X-Men #6 (Volume 3) arrived in late December concluding the Curse of the Mutants (X-Men versus Vampires) storyline, and this is a good point to discuss the new series by Victor Gischler and Paco Medina. I fell far behind in reading this series as it published and I had to catch up on nearly every issue today. Apparently, I didn’t even make it all the way through issue #2 when it first shipped! I’ve been a huge X-Men fan most of my life and have been reading for decades. Falling behind like that says a lot about this book and my feelings regarding it.

Spoilers ahead.

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It’s like 1991 all over again. In July, Marvel launched a new X-Men #1 by Victor Gischler and Paco Medina featuring a mutants versus vampires story that’s still raging on. Tomorrow, Marvel follows up that launch with Uncanny X-Force #1 by Rick Remender and Jerome Opena. It’s hard to say that this merits its own “day” in celebration of its release, but its launch certainly makes more sense than X-Men #1‘s.

Back in 1991, Marvel released Chris Claremont and Jim Lee’s X-Men #1 in the same summer as Fabian Nicieza and Rob Liefeld’s X-Force #1. Both were huge sellers with X-Men #1 at 8 million copies and X-Force #1 somewhere around 5 million in the heyday of speculative investment (X-Force also did it with only one cover compared to X-Men‘s five). While X-Force didn’t endure the way X-Men (now X-Men: Legacy) did, it was still a successful concept that was reborn coming out of 2007’s Messiah Complex storyline.

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Duane Swierczynski’s Cable series is exactly what it needed to be.  Coming out of Messiah Complex, the latest volume of Cable followed the title character and his efforts to protect the first mutant born since the M-day event during House of M.  It involves one of my favorite characters, time travel, dystopian futures, and chase scenes with interesting takes on all of them.

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