290: Ed Brubaker Retrospective
- Matt Campbell
- 18 minutes ago
- 7 min read
Introduction
While this was a pretty decent run, it's really hard to generalize. Brubaker kicked off a space opera (Deadly Genesis, Rise and Fall of the Shi'ar Empire, and War of Kings), navigated a giant event (Messiah Complex), and ended his run by helping to re-boot a new status quo (Manifest Destiny.) I can't help but assume when I get to the end (Krakoa) that I'll have a hard time answering what "The Brubaker run was like."
In a CBR interview, he says:
I had been an X-Men fan as a kid to some degree, but I wasn't a hardcore X-Men fan like a lot of people were.
I think this comes out a bit. Again, I don't think this was a bad run, it just didn't seem to have much identity. I typically hold off on reading interviews until I get done with a run and a lot of the times I'm not surprised to hear that author's were huge fans and really motivated by certain characters or arcs. So to hear that this wasn't the case just makes sense. Let's get into the major themes.
Major Themes
Hidden History & the Consequences of Secrets
Brubaker’s run is built on the idea that the past is never truly buried. Deadly Genesis explodes the myth of Xavier as an unblemished mentor, revealing a secret team, a dead mission, and a lost Summers brother. The ripple effects of distrust, fractured leadership, and moral ambiguity shape everything that follows. Brubaker consistently frames the X-Men as living in the shadow of choices made decades earlier.
Cosmic Hubris & the Collapse of Empire
Brubaker leans heavily into big-galaxy storytelling: Shi’ar dynastic politics, civil war, coups, and the rise of an unstable tyrant. The conflict isn’t just “space adventure”; it’s a study in power vacuum, historical grievance, and the way empires fall apart from both internal corruption and external vengeance. Vulcan becomes a living metaphor for cycles of imperial trauma.
Mutants Turned Against Mutants
A recurring thread through The Extremists, Messiah Complex, and even the post-MC arcs is that the greatest threats to mutantkind often come from within. Morlock extremists, Sentinel-builders, the Marauders, time-travel factions, and splinter ideologues all collide in a way that reframes mutant conflict as civil war rather than simple “humans versus mutants.” Brubaker keeps asking: What does survival look like when your own people are breaking apart?
The Birth of the Mutant Future (Messiah Complex Seeds)
Brubaker co-architects the era that leads directly to Messiah Complex, a storyline obsessed with fate, extinction, and “the child who will redefine mutantkind.” Throughout his run, everything trends toward the question of what mutant survival even means when the population is dying, scattered, and mistrustful. Brubaker positions the X-Men right on the brink of their next evolutionary leap, both narratively and literally.
Breaking Down the Arcs
In Brubaker's own words:
"It's kind of a horror story, but it's mostly an X-Men story," said Brubaker. "However, the way that the story gets to them is through having these terrible memories pushed to the surface in all of them. It's like the worst thing that you ever did in your life and you walk into your room, and suddenly, you're reliving that moment for a second-- you know, weird little 'their worst fear' kind of things."
In Deadly Genesis, a ferocious mutant named Vulcan emerges from orbit, unmasked as the long-lost “third Summers brother,” sparking an explosive return for the X-Men. Having survived a previously unknown rescue mission orchestrated by Professor Charles Xavier — whose first attempt to save the original X-Men ended in death and despair — Vulcan seizes the spotlight, revealing the dark truth about a secret mutant team that perished. As Vulcan exacts brutal vengeance, including the shocking death of Banshee, the surviving X-Men are forced to confront the buried history Xavier hid from them. In the aftermath, Xavier’s control fractures irreparably: trust is broken, memories are shattered, and Cyclops effectively expels Xavier, signaling that the old order is dead — and a new, more volatile era for mutantkind has begun.
In this sprawling cosmic saga, Vulcan — the long-lost Summers brother — returns with vengeance on his mind, setting out to destroy the mighty Shi'ar Empire and everyone who wronged him. A rag-tag team assembled by a weakened Professor X — including Havok, Polaris, Nightcrawler, Rachel Summers, Warpath, and Darwin — blasts off into space, battling Imperial Guards, traitorous Shi’ar factions, and outlaw alliances in a desperate gamble to stop Vulcan’s genocidal crusade. Despite their best efforts, Vulcan’s rage and ambition prove unstoppable: he topples old regimes, resurrects the deposed ruler D'Ken, frees Deathbird from prison (sparking a lethal alliance), and ultimately seizes the throne for himself. In the end the X-Men emerge battered and defeated — Earth-bound for now — while Vulcan and Deathbird flee as emperor and empress, leaving the Shi’ar Empire broken and a dark new chapter beginning.
