Fearless

“Fearless”
X-Men #1-9
Written by Gerry Duggan
Art by Pepe Larraz with Javier Pina (#4-5, 8) and C.F. Villa (#9)
Color art by Marte Gracia

X-Men is a series with a huge built-in advantage in that it’s primarily illustrated by Pepe Larraz, one of the best artists working in the medium today and one of the three people (along with Jonathan Hickman and R.B. Silva) who created and defined the Krakoa era of X-Men. Gerry Duggan is also one of the crucial foundational authors of this era as well, and it makes sense that he would be the one to be passed the baton of the main X-Men series from Hickman. Unlike Hickman’s run, which mainly served as a hub for general top level X-stories and had no particular team called the X-Men, Duggan is actually writing a clearly defined superhero team. This plays to Duggan’s strengths as established in Marauders – he’s very adept at writing old school superhero stories with an emphasis on Claremontian character development while working within Hickman’s sci-fi framework. His style is a well-balanced compromise, traditional in its structures but forward-thinking in its substance. 

Duggan and Larraz, who have worked together previously on Uncanny Avengers, made their Krakoa-era debut together on Planet Size X-Men. That issue, in which the mutants terraform Mars and establish it as the planet Arakko, was very bold and easily the biggest narrative move that was not set in motion by Hickman himself. From a post-Hickman perspective it was an important move in proving the other writers had it in them to make huge, clever creative swings that were not dependent on following his plans. Particular to Duggan, it seems like the first step in asserting himself as a primary author rather than a second banana, and his X-Men run has moved along with other contributions to the macro plot that have made the series seem vital rather than a more trad continuation of Hickman’s project. 

Duggan’s primary interest has been in further developing Orchis by introducing new characters and collaborators rather than focus on Hickman’s core Orchis cast of Director Devo, Doctor Gregor, Nimrod, and Omega Sentinel. The first issue introduces Feilong, the quasi-Elon Musk Chinese scientist who is embittered by the mutants usurping his plans to colonize Mars and spitefully creates an outpost for Orchis on Phobos, the moon of Mars. There’s also Doctor Stasis, a mysterious scientist with Doctor Moreau-ish tendencies and a Boba Fett-ish helmet who is intent on cracking the mysteries of mutant resurrection, and classic Marvel villain M.O.D.O.K., who is brought into the Orchis ranks on a contingent basis. The story is still in motion as of #9, but I appreciate the potential here – Feilong represents a logical response to the hubris of creating Arakko, while Doctor Stasis just… looks cool on account of Larraz’s design. As we all know, just looking really cool can take a villain very far. But it makes sense to expand the scope of Orchis’ membership, particularly as we’re meant to understand that this is a growing coalition of powers moving against the mutants. It can’t just be the same four characters working on all fronts

Duggan and Larraz’s X-Men is a tight team of 7 elected members – Cyclops and Jean Grey as the leaders and mainstays with Rogue, Polaris, Sunfire, Synch, and X-23 as Wolverine. (As a matter of site-wide clarity, I default to identifying that character as X-23 - no implied disrespect to her using that codename.) Duggan’s story structure is episodic with mostly done-in-one superhero plots that give space to spotlight a particular character. This has worked out pretty well, though it has been frustrating in the sense that it can give short shrift to characters who seem to linger in the wings before getting some story focus. The best example of this is Rogue, a major X-Men character who has had a fairly minor through the Krakoa era. It seemed at first that Rogue would finally get some time to shine in this series, but she’s barely around for issues on end before getting her spotlight in #9. In retrospect this was clearly a matter of scheduling – her scenes were focused on reuniting with her foster mother Destiny and that clearly had to be published on the other side of Inferno – but it nevertheless tests the patience in a monthly publication. 

The two characters who’ve been best served by appearing in this series are perennial third-stringers Polaris and Sunfire. Polaris has largely suffered through the years for being written with such wildly varying characterizations that more recent writers like Leah Williams have had to settle on making this volatility a feature rather than a bug, and Sunfire has been used so sporadically that he was rather undeveloped until Rick Remender and Duggan gave him a little more interiority in Uncanny Avengers. The Polaris situation was largely resolved by Larraz, who presented her in early X-Men art as a somewhat haughty cool girl carrying a Starbucks cup into battle. This is such a clever spin on where the character is in this era – she’s the daughter of Magneto and is giving off some Big Heiress Energy while still retaining the just-barely-concealed insecurities of Williams’ characterization of her in X-Factor. Duggan has simply followed Larraz’s lead here, and presents her as someone who’s juggled a lot of potential life directions and imposter syndrome issues and is finding herself by merging all her competencies as a superhero. 

As for Sunfire, it’s more a matter of this classic loner finding a sense of self-worth in service to his new nation but gradually realizing there’s other options for doing so that provide him the solitude he craves. It’s not easy to convey introversion in a superhero comic without showing an interior monologue through captions and thought balloons, but Duggan pulls this off in small gestures through the run. I can’t imagine Sunfire will be sticking around once the second team is voted in, but I do hope Duggan continues to follow the character as he gets increasingly involved in Arakko and cosmic matters, and I’m looking forward to his mission resolving a X of Swords dangling plot I’d assumed would be picked up in Tini Howard’s series.

The rest of the ongoing threads range from very engaging, like Cyclops being forced to conceal his resurrection in the guise of Captain Krakoa after dying publicly at the hands of Doctor Stasis or Duggan running with the tragic romance of Synch and X-23 as established by Hickman in The Vault issues, or are in a wait-and-see limbo like the Gameworld subplot that apparently comes to a head in the next few issues. The latter is a fairly thin concept that gains a lot from Larraz’s world building and draftsmanship, which gives a somewhat mundane notion a genuinely alien appearance and some necessary razzle dazzle. 

Larraz’ art is typically excellent in his issues, but thankfully he has very good understudies on this series. Javier Pina, a fellow Spaniard, has a style that merges a lot of Larraz’s aesthetics with a touch of George Perez and Phil Jiminez. It meshes well in a collection, particularly as Pina has nudged his art towards more overt Larraz mimicry in #8. C.F. Villa, who illustrated #9, also works within a similar stylistic framework, though his linework comes closer to that of Valerio Schiti. Given that some of the other X-series have suffered some lackluster fill-in artists the consistency on X-Men is to be commended, particularly as Larraz is a very difficult act to follow. 

Jonathan Hickman's Dangling Plot Threads

It was announced today that Jonathan Hickman is stepping away from the X-Men indefinitely after the end of Inferno to do another major Marvel project, mainly as a result of everyone else working on X-Men comics wanting to stay within the first act of his planned story longer than he wanted to. Reading between the lines it seems like he will be coming back around to complete his story later on – my guess going on where things are story-wise in the other books is maybe towards the end of 2023.  In the meantime it seems like Gerry Duggan will be leading the line as they continue to explore the ideas of Reign of X.

This is disappointing in that I very much want to read X-Men comics written by Jonathan Hickman and am heavily invested in the story he was writing, far more than any of the other X-Men line writers. So I very much hope that things work out so he can complete the story he began, particularly as there are MANY loose ends for him to deal with. It would be heartbreaking for him to abandon these threads forever, particularly when so much of his X-Men series was meticulously arranging dominos that haven’t come close to falling.

Here’s a list of the major dangling plot lines, starting with the questions I expect to be addressed in Inferno:

• How did Moira MacTaggert actually come to know the capabilities of Krakoa? We understand that this comes from her 9th life in partnership with Apocalypse, but it seems like there’s some more to this than what we’ve seen, particularly in her 10th life.

• And what was actually going on with Xavier and MacTaggert’s initial confrontations with Krakoa in Giant Size X-Men #1 and Ed Brubaker’s Deadly Genesis mini-series?

• What does Moira know that she has kept from everyone else, possibly including Xavier and Magneto? “We always lose,” yes, but it seems like there’s something more specific left unsaid.

• What does Destiny actually know that Moira is deliberately suppressing? Or maybe, from another angle, what is Moira trying to learning from reading Destiny’s diaries?

• What will Mystique do to force the resurrection of Destiny?

• When will Sabretooth break free? (I have a feeling this is connected..)

• Will Moira reveal herself to Krakoa?

• When/how will Orchis learn of the resurrection protocols? (This is hinted at in Duggan’s X-Men #2.) 

• How will Orchis/Nimrod strike?

Questions set up by House of X/Powers of X, X-Men, and Giant Size X-Men:

• What will become of the Sentinel legions being created in Sentinel City on Mercury?

• What will be Sinister’s inevitable betrayal of Krakoa? 

• When will we see the chimera in this timeline? (This seems likely to start moving along in Hellions.)

• What is going to happen with the Children of the Vault?
• Who created the Children and why?
• Is there a direct connection of the Children and the Homo Novissima, or is this more just thematic mirroring?

• What will happen with the AI growing in The World that was created from Vault technology, from the end of Giant Size X-Men: Storm?

• What’s the situation with the Phalanx and ascension? There is nothing set specifically in motion here but it’s clear enough it’s part of Hickman’s endgame. 
• Is some part of Krakoa infected with the techno-organic virus, as seen in Powers of X?

• When will things go wrong with Vulcan after the aliens tampered with his mind in X-Men #10?
• What will happen with the Brood after the X-aligned Broo became their king in X-Men #9?
• How will Storm call in the debt of the Shi’ar from the end of X-Men #17? (This seems likely to just be folded into S.W.O.R.D.)

• Who exactly is Riley Marshall and who does he actually work for? (Could be Orchis… or not.)

