Marvel teases Death of X for fall 2016

A mysterious teaser image for something called “Death of X” by Marvel hints at something grim on the horizon for mutants this fall.

Well, this can’t be good, even if it might make for a good story. The following teaser image was released by Marvel with an email that contained no body and only the subject line “Death Of …”

That’s not much to go on at all, but let’s try unpacking it a bit anyway. Someone is dying, and the ‘X’ almost certainly means the X-Men are involved. The use of the letter most associated with mutants means it’s likely to be more than one person in the crosshairs, or else it would just be named like “Death of Wolverine” was.

Professor X is already dead, so it can’t be him. But it could mean the death of his dream, as in the X-Men throwing in the towel and going their separate ways. Perhaps a villain figures out a way to get them to disband “permanently” or something to that effect.

It’s also worth remembering that mutants are generally in a bad way right now thanks to the wide spread of the Inhumans’ Terrigen Mists, which are harmful to them to the point that they are slowly killing them. We could be looking at the death of mutants as a species, then, something that has been threatened many times over the publication history of the X-Men without ever quite coming to pass.

If that thought makes X-Men fans nervous, the thing to remember is that despite talk that Marvel would do away with mutants because of Fox holding the X-Men movie rights, they’re still too valuable in general to kill off. Expect a storyline that brings them to the brink, but actually saying “there are no more X-Men” would be a shocking move indeed.