KingRoyal wrote:Watching the X-Men cartoon got me into reading X-Men comics which in the 90s were just full of people dying
I'd say that really started in the '80s.
I mean, the first time Xavier died was back in the '70s (EDIT: actually it was the late '60s), but characters dying all the damn time was an '80s thing.
I remember a conversation with my uncle -- late '90s, early aughts -- where I said "Claremont's back on X-Men" and he said "Oh boy. Who's dead so far?" and I was like "Cyclops."
The Krakoa Era actually did something interesting with that by giving them a plot device that lets them resurrect dead mutants, which let them bring back every mutant who's ever died (Charlie Jane Anders wrote a pretty good text piece narrated by one of the Morlocks who just woke up after the last thing they remember was being murdered in the Massacre) and made every mutant more-or-less immortal. I think that's over now and we're on to whatever the new status quo is (not 100% on that, I don't read the core X-books and only catch up on whatever the hell's going on in them sporadically through references in other stuff like Deadpool, or the aforementioned New Mutants miniseries by CJA and Enid Balam), but it's a neat enough idea; death hasn't had any stakes in superhero comics in decades, if ever, so why not pull hard in the opposite direction and explore what that means?