Why do so many supporting characters in X-men get forgotten and forced into irrelevant wallpaper?
Why do so many supporting characters in X-men get forgotten and forced into irrelevant wallpaper?
Because each writer doesn't grow up with infinite time, money and interest but instead gets to know a specific set of characters they latch onto as well as possibly making some OCs to interact with said characters or just to get royalties. Then the cycle repeats itself.
Well that sucks
Marvel I think only pays royalties for reprint. You don't get anything except a "created by" credit for adaptation of characters or stories or use by other writers (which would quickly become very difficult to manage for popular characters like Spider-Man etc).
But essentially X-Men hit a critical mass in the 1990s and became unreadably vast. It's been half of Marvel's output for 30+ years: even if you could find time to read it all, you couldn't make sense of it and so as you surmise these characters are forgotten simply because it's impossible to keep track of them all.
It's also true that people didn't use the Handbook to look up concepts before using them for new characters. The Handbook wasn't very good for that (marvunapp is better by being online but not really comprehensive despite its intentions) because you kind of had to know what you were looking for anyway. But they could have (and should have been doing, at writer's retreats/office meetups) figured out whether they were having original ideas or not, so there's a fair amount of repetition just because they're sticking to themes.
On the other hand that does mean that there's a fair amount of one-and-done or minor recurring characters - who absolutely don't need a spotlight issue - who make it seem like the world is more than just the same rotating cast wailing on each other, assuming you could be bothered to read 10 years of comics at a time and try to take it all in.
Because only handful of characters are popular enough to stick around.
This isn't unique to xmen. Its the same reason that new heroes across marvel and DC fail to take off: you only have a finite readership limited money they are willing to spend keeping up to date with new ongoings. You only have so much screentime to use to tell your stories, especially the big mega events. And, without fail, both of these limitations get cock-blocked by your established cast of old characters that never retire or move out of the way.
To put it another way: are you under the delusion that DC will ever have a big mega event storyline that doesn't hinge on or get resolved by some combination of superman and batman? Like, 1 time in 10 the Flash gets to be important instead, and even thats a rarity. In such stories basically every other hero, even other members of the justice league, are bit parts at best or window dressing for splash pages at worst. With the brand-defining characters consistently having absolutely everything of importance orbit their dicks like that, how can a new hero ever compete?
Mutants are easy to create new irrelevant future wallpapers.
The real answer is that Bob Harras decided the X-Men needed to be the Phoenix Saga team again which caused Kelly and Seagle to leave which then forced out newer characters like Cecilia Reyes or elevated ones like Cannonball. It enshrined the idea that there was a set of classic character who had to always be on the X-Men and thus stratified things.
That's not a real answer because things were only like that for a few years and then he was fired and replaced with someone who didn't feel that way at all.
Because dozens of X-men writers have been making dozens of OCs since Claremont's day.
So maybe X-Men would be more cohesive and less cringe if it wasn't written by Xfags?
Brevoort answered this exact question today
Why are the characters in the Avengers books almost always the same, but new x-characters are always created in each new ongoing X-series? And most of the new x-characters will be left aside whenever a new run begins.
It’s because the premises of both series are different, Joel. The Avengers are Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, which implies that they are people with some manner of track record under their belts to become associated with such a group. Whereas the X-Men are dedicated to finding and training new mutants in the use of their powers, which implies a constant stream of new characters being discovered and coming into the fold. As for your last point, that all depends on how good of a job we do, doesn’t it? If readers want to see more of a new character, and creators are interested and invested in a new character, then they’ll have legs and go on—just as Wolverine and Storm and Nightcrawler and Rogue once did.
Tom has gone way overboard with this having X-Men, Uncanny, and Exceptional all being about finding and training new mutants that no one's going to care about at all a decade from now. Keep the OCs down to one or two a book, not nearly half a dozen each in three books.
This issue is legit my all time favorite Cyclops story and that night scene with Scanner especially is Cyclops distilled into his purest form. Everyone loves cool pragmatic Rightclops but the best Cyclops is Cyclops the leader, the guy who will ruminate on his pain when he has a quiet moment but knows that he needs to be a pillar for everyone else and who knows how to get the best out of people even if in the moment they might think he's being a dick or pushing them too hard.
the X-Men are dedicated to finding and training new mutants in the use of their powers
this isn't really what they've been about since like 1989 or something
There's usually a dedicated book for it. The mid-90s had Generation X, the early 00s had New X-Men, both versions, the early 10s had Generation Hope followed by Wolverine and the X-Men. Then there was that period where they were mad about the Fox deal and not making any new mutants for them to use, once that was sorted, Hickman was all about bringing every dead and de-powered character back in addition to making new ones from Mars.
1) higher ups want shit to sell and they would rather just have x-men consist of just wolverine shlock
2) you need good writers to give secondary characters a fair shake, which marvel doesn't have
3) you have to have story arcs that involve other characters, which means the writers have to have read derivative works, which shitty writers haven't done and don't care to do
everyone loves rightclops
no the fuck we don't
This, She-Hulk supporting cast disappears into the abyss every new book.
