Rising from the Ruins: The New Dawn of the X-Men in 2024

It’s 2024, the year that the X-Men franchise is undergoing huge changes across animations, movies and comic books. The animated series X-Men ’97 brought the mutants back to television screens, while the upcoming five-part event mini-series Deadpool — Wolverine is on track to reintegrate Hugh Jackman’s Logan into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And then there’s the comics. This year, Marvel is wrapping up one era of the X-Men and starting another with a ‘From the Ashes’ relaunch, ushering in a new status quo for the X-Men that’s rooted in the breakthrough reimagining of the X-Men’s place in the Marvel Universe that began with Jonathan Hickman’s 2019 miniseries House of X and Powers of X.

A Fresh Start: Beyond the Krakoa Era

In the hands of the writer Jed MacKay and artist Ryan Stegman, the flagship monthly X-Men title features Cyclops leading a cast of mutant misfits from the remains of an Orchis facility in Alaska. Though mutants’ world grows less and less tolerant of their kind, this team of champions fight for what is right and just.

The Creative Minds Behind the Change

Each applies their own particular gifts and sensibilities to the project, and one hopes that both longtime fans and newcomers alike will be captivated. Any hard feelings — Hobgoblin’s temporary dethronement, for instance — were clearly not between the scribes, however, as their efforts and energies seem equally devoted to both alluding to and moving beyond the legacy of the X-Men. Stegman, for his part, said: ‘I’ve been deeply immersed in the lives of the original X-Men. There’s more frozen history and exciting characters than any other superhero team. I’m thrilled to explore and reshape the comic book’s most fabled universe. You always want your fingers in as many pies as possible. This is a dream job.

Reimagining the X-Men Aesthetic

With a reputation for forceful and vivid design work with a high level of detail, Stegman looks to honour the X-Men’s comic book roots for this new chapter, inspired by the colourful and bombastic energy that made the X-Men ‘97 animated series so successful. The distinct quirkiness of Stegman’s designs serve to create both the unique individuality of each X-Man, and their united presence as a uniform, larger-than-life hero unit: ‘It goes into the layer of the overall icon-ness that makes it feel like the X-Men you’ve known, and at the same time feels fresh,’ he explains. ‘I think it’s very exciting.

Selecting the Team Roster

MacKay and Stegman spent weeks working on the roster for this relaunch, focusing on which characters would look cool on the page and create an engaging story. We have the twin heroes Cyclops and Havok, the mutant pariah Magneto, inductees into the X-Men from across the mirror worlds and into the old guard who — well, they’re still kicking around, aren’t they?

Challenges and Expectations

It’s not a light switch either, flipping over from the massive, multi-year, fan-celebrated Krakoa dramas into this new status quo. Asked about this shift, MacKay told us: You can’t expect everyone to be excited by that. You have people whose favorite stories were back in that era when the characters were exiles and in the wilderness. You want them to be part of the future, but you can’t expect them all to be eager to see what they want to see. What they want to see might not be part of the new story any more. Stegman added: We have to hold on to the great Classic X-Men history without being held back by it. And then hopefully, we can create a new legacy for the X-Men that takes all of that into account.

Navigating the New Marvel Landscape

By tying everything together, the Marvel universe allows MacKay, who writes the Avengers series, to build stories that move the X-Men and Avengers into closer alignment, resulting in more interesting crossovers and character development — such as Storm taking on her roles within these teams.

Exploring the New Status

The X-Men’s new status quo in 2024 as a testament to the resilience and evolution of these stories and characters is a reflection of that modern sensibility. The end of Krakoa turns the X-Men back towards the old, in the sense of returning to the X-Men’s origin as one of the biggest underdogs and most misunderstood groups of humans in modern fiction. But the end of Krakoa also paves the way for more new narratives, new characters and new challenges.

Going forward, into the franchise’s future, fans can expect stories set in line with the rich history of the franchise while also being unafraid of mining the most pressing tensions of the present. The change is not a knee-jerk reaction to the successes and failures of the past so much as it is a planned move to ensure that the X-Men remain a force in the Marvel Universe of the future.

Look for the start of something big when X-Men #1 launches the next great X-Men story, and confirms the X-Men’s place at the heart of the ever-changing Marvel Universe.