I Am Not Ashamed

“I Am Not Ashamed”
House of X #6 (2019)
Written by Jonathan Hickman
Art by Pepe Larraz
Color art by Marte Gracia and David Curiel

The opening sequence of “I Am Not Ashamed” resolves a big question from the first issue of House of X: How did Charles Xavier, who had always preached an assimilationist dream of peaceful coexistence, arrive at the isolationist solution of creating the Krakoa nation-state? The first issue took place in the immediate aftermath of Xavier’s psychic message to the world, and in this issue we get to see that speech in full. Xavier offers his pharmaceutical miracle drugs to humanity in exchange for Krakoan sovereignty, but explains that while he was once inclined to present this as a gift, it will now come at a price and with conditions after being disillusioned by humanity’s genocidal actions against mutants. The change of heart makes sense, and issue #4 laid a lot of the groundwork for this by emphasizing the emotional impact of these genocides on Xavier. Like most everything in House of X/Powers of X, it’s all cause and effect, and it’s a natural evolution of Xavier’s characterization rather than a betrayal of anything that came before.

One of the key narrative shifts in House of X is in reestablishing Charles Xavier as the leader of mutantdom, and as a mostly benevolent and decent man with a big dream. He’s still got some dubious morality and a god complex, but he’s firmly positioned as the protagonist of the story. Much like Chris Claremont, Scott Lobdell, and Grant Morrison before him, Jonathan Hickman presents Xavier as an inspirational visionary rather than as an unethical and manipulative creep, as he was portrayed through much of the past decade and a half. Hickman played on this history a lot through this story, giving the reader reason to be freaked out by Xavier and assume the worst. But at least for now, we can take Xavier to be a good person with honorable goals who is doing what he believes is best for his people, and for the world at large. 

The bulk of the issue depicts the first meeting of the Quiet Council of Krakoa, and the establishment of the nation’s first laws as the group decide the fate of Sabretooth. The scene does a good job of asserting the value system of the X-Men – mutants must never kill humans, mutants must multiply and thrive, Krakoa is sacred – and gives Pepe Larraz plenty of room to flex on drawing the body language and facial expressions of the assembled cast. The long shots establish a lot of character detail in physical gesture and bearing, and tighter talking head shots convey volumes about personality in what characters do with their hands as they speak. Even without following the dialogue, you get the gist of the conversation in how they move – Mister Sinister’s flippant cruelty, Storm’s seriousness, the thoughtful quasi-spirituality of Exodus, Emma Frost and Sebastian Shaw’s different shades of blue blood haughtiness, and Mystique’s impatient, dismissive demeanor. 

A highlight of the scene is when she interjects to taunt her son Nightcrawler for his religion – their relationship is never mentioned, but her callous disdain for the boy she abandoned is very apparent. Nightcrawler’s thoughtful and kind-hearted reply to her question asked in bad faith is a good argument for nurture mattering more than nature, as he’s clearly a much better man for never being raised by this deeply nihilistic woman. 

The final sequence is a celebration of the establishment of Krakoa, and feels a lot like the Ewok celebration conclusion of Return of the Jedi. Larraz also shines here, as he conveys a lot of character beats without the support of dialogue. The scene depicts joyful post-resurrection reunions, a conciliatory moment between Wolverine and his nemesis Gorgon (who has been given a key military leader role), and gives a suggestion of the new dynamic of Cyclops, Jean Grey, and Emma Frost in a cleverly illustrated sequence in which Jean begrudingly passes Emma a beer. It will be fun to see where Hickman goes with this – are we basically going to get an Archie/Betty/Veronica dynamic, or will this get more progressive in its sexual politics? A bit of both would be fun. We’re beyond “human laws” now, but it remains to be seen what gets defined as mutant sexuality, particularly in light of the mandate to procreate. 

Some notes:

• We finally get to see Moira X in the present day, though only in a cameo in her No-Space. But what is she up to these days? Why is she in hiding, even from Krakoa? And does anyone besides Charles Xavier and Magneto know about who she actually is and her role as the chief architect of this grand scheme? 

