Fyrcyning wrote:
leveret1 wrote:
Fyrcyning wrote:

This is one of the X-books that underlines the "racial awareness" aspect of being a mutant. Instead of just using it as a story element, whole story arcs rotate around it. The thing had already been beaten to death by previous writers, it is becoming a major case of dead horse flogging (maybe it was just Casey's Church of Humanity nonsense that killed the horse in question).

Thing is, that's the central premise behind the X-books: the fear of mutants as "other" and their roles as outsiders. If you do away with it, what do the X-Men become? Just your regular, standard-mill superhero team.


A lot of people here refer to the CC/Byrne run as the pinnacle of X-stories. How many stories in that run are mutants/humans stories? Exactly one: Days of Future Past. It's a great stroy, of course, but the whole run illustrates that there are lots of other possibilities to explore. I wouldn't call the Dark Phoenix Saga a "standard run-of-the-mill" superhero story.


Under many writers, the X-Men became would-be martyrs, and mutants have become commonplace (until House of M). The words "hope", "dream", and "soul" are thrown around waaaaaaaay to often. The CC/Byrne run remains the pinnacle of the series because it doesn't follow the formula that has been beat into the ground since Byrne left. Unfortunately, there are more bad X-Men comics than there are good ones, and thus CC/Byrne have become the exception and not the rule.