It seems we're not done with the bonus pages quite yet--they've simply elected to stop putting QR codes in the digital release. Interesting choice.

(via reddit)

My initial guess is that Bobby is working for Cyclops, who had already been seen coordinating with the other independent former X-Men. His group has been focused on identifying and reaching out to new mutants, so it would make sense to me if he'd observed reports of Bronze being attacked at the concert, and contacted Bobby as a trusted friend to check it out and see if she's safe.

As a piece of supplementary content, I think this is the least invasive of the bonus pages. It's likely that next we see Bobby, he'll be arriving in Chicago, and functionally this will amount to a missable teaser for future issues. From a sales perspective however, I think this was a truly deranged decision. Bobby is a very high profile character, probably a bigger draw for moving retail sales than Kitty or Emma. If he's going to star in this book, as now seems to be the case, I don't really understand hiding that for months and only announcing it here.

According to [Uncanny] X-Men #1, Bobby Drake was sixteen when the team made its public debut. Furthermore he describes himself as a "couple" of years younger than his friends. We also know that Hank is somewhat older than Scott, Warren, and Jean. So, the short answer to your first question is: Bobby is 16, Warren, Scott, and Jean are 18, and Hank is probably 18 or 19.

It's not specifically clear whether Bobby is literally two years younger, or if "couple" is being used in a more figurative sense. I think it's safe to take at face value though, given that he is clearly presented as a member of their age cohort (along with Lorna and Alex); is meant to be reasonably close to the same age as Peter Parker and Johnny Storm (who should also be in the same general range as the original X-Men, as they were all teenagers at the same time); and lastly when Claremont revived the X-Men publication years later, Bobby was depicted as now comfortably a young adult, finishing up his accounting degree, at the same time that Jean was dealing with her first job drama, and Warren was off with the family business.

I also think it's safe to guess Hank is no more than a year older than the others. He's treated as a peer of his teammates rather than as a helper to the Professor, and seems comfortable as a member of the group even outside of X-Men training. Hank's more advanced academic pursuits with respect to his teammates are also shown to be a product of his intelligence and not simply him being in a more senior class, which I think furthermore point to him being loosely their age.

Later authors have occasionally given different ages to the first team, or at least to Scott. Bendis, who wrote them for the longest, identifies the younger Scott as sixteen when he first comes face to face with his modern counterpart (Uncanny X-Men volume 3 no. 12). In Matt Fraction's inexplicably titled Dark Avengers/Uncanny X-Men: Exodus, Scott gives a televised speech in which he claims to have joined the X-Men at age 15. And in Stuart Moore's X-Men Origins Cyclops, Scott is shown to have first met Charles when he was 17 (which works), but he also dates X-Men #1 as taking place when Scott was 21 (which contradicts every other version of the story).

I think it makes the most sense to just go with the original story, and take 18 as the team's median age. I think you could also just as well argue that the 15-17 number isn't in contradiction per se, but only reflects Scott's age when Charles started training him, or even when he first became Cyclops, and not his age in X-Men #1 when Jean joined the team and they confronted Magneto for the first time.

I know some fans also feel that the Bendis' run discounts the possibility that they're in their late teens, because he writes them so young, but I think that's kind of ridiculous. Bendis writes everyone like that, and in any case people are basically the same at 14 as they are at 34, so how much more mature does anyone get from 16 to 18, really?

I think having them remain (mostly) at 18+ is the most plausible reading of the original run, and the most consistent with their general dislike of Charles recruiting actual child soldiers in later classes, and as well with Marvel's editorial policy that the X-Men have existed for ten years in-universe in perpetuity and are now just shy of 30.

Second question: Their ages later on, when the All-New, All-Different team first formed aren't given directly, but they're easy to work out.

So, at time of first death, Jean was 24ish depending on when her birthday falls in the year. Scott and Warren are the same age, Bobby is two years younger, and Hank is probably around 1 year older.

How much time passes between Jean's introduction to Storm, Thunderbird, Wolverine, Banshee, etc and her death isn't specified, and during his first run, Claremont tried to maintain a pretense of everything occurring in real time, but already it had started to become untenable and can't be trusted.

At the time of Jean's death, the core Claremont trio of Storm, Wolverine, and Nightcrawler are still very early in getting to know each other as people, despite spending a lot of time together on page. So I think it's very likely that only a few months have passed between the new recruits joining the team and when Jean died and the remaining original X-Men make their departure. So I would just treat the Dark Phoenix Saga as taking place in the same year as the first mission to Krakoa, with Jean/Scott/Warren remaining 24 throughout.

Third question: To get to their ages at M-Day, I need to do something cataclysmically stupid. Something that I always tell everyone to never do when talking about the X-Men: I have to talk about how old Kitty Pryde was. She who has had three separate, non consecutive, fifteenth birthdays; and she who, famously, began the 1990s three years older than Jubilee, but still managed to end the decade two years younger than her. But, for once, bringing her into things is going to make everything else make more sense.

In X-Treme X-Men we're told directly that Kitty joined the X-Men five years ago. This is useful to know, because she joined the team on the exact same day that Jean died, so it has also been 5 years since that happened. X-Treme X-Men takes place at the same time as New Mutants volume 2, later to be relaunched as New X-Men: Academy X, which documents the first academic year of the Xavier School post its outing as a mutant boarding school. The two books ran parallel to one another and reference the same events in the lives of the original New Mutants.

Academy X concludes during the House of M crossover itself, and with the depiction of the typical US/Canadian school dances, and the inclusion of a year book issue, I think it's reasonable to conclude that the entire Academy X era takes place over about one full school year. So adding that together, M-Day should fall around 6 years after Jean's first death, making her, Scott, and Warren around 29-30, Hank 30-31, and Bobby 27-28.