• It seems that this panel gives us our first glimpse of Doctor Killian Devo, the director of Orchis. I’m particularly excited about this character, and appreciate that Hickman has made the new main villain of the X-Men a guy called DOCTOR DEVO. Stan and Jack would be very proud! 

• I had assumed that we’d get back to Orchis in this issue, but we’ll clearly move on to finding out what their plan is following the destruction of their D̶e̶a̶t̶h̶ ̶S̶t̶a̶r̶ Mother Mold in Hickman’s X-Men series. 

• I filled in the map of the primary Krakoa in the Pacific Ocean with the names of locations for my own purposes, but here it is for you too. It’s just a lot easier to take in at a glance this way. Note the friendly tip of the hat to George R.R. Martin!

• We’re nearing the finish line of HOX/POX now, and there’s still a lot to be resolved in the final issue of Powers of X. Like, what will happen when the mutant consciousness archived becomes part of the Phalanx? What happened in Moira’s 6th life, and why has that been a secret? How did Moira find out about the true potential of Krakoa? And do all of those questions actually tie together? The finale of House of X is hopeful and optimistic, but there’s a nagging sense that the finale of Powers of X will show us the hidden cost of all this, or introduce a narrative catch that complicates everything we’ve seen. 

Society

“Society”
House of X #5 (2019)
Written by Jonathan Hickman
Art by Pepe Larraz
Color art by Marte Gracia

“Society” is perhaps the most radical issue of House of X/Powers of X thus far in terms of how it relates to X-Men comic books produced by anyone prior to Jonathan Hickman. The resurrection protocol hinted at in earlier issues but revealed here flips something that had become a crutch of the X-franchise – the tedious cycle of killing off characters for dramatic effect and then muddling through increasingly dull and convoluted ways of bringing them back – into something that is now simplified and central to the emerging mutant culture. The issue presents the process as a sort of spiritual ritual, and Charles Xavier’s crucial role in it positions him as a messianic figure for all of mutantdom. The Krakoan nation, the big plans for the future, the X-Men, the creation of a distinct mutant culture – that’s all well and good, but this is what really seals the deal for all of mutantdom to follow his rule. 

This is a brilliant conceit, and the scene in which Storm reintroduces her reborn brothers and sisters to the Krakoan people is one of the most moving and powerful sequences in the history of X-Men comics. This is mutant culture, this is mutant pride, this is justice and revenge. This is Storm, written as she ought to be for the first time in around 30 years. She is now the high priestess of mutants, a true and iconic leader of her people. No other character in the canon could have carried this scene. You get her natural gravitas and commanding presence, her radicalism, and her long personal history with the characters being resurrected. Her sense of joy, triumph, and righteousness in this moment is overwhelming. Pepe Larraz’s rendering of her face and body language is brilliant in conveying the essence of her character. As with his depiction of Nightcrawler, it feels like we’re really seeing these beloved but often poorly handled core characters again for the first time in many years.

The resurrection protocol puts every major X-Men character back on the table with minimal fuss, and keeps writers from having to mess around with continuity to just use whatever characters they want to write. The Matthew Rosenberg mini-run that directly preceded HOX/POX in which he killed or severely wounded a large number of major characters with the full knowledge of what Hickman was about to do now feels particularly hollow, childish, and pointless. Three of the characters resurrected in this issue – Cyclops, Jean Grey, and Wolverine – had been brought back to life in three different stories in the very recent past, and this renders those comics particularly pointless. Each of those stories was overly complicated, sweaty, and dramatically inert. In the words of Charles Xavier, “NO MORE.” Hickman has closed off the possibility of other writers doing these sort of bad stories indefinitely. This is a huge gift to the reader. 

Xavier isn’t just keeping his X-Men in circulation. He’s reviving hundreds of mutants he has catalogued, and rebuilding the mutant population of the earth. The resurrection plan is ongoing, but it’s clear enough that this miracle machine of rebirth won’t last for long. The resurrection mechanism relies on five specific mutants – Goldballs, Tempus, Proteus, Elixir, and Hope – and the use of Cerebro as a method of cataloging and preserving mutant minds. The vulnerabilities of this system are obvious, and are bound to be dismantled at some point. And given that mutant culture is now so focused on organic technology, it’s a glaring problem for something so crucial to involve a machine when machines are the enemies of mutantdom. The notion of preserving mutant consciousness is clearly derived from Moira’s knowledge of Nimrod’s archive, so what happens when some version of Nimrod inevitably becomes a reality in this timeline? Surely this is all very vulnerable to technological attack and exploitation.

