If the X-Men are the last of the mutants, doesn't that kind of defeat their whole purpose? They'd no longer have a mutant populace to fight for or any evil mutants to fight against. They'd become just another Avengers team, basically.
Isn't it ironic? When the X-Men hit it big in the 90's, practically every single Marvel book that wasn't X or Spider related did anything and everything to try to mooch off the wealth, and amung them was the Avengers, with the whole jacket thing, "The Crossing" convelution and "attitude".
Fast forward about 10 or so years, and now that the X-Men have been milked so dry from their former glory that Marvel can't just spit out solo's starring B-Listers and expect them to sell well for a year (or 6 months), they may be forced into the mold of the new hot franchise, the Avengers. Now that the Avengers have hit it big, they have 2 core titles (3 if you include Avengers: Initiative), along with several "members" of various teams who have solo's that crossover, and have been the workhorse of Marvel for the past 3 years.
Calliber said:
Whats so bad about having millions of mutants?
Indeed, what IS so wrong about that? Last night's episode of HEROES noted that if millions of New Yorkers died, some 4-8 million people or more, it would be approximately .07% of Earth's population. So you could easily have millions of mutants and be able to play off how rare they are.
Perhaps the first problem is that 99.9999% of Marvel's stories deal with New York city; the first wave of post CW books have lowered that figure to about 95.9999%. Therefore, it can give the illusion of there being many mutants cluttering into New York City. The second is that "events" are a gimmick and after spending years fearing that mutants would overrun the planet, it seems to be an easy fix for instant drama to reverse that and make them endangered and rare, almost as rare as the Inhumans or the Eternals. Ideally, the X-Men are there to tell allegories about prejudice, but in practice they spend most of their time in character-specific soap opera or generic superhero hoey (time travel? Aliens? Alternate realities?) that make this lose track. The only writer who attempted to try to steer the ship back to what the premise was always preached to be in theory was Morrison, but his run alienated newcomers against hardcores, and despite big sales, Marvel's done everything possible to undo that storyline, drilling in the lesson to never be innovative with the X-Men again.
The ugly truth about franchises, especially ones that are almost half a century old, is they cannot change very much. Change them enough and they become something new, something that may not sell as well and may take some readjusting, as as well new techniques to write. Like anything in life, writers, editors, and the audience deathly fear change. Especially for a franchise that kept Marvel afloat during the 90's and even today is still big.
The problem with DECIMATION was that all of the core writers on the core titles avoided it, and the only titles that dealt with it were the B-List books (X-FACTOR, NEW X-MEN) and mini's. The core X-Books did what they always did; character specific soap, generic superhero action, and bent over backwards to avoid the "event" that the editors forced on them. Plus, no major character was effected by M-Day, and those rare ones that were have been "repowered" at the whims of whatever writer wanted it. Iceman was repowered immediately, followed by Polaris and even Magneto. An event that effects no one has no oomph. Love or hate CIVIL WAR, it had the cajones to effect practically every major character. DECIMATION was practically ignored by every major character, and thus a waste.
Bring on the .07% of mutants, I say. But that won't happen. It's much easier to rely on the same successful X-cycles of soap, aliens, and schlock than daring to logically and realistically dwell on the "deep issues" that this beloved franchise professes to be about, but hasn't been, for quite a while (beyond an occasional one-shot tale or two).
So the numbers may lower down to there 99 or 60. Only 99 or 60 so mutant left in the world. i hope this is not true.
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