UXN 2016 YEAR IN REVIEW

February

With everything back to normal we release our 2015 Year in Review article detailing everything you might have missed in the past year. We also chose a new logo for the site and Facebook, hinting at something else that we would be releasing during the month. We didn't keep you waiting in suspense too long as we dropped the long-requested update to Cyclops' spotlight on you. The update had been in the works for a while and his brief hiatus from any on-going comics proved to be an apt time to get him up to date. Following on from that we (inadvertantly) continued with the Cyclops theme on Valentine's Day when we updated the Summer Lovin' and Til Death Us Do Part...and Beyond articles. 

Amber Hunt's profile in January had been our 98th on the site since we started writing them six years previous. We had a big celebration planned for our 100th but we thought we would have a little fun with you guys in the run up to our 99th. Each day we released a hint to the character's identity and it took the full week of hints for someone to guess correctly. With the identity guessed we released the profile on Humus Sapien, a little known mutant who had been created in a fan-competition 25 years before he debuted.

Choosing who would be the 100th profile was a remarkably easy choice as there was only ever going to be one candidate. On February 29th, a very special day in itself, we released the mightiest profile of them all...the Living Monolith. 

March

With the release of our 100th profile it was time to begin the next part of our celebration with another round of Unusual Suspects. Long-time visitors were familiar with our competition where we showed you eight silhouettes of profile-worthy characters and you had to deduce who they belonged to. The competition ran for a week and early on we had an entry with all eight correct guesses. Rather than end it early we decided to let it run for the full week and we even gave some hints halfway through for those who were struggling. The competetion finally ended and the answers were drip fed to you throughout the rest of March in the form of fully written profiles on the particular characters.

The first to be released was Harry Leland, who was the character most entrants guessed correctly. The other characters were also released based on how many people had correctly guessed them. So next was Zero, Garokk, Annalee, Smart Alec and Chimera. The final two proved to be rather tricky for a lot of you and they were eventually shown to be Damian Trypp and Xenith the Strontian.

Only one person had managed to guess all eight correctly before the hints were given out and so we gave a big congratulations to Robbert Graner. He was given the choice of selecting any character he wanted for us to write an article on. Robbert wasn't the only winner though as three more of you managed to guess all eight correctly. As a runner-up prize we created a pool of characters to choose from and had the other winners collectively choose one for use to write. 

April

It was April 1st and as all regular visitors know we like to have fun on April Fool's Day. This years prank involved us announcing that we would allow visitors to comment on character articles and get discussions going on about all our releases. However, within 10 minutes of posting the announcement we were forced to cease the feedback as the comments had desceneded into abusive messages. Who knew people could be so mean on the internet. 

We finally got back to normal and given that we had released so many character articles recently we decided to dial thngs back and release a Publication History X on 2002. That said, we did have a profile written as a spare just in case on of the others didn't make the cut for the Unusual Suspects, so not wanting to leave her out we released Infectia. 

Believe it or not we hadn't released a full-on spotlight so far this year so we quickly remedied it by unleashing the villainous Lady Mastermind on you. 

Whilst our character articles are a favourite to many of you we also release issues summaries as often as we can. In the 15 years that the site has been going the number of summaries on the site has slowly increased and in April we reached the massive milestone of 7000 summaries!!! To celebrate we released the summaries for X-Men Legacy (1st series) #300 and X-Men Legacy (2nd series) #23 and 24. These summaries helped complete the X-Men (2nd series) title that began way back in 1991 and ended a couple of years ago.

Our final release of the month was an article on Paulie Provenzano, a short lived X-Man who was recruited when the rest of the team was MIA.  

May

May saw the release of two of our increasingly popular Publication History X articles, this time on 2002 and 2003. We also had a couple of character articles ready to launch, with the first one being on Ghost Girl, one of the newer generation Alpha Flight members. The second article was a bit more special in that it was the winning article picked by Robbert Graner who wn the Unusual Suspects in March. So as a reward we debuted Margali Szardos, the villainous mother of Nightcrawler and Amanda Sefton. 