And then there’s Mister Sinister. All of this is possible thanks to his archive of mutant DNA, but we already know that Sinister is up to something with all of this. What will be the actual cost to Xavier’s deal with this devil? We’ll probably get some idea of this next week.

Some questions about resurrection:

• Was Wolverine reborn with adamantium via reality-warping Proteus hand-waving, or will he need to re-up with the new body? I would quite like to see Magneto put it back on his skeleton to atone for ripping it out back in “Fatal Attractions.” 

• Similarly, has being reborn stripped Warren Worthington III of his Archangel metal wings and the genetic tampering of Apocalypse? I would hope not, as I vastly prefer Archangel to Angel on a visual and conceptual level. 

• Is this resurrection system at all compatible with Moira’s reincarnation power? Could Moira X be copied as Moira XI is born into a new timeline? 

This issue is extremely bold and sets up a lot of story to come, particularly in the final sequence in which all of the “evil mutants” who were not already on Krakoa arrive to join Xavier’s mutant society. But given that we have three more issues in this story, much of the dramatic momentum built up over the past 8 issues comes to a halt by the end. The issue is powerful in terms of giving the X-Men a major triumph, both in defeating their “great enemy death” as Storm puts it and in fully establishing Krakoa as a sovereign nation thanks in some part to the psychic nudging of Emma Frost. But unlike previous episodes, there’s less “now what???” urgency. 

But there are a lot of good questions going into the final three issues of this story: 

• Where is Moira X now? And what has she been doing in the more recent past? 

• What happened in Moira’s sixth life? 

• How will Orchis find out that they did not actually kill eight major X-Men, and can this moment please involve Cyclops pulling a “surprise bitch, I bet you thought you’d seen the last of me” on Dr. Alia Gregor? Surely this will result in a major panic on their end that will hasten the creation of Nimrod. 

• What will happen with the Phalanx as it absorbs Nimrod’s archive of mutantkind in the distant future of Moira 9’s timeline, and how will this reflect on what is happening in the standard timeline? And will Cylobel figure into this?

• How exactly did Moira learn about the true capabilities of Krakoa, and how did the mutants come to know of the major applications of Krakoan fauna that we’ve seen in the story so far? 

It Will Be Done

“It Will Be Done”
House of X #4 (2019)
Written by Jonathan Hickman
Art by Pepe Larraz
Color art by Marte Gracia

How do you write your way out of this? 

If this issue was in fact the demise of six crucial X-Men characters – Cyclops, Wolverine, Jean Grey, Nightcrawler, Archangel, and Mystique – plus Husk and possibly Monet for good measure, it would be one of the best character send-offs in the history of Marvel publishing. Dramatic, triumphant, tragic, horrifying. It’s the ultimate X-Men story, really. It truly puts to shame all previously published deaths of these characters. (Yes, almost all of them have died at least once, and with the exception of Jean’s various deaths, they’ve all been in either underwhelming or outright awful stories.) 

But we know very well in advance that most or all of these characters will return for Dawn of X next month. Cyclops, Wolverine, and Jean Grey are on the cover of the forthcoming X-Men #1, written by Jonathan Hickman. The reader is fully aware of this, and Hickman is playing on this knowledge in the story. This is his version of Harry Houdini putting on handcuffs and leg-irons, getting locked in a packing crate, and getting lowered into the East River. 

How is he going to write his way out of this??

But let’s not speculate. At this point we know this is a mug’s game. The outcome of this issue is enough to remind us that the radical narrative moves of HOX/POX isn’t about to let up at any point.

“It Will Be Done” is framed by an internal X-Men report on the two major extinction-level events for mutants – the Genoshan genocide at the start of Grant Morrison’s New X-Men and the “mutant decimation by the pretender Wanda Maximoff” in Brian Michael Bendis’ House of M. The document – “Look At What They’ve Done” – fills in other major mutant crimes and files them by affiliation. Given the particular anger towards Wanda “Scarlet Witch” Maximoff and the strident tone of the document, in which the Avengers are put on equal footing with flagrantly anti-mutant hate groups like the Purifiers and Reavers, the implication would be that the document was created by Magneto. 