The Beginning

“The Beginning”
X-Men #21
Written by Jonathan Hickman
Art by Nick Dragotta, Russel Dauterman, Lucas Werneck, and Sara Pichelli
Color art by Frank Martin, Matthew Wilson, Sunny Gho, and Nolan Woodard

• This issue marks the end of Jonathan Hickman’s run on this particular title, though not the end of his X-Men run – his Inferno miniseries will launch in September and pick up on the Mystique/Moira and Orchis threads of the previous issue, and I strongly suspect there’s another thing coming before year’s end that won’t be announced until after next week’s Planet Size X-Men special. A new X-Men series by Gerry Duggan and Pepe Larraz starring the team introduced in this issue will launch next month, and I haven’t decided whether or not I will cover that on an issue-to-issue basis or simply write about it in chunks as I do all the non-Hickman titles. 

• At this point I’m inclined to think that Hickman’s story isn’t following a standard three act structure as much as it’s working on a more musical logic – House of X/Powers of X is an overture establishing themes, and this issue is the end of a movement that began with the first issue of this series but also included his New Mutants issues, the Giant Size specials, and the entirety of X of Swords. 

The overall structure of this phase includes motifs and story sequences that recur like melodies, in this issue we get an echo of the opening of X-Men #1 in which Cyclops recalls how Xavier saved him as a child in the form of Cyclops explaining to, uhhhh… MCU head honcho Kevin Feige… why Xavier’s dream continues to motivate him. It highlights the earnestness of the character, and effectively ends his arc as the central protagonist of this particular series. Cyclops is a true believer who finds his purpose in being an X-Man, and in a new society where there was no longer a formal X-Men team, he just kept making new X-Men groups until finally deciding to formally recreate and reinvent the X-Men. There’s an innocence and optimism to what he and Jean Grey are doing now that was notably missing from the start of this phase, and regaining that spirit is the triumph at the end of this arc. 

• The rest of the issue mostly nods cryptically in the direction of plot threads unlikely to feature in Inferno – whatever is going to happen with Mars, Emma Frost seeking some resource from a hidden society in an unnamed city that I’m reasonably certain are being introduced in this issue, and a selection of Sinister Secrets that hint at new developments for Cypher and Sinister, upcoming changes in the membership of the Quiet Council, and “an unknown material of immeasurable worth” in Otherworld. It seems like a lot of plot threads going forward will involve precious resources and competition between various societies, which makes sense as the Reign of X phase is above all else about “expansion,” as Emma puts it in her speech at the Gala. 

• The opening scene with Namor, Magneto, and Xavier is a delight, but of course it is – it’s four pages of Namor dialogue written by Jonathan Hickman, the definitive Namor writer. Namor’s presence is mainly to deflate the two heads of state at their own self-congratulatory party, though if it turns out that the mutants do in fact terraform and colonize Mars his boast about controlling 70% of the planet might end up looking like less of a brutal own on them. But the crux of the scene is Xavier not shrinking from Namor asking him “How goes the empire building?” “Well, I think.” The hubris sets in…but an Inferno awaits. 

• The issue is broken into four scenes by four artists – longtime Hickman collaborator Nick Dragotta very much at home in a Namor scene that plays to his East of West strengths, the X-Men membership reveal sequence by the slick but somewhat sterile Russell Dauterman, some pages by Lucas Werneck that nicely convey the social dynamic of the Gala, and Sara Pichelli shifting her usual style a bit for the last few pages with Emma Frost at her most theatrical. The shifts in style work this issue – different moods for different parts of the party. 

• I don’t love the celebrity cameos, not because they’re celebrity cameos per se, but rather that if you’re doing a big Gala like this it is pretty laughable for it to be mostly unglamorous comedians and older rappers rather than… you know, anyone who you’d actually expect to show up to something along the lines of the Met Gala. You expect Rihanna and Lady Gaga and A$AP Rocky, you get Marc Maron and Patton Oswalt and George R.R. Martin. 

Lost Love

“Lost Love”
X-Men #20
Written by Jonathan Hickman
Art by Francesco Mobili
Color art by Sunny Gho

• It’s been 14 months since X-Men #6, the instant classic issue in which Mystique infiltrated the Orchis Forge and discovered that Dr. Alia Gregor – the Orchis scientist who murdered her back in House of X #4 – was making progress in her creation of Nimrod. This issue finally circles back to that plot, showing us that Dr. Gregor has completed Nimrod and is using the body of this endlessly adaptable mutant-hunting weapon to host an approximation of the consciousness of her husband Erasmus Mendel, who died in the X-Men’s attack on the Orchis Forge in House of X #3. We also catch up with Mystique, who returns to the Orchis Forge on a mission to completely destroy it and everyone there. Things don’t quite work out well for either of them.

Mystique’s infiltration is immediately detected when Nimrod goes online and while her attack is fully botched, Nimrod’s solution to the problem of getting rid of her black hole bomb results in Erasmus Mendel’s consciousness getting wiped out. Dr. Gregor fails in her attempt to bring back her beloved husband, and Xavier and Magneto continue to deny Mystique the resurrection of her wife Destiny as punishment for failing her mission. Of course, they are actually refusing to resurrect her in order to honor the wishes of Moira MacTaggert, who fears the cruel precognitive Destiny more than anyone else.

• Mystique and Dr. Gregor are parallel characters with the same base motivation – they just want to be reunited with their dead spouse. This is a resonant and relatable emotional center for two characters who are otherwise callous monsters. Dr. Gregor builds the tools of genocide, and while she at first seemed to view her work as a matter of pragmatism, the loss of her husband twice over as a result of mutant intervention has surely radicalized her. Mystique, on the other hand, is a character who only operates in self-interest – her attack on the Orchis Forge is motivated entirely by her will to survive and the promise of Destiny’s return. She doesn’t really care about mutants at large beyond wanting to protect herself, and the denial of Destiny’s resurrection is pushing her towards actively working against Krakoa out of spite. 

And who was Destiny? Whereas Mystique is a bitter and unforgiving nihilist out for herself, Destiny was a woman whose ability to glimpse visions of the future made her a paranoid zealot. She was utterly ruthless in her quest to destroy the enemies of mutants, and her righteous crusade – as well as their genuinely loving relationship – gave Mystique’s life shape and a mission. In the time since Destiny’s death she’s mostly regressed to her worst impulses of selfishness and capricious cruelty. Would Mystique be better off with Destiny back in her life? Emotionally, sure, but we know very well that Destiny’s return would almost certainly result in outing Moira MacTaggert and her supposedly doomed mission. It would probably tear Krakoa apart, possibly spark a mutant civil war. Mystique would just end up radicalized by her beloved Destiny once again. 

• Director Devo also returns in this issue, and in his conversation with Omega Sentinel we get a bit more insight into who he is. His previous appearances in X-Men #1 and #6 portrayed him as a fairly easygoing and gentlemanly figure, and while he still conforms to type here there’s also a glimmer of his cruelty as he gloats about realizing the mutants fear Orchis. We already knew that he was motivated in part by his disgust for the arrogance of the mutants – “the bold declarations of inevitability” – but we now see that he’s just as arrogant. And of course he is – the mutants, the humans, the artificial intelligences, the Children of the Vault – they’re all fighting not just for survival, but for dominance. Absolutely no one involved has peaceful coexistence in mind – except maybe the X-Men, who spent years fighting for the original “peaceful coexistence” iteration of Charles Xavier’s dream. 

• This issue is illustrated by guest artist Francesco Mobili, whose art style rhymes somewhat with X-Men #6 artist Matteo Buffagni, though whereas there’s a softness to Buffagni’s line, Mobili’s linework can look slightly stiff. Mobili’s just sort of functional in conversational scenes but he really shines in rendering Nimrod and illustrating the action sequence on the Forge station. I get the sense in looking at his art that he’s still in the process of finding his style – he’s got the raw talent, but he hasn’t quite landed on a distinctive aesthetic yet. 

• The text above the “previously…” recap copy is “A Tilting Within,” a phrase that struck me as odd and distinctive. I looked up and found that it’s from a poem by Marie Howe called “Annunciation.” Here’s the full text:

The poem is from Howe’s collection Poems from the Life of Mary, and “Annunciation” is from the perspective of Mary as she is told by the Archangel Gabriel that she will become the mother of Jesus Christ. It’s pretty easy to see how this matches up with Dr. Gregor’s experience in this issue and the “birth” of Nimrod, though Hickman is going for a brutal irony in making this allusion. 

• Moira MacTaggert makes a silent cameo at the end of the issue, but her activity when Xavier and Magneto arrive at her No-Space to inform her that Nimrod has gone online says quite a bit: She’s reading Destiny’s diaries. The promo pages at the end of the issue suggest this Moira/Destiny story is coming to a head much sooner than I would have expected in the fall with a new Inferno.

• It would seem that given the contextual clues of the Hellfire Gala next month and what seems likely to happen in Planet-Size X-Men, Magneto and Xavier are going ahead with their plan to terraform Mars before Orchis and Nimrod can prevent this part of their masterplan.

Out Of The Vault

“Out of the Vault”
X-Men #19
Written by Jonathan Hickman
Art by Mahmud Asrar
Color art by Sunny Gho

• In all the time I was wondering how Jonathan Hickman would depict thousands of years passing in a single issue the obvious thing – the thing he chose to do – never occurred to me: A timeline similar to the way he mapped out the lives of Moira MacTaggert in House of X. It’s very effective in condensing the story while offering some intriguing details, and in keeping the focus of the issue on Synch’s experience in The Vault and the close emotional bond he forms with X-23 along the way. The balance of emotional weight, hard sci-fi, and narrative density is Hickman at his finest, and X-Men #19 is one of his best issues of this volume so far, probably second only to the Mystique-centric story “Oracle” from X-Men #6. 