June

With a relatively slow May over with we ramped things up again by tieing our upcoming releases into X-Men Apocalypse, the latest X-Men movie that was currently playing in cinemas. We started off strong with the man who inspired the movie itself, Apocalypse. His Bring on the Bad Guys article was written in 2003 and it had become woefully out of date. So it was brought up to date once more and all the images were refreshed.

Much like Apocalypse, our next character was also written in 2003 and he had gone through a number of monumental storylines in that time. Appearing in the movie as one of Apocalypse's Horsemen it made sense to update Archangel and unleash him on you.

In all the years the site had been going we had never gotten round to doing a timeline article on the X-Men movies. With the release of Days of Future Past a couple of years previously the whole timeline was in flux and so Monolith took on the task of figuring out how all seven movies tie together.  Despite a few discrepancies things managed to flow together well and the X-Men Cinematic Universe Timeline was created.

Just to keep you on your toes the last release of month had nothing whatsoever to do with the movies. A character article on the often forgotten Alphian Groundhog was released. 

July

We were now halfway through the year but the best was yet to come. After a busy movie-themed June we got back to normal and put out our latest entry in the popular Publication History X 2006. Our next character article was chosen by the winner of the Unusual Suspects competition from a few months previous. Obviously last year's releases on the 2099 universe got Robert Garner's appetite wet for the timeline as he chose La Lunatica to recieve a spotlight. Not to be outdone by her sister's spotlight earlier in the year, Martinque Jason aka Mastermind III was next to get a character profile. The final release of the month was a Publication History X on 2007, the year that saw the X-Men's cosmic friends get a fair bit of spotlight. The timing of this article may have been coincidental but the hints were there for something special in August.

August

We started the month off relatively slow (almost as if the staff here were preparing for something big...) with an article on a relatively new object to the X-Men...the Ghost Box. Next up was an article your's truely had been prepping for well over a year. Updates are often some of the most popular articles on the site so the visitors were especially pleased to see Rogue's spotlight finally get dusted off. 

It was time to celebrate UXM.net's birthday once more and this year we were pretty in pink for our sweet 16th. It had become apparent when we were talking about possible event themes that we had enough material to revisit the site's very first event month. So the logos were changed, the front page was decked out in pink and we unleashed an invasion by the Shi'ar. The first two releases focused on updating one of the event's original articles, the alien race entry for the Shi'ar as well as the X-Marks the Spot on the race. After refreshing the article and catching you all up with 16 years worth of history we debuted one of our brand new character articles. There were many characters we could have done but it only seemed fitting to kick things off with one of the more outrageous members of the Shi'ar...Deathbird.

We kicked off week two with a new team entry on the Praetorian Guard and followed it up with an update to the M'Kraan Crystal. Another character entry rounded off the week, this one on Korvus Rook'shir and his oversized Phoenix-powered sword. The original event was full of entries on the various alien races the X-Men had come across over the years. Whilst many of them hadn't been seen again we still took the opportunity to refresh many of the images. The Mephestoids and Timorians were the first two to receive a spring clean but they wouldn't be the last. On the theme of updates we decided the event wouldn't be complete without revisiting one of the most popular teams the X-Men have ever faced...the Imperial Guard.

September

After that it was character article time again and this one was on a very divisive character both in and out the comics. Vulcan, the secret X-Man who went on to conquer the Shi'ar was given his very own spotlight, which marked our halfway point in the event. 

Week four started with more updates to the alien races, this time the D'Bari and P!ndyr, two forgotten races, were brought back into the spotlight. During the past few weeks we had been releasing issue summaries that featured the Shi'ar. Those of you who were observant enough should have noticed that they were all part of the 90's crossover Operation Galactic Storm. With the release of those issues we thought it was only right to write an entry on the crossover itself. Our third character entry of the event was on a realtively new character who had quickly amassed enough history for her own profile...Warbird II. As we entered the final week we started it off slowly with two more updates to the alien races, the Uncreated and the Sidri. It was time for the event month to come to an end but we couldn't let it go without a bang and so we debuted the crowning glory of the event, the spotlight on Gladiator.