But this issue isn’t about Magneto’s rage, it’s about Xavier’s. We see him at the end of the issue a broken man, with most of his closest and most beloved students and lieutenants dead after stopping yet another attempt at genocide by the humans. The final pages let his resolution - “no more” – echoing out through the images of the tragedy of this issue, and the endless series of hate crimes presented over the past two decades of publishing.

It’s a powerful use of text, particularly in the context of how the text pages have been used for dry informational purposes so far through the series. This is all emotion. Grief, then rage, then resolve: NO MORE. 

The pages directly reference Wanda Maximoff at the end of House of M, so it’s certainly intentional that Xavier is echoing her fateful words – “no more mutants” – in House of X. But what will Xavier do? It had already seemed like he’d gone radical from the start of the story. What is the next step further?

Pepe Larraz continues to impress with this issue, delivering some of the best action scenes I’ve seen in comics in many years. His pacing – which I suppose to some extent is the pacing of Hickman, but still – is exquisite, and he gives each moment of triumph and tragedy an appropriate level of gravitas. I particularly love his shots of the Mother Mold, which are consistently ominous but oddly beautiful – a sci-fi bust sculpted by Jack Kirby, backlit by the sun. The scene in which Wolverine destroys it as it vaingloriously rants about its own creation myth, couched in the story of Prometheus. As predicted, the AI was not fully mature. The X-Men have snuffed out a mad god. 

Some major questions going into the last 5 issues of HOX/POX:

• What becomes of the “dead” X-Men? And is this development setting up the answer to the question of what Xavier was doing in the first scene of House of X #1, and an explanation of how it is that the two Stepford Cuckoos killed in New X-Men are alive and well?

• What is the “true purpose” of Cerebro? 

• How will the agendas of Apocalypse, Mister Sinister, and Exodus fit into all of this?

• Where is Moira X now?

• What is happening with the Phalanx in the far future of the Moira 9 timeline, and how does it relate to what is happening in the primary timeline?

• What happened in Moira’s sixth life?

• How did Xavier and Moira learn of the true capabilities and potential of Krakoa?

• What about the drugs for humans? 

Once More Unto the Breach

“Once More Unto the Breach”
House of X #3 (2019)
Written by Jonathan Hickman
Art by Pepe Larraz
Color art by Marte Gracia

The new dynamics of humans and mutants in House of X put humans at a severe disadvantage – they don’t have natural godlike powers, they don’t have access to miraculous Krakoan biotech, and they’re doomed by evolution to be phased out within a few generations. But they do have money and political power and advanced technology. They also have the motivation of a deep fear of mutants, and it’s a fear that this issue suggests is totally valid. The mutants are now rejecting human laws, and allowing mass murdering psychopaths to essentially kill humans with impunity. Humans on a space station face the terror of having a squad of immensely powerful mutant soldiers attack them without warning, and with intelligence gathering resources far beyond what they could have expected. All the humans have to consider at this point are drastic asymmetrical moves, whether it’s the forces behind Orchis building a Mother Mold, or one Orchis scientist resorting to a suicide bombing in the hope of foiling the X-Men’s mission. 

“Once More Unto the Breach” sets in motion the second phase of the HOX/POX story, in which the X-Men – the actual X-Men! – head off to shut down the Mother Mold and prevent the creation of Nimrod. There’s some heavy work done in the text pages of this issue explicating the direct evolutionary path from Sentinel to Master Mold to Mother Mold to Nimrod, but it mostly provides a lot of simple joys just by giving us cool moments with beloved characters. 

Nightcrawler gets a spotlight scene in which he recons the Mother Mold station, and you can sense Jonathan Hickman and Pepe Larraz’s enthusiasm for the character on the page. Larraz draws one of the best Nightcrawlers I’ve ever seen, very true to the classic model of the character illustrated by Dave Cockrum, John Byrne, Paul Smith, and John Romita Jr but a bit more slender and delicate. He doesn’t look human at all, but he still has a familiar joyful, handsome quality. 

