As a reader of a certain age, I remember being super excited when Generation X first debuted in the 90s. I loved the Phalanx Covenant event, I loved the design of characters like Chamber and Penance, and since I was a bit too young to be into the New Mutants, it was excited to read about the next generation of X-people, even if some of the soap opera elements may have flown over my head a bit. All this to say I was a regular reader, owning every single issue up until a point. In the years since I forgot why I stopped reading the book, especially as my affection for characters like Sync and Monet have only grown since.
In reading The Secret of M – an Epic Collection that features Generation X #24-32, the ‘97 Annual, X-Men Unlimited #16, Marvel Team-Up #7, the Gen X Underground one-shot and the entire three-issue run of Daydreamers – I was reminded just how dire the state of X-Men comics were in 1997. This was a very experimental era, where Marvel was clearly throwing a lot of things against the wall to see what stuck and falling on their face a lot more often than not.
Marvel Comics
To start off, if you’re considering the book because you love Monet and want to learn what her secret was, you should know that M’s secret is saved for the final issue of Generation X proper, rather than any book-long thematic element. The book spends a lot more time with Banshee, Skin, and Jubilee than anyone, and the M stuff lingers toward the end as a very unsatisfying cliffhanger. As you could probably guess from the issues listed above, this book also features a hodgepodge of stories that don’t really gel well with each other. It’s perhaps the fate of all of these Epic Collections that function more as time capsules than graphic novels, but it does make reading this book in a sitting difficult.
Annuals tend to be self-contained stories that have no weight because they aren’t even really canonical. There’s a bizarre “flashback” issue in the middle that I guess tries to retcon some history between Banshee and Emma Frost (and shoehorn in the Dark Beast) that is of zero consequence. The team-up with Spider-Man feels light and meaningless, and the less said about the Daydreamers series the better. It all just feels like fluff, particularly with how intense the Black Tom and Operation: Zero Tolerance storylines can feel. The Underground stories are a fun trip to left field, but there’s just a lot of chaff, and not enough wheat.
This is also a weird stage in the career of Chris Bachalo, an artist whose work I’ve grown to love in the ensuing years, but was unsure of at the time. His character designs were great, and some of his more abstract concepts (namely Emplate) resonated with me, but he could get messy at times. This collection also manages to capture what I feel was the most unfortunate period in this talented artist’s evolution: the Bratz phase. For the first several issues he pencils in this collection, his style is fairly comparable to his OG Gen X sensibilities (the creepy redesign of Black Tom, in particular, is rad as hell), but around midway through, the character models enter a peculiar exaggerated stage that gives all characters big eyes, feet, hands and heads, rendering each character, particularly the female ones, looking like Bratz dolls. It’s possibly a byproduct of the group of children that were hanging around the team around this time (the aforementioned Daydreamers) but it is extremely unfortunate, as it definitely alters the vibe of the book in a negative way.
I love the Gen X kids, and it wasn’t until I read this collection that I realized how they were conceptually designed to be a team of outcast teenagers for teenage readers who feel like outcasts. There’s the guy with Skin issues (Skin), a girl who constantly needs to change her appearance to feel useful (Husk), the seemingly perfect rich girl with a dark secret (M), the sullen emo (Chamber), and the guy who is literally better than you at everything you think you’re good at (Synch). I just wish some of that cleverness found its way into this collection. There is some fun to be had in the Generation X issues, but the tie-ins, one shots and annual needlessly clutter up the final product, making it hard to recommend to essentially anyone beyond completionists.
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