With 2014’s big move to the new server complete we looked to 2015 to build on the fantastic work as the site edged closer to a very special birthday. As well as a new logo for the site we also welcomed some new contributors and perhaps our most ambitious event yet.
January
Perhaps this was an inadvertent hint as to what the theme for the year could be, our first release of the year was the team entry to Dazzler’s reality hopping X-Treme X-Men II. For now though we were looking to getting back into the swing of regular releases after our Winter of Articles Past and so the first profile was released in the form of Manbot. Our Review of 2014 soon followed to remind you, much like this article is doing, of all the awesome things we released in 2014. Finally, we ended January with a bang by giving you the long awaited Spotlight on Firestar. Even before she joined the X-Men fans had been asking for a spotlight on her and her debut in Amazing X-Men gave us the perfect opportunity to release her. As an added bonus we also released a companion article to her Spotlight called A Firestar is Born detailing her peculiar origins in Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends.
February
The strange villains Nanny and the Orphan Maker received a profile in early February, reminding everyone that the X-Men really do have some of the oddest villains out there. We broadened our horizons past character entries to give you a new X-Marks the Spot on the X-Men’s temporary home of Graymalkin Industries. Following that was our first of many, many updates for the year on two characters with a very confusing backstory. X-Factor (3rd series) had shed light on their convoluted history and so we thought it time to update both Longshot and Shatterstar and add a special article called Shatterstar is Who?...What?...Huh??
With the film still fresh in people’s memories we released a team entry on Big Hero 6 to remind you all of their X-Men origins. Our final release for the month was on a profile on a villain many of you may not have heard of but had a deep hatred of the X-Men…Professor Power.
March
During the end of 2014 we realised we had a number of articles in development that all had a common theme to them. With a little organizing we were able to give you the first theme for the year, Magnetrix March, a celebration of everything Polaris. First up was a profile on a woman that Polaris could truly call her nemesis, the psychic entity Malice. 
Following that was an update to a team Polaris unwillingly served on for a while, the Horsemen of Apocalypse. X-Factor (3rd series) seemed to do well at shedding light on the mysterious aspects of various character’s histories. With her connection to Magneto cemented it was only right to update the Polaris: Powers and Heritage article to take this into account. With March drawing to a close it was time for the theme-month’s finale and an update was given to Polaris’s Spotlight.
April
As is tradition now, April 1st saw us prank our visitors and this year we declared that we would be turning ourselves into a news site. We released a number of fake articles such as an interview about an upcoming Namor – The First Inhuman series, a title featuring Beast and Iceman called Secret Wars – Continuity Bound and a series featuring Legion and Matthew Malloy called Secret Wars – Erasurehead. We released a new feature called the Aural Index to the Marvel Universe where comics were described out loud for anyone to hear. Finally, as we wouldn’t have the time to keep up with our regular releases we decided to cheat a little and go the wiki route. So we gave you the first of our new-look Spotlights on Lockheed.
Of course it didn’t take many of you long to catch on this was all a joke and you joined in the fun. Interesting side note, as you may remember we were stopped from doing our 2014 prank by an unfortunate server outage the previous year. The new-look Lockheed spotlight copied from Wikipedia was supposed to be the prank but we were unable to use it and thankfully we kept it and incorporated it into this year’s joke. Don’t worry, I am sure Lockheed will get a real article on here some day (NEVER! - UXN Editorial Team).
After the shenanigans of April 1st we put the site back to normal and got on with our regular programming. First up was another X-Marks the Spot entry on a little known locale called Chaparanga Beach. Alpha Flight were the next team to receive an update as they had come back to life and even landed a brief series since their last entry. Next we released our second official Spotlight of the year on another often-requested character, Rictor. He completed the 1980’s New Mutants line-up and was one of the few remaining 1990’s X-Force members left. Our last article for April was an update on Husk, who had gone through a very odd story recently and we saw it as the perfect time to dust her off.
May
By now the internet was abuzz with the news that the Marvel universe was ending thanks to the enormous Secret Wars event. All the various alternate realities had been dying and only a few remained. UXN decided to get in on the action and we delved into our own Alternaverse event that started with an Exiles month. The first entry was on the Panoptichron – the Crystal Palace base the team used. Next followed an update to one of the founding members of the team, Nocturne, and we also gave you some cool desktop wallpapers featuring the team.
One of our contributors is a huge Spider-Man 2099 fan and so the opportunity proved too irresistible not to include a Spotlight on him given a version of him served on the Exiles. Afterward we released an alien races article on the guys who started the whole situation, the Timebreakers. This was a notable article because it was written by long-time visitor Gibbering Fool, who was soon drafted into the UXN ranks. Look out for a lot more articles from him in the future. Our last release of the month was an update to one of the most out of date spotlights we had on the site, Sage. We have been trying hard to bring you fresh articles whilst still working through the backlog of older articles in need of our attention. Exiles month drew to a close but we realised we had so much more to offer from the multiverse, and after a quick logo change…
June
…X-Men 2099 month started. This particular future often gets overlooked by casual fans but it proved rich enough to spawn numerous articles, starting with a Spotlight on Skullfire. Since it was already on the site we went back over the Fall of the Hammer crossover and freshened up the
images. Next was the 2099 timeline entry that tried to shed light on the events that led up to the future as well as a brief overview of the timeline itself. Another Spotlight on Cerebra was released, quickly followed by a team entry on Nation X 2099, the X-Men of the time. Since the 2099 universe originated in the 1990’s it goes without saying that there were trading cards associated with it.
