Okay, so obviously I've been reading a lot of X-Men and X-related titles. I'm working through them chronologically, and two of the stories that stood out to me that I wanted to talk about were Days of Future Past and Days of Future Present. I've seen that there are other things coming up with similar names that I haven't even read yet, so I'm keeping this conversation to the ones I've actually gotten through.
I'm going to start with Days of Future Past, then get into Days of Future Present, because there is quite a bit to talk about with both of them. And there was another story I ran into while reading New Warriors that reminded me of them, even though it was unrelated. I'll get to that after these, because I finally figured out which one I was remembering.
Spoilers, obviously. I'm getting into what happens and how the stories end.
The first thing about Days of Future Past is that the original story is two issues. That's it. X-Men #141 and Uncanny X-Men #142. When a story has a name this recognizable, it would be pretty easy to assume you were about to get into some huge event spread across half the books Marvel was publishing. But you can read the original in a very short stretch, and there is a surprising amount happening inside it.
That is worth bringing up when you're doing a chronological read-through. You keep moving through these characters' lives, and suddenly you get shown a possible end to almost everything you've been following. The book doesn't spend another year preparing you for that. It just puts you there and makes you deal with the difference.
The future is 2013, and the Sentinels have won. Mutants are being hunted and put into camps. A lot of the people you know are already dead. The people who are left are older, worn down, and trying to do something with whatever they still have available to them.
And the person bringing you into that world is Kitty. Or Kate, in this future.
That is such an important choice. In the present, Kitty is still the young person coming into all of this. There is a lot she hasn't experienced. She still has this whole life in front of her, and being around the X-Men opens up a world she didn't know she could be part of. Then you turn around and see an adult version of her after that world has been destroyed.
You don't have to know every single thing that happened between those two versions to understand what has been taken from her. You already know enough about the younger Kitty to recognize that the older one shouldn't have had to live this way.
Think about how different it would feel if the story started with somebody completely new giving you a tour of a bad future. You could understand that the conditions were terrible. But with Kate, you're also looking at the future of a person you have already been getting to know. Every familiar face around her adds to that. Every familiar name that belongs to somebody who didn't make it adds to it too.
And it goes beyond the X-Men. The evidence of what happened to other heroes makes the whole thing feel bigger than one team losing a fight. This has become the world people have to live in. There isn't some untouched corner of the familiar Marvel setting where everyone is just carrying on as usual and waiting to come help.
That is where the Sentinels become especially disturbing. We've seen giant robots fighting mutants before. But here the machines are part of the system people live under. Being a mutant determines how you are treated before you've done anything. You don't need to be trying to take over the world. You don't need to be one of the dangerous people the politicians always bring up. Existing is enough to put you in danger.
That makes all the old talk about protecting the public look different. You can say you want to keep people safe, then create something that decides entire groups of people are the problem. Once that becomes accepted, who is left to argue on behalf of the people it is hunting? And what happens when the machinery you built to enforce that idea starts deciding what safety means for everybody else?
The story gives those questions an actual setting. You can see the result rather than just hear somebody warn that things might get bad.
So what do the survivors do about it? At this point, they don't have a normal solution. They aren't in a position to put a team together, kick the door in, and take back the country. They are trying to change the event that helped send things in this direction to begin with.
That event is the assassination of Senator Robert Kelly by Mystique's Brotherhood.
Rachel helps send Kate's consciousness back into the body of her younger self so she can warn the present-day X-Men. The younger Kitty is physically there, but the person speaking through her has lived through the future they are trying to prevent.
And, yes, that is a difference worth keeping straight if you're coming into this with the movie in mind. Kate is the one going back here. Rachel helps make it possible. Wolverine has a role in the future, but he isn't the person taking over his younger body and doing the time-travel mission in this version.
What Kate brings with her is knowledge. She knows what happened. She knows the consequences. She knows things about these people that, from their perspective, haven't happened yet. But she still has to get them to act on that information in time.
There is a strange imbalance in that conversation. They're looking at Kitty, the young member of the group. She is looking at people whose lives she has seen play out, including people she has lost. Imagine trying to explain the urgency of something to a person while also dealing with the fact that, the last time you knew that person, they might already have been dead.
That is part of why using Kitty works so well. The difference between what everyone sees and what she knows is enormous. She doesn't suddenly look like a future soldier with equipment strapped all over her. The change is inside the person they already recognize.
Now, the mission itself sounds simple when you say it out loud. Stop Kelly from being murdered. But look at who Kelly is and what he is doing. This is somebody taking a public position against mutants. The X-Men have to protect him from other mutants while he is helping create the atmosphere that makes their lives more dangerous.
There are a lot of ways a lesser version of this story could let them off the hook. Kelly could suddenly reveal that he was secretly on their side. He could become immediately grateful and understanding. The threat could be moved to somebody easier for everyone to care about.
But they have to save the actual man standing there, with the actual beliefs he has. You don't get to make saving somebody conditional on whether they have been fair to you.
That is a pretty good test for the X-Men. It's easy to say they protect a world that hates and fears them. Here is a person contributing to that fear, and they are putting themselves between him and the people trying to kill him. They also know that his death could make things infinitely worse. The personal and practical reasons are tangled together, but the job still has to get done.
