Every year in Marvel comics there is a major event, Secret Invasions, Civil Wars, Skrulls, Kree, something and at the heart of all those crossovers 90% of the time are The Avengers, Marvel's premiere super hero team. This year Marvel brought in its mutants to the big event of the year the X-Men are finally a part of the big years crossover.
I personally am a huge X-Men fan, so when I heard that this was going to be the event of the summer I was incredibly excited and could not wait to start reading this story. Round 4 recently came out and its clearly a filler issue between big events. It was needed to establish characters places and give some insight to what the major players Hope, Wolverine, Captain America and Cyclops are doing.
The Avenger vs. X-Men books carry the main story, the side book that highlights specific fights has been going into details of one on one battles. The last book showcased Gambit vs. Captain America and Spider-Man vs. Colossus, neither fight was that spectacular and the Spidey vs. Colossus fight was down right bad.
In each teams respective books normally we would see a continuation of the continuity of the universe that's happening right now. In the Avengers books we are, we're seeing history of The Iron Fist connection in New Avengers. In Secret Avengers we had the away team in space to take on the Phoenix in a suicide mission. In the Avengers book we're seeing how this is tied to the Kree and one of its members may end up betraying the Avengers.
However over in the X-Men books we're not all dedicated to the current story, in X-Factor they're not even touching up on it and I might forgive that book but in X-Men #28 they had a story of Pixie fighting Skrulls. The book is called X-Men yet they aren't doing stories dedicated to the biggest X-Men story in years! Its the return of the Phoenix force and we don't get any thing tied to it? Bizarre. In Uncanny X-Force no Phoenix, in Wolverine, no Phoenix, how can we have all these main X-Men books and not tie to the major event of the year.
In Astonishing X-Men we are going to have a gay wedding between the B List character Northstar and his boyfriend, this should be a big event and it seems to be a trend that's happening in comics recently. Archie had a gay wedding, DC is going to have a current hero come out of the closet and Marvel is going to have a gay wedding in issue #51. An event like this should not be happening during the Avengers vs. X-Men story line, it should be its own stand alone type of thing and more than the X-Men should attend the wedding showing support from all the superheros for this event.
Being an X-Men fan I'm very sadly disappointed that the X-Men are being treated as the side characters in an Avengers story especially since that story completely revolves around The Phoenix force. The Avengers again are the golden children of the Marvel universe and the X-Men continue to be hated and feared by the rest of the world.
