In the opinion of current Marvel Comics Executive Editor and newly appointed X-Men Group Editor Tom Brevoort, one of if not the biggest failure of the mutant team’s recent Krakoa era was, simply put, that it turned Marvel’s Merry Band of Mutants from selfless heroes into blatant killers.
Brevoort, who assumed his latter position just ahead of the X-books’ post-Krakoa From the Ashes publishing initiative, offered his criticism of the mutant’s most recent attempt at a nation-state while answering fan questions for the latest entry of his personal Substack blog, Man With A Hat.
Asked a trio of questions as to how he planned to direct his writers in regards to the mutant team’s morality – “Do you intend to make your tenure on the X-Men less morally gray than they’ve been written as for the last 45 years? Do you intend to present them as more plainly heroic? Do they X-heroes now have a no-kill code similar to the Avengers or Fantastic Four?” – Brevoort bluntly asserted, “My philosophy boils down to this: I don’t think that the X-Men should be casual or gleeful killers.”
“While they have certainly been in situations where lethal force was called for and appropriate over the years, I don’t think that this should be their default setting,” he argued. “And one of my big complaints about the end of the Orchis War was in how readily and even joyfully some of the X-Men murdered their foes. That’s fine for some characters—nobody is going to question Wolverine killing a bunch of people (though I feel that even he has certain rules of engagement which he will honorably try to follow). But seeing Nightcrawler teleport a couple of hapless Orchis goons into deep space and leave them to die just felt wildly out of character and wrong to me.”
“If our heroes are going to be heroes, then they have to be held to a higher standard than that,” Brevoort posited. “We said it a lot back in DEATHLOK thirty-plus years ago: you’ve got to do what’s right, not what’s easiest. I’m sure that we’ll have plenty of moral grey area that we can explore, but I do think that the days when the X-Men would casually throw around lethal force and laugh about it thereafter are over now.”
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In addition to the X-Men’s bloodlust, Brevoort also acknowledged that one of the Krakoa Era’s biggest ‘finale stumbles’ was how rather than its many, many titles offering different stories for different audiences throughout their entire runs, they all eventually focused their narratives on the mutant nation’s sociopolitical happenings.
“Tom, I keep hearing about how the point of this new line of X-Books is meant to have ‘something for everyone,’ as you felt like Krakoa didn’t have wide enough appeal,” pressed a fan by the name of Callie. “I’m just wondering if you have any context of the early krakoa era, as it’s been said pretty explicitly by JDW/Hickman that the point of the initial krakoa launch was to have at least one book that would appeal to everyone.”
“That may have been the point, Callie, and even what was laid out in those early books,” replied Brevoort. “And I don’t really want to disparage any of it. But what I can tell you is that I’m far from the only person who felt that all of the X-Titles during the end portion of that era tended to slosh together a little bit, and all of them seemed to revolve around Krakoa business—as they sort of had to, given the set-up. So we’re working to try to remedy that.”
The next entry in the X-Men line’s From the Ashes revamp, X-Factor Vol. 5 #1, is set to hit what few comic book store shelves still exist on August 14th.
