This was the year the X-Men went from great to holy sh–.

After building up a bank of talent in 2018, 2019 saw a host of writers and artists set loose on the AU event story “Age of X-Man,” in which incel Jesus Nate Grey creates a world in his own mind in which everyone is a mutant and at peace but children are born from eggs and no one’s allowed to love on each other. Not that even mind control could stop X-Men, or its fans, from being horny AF.

Meanwhile, back in reality, a newly not-dead-anymore Cyclops and Wolverine found themselves in a world without X-Men, on a suicide run with the last remaining graduates of the Xavier School against a world that hates and fears them, while being manipulated from afar by Emma Frost, who was Black King of the Hellfire Club for a brief, glorious moment. Together, their last, desperate gambit is to make humans forget mutants ever existed.

After a few off years, those stories alone would have been seen as a welcome return to form for the X-books, but then:

In June, writer Jonathan Hickman and artists Pepe Larraz and R.B. Silva arrived with a mind-blowing, 12-week story in “House of X” and “Powers of X” that rewrote the X-Men’s status quo for the foreseeable future, giving them a new homeland, leverage over the human race and, perhaps most astonishingly, a way to cheat death that freed the X-office up to tell all kinds of new, interesting stories.

What follows is not a list of best series or best characters from the past 12 months of X-Men storytelling. Quite frankly, your favorite character had a great year (especially if your favorite character is Cyclops, Emma Frost, Apocalypse or Moira MacTaggert). Today is not about picking a favorite child.

Instead, we’re looking at some of the things that made the X-Men great in 2019. It may be as small as a panel or as significant as the retconning of a major supporting character, but each played a role in putting the X-Men back on top of Marvel’s, and Diamond’s, sales charts.

Art by Pepe Larraz

MOIRA X

Remember when Moira MacTaggert was the X-Men’s sassy new maid? Yeah, me neither.

Through what may be one of comics’ greatest retcons, Hickman, Larraz and Silva showed us the 10 lives of Moira Kinross-Cowan-Xavier-MacTaggert, a mutant with the ability to be reborn over and over again, each time with the memories of her previous lives. She’s loved, hated and worked with Xavier. She’s fought at the sides of Magneto and Apocalypse. She’s been kept alive for a millennium as a pet in a posthuman zoo. She’s seen how time and time again, the humans’ hatred of mutants leads to the rise of machine intelligences that destroy them all, be it Sentinels or Nimrods or the Phalanx.

Moira’s 10th life may be her last chance to save the mutant race, and her only chance at an 11th bonus life. As long as, you know, the humans don’t level up again and wipe out Krakoa, and Xavier and Magneto don’t make a total hash of things on the surface while she toils away in her secret No-Place.

Art by German Peralta

‘MY MAN‘

This panel, from “Prisoner X” #4, drawn by German Peralta and written by Vita Ayala, was my favorite single panel from any comic I read last year. The straight riffing on Denzel. The gleeful sneer that shows the tide’s about to turn. If this were pro wrestling, this is that moment when the face who’s been getting his ass handed to him successfully blocks his opponent’s blow and turns to the audience with his O face as if to say, “I’m about to do my special move, aren’t I?”

So much of what made “Age of X-Man” work were these little moments where specific characters got to shine. Bishop and Polaris in “Prisoner X.” Meggan in “Amazing Nightcrawler.” Pretty much everyone in “X-Tremists.” The work done this past year by writers like Ayala, Leah Williams, Tini Howard and Seanan McGuire shows just how deep the X-bench is, and how much women and femme-presenting writers bring to a franchise lauded for its women protagonists. Plus, Tini brought back Pete Wisdom, so you better believe we stan.

Art by Rahzzah

ALL THE SHIPS AT SEA

As we mentioned before, Nate Grey may have tried to ban love in his “Age of X-Man,” but that only gave rise to new hookups. Some – like Nightcrawler and Meggan in “The Amazing Nightcrawler” – fans had pined for for decades. Others – like Psylocke and the Blob in “X-Tremists” and Bishop and Jean Grey in “Marvelous X-Men” – we had no idea we wanted.

But that was a fantasy land, built to end. While all that was going on, there was a bigger issue at play. Eventually, Jean and the rest of the reality-displaced X-Men were going to come back. Would she and Cyclops reunite? Would Scott choose Emma over Jean? And what about Logan?

In “Uncanny X-Men” #22, Matthew Rosenberg and Salvador Larroca give us one answer …

Art by Salvador Larroca

In “X-Men” #1, Hickman gives us another.

Without saying it, because he never would, and without showing it, because see previous, Hickman has given supporters of polyamory a coded fic for the ages. Why make Scott choose when he and every other mutant on Krakoa could be with whoever they want because monogamy is a human thing and they’re creating a new society not bound by human rules? It’s like 1960s McAvoy Xavier from “X-Men: First Class” is whispering in everyone’s ear about how mutation is “groovy, baby” and everyone should just get “shagadelic, yeah.”

Art by Leinil Yu

CYCLOPS … HAPPY?

