{"id":382607,"date":"2026-01-02T00:47:12","date_gmt":"2026-01-02T00:47:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/382607\/"},"modified":"2026-01-02T00:47:12","modified_gmt":"2026-01-02T00:47:12","slug":"30-years-on-marvels-biggest-story-of-1996-is-way-better-than-anyone-would-admit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/382607\/","title":{"rendered":"30 Years On, Marvel\u2019s Biggest Story of 1996 Is Way Better Than Anyone Would Admit"},"content":{"rendered":"

Being a Marvel<\/a> fan in the \u201990s wasn\u2019t always easy. The \u201980s were basically a second Golden Age, and Marvel was putting out some of the best superhero comics throughout the decade. In the \u201990s, the writing started to go down the tubes as art became more of the focus, with artists like Todd McFarlane, Ron Liefeld, Jim Lee, Marc Silvestri, Erik Larsen, Whilce Potracio, and Jim Valentino becoming big names and shifting the focus. The Image exodus saw a new generation of artists step up and the writing taking on another back seat on a lot of books, as the X-Men and Spider-Man became the dominant Marvel paradigm. All of this led to 1996, when a major X-Men story was about to become the biggest Marvel story ever: \u201cOnslaught\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cOnslaught\u201d has something of a bad reputation in 2025. It\u2019s looked at as one of the biggest examples of the rot at the House of Ideas 30 years, a bad crossover event in every sense. However, I\u2019d like to present a different vision of the story. The \u201990s were the X-Men\u2019s decade<\/a>, and \u201cOnslaught\u201d was the culmination of numerous plot lines. It also pushed the Marvel Universe forward, leading to some amazing comics in the years to come. \u201cOnslaught\u201d has been maligned for decades, but it\u2019s time to admit we\u2019ve been too hard on it.<\/p>\n

\u201cOnslaught\u201d Is Nothing Like You Remember and Stronger For It<\/p>\n

\"TheImage Courtesy of Marvel Comics<\/p>\n

As some one who had been mostly reading X-titles back then, I\u2019ve always had a certain fondness for \u201cOnslaught\u201d. It paid off the \u201cX-Traitor\u201d storyline introduced in Uncanny X-Men #282, revealing that the one who betrayed the team was Xavier all along. It tied into \u201cFatal Attraction\u201d (although you\u2019d never know that unless you read a particular issue of Wolverine during the story), and ended with a big bang that changed the landscape of the Marvel Universe and set up some very good (and very bad) comics that would beget more great comics down the line.<\/p>\n

\u201cOnslaught\u201d is a certain kind of X-Men story, one that had been building up for about a year of books over on the X-Men side of the Marvel Universe. If you weren\u2019t reading Uncanny X-Men in 1995, you wouldn\u2019t really understand anything in Onslaught: X-Men #1, the story that kicked the crossover off, and the rest of the story would be just a bunch of sound and fury that ended with a big dumb fight that kicked off the dreaded Heroes Reborn reboot. However, like most of the greatest Marvel event stories over the years<\/a>, if you go back and give it a chance, \u201cOnslaught\u201d will surprise you.<\/p>\n

If you were to read the story now, all you need to know is that Xavier has been acting funny and a mysterious bad guy has been menacing the team. From there, you get the stellar Onslaught: X-Men #1 kick-off comic, which is the X-Men versus Onslaught with awesome art from Adam Kubert; this was his first Marvel event comic and he knocked it out of the park. From there, the story sees Onsalught take control of a fleet Sentinels with the help of Dark Beast and attack New York City. There are two different chapters of the story: the Phases and the Impacts. Phases are the most important parts of the story and the Impacts are ancillary (Wolverine #104 is an Impact, but you need to read it).<\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly, the best chapters of the story come in X-Men (Vol. 2) #53-56 and Uncanny X-Men #336-336. Fantastic Four #415-416 are better than they have right to be, Cable #33-36, The Incredible Hulk #444-445, X-Factor #125-125, The Amazing Spider-Man #415, and Wolverine (Vol. 2) #104-105 are all great as well. Read those issues, along with Onslaught: X-Men #1 and Onslaught: Marvel Universe #1, and you\u2019ll get a pretty exciting well-paced story. Greats like Mark Waid, Peter David, Larry Hama, Scott Lobdell, Dama Kubert, Andy Kubert, Carlos Pacheco, Ariel Olivetti, Ian Churchhill, Joe Madureira, Warren Ellis, and more give readers some sensational issues, building the event\u2019s central conflict nicely. By the time you get to the big fight in Onslaught: Marvel Universe #1, you\u2019ll have gotten a coherent, exciting story from a time in Marvel history that gets a lot of hate.<\/p>\n

\u201cOnslaught\u201d Has Always Been Unfairly Maligned<\/p>\n

\"TheImage COurtesy of Marvel Comics<\/p>\n

I think one of the problems with \u201cOnslaught\u201d as a story is that a lot of people assume it\u2019s some kind of confusing X-Men story. However, it\u2019s not; the X-Men parts of the story are only important if you had been reading X-Men books back in the \u201990s. What \u201cOnslaught\u201d really is a story that\u2019s pretty familiar to Marvel fans: an all-powerful villain attacks the heroes, trying to gain more power in order to remake the world in his twisted image. There\u2019s some cool fights, some interesting lore, and a big dumb fight at the end with killer art that sets the Marvel Universe in some interesting directions, with The Incredible Hulk and Thunderbolts putting out best of all time stories.<\/p>\n

Heroes Reborn was bad, yes, but it led to the much better Heroes Return, which gave readers some of the best Avengers stories of all time<\/a>. \u201cOnslaught\u201d isn\u2019t poetry or anything, but it\u2019s a pretty entertaining event story, with some of the best art from the best artists of the \u201990s giving readers some awesome fights and moments. For years, you\u2019ve been told that this story is terrible and you can skip it, but honestly, it\u2019s always been a pretty cool story. It\u2019s nowhere near perfect, and it doesn\u2019t reinvent the wheel or anything, but it was fun and it led to a Marvel renaissance that would bear fruit in the years to come, even if it seemingly failed at first. Without \u201cOnslaught\u201d, a lot of great things for Marvel\u2019s heroes never take place and it\u2019s certainly worth your time to read.<\/p>\n

What do you think of \u201cOnslaught\u201d? Leave a comment in the comment section below and join the conversation on the ComicBook Forums<\/a>!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Being a Marvel fan in the \u201990s wasn\u2019t always easy. The \u201980s were basically a second Golden Age,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":382608,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[88,12761,206,186534,128802,9616],"class_list":{"0":"post-382607","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-marvel","10":"tag-movies","11":"tag-onslaught","12":"tag-regular-feature","13":"tag-x-men"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=382607"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382607\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/382608"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=382607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=382607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=382607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}