Paul O'Brien has some interesting speculation in his review of the latest arc of Bendis' All New X-Men. People have been thinking that Marvel is headed for a reboot since the teaser art from AvX was first released, and the events of Age of Ultron certainly sound like they are settings things up. If so, it's a crazy slow shamble towards a reboot, but that's the pace all Marvel's stories work at now so i suppose it's not impossible. I haven't read Age of Ultron (but i did read the follow-up in Hulk that suggested pretty clearly that continuity is broken) and i dropped All New X-Men after (*checks*) oh my god, eleven issues of nothing happening, so i don't know how plausible O'Brien's speculation is, although his review makes it sound convincing. And i've already given my thoughts on the various outcomes of a Marvel reboot on multiple occasions, so i don't want to get into all that again at least until we have some kind of confirmation.

I just wanted to say that if the idea is that the All New X-Men are leading the way to this line wide reboot, it explains why this series seemed to go off the rails from its original remit. Paul O'Brien summarizes it like this:

The high concept of All-New X-Men is that the Silver Age X-Men are brought to the present day, and are appalled by seeing how the world has turned out. As of course they should be. The Professor is dead; Scott killed him; Jean is dead and (sort of) responsible for genocide; Hank is a giant blue ape; Warren is a grinning idiot; and Bobby... well, things actually turned out okay for Bobby, but there's plenty left for the X-Men to be horrified by. Plus, it's not as though the X-Men seem to have made any real headway in their goal of co-existence between humans and mutants. It's not a happy picture.

The thing is, that's not exactly how i thought the series would be. O'Brien is right that the general idea was that the Silver Age X-Men go to the present and see that things haven't turned out the way they would have hoped. But you'll notice that most of O'Brien's examples are personal - Jean is dead, Beast mutated, Angel's in whatever weird state the X-Office has put him in nowadays. He does say that they also haven't made "headway" on the mutants right issue, but he's right to only mention that in passing, since Bendis' book, at least in the eleven issues i read, also focused on the personal more than the bigger mutant picture.

And when i originally heard about this series, i thought the concept was pretty brilliant. Take Days of Future Past and flip it on its head by having the Silver Age X-Men come to the present and react to it as a dystopian horror the way the 1980s X-Men reacted to the Days of Future Past future, i.e., because of the way it showed that Professor X's dream of mutants and humans living together was destined for failure, not because some individual characters were dead or whatever. The subtext would be like bringing George Orwell to the present and having him learn about the NSA and state secrets privilege and the abuse of the Espionage Act and the like. In the Marvel universe there was Civil War and the 198 mutant camp and the mutants segregating themselves in Utopia and lots more stuff like that. So the idea could be that the Silver Age X-Men show up for six issues, are horrified by the "future" and then go home resolving to make changes to make their future better, and leaving the present day X-Men realizing how much they've failed.

I think there's a smattering of that idea with Cyclops having formed a separate group of X-Men with Magneto, but (from what i've read) it really got lost in the sprawl of Bendis' plots, and the focus again seems to be more on the personal (how could Scott have killed Xavier?!?) than anything about the current state of mutant rights. Which is too bad, because while that short story might not have served any long term reboot goals, but i think it would have been a much more powerful story.