Huh? I’m not quite sure why fewer mutants means NO FUTURE. Nothing you say makes any sense.

Evolution of the species has been done in SF a bunch of times; people have to deal with the evolution of the species as a whole, in addition to the evolution of individual people. That means ordinary people becoming the minority and eventually dying out. If mutants are forever a persecuted minority, they’re not the face of evolution. They’re not the future.

SRS

Huh? I’m not quite sure why fewer mutants means NO FUTURE. Nothing you say makes any sense.

In the Cyclops Era they didnt really get rid of him , they made him comeback to the sidelines to help with any kind of crisis . Hell they even found a way to involve him further with the illuminati .

The “cyclops era” and “no more mutants” era was full of great stories imo . I love what was done with the X universe in the past years and the new energie it brought .

But it’s time to see the X-men truly without Xavier , and we finally get a serious chance for that imo .

But that’s just it – Xavier’s dream, just like Magneto’s opposing viewpoint of mutant dominance and inevitable race war, became irrelevant after M-Day, once there weren’t enough mutants for peaceful cohabitation with humanity – or war with humanity, for that matter – to make any real difference. Professor X, for better or for worse, was always there to represent the grander themes and scope in the X-books – and that scope becomes necessarily smaller when the comic goes from being about the future of humanity to being about a couple dozen random people holed up on an island trying to survive.

So in that context, of course Professor X is going to be sidelined or killed off – he’s a character who’s all about the future of mutantkind, and when mutantkind quite explicitly doesn’t have a future, there’s nothing much for him to do. The problem is, there’s nothing much for the X-Men in general to do, either. Do they go back to Utopia and sit around in survivalist mode? Do they go back to Wolverine’s mansion and try training “the next generation of mutants” – y’know, the one that barely exists? Do they just turn into Avengers who wear X’s on their costumes?

Not really imo . like i’ve said we have mostly seen people SURVIVE without Xavier’s help … not so much them dealing with the dream of cohabitation with humankind .

Whenever potential inways were made , like the whole move to San francisco and Utopia , something major was always on the horizon to distract them from addressing truly living and evolving without Xaviers guidance .

And gratuiteous or not , Xavier death is at least a good deterrent from constantly falling to him for help .

The problem with Xavier is that shunned and left depowered after Deadly Genesis , they could and should have left him depowered , so we could truly see a world without Xavier’s influence .

The only time we truly did so far was the Age of Apocalypse .

Having said all that, if I hadn’t read about it in the news I wouldn’t know that Professor X was supposed to be dead. Can’t they put him in the same Phoenix healing chamber they put Hawkeye in a few issue ago?

While taking Xavier out of the picture entirely and forcing the characters to deal with his death (again!) may seem like it might have some dramatic possibilities, it’s not nearly enough to make up for the fact that the X-titles in general are broken, and really have been since M-day. The X-Men aren’t relevant in a world where the mutant population isn’t big enough to fill a high school gymnasium; all those grand arguments between Xavier and Magneto about the future of mutantkind are beside the point when mutantkind has no future. Without a larger mutant population to represent or fight for, the last several years of X-men stories have become plodding exercises in rehashing a sort of Gilligan’s Island plot – everyone’s stuck in the same miserable status quo and looking for a way out, which will never arrive. Is it any wonder that the X-books are being gradually swallowed by the Avengers line – a series of comics as directionless as the X-books, but anchored to a successful film series, and the cynical-but-winning premise of “here are all the popular characters, all in one place”?

Well, it really hadn’t been done before – that was the first time Marvel had killed off an established major. Grieving letters appeared in subsequent issues’ letters pages.

I don’t think anyone noticed that Roy Thomas had left a way open to bring him back.

His tenure at the helm of mutant things have been over already for a while , and he’s been as involved than Cyclops in dubious and nefarious choices imo over the past decades ((remember the events of Deadly genesis and his illuminati membership among other things ?) .

Dead or alive , it’s time to see if the vision can live and thrive without his constant input and nagging .

The cyclop era was supposed to show that , but cataclysmic events made it much more about raw survival than the “original dream” to be enough of a good test run