stolen from bleedingcool.com
I'm a little rusty on X-Men nowadays, particularly compared to my late 80s to late-90s heyday. As such, I don't feel so bad for missing about a quarter of the references here without thinking really, really hard.
This looks pretty inpenetrable, but I think that serialised fiction like X-Men fulfils a similar role as (and I say this with approx. 1% knowledge on the topic) TV soap opera. It's not important that you know all of the ins and outs, just as long as you know that, in the broadest of senses, who likes, hates and secretly loves who, who's boffing who (or what, perhaps). Everything else is just colourful window dressing, and the same handful of plots repeated endlessly for newer viewers.
This looks pretty inpenetrable, but I think that serialised fiction like X-Men fulfils a similar role as (and I say this with approx. 1% knowledge on the topic) TV soap opera. It's not important that you know all of the ins and outs, just as long as you know that, in the broadest of senses, who likes, hates and secretly loves who, who's boffing who (or what, perhaps). Everything else is just colourful window dressing, and the same handful of plots repeated endlessly for newer viewers.