The X-Men are going through a tough time right now. The books were relaunched in 2024, and have been floundering, with the quality and interest in them at its lowest ebb. Many fans keep comparing it to the Krakoa Era, the status quo that led into the relaunch and changed the team for five years. The Krakoa Era was extremely innovative for the group, and led to stories that fans loved. It began in 2019, after Disney bought 20th Century Fox and regained the rights to the team, with superstar writer Jonathan Hickman given the helm. Mutants began their own nation, and readers got to see them in new roles in the world. It was a great time to be an X-fan, and readers got some best of all time X-Men stories.
However, there’s definitely an aspect of looking at the past with rose-colored glasses when it comes to the Krakoa Era. As great as it was times, there were numerous problems with it, as Marvel did make some big missteps during those years. These are the seven biggest mistakes of the Krakoa Era, hurting the era and leading to its disappointing ending.
7) Fall of the House of X
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Fall of the House of X was part of the one-two punch that ended the Krakoa Era, and it was terrible. It was written by Gerry Duggan, who had been doing an underwhelming job on X-Men (Vol. 6) and this book was everything wrong with his X-Men writing: bad humor, lots of characters who were completely out of character, and simple, dumb plot points. Artist Lucas Werneck is usually amazing, but his art in this book looked rush and wasn’t up to his usual standards. Everything about this book was a mistake, and it dragged down Krakoa’s end.
6) The Synch and Talon Relationship
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X-Men (Vol. 5) #18-19 was one of the best X-Men stories of the last five years, and it planted the seeds for a huge mistake. This story put Synch and Wolverine II together as a couple for centuries in the Vault, a place where time ran differently, with only Synch escaping. Eventually, the team would go back to the Vault and found her body in stasis. The two of them began their relationship again, and it was one of the worst parts of X-Men (Vol. 6). We were constantly told how much they love each other, but what we saw never matched that. It was a waste of page space, and played a key role in making X-Men (Vol. 6) terrible.
5) Doctor Stasis
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Marvel has created some cool villains lately, but Doctor Stasis isn’t one of them. He was the main antagonist of the horrible X-Men (Vol. 6) and was kind of a waste of a character. Much like Mister Sinister, he was a clone of Nathaniel Essex, working with the humans in order to figure out how to become a Dominion. The problem with the character is that he was basically just a second version of Mister Sinister. The only difference between with them was who they worked with. We didn’t need two Mister Sinisters, and Doctor Stasis never did anything to make an argument for why he should have existed. Duggan apparently wanted to use Sinister in his book and when he wasn’t allowed (because the character was appearing in the superior Immortal X-Men), so he created this rip off that stank up the end of the era.
4) The Moira MacTaggert Villain Turn
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Moira MacTaggert played a massive role in the Krakoa Era. It was revealed that she was a mutant who was resurrected at her birth every time she died. She watched mutants lose in all of her lives, and decided to help create the mutant nation of Krakoa and “save” mutantkind. Moira was going to get her own solo series (more on that later), but all of that changed when COVID struck and Jonathan Hickman decided to leave the X-books. Instead, she was made into a villain in an extremely rushed manner, becoming a genocidal mutant hater like a switch was flipped in her head. There were better ways to do this, and it’s a black mark on the era.
3) Krakoan Resurrection
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The Krakoa Era dropped some big changes on the mutants and one of the most shocking was Krakoa Resurrection. Basically, Tempus, Proteus, Hope, Elixir, and Egg could use mutant DNA and downloaded memories to bring mutants back from death. It was a huge change and it was cool at first, but then every creator kept killing the characters all the time. Death became even more worthless than it was before because of the industrialization of resurrection. It was a cool idea that was overused and took away the stakes of every story, and that’s before you have to think about whether everyone who died is a clone or the real thing.
2) The COVID Response
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Covid changed the world, and comics were badly effected by it. Books went on hiatus and plans were changed. The X-books sold very well during this period, and readers were teased with books starring Moira MacTaggert and the Imperial Guard. Fans were excited, but Marvel decided to do away with a bunch of the planned books. Instead, we got stinkers like X-Corps, Children of the Atom, and the beginning of the Duggan run on X-Men (Vol. 6). Instead of going with weird books that had potential, they went with plain bad books, and “Reign of X” suffered greatly because of it.
1) Straying From Jonathan Hickman’s Original Outline
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Jonathan Hickman was the mastermind of the Krakoa Era, coming up with the ideas that kicked it off, recruiting the writers, and setting the guidelines for the era. However, two years in, he was gone. What happened was that the other writers wanted to go in different directions from the outline, Marvel wanted to stretch the whole thing out because it was profitable, and fans enjoyed Krakoa as a status quo. Hickman decided to leave (it was once played as amicable, but later interviews would show he was disappointed in things being taken from him) and while we got a few great books, most everything else was fair to middling. His outline was completely different, and knowing what we got instead, it’s easy to see how big a mistake Marvel made letting him leave.
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