In this tense “calm before the storm” story, a radical faction of Morlocks — led by Masque and driven by a prophetic “book” — kidnaps the depowered mutant Leech, declaring war on the surface world and seeking to leverage Leech to resurrect Magneto. Storm assembles a strike team — including Hepzibah, Warpath, and Caliban — to descend into New York’s sewers and confront the extremists, blending compassion, fury, and moral uncertainty as they aim to stop a mutant-on-mutant atrocity. Meanwhile, Charles Xavier and Nightcrawler hunt for Magneto, increasingly concerned that S.H.I.E.L.D. or O.N.E. might capture him first — creating a spiral of distrust and shifting alliances. As tensions mount and betrayals surface (including a shocking turn by Skids), the climax erupts in a brutal showdown beneath New York, forcing the Morlocks to retreat but leaving mutantkind rattled and the book of prophecy in hand for Magneto. The arc ends with uneasy calm — a fragile reset before the storm, as everything sets toward the looming apocalypse of Messiah Complex.
When Cerebro detects a shockwave of mutant energy in Alaska, the world’s last surviving mutants realize that—for the first time since M-Day—a new mutant has been born. A team led by Cyclops — alongside Wolverine, Nightcrawler, Angel, and Emma Frost — races to Alaska, only to arrive too late: the town is burning and the newborn mutant is gone, whisked away by a brutal clash between the fanatic anti-mutant group Purifiers and the murderous mercenary squad Marauders. As the X-Men reel from failure, Cyclops seizes control of the search effort, ordering covert operations: depowered mutant Rictor infiltrates the Purifiers, while members of X‑Factor and the New X-Men dig into alternate-timeline secrets via time-splicing technology. Meanwhile, the monstrous hunter Predator X is unleashed — a terrifying variable that stalks mutants and dramatically raises the stakes. As alliances shift and betrayals mount, all paths — Purifiers, Marauders, future-obsessed X-Factor, desperate X-Men — converge on a final showdown. Though the fate of the mutant “Messiah” remains uncertain by issue #493, the moment feels like a cliffhanger for mutantkind.
In the wreckage left by Messiah Complex, the X-Men are officially disbanded — no team, no mansion, no clear purpose for mutantkind. Cyclops and Emma Frost retreat to the untamed wilds of the Savage Land for solace, while the likes of Nightcrawler, Wolverine and Colossus wander across Europe and Russia, mourning losses and questioning what remains of their mission. Meanwhile, a strange psychic phenomenon warps part of San Francisco into a 1960s-style utopia — a bizarre illusion masterminded by a resurrected villain manipulating reality. As Cyclops and Emma work to unravel the mystery, Nightcrawler, Wolverine and Colossus find themselves tangled in brutal interrogations by Russia's “Red Room,” all probing for mutant secrets. In the end, the illusion is shattered, the manipulated populace freed, the X-Men begin to drift toward regrouping in a new home — but the fractures remain, hope and mistrust now entwined as mutantkind claws forward into uncertain days.
The X-Men uproot themselves from Westchester and establish a bold new home in San Francisco, opening the doors to any remaining mutant willing to join them — a fresh start fraught with hope and danger. Almost immediately, their new status quo is tested: a resurrected Magneto instigates a Sentinel attack — the first of many threats — and soon the xenophobic new group Hellfire Cult rises alongside the sinister Sisterhood of Mutants, signaling that old hatreds still follow them west. Amidst the chaos, the X-Men launch internal efforts to rebuild: forming a science team, founding Graymalkin Industries as their new base, and reaching out telepathically to mutants across the globe. By issue #507, the web of threats — external bigotry, conspiracy, and mutant-on-mutant conflict — has only grown more tangled, setting the table for a darker, more uncertain chapter for mutantkind, even as San Francisco glitters like the promise of a new beginning.
Characters
Most runs consist of a set cast of characters who go through a few story arcs, but this was anything but that. He speaks about this directly in an interview with (CBR) when comparing writing the X-Men to the Authority:
"With the Authority, you kind of have to use every single one of them in every issue to some degree. If not, then it has to be very deliberate that you're not. With the X-Men, they're set up in a way that you don't actually have to use any of them that you don't want to use, because there's so many of them, for one thing. I found it's more like writing a book about a huge cast of characters, and whatever ones you need to be in a certain scene you just throw in there.
As you likely know, I am reading every X-Men comic for the first time. But as I've spent the last five years becoming an X-Men superfan, I've read a lot (in Reddit forums, random articles, etc.) about how Havok's best run was the "Vulcan Chasing" stuff. Deadly Genesis creates an entirely new sub-set of X-Men with Havok, Polaris, and Rachel off in space alongside Cho'd, Raza, and Liliana. This group will be apart from the core X-Men until it comes to a head with War of Kings.
One of the things I'll likely remember him for more than others is bringing Warpath back into relavance. I think I can say without exaggeration that this was the best version of Warpath we've seen to date.
Brubaker also chats about having fun writing Nightcrawler and Colossus:
"Rereading the old ones and then working on it, I was eight pages in and I was writing a scene with Nightcrawler and Colossus and I was like, the idea of the X-Men is really cool. You know, writing these characters is actually fun, because there's so many of them that if you know the basic way they all deal with each other, the dialogue really just writes itself. The characters, at least the ones I'm using in this, are so well-realized that it's easy to write them."
All in all, this is a solid run, but not the absolute best.