X-Men Bracket Game

https://lebeauleblog.com/2019/05/20/x-men-bracket-game/

We’re a few weeks away from the release of Dark Phoenix, the final installment in the increasingly complicated X-Men film series. Or at least the main series. There are offshoots. As movie franchises go, X-Men is one of the most messy. That’s appropriate given the impenetrable continuity that has built up around Marvel’s mutant superheroes in comic books. For this bracket game, I have picked thirty-two X-Men from the huge cast of characters. We’ll spend the next several weeks letting readers pick their favorite.

The X-Men came relatively late in Stan Lee’s Silver Age cycle of comic book creations. Lee says he came up with the idea for mutant because he was running out of ways to give superheroes their powers:

I couldn’t have everybody bitten by a radioactive spider or exposed to a gamma ray explosion. And I took the cowardly way out. I said to myself, ‘Why don’t I just say they’re mutants. They were born that way.’

Right from the beginning, Lee and cocreator Jack Kirby introduced themes of alienation and civil rights which were especially timely in the sixties and remain so to this day. But X-Men was not an immediate success. The initial team of Cyclops, Marvel Girl, Beast, Angel and Iceman didn’t stand out among the crowded Marvel universe and the book faced cancellation.

In 1975, Len Wein and Dave Cockrum relaunced the X-Men with several new characters who helped propel the book to success. It was during this era that Colossus, Nightcrawler, Storm and Wolverine were introduced. The comic became one of Marvel’s top-selling titles under the creative team of Chris Claremont and John Byrne.

As the bracket game continues, we’ll look at how that popularity grew through the boom and bust cycle of the 90’s and how Marvel’s mutants became pioneers of movie superheroes. For now, let’s take a look at the first round matches.