10 Reasons Why X-Men Are Actually Better Than The Avengers
6. The Soap-Style Drama
Marvel Comics
Compared to the Avengers, the X-Men could be considered somewhat impenetrable. Why? Although both comics have been going for a similar amount of time (The Avengers since 1963, the X-Men that very same year), the heavy emphasis on melodrama as well as the sheer number of characters who've appeared in the X-Men precludes an easy introduction to their antics. To this day, it's still fair to say that X-Men isn't exactly Marvel's most accessible comic.
And yet, part of that long-running, soap-style drama is what makes it so charming. There are so many relationships and connections in the series and most have all have impacted the other in some way or another. The characters are consistent, and they each carry the experiences of hundreds' worth of issues with them wherever they go.
This in turn has given way to an extremely self-referential style of storytelling where writers are constantly making callbacks to older series, which again, can make things quite confusing. However, once you're in, you are in. Just don't be surprised if things seem a tad discombobulating without any prior context.
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.
