its a problem you have to deal with when everything depends on the backstory of previous arcs to introduce new ones (ie, how they react, their motivations, etc.).

because, honestly, you can't just do one adventure arc without knowing the the chars well enough...

thing about it... when X-men first came out, with no real history to the chars, it was just a stock comic... full of cheesy silver age monologging and fist-is-mightier solutions. it took many years and many writers to build the continuity (then break the continuity, then build it again, but in alternate universes that sometimes communicate their continuity to ret-con each other).

wait... what was i talkin about again?