What Do People Think Of From The Ashes?

So, I went to the X-Men subreddit and asked people what they thought about From The Ashes. It was a fun time.

The end of the Krakoa Era often felt like we were being put out of our misery. Fall Of X was… well, it was something. However, we knew pretty quickly into it that things were going to take a massive change once it was all over. Marvel announced that Tom Brevoort, the publisher’s Executive Editor, was taking over the X-Office, moving him away from the Avengers and Marvel’s event scene for the first time in the twenty-first century. Brevoort has long been one of Marvel’s main behind the scenes forces, and bringing him to the X-books was a big deal.

However, it also wasn’t looked at as the best move in the world by every single fan. I’m pretty active on the X-Men subreddit, a place that honestly kind of sucks and gets really hive-minded. When the announcement was made, you had the group who think that everything is always rosy talking about how Brevoort was involved with Hickman’s Avengers run and Bendis’s New Avengers, spinning the whole thing as something good. Then there were the doom and gloom contingent, of which I was a member, who also brought up all the really stupid stuff that Brevoort had been a part of over the years. It was a war, which is pretty normal on Reddit.

Of course, all of this was at the end of 2023. No one really knew where the X-Men books were going or what was going to happen next then. However, as the months went by and Fall Of X started to underwhelm even more than we thought possible, some people started to look forward to what was coming next. Anything had to be better than what we were getting for some people, so when information on From The Ashes started to hit, there was a lot of excitement. Marvel started teasing out titles and creative teams months in advance - I wrote several articles for CBR about them - Uncanny X-Men from Gail Simone and David Marquez, X-Men from Jed MacKay and Ryan Stegman, Exceptional X-Men from Eve Ewing and Carmen Carnero, Jean Grey from Stephanie Phillips and Alessandro “I’m a tracer!” Miracolo, Wolverine from Saladin Ahmed and Martin Coccolo, NYX from Collin Kelley, Jackson Lanzing, and Francesco Moritarino, X-Force from Geoffrey Thorn and Marcus To, X-Factor from Mark Russell and Bob Quinn, Dazzler from Jason Loo and Rafael Loureiro, and Storm from Murewa Ayodele and Lukas Werneck. I think that’s all of them, but I feel like I’m forgetting a few. It all started in July of 2024, with the release of X-Men (Vol. 7) #1.

The last few months have been rather interesting, partly because of the way fans have reacted to From The Ashes. The X-Men subreddit is often a contentious place, and the reality of From The Ashes has been just as divisive as the beginning announcements of it were. So, because I’m a journalist, or something, I decided to make a post asking people what they thought of From The Ashes on the X-Men sub so far at the end of September. This past week, I also asked about why people loved Uncanny so much. So, this post is going to talk about what I learned from doing it.

Overall, the responses to both posts were pretty favorable. The From The Ashes post had a lot of people saying the same thing - that despite the new status quo not bringing a lot of new ideas, people mostly enjoyed it. There was a feeling that there being a title for every kind of fan was a good thing. A lot of people enjoyed the “back to basics” approach. From The Ashes is very much nostalgia driven. It takes ideas from a lot of places in X-Men history, and that fact seemed to comfort a lot of repliers. This would come up more later when I asked what people liked so much about Uncanny X-Men. There were very few completely negative comments, but they were there. They mostly hated the lack of new ideas and plots. NYX was a favorite of a lot of commenters, which I found to be interesting, since it was the book that dealt the most with Krakoa stuff. Most people said that they liked some of it, and didn’t like other parts of it.

I had noticed a lot of praise for Uncanny X-Men on the sub and after reading the first three issues, I went and asked everyone what they thought of the book. Again, there was mostly positive comments, and they all basically said a variation of the same things. They enjoyed the book because of Marquez’s art and Simone’s emphasis on character. This latter factor became the main source of praise for the book. Simone wrote her team - which so far consists of Rogue, Gambit, Wolverine, Nightcrawler, and Jubilee with some new mutants - more as a family and commenters really enjoyed her characterizations of the characters. They felt that this book had something that the Krakoa Era books were often missing. Again, there were very few completely negative comments.

Now, there was a reason why I asked these questions and it’s because I personally aren’t really a fan of From The Ashes. I’ve already dropped some of the books I subbed to, including X-Men and Phoenix. I’m not enjoying the nostalgia heavy approach of the books. X-Men, for me, is basically a pastiche of Bendis’s Uncanny from 2013 with some plot elements from Grant Morrison’s New X-Men. The art by Stegman also didn’t do it for me at all, especially his Cyclops design. Phoenix was more about every other character instead of Jean Grey, which isn’t what I wanted. Plus, there was the fact that the artist traced a lot of Olivier Coipel art. I wrote an entire post about Wolverine, a book that had a good idea and great art surrounded by a mass of cliches. Uncanny X-Men is my favorite of the books so far, but for me, I feel like it’s a basic team book and not really worthy of the praise I’ve seen it get. It’s definitely not bad, but it’s not amazing. I still haven’t read Storm yet, and the rest of the books didn’t really appeal enough to me to want to pay for or even pirate.

From The Ashes has been selling rather well, especially Wolverine and Uncanny X-Men, so I would say that so far it has been something of a success. While it hasn’t created the same kind of buzz that the beginning of Hickman’s run did, it is still pretty solidly popular. Of course, there is definitely a contingent of readers that aren’t exactly happy about it overall, but that’s to be expected.

There are some things about it that most fans aren’t really happy with - for example, the upcoming “Raid On Graymalkin” X-Men/Uncanny X-Men crossover sees the two team clash and many are against this idea. It hearkens back to when Marvel was all about hero versus hero events, something Brevoort was very much involved in, and even people who like FtA think this idea is a little much. It will be interesting to see the direction Brevoort and company take the books; the X-Men are coming to the MCU and that’s going to mean some MCU synergy. Personally, I predict that the X-Men will be back together in the Mansion in the next couple of years, but I could easily be wrong.

I don’t think From The Ashes is for everyone. Its lack of a central story makes it easy to ignore a lot of it, and its nostalgia theming, often blatantly copying stories from the past, makes it unappealing for a lot of longtime fans. However, books like Uncanny, with their focus on character, are enough to convince many old school fans who miss the feeling of the old days to stay around. The one thing that I look forward is seeing how the line develops. I don’t have a lot of faith in Tom Brevoort - I’ve disliked nearly everything he’s edited for years now - or Marvel, and I want to see where they take the X-Men. MCU synergy is something of a curse in my opinion, and the X-Men are going to be in the thick of it in the years to come, especially because of how popular every mutant related Marvel Studios production has been lately. Will Brevoort and Marvel bungle the whole thing? Almost certainly, as they’ve done for years now, but it will be fun to see if they’ve learned anything.

So, that’s that. People like From The Ashes. However, they LOVE Gail Simone and David Marquez’s Uncanny X-Men. What does the future hold? We’ll see. Anyways, here’s the subscribe button.

Here’s my Patreon, in case one of you decides to have mercy on my very broke soul.

patreon.com/CrustyOldFan

Come back for the next installment, when I write about 2000s Marvel and DC, an era that I look back on with a lot of fondness.