• Back at the start of this storyline in X-Men #5 when we’re introduced to Synch, we’re reminded in the text pages that his resurrection has put him in an awkward situation as all of his friends from the Generation X comic have moved on with their lives while he’s re-entering life a few years behind them. On the other side of his mission in the Vault he’s in an even stranger situation, having lived far beyond one life entirely removed from everyone but X-23 and Darwin, and now he’s the only one who remembers their time together. It’s a strange sort of tragedy, but because Synch is a fairly optimistic character, the issue ends on a hopeful rather than maudlin note that directly echoes his cautious optimism going into the Vault with X-23. 

Hickman has clearly made it a mission to spotlight characters from Generation X out of personal affection for them, but what he does for Synch in this story goes beyond merely giving an old character from prime airtime. Synch, a character who has been absent from publication for 20 years, is both refined and redefined in this story – the essential Good Dude Romantic Lead elements of his personality are unchanged, but the circumstances of his experience are now unique and fascinating. From here on out he’s an old man in a young man’s body, a seasoned veteran who is now the mutant nation’s living repository of information about what could be their greatest existential threat. He’s now a narrative mirror of Moira MacTaggert, embarking on his third life and carrying the full knowledge of past lives like precious cargo. (Also, like Moira in Powers of X, he owed the extension of his life to borrowing the powers of a Wolverine.) 

• We learn quite a bit about the Children of the Vault in this issue, and get a sense of how a deliberate technological approach to evolutionary development differs from the natural processes that result in mutantdom. It’s all quite advanced and there’s every indication that the existence of the Children and the Vault is part of some larger plan, but we are totally in the dark on whose plan it is. This issue makes it clear that Orchis is not responsible for the Vault, though they are aware of it and have captured and dissected Children. (Serafina of the Children was rescued along with several mutants from Orchis custody in X-Men #1.) 

It seems probable that Orchis may co-opt the Children at some point in the story, but for now it’s a whole other situation. I suspect the mystery of who created Homo Novissima may be equivalent to the mystery of Rabum Alal that runs through Hickman’s Avengers run and culminated in one of the best reveals in that story. 

• Aside from a brief cameo from Cyclops and Charles Xavier at the end of this issue, this two-part story is notable for being entirely focused on post-Chris Claremont cast and ideas. Synch was introduced in 1994, everything else in the Vault story was created in the 21st century. It’s fun to imagine what an X-Men reader in the ‘80s might make of this story if you could somehow send these two issues back in time. The most recognizable element would be a female version of Wolverine! 

• Synch looks great with a bald head and beard, by the way. Mahmud Asrar did a fabulous job in aging him up along with X-23 and Darwin. Asrar did a typically fantastic job on this issue, it’s too bad this is apparently his last issue of the series for the foreseeable future. 

• We don’t really have conclusive evidence that X-23 and Darwin died in the Vault, so it’s quite possible those versions of the characters are still in the custody of the Children and their powers of survival and infinite adaptation will be integrated into future generations of Children. Bleak! 

Inside The Vault

“Inside the Vault”
X-Men #18
Written by Jonathan Hickman
Art by Mahmud Asrar
Color art by Sunny Gho

 • This is the issue I’ve been waiting for – a return to the Vault plot after many issues of detours into Shi’ar space, alien invasions, and the whole X of Swords affair. I will admit that this issue is a little disappointing to me in the sense that I was expecting it to show how X-23, Synch, and Darwin survived in the Vault for thousands of years of artificial time, but it’s now apparent that’s what we’re going to see next month. The story for this issue reintroduces the premise and lead characters – only fair since it’s been 12 issues since we left off and this story will be collected in separate volumes – and gives some space to reacquainting us with the Children of the Vault, characters who haven’t appeared since their co-creator Mike Carey last wrote them in X-Men Legacy just over a decade ago. 

• If you’re feeling totally lost: The Children of the Vault are a group of characters introduced in Carey and Chris Bachalo’s “Supernovas” arc from 2006. The Vault is an environment with artificially accelerated time, and the Children are the super-evolved humans created as a result of existing in this space. They are not mutants, but they are also not human – they are effectively post-human, like the homo novissima introduced by Jonathan Hickman and R.B. Silva in Powers of X #6. X-23, Synch, and Darwin were dispatched by Charles Xavier and Cyclops to the Vault in X-Men #5 to gather information on the Children and their society, which is congregated in a place called The City within the Vault. 

• We went into this issue knowing very little about The City, and come away from this with some breadcrumbs of information – though The City is vast, it is sparsely populated as a result of a  population control mandate. We see that the Children answer to a central artificial intelligence, and that artificial intelligence engages with them in very scientific terms of analysis and objective goals. We see that the central artificial intelligence is developing the Children to be capable of “occupation/subjugation” of the outside world, and they must be further upgraded in order to compete with the rising mutant population. It is not clear who this artificial intelligence serves, and it’s never been revealed who created the Vault in the first place. 

• The issue ends on a text page in which Charles Xavier authorizes this trio of X-Men to kill, rationalizing that since the denizens of the Vault are not technically human, it does not break the Krakoan law against killing humans. This is reasonable, particularly given the circumstances they’re being thrown into, but it highlights a recurring theme of Xavier being so spooked by what he knows of homo novissima via Moira McTaggert in Powers of X that he seems quite gung ho about full-on genocide of any and all post-humans that emerge regardless of whether they’ve actively threatened mutants. This is understandable, as we the readers are aware that Xavier isn’t wrong when he says post-humans “represent the single greatest existential threat to mutants,” but it’s a strong suggestion that it’s only a matter of time before Xavier and the Quiet Council deliberately perpetrate some horrific large-scale crime, whether it’s wiping out the Vault or something else. 

• Though I admit I prefer R.B. Silva’s depiction of the interior of the Vault from #5 as it suggested a more nebulous sort of non-space, I appreciate the way Mahmud Asrar draws The City as this super-developed nowhere zone sorta like the under-occupied “ghost cities” in China. It’s ominous in a different way, all these empty buildings and infrastructure representing the threat of a population boom that hasn’t yet been authorized. 

As usual, Asrar is very good at rendering physicality and expression. He’s particularly good at drawing X-23 in Wolverine mode – there’s a particularly well-executed sequence in which she leaps down to eviscerate Serafina, and another panel I like a lot later on in which she’s leaning forward with her arms down in a very animalistic stance. Like a lot of artists he’s a little awkward in translating Chris Bachalo’s designs into his own style, but I think he does pretty well with Fuego, the Child with the flaming skull head. 

• The next issue, in which these X-Men escape the Vault, can’t come quickly enough. I’ve been excited about seeing how Hickman depicts thousands of years of elapsed artificial time for quite a while now. 

Empty Nest

“Empty Nest”
X-Men #17
Written by Jonathan Hickman
Penciled by Brett Booth
Inked by Adelso Corono
Color art by Sunny Gho

• Let’s start with the art, since that’s going to be the focus of most anyone’s response to this issue. The guest artist on this issue is Brett Booth, who is well-documented as being a major creep who has threatened online critics. In an ideal world, he simply would not be drawing X-Men comics in 2021– there’s no shortage of great artists who are not hugely problematic people who could be working with Jonathan Hickman on the flagship book. I really hope this will be his only contribution to this title.

Booth’s art on this issue isn’t terrible, though it’s a major stylistic shift away from the aesthetics of this era. His art is very ‘90s, merging elements of Jim Lee, Image-era Marc Silvestri, Whilce Portacio, and Michael Turner into a synthesis that isn’t quite a personal style so much as it’s a very good aggregate approximation of what cool comics art would’ve been like about 20-30 years ago. This is a style very associated with X-Men, but it’s been a long time since X-Men comics have actually looked like this. It’s an aesthetic that was once aligned with a stylistic revolution but now only comes off as retro, especially since Booth is coming on after recent issues featuring the more contemporary (and technically far more accomplished) styles of Phil Noto, Pepe Larraz, and Mahmud Asrar. 

Brett Booth’s style, however artistically inbred, is well suited to this particular issue, which calls for a lot of action scenes full of aliens to offset the more dry elements of Hickman’s plot. Booth’s presence here seems to be a deliberate callback to Uncanny X-Men #275-277, in which Jim Lee drew Chris Claremont’s final foray into Shi’ar space before getting pushed off the book a few months later. Booth’s draftsmanship is definitely not on par with that of Lee, but he can provide a similar vibe and spark some nostalgia for that era. He tosses in a little extra nostalgia value in drawing Cyclops and Jean Grey in their Walter Simonson-designed X-Factor costumes from the late ‘80s, making him one of the few to run with Hickman’s invitation for artists to draw the characters in whatever costumes they like from the past. 

I’m damning Booth with faint praise here – it’s not as bad as it could be, he’s not as horribly miscast as he could have been, he’s hitting nostalgia buttons for readers of a certain age – but it’s only because I’m reviewing the actual pages here. I don’t think a person who has behaved as he has should be getting this level of professional work, and I think Marvel editorial should seriously rethink their priorities and policies with creators. 

• This is one of those Hickman issues where he’s clearly setting plot in motion and doing his best to make it fun and enjoyable, even if it’s pretty obviously the story equivalent of eating vegetables so you can get your dessert later on. In plot terms, the main thing is that Storm is now in the position of collecting a major favor from the empress of the Shi’ar, which is clearly to do with the promised major Storm developments to come later this year. (This month’s issue of Marauders, which in retrospect takes place after this story, suggests that Storm is ready to move on to…something.) 