The other X-Men on the mission get smaller moments. Monet is regal and intelligent, but deeply pessimistic. Jean Grey is gentle and essentially pacifistic, but her empathy for those she presumes to be innocent is offset by what comes across as a distant, spacey affect. Cyclops is intense and focused, Mystique is aloof and clearly has her own agenda, and Wolverine is jaded and skeptical. 

The biggest character moment in this issue is the reintroduction of Emma Frost, who arrives as a Krakoan ambassador to retrieve Sabretooth from a human super prison after he was apprehended by the Fantastic Four in the first issue. Larraz’s drawing of Emma’s entrance is extremely fabulous. She rolls in like Beyoncé, but with somehow even more grandiosity and confidence.

True to form, she’s righteous and condescending, and is highly effective in her immediate goals of establishing Sabretooth’s diplomatic immunity but an abject failure in terms of engendering any sort of goodwill for the mutants of Krakoa. The humans in this courtroom scene are exasperated and rightly so. The reasoning around letting Sabretooth – a man who has killed hundreds of people over the years in cold blood, often just to satisfy his sick urges – go free is not particularly sound. Emma lords the superiority of her race over the humans in a rather cruel and hateful way. This hubris is bound to backfire horribly on the X-Men. 

The issue ends with the death of Captain Erasmus Mendel, who sets off a bomb under the X-Men’s ship as they prepare to dock the station. Mendel is the romantic partner of Dr. Alia Gregor, the primary Orchis character in the story thus far. Gregor, already so focused on building the Mother Mold and stopping mutantdom from supplanting humanity on earth, will certainly not take this well. The scene doesn’t do anything to make the Orchis operatives more sympathetic – they are unambiguously working towards genocidal ends – but it does convey Mendel’s rational fear of the X-Men and their high chances of thwarting the thing they’ve put so much work into, a thing he believes is entirely justified. 

This scene is important in depicting the emotional reality of the Orchis characters, but also in reminding readers that the X-Men are scary. Not just Wolverine and Archangel, but every last one of them. If you’re about to face them the odds are stacked hopelessly against you, and you probably will panic, or destroy yourself if just to temporarily knock them off balance, or leave them stranded in outer space. 

The Uncanny Life of Moira X

“The Uncanny Life of Moira X”
House of X #2 (2019)
Written by Jonathan Hickman
Art by Pepe Larraz
Color art by Marte Gracia

“The Uncanny Life of Moira X” is one of the most radical X-Men comics ever in terms of the magnitude of the retcon being introduced and its implications for all future X-Men comics, but it’s also a bold narrative move so early in Jonathan Hickman’s tenure as the lead writer of the franchise. After two issues of setting up several major plots across four time periods, he’s stepping back from all that to focus on the origin story of Moira MacTaggert, a supporting character who was killed off nearly 20 years ago. Moira – a brilliant scientist and former lover of both Charles Xavier and Banshee – was always understood to be a human ally of the X-Men. In this issue we learn the truth: She’s a mutant with the power of reincarnation, and the Moira that we have known all along – and the Moira who appeared in Powers of X #1 last week – is the tenth Moira. It’s not an X, it’s a 10. 

The issue tells the story of Moira’s many lives, and how living through different timelines gradually radicalized her and set her up for her proposition to Charles Xavier in her tenth life, which she has been led to believe could be her last. Much of the story deals with Moira’s learning curve in figuring out what to do with her extraordinary circumstances – she spends much of her second life coming to grips with the odd experience of reliving your life from the start, and what happens when she deliberately changes events. 

Hickman addresses a lot of interesting details of Moira’s experience here – what it’s like to be a fully aware adult in the womb, and what it’s like to meet the love of your life again only to know too much about them going in and have that prevent the possibility of repeating the romance. Other details are left to the reader’s imagination, such as what it must be like to live adult lives and then be forced to relive childhood and puberty over and over again before getting on to the agendas of adulthood. Moira’s lives are outlined in a flowchart in the back of the comic, and she’s lived around 500 years. Imagine the sort of patience she must have developed along the way. 

