Like many kids born from the mid-eighties and on, I grew up loving superheroes but didn’t come to them through the comics they originated in. Don’t get me wrong, I had the occasional comic and I loved each one as if it were a precious heirloom, but life was filled with superheroes, from Batman movies that dominated the theatres, Happy Meals and our imaginations, to the cartoons that we watched every day. It was in these 22-minute adventures that I discovered a lot of the comic book world, and the X-Men animated series on FOX Kids was no different. It’s how I was introduced to the world of Marvel’s mighty mutants and whether or not it has held up over the years, it holds a high place in my memory’s esteem because it was one of the things that made me want to read all the comics.

Because I wanted so badly to read comics, and because even when I was 10 I was incapable of not being a giant nerd about every single thing I liked, I bought the Official X-Men Handbook and read the whole thing, front to back, over and over again. I memorized everything, even the memberships of the Blue and Gold teams, the kinds of pranks Boom-Boom liked to play and the ways everybody would cheat outrageously at baseball because of course they would. Goddammit, I was ready.

Of course, I didn’t actually jump into the comics until much later – I wouldn’t have even known there was such a thing as a comic book shop if it wasn’t for sneaking episodes of The Simpsons – and when I did, it was with the “Endangered Species” storyline. I had no idea what was happening and despite an embarrassing number of hours spent on Wikipedia, I never quite felt like I had a real grasp on what was going on for the next several years.

Until now. Until Regenesis, which is absolutely the X-Men story I have been waiting for since I first saw “Night of the Sentinels.” And how does it accomplish this? Through good old-fashioned incredible setup and storytelling.

01. SERIOUSLY THE WORLD IS COLD TELLIN THE MUTANTS TO DIE AND CYCLOPS IS PRETTY POLITE ABOUT IT ALL THINGS CONSIDERED

The heavy lifting for all this is done in Uncanny X-Men #1, by Kieron Gillen and Carlos Pacheco. Don’t get me wrong, it is a ridiculously packed story that puts front and centre the reality of the mutants’ situation as an endangered species fighting for survival, but it does one thing better than just about any other: it doesn’t assume I know who everybody is or why they’re there, but doesn’t bury it in exposition, either. Here is what I need to know:

• Mutants are an endangered species, hated and feared by many.
• They live on an island nearSan Francisco.
• Various teams of mutants fill various duties.
• Cyclops is a stern but skilled leader who has just about had enough of the world’s shit.

That’s it. Period. Everything else is delicious gravy for established readers, but more than a little bit of it chokes new ones. It’s a hard balance to find, and I was pleased to see that Gillen absolutely gets it. When I was reading the first relaunched issue of Uncanny, I was struck by how much it felt like someone’s first X-Men comic, where they could move forward but still get the sense that the world of the comic was so gloriously, wonderfully big. Don’t get me wrong, some readers will be lost, and some have said they were, but what I loved is that I didn’t have to use Wikipedia once to catch up on who somebody was; even Mister Sinister’s history was alluded to but you didn’t need to know it to know that (a) he has been messing with Scott for years and 2) he is a pretty dangerous dude. Hell, I don’t really know what Sinister’s deal is and yet I knew that turning-the-world-into-a-Victorianesque-version-of-him is a very bad thing the X-Men are going to need to stop. It just worked.

02. ADJECTIVES NEED NOT APPLY

Wolverine and the X-Men #1 is an entirely different beast. It’s Wolverine, culturally renowned badass thanks to four movies, as a teacher. Wearing a shirt and tie. This is honestly a concept that sells itself and if you don’t understand why, I really don’t know what to do with you. Writer Jason Aaron has said the key to writing Wolverine stories is by putting him in non-Wolverine scenarios, and a scenario where murdering people is expressly forbidden because they’re state inspectors is up there.

Let me level with you: as soon as this series was announced, I wanted to see a comic where Logan wore an ill-fitting shirt and fretted over the budget more than anything else, and I got this on the first page. That is literally the first scene. Thanks to Aaron and artist Chris Bachalo, I got my wish with the series right from the start. It is exactly what I wanted it to be.

