I understand the concern, though. There are fans of the X-Men who, rightly or wrongly, are concerned that those characters and that line is being marginalized or even done away with. So anything that feeds into that worry is cause for even greater paranoia. Given the tremendous number of  X-titles we put out every month, I find this all just a little bit ridiculous–but only a little bit. Fans on the outside cannot have the same perspective as the people on the inside making the decisions, but they want to–they want to feel like they’re insiders, that they’ve got their finger on the pulse of what drives our decision-making. And sometimes they do, but most times they don’t.

Also, fandom in general wants to feel like every decision that happens in the world of comic book publishing comes from a place of purity of creativity, rather than from a business or monetary perspective. This despite the fact that this has never been the case in the history of comics–in the pre-Internet days, Stan and his successors were adroit at putting over the most blatant sales or business-driven decisions as something borne of creativity. And the reality is that it’s seldom one or the other–it’s the intersection where creativity and commerce meet that you get series that can go the distance.

And, of course, just the general cynicism of the age we live in.