Days of X-Men Past:
:Postcards from Krakoa
From the archives:
Giant-Size X-Men: Nightcrawler
It is approaching a year since our favourite heroes decided that enough was enough and they planted their flag in the ground forming their island nation of Krakoa. It has been a revolution in terms of quality and direction for the entire X-Men publishing line, which even a massive fan like me had to admit, was somewhat rudderless in 2018/19.
However, even with all these fantastic new tales and strides in character development we’re seeing come out of Hickman’s (literal) Brave New World, there is one massive character, so important to the whole X-family, that hasn’t joined our mutant heroes in pastures new: the X-Mansion.
I don’t think I had realised it until I began to read Giant-Size X-Men: Nightcrawler but I’d been missing the mansion, and in particular, the idea of the team as teachers and students, in addition to superpowered heroes and villains. It’s not just the brick and mortar, I mean, even the Avengers have had a stuffy old mansion headquarters for a long period of their history, but it was what was within the walls of that building in Westchester, New York.
Here on Dawn of X as well as looking at current content, we’ll also take a trip down memory lane and specifically jump back to specific points in time - namely 40, 30, 20 and ten years back in time for the current date and look at the X-Books which came out in the same month but decade(s) prior.
So, to kick things off, here we are in April 1980 - in reality, I’d not been born yet, but our second band of mutant heroes had already been setting the industry a blaze for five years following the release of the now classic Giant-Size X-Men #1 in April 1975. With Uncanny X-Men #132, we’re kicking things off with an iconic issue and we’re now a couple of issues into the iconic Dark Phoenix Saga - perhaps one of the most influential arcs in superhero comic books.