My general sense of Wolverine is that, like most people I fell in love with the character at this exact moment…
…right before he solo’d the entire Hellfire Club from the sewers up to the upstairs rooms where the Inner Circle were holding the X-Men prisoner, and providing the crucial distraction that allowed Jean to free them and save the day.
As a character, before the rush of imitators in the Dark Era of Comics and Wolverine’s own massive over-exposure in the 90s, Wolverine was the original anti-hero. But rather than being driven solely by ANGST and MANLY RAGE, Logan had a lot more going on that made him a fully three-dimensional character: while a staunch individualist, he was also fiercely loyal to his friends; while hot-tempered even when his berserker rage wasn’t at issue, he was also a snarky jokester; and most important and most enduringly, he was a protector and a mentor to children. (Something at the core of both Death of Wolverine and one of my all-favorite series, Wolverine and the X-Men.)
As an X-Man, he was absolutely crucial to the dynamic of Chris Claremont’s X-Men: he was the raging yang to Cyclops’ repressed ying, constantly questioning and pushing. Without him, there is none of the drama or conflict that distinguished the rowdy, more adult All-New X-Men from their milquetoast, demerit-fearing OG counterparts. And while it’s been somewhat blown out of proportions, he was the third leg in the Scott-Jean triangle that played a major part in the Dark Phoenix Saga, the alternative partner who was A. into Jean, B. anything but repressed sexually, and C. a little bit dangerous and spicy (and thus a “gateway drug” for a Jean Grey looking to explore those parts of herself given life by the Phoenix).
On a deeper level than the romance-comics-inspired love triangle, I think the key to Wolverine’s popularity was that he was a better fit for the 1970s than the late 50s/early 60s A-Type Cyclops:
In terms of the mutant metaphor, once you get to the early 90s and the truth of Weapon X gets fleshed out by Barry Windsor-Smith, Logan is the epitome of mutant oppression, having been almost completely dehumanized by a military-industrial complex that tried to turn him into a living weapon, erased his memories and implanted false ones, conducted medical experiments on him, and on and on until he rebelled. And this was a key part of what made him tick as an anti-hero – rather than simply indulging in violence purely hedonistically, for Logan, resistance means rising above the level of the animal, of the weapon.
In terms of origin stories, well, there’s been some better and some much, much worse. If I had to choose, I like Barry Windsor-Smith’s ambiguous version, where you get the sense that he definitely had a life before Weapon X, but where you can never be sure what’s real and what was a simulation that Weapon X implanted in his mind.
Ok, finally got to see Logan. For the sake of my in-box, here are some thoughts:
Overall Opinion:
Unlike some folks, I wouldn’t say it’s the best superhero movie ever made, although it’s certainly one of the best. It’s definitely the best Wolverine movie ever made by a long margin, and arguably the best X-Men movie ever made, far better than anything that Bryan Singer ever touched.
At the same time, it’s not the model for all superhero movies to come: it’s a very idiosyncratic, small-scale action film that works primarily because the audience has a long-term relationship with Hugh Jackman as this role. It’s not the hard R violence that makes it work, it’s not even the avoidance of 90% of superheroisms that makes it work – it’s that this movie is particularly suited to this particular character, and what makes movies good is when movies are grounded in character.
About the Movie and Its Inspirations:
I’ve heard it described as a “post-apocalyptic western,” but that’s not quite accurate. Things have gone really bad for the people we care about, but modern society (i.e, the post-industrial capitalist U.S) is very much present and ticking along just fine, having rolled over and ground down mutantkind like everyone else who isn’t wanted by the powers-that-be, whether that’s the poor Mexican women and children exploited by the evil corporation with shadowy ties to the U.S government, or black farmers trying to make a living in the shadow of automated agro-business conglomerates and self-driving trucks, or immigrants trying to make it to some sort of safety in Canada one step ahead of ICE. More on those themes in a bit.