On a thematic level I believe we’re meant to take the central plot, in which the X-Men squash a rebellion against the Shi’ar Empire led by a cleric from a vassal world called Stygia, as a harbinger of things to come as Krakoa appears to be moving towards expansion in the Reign of X phase. The tension in this issue is that the Stygians have a valid complaint against the empire in the wake of an intergalactic economic crash, and the X-Men’s actions in rescuing Empress Xandra and preserving the Shi’ar status quo are not justified as anything besides maintaining a crucial alliance with this space empire. I presume Hickman intends for us to feel ambivalent about this. Given everything else he’s ever written, I can’t imagine he’s setting up Krakoan expansionism to be a fully positive thing.

• The last two pages elaborate on the X-Men election concept that was announced in the previous issue, and it looks like Hickman is indeed carrying over the “audience participates in the fictional election” tradition from the Legion of Super Heroes by letting the readers get to vote in one of ten characters – Banshee, Forge, Polaris, Boom Boom, Tempo, Cannonball, Sunspot, Strong Guy, Marrow, or Armor – in an online poll. It’s a cool idea, and I would say that Hickman’s use of Cannonball and Sunspot in this issue and obvious delight in writing both of them puts a thumb on the scale in favor of those two. Aside from them, I think Polaris and Armor have pretty good chances here. 

The in-story election makes it very difficult to figure out who might get voted in as X-Men. Who is popular on Krakoa? Who would people want to be their X-Men? I figure a substantial chunk of the roster will be classic members that the population will trust to protect them – Wolverine, for sure, and probably people like Colossus and Rogue. (This logic would apply to Storm and Nightcrawler if they were not members of the Quiet Council.) But aside from that, who might be trusted and beloved by the Krakoan nation, and also be someone Hickman would want to write regularly? I figure Monet would be a given, probably Magik too. I can imagine the people voting in The Gorgon based on his heroic actions in X of Swords, but not being aware that his flawed resurrection has brought him back as essentially a new person. Maybe the Arraki vote in Bei the Blood Moon?  Maybe the ex-villain population of Krakoa would want to get someone like Avalanche or Blob in there?

Sworded Out

“Sworded Out”
X-Men #16
Written by Jonathan Hickman
Art by Phil Noto

• The end of this issue introduces a new structural conceit for the X-Men – Cyclops and Jean Grey will be the leaders, and the rest of the members will be voted in by the citizens of Krakoa. The concept is basically an inversion of a tradition from the Legion of Super Heroes – rather than the leaders be voted in, it’s the actual membership of the team. It looks like we won’t see how this plays out for a little while as the new team will be revealed at the Hellfire Gala, but it does seem like an idea that is going to backfire on Cyclops and Jean in some way. But in any case, it’s very pointedly different from the complete lack of democracy that went into the creation of the Quiet Council, and everyone involved is going into this new iteration of the X-Men with some understanding that the Council and the X-Men will come into conflict at some point. 

• This issue also establishes the new status quo of Arakko, which is now on Earth as a result of Apocalypse’s bargain with Saturnyne at the end of X of Swords. Arakko – as a sentient body of land, and as a people – refuses to merge with Krakoa. Isca the Unbeaten is revealed to be one of the leaders of Arakko, and though she sits as part of a governing body, her power to never lose essentially makes her the de facto ruler of the nation as she always gets her way. She meets with Xavier and Magneto and peacefully but bluntly explains that the people of Arakko are hardened by centuries of war and will not be able to shake that off any time soon. 

Phil Noto’s art on this very talky scene is carried in large part by his very thoughtful coloring in which Xavier and Magneto wear their black and white clothing on a cool green background while Isca is surrounded by red and brown foliage that matches the earth tones of her armor. Noto also does a good job of conveying how gentle and effete Xavier is, framing him as small and distant in the frame as he clutches a Krakoan flower. I think this choice may have had a lot to do with how much dialogue he has in those panels, but it’s very effective in contrast with the tight shots of Isca that make her appear strong, confident, and unflappable. 

• The most important bit of news on the Arakko front is buried somewhat in the issue, as Cypher reminds the Quiet Council that there’s roughly twenty times as many Arakki mutants as there are Krakoan mutants. The immediate implication of this is that this would be quite bad for Krakoa should the two nations come into conflict, but the bigger problem is more obviously what is going to happen once the rest of the Earth finds out that a nation of several million battle-hardened mutants from a hell world now reside on the planet with them. I suspect that once this news gets to Orchis it will lead to the activation of Nimrod and the deployment of the machines being built in Sentinel City on Mercury, and this will go very, very badly for the mutants of Arakko. I suspect that one way or another only a massive tragedy on Arakko and the heroic intervention of the X-Men will unite the Krakoans and Arakki. 

• I do hope we get to see some Arakki mutants venture out into Earth and decide they like it a lot better than the nightmare they were trapped in. Seems reasonable, right? Surely some nature will beat out nurture here. 

Destruction

“X of Swords: Chapter 20”
X-Men #15
Written by Jonathan Hickman
Art by Mahmud Asrar
Color art by Sunny Gho

“X of Swords: Chapter 21”
Excalibur #15
Written by Tini Howard
Art by Mahmud Asrar and Stefano Caselli
Color art by Sunny Gho and Rachelle Rosenberg

“X of Swords: Chapter 22”
X of Swords: Destruction
Written by Jonathan Hickman and Tini Howard
Art by Pepe Larraz
Color art by Marte Gracia

• And so it ends! For me this hit just the right balance of hitting the beats I expected based on foreshadowing and structure while throwing enough curveballs to keep the plot suspenseful and interesting. 

• The most surprising part of the finale is the simple fact that Apocalypse made it out of the story alive! It felt a lot like this storyline was meant to end tragically for him, but instead he comes out of this story as both the character who ends the conflict and liberates the mutants of Arakko, but also gets a happy ending in reuniting with his wife and children in Amenth. He got everything he wanted, and he earned it by letting go of his ego. It’s amazing to think that in a little over a year Jonathan Hickman and Tini Howard completely transformed Apocalypse from megalomaniacal arch villain with an incoherent philosophy into a sympathetic protagonist with a poignant backstory that explains a lot of what he’s done in the past but mostly points to interesting new directions for the character, whether he’s played as a hero or antagonist. This is a transformation on par with Chris Claremont fleshing out and adding depth and pathos to Magneto through the 1980s. 

• And as Apocalypse gets everything he set out to accomplish, Opal Luna Saturnyne maneuvers everything in place to achieve victory over Amenth but quite definitively is denied the one thing she desires – Brian Braddock as both Captain Britain and her lover. Her role in this story is interesting, never quite conforming to protagonist or antagonist, and ending with an acknowledgment of her broken heart. 

• X-Men #15 reestablishes the formal existence of the X-Men, which is a funny thing to say about the fifteenth issue of a comic book series called X-Men. There was some implication that anyone who was in action under Cyclops’ command was by default the X-Men, but the text pages in this issue show that the team was being phased out by the Krakoan government in favor of giving military power to the captains and X-Force (“the FORCE initiative”) for defense needs. But here we have Cyclops and Jean Grey deciding that there needs to be X-Men to act heroically without the hindrance of the Quiet Council’s politics. Jean is forced to step down from her seat on the council, which slightly disappoints her though she seems far more excited about creating a new sort of X-Men. It seems that the “anybody who needs to be an X-Man is an X-Man” approach will continue in a more formalized way, but likely with a more defined core group starring in Hickman’s flagship.

It feels more exciting for this development to happen as a response to a major crisis, and for it to come at a cost for Jean Grey. In retrospect the first year of Hickman stories was mostly setting narratives in motion and establishing the status quos of Krakoa, but now that we’ve got that all firmly in place the series can actually move forward with the most obvious element back in the mix – a team of superheroes. And Hickman is not hedging on the superhero thing, Cyclops and Jean Grey are presented as truly brave and idealistic people with pure motives, and the X-Men is a force for unambiguous good as a counter to the more pragmatic and morally dubious actions of the Quiet Council. This very earnest and retro portrayal of heroism feels as refreshing as any of Hickman’s more radical premises. 

• Jean Grey’s forced exit from the Quiet Council and Apocalypse going off to Amenth marks the first shift in the Krakoan government, and I’m curious to see what the council does to replace them. I think it’s quite possible they don’t replace Apocalypse on the Autumn seats, given that he has not given up his position and he’s the man who reunited Krakoa and Arakko and liberated the Arakkii from Amenth. It’s a given that Jean will be replaced, presumably by another traditional X-Men member, as that was more or less the point of the Summer seats. Archangel seems to be a likely candidate, or maybe Banshee? Iceman doesn’t feel right, Beast is the head of the mutant CIA, Wolverine wouldn’t want it, and most everyone else is busy. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to get someone like Mirage in the mix, to represent the mutants of the Sextant. 

• And what of Betsy Braddock? The ending establishes that she is the one true Captain Britain henceforth and that there is a new Captain Britain Corps of infinite versions of Betsy throughout the multiverse, much to the chagrin of Saturnyne. The text page at the end of X of Swords: Destruction indicates that our Betsy – Betsy Prime – is “missing,” which is quite an improvement over her presumed death in Excalibur #14. But we don’t see this, as this is setting up the next arc of Excalibur. That book should be quite interesting going forward, between the contentious relationship between Betsy and Saturnyne, and how much this story fleshed out the realms of Otherworld. I’m quite looking forward to seeing more of Sevalith and The Crooked Market in particular. And hey, what about Mercator?

