Now that Marvel has wrapped up the X-Men vs. Inhumans event, the characters needed a plan for this new beginning they’ve created for themselves. The answer was ResurrXion, a complete reboot offering new and existing titles with the classic characters. The newest trailer for the project just dropped yesterday.
“We’re going to get back to flights, and tights, and capes, and all the classic X-Men tropes,” David Ketchum, an editor overseeing the reboot, told EW.com, “We very much want to harken back to that era where it’s the most classic iteration of the X-Men.”
Which means a new Team Blue, Team Gold and Generation X for established characters, and solo titles for Jean Grey, Old Man Logan and Cable, all of which penned and written by great creators. The problem is that only one is a woman, Christina Strain (Runaways). One female creator out of eighteen doesn’t look so great.
Strain has a stack of credentials to back up her name, as do all the creators working on ResurrXion, but so do other women currently and noticeably not working at Marvel. The comic behemoth usually credits 20 percent of its creators as women for every month’s releases. Lately, that number has been hovering around 16 percent.
There is also a problem of representation in the characters. Strain, from South Korea, will be working on the new Generation X title, which is led by Chinese-American Jubilee. Jubilee and Storm are the two most notable exceptions to the very euro-centric demographic these ResurrXion teams are made of. Right now, there are more people made from precious metals and ice than non-white people in this reboot back to the “classic retro” X-Men.
Each creator on this project has done excellent work for Marvel and other comics in the past. It’s also worth noting that each of the “group” titles are led by female characters, which is very impressive. It shows an awareness on some level that just isn’t reflected in the casting.
This isn’t a last-ditch effort to save the popularity of the characters by any means. This new line has been in the works since last year, and the titles that come out of this project have a good chance of being great all by themselves.
But as someone who got into Marvel during their All-New All-Different line, with Jane Foster as Thor and Kamala Khan as Ms. Marvel, it feels less like a ResurrXion and more like an expiration.
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