All-New, All-Different and the Fallow Years

Secret Wars ended, the map was redrawn, and Marvel spent four years pushing the Inhumans into the space the X-Men used to hold. Fox owned the mutant film rights. The X-line produced the worst books of its life. Everything else produced some of the best. This era asks you to read around the X-Men rather than through them.

Why you are reading this era

Here is the commercial fact that shapes everything. Fox held the film rights to the X-Men and Marvel Studios did not. Marvel Studios did hold the Inhumans, and Marvel Publishing spent 2015 to 2017 promoting them hard: an Inhumans line, an Inhumans crossover, an Inhumans television series. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is visible in the schedule and in the plots. The X-books of this era are about a gas cloud that sterilizes and kills mutants, about mutants being declared endangered for the third time, and about Cyclops dying and then being smeared posthumously. Nobody writes four years of that by accident.

So the triage is lopsided, and it should be. Track A is the thinnest reading list in this book. Track B is one of the richest. You will skip most of the X-line here and lose almost nothing, because the next era treats this period as a bad dream and starts over.

What you gain is the setup for two things. First, the pieces Krakoa needs: Cyclops dead, Jean Grey alive again, Laura Kinney holding the Wolverine name, and the mutant population beaten low enough that a nation-state looks like a solution. Second, four runs that are simply among the best comics Marvel has published. Tom King’s Vision, Al Ewing’s Immortal Hulk, Tom Taylor’s All-New Wolverine and Jason Aaron’s Thor endgame all land inside these four years.

Threads that pay off later: Aaron’s Thor closes in 2019 with War of the Realms; Donny Cates plants Knull in 2018 and detonates him in 2020; Ewing’s Hulk work feeds his cosmic books through the 2020s. Jonathan Hickman is absent from Marvel for this entire period. He comes back in the last months of it, and that return is Era 12.

The reading list

The tracks barely touch. Read Track A quickly and then treat Tracks B through F as the main event, in roughly publication order.

Track A: Mutant

Inhumans vs X-Men #0-6 is a pinned Skip for a simple reason: it is a six-issue fight to resolve a threat the line invented and then abandoned, and it ends by destroying the Terrigen cloud so that the status quo can resume. No character you will meet again is changed by it, and the one death that matters, Cyclops in Death of X #4, already happened.

All-New Wolverine #1-35 is the exception that proves the era had talent available. Taylor takes X-23, gives her a young clone sister and a wolverine called Jonathan, and writes 35 issues about a killing machine choosing not to be one. It needs no prior X-23 reading. It is the book Logan the film is reaching for.

Track B: Avengers and cosmic

Verdict on the Hydra Captain America story, since someone will ask. Skip it. Nick Spencer’s actual craft is better than its reputation, and the political reading is sharper than the outrage allowed. It still fails on the only test this book applies: 29 issues across two titles, and the ending restores the exact status quo of the first page using a magic cube. You can be told what happened in one sentence and lose nothing.

Immortal Hulk #1-50 is the best Marvel ongoing of its decade and you should treat it as required even if you have never read a Hulk comic. Ewing rebuilds the character as horror: Banner walks by day, something else walks at night, and the book works its way outward from body horror to a genuine cosmology. No prior Hulk reading is needed. Ewing tells you what you need as he goes.

The Vision #1-12 is twelve issues, one story, no continuity homework. A synthetic man builds a synthetic family in suburban Virginia and narrates their destruction with total calm. It is the most controlled thing Marvel published in the 2010s.

Track C: Street level

Track D: Spider-Man and symbiotes

Track E: Fantastic Four and the cosmic frontier

Note the gap, because it is conspicuous. Fantastic Four ended at #645 in 2015 and did not return until August 2018. Marvel’s founding title was off the schedule for three years, during the same stretch that the X-books were being run down, and Fox held those film rights too.

Track F: Solo and standalone

Cross-book checkpoints

• Read Death of X #1-4 before any 2016 X-book. It was published after Uncanny X-Men vol 4 #1 but is set eight months earlier, and it explains the war.
• Civil War II #3 kills Bruce Banner. Immortal Hulk #1 opens with him alive and declines to explain. That is deliberate; read it anyway.
• Phoenix Resurrection #1-5 comes before X-Men Red #1. X-Men Red is the only book that uses the resurrected Jean well.
• The Mighty Thor #700-706 comes before Thor vol 5 #1-16, which comes before War of the Realms #1-6. That order is the whole Aaron arc in sequence.
• Venom vol 4 #1-12 must precede Absolute Carnage #1-5.
• Marvel Two-in-One #1-12 runs alongside the wait for Fantastic Four vol 6 #1 and answers the question that title’s absence raised.
• Secret Empire #0-10 leads into Generations and then Marvel Legacy #1 (September 2017), which is when many titles revert to their old numbering. That is why runs in this era jump from #23 to #700.

Characters introduced

Retcon notes

Adaptation notes

Checkpoint