• Isca the Unbeaten did turn to join the X-Men once the tide is turned by Apocalypse claiming the mantle of Annihilation, but I feel like it’s a fumbled beat. She doesn’t actually DO anything in this moment, she is simply shown feeling the compulsion to switch sides. It’s one of the few beats in Destruction that feels sort of inert. But it will be interesting to see what becomes of Isca – she is remaining on Arakko, and hence will be living on Earth. I imagine we’ll be seeing a lot of the Arakkii’s acclimation into Krakoan society through her eyes. It’s bound to be a very complicated process. Millions of Arakkii have been liberated from the hellish dominion of Amenth, but will they actually interpret this as such? It looks like they might just be going from being the vassal state of Amenth to the vassal state of Krakoa.

• The merging of Krakoa and Arakko represents the next stage of expansion for mutant society, loosely following the stages of societal types laid out in Powers of X. It seems very likely that the overall Hickman story follows Krakoa as it moves up through these ranks, and the next step is probably expanding into the cosmos in alliance with the Shi’ar. The “next” teaser at the end of Destruction certainly points in this expansionist/imperialist direction: Reign of X. 

• Pepe “The God” Larraz delivers some truly astonishing pages in Destruction, this time shifting gears from the more atmospheric world building of the previous two Larraz issues to focus more on busy fight scenes in which he’s require to draw a staggering number of characters like a modern George Perez. His storytelling is excellent here, nailing all the big dramatic beats with great claritiy and potent emotion. His work on this storyline cements his position as the best and most exciting currently working for Marvel Comics, though nearly all the runners up – Mahmud Asrar, R.B. Silva, Rod Reis, Phil Noto, Joshua Cassara – also provided art for the story, and Carmen Carnero and Stefano Caselli stepped up in a major way for this too. 

Truth

“X of Swords: Chapter 12”
X-Men #14
Written by Jonathan Hickman
Art by Leinil Francis Yu with Mahmud Asrar
Color art by Sunny Gho

“X of Swords: Chapter 13”
Marauders #14
Written by Gerry Duggan and Benjamin Percy
Art by Stefano Caselli
Color art by Edgar Delgado

• I was wondering how Mahmud Asrar was handling the deadline crunch of seemingly getting put on a third of last week’s Stasis special while being assigned to draw four other issues in the crossover, but now we know the answer: He only drew the framing sequences of this issue, and the majority of the issue is made up of repurposed Leinil Francis Yu pages from X-Men #12. Jonathan Hickman has made use of the old “reuse the art” trick before, but this is a particularly bold move, reframing the history of the mutants of Arakko as told to Apocalypse by Summoner from the perspective of Genesis. Whereas Summoner was trying to mislead and trap Apocalypse, Genesis is telling him the hard truth of things. It’s like hearing the same song played in a different, far more melancholy key. 

This creative decision is as artful as it probably was quite pragmatic, though it does make you wonder what the compensation deal was like for Yu in this situation.

• It’s interesting to see where Summoner and Genesis’ accounts differ and converge, with some bits of their stories perfectly aligning on particular panels. The most blatant deviations come towards the end of the story, with Genesis revealing that the demons of Amenth had bred captured mutants to create a hybrid warrior race and the demon conjuring Summoners, and that Genesis indeed killed the prior host of Annihilation and was obligated to wear the Golden Helm of Amenth and command its armies. And though she put this fate off for many years, she eventually gave in and all of Arakko succumbed to Amenth. This led to the conquest of Dryador, and onward to the next goal of taking Krakoa. The final text page of this issue is heartbreaking, spelling out the truth of Arakko: The mutants there are “prisoners in their own land,” oppressed by the Amenthi hybrids, the Summoners, and the Golden Helm. What was previously implied is now very clear – Arakko must be liberated from Amenth and the mutants loyal to Amenth. 

• Isca the Unbeaten plays an interesting role in this story – her power to never lose compels her to side with inevitable victors, which directly led to her sister Genesis being corrupted by Annihilation and Arakko falling to Amenth. She’s a narrative echo of Cylobel from Powers of X, who was bred by Nimrod to betray her fellow mutants, but the notion of people who are genetically compelled to turn against their own is an odd and potentially contentious theme for Hickman’s macro story. However, just as Cylobel turns against Nimrod, it seems very likely that Isca will side with Krakoa by the end of this story. But whereas this is a redemptive act for Cylobel, wouldn’t this just be another convenient turn of events for Isca? And besides, how exactly is surrendering one’s loyalties not a form of being beaten? 

• The “vile schools” of mutant-Amenthi hybrid warriors is another echo of a plot point from Powers of X – the breeding of chimera as a warrior class of mutants by Mister Sinister. And what’s going to be the comic in this storyline to really engage with the vile schools? Hellions, the series featuring Mister Sinister as the lead.

• There’s such a sad poetry in Apocalypse having to face this brutal survivalist ethos he’s been living with for centuries from the perspective of now having Krakoa, and seeing in Krakoa a real possibility of true mutant culture and prosperity that is entirely alien to these Arakki people who can only see a zero sum game of survival or destruction. Genesis sees only softness and weakness in Apocalypse and Krakoa, but she has lost all context for true civilization. The Arakki fight merely to conquer and survive in their miserable lives, but the people of Krakoa have something to truly treasure and protect.  Genesis is blind to the power of that motivation. 

• Marauders #14 is a welcome tonal shift from X-Men #14, reorienting the story back to the perspective of the X-Men swordbearers as they meet their counterparts from Arakko for the first time at a banquet hosted by Saturnyne. Much of the story focuses in on Storm, who carries herself with absolute confidence as she rebuffs the romantic advances of Death, and on Wolverine, who is openly contemptuous of Brian Braddock for not taking advantage of Saturnyne’s love for him to prevent the tournament. There’s also a fantastic little scene in which the Krakoan captains Magik and Gorgon look for weaknesses in their opponents and test Isca, who manages to spook even them. 

• Stefano Caselli noticeably steps up his game for this issue, and really outdoes himself in drawing the surreal banquet hall of the Starlight Citadel. He does some stellar work with body language and facial expressions through the issue, and is particularly impressive in how he conveys so many distinct personalities and interpersonal dynamics in the party scenes. He was very well cast for this sequence of the story. 

• Since starting this site I’ve paid a lot more attention to X-Men comics fandom, and doing that can be like stepping into a weird alternate universe in which everyone dislikes Wolverine and finds him boring. I can’t relate. But this issue, as with most Wolverine comics written by Benjamin Percy, makes a great case for why he’s such a widely beloved character. His brutish no-bullshit attitude is a necessary contrast with the pomp and circumstance of Saturnyne’s banquet and the absurd formality of her contest. When he stabs her on the last page it is a genuinely cathartic moment, even though it’s quite clear there’s no way he’s successful in this tactic. 

History

“X of Swords: Chapter 9” 
Excalibur #13
Written by Tini Howard
Art by R.B. Silva
Color art by Nolan Woodard

“X of Swords: Chapter 10”
X-Men #13
Written by Jonathan Hickman
Art by Mahmud Asrar
Color art by Sunny Gho

• This issue of Excalibur features guest art by R.B. Silva, who turns in his last X-Men interior pages for the foreseeable future as he moves on to become the regular artist on Fantastic Four. His work here is typically excellent and brings the grandeur, atmosphere, melodrama, and romanticism that’s in Tini Howard’s stories but missing from usual artist Marcus To’s pages. Howard’s plot moves along the macro story of X of Swords but plays out like a self-contained fairytale in which Saturnyne pits Betsy and Brian Braddock against one another in a ploy to strip Betsy of the mantle of Captain Britain and return it to her beloved Brian, but it all backfires on her in the end. By the end of the issue Betsy is affirmed as the one true Captain Britain and wields Saturnyne’s Starlight Sword, and Brian becomes Captain Avalon, retains his Sword of Might, and is given a new role as the protector of his brother Jamie’s realm in Otherworld. It’s a happy ending, at least for now. Howard’s narration at the end doesn’t bode well for the Braddocks. 

• X-Men #13 is more of a fable. The story is mainly focused on a flashback to Apocalypse’s life on Okkara that fills us in on what his wife Genesis was like, and shows us what actually happened as she and their children took off with Arrako into Amenth. The story we’ve seen before, which presented Apocalypse as a more decisive and heroic figure, is inverted – he was left behind by Genesis, who deemed him not strong enough to join them. His mission over all these years was given to him, to make the world strong enough to stand against the hordes of Amenth. Suddenly everything about Apocalypse makes sense, and the power-hungry despot is now a tragic romantic figure. 

• This issue establishes that the mask of Annihilation effectively is Annihilation – or, more accurately, the Golden Helm of Amenth. The wearer of the helm controls the hordes of Amenth, but the helm controls the wearer, which must be fit enough to be worthy of it. Apocalypse must face the avatar of his own cruel survival-of-the-fittest ethos, and likely rescue his beloved wife from its influence. It’s hard to imagine he’ll make it through this; it would feel like a cheat for this to not end in tragedy for the newly sympathetic archvillain. 