That’s not to say it’s not a Western (just that it’s not post-apocalyptic). while the action and the cinematography don’t really evoke Westerns, the landscapes – from the flat Mexican deserts to the rugged mountain forests of the Canadian border – definitely do. As does a rather beautiful sequence halfway through the movie where Logan, Laura, and Xavier stop to help a farming family corral some loose horses before staying the night.
Moreover, the film’s thematics lean heavily on one Western in particular: early on in the movie, Laura and Professor X watch Shane on the TV, especially the final scene in which Shane (one of the most archetypal lone gunslingers ever) explains why he has to leave rather than settle down. This gets recapitulated at the end when Logan dies, as Laura repurposes his monologue as a eulogy, having few other words to explain what Logan’s life meant. It’s not hard to draw parallels here: like Shane, Logan is an initially reluctant combatant who eventually gets drawn into a conflict not of his own making, there’s also a strong theme of eras passing (just as the mutants are no more, Shane points out to the villain that the farm rather than the cattle ranch is the future of the West), and of course, much like Shane Logan is someone whose life has been indelibly marked by violence who finds a final meaning in ridding a community of men of violence before removing himself so that there “are no guns in the valley.”
I’ve also heard Logan described as inspired by Old Man Logan. That is not the case (thank god), and the movie is better for it: the only things the two have in common is that Logan is old, there’s no superheroes anymore (although the supervillains have NOT taken over) and there’s a road-trip. It is much, much closer to Death of Wolverine and X-23: the central plot is an Wolverine whose healing factor is failing him finding meaning by putting an end to one more attempt to recreate Weapon X (with the main difference being that he kills the son of the head scientist rather than the man himself) and the way that his relationship with Laura Kinney allows him to find some measure of fulfillment and create a legacy that will carry on after his death.
That Logan ends the movie buried under rocks with a cross turned to the side to indicate that he died in the faith of Xavier after all rather than mummified in an adamantium shell is not much of a difference: what matters is the Beautiful Death seemingly set down by destiny for Logan, that he will die in victorious battle protecting mutant children from the evil men who would exploit them.
Incidentally, for a film that otherwise eschews continuity like the devil, one of the unmistakable callbacks in the film (and arguably the core image around which the film was built) is to the mansion fight sequence in X2 – aka the main reason why Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine has such a grip on the memory of X-Men fans. Once again, it’s Wolverine against military baddies, although here we have a double chase sequence as Wolverine hunts Donald Pierce’s Reavers (yes, it’s that Donald Pierce, X-Men’s most fabulous anti-mutant bigot cyborg) as they hunt mutant children trying to make it to the Canadian border.
Themes and Politics:
So as many people have pointed out, there are a lot of political resonances in Logan that probably weren’t intended as a statement on Trump’s America (since the film was written between 2013 and 2015) but it’s not like one couldn’t hear the rumblings and see the signs if one was paying attention.
Logan takes a clear, thematic, but not didactic stance on issues of immigration: it starts from the very beginning of the film where we see Logan crossing a highly-militarized border as part of his daily commute or dealing with drunken teenagers standing up through his skylight shouting “USA! USA! USA!” as they pass by a border checkpoint, and it moves to center stage when Gabriella, a whistleblowing nurse who used to work for Transigen, tries to get him to help an undocumented child cross the border – not into the U.S, because the U.S is clearly no longer a place of opportunity or refuge, but into Canada.
Through Gabriella’s story, we learn about the broader political situation, that begins to link in more and more issues. In an act of globalized regulatory arbitrage that’s straight out of my colleague’s book pictured above, Transigen located itself in the Mexican border region so that it could take advantage of laxer regulations, paramilitary support from the government (thanks in no small part to Transigen’s connections to the U.S military-industrial coalition because they’re really Weapon X), and it is darkly implied, a steady source of disposable bodies of women of color to use as incubators for genetically engineered mutant babies thanks to the ongoing crisis of murders and disappearances in Ciudad Juárez.
