Jordan: I think the big lesson was that the X-Men can grow and change, still. This run took the core of the X-Men and spun it in a different direction than it had been before. It was (and I guess I am sorry about the pun here) an evolution of the idea. It went into bigger ideas about evolution and culture and society, it changed the character’s relationships to one another as well as to their roles in the X-Men and what the X-Men meant. The fact that such big moves could happen while still feeling both fresh and like the X-Men was amazing. It’s what made me a regular monthly X-Men reader rather than someone who just read collections of older material. It felt like it was the X-Men of that moment, the X-Men of the current world rather than a callback to the X-Men that were in the past. So, in the end, the lesson to learn is about why they did what they did, the larger ideas behind what they did rather than the specific things they did.
Jordan: Oh man, I love it. Flawed characters are the best. Characters overcoming their own shortcoming, or at least struggling with them, is pretty much the thing that makes the best stories. It’s what makes Marvel Marvel—the classic idea of the heroes having feet of clay is what set them apart from a lot of the heroes that came before. Superman is, for the most part, a purely aspirational hero. He is perfect, he is good at everything, he has all the powers and can defeat anything. Spider-Man fails the people close to him, he struggles to do what’s right and usually gets punished for doing it. (Side note—that is not a knock on Superman. I love him as an aspirational hero. To my mind, people complaining about him being too powerful are missing the point of Superman. But that’s neither here nor there.)
Jordan: Beast is another great example of a terrific flawed character. I think a lot of the nuance of Beast that I love has roots in this era. The X-Men fans who hate Beast love to rage at him being a hypocrite, at this mistake and that mistake that he made. And you know what? They are right about a lot of it… and that’s why he is great and interesting. He is an incredibly smart guy who has good intentions and thinks a lot about what is and is not right… but thinking and doing are two different things and he really struggles with that. Sitting and thinking about ideals is a very different thing than reacting to real life in the moment, and sometimes you end up in a different place than you wanted to. I can really relate to that.
Good stuff.