A + X by Keith Gammage

As the judge of Avengers vs X-Men (current Heroclix organised play events - Editor) I am supposed to be neutral. But it’s hard to be neutral. I’ve always been an X-Men fan. And yet...perhaps there is a way. Perhaps I just need to follow in the footsteps of one of my favourite characters, the Beast.

It’s hard to believe in these days of movie success, but there was a time when the Avengers were unpopular. Don’t believe me? Then ask yourself, why does Marvel still have movie rights to the Avengers? When they went bankrupt after the comic bubble burst, Marvel sold off movie rights to all their characters, except the Avengers. No one wanted the Avengers. The book was one of Marvels lowest selling titles, full of characters nobody had ever heard of.

So what changed between then and now? What happened was this: Marvel gave the Avengers to a writer named Brian Bendis. Whilst I am not a fan of Bendis, he is one of Marvel’s most popular writers, and I can’t deny that his name sells a lot of comics. His job was to turn the Avengers around, and make them as popular as the X-Men were at the time. Bendis accepted the task on one condition - in order for Avengers to become Marvels top superheroes team, it had to have the top heroes on it. He wanted the best there is. Wolverine. Spider-Man. Daredevil. Thor.

The first thing Bendis did was kill off all the ‘second-stringers.’ Jack-of-Hearts. Ant-Man. Vision. Hawkeye. All dead, courtesy of a now-insane Scarlet Witch. Avengers disassembled. This was followed by cancelling the Avengers comic.

Bendis started a new comic named, aptly, The New Avengers. He didn’t get Daredevil or Thor (the latter was dead at the time), but he did get Cap, Wolverine, Spider-Man, Spider-Woman, Iron Man, Luke Cage and the Sentry. (Sentry was Marvel’s latest attempt at creating a Superman-like character. It failed as usual.) Wolverine’s been an Avenger for close to a decade now, but he never stopped being an X-Man. He has become so well-known for his dual-membership in both teams, that characters inside the comics started to make jokes about it.

 

I don’t like Wolverine. Fortunately for me, he is not the first of the X-Men to become an Avenger. The Beast joined their ranks way back in 1975, and even to this day the Avengers regard him as an elder statesman of sorts. Beast is very accepting of people. Avengers, X-Men, it doesn’t matter. He even invited Doctor Nemesis to join the X-Club, and everyone knows the Doc was on the wrong side of World War II. Like Wolverine, when Avengers vs X-Men erupted, the Beast was to be found on the side of the Avengers - but unlike Logan, Beast refused to fight any of the X-Men directly. He is, after all, one of the original five X-Men. Though no one knew it at the time, he was also dying, which is why he volunteered instead for Thor’s suicide mission to confront and stop the Phoenix before it reached Earth...a mission that was not quite as suicidal as the Avengers thought. The Phoenix pretty much ignored them, shrugged off all their attacks and headed for the Moon, where the X-Men and Avengers were squaring off over Hope Summers.

 

 

People have been asking - what about the Scarlet Witch? Why is she an Avenger? She’s a mutant, the daughter of Magneto. But, she’s a bit different than your usual mutant. Way back in Avengers #16, Thor, Iron Man and Giant-Man all left the Avengers, and Captain America made the dubious decision of replacing them with three former super-villains - Hawkeye, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch. Whilst Quicksilver did later join the X-Men, the Witch never has. The X-Men wouldn’t want her anyway. She is an Avenger through and through. No-one is entirely sure what her mutant power is - the abilities she uses are magical in nature, stemming from the fact that she was born on Mount Wundagore, prison of the creature known as Cthun.

And so then...do I choose Avengers or X-Men? Why not both? It may not be easy, but it’s possible. Beast has done it, Wolverine has done it. You just have to hang in through the bad patches. What's a few wars between heroes?