From Gabriella’s whistleblowing camera footage, we find that Transigen followed a policy of deliberately dehumanizing its creations – considering them nothing more than patents and copyrights – as both a way to justify human experimentation, abuse, and the creation of child soldiers. And this attitude flows through directly to Doctor Zander Rice’s reveal that they’ve been spreading genetic weapons through the mass market food chain in order to quietly sterilize mutantkind and make the X-gene once more a controllable part of the government’s arsenal, the way Weapon X always wanted it to be.
Arguably, the political story of Logan is one of global intersectionality: the same corrupt, violent corporate/government forces working against poor women and children in Mexico are the same forces working against African-American farmers in the heartland are the same forces who’ve been working to dehumanize mutants from the beginning, and the only way to preserve hope for the next generation is for everyone to get together at Eden and fight back.
Just read issues #5 and #6, and man, it is not good, despite some rather interesting stuff in #1-4 (I really liked Jean Grey’s psychic war with Karnak).
The main problem, to me, is that the writers never figured out how to finesse the basic premise and service the characters at the same time. The big moment in IvX #6 is Medusa deciding to destroy the last Terrigen Mists because the alternative is the death of all mutants and only a monster would allow that to happen on their watch.
Which is a great moment if you want to make Medusa look super-heroic…except that “Terrigen Mists will kill all mutants” was the basic setup for BOTH Inhumans vs. X-Men and Death of X. Medusa has known all of this for ten issues/more than eight months, and in all that period was staunchly on the side of “preserve Inhuman culture” to the point of war. Not only is there no catalyst for Medusa to change her mind, there’s not even a moment where she really wrestles with 1. Black Bolt causing this problem in the first place, 2. the fact that she’s killed multiple people to back his play (and no, her “I hated doing that” doesn’t count), and 3. she herself was saying mutant-genocide-is-inevitable, oh-well, we-are-the-future-and-mutants-are-the-past for a while, so it’s not like she hasn’t thought through any of the broader implications of her actions.
And given that Issue #4 set up the idea of the younger Inhumans revolting against the older ones and then #5 and #6 squander it by having them just deliver a MacGuffin, you can almost see what a real confrontation with them would have looked like, forcing her to realize that you can’t fight for the idea of Inhumanity if real Inhumanity is screaming “not in our name.” As a result, IvX #6 reads as a super-clumsy author saving throw meant to A. keep the Inhumans looking enough like “good guys” to be viable properties, and B. get Medusa to her pre-determined end point of hanging out with Black Bolt in his new nightclub, without actually putting in the work for the characters to earn their endings. (Complete with a chunk of Emma’s face on the bar…which is creepy as hell.)
Likewise, the flip-side of this moment is Emma Frost going evil. Now we’ve seen that setup from the end of Death of X, but man does it just go from 0 to infinity-stupid in a heartbeat. One moment Emma Frost is an ideological extremist trying to burn Cyclops-the-Martyr into the collective mutant psyche, the next she’s mind-controlling everyone and building anti-Inhuman Sentinels and getting a face scar (BECAUSE SHE’S FLAWED, GET IT) and putting on a Magneto/Cyclops helmet and spike costume
– and at this point my eyeballs were rolling up into the back of my head.
I’m fine with Emma Frost as a villain but “women can’t get over their exes” is not an interesting motive for a villain, especially when the specter of Claremont’s Emma Frost, a plain-dealing villain who was manipulative and ambitious and ruthless and above all independent and self-directed in her choices, is hovering over the new status quo. That Emma Frost would despise what we have now.
There’s a lot of stupid stuff along the way – characters changing sides and motivations on a dime, fights where characters are winning or losing seemingly based on coin flips, lots of muddled crowd scenes, dei ex machina out the ying-yang – but that’s just standard Bad Event Writing/Arting.
So in conclusion:
Now that we have all of IvX and can look back over the whole, it’s even more glaring that this whole thing was Soule and Lemire doing Death of X again and trying to get it right this time. Unfortunately, they couldn’t stick the landing last time, and they didn’t stick it this time – which means the better part of the X-line for the last 2-3 years has to be written off as an artistic failure.
