had attempted to commit genocide against the Inhuman race. He'd once again caused the world to hate and fear mutants, while the X-Men fled the Earth to a demon dimension that wasn't contaminated by Terrigen. Here's the problem; with setup like that, you need a real payoff. Worse still, Marvel knew they would have to go by a process of 'show, not tell'; sooner or later, they'd have to reveal just what Cyclops did. Death Of X Towards the end of 2016, Marvel released the Death of X miniseries - a four-part arc written by Charles Soule and Jeff Lemire. This miniseries stepped back eight months, and showed the X-Men first learning of the Terrigen crisis. Cyclops's reaction was to take charge of the X-Men, launching a plan that successfully transmutated half of the Terrigen cloud into a harmless red mist. In response, Black Bolt killed him. In a fascinating twist, we learned that this hadn't actually been Cyclops at all. He'd died shortly after being exposed to the Terrigen Mist; a grieving Emma Frost had projected images of Cyclops into everyone's minds, seeking to give meaning to his death. The Problems Build There are two major problems, though. The first is that the conflict between the X-Men and the Inhumans just feels rather artificial. It's clearly one step short of trolling X-Men fans; many had long argued that the X-Men were being phased out in favor of the Inhumans. In setting up this controversial arc, Marvel chose controversy over consistency. Fans could see no reason why weather-manipulators couldn't gather the Terrigen into one place and then contain it. This shouldn't even cause a problem for the Inhumans; historically, the Inhumans had preferred the Terrigen to be contained in chambers, with Inhuman candidates stepping into the Mists as part of a sacred rite. Inhumans vs. X-Men actually made this problem worse. The X-Men's strategy for destroying the Terrigen was more than a little bemusing; Forge devised a machine that could gather all the Terrigen in one place, and the X-Men would then incinerate it. So the proposed fan-solution became even more persuasive, and the whole conflict lost meaning as a result. The second problem is tied to this. The post-Secret Wars comics had discussed Cyclops as a genocidal monster, and had literally compared him to Adolf Hitler. Worse still, those comparisons had been made both by X-Men and Inhumans; the idea has been a constant refrain in Dennis Hopeless's All-New X-Men. References had been made to Inhumans dying at Cyclops's hands. But Death of X didn't reveal anything genocidal; Cyclops (apparently) destroyed half the world's Terrigen in a single strike, and Black Bolt responded with an apparent act of murder. To compare an act of self-preservation, in which Cyclops destroyed half the Terrigen Mists, to Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust seems more than a little overstated. That's particularly the case when fans could easily see a solution to the conflict, one that didn't lead to one of the two races being rendered extinct. What Went Wrong? The heart of the problem was clearly at an editorial level, with a lack of planning. It seems pretty cobvious that, back when this arc started in the aftermath of Secret Wars, Marvel simply hadn't decided what it was that Cyclops had done in the first place. It was genocidal, monstrous, truly evil; beyond that, it simply hadn't been planned out. As a result, writers like Dennis Hopeless incorporated this into their stories, building up the story of Cyclops's evil. But when it came to telling the story, Charles Soule and Jeff Lemire faced a very real issue. They had to both make Cyclops's actions unacceptable - and in-character. They had to sell this story as something that Cyclops, a man who had railed against extinction time and again, would actually do. And they couldn't achieve it, precisely because Scott Summers is no Adolf Hitler; nor is Emma Frost, even if she was the actual architect who destroyed half the Terrigen Mist. This is the fundamental problem with using an eight-month time-jump; if you haven't planned it out well enough, then sooner or later your story falls apart. This was the most visible example of poor planning, but it wasn't even the only one; the mysterious Terrigen-inspired M-Pox plague was badly thought out, too. Different writers and artists portrayed it in countless different ways, and ultimately Charles Soule hand-waved this poor continuity aside by having Beast state that Terrigen affects every mutant in a different way. It was a subtle retcon, and it was done purely to wriggle out of a continuity bind Marvel had got itself into. The sad truth is that the last year's worth of stories haven't been good for the X-Men. A fundamental lack of planning has undermined most arcs from 2016; events that were set up to be massive have fallen flat. Meanwhile, an overall lack of logic - a desire to force through a narrative without thinking it through - has left fans bewildered, wondering how a genius like Hank McCoy couldn't see an obvious solution. I don't hold this against the writers; it's pretty clear they've done the best they can to deal with a bad job. Instead, the responsibility for this lies with Marvel's X-editors, who in my view really dropped the ball. Thankfully, this arc is nearly over. We're about to enter a new age - the "ResurrXion" era, which promises to abandon extinction arcs altogether. Personally, I think that's a good move.