Does any of this make sense?

Brian K. Vaughan is doing pretty good writing for Buffy Season 8 - based on the 2nd "volume" of the series. That's not the point of this post, but I thought it should be said.

Last night, Andy Ihnatko tweeted, "The X-Men mythos has about as much structure, linearity, and consistency as a David Lynch movie. I just can't get interested in it". At the current point in time you can see my reply to right, but for posterity I said, "I can get interested, but I understand your point. Especially with all the 'futures that must be prevented'. Cable's still cool tho".

Thinking about it, his reply to that is pretty on the spot: "I'm sure lots of the mutant stuff is good! But I feel like I need to go to summer school in order to understand what's going on." You do really need a program to know who the players are. How else are you supposed to know that Cable is Nathan Dayspring is Nathan Christopher Charles Summers, which means that he's the son of Cyclops and Madelyne Pryor (who was a clone of Jean Grey) who was sent to the future after he was infected with a techno-organic virus by Apocalypse.

It really doesn't help that if you want to read any of the major storylines there are always 3-4 titles that you have to keep up with, possibly more depending on what point in time you're talking about.

My solution to this is to focus on following the Ultimate continuity, which was created for just this sort of problem - well, it was created to reach out to a younger audience that didn't have the background knowledge. The storyline is already getting a little messy (we've just recently had our first incursion of future people in the form of Cable - who's actually Wolverine in this version - and Bishop), but it's all contained in one book.