• Mahmud Asrar shifts his art style a bit for this issue – his linework is a bit thicker with chunkier blacks and more negative space, occasionally somewhat resembling the style of Mike Mignola. This is very effective in his depiction of the Golden Helm of Amenth and his evocative renderings of Okkara and war with the creatures of the dark world. Asrar is particularly good at conveying Apocalypse’s deep, centuries-old sorrow. His enormous bulk, once so intimidating, now looks like a manifestation of his overcompensation, and of the incredible weight of the loneliness and grief he carries with him. The first panel of the penultimate page, in which we see him looking down at his reflection in a pool of water before gathering the parts of his sword The Scarab, is a moment where we see him in a fully honest moment. There’s no one to observe him, no audience for his shows of strength, and so you see him without the clarity of purpose that was driving him for ages. In that panel he’s a sad old man who has been betrayed by his lost children, and must face the possibility that he’s wasted his long life. 

Amenth

“Amenth”
X-Men #12
Written by Jonathan Hickman
Art by Leinil Francis Yu
Color art by Sunny Gho

“Amenth” is a tremendously ambitious issue focused almost exclusively on world-building in advance of the X of Swords epic beginning next week. It’s quite a lot to take in. In 14 pages we’re presented with Summoner’s abridged history of centuries of a mutant society stranded in the fallen world of Amenth after the “Twilight Sword” of “the enemy” split Okkara into Krakoa and Arrako. We learn that the mutants of Arrako are led by Genesis, the wife of Apocalypse. Genesis was betrayed by a fellow mutant and killed by Annihilation, the god of Amenth. As we enter X of Swords, Apocalypse is called on to liberate the surviving mutants of Arrako from the siege of Annihilation and the hordes of Amenth. We’re left with some question of Apocalypse’s motives at the time of Okkara’s split, and his motives now. 

It’s all very good set up for the next big story, and establishes the most radical changes to X-Men mythology since House of X/Powers of X. The notion of an entire separate lost mutant society with centuries of history is wild, as is the revelation that Apocalypse is not the first mutant but rather the first of the second generation of mutantdom. There’s still quite a bit of story ahead in X of Swords, but it seems to me that the likely result of that story is the first level up in mutant society in terms of the galactic scale presented in Powers of X #2. It’s the next step in the evolution of Krakoa as a society towards greater scale as the macro story moves along – the alliance with the Shi’ar being an eventual logical step, and I suspect we’ll eventually see Krakoa ascend to some stage of “worldmind.” And then, maybe in the end…the Phalanx. 

This is Leinil Francis Yu’s final issue as the regular artist on this series and his work in conveying the grand scale of this plot is outstanding. Hickman’s plot is extremely demanding, with pages in which every other panel represents major historical moments on a large scale, and Yu delivers without making it all feel too heavy and overwhelming. I particularly like the way he drew the sequence with Genesis entering palace of Annihilation – it feels both Biblical and alien, and full of small details that suggest yet more history to be told. Yu has been a mainstay of Marvel Comics – and of X-Men projects – for over 20 years, and his work on this past year of X-Men with Hickman has been a career pinnacle for him. They’ve worked together on Avengers in the past, and in that series he was also pushed to draw sci-fi on a grand scale. It’s another example of Hickman seeing what an artist is truly capable of and pushing them to the next level. 

Onwards to X of Swords! 

Into The Storm

“Into the Storm” / “The World” / “Disintegration” 
Giant Size X-Men: Jean Grey & Emma Frost, Giant Size X-Men: Fantomex, and Giant Size X-Men: Storm
Written by Jonathan Hickman with Russell Dauterman (Jean/Emma)
Art by Russell Dauterman (Jean/Emma, Storm) and Rod Reis (Fantomex)
Color art by Matthew Wilson (Jean/Emma, Storm) 

The Giant Size X-Men specials were initially sold as stand-alone one-shots, but as it turns out three of the five issues are, in fact, a coherent story arc that appears to advance the slow-burning Children of the Vault subplot. These three issues amount to 90 pages of story, but the plot isn’t particularly dense: Storm gets sick following getting zapped in her attack on the Vault in X-Men #5, Jean Grey and Emma Frost discover that she’s got a “machine virus” and will die within a month, Monet figures out that she can be saved in The World, and Fantomex brings Storm, Monet, and Cypher to The World to eventually extract the virus from Storm’s body. 

The first issue of this arc is essentially a tribute/cover version of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s famous “quiet issue” of New X-Men in which Jean and Emma perform a similar “psychic rescue” with Charles Xavier, and as such it’s more of a showcase for Russell Dauterman’s considerable skills as an artist. The Fantomex issue is also a blatant Grant Morrison tribute, with several scenes involving Fantomex quoted directly from New X-Men issues. This is all very nice and well-executed, but feels a little odd in the context of Jonathan Hickman’s larger project on the X-Men, which before this point had excised the “hey, remember this?” nostalgic references that had piled up quite a bit in recent years and fully metastasized in Mark Guggenheim’s vile X-Men Gold run. And true, those nostalgic nods were almost always to Chris Claremont comics, but the spirit is still the same. Also, the “hey, I’ve already read this” feeling makes these issues seem more slight than they actually are. 

The Fantomex issue illustrated by Rod Reis is quite good. The plot depicts scenes from Fantomex’s life in which he brings different groups of people into The World, the artificial environment with accelerated time where he was created and raised. There’s an implication of unreliable narrative, that there’s only so much we should believe about what we’re seeing from the perspective of a man who is a living lie from a fake world – a “living contrivance, a product… a hall of mirrors with no end” as Psylocke puts it in Rick Remender’s Uncanny X-Force. But as much as the truth of it all is ambiguous, we see how Fantomex’s awareness of this weighs on his actual soul. 

The big reveal of this issue is that Fantomex and Ultimaton – both products of A.I.M. and Weapon Plus’ project of developing mutant-hunting super soldiers in The World – are essentially identical twins raised with as much variance as possible. Fantomex was discarded as a baby, and the other gradually evolved into the Ultimaton we see in Morrison and Chris Bachalo’s “Assault On Weapon Plus” story. Each time Fantomex returns to The World he encounters Ultimaton at different stages of his development, always asking him if he would like to leave with him. Ultimaton always declines, and as time goes on sees Fantomex as an abstraction – “some primal direction of man, some primal direction of me.” The issue leaves off with Fantomex bringing Storm, Monet, and Cypher to The World, and the plot thread concludes in the Storm issue with Fantomex deciding to remain in The World with his ersatz brother. To be continued, of course, but there’s a nice emotional charge to this beat – Fantomex embracing the only sort of family he has, and giving up something of himself to help or guide this warped reflection of himself. 

The Storm issue covers interesting ground. It’s a story about Storm fighting for her life, though in the first few pages Emma Frost points out how “overly dramatic” this is given that they have the means to immediately resurrect her. The point of the story is that Storm is a person who would fight for survival regardless – she refuses to surrender to anything, she will always try to find a way to overcome obstacles. Storm is also quite dramatic. It’s part of her charm. 

The mechanics of the plot of this issue are driven largely by Monet and Cypher, who are clearly two of Hickman’s favorite characters. The story serves as a reminder that part of Monet’s impressive set of powers is advanced intelligence, and her genius is ultimately what saves Storm. Monet largely serves a plot function here, but her presence in this story, as well as in House of X and Empyre: X-Men amount to Hickman making a case for her as an essential X-Men heavy hitter from here on out after years of the character being sidelined as a result of relative obscurity. 

Cypher is more of an observer and interpreter in the plot, just as he was in the Nightcrawler special. At the end of the issue we see the machine virus entirely removed from Storm’s body and held in a containment field to prevent it from rapidly evolving in the artificially accelerated time of The World. In the epilogue we see that Cypher recognizes that the machine virus is sentient and conscious. This is left as a ticking time bomb, as the possibility of an artificial intelligence developed in the artificial time of The Vault attaining “evolutionary critical mass” in the slightly different artificial time of The World can become an existential threat to mutants down the line. 

We’ll be returning to this machine virus thing at some point, but it’s hard to say which ongoing plot this beat connects to – is this going to remain a part of the Vault thread? Or maybe, since there’s a direct tie from A.I.M. to Orchis, this is part of how their Sentinels evolve to a Nimrod state? It could just as well be part of the Phalanx subplot. Just as with the mysterious tower built for Emma Frost in the Magneto special, it feels like it could be quite a while before we find out the actual significance of this issue to the macro plot. 

These specials were designed as showcases for artists, and as can be expected, these issues give a lot of room for Russell Dauterman and Rod Reis to flex. They’re both quite good but I prefer the loose, gestural qualities of Reis’ art to the extremely tight and slick lines of Dauterman. The latter’s work is beautiful and dynamic but a bit too stiff at times, and while he can draw very nuanced facial expressions, there are many panels where the faces seem oddly blank and vacant. Dauterman is called on to draw abstract environments in both of his issues, and while they work well on his terms, they seem rather cold and static compared to Reis’ more surreal and dreamlike drawings within The World. It’s an intriguing contrast of styles, with Reis more connected to cartooning while Dauterman’s aesthetics are more rooted in animation. 

One War, One Mutant

“One War, One Mutant”
X-Men #11
Written by Jonathan Hickman
Art by Leinil Francis Yu
Color art by Sunny Gho

This issue is another tie-in with Empyre, after the previous issue and the Empyre X-Men miniseries which concluded last week. It’s interesting to read these in the context of Al Ewing and Dan Slott’s main Empyre miniseries, which has its merits but has struggled to convey narrative momentum or deliver any memorable setpieces. This issue – 22 pages, only 16 of which are directly related to the Empyre plot – presents all the beats of a big event story in concentrated form without feeling rush or as if it’s missing any connective tissue. On top of being a far more entertaining and exciting story, it shows the X-Men easily triumphing over the invading Cotati aliens through their collective power and creativity, which in context of the broader Empyre story make the event’s primary protagonists the Avengers and Fantastic Four look like fumbling chumps. 