We managed to get our hands on the Marvel Masterpieces 1993 set which included a set of chase cards for the X-Men 2099 characters. Whilst all of the 2099 X-Men could have received spotlights we tried our best to pick those whose stories didn’t overlap with each other. So our final release for the month was a Spotlight on Xi’an.
July
Our next universe for our tour of the multiverse was one which many of you are bound to be very familiar with, the Age of Apocalypse. Much like the 2099 month, there were lots of characters we could have focussed on but we had to whittle it down to a select few with unique histories. So our first profile was on Holocaust, the exile from the AoA who came to Earth-616 and cut a deadly path through the X-Men. 
Following him was a profile on another villainous refugee in the form of the Sugar Man. The Age of Apocalypse article we already had on the site was long overdue for an update and it didn’t quite match the current standard of entries we release today. So the universal AoA entry was split in two and the first half detailing the Age of Apocalypse crossover was released to remind you all of where this universe began. Another, simpler, update followed on one of the few heroic AoA refugees to make it out the timeline. 
Since his spotlight was last written X-Man had come back to life and even joined the X-Men so it was only fitting to update him. Next came one of our bigger articles for the event, the Spotlight on AoA Nightcrawler. Lastly the second half of the original AoA article was released, renamed as the Age of Apocalypse timeline. Much had gone on since it had last been touched and so a rather lengthy overhaul was needed as well as lots of fresh images. Many of these images were supplied by a budding new contributor called hotknives, who at this point still remained elusive but would go on to supply many more images for future articles.
August
We were beginning to wind down after three months of touring the multiverse but we had a big reason to keep going on. UncannyXmen.Net was turning 15 this month and so we changed the logo to reflect that and gave the contributors free reign to release whatever they wanted. One of the first things we decided to focus on was an article on the site called Publication History X, which detailed every x-title released in a given year. The article currently ran up to the 90’s and stopped and so we decided to resume the work but also go back over the existing entries. Now, as well as detailing what issues were released in a year we identified what characters first debuted and what notable events went on too. Throughout August we released numerous entries to this article getting us from 1962 all the way up to 1997.
With GibberingFool on board and eager to expand the alien races section we welcomed a new entry on the Scy'ar Tall/M'Kraan race. Following that was a profile on No-Girl, who we had hoped to release slightly earlier in the year but her appearance in the Spider-Man and the X-Men caused us to delay it until the series wrapped up. As well as our dedication to overhauling the old Spotlights we need to keep up to date with what is currently going on in the MU. Rapid-fire updates on some characters are ideal as it only requires a couple of paragraphs of text to get them to the next junction in their story. So the first of the month was on Danger who was released when All-New X-Factor just started but now we could draw a line under her given the series had finished.
Hitting a big milestone like 15 years made us look at some of the constant articles on the site such as the X-Men Primer. The MU moves so fast and this needed a major update. With everything stopping for Secret Wars it provided a great place to bring the article up to date so anyone new or coming back to the X-Men could get a brief overview of events. After that we released one of our relatively rare Bring on the Bad Guy articles on Proteus, a character we thought about releasing during Exiles month but couldn’t squeeze him in.
We finally hit the big day and UXN turned 15 years old. The site had gone through many changes over the years and to celebrate we thought we would look back on the very first spotlight released and get that up to date. The character in question was Psylocke and she had certainly racked up the stories since her last update as we almost doubled her Spotlight size. Since Psylocke’s images were refreshed it wasn’t too much trouble to do the same to Revanche and so a rapid fire update on her was released.
Every three years we like to poll the visitors to find out about their comic buying habits as well as what they think of the site. We opened the poll and tentatively sat back as the results came in. In the meantime we distracted ourselves with an update to Daytripper’s Spotlight, but given that she doesn’t get called that now we changed its name to Amanda Sefton. Refreshing the images for her update as well as doing AoA Nightcrawler’s Spotlight meant that it was a perfect time to get the regular Nightcrawler’s Spotlight up to date. The last time we caught up with him he was stuck in the afterlife so a rapid fire update to his spotlight brought him to the end of his current solo series.
