For a couple of years or more now, I’ve written that readers can follow new releases of the various X-books if they know a few things going in.

– Marvel’s mutant community is now a nation, living on the sentient island of Krakoa. They are governed by a council that includes or has included Professor X, Magneto, etc.

– The mutant community has offered life-saving medications and other amenities to the rest of the world, if humans will simply leave the nation of Krakoa alone, and has promised destruction to any nation that interferes or threatens them.

– The current X-books are sort of the manifestations of Moira MacTaggert who has been reincarnated multiple times through the various incarnations of the X-Men throughout Marvel’s 60-plus history.

– Mutants can be killed but they cannot die. Mutantkind has learned the secret of reincarnation via keeping databases stored with up-to-date memories and growing new genetically matched bodies.

Even with all of that, I felt readers could keep up with what’s going on in all of the X-books.

But reading the third collected volume of the “X-Men” comics, I realized it may be impossible for a new reader, or even a casual reader, to figure out what is going on. Or even a regular reader of a specific X-title, for that matter.

After a year or more of X-books, there was no “X-Men” title – the X-book that started all of the X-books all those years ago. The X-Men mission now is to serve as an elite force to not only guard Krakoa but to help humanity (pretty much the traditional X-Men job).

But even having read all of the “X-Men” issues in this current iteration, as well as several other X-books (including keeping up with “X-Men Red,” which is mutantkind establishing a colony-nation on Mars), I don’t read all of the mutant books, or even all of the mega-series books, so some of the action in “X-Men Volume 3,” I had to piece together, or just scratch my head, shrug my shoulders and move on.

So, readers visiting the X-books for the first time in a while should do so with the knowledge that some characters will be familiar, many will not, others will be missing or in another X-book; the storyline is not self-contained and may not even be related to the last issue of the same X-title but be a spin off of another X-title or part of a massive Marvel-wide mega-series.

And it would, at this point, cost a small fortune to catch up on all of the issues and titles.

The X-books put the x in complex.