It’s just not very well-set up in his previous characterization: from the beginning, Scott Summers has been one of those “emotionally repressed, …Type-A…personalities,” I talk about not working as well in the present, which is part of the reason why he has such a big hatedom.
Now, unlike Reed, Summers has historically been more of a follower than a leader – Xavier’s teacher’s pet and hall monitor, the eternal Leonardo to the Raphael/Michelangelo antics of Bobby and Hank (and Warren, sometimes) – but very much a rules-following, by-the-book guy. And the main thing that made him more than a total wet blanket was his Teen Romance-style angst about whether Jean could ever love a man who shot red eye-beams. So to sum up: Scott Summers = dutiful and into romance.
Now, I think there was a way that Claremont could have leaned into the Mr. Vice Guy thing, but didn’t quite: namely, actually exploring Scott’s tendencies to have low-stakes, no-labels affairs the moment he thought Jean was dead/not around (thinking about Colleen Wing, Lee Forrester here) as a way to introduce the idea of Scott straining against his own repression and feelings of being trapped in his role as Designated X-Men Team Leader, and then build up from there to establish Scott Summers as one of these heroes with feet of clay (in his case, a tendency to default to following others’ expectations of him despite not really being fulfilled by the life that results in, and then a reactive tendency to try to wreck his own life in a search for independence and self-knowledge):
But there’s not really any follow-through. Scott and Jean never have a chance to talk through this tendency and how it reflects on his feelings about Jean (even though they’ve got one of those creepy psychic-link-true-love things going on which means she knows and he knows she knows) or what he wants from life beyond being her boyfriend and an X-Men. Nor does anyone really call him out on his hypocritcal jealousy around Jean Grey and other dudes (although one time it was Mastermind, so I guess you get a pass there), or really call him out about about dumping Madelyn (granted, a lot of that was the fault of Fall of the Mutants and Inferno, but still).
Sidenote: I’ve never had a problem with Spiderman being married and, yes, him getting a divorce works so much better than diabolic annulment.
I’ve always felt that there was a fundamental ambivalence about what Madelyn Pryor was supposed to be for: is she the impetus for Scott Summers to mature and start a new life outside the X-Men as a husband and a father (which if so is really complicated by having her be an identical twin of Jean, because it starts their relationship off on such a fragile foundation), or she she supposed to be part of some grand conspiracy (whether that’s the Dark Phoenix and Mastermind or Mr. Sinister and cloning or Hell invading NYC)?
Yes, the bigger problem was Busiek coming up with the clone loophole for Jean Grey’s death-because-of-genocide thing, but Claremont’s hardly innocent here – her being an identical twin was always going to get people talking about clones and whatnot, likewise all of his shenanigans about Jean dying and Madelyn being reborn at the exact same second was way too obvious a phoenix metaphor. If Madelyn was going to be Cyclops’ cosmic consolation prize and nothing else – which is a bit creepy, when you think about it – just have her be a different woman! I mean, Lee Forrester is pretty awesome and X-Men artists don’t have a hard time drawing her as distinctly different…
But the biggest mistake, IMO, was having Scott react to Jean’s rebirth by leaving his wife and baby to chase after Jean and pal around with his old school chums in X-Factor – leaving aside whatever you think about Claremont’s ideas about characters needing to age out of the X-Men, on a personal level, that’s some profoundly unheroic behavior. Pretty much everyone from Claremont on down has said after the fact that they didn’t think this through, although I would argue that there were ways to turn into the skid if you weren’t set on the idea of Scott coming out of this ok – after all, Jason was a hero, and look what happened to his first marriage…
On the other hand, as convoluted as it was – and it definitely it could have used a few less moving parts – Inferno was a hell of a way to resolve the tangle, an ambitious as hell decision to turn everything up to 11 and just guitar solo your problem away. (Even if it did involve Madelyn Pryor getting hit with every single gendered stereotype – woman scorned, evil witch, why’s she killing her baby again?, etc. etc. – imaginable.)
