An Uncanny History
Even today the general public still thinks of the X-Men as they appeared in the first few Fox movies and in the 1990s cartoon show: a collection of slick and attractive heroes with awesome powers. While they’re never not that, exactly, the X-Men are also far more complicated.
The series began as more or less a boarding school adventure created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in the 1960s and transformed into a minority metaphor under the guidance of writer Chris Claremont in the 1970s and ’80s. The characters became the pinnacle of cool in the 1990s, as superstar artists such as Jim Lee gained creative control and Marvel saturated the market with all things X-related. But the X-Men have also been a vehicle for high-concept ideas, as demonstrated by Grant Morrison‘s New X-Men run in the 2000s and the recent Krakoa era, spearheaded by Jonathan Hickman.
The best X-Men stories combine all these complexities into a superhero adventure. Take Hickman’s X-Men run from 2019 to 2021. In addition to embracing the big-concept mutant metaphor by having the mutants establish their own sovereign nation of Krakoa, Hickman’s run also saw the heroes form a do-gooder team (complete with slick new costumes), wring drama from mistrust between Professor X and other mutants, and even embrace the soapy relationship fun, suggesting that the Jean-Cyclops-Wolverine love triangle had coalesced into a throuple.
For the first proper X-Men movie in the MCU, a movie that’s coming after so many retreads of the Fox X-Men era (including Avengers: Doomsday, apparently), Marvel needs to have all of these elements present. And Schreier’s the guy to do it.
Kindly Robots, Crying Teens, and Marvel’s Mutants
Swap out a few names and power sets, and it’s easy to see how Thunderbolts* could be an X-Men story. We’ve got a bunch of people who feel like misfits drawn together by a leader they may or may not trust (lest we forget, Professor Xavier is a jerk). We’ve got interpersonal drama as the team members contend with losing their self-perceptions. We’ve even got a big bad who has potential to do great good, provided he follows his better angels.
Some might object here and point out that Thunderbolts* wasn’t truly a team movie. It was mostly about Yelena and Bob, with everyone else in some degree of supporting role. But that’s not unusual for X-Men stories. Writers have often used a POV character to introduce the world the audience—usually a young woman like Jean Grey in the first comics or Rogue in Fox’s original X-Men movie. If there’s truth to the rumors that Julia Butters will play Kitty Pryde, a frequent audience surrogate in the comics, then it will probably happen again for the MCU X-Men, and Schreier’s work with Yelena proves he knows how to handle the trope.
