I had this peculiar and complex dream this morning that someone was trying to destroy the Marvel Universe (and no, this mysterious villain was not a shadowy figure with giant mouse ears). The interesting thing about this particular dream was that it wasn’t an attempt to destroy it from within. Someone was trying to eradicate it from the real world. Joe Quesada (the current editor in chief) was next on their hit list, and there were creators who had been entirely eliminated from the timeline already.
Claremont, in fact, wasn’t doing so well. The only two of his characters I saw were Kitty and Nightcrawler, though there was some reference to Colossus. Lee & Kirby were doing better: all the original X-Men, including Xavier, were still on hand, although it appeared that Jean was, as usual, dead. They, like people outside the comic, were fighting for the universe’s survival; Xavier seemed to be concentrating on–struggling to–keep memories of who and what they were in the X-Men’s minds, so they could continue to fight. It was fairly clear that–perhaps despite the villain’s intentions–the unravelling was happening more or less linearly
But one of the most interesting things was that according to the Resistance (who appeared to come from the present and future and could go into either *our* universe or the comic book universe with equal ease, depending on where the fight needed to be taken), the villains had already succeeded in wiping out the most popular female superhero from the Marvel universe. Had succeeded so well, in fact, that none of us who were modern fans had ever heard of Gemma Fade: she had simply never existed in the Marvel timeline. Had succeeded so well that the Resistance, even with their ability to move through time, weren’t certain what Gemma’s powers or story were, only that she had, at one time–in one world–been an iconic superhero who stood shoulder to shoulder with Superman in global recognizeability.
I’m pretty curious about Gemma now. :)