8 Comic Book Characters Who Should Have Stayed Dead

The X-Men have become defined by three things: soap opera dramatics, a sprawling cast of characters, and epic plot threads that run over many, many years - be that intentionally or not.

At its best, the main X-Men title is a lens through which writers can talk about politics and social themes; be it Charles Xavier as a proxy for Martin Luther King and Magneto as Malcolm X, or the Legacy Virus as a poorly handled look at the AIDS epidemic.

But this misses the most fundamental point of the X-Men: they are mutants, and mutation is all about change.

The Darwinian adaptation of a species dictates it must always be moving forward. However, for such a system to work, there must be an element of death. Without it, humanity would never have crawled its way out of the primordial soup, and in comics, homo-sapiens would never have begotten homo-superior.

So mutant heaven with a revolving door would serve no other function than the stagnation of that species and a once constantly evolving line of comic books.