The All-New, All-Different X-Men

Marvel restarts a cancelled book with an international cast and hands it to a writer who stays sixteen years. In five years the title goes from reprint filler to the best-selling comic in America. It gets there by killing its most powerful character. Almost everything the modern X-Men line assumes about itself is decided in these sixty issues.

Why you are reading this era

The X-Men of Era 1 failed. Uncanny X-Men #67-93 were reprints, because the book could not sell new material. Giant-Size X-Men #1 in 1975 restarts it with a team that is still, fifty years later, the team a general audience pictures. If you want one entry point to the mutant line, this is it. Nothing before it is required reading.

Chris Claremont writes Uncanny X-Men #94 to #279. What he brings is interiority. His characters have inner lives that contradict their dialogue, they change across years rather than resetting each issue, and the plots run in the background for dozens of issues before they land. Dave Cockrum designs the cast. John Byrne, from #108 to #143, gives it the clarity and the acting that turn it into a mass-market book.

The threads that start here are long. Wolverine’s unknown past is planted in #94 and is not answered until the 1990s. The Shi’ar empire arrives in #97 and keeps the X-Men a cosmic property for the next forty years. The Hellfire Club and Emma Frost arrive in #129 as villains and become, eventually, the leadership. Mystique debuts in another book entirely and becomes the line’s most durable antagonist. Kitty Pryde arrives in #129 as the reader’s way in, and the trick works so well that the line repeats it every decade.

Then there is Jean Grey. The Dark Phoenix Saga is the era’s peak and the franchise’s most adapted story. It is also the source of Marvel’s most consequential retcon, and the reason no death in this universe has been permanent since. Read it as published. Learn about the retcon afterward.

Outside the X-office these are quieter years, with two exceptions you need: Jim Starlin finishes the Thanos story that Infinity Gauntlet pays off in 1991, and Frank Miller arrives on Daredevil in 1979.

The reading list

Read Track A straight through. Drop into the other tracks at the checkpoints below, which are placed by cover date, so the tracks stay in step.

Track A: Mutant

Classic X-Men reprints Uncanny X-Men #94 onward with twelve new pages per issue, mostly by Claremont and John Bolton, plus inserted panels. It is genuinely good and it is a trap for a first-time reader, because the backups explain motivations the original issues deliberately withhold. Finish the era first, then come back.

Track B: Avengers and cosmic

Two things here are worth your time and the rest is context. Starlin’s Warlock is the whole reason Thanos is a character rather than a design, and it ends properly rather than trailing off, which is rare for the period. The Korvac Saga is the best Avengers story between Kirby and Busiek: a godlike man wins, the entire roster dies, and the story argues that the Avengers were wrong to attack him. It is also the clearest picture of who the 1970s Avengers were, which matters when you reach Era 3 and the roster starts turning over.

Track C: Street level

Spider-Man folds in here. His books in these years are street-level crime and soap opera, and there is not enough of either to justify a separate track.

Daredevil #158 is the single most important issue on this track. Miller is only the penciller, and Roger McKenzie is still writing, so the dialogue stays ordinary while the layouts turn into something no other Marvel book was doing. Read the ten issues to watch the transfer of control happen in real time. Miller takes the scripting at #168 and creates Elektra, which is 1981 and belongs to Era 3.

Track F: Solo and standalone

Ms. Marvel is the one to actually read, and read it for the thread rather than the craft. Claremont takes over at #3 and spends twenty issues building Carol Danvers into a lead, which is what makes Avengers #200 land as badly as it does and Avengers Annual #10 land as hard as it does. Mystique walks out of this book and into the X-Men, so #16-18 pay for themselves on their own.

Cross-book checkpoints

Days of Future Past belongs to Era 3 by date and by function. It introduces Rachel Summers, Destiny, Pyro and Avalanche, and it starts the Brotherhood and Senate-hearing plots that run for the next four years. Stopping this era at #140 keeps the Dark Phoenix ending as the ending.

Characters introduced

Retcon notes

The published ending was not the planned one. Claremont and Byrne intended the Shi’ar to strip Jean’s powers and leave her alive, and the book’s editor approved it. Jim Shooter, then editor-in-chief, refused, on the grounds that in Uncanny X-Men #135 the character had destroyed an inhabited star system and killed billions, and could not then walk away depowered. The original version was published in 1984 as Phoenix: The Untold Story, and What If? #27 dramatizes it. Read either only after #138.

Judge the retcon on what it costs. It was engineered to relaunch a team book, and it works: Jean returns, X-Factor sells. But it removes the point. The 1980 story is about a good person who is given unlimited power and is corrupted by an ordinary manipulator, and who then executes herself because she cannot be trusted. The 1986 version says an alien did it. Read the original, know the fix exists, and treat every later Phoenix story as built on the fix rather than the original.

Adaptation notes

Checkpoint