But if we could do it over again…
I think the main thing I’d do is to not start from a position that Scott and Jean Are Fated To Be Together. Jean dying, whether she comes back as a clone or what, should be a big line in the sand when it comes to their relationship – he saw her die in front of him, there’s the legacy of the Phoenix and the Dark Phoenix that will always be between them, things could never be the same. So maybe Scott doesn’t leave his wife and kid. Maybe Jean Grey gets to move on and have relationships outside the guys she went to a boarding school with when she was a teenager, and maybe she gets to explore rather than repress huge parts of her personality that she never could while Xavier was keeping a psychic bomb confined in her skull.
Another thing I’d do: embrace consequences. Rather than just trying to kill the hypotenuse so you can have Scott, Jean, and Nathan as a “normal” nuclear family (because it’s not a normal family, time travel and cloning creeps back in, and that’s how you get Cables), why not have Scott lose his shot at happiness with Jean as a way of signalling that maybe what he did to Madelyn and Nathan wasn’t ok? Or maybe Madelyn just takes her son with her, rather than going through the whole Madea plot, because he’s her son and Scott abandoned them (now I’m getting Hamilton and Les Mis scrambled in my brain)?
Or at the very least, how ‘bout everyone has an awkward but open conversation about the dysfunctional dynamics off the Summers-Grey-Pryor clan? Maybe puppets are needed to get across that Jean is kind of interested in trying out BDSM and might not want to become a surrogate mom right now, Scott, or to get Alex to open up about why he keeps becoming romantically interested in manipulative women who remind him of his brother’s ex, or why Scott develops commitment issues around powerful women and then goes off looking for women who resemble his mother-
no, please, use the puppets not the mutant powers…
Well, I think you either lean into the rich 70s melange of aliens, cosmic forces, secret societies in fetish-wear copied from The Avengers (UK), allegories about the danger of repressing women’s sexuality and power, crash-landing space shuttles, the Blue Side of the Moon, or you don’t.
But in so far as it’s related to the social commentary…well, it’s there in places but it’s not in the foreground:
Jean becomes Phoenix only because the U.S national security state bankrolls Steven Lang’s genocidal Sentinel program, which sets up the aforementioned space shuttle, at a time of intensified “anti-mutant hysteria,” includeding the firebombing of Judge Chalmers’ house.
The Hellfire Club as a metaphor for social class and the failure of intersectionality – they’re mutants who are basically pushing the Sentinel program, because they’re so rich and powerful they think they’re above oppression.
The cold war between Xavier’s and the Hellfire Club over the soul of Kitty Pryde as a metaphor for whether the Youth of the 70s would follow the idealism of the 60s social movements or selfish Yuppieism/proto-Reaganism.
Dazzler the Movie and those shenanigans are bang in the middle there.
And of course, Days of Future Past lands right after it ends…
Here’s how it fits into the larger thing: if all the X-Men are allegories, if they’re just “representatives of the oppressed” and nothing else they don’t work. You have to start with character – are these heroes people we care about and identify with? – otherwise they’ll come off as cardboard cutouts rather than real people and no one will care about their fictionalized oppression. So the hook, to me, is that the X-Men are super-heroes that, unlike the Avengers or the Fantastic Four, face oppression – but you need both parts: yes, the Sentinels and the Hellfire Club and Genosha and everything else, but also the Shiar and the Juggernaut and giant dragons over Tokyo and the Asgardian Wars, and the Dark Phoenix Saga.
So to me, what makes Dark Phoenix Saga important to the X-Men is that it gives Jean Grey and Scott Summers a emotional arc with weight and depth – it makes them real people.
I’ve never been a huge fan of Cable for the same reasons that a lot of people aren’t – Rob Liefield over-design, ridiculously complicated retconned backstory, liberally “borrowing” from the Terminator 1 and 2′s aesthetic and tropes – but I was reading a bunch of articles on Cable that various sites are putitng out b/c of Deadpool 2 and I’d listened to the X-Plain episode on Cable’s intro, and I realized that there was something else that kind of bugs me about Cable.