The most brilliant sequence in the issue shows what happens at the end of Moira’s third life, in which she succumbs to self-loathing of her mutant nature and uses her scientific brilliance to devise a “cure” for the X-gene. Her lab is attacked by Mystique’s Brotherhood, and all of her colleagues are murdered. Destiny, an old blind woman who can see the future, confronts Moira about what she has done. 

Pepe Larraz’s interpretation of John Byrne’s character design highlights an essential creepiness to Destiny’s eye-less golden mask, which is even more unsettling in its contrast with Moira’s highly emotive face as she faces her captor’s righteous dismissal of her work and promise to murder her in any new life she has should she go down this path again. Hickman’s Destiny is cold and ruthless, but speaks nothing but truth. Destiny only wants to ensure that Moira uses her gifts to help her people in her lives to come, and sees to it by having Pyro burn her alive – “And slowly, so she doesn’t forget how dying like this feels.” This is the most nuanced and horrifying depiction of a terrorist act to ever appear in an X-Men comic.

Moira’s story is largely about the responsibilities of members of oppressed groups who have the option to pass. Moira can opt out of living as an out mutant, and can also choose to work against her people. But she is in a unique position of power in terms of helping her people, and after her experience with Destiny she becomes increasingly radicalized and focused on working for the greater good of mutants. We see her go through different approaches and iterations on mutant philosophies – lives spent with Xavier, a life with Magneto, a life at the side of Apocalypse – and all of them fail in the goal of protecting mutants from the the machines. We leave her in a pivotal moment that sets up the beginning of this story – the establishment of the House of X, and a world in which she and Charles Xavier “break all the rules.”

Notes and observations:

• Moira’s seventh life spent hunting down and killing all of the Trasks, the family responsible for the creation of the mutant-hunting Sentinel robots, explicates an emerging theme that was suggested in Powers of X: The machines are an inevitability and evolve in parallel with the mutants. The struggle in this run is not so much between human and mutant but rather mutants and machines: the natural inheritors of the planet and the creations of man. The machines carry out the social orders enforced by their creators – programming passed down from a ruling class. 

• Moira’s sixth life is not accounted for in either the story or the flowchart of her lives in the back of the issue, which is clearly a big deal. I suspect this will be addressed in one of the next few issues, and it will be the life in which Moira discovers the truth about the nature of Krakoa. 

• This issue opens up the possibility of a continuity reboot, and that we’re already in the new timeline, with the first hints being that the two Stepford Cuckoos who had died in the Grant Morrison run are both alive in House of X #1. Many of the characters who were killed off in Matthew Rosenberg’s Uncanny X-Men run, which just ended a few weeks ago, are already slated to be regulars in forthcoming X-comics. It would seem that Rosenberg actually did what he said he was doing in that arc – tell the “last X-Men story” – and in a pre and post-Crisis sense of things, it looks like he actually did. It seems very likely that we’re in Moira X world now, and that up until recently we’ve been in another Moira’s timeline.

The House That Xavier Built

“The House That Xavier Built” 
House of X #1 (2019)
Written by Jonathan Hickman
Art by Pepe Larraz
Color art by Marte Gracia

House of X begins in the aftermath of extraordinary world-transforming change, and leaves the reader scrambling to catch up with what has happened in a sequence of vignettes and text pages that convey a huge amount of exposition and world building. Jonathan Hickman has been experimenting with this formal conceit for a little while, particularly in his excellent Image series The Black Monday Murders with artist Tomm Coker, but this is a more sophisticated iteration that is more integral to moving the story along.  There is other precedent for using text pages as part of a comics story, like Alan Moore’s Watchmen or the Keith Giffen/Tom and Mary Bierbaum version of Legion of Super Heroes, but in those cases the pages mainly provided context and subtext. Hickman is using text and charts to advance plot and to deliver crucial narrative reveals. The radical and inventive approach to storytelling emphasizes that this is a drastic break from previous X-Men comics, but more importantly throws the reader into the deep end of the plot without relying on any particular POV character. The scope of the story is important, and the text pages communicate that as well as a great deal of knowledge that only some scattered characters are privy to.