Because every time a n ew writer comes on X-Men they shit out 5-10 unremarakable new mutants who most writer just forget or ignore in subsequent runs
yes we do
Every Cyclops is rightclops because Cyclops is always right
right, because krakoa didn't blow up in everyone's faces. truly, going along with magneto's worldview and working towards the goal of a fascist ethnostate worked out for everyone and sales are the same as the 90s
They didn't commit to Krakoa being wrong, though. Krakoa didn't eat itself because it was rotten from within, Krakoa does diablos ex machina'd by an outside threat. If Nimrod didn't drop on it and have free reign by the author to slaughter everyone, Krakoa was loaded up with red flags but would have continued on.
The reasons that Krakoa failed in the end had nothing to do with its own internal fucked-up nature. That was all red herrings because nothing came of them.
fucker couldn't find a smaller stick to write with?
If I was writing comics and ever got a chance to write the X-Men I would 100% have Scanner join like she should have been able to after the destruction of Avalon and give her a crush on Cyclops.
Every writer to work on them introduces like 10 OCs and only so many can be in a comic, and subsequent writers will most likely just use the a-list characters + their own OCs
People really don't care abiut new recruits. I'm not against having new characters popping up, but don't feature them. UXM is all about the new kids when Gail Simone ignores Wolverine, Gambit, and Nightcrawler, who can be considered top ten favourite xmen. Ask anyone who's remotely interested on the xmen if they'd rather read some school adventure with four randoms and a horse or instead read books about the three guys having adventures and kicking ass in Louisiana.
People keep telling me UXM is getting good and whenever I check, they're all pushed to the background so Simone can write her yuri fanfic and remind us how hot is Rogue.
I blame this on the consequences of writers being rotated through the main titles instead of being allowed to develop their own characters and stories. Writers want to leave their mark on the team, but the only way to do that is to throw in some new OCs and hope that a future writer validates your work by having them stick around and become 'real'. But that almost never happens.
Why would you ever want to work on a run and then leave nothing behind that indicates you were ever there? Every writer wants to be immortalized in their work somehow, and if they can't introduce a new big character the best they can do is introduce a new small one.
This guy. This guy right here is the problem.
This is the sort of comics fan that doesn't *want* new characters and stories, and resents you 'wasting his time' by not focusing on the same characters as have been on the rotation since his parents were kids.
This is why the old established heroes are never allowed to make way for new ones.
UXM is all about the new kids when Gail Simone ignores Wolverine, Gambit, and Nightcrawler
I like how Jubilee has been such a non-presence in that book that you forgot to include her in the list of underused characters.
I hate muties so fucking much bros, especially the psychics.
Hahaha. I love her but she ain't as popular as the other three.
Yeah, because when I pick a Batman comic, I wanna read about how John Smith is now the new Batman.
I get that the xmen is a team and this allows us to rotate new characters, but there are already a big bunch of characters we can use without creating new ones. These new kids from EXM and UXM are gonna be forgotten once the FTA era is over.
Truth is, maybe what you say it's true, but people want to see at least the classic x-men being around. Adding more new characters with the hopes that something will catch up is the formula that has made them in fact unpopular and convoluted.
You can have a group of constant characters and feature new and old ones popping up here and there and have new adventures, but that's not what's happening with UXM. UXM is not an xmen book, it's the novel that the author, Gail Simone in this case, which she could be writing that occasionally features the most popular xmen because she's been hired to write them despite she'd rather be doing something else. Editorial doesn't give a shit, because they still sell "fine", but the book is terrible if you tune in to check what the promoted characters are doing and turns out, they're doing nothing.
Hickman was all about bringing every dead and de-powered character back in addition to making new ones from Mars.
because god knows nobody's sick of X-Men coming back from the dead to just sit on the magic bus and do nothing for all of time
Wanda did nothing wrong.
because of the implication
New writers need room for their self-inserts.
mirin
damn scott
literally this
she was being mindraped by Professor X and Magneto and powerpacked by Doom at the time, she basically got Onslaughted+++
The first comment is informative and correct huh that's strange
Everyone loves cool pragmatic Rightclops
No they fucking don't. They love the MEME of it but they don't care about the character. or the story.
Scanner a cute!
I'll save us
by destroying this ancient aquifer and killing everything for fifty miles around
so that we can have one drink of dirty desert water
Frenzy could run out of here at 65mph but nope
one of the Kleinstock triplets could literally fly but the others never even try to
sent Scanner out to fly around in energy form for "400 miles in a circle" and she didn't see shit
Australia literally has roads and towns all through the interior, there's nowhere that deserted
fuck's sake cobber is he training them wrong on purpose as a joke?
It's really stupid. She was always the nice girl of the Acolytes and never really came off as all that villainous, she was basically only around because she's a total follower type. After this story she randomly showed up and attacked them because she wanted to join and have the chance to be rehabilitated like they'd done with other former villains and they just went "lol no" beat her up and let her get arrested. I don't think she's shown up since, not even during Krakoa when literally every piss ant mutant got at least a background cameo.