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

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.