He’s too many things: he’s both a powerful psychic (hence the glowy eye and whatnot) and he’s a military badass (hence the hardware that outdoes the Punisher for sheer tonnage). And often the comics haven’t really figured how to do both at once – hence the techno-organic virus, which is most often used as an explanation for why Cable doesn’t use his psychic powers, so that the creative team can focus on Cable doing one thing at a time. Which is both a bit of a waste and contributes to the argument that Cable is a juvenile Cartmanesque overstuffed grab-bag rather than a unified concept.
But you know what would be interesting to see: rather than Cable just being a military badass in a universe that’s hardly lacking for them, what if Cable was a psychic who’d been trained to harness his powers for military purposes and nothing else?
After all, 616 psychic mutants are normally trained in more defensive and quasi-spiritual methods that make them the wizards and clerics of their D&D parties: whether it’s Jean Grey or pre-transformation Psylocke or Emma Frost or Charles Xavier, psychics generaly specialize in communications and coordination, protecting their allies via some form of shield, going to the Astral Plane so that they can fight the other psychics while the normies engage in fisticuffs, and they often get hit with various feedback effects or whammies just long enough to keep them away from the combat, once again separating them from the brawlers and bruisers.
But in a future apocalyptic war against Apocalypse, I would imagine that the grizzled leaders of the Resistance would insist on a more applied approach to psychic powers, and thus you’d get a Cable who did things very differently: it’s a complete waste of his abilities for Cable to actually fire a gun by hand no matter how long and hard and thick it is (wouldnt be a post about Cable without some Freudian subtext) when he could use his telekenesis to remotely control entire platoons’ worth of firepower. Likewise, Cable’s ability to telepathically surveil and then disrupt enemy command hierarchies is far more useful militarily than punching people with his metal arms.
So I guess what I’m interested in is a Cable who’s less 80s Arnie and more late-career Liam Neeson, Tom Hardy Mad Max, or Keanu as John Wick.
I found Death of X very very meh – the central conflict that Inhumans vs. X-Men is built on doesn’t make any damn sense as a result.
So with that rather enormous caveat, I’ll say that the Inhumans vs. X-Men team are doing a better job of making bricks without straw, and there’s some really interesting ideas here (I really liked the Jean Grey/Karnak “fight” as a clever use of telepathy), but it seems to be heading toward a rather clumsy outcome where the X-Men are restored to Earth and the Inhumans go off to space to trace their Kree ancestry or something. Which isn’t a bad status quo, but the weirdness they had to go through to end up there is bizarre.
That’s a fair argument, especially when the characters that are standing in as metaphors are (in their civilian clothes, and it’s noticeable that all the original X-Men could pass) five WASPY teenagers (with only one woman to boot) who live in a private boarding school in Westchester that’s run by one eccentric millionaire.
At the same time, there are a couple ways to deal with this: the first is Chris Claremont’s strategy, which is to make your cast more diverse so that you have characters who are black and mutant, gay and mutant, and so on. Thus, rather than the metaphor supplanting or erasing the thing it’s supposed to stand in for, you can explore interesting questions of intersectionality, passing privilege (see: the Morlocks), etc.
Another strategy is to have the issue of mutant rights actually interact with these other movements and politics. We see a little of this when we get into Magneto’s fascinating role in the Cold War, but I’d love to see more, especially in the original period setting. How would the black power movement of the 1970s have reacted to Storm suddenly appearing as the most powerful black woman in America? How would San Francisco politics have changed with the X-Men spending some time as the city’s super-hero team? Why don’t we see mutant urban enclaves (again, other than the Morlocks) before Grant Morrison’s run on X-Men, and how would those enclaves have fit in the complex urban politics of the 1970s? Why don’t we see a mutant rights movement, and how would that movement have developed relationships with the gay rights movement or the civil rights movement or the labor movement?