The event may have come to a close but September was still going strong. After putting our front page back to normal and takign a few days to breath we started churning out the new content once more. Since it's creation in Uncanny X-Force, Tabula Rasa had fast become a unique part of the X-Men's mythos and so we honoured that with an X-Marks the Spot. It had been a few months since we had put out a Publication History X, and so we reminded you all about the events during 2008 which saw the X-Men move to San Francisco. 

October

Our resident Alpha Flight fan had been hard at work as we were starting to get a backlog of Alphians ready to be published. To amend this we gave you a profile on Yukotujakzurjimozoata, also known as Yukon Jack to you and me. It was time for Publication History X 2009, bringing the total closer and closer to present day. Another character profile was next on someone who many of you may not had ever heard outside of the 90's trading cards. Empryean had been in the works for a while but his image work had proved to be very tricky. The combined efforts of Binaryan and Dean Clayton triumphed and we were finally able to release him. It was Halloween again and UXM.net always likes to celebrate this time of year and coincidentally we had the perfect character in the pipeline. Whilst Robert Garner had won the Unusual Suspects event there were three more people who also guessed correctly (just not fast enough). We tallied all the wrong guesses that everone had given us and gave the list to the three other winners to pick a name off. It was an overwhelming majority for the winner and so we marked Halloween with Marvel's very own were-pterodactyl...Sauron. 

November

Our drive to focus on newer characters and concepts continued this year with an article on one of the X-Men's more horrific villains...Predator X. It was also time for another profile on an Alphian, this time on the oldest hero out there (besides Wolverine of course) Centennial. Publication History X 2010 was next up, reminding those of you with bad memories about Second Coming and the losses of Nightcrawler and Cable. Much like this article is reminding you about the whole year we decided to honor tradition by releasing an article that just focused on the recent Shi'ar month. 

December

Exiles fans were delighted to get a profile on one of the very first member and the first to lose his life...Magnus. Next up was a team entry on a recent villainous team comprised of the X-Men's deadliest female villains...The Sisterhood I. We went back to the 80's for our next profile, a joint one on Tom Corsi and Sharon Friedlander, friends to the New Mutants and defenders of Muir Island. We realised that we hadn't been keeping up with character updates as much as we would have liked to. So, our final release of the year was an attempt to remedy it by refreshing the British super spy and one of Kitty's many love interests called Peter...Wisdom. 

2016 in numbers

30 new character articles

6 spotlight updates

18 miscellaneous articles

14 miscellaneous article updates

Issue Summaries

Jan - 20

Feb - 16

Mar - 14

Apr - 14

May - 12

Jun - 12

Jul - 10

Aug - 17

Sep - 21

Oct - 18

Nov - 16

Dec -10

Total for 2016 - 180 - That's an average of 0.49 releases a day!

Logos

The first logo change of the year came when we unleashed the Unstoppable Juggernaut month on you in Januray. 

With our first theme month of the year over we changed the logo to sometihing more regular but with our release of the Cyclops spotlight update we couldn't help but tie in to the occasion. 

The Cyclops logo stuck around for a while until the site was invaded by the Shi'ar, marking the launch of the 2016 event month.

The final logo of the year was a more understated yet elegent one that simply showed what this site was all about

Conclusion

What a year we had. We saw some of our oldest and biggest spotlights get updated, had our third Unusual Suspects competition, had an event month and still found time to reference the recent films. 

As we draw 2016 to a close we can be proud of the work the site has done this year and all the effort the contributors have done to ensure we are the most dedicated X-Men site there is. Whilst we cannot reveal all our secrets for 2017 you can rest assured that some are sure to be colossal and beastly in nature.

We are always on the look-out for new contributors in all aspects of the site whether they help with issue summaries, writing site articles or helping with the image work that goes into the articles. Please feel free to contact one of the cotributors if you think you might be able to assist us in our work on the site.

Happy New Year from all the staff at UncannyX-Men.net