If you’re an X-Men fan of a certain age, you may have read the past two months’ worth of From the Ashes comics and wondered, “Where did all the New Mutants and Generation X kids go? I mean I know Magik is in X-Men, but it’s like the rest of them just disappeared into the White Hot Room.”
But the answer is simple. From the Ashes isn’t interested in hand-waving away the fact that there are too many X-kids at the Thanksgiving table. From the Ashes is a story about the adult X-Men — the famous ones, the ones on T-shirts and cartoons — undergoing a midlife crisis, while the youngest and newest mutants watch and say WTF, Dad?
They say in times of trauma we revert to past habits in search of safety. And the Fall of X — the destruction of Krakoa by Orchis and Charles Xavier’s bad decisions — was trauma.
A theme of the new era so far is that, even in a world where Xavier is imprisoned and Magneto is more or less retired and puttering around the abandoned Sentinel factory, the adult X-Men cannot stop being X-Men and doing X-Men things.
In X-Men, Cyclops cannot stop leading a mutant strike team, to the point that it’s giving him panic attacks (See the end of X-Men #3), while Beast cannot stop being bouncy and blue-furred (because his previous war criminal self was replaced with a mentally younger clone). In Uncanny X-Men, Rogue and her friends cannot stop playing superheroes. In X-Factor, the U.S. government cannot stop using mutants to its own ends, and Havok cannot stop being an idiot. In X-Force, Forge and Sage cannot stop meddling in global affairs. In Phoenix, Jean Grey cannot stop being fire and life incarnate. In Exceptional X-Men, one assumes, Emma Frost cannot stop resignedly sighing, “Once more, for the children” and cinching her bustier. These are the middle-aged children of Xavier going through their shit while their children see their parents as imperfect messes, some for the first time ever.
Only the young mutants are trying to find a new way forward. It’s why NYX works so far. For the most part, the mutants of the past 20 years are out from under the yoke of Charles/Eric/Emma/Scott/Logan/Cable/etc. and are looking for their own dreams in a new environment.
Look at the core mutants of NYX: Ms. Marvel, Wolverine (Laura Kinney), Anole, Prodigy and Sophie Cuckoo. Excepting Kamala Khan, they are the mutants of the Academy X era. (Another mutant of that generation, Surge, is in X-Force.)
More than any other, they are the trauma generation of mutants. They’re the New Mutants if the New Mutants had, like, 20 Doug Ramseys that all died on a bus. Activated after 9/11 and the Wild Sentinel attack on Genosha, many of them then watched their friends and classmates killed by Purifiers in the pages of Craig Kyle and Chris Yost’s New X-Men, only for many of the survivors to be forgotten by subsequent writers. Their one happy moment together on Krakoa came at the end of a story in X-Factor. No other generation more so deserves a “now what” story to explore what being a young adult mutant means in 2024, especially because the older generations of mutants have been aged up in various stories.
Cannonball is married with a child. Sunspot is super rich and once ran his own team of Avengers. Dani Moonstar trained many of the Academy X kids. Doug is Apocalypse Jr. now. M has been written as a hypercompetent adult for years. Synch was a core X-man on Krakoa and was aged internally by his time in The Vault. Husk had sky sex with Angel that one time.
Exceptional X-Men by Eve Ewing and Carmen Carnero, debuting this Wednesday, also will explore what it means to be a young mutant through three new characters — Bronze, Axo and Melee. It also stars one of the few mutant middle children in the new line: Kate Pryde, who is specifically trying not to get pulled back into X-Men business and has created a literal coffeeshop AU for herself, like any good overachieving child who dive-bombed after college because there were no more multiple-choice tests to ace.
We’ve also been introduced to new mutants in X-Men, Uncanny X-Men and X-Factor; ones unburdened by 61 years of X-Men bullshit, which Krakoa now is. What does the world look like to them? What does mutant culture look like to them? What do the X-Men look like to them? The smartest stories will interrogate that.
We always ask why the X-Men are hated and feared while other superpowered individuals are seemingly beloved. We have an answer now: Mutants set themselves apart. For a brief period, they took their ball and made a home out of it. A global superpower with its own rules and customs and alphabet and views on sex. And it fell by human hands. Now they’re back. Are they mad at everyone? What are they going to do? Keep protecting a world that hates and fears them? Why? For their own mental health? That hardly seems sustainable.
But it’s exactly why we can’t tell this story with every mutant on the table, and why, even at 14 books, From the Ashes is focused on a smaller pool of characters. Bringing in the New Mutants or Generation X would give us too many Kate Prydes. (Although admittedly, a book where Kate, Dani and Paige Guthrie all work in a coffee shop owned by Roberto Da Costa sounds downright cozy.)
Yes, the new mutants created now will be forgotten in a few years, but we need their eyes and voices now, because otherwise this line would be as stale as we say it is on the internet.
Buy Exceptional X-Men #1 here. (Disclaimer: As an Amazon Associate, ComicsXF may earn from qualifying purchases.)
Dan Grote is the editor-in-chief of ComicsXF, having won the site by ritual combat. By day, he’s a newspaper editor, and by night, he’s … also an editor. He co-hosts The ComicsXF Interview Podcast with Matt Lazorwitz. He lives in New Jersey with his wife, two kids and two miniature dachshunds, and his third, fictional son, Peter Winston Wisdom.