Another set of trading cards found their way out of the 90’s and into the light. A set by Jim Lee containing some fantastic art was uploaded for all to see. Not to be left out the celebrations, Alpha Flight were represented by an updated to Marrina’s Spotlight that incorporated the latest series from the team and her new edgy look. Just like when we released them a few years ago both Exiles Mimic and 616 Mimic were updated together. The celebration month had to come to an end and we did it the only way we knew how by commemorating a recently departed X-Man, Wolverine. Well, we didn’t exactly get too sentimental over him. Despite his Spotlight first being released in 2012 he had already amounted a great deal of new stories and you really have to keep on top of these things. Taking the opportunity to get him up to date whilst he is dead we released our final article for our Birthday Extravaganza!
September
We took a well-earned rest during September to relax from the summer’s chaos and decided what the next few months held in store. Even after all that though we couldn’t release nothing so we gave you the next entry into the Publication History X 1998. Behind the scenes hotknives had been offering help with images for various articles and after some begging he finally agreed to join the staff. You can look forward to seeing more of his work in 2016, including the images for a rather large Spotlight update.
October
Relatively refreshed and raring to go we begun churning out our regular releases again and first up was a profile on Raza Longknife from the Starjammers. Next, we had tallied the results of the feedback poll and we displayed them for all to see in handy pie-chart format. There were a number of requests for updates and new spotlights from the feedback that proved very interesting given that many of the suggestions were already being worked on and one would be released in the near future. GibberingFool continued his quest to expand on the space-themed aspects of the site by creating the alien races article on the Strontians. Publication History X 1999 was released towards the end of the month, leaving our final article in October to fall on Halloween. There are numerous horrifying characters that we could have brought to your attention but we decided none was better than Jubilee, the X-Men’s very own vampire. A rapid fire update brought her Spotlight from her newly emerged vampirism up to her current teen-mom drama.
November
Carrying on the horror theme for a week we released a profile on the Generation X nemesis Emplate. Next up our Publication History X hit the current millennium with its entry on 2000. Our last Spotlight of the year followed in the form of Blindfold, a character some of you had requested in the feedback. It’s always fun to see what characters the various visitors of the site request, especially in cases like this where that character had already been written and was awaiting release. Our final release for November was an update to an article that hadn’t been touched in 12 years. We are well aware it’s not just the character entries that need looking at and so the X-Marks the spot on Caldecott County, Mississippi was given some new images and updated.
December
As we headed into the final month of 2015 we continued strong by releasing the profile on Moses Magnum. The Publication History X for 2001 followed as we headed closer to the Christmas period. Originally we had no special release planned for Christmas but when a thread was started on the forum detailing the many Christmases of Marvel we saw the chance for a great article. The author, DCypher, was more than happy to turn his research into an article and so we bid Merry X-Mas to the X-Men, and to you. Our final release for the year was another character update, only this one on the hugely popular Joseph. After that we put our feet up for a few days and prepared for 2016 and our Unstoppable January.
2015 in Numbers
8 new Spotlights/BOTBG
10 new Character Profiles
18 Spotlight updates
15 miscellaneous articles
9 miscellaneous article updates
Summaries
Jan - 10
Feb - 12
Mar - 3
Apr - 10
May - 24
Jun - 18
Jul - 26
Aug - 24
Sep - 18
Oct - 17
Nov - 21
Dec - 22
Total for 2015: 205 - That's an average of 0.56 releases a day!
UXN Logos
During 2014 we gave the members of the forum an oppurtunity to come up with a new logo design and at the beginning of the year after looking at the designs that were submitted, one stood out, and we debuted the brand-new design by frequent visitor Anna Raven.
In March, we switched to a classic logo design to match our Polaris-themed month we had going on.
As part of the planning for the Alternaverse event, we decided to would be good to reuse some of the old logos that had incorporated the characters from each of the themed months, so with the the Exiles first we dusted off the old logo. This was then followed by the X-Men 2099 logo for June and finally in July the Age of Apocalypse came our way and the logo changed a third time to fit that universe.
Our final logo change of the year occured in August for the sites birthday. We wanted to do recognise that the site had been going for 15 years, give a nod to the past and present lineup of the main Uncanny X-Men Title, but also do something new. We created a new main logo to reflect the style of the main X-Men titles (the circle element is from the All New X-Men title) and then incorporated the characters inside the text for the main site banner. Even though it was intially designed for just the sites birthday, we decided to carry this until the end of the year.
Wallpapers
Despite cutting down on the number of wallpaper releases we put out we still couldn’t resist an Exiles themed one during May.
2016
We already have some amazing ideas for 2016 and we can't wait to debut them to you all. As well as some highly requested spotlights we also have a number of updates to the bigger characters you often as for. Add on to that some milestone celebrations at the beginning of the year and 2016 is going to get off to a great start.
Once again we would like to thank you for being with us all year and giving us your feedback and all the articles we produce. We are always on the lookout for new contributors to the site regardless of what you may be interested in and the time you have to spare. If you think you would like to do some issue sumamries, write articles or even help out with the much needed image work them please feel free to conact any of the staff and we will be glad to help you.
We hope you had a great 2015 and we hope you will be with us through the next year too.
-The UXN team