Heroic Failures In Comics: Counter-X

The year was 2000, and the world was a much different place. Over-extension of the X-Men line had led to there existing several books of...dubious quality.

Actually, I guess it's not really that different from today.

But back then, Marvel had a solution, turn over three of its marginal X-titles to Warren Ellis and friends to see if he turn them around. Long story short: He couldn't. Although it's worth noting that one conceit of the Counter-X gimmick was that Warren Ellis would gradually turn over control of the books to his chosen successors.

Why did it fail...well, let's look at the three books...

Generation X
You see, the first X-Men spinoff was The New Mutants, and it was a tremendous success. Interestingly enough, it eventually evolved into X-Force, which I'll look at in a second...

Before Counter-X: Jay Faerber was the writer, and the Massachusetts Academy (home of Generation X) had been forced to take in normal students in order to pay the bills. The drama came from the mutants being forced to hide their powers. Your standard teen soap opera, basically.

After Counter-X: Brian Wood gets rid of the normal students and the least interesting member of the team via a series of events not worth getting into at the moment. Frankly, the retool only lasted about a year, and a large part of that was taken up by a series of spotlight issues, so it's kind of hard to say there were a lot of changes. Either way, the book ended by scattering the team and closing the school.

X-Force
In a shocking twist, the X-book most tied into the worst excesses of the '90s started to show its age after about a decade, hence it was also involved in the Counter-X initiative.

Before Counter-X: X-Force was a band of young mutants (but not as young as Generation X) who were "edgier" than the main X-Teams. At least I think that's what it was about, it's kind of hard to figure out exactly what makes the bunch of mutants different from every other bunch of mutants.

After Counter-X: X-Force is a "black-ops" team, operating extra-legally in order to stop evil-doers. I think the key difference is that they play up the "extra-legal" concept. There's probably supposed to be a sort of ambiguous morality or something inherent in this approach, but it doesn't really come through.

Actually, X-Force survived the Counter-X implosion and was given over to Peter Milligan and Mike Allred and changed into an entirely different book about the convergence of celebrity and super-heroics.

X-Man
Behold the most superfluous X-Book that ever was!

Before Counter-X: Nate Grey was the super-powerful son who, through a complicated series of event was the biological child of Cyclops and Jean Grey and raised in a dystopia, and yes, that does sound a lot like Cable...except without guns...or a sense of purpose. It sounds as good as it was.

After Counter-X: The most successful Counter-X in terms of quality, it succeeded because it actually fixed one of the key flaws in the book by giving Nate Grey something to do. Unfortunately, it involved Nate Grey becoming some sort of shaman and involved bunches of alternate universes, but at least it tried.

Counter-X never really had a chance, the books Ellis was given to overhaul were marginal to begin with, and the industry wasn't in great shape at the moment. Still, the relaunches were mainly giving the existing bad concept a Ellisian gloss and sending them on their way, and that certainly wasn't going to work.