In the year 2000, appropriately enough, the first X-Men film had been released. And although the movie no longer looks very good compared to our slick modern superhero flicks, it did change the cinema landscape as audiences started to take the genre more seriously.
Not only that, it also changed the comics. The Ultimate line of Marvel comics had already taken way, in an attempt to update and simplify iconic characters like Spider-Man so that new readers could understand what the hell was going on. This went for the X-Men as well, but the less I say about Mark Millar’s leatherclad reboot experiment the better. (Ultimates on the other hand was great, but that’s another story.)
Over in the standard Marvel Universe, X-Men wasn’t doing well. Bogged down by the weight of years of continuity, the comics were incomprehensible to anyone but the most devoted of fans. This was a problem. They tried bringing back Chris Claremont. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the same as the old days and that didn’t work.
So in 2001, during that brief window when it was an optimistic new millennium and 9/11 hadn’t happened yet, Marvel Comics’ new editor-in-chief Joe Quesada was pushing the medium forward and had poached DC’s brilliant writer Grant Morrison. The mad genius Scottish author was allowed to do whatever they wanted, and this was just what was needed.
Along with fellow Scotts brilliant illustrator Frank Quietly, New X-Men was born and completely changed everything. New, non-“superhero” black costumes that actually looked cool. Beast was now a cat. White Queen, with new powers, was a core member and this was a great idea that’s worked well since then.
The boldest move of all, was a genocide in that poor fictional nation of Genosha in the very first issue. This is probably an overly done plot point nowadays, and I wish comics didn’t have to be so dark anymore—note Fall of X happening right now—but the point was it was time to clean the slate and tell brand new stories.
New X-Men is still one of the best X-Men eras for novice readers to pick up and enjoy. It also had the standard soap opera stories, outer space, and Phoenix etc. It still felt like X-Men. It was smart, subversive science fiction. Almost cyberpunk aesthetically, still not dated.
I’d recommend a reread anytime. After that, there was Joss Whedon’s follow-up Astonishing X-Men which is mostly optional. Some people like the mid-2000s Messiah trilogy and I have a soft spot for the post-MCU era’s Avengers vs X-Men and other works by Jason Aaron. Overall, it’s okay to just skip ahead to 2019’s House of X/Powers of X by Jonathan Hickman as the only X-Men since that is truly required reading and lives up to that level of quality.
All in all, X-Men is a series that peaked in the 1980s. The 1990s were fun, somewhat, and then there was Grant Morrison’s New X-Men which officially ended what came before and ushered in the 21st century. Let's not even get into the corporate shenanigans of Fox and Disney and the movie universe(s). Mostly thanks to Hickman, X-Men today is still relevant and cutting edge as ever. That being said, equally true, it’s always worth remembering what came before…