The Brotherhood fight also gives Storm something more complicated to manage than just picking who attacks whom. She has to lead the team in a situation where everything they do can be turned into an argument against them.
Wolverine is willing to use his claws, and Storm is not about to let that become the answer to every problem in the room. She has to deal with that while the fight is happening. She doesn't get to wait until afterward and explain why it might have been better if nobody had been carved up in front of the people conducting anti-mutant hearings.
That could sound like a matter of appearances if you pull it out of context, but there is a real ethical problem underneath it. If the team believes in protecting people and using restraint, those beliefs have to apply when the situation becomes difficult. Otherwise, they're just things they say when nobody is pushing them.
And this is still a dangerous fight. The Brotherhood aren't standing around politely letting the X-Men demonstrate their principles. Mystique is using deception. Destiny can anticipate what people are going to do. Pyro, Avalanche and the Blob each create different problems. The heroes still have to win while keeping sight of why they are there.
That combination gives the present-day action a lot to do. You're following the fight, you're watching Storm lead, and you're waiting for the one moment that could decide everything Kate came back to change.
Meanwhile, the story keeps taking you back to the future.
That is where the urgency really comes from. If we only saw the present, we would know Kelly was in danger, but it would still resemble a superhero team stopping an assassination. The future makes every delay feel different. You have already seen what is waiting on the other side of failure.
And the future battle doesn't give you the usual comfort of knowing that these are the X-Men, so somebody will probably find a way through it. Wolverine, Storm and Colossus are people who would normally make you feel better about a team's chances. Here, the Sentinels kill them.
There is a point in a lot of superhero fights where things look hopeless because that's the setup for somebody turning it around. This story lets the people in the future keep fighting without giving them that payoff. They can do their best and still die. The hope is tied to what Kate is doing somewhere else.
That changes the meaning of their effort. They aren't useless because they can't win the fight in front of them. They're doing what they can while the one chance they have is playing out beyond their reach. But the story also doesn't pretend effort guarantees survival.
It is worth sitting with that for a second, because otherwise the deaths can become a collection of shocking images and you move right past what they do to the story. These are people trying to prevent a world from reaching its final disaster. They have already survived more than anyone should have to survive, and being brave now doesn't mean they are going to be rewarded with another day.
Then you cut back to the present, where there is still time. Somebody can still intervene. A person can still move a little faster, notice something, get between an attacker and a target. That contrast makes the smallest choices feel much larger than they would in an ordinary team fight.
Kate stops Destiny from killing Kelly. The assassination is prevented. The thing she came to do has been done.
And this is where I think the ending is especially worth talking about, because the story could have given everybody an easy way out right there. You could have had the X-Men save Kelly, then shown a better future where the people we just watched die were all alive. Everybody gets to feel that the plan worked. Two issues, big adventure, problem solved.
Instead, the X-Men don't know whether they have saved the future Kate came from. They know they stopped the murder. They can't look forward and verify everything that came after it.
That uncertainty is important on its own. They have acted on the warning, but they don't get to see every consequence. They still have to live their lives and make choices without knowing whether they have escaped the future they were shown.
Then the epilogue makes the situation even less comfortable. Project Wideawake moves ahead. The government is still willing to consider Sentinels an answer to the mutant problem.
So Kelly is alive, but the thinking that made the future possible is still around. Saving his life hasn't automatically changed his mind. From his perspective, mutants also tried to kill him. The fact that other mutants stopped them doesn't make all his fears disappear.
That is frustrating in a very recognizable way. You can do something that ought to challenge someone's whole understanding of you, and they can still find a way to fit it into what they already believed. The X-Men don't get to choose the lesson Kelly takes from the experience.
It also stops the assassination from becoming a magical explanation for every bad thing in that future. Yes, it is the event they are trying to prevent. But there are people, institutions and decisions around it. The end makes you look at those too. If the same fear is still being encouraged and the same kind of machinery is still being built, then stopping one tragedy doesn't mean everybody can stop paying attention.
That's why I don't want to reduce this to “they went back, saved the senator, and fixed the future.” That skips the part the book deliberately leaves hanging. They saved a life. They prevented the event they were warned about. Those things matter. But the story hasn't promised them that the rest will take care of itself.
And that gives you something to carry into the books that come after it. You have seen how bad things could become, so the arguments about mutants don't just sit there as background noise anymore. You know what people are capable of building around those arguments.
For a story this short, it covers a lot: Kitty's future, Rachel's role in trying to change it, the cost of the Sentinel world, Storm's leadership, the X-Men protecting someone who opposes them, and the possibility that doing the immediate job still leaves a much bigger problem.
That is where I want to leave the original before moving into Days of Future Present. Because once Franklin and Rachel become the focus, the conversation changes. We are dealing with people who have carried that future into another time, and preventing an assassination is no longer enough to explain what they need.
Okay, so obviously I've been reading a lot of X-Men and X-related titles. I'm working through them chronologically, and two of the stories that stood out to me that I wanted to…
· Comics / Marvel / X-Men