No longer being forced to choose between Jean and Emma aside, Krakoa has been very good to Cyclops. Scott Summers is no longer the insecure eye-laser boy afraid of screwing up and pining for the redhead from afar, nor is he the tormented revolutionary guerilla icon.

Instead, the X-Men’s greatest tactical mind gets to play field leader while the Quiet Council makes the tough decisions. He gets to live on the moon with his extended family (and Wolverine; see above). He gets to take his children, from whom he has so often been separated by time and alternate realities, on monster-hunting raids. He’s got a swagger worthy of someone who is so many X-fans’ favorite character. And he is perhaps the best example of how the X-Men are on top right now.

Cover by Whilce Portacio

DEATH …

Rosenberg’s “Uncanny X-Men” run was billed as “The Last X-Men Story.” A ton of mutants died. It was bleak as hell. And it shipped biweekly, so there was no time to mourn. Only one got a proper burial, and the way she died was seen as a gross allegory for trans-panic murders.

Not long after, in “House of X,” Cyclops took a handpicked team of heavy hitters – Jean Grey, Wolverine, Nightcrawler, Archangel, Mystique, M and Husk – into space to blow up a Sentinel-factory factory and got picked off one by one by the humans aboard it, as Xavier, Storm, Beast and others watched via telepathic link from Earth. It was horrific. And then …

Art by Pepe Larraz

… all of it was wiped away. With the aid of Cerebro and five mutants whose combined powers could make new bodies – one of whom was Goldballs – Xavier and company began the process of resurrecting (almost) every mutant who’d ever died, bringing back everyone from Cyclops to Wolfsbane to Pyro to Shinobi Shaw to Esme and Sophie Cuckoo. No longer would the X-books sacrifice characters for shock value. No, for now at least, writers would have to find new gimmicks. Even the assassination of Xavier in “X-Force” #1 was a minor inconvenience, quickly undone.

Art by Joshua Cassara

NEW ROLES FOR OLD VILLAINS

When Xavier opened Krakoa up to all the X-Men’s old villains, they stopped being villains. So who are they? Part of the fun of the “Dawn of X” titles is learning who these mustache-twirlers are in this new world order. Take Apocalypse, for example. No longer forced to spend all his time declaiming about survival of the fittest, he’s traded his armor for some flowing robes with gold accents and has rediscovered his love of sorcery. Black Tom Cassidy, formerly one-half of the tightest pair of two-bit criminals in the Marvel Universe, is now head of security on Krakoa. Pyro has found his bliss sailing the seas with Kate Pryde, getting sparked by Lockheed and screaming Journey songs at the top of his lungs.

Art by Leinil Yu

It also opens the door for new villains, such as Hordeculture, the group of aged botanists introduced in “X-Men” #3 who hoisted Sebastian Shaw by his own pitard and told Emma to wash herself. There’d be no room for characters like these if the X-Men still had to contend with punching the Brotherhood and the Acolytes.

THE KRAKOAN ALPHABET

I can’t sight-read Krakoan yet. I can pick out a few key letters, like O and E, but I still have to refer to the photo I snapped of the Krakoan alphabet when I’m reading the “Next” page at the end of each X-Men comic. But how fun is that, that in 2019 we have our own little decoder-ring language to play with, that’s become part of the mythology of X-Men and that drives conversation on what’s going to happene next. Hickman alone is cryptic as hell, but taking a thing that’s open to interpretation and then making us have to translate it, that extra level of “What the hell does it all mean” – that’s some galaxy-brain ish.

DATA PAGES

When you’re taking a beloved, 56-year-old property and transforming it into something new and different, you are not unlike Lucille Ball when she gets caught sneaking into one of her husband’s performances: You’ve got some ‘splaining to do.

But how to do that in a way that is both informative and entertaining? How about black-and-white text?

Hickman’s data pages – with fonts and design by Tom Muller – aren’t a book report to be droned over; they’re a feast to be devoured, each one providing new information, charts and organization without the overpowering sound of Cyclops clearning his throat and saying, “As you know, Wolverine …” Without these pages, what would we know about the hybrid breeding pits of the SalCen kennel? How would we know what percentage of ORCHIS is ex-Hydra? How would we know exactly how many mutants were killed on Genosha in the wild Sentinel attack, and how many were de-powered on M-Day by “the Pretender Wanda Maximoff”?

And if you think a page of clinically presented information can’t hit you in the feels, well, you’re just a wrong person. One of the most powerful moments of “House of X” #4, the issue where ORCHIS kills Cyclops’ strike team, is when the data pages begin folding in on themselves, repeating and going negative, until all that is left are two giant words: “NO MORE.” Or how about in “Gwenpool Strikes Back” #5, when Gwen is retconned as a mutant and gets her own data page, the official sign she’s made it as a citizen of Krakoa?

In the few short months data pages have been a thing, they’ve become a visual shorthand for X-Men comics, like smiley-face buttons for “Watchmen” or nine-panel grids for Tom King-Mitch Gerads books or those half-mask faces you see in Spider-Man. That’s the power of good design, and strong branding, two things our merry mutants deserve.