And like Uncanny, Wolverine and the X-Men doesn’t need much explanation. Wolverine started a school for mutants. It’s a familiar concept – more on that later – and a simple one. It’s got high stakes (children are the future and whatnot), a concept based around a really solid, incongruous pairing (Wolverine as a teacher has been played for laughs before, but this also brings drama) and genuinely hilarious physical comedy like Wolverine, the Marvel Universe’s most dangerous motherfucker, hiding behind Kitty Pryde, a short, thin, young woman because because he’s scared of some bureaucrats. I actually did a genuine double fist pump when I saw that panel. The point is, the issue gives such an elegant premise that you don’t really need to know anything else, and Wolverine’s tour through the school basically sets it all up perfectly. It is a high school comedy with kid superheroes. Licenses to print money have been given out for less.

03. FAMILY BACKMATTERS

One of the most genius things Regenesis does is with its backmatter. You want to know why things are so fraught with tension between Cyclops’ mutants and the world? They include his letter to other nations of the world right there. You want to know what kind of school the Jean Grey Academy is? There’s the school brochure, which is honestly one of the funniest things I have read all year. And best of all, each book comes with a handy and minimalist flowchart delineating who’s in each book, who’s on each team and who is just a dang ol’ kid. Each is one single page and it explains the status quo better than any Wikipedia article is, and it frees up a lot of pointless exposition that would have bogged down the issues themselves. Freeing up so much explanation lets the issues themselves carry the imagination, the real reason any of us read comics anyway.

04. FOR THE EXPERIENCED LOVER

One thing that Regenesis balances well is the two viewpoints of Cyclops and Wolverine. It never presents judgment. Neither is the villain and neither is the misunderstood bad boy, a feat especially great because the latter is basically what Wolverine was created to be. Schism explained why the two parted ways in a wonderful way that had been building up for years. Wolverine followed Scott and killed the right people for him because he felt it was protecting others from that. If Scott was turning everyone – including children – into soldiers, that wasn’t someone he could kill for anymore. Meanwhile, Cyclops is surprised and angered by Wolverine’s sudden (to him) appearance of a moral high horse considering he has spent over a century murdering people. To me, it was a great job of breaking up the team without having to shoehorn needless melodrama into everything. It felt like it honoured the history of the comics franchise in a way that it made me very happy to see.

Regenesis presents this split as something that is still fresh, but neutral. Each guy has his reasons. Each one has good reasons. Neither series spends time having its characters being pissy about the other’s. It is what it is. It’s sad, it’s momentous, but it’s done. Now we move forward, new readers are the better for it and it felt genuinely organic to me.

05. THE SECRET OF MY SUCCESS

As I’ve been mulling over Regenesis for the last month, I’d been wondering why it felt so natural and, dare I say, iconic, despite all the big changes in the franchise. It’s uncharted water in many ways, but it also felt like things were returning to the way things should be, even if they’d never happened quite like this before. Then it hit me:

Regenesis doesn’t just divvy up the X-Men. It divvies up the franchise’s core concepts.

Going back to the cartoon – and the movies, arguably the way the average person thinks about comic book characters these days – I started to think about what the X-Men were to me as a kid, what their cultural imprint has been during my lifetime. The list ultimately came down to three things:

• Mutants are hated and feared by the world, constantly on defense.
• Mutant children attend a school where they learn about their people and their powers.
• Cyclops and Wolverine do not care for each other.

The franchise’s allegory for civil rights is as iconic as Xavier’s academy. Neither series post-Schism takes on both sides of this. Uncanny X-Men takes the struggle for survival and respect, while Wolverine and the X-Men takes the school and that kind of established environment.

As a result, each book takes on enough of the franchise’s cultural identity to be familiar and feel “right,” while the entire idea of the split in the first place is the return to the list’s third item, tying both titles together. Each takes on enough of the X-Men tradition to be familiar and welcome new readers, while the stories themselves are good enough to not get bogged down by making readers ask “Why?” constantly. There’s enough in each that it just feels right, and splitting those core concepts is the best heavy lifting of all. It lets the history get out of its own way so that the comics can sell the part that matters: the X-Men are cool.

I’ve been waiting my whole life to find an X-Men story that felt as perfect to jump into as that first cartoon I watched. Regenesis is that story, and I’m excited to see where it takes me.