Line Expansion and the Late Eighties

One X-book becomes five. One cosmic writer comes back and builds the story the movies will spend eleven years adapting. Marvel learns that a #1 with a shiny cover sells two million copies, and the line starts writing for the speculator instead of the reader. The best comics of the decade and the worst habits of the next one arrive together.

Why you are reading this era

This is where the Marvel Universe stops being a set of titles and becomes a set of franchises. The X-line splits into Uncanny X-Men, X-Factor, New Mutants, Excalibur and a Wolverine solo book, and Claremont writes or oversees most of it. He uses the space well. The X-Men fake their own deaths, move to the Australian outback, and then scatter through a magic doorway that erases their memories. For most of two years there is no X-Men team, and the book is better for it.

At the same time Jim Starlin returns to cosmic Marvel and constructs Infinity Gauntlet, which is the direct source of the entire MCU Infinity Saga. If you came to comics from the films, this is the era where you finally read the original of the thing you already know.

Three threads start here and pay off much later. Mister Sinister’s interest in the Summers bloodline runs from 1987 through Messiah Complex in 2007 and into the Krakoa books of 2019. Cable arrives from a future that will not be explained for years, and the explanation lands in the mid-nineties. Peter David takes over X-Factor at the very end of this era and builds the best-written X-book of the early nineties in the next chapter.

Read this era with your guard up on one point. From roughly 1990 the art starts selling the books and the writing starts thinning. Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld and Todd McFarlane are the reason Marvel’s sales explode and the reason its stories get worse. The syllabus tells you which of their books earn the time.

The reading list

The tracks interleave cleanly by year: read the X-line in publication order, drop Kraven’s Last Hunt in at 1987, and take the Starlin cosmic run as one uninterrupted block at the end.

Track A: Mutant

Read this track in the order printed below. It is close to publication order, with the crossover chapters grouped so you are not flipping between titles mid-scene. Two entries need a word of warning. New Mutants #87 and #98 are the commercial hinge of the whole decade: Liefeld’s anatomy is wrong, his storytelling is unclear, and his figures have no feet, and none of that stopped those two issues from turning a cancellation candidate into Marvel’s best-selling book. Read them because the industry changed there, not because they are good. X-Factor #71 is the opposite case. It lands in the last months of this era, it is quietly one of the best things Marvel published in the nineties, and it belongs to the next chapter. Start it here and keep going.

Track B: Avengers and cosmic

Starlin’s three books are one story in three formats, and they are the reason this track exists. Acts of Vengeance is the counterexample. Loki persuades the villains to swap enemies, which is a fine idea, and then twenty titles use it as an excuse for a guest star and change nothing. It is a fair read if you are already following Iron Man or Fantastic Four, and a waste of a week if you are not.

Track C: Street level

Kraven’s Last Hunt is six issues and you should read all six in one sitting. It is a story about grief and burial in which the hero spends most of it underground, and it treats a C-list villain as a tragedy. Nocenti’s Daredevil is harder to sell and worth the effort: it is political, strange, and openly angry, and Typhoid Mary is the best new Marvel villain of the decade.

Track D: Spider-Man

Track E: Fantastic Four and the cosmic frontier

Track F: Solo and standalone

Cross-book checkpoints

Fall of the Mutants deserves a flag. Marvel branded it as a crossover and it is not one. Three teams face three unrelated crises in three books, and nobody in one story meets anybody in another. Treat it as three arcs published in the same month. Inferno, one year later, is the real thing, and it is the first X-event where the plot genuinely hands off between titles.

Excalibur is the pinned hidden gem of this era and it is the book most readers skip. It is the funny, warm, weird X-book: Nightcrawler and Kitty Pryde in a lighthouse in Britain, a shapeshifter, an alcoholic Captain Britain, and Alan Davis drawing all of it with more joy than anyone else at Marvel. It parodies the Claremont house style while Claremont is writing it. Read at least through #17, where Davis leaves.

Characters introduced

Retcon notes

Adaptation notes

Checkpoint