The story begins two months after Charles Xavier has established a mutant nation state on Krakoa, the living island that was both the setting and antagonist of the first “all-new, all-different” X-Men story in Giant-Size X-Men #1 from 1975. The X-Men have harnessed the unique properties of Krakoa to create mutant-only habitats around the world which are connected with “gateway” teleportation portals. Xavier and the X-Men have synthesized three drugs from Krakoan flowers – a pill that can extend human life by five years, another that cures mental illness, and a third which is an adaptive universal antibiotic – and are offering them to human governments in return for accepting Krakoa as a sovereign state. It is later implied that Xavier pursued drug angle to deliberately destabilize the pharmaceutical industry. Xavier has also developed a mutant language which he has spread telepathically as a means of advancing a distinct mutant culture.

We catch glimpses of Xavier in this story, but we barely hear from him. This version of Xavier, as designed and illustrated by Pepe Larraz, is a gaunt and vaguely dainty man wearing skin-tight black clothing and a giant Cerebro helmet that covers his eyes. The design is remarkably similar to that of The Maker, the evil version of Reed Richards who was a recurring nemesis in Hickman’s earlier Marvel work. The first scene of the book is ambiguous and creepy, as we see the new version of Xavier watch what appear to be adult clones of Cyclops and Jean Grey emerge from pods in some strange birthing chamber on Krakoa. His only line of dialogue is his catchphrase from the start – “To me, my X-Men.” It’s extremely unsettling, and immediately casts some suspicion about what he’s really doing. The only other time we see Xavier in this issue is when he greets Jean Grey and a young mutant on Krakoa. Larraz makes him appear entirely inscrutable, but also delicate and serene. 

House of X introduces a new form of human antagonism in the form of the Orchis Protocol, a “doomsday network” pooling the resources of many organizations – mostly AIM and SHIELD, but also stakeholders in SWORD, Alpha Flight, and Hydra – to keep mutants from disrupting human economies, taking over territory, and overtaking humans in population. The latter is a pressing concern as Dr. Alia Gregor, an AIM scientist and key member of this initiative, has discovered that mutants will inevitably become the dominant species on the planet within 20 years. Hickman is bringing back an idea from the start of Grant Morrison’s New X-Men in the early 2000s which had been undone by Marvel editorial in Brian Michael Bendis’ House of M in 2004. We’re back to a world where mutants are indeed the inevitable next wave of human evolution, and humans must either resign themselves to this fate or attempt to stop this, or at least hold on to power and privilege for as long as they can. It tilts the concept of the X-Men franchise to be more relevant to what has been happening in the world over the past few years, as right wing extremists rise up in a desperate bid to squash progress that is somewhat inevitable given societal trends and shifts in population.

The Orchis Protocol scenes establish a serious threat to mutants in the form of a Master Mold – a mother Sentinel that creates other Sentinels – bonded to a rebuilt Sol’s Hammer, an incredibly powerful Dyson Sphere designed by Reed Richards and Tony Stark as a planet-destroyer in Hickman’s New Avengers series. The device captures and harnesses the power of the sun to create new Sentinels, which is somewhat ironic given that in Roy Thomas and Neal Adams’ classic Sentinels story from the late ‘60s, Cyclops defeats them by using logic to trick the mutant-hunting robots into flying into the sun. The image of the Master Mold/Sol’s Hammer hybrid – which the Orchis doctors call The Forge – is rather striking, with the extreme Kirby-ness of the Sentinel design contrasted with a mosaic of solar panels. It’s like the Death Star reimagined as a hanging mobile in outer space. 

The issue is mostly focused on world building and introducing new human antagonists, but Hickman spends a good chunk of the issue (re)introducing two of the franchise’s most crucial characters, Cyclops and Magneto. Cyclops appears midway through the issue to establish the new role of the X-Men in this post-Krakoa world. Cyclops arrives in Manhattan through a Krakoan gateway to apprehend Sabretooth, who has just been captured by the Fantastic Four after robbing a Damage Control facility with Mystique and Toad. (Damage Control has been reimagined by Hickman as a corporation mainly interested in stealing and archiving the work of superhero scientists like Reed Richards and Tony Stark, which explains how Orchis managed to build their own Sol’s Hammer.) Cyclops explains that he wishes to take Sabretooth back to Krakoa, and the Fantastic Four understandably object – the guy is a hugely prolific serial killer and had just injured or killed several guards. The X-Men are now granting amnesty to all mutant criminals to build their mutant nation. And really, why not? Virtually every member of the X-Men is a criminal one way or another anyway. Cyclops just spent several years of publishing as a noble sort of terrorist revolutionary. 