The Cotati/Empyre stuff is really just a MacGuffin in this issue. The real story is in pushing along simmering plot points from X-Men #1 and #7 – the emerging narrative among Krakoans that Magneto is the nation’s greatest hero, and Exodus making that a major talking point as he indoctrinates the children of Krakoa. The Exodus fireside chat scenes in #7 and #11 have a creepy ambiguity to them. For one thing, it’s strange for one of the heads of the Krakoan state to be hanging out with little kids in the woods at night. But more than that, you see how Hickman has Exodus saying a lot of things fully in line with the Krakoan triumphalism of the Dawn of X period, but always pushing a few steps further towards a radical mutant supremacist dogma. I like that Hickman is presenting this as a slow and insidious shift, starting in the shared joy of the birth of the Krakoan nation but gradually moving towards inevitable ideological conclusions. 

Exodus has always been portrayed as a zealot, and as someone in thrall of Magneto as a symbolic figure. The concept of the character has always been strong, but the greater Krakoa story is the first time Exodus has been put in the position to fully develop and reach full narrative potential. Just as other characters in the Quiet Council represent threats from within Krakoan society – the sociopathic Machiavellian scheming of Mister Sinister, the ticking time bomb of Mystique’s justified resentments, the corosive ruthless capitalism of Sebastian Shaw, the egotism of Magneto, the messianic hubris of Xavier, the hidden agendas of Apocalypse – Exodus is the personification of radical nationalism. 

Exodus exerts his power through influence, making a point of passing his views to the children, and in mythologizing Magneto in a way that will inevitably bring out the worst of his vanity. Magneto is a hero in this story; we see him at his best as he protects his people in a show of incredible power in tandem. But it’s been pretty clear from House of X #1 that we’re in for a long, slow, and heartbreaking story in which Magneto’s arrogance eventually becomes a big problem. Pumping him up as a great leader and supreme champion seems like a sure path to him making a terrible decision down the line with the absolute conviction that he’s doing something heroic. I have a feeling Hickman’s long game with Magneto is to present him as this heroic figure for a long time before this heel turn happens, so when it comes it’s totally gutting. 

Some notes: 

• The issue begins with a scene in which some semi-obscure younger mutants from the 2000s meet Summoner, the character from Arrako we met in #2. This is the first we get a sense of his personality – friendly and erudite, but raised in a culture obsessed with strength – and it’s mostly a tease of what’s coming in X of Swords. The best part of this scene is quite subtle, as silhouettes of characters we know to be villains from Arrako in X of Swords promo art appear in the shadowy backgrounds of the panels. The final line of the scene says it best: “Well…that’s ominous.” 

• Hickman’s issues have been light on text pages recently but we get a good set here in the form of an official report from Cyclops to the Quiet Council relaying minutes from a meeting of Krakoa’s military captains. As with a lot of the best text pages, this gets across a lot of information that would have been dull as expository dialogue. It also feeds directly into the issue’s plot, as Cyclops discusses the possibilities of mutant powers combining in tactically useful ways, which is displayed in the story as Magneto, Iceman, and Magma work together in the battle with the Cotati. This is a natural progression of Hickman’s concept of how The Five collaborate to resurrect mutants, but it’s also elaborating on a concept going back to the early days of Chris Claremont – the “fastball special.” 

• I can’t help but notice that Exodus’ star student, the white kid with a pink mohawk and glasses, looks a lot like Quentin Quire. Which is not to say there’s an in-story connection between the two, but that Quire originates as a student radical in Grant Morrison’s New X-Men. Maybe we’ll be seeing him as a deliberate parallel with Quentin as this story progresses. 

Un-Ring

“Alien Plants Vs. Mutant Zombies,” “Growing Strong,” “Staff Infection,” “Un-ring” 
Empyre X-Men #1-4
Written by Jonathan Hickman with Tini Howard, Gerry Duggan, Benjamin Percy, Leah Williams, Ed Brisson, Vita Ayala, and Zeb Wells
Art by Matteo Buffagni, Lucas Wernick, Andrea Broccardo, and Jorge Molina
Color art by Nolan Woodard with Rachelle Rosenberg

Empyre X-Men is two things – a loose tie-in with a Fantastic Four/Avengers event and a formal experiment in publishing a mini-series as an “exquisite corpse” exercise in which each of the current X-book writers get to write a segment of the story – but is more importantly third thing, which is Jonathan Hickman setting his Scarlet Witch story in motion after teasing it in both House of X and X-Men #7.  The jam elements of this miniseries are fun, especially the aspect of it that’s basically watching each writer do their best to introduce a wild plot beat before handing it off, but it’s ultimately all a bunch of enjoyable filler between the Hickman portions at the beginning and end of the series. 

Since so much of what Hickman has been doing at this stage of things has been moving characters and plot points into place for bigger things later on, it’s encouraged a way of looking at the stories in terms of what’s been established or advanced. In this case, there’s some small but notable beats – we finally get to see what Angel and Monet have been up to since House of X since they don’t appear in any of the spinoff series, and we see Beast steal some science stuff from Hordeculture, the evil botanists/Golden Girls pastiche characters from X-Men #3. 

Angel – who is apparently free of his menacing Archangel persona for the moment – is heading up some business operations for Xavier with the assistance of Monet, and his main plot beats amount to him being like “put me in the game, coach” to Xavier and then just bumbling around as a beautiful himbo who is objectified by most of the women in the story for the remainder of the issues. It’s all very cute and a nice change of pace from the usual angst-ridden Angel/Archangel stories, but it’s still not giving this fairly central X-Men character much to do. When notable characters aren’t in any spin-offs I assume they’re part of Hickman’s larger plan – certainly the case for Monet and Nightcrawler – but with Angel I just wonder if the writers don’t have any particular ideas of what to do with him that isn’t just going back over the Archangel/Apocalypse beats yet again.

The Scarlet Witch plot goes like this: Wanda Maximoff, overcome with the guilt of stripping millions of mutants of their powers in House of M, has tried to make up for this by attempting to resurrect the 16 million mutants killed in the Genosha genocide from Grant Morrison’s New X-Men. She screws up the magic and brings them all back as zombies, and the middle section of the story is a melee with the mutant zombies, the Cotati aliens from the Empyre story, Hordeculture, and demons from Limbo. She goes to Doctor Strange to fix this and after harshly criticizing both her shoddy magic and misguided intentions, he fixes the situation on the zombie/magic end of things. 

The Wanda plot is interesting to me for a lot of reasons. For one, it’s sort of amazing that in all the time since House of M was published in 2005, there’s never been a proper X-Men story that has truly engaged with her effectively destroying mutantdom for many years. This has come up in some Avengers stories, but it’s not really the same thing. Given that House of M was a thing that deliberately hobbled the X-Men as a franchise at Marvel in favor of the Avengers for many years, the anguish of mutants about “M Day” is mirrored by the people (like me!) who frustratedly read X-Men books in the aftermath of it. From an X-Men fan perspective, setting her up as “the pretender Wanda Maximoff” and having her villified by Krakoan culture feels correct both in the text and on a meta level. Wanda is a made-up character, but she represents an editorial decision a lot of readers resent. 

But despite all this, Wanda Maximoff is still basically a heroic figure in Marvel lore. Even if her actions in this story create a huge mess, she’s still presented as a sympathetic figure who desperately wants to make up for what she’s done in the past. Doctor Strange’s dialogue with her in the fourth issue is blunt to the point of brutality, but he’s not wrong about her: She’s a reckless person who creates chaos and other people always have to deal with the mess she makes. She’s always trying to erase her sins rather than “eclipse them with greater deeds,” as Strange puts it. Hickman’s dynamic between these two characters is intriguing to me – he wrote Doctor Strange extensively in New Avengers and Secret Wars, but Wanda didn’t appear in any of his Avengers work. Strange is presented as very intelligent, but condescending and dismissive, particularly towards women. Wanda comes off as dim and impulsive, but very sensitive and decent at heart. Even if Strange is absolutely correct about her, Hickman pushes the reader to feel empathy for her. It’s going to be rough when she eventually has to confront who she is the mutants of Krakoa somewhere down the line. 

The X-Men don’t know Wanda is responsible for the zombie mutant situation, but Wanda doesn’t know about the Krakoan resurrection rituals. This is addressed in a subplot with a mutant called Explodey Boy who first appears as a zombie and then later as his resurrected self. There’s an extended sequence in the last issue illustrated by Lucas Wernick in which the two Explodey Boys meet and talk through their odd existential situation. This very Brian Michael Bendis-y sequence is very sweet and makes good use of the possibilities of resurrection as a major feature of Krakoan life, but it grates on me that Hickman and Wernick portray Explodey Boy as a cute blonde white boy with an “aw shucks” demeanor when they had the option to make him… so many things besides a cute blonde white boy! For one thing, he looks and talks just like Cypher, so there’s a matter of redundancy. But when the entire point of Explodey Boy in the story is that he’s a wholesome normal kid, making him a blonde white boy is basically equating that with the utmost of sweet normalcy. It just seems to me that an X-Men comic in 2020 should avoid a lazy trope like that. 