There is a very common argument that says that the X-books never quite fit in well with the rest of the Marvel line, because in a world where lots of people have superpowers, why are mutants so uniquely threatening? Why is it that they are hated and feared while the Fantastic Four are America’s First Family and the Avengers might as well be the GI Joes?
I’ve never found that to be a problem – in part because there are plenty of other superheroes who also come in for the same treatment (see the Hulk or Spiderman vis-a-vis the Daily Bugle), but also because we have lots of examples in our world of inconsistent attitudes from the public.
My thinking has always gone like this: most Marvel supers have the one-off origin story that was de rigeur in the Golden Age of comics: Cap’s Super Soldier serum is lost, Iron Man is self-built, the Hulk is created in a gamma bomb test, there’s only one Mjolnir waiting around to be picked up by someone worthy. And for the public at large, this is at least somewhat comforting because there’s no reason why they’re special and you’re not, it’s a matter of chance, and who knows, maybe one day you’ll win the superpower lottery, and even if you don’t the people who did aren’t better than you.
But mutants break that comforting illusion: there’s an entire group of people out there who get superpowers because they’re born with it, which means that if you don’t have an active X-gene, you’re no longer “normal,” you’re a flatscan. Which means you’re anti-special, a negative result, you’re a muggle ‘arry. So I could see why there would be a special kind of resentment there. Which absolutely should also be the case with Inhumans and their special latent genes which means they get to come out of the chrysalis a beautiful shiny butterfly while you’re stuck as a caterpillar.
But I don’t think that’s enough to explain “anti-mutant prejudice.” And this is where I think history and politics come into it. In both the comics and the movies, governments in WWII plunged a bunch of money into superpowers and almost all of what they got back was eaten up by the war: Cap goes into the ice, Namor goes back to being a non-aligned power, the Human Torch is deactivated, and so on. And between then and now, governments try to rebuild their capacity and keep powers as a monopoly of the government: hence all of those failed attempts to recreate the Super Soldier serum, Weapon X, etc.
But mutants by their very nature arise outside fo the control of the national security state, and that scares the hell out of them. Your Alpha or Omega class mutants are essentially global superpowers, and can’t be controlled easily or at all. And I think the national security state would start to push that picking and choosing phenomenon: Tony Stark is ok because he’s a human and a military contractor, the Fantastic Four are ok because they come out of NASA, but the X-Men are dangerous rogue elements.
So actually, I think a rebooted X-Men would fit quite nicely into a post-Cap 3 MCU. Thanks to some really clumsy handling of the fallout from the Lagos incident, world governments who were already paranoid about superpowers acting independently start stoking public fear of “enhanced” individuals like Wanda Maximoff. Now all of the sudden, there’s an entire sub-species of “enhanced” individuals hiding in plain sight – are they in league with the rogue Avengers? HYDRA? The aliens? The Daily Bugle demands answers!
To me, the biggest problem is how you fit X-Men’s backstory into the history of the MCU. But I think this is solvable, because we have that nice 60s-70s period of covert superheroing where Ant-Man was active. So back in the 60s and 70s, governments start becoming aware of mutants, but they think there’s just a few individuals. So they keep mutant activity classified, Weapon X starts running quietly in the background, maybe some Sentinels get built during the Cold War “purely for contingency purposes.” And then in the present day, when it turns out that the mutant population has been expanding rapidly but from a really small base, and all of SHIELD’s secrets get leaked…
For most of the X-cast, time isn’t really a factor – either for the original team or the all-new folks or the new mutants or generation x or after, they can really come from any time; Wolverine should have been around for a long time, but his healing factor makes him immortal so that’s not a problem either. The two big problems are Magneto and Professor X. Magneto being a survivor pins him down to a generation that is now rapidly approaching triple digits, and Professor X really should be a peer of Magneto as opposed to significantly younger. So we’re going to need some sort of Bucky-like explanation for why they’ve been kept on ice and why they’ve come out of the ice.
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