The scene with Cyclops and Reed Richards sets the tone for Hickman’s version of the X-Men’s leader, and given that Reed Richards was the primary hero of the writer’s previous epic Marvel story through Fantastic Four, Avengers, and Secret Wars, it’s a clear passing of the narrative baton. Hickman’s characterization of Cyclops is close to that of Kieron Gillen and Brian Michael Bendis – he’s intense and altruistic, and is monomaniacally obsessed with the survival and advancement of mutant culture. He’s very cordial with the Fantastic Four – he’s been friends with them since he was a teenager – but he can’t help but be a little condescending to them, and doesn’t seem to get that he’s being a little creepy when he tells the Richards to let their mutant son Franklin know that he can join his family on Krakoa any time he likes. His non-mutant parents, of course, aren’t welcome. 

It’s unclear how much Hickman will reference previous stories in this run, but it’s worth noting that what Xavier is achieving with Krakoa is a bolder and more all-encompassing version of what Cyclops was attempting with the island of Utopia in the Matt Fraction/Kieron Gillen era. The key difference is that Utopia was the makeshift tactical solution of a soldier – a fortress under siege, more like a cult compound than Xavier’s vision of an entirely new culture and homeland for mutants. At this point in time, no one is expected to be a soldier on Krakoa.

Magneto appears in the issue as Xavier’s proxy, serving as an ambassador greeting a handful of human dignitaries at the Krakoan habitat in Jerusalem. (Hickman is not shying away from the Zionist parallels of Krakoa by setting this plot there, and centering it on Magneto, a Holocaust survivor.) Magneto is clearly overjoyed by what Xavier has accomplished, and why not? It’s the mutant supremacist separatist culture he’s always envisioned rather than the assimilation fantasy that Xavier had always pursued. Hickman wants the reader to question this – how did Xavier arrive at this reversal of intentions? He also wants us to think about why Magneto was never capable of doing this himself. 

Magneto was given the task of confronting these humans about Xavier’s deal precisely because he is an intimidating presence who is unafraid to tell them that that Xavier’s offering is a gift and an incentive, not a negotiation. He’s serving as Xavier’s enforcer, but even at this early stage it’s clear that getting the thing he’s always wanted in life will not mellow him out even a little bit. With this leverage, and with Xavier’s encouragement, he appears ready to take everything too far. His entitlement knows no limits, and his rage and fascist impulses cannot be quieted. At the end of the issue, he gloats about the power mutants now have over humans, and the inevitability of a mutant future. One of the dignitaries – who is established as neutral in all of this –asks him, “Do you know what you sound like?” Magneto tells him that, yes, he does. The question of who he sounds like is left ambiguous – Hitler? A God? Just an overzealous douche? It seems obvious that this question will be the central theme of Hickman’s Magneto going forward.

Pepe Larraz is a revelation in this issue. Larraz has been a strong artist for some time, and turned in excellent work in the recent X-Men event miniseries Extermination. His art still greatly resembles that of Stuart Immonen – hardly a bad thing given that Immonen is one of the best artists working in the medium – but he in some ways surpasses Immonen in this issue. Larraz and colorist Marte Gracia realize Hickman’s concepts with vivid detail. Many comic book artists struggle with drawing evocative settings but this is where Larraz thrives – he nails the natural but somewhat alien beauty of Krakoa, and the way the mutant vegetation of its habitats looks lovely but surreal in the context of human cities. The interior of the Orchis station at The Forge is also quite evocative. Those designs are more familiar from the visual vernacular of science fiction, but Larraz fills out the cold, sterile, and cavernous spaces with atmosphere and details that feel slightly off. A long shot establishing Orchis experimentation on Krakoan vegetation in the station is a subtle bit of foreshadowing that also emphasizes the contrast between the crushing machinery of mankind and the organic beauty of mutant biotech.