If you want corroboration while also having the chance to experience a desperate urge to kick something, here's a cropped out section of the House of X/Powers of X timeline.

My version has a type mistake, where years 49 and 50 were incorrectly reversed. Genosha should be year 50, and Moira's "death" at 49. (IIRC later print editions fixed this) M-Day and Decimation would happen in year 51. The Year 47 event references the storyline beginning in Jim Lee's X-Men #1, and so the formation of the Claremont X-Men would likely be in Year 45 or 46. Scott and co being 30ish at Year 52, and working backwards...It actually all kind of lines up?

Which I hate! I hate that it works. It forces you to accept that everything after M-Day occurs over the course of just one single year. And it's so annoying that it's actually kind of possible, when you remember how much everyone loved decompressed storytelling in those days, and subsequently how almost nothing actually happened for a decade and a half of comics. But still! That's so ridiculous! Why do they do this!

Hope that helps! Thanks for the ask.

It occasionally feels like Marauders forgets that Kitty can phase, which can be frustrating in a book that also struggles to justify having her remain in the cast. That whole dilemma with needing St. John and Bobby to create a distraction (which would be more excusable if we'd at least seen what they did, if it was just giving the artist something fun to draw) so that Kitty could discretely swim to shore to place a gate for Callisto, was completely unnecessary, given she could have just phased down through the boat and walked to Madripoor. She could have even taken the boys with her.

I know there was also the problem of the team being legally barred from coming ashore, but they could have gone in plain clothes, and they could have taken the cameras down. Being the X-Men's sneaky infiltrator is kind of Kitty's whole thing. And joining up with Callisto's group could have given all of them something more substantial to do than passively waiting for the Morlocks to solve the plot for them. They really need more of those moments together; outside of guest appearances in other books we haven't seen the three of them (plus Bishop) actually function as a team since issue #6.

It's been a while since I've made an X-Men post; I haven't really found anything to have an opinion on in the current batch of titles. I do like the first look of Hickman's revamp though. It's not really what I wanted per se, but the teams we're getting look good, and the individual synopses are at least interesting. The core book has a good team, even if it's a bit Summers-Grey heavy, but that's not necessarily a bad thing when we so rarely get to see them interact with each other as a family. It's nice to see the New Mutants in space again too (and completely ignoring both Uncanny and Dead Souls, it seems), and X-Force's use of Sage and Jean is something that's been teased for ages and never actually followed through on.

The titles themselves are less inspiring. Excalibur and Fallen Angels are blatantly just a copyright renewal scheme, and writing an Excalibur team with only a single European character is patently unjustifiable, as bad or worse than Marvel commissioned the Genosha team.

Marauders, while just as bad, can at least be justified in-story, depending on how Duggan and Lolli go about it. These have all been pretty sketchy characters at times. Emma, Pyro, and Bishop have all been outright villains, Ororo and Bobby have faked it in the past, and Kitty was teased all throughout the late 80s and mid-90s as a character who could eventually fall either way without surprising anyone. The pirate theme, seemingly justified by using Emma's shipping corporation as a cover story, is a natural fit for most of them. With the shipping company hook, I'm assuming they're going to be fighting human trafficking and arms proliferation as a primary reason for being, which is also a good place to bring Emma, as a reminder of what she was originally meant to be atoning for in her own eyes and those of her teammates.

As for the others, Bishop was a paramilitary freedom fighter, and later had something of a hit-and-run bandit ideology with his time-travel adventures. Ororo led the X-Men during the Australia-era, when they were a reactionary strike force, and had been branded as outlaws and terrorists internationally. Kitty has ties to the island of Madripoor and to Victor Creed himself, so it's not totally out-there  that she might choose to call her team the Marauders. She was recently a cast member of the Guardians of the Galaxy during their ill-conceived phase as outlaws, has been known to rob banks from time to time, and her love of pirates is well established. So while they're all established heroes, having them be a bit shady for a while wouldn't come out of nowhere, when you look at where they've gone before.

Bobby is the odd-man out, even with his past in X-Factor, dating to the time when they were an undercover rescue team. But as he's friendly with Ororo and Bishop, and has worked with them extensively in the past, and is meant to be very close with Emma and Kitty. It's possible that he's just there to keep an eye on all of them, not unlike the role Ororo herself had on the Extinction team (and both Kitty and Lockheed in Astonishing, and Emma in New X-Men, and Bishop pre-Onslaught--if he's just there to spy on them and keep them out of trouble, this is definitely a team that could understand and approve).

The main conceptual problem as I see it is that it's basically a team of team leaders, and having them all roam around together looking for trouble is a waste of a lot of their individual talents. Ororo in particular is primarily known as a leader, and while maybe she's willing to step away from that from time-to-time, and might be willing to accept overall organizational leadership from someone like Scott, Erik, or Kitty, you're generally going to want to see her at least leading her own team. Bobby, more recently, has had an arrangement with Kitty to lead his own independent team. And Bishop is generally going to be leading at least half of the team to get the most out of his skill-set.

Hopefully, and in keeping with both the pirate theme and with Emma running a huge maritime organization, they'll get around that by just giving them each their own crew to play around with. That way, they can each be members of the overall "team," without backtracking in their long term character development. And then you could just have Kitty and Emma as the overall leadership, directing them from afar, which would also let the book get the most out of their own relationship, which is always more interesting when they're alone.  

I don’t think I’m really a fan of “Present!Bobby suddenly discovered he was gay from Young!Bobby, who was informed he was gay by Jean”.

Couldn’t we just proceed under the assumption that Bobby already knew he was gay and pretend that whole thing with Jean never happened?