Am I looking too much into this or...

[Tawmis]

Exactly, Tawmis. House of M/Decimation was an ill-conceived deck-clearing exercise (mostly just proving that Marvel editorial has no idea what a realistic minority population entails) that was supposed to get rid of all the mutants supposedly cluttering up the Marvel Universe, but just resulted in the books feeling more crowded with superfluous mutants than ever. "But," they protest, "it's a different era! These are ALL of the mutants in world now!" Yeah, and you've managed to hobble your writers by doing it -- a lot of these guys apparently aren't so good at coming up with antagonists if they can't go to the well of endless mutants. So all you've done is taken writers from introducing flavor-of-the-week mutants every other arc, to introducing flavor-of-the-week villains that need an extra page of exposition to explain how they aren't technically mutants, just really close to the real deal, and it's not doing the books any favors.

Very, very, very, very well said. And so very true.

You know, in all honesty - I think you nailed it when you said that the books were full of fluff characters. That's exactly how it feels. There's just SO MANY characters now. It's entirely too crowded. I think that's why I like the older comics. They were far more basic. There was your standard folks you would see come and go. If someone left a team, it was a pretty big deal, because there weren't a lot of characters. Nowadays... there's just so many... anyone can leave and be easily replaced by the other five or six characters out there who have almost identical powers... no one feels unique anymore.

[MistressMerr]

Exactly, Tawmis. House of M/Decimation was an ill-conceived deck-clearing exercise (mostly just proving that Marvel editorial has no idea what a realistic minority population entails) that was supposed to get rid of all the mutants supposedly cluttering up the Marvel Universe, but just resulted in the books feeling more crowded with superfluous mutants than ever. "But," they protest, "it's a different era! These are ALL of the mutants in world now!" Yeah, and you've managed to hobble your writers by doing it -- a lot of these guys apparently aren't so good at coming up with antagonists if they can't go to the well of endless mutants. So all you've done is taken writers from introducing flavor-of-the-week mutants every other arc, to introducing flavor-of-the-week villains that need an extra page of exposition to explain how they aren't technically mutants, just really close to the real deal, and it's not doing the books any favors.

Man, I tried to reply to this but couldn't because it lays it all out so perfectly. Nice.

[Le Messor]

What she said.

[suzene]

Thanks, guys. Much appreciated.

You know, in all honesty - I think you nailed it when you said that the books were full of fluff characters. That's exactly how it feels. There's just SO MANY characters now. It's entirely too crowded. I think that's why I like the older comics. They were far more basic. There was your standard folks you would see come and go. If someone left a team, it was a pretty big deal, because there weren't a lot of characters. Nowadays... there's just so many... anyone can leave and be easily replaced by the other five or six characters out there who have almost identical powers... no one feels unique anymore.

Precisely. It's no bloody good telling us how few mutants there are in the world (though they back-peddled on the 198 figure pretty damn quick) when you're trying to 1) show us all 200+ of them in every arc and 2) using almost none of them or the story possibilities inherent in the concept intelligently. And then the big event/new series that we're all supposed to get excited for is that they're going to introduce more mutants with powers almost identical to those of characters already present and being ignored. It's an exercise in frustration from almost every angle -- the characters are served so poorly that I just can't lie back and enjoy the ride, and the writing and art are so bad that I can't ignore the flaws of the concept and just enjoy the stories. There's nothing there for me to latch onto and I never thought I'd say that given some of the writing talent currently at Marvel's disposal. (Though, to be honest, I never got what was supposed to be so great about Fraction's work even pre-X-Men.)