Fire

“Fire”
X-Men #10
Written by Jonathan Hickman
Art by Leinil Francis Yu
Color art by Sunny Gho

Vulcan has been a regular supporting character through Jonathan Hickman’s run on X-Men so far, largely played as an overly serious foil to more established characters – his biological brothers Cyclops and Havok, and his new housemate Wolverine. Vulcan is a tricky character who was introduced in Ed Brubaker’s mid-2000s run as a complicated retcon: He’s the lost Summers brother, he was chosen by Charles Xavier and Moira McTaggert to lead a doomed team of forgotten X-Men on a mission to Krakoa, he went off to space to become a tyrannical Shi’ar emperor. There’s even more to it than that, but mostly in “cosmic” Marvel books I have never read. There’s a lot of reasons many reasonable writers would run screaming from this extremely convoluted character, particularly as he’s never had much of a compelling personality beyond spite and madness, but given how much of Hickman’s X-Men hinges on the intersection of Xavier, McTaggert, and Krakoa – not to mention Cyclops being a lead character – he’s sorta cornered into dealing with him and his now-resurrected lost X-Men. 

“Fire” does not call back to the part of Vulcan’s story that intersects with Moira and Krakoa, but it does properly reintroduce Petra and Sway – though really, given how little they’ve ever appeared as living characters, it’s more like a regular introduction. Of the four lost X-Men that Brubaker introduced in X-Men: Deadly Genesis, these are the two who died on Krakoa. (Darwin, who appeared as part of the trio who disappeared into The Vault in issue #5, survived the experience and was featured as a member in Brubaker’s Uncanny X-Men run.) Petra and Sway are depicted as rather messy hedonists intent to drink heavily and get wild at the Summers House on the moon while the “boring mutants” are off on vacation. They come across as cheerful types who are not particularly bothered to be residents of a living island that once killed them both. Resurrection seems to have a way of making people very forgiving about such things.

The issue mainly boils down to Vulcan encountering a group of invading aliens connected to the Empyre crossover event and them tampering with his mind, seeing his reborn and stable form as a broken version of him, and introducing a corrupting element that will undermine his progress and redemption. This sets Vulcan up for an eventual return to his primary role as an antagonist, most likely whenever Hickman’s ongoing Shi’ar story kicks into high gear. The interesting part of this development is more that Vulcan’s story becomes about him knowing this has happened and actively resisting the lure towards madness and destruction. 

Hickman has put a lot of effort into putting the traditional X-Men mutant villains on paths towards antagonistic roles without undermining the notion of Krakoa unifying all the mutants. House of X set Sabretooth up for an eventual revenge story after he was cruelly imprisoned by the Quiet Council, and Powers of X set in motion some grand betrayal by Mister Sinister as part of establishing the resurrection protocols. Exodus appears to be on a path towards cultish zealotry in parallel with Nightcrawler’s creation of a mutant religion, and it looks like we’re set to discover Apocalypse’s true motives in X of Swords. And then there’s Mystique, who will undermine the Quiet Council as she seethes in fully justified resentment of being denied the resurrection of her wife Destiny. It’s pretty clear that once the Mystique/Destiny/Moira plot comes into play, we’ll be entering the end game of this whole thing. 

Vulcan’s trajectory is an interesting counterpoint to that of Mystique. Both are former enemies playing at being reformed members of Krakoan society, but whereas Mystique is only playing along to advance her personal agenda, Vulcan seems to genuinely want to be a better man and live up to the example of his brothers. Mystique embraces the moral rot in her, and her capacity for causing chaos, but Vulcan now lives in fear of this destructive element in him. Even before the alien intervention he knew he was a bomb waiting to go off – now he’s stuck worrying that he is powerless to defuse it. As with the other mutant villains set on a track to return to form, his plight is very true to the core of his character and is driven by relatable motives. The difference is that he’s the character positioned to overcome his worst impulses. 

Some notes:

• It’s hard not to notice how between Hickman’s X-Men, Gerry Duggan’s Marauders, Ed Brisson’s New Mutants, and Benjamin Percy’s X-Force there is a real obsession with showing X-Men drinking heavily, with a few characters being depicted as problem drinkers. It’s a little weird, and I imagine it must grate on sober readers quite a bit.

• I love that Hickman has made elements of Ed Brubaker and Mike Carey’s parallel mid-’00s X-Men comics very crucial to his own work, while virtually nothing from Joss Whedon’s much more popular concurrent Astonishing X-Men series has come into play. But of course – Whedon’s take was deliberately retro, and he didn’t actually add much to franchise in terms of big ideas. (But hey, Armor has showed up, so that’s something.)

The Reading

X-Men: Free Comic Book Day 2020
Written by Jonathan Hickman and Tini Howard
Art by Pepe Larraz
Color art by Marte Gracia

Every year Marvel issues a special Free Comic Book Day comic designed to hype up whatever major event is coming along, and the headlining story in this year’s edition is basically a trailer teasing the first X-Men crossover of the Hickman era, X of Swords. Even aside from hyping up the next big arc, this issue is exciting if just because it reunites Hickman with Pepe Larraz, the artist of House of X. The two have a remarkable creative chemistry, and Larraz has asserted himself as the definitive artist of this X-era. The pages, which rely heavily on his gift for character design and evocative environments, feel like home. 

The familiarity of Larraz’s line is helpful in grounding the issue, which otherwise pushes the reader off the deep end into unfamiliar territory. The opening pages introduce Apocalypse’s original Horsemen, who he lost when Okkara was split into Krakoa and Arakko centuries ago. I’m not certain exactly what happens in these pages, but it establishes them as powerful and brutal characters who seek Opal Luna Saturnyne, the Omniversal Majestrix of Otherworld. There’s certainly some missing threads here, but the Horsemen and the lost island of Arakko being connected to Otherworld makes more sense of Apocalypse’s machinations through Tini Howard’s Excalibur series. It’s all starting to click together. 

The remainder of the issue teases out the rest of the story as Saturnyne does a tarot reading to get a sense of what may be coming to her. Hickman, Howard, and Larraz provide a feast for speculation, particularly in the final three cards. I’m not going to indulge in that for now, but I will say I’m quite pleased that Archangel, Banshee, and Penance are being positioned as prominent characters in this story after being largely absent from the first wave of Dawn of X books, and that Storm seems to have a major plotline in this arc. This, along with Giant Size X-Men making Storm central to the ongoing Children of the Vault thread, gives me hope that after many years of being sidelined we may be entering a phase when Storm is restored to her proper place as a crucial character in this franchise. 

Wait And See

“Wait and See”
Giant Size X-Men: Magneto
Written by Jonathan Hickman
Art by Ramón Pérez
Color art by David Curiel

It’s been a bit difficult to find the appropriate level of expectation for the Giant Size X-Men issues. Each of the three published so far has felt less substantial than any of the regular issues of X-Men written by Jonathan Hickman, and have done more to gesture in the direction of future stories than deliver something more satisfying in the moment. The comics have all delivered in terms of serving as showcases for talented artists, and with this Magneto issue the Canadian illustrator Ramón Pérez– mostly known for his indie and web comics – gets to show off his considerable craft on a very mainstream title. Hickman’s primary interest here seems to be in letting the artist flex, and in laying in plot details for later on. The former is a great idea when working as a writer in a visual medium, the latter goal is fine in the abstract but in the case of this issue it mostly just undermines a story that presents itself as a quiet character study. 

The plot of the issue is basically that Emma Frost has asked Magneto to acquire an island for her, and he accomplishes that with the help of her profoundly arrogant ex Namor, the mutant monarch of the seas. At the end of the issue we see Magneto assemble a tower with a Sentinel head built into the side for Frost, and well, that’s that. We’ll find out what Emma is going to do with this island some other time. It looks cool, so there’s that. There’s some bits of deep sea adventure in the middle of the story with Namor, but in narrative terms that’s what happens in 30 pages.

The meat of the story is mostly in observing Magneto at this moment of his life. He’s typically a character defined by his unrelenting ideology and antagonistic relationship with humans, but in this issue we see him rather contented by the founding of Krakoa and his station as one of the fledgling mutant nation’s leaders. Magneto has been a steady presence in Hickman’s story thus far, but his most memorable scenes have involved him making grand and unapologetically arrogant speeches to human leaders. This facet of Magneto is not on display in this issue. Instead we him willing to wait patiently for Namor among a bunch of puffins on a small island, and dining with Emma Frost, a woman he clearly recognizes as both a peer and a friend. The latter is notable – even though these characters have a good amount of history as colleagues, it’s actually pretty rare to see Magneto engage with someone besides Charles Xavier or Rogue as either a respected friend or confidant. His tendency is to be alone, and to project a superior aloofness.

Magneto, Emma Frost, and Namor are all characters with major superiority complexes and a flippant contempt for humans. In contrasting today’s Magneto with two characters he has so much in common with, we see how much he’s changed in the recent past. His rage has subsided upon the realization of his lifelong dream of a mutant nation, we see him as magnanimous and respectful - not just of Emma and Namor, but of the human man living on the island. The entire story is him doing a favor for Emma, whereas Magneto’s role since the start of House of X has largely involved him sending other mutants out to do his bidding. I get the sense that in the long run of Hickman’s story, this will be understood as a glimpse of Magneto at a good moment in his life. This state cannot last for him, and that’s his tragedy. 

The matter of Emma’s island tower is intriguing but makes the issue feel unresolved and incomplete, and since the issue ends on an inert “that’s it?” moment it undermines the understated character development that was the actual focus of the issue. It may have landed better if the issue ended on another quiet Magneto moment, or if Perez’s last page didn’t feel like such an abrupt ending. But I think Hickman is more to blame here – whereas the previous Giant Size issues have advanced an ongoing mystery with Cypher and presented a cliffhanger with Storm, both of which are tied to macro plots introduced in House of X/Powers of X, it’s hard to get a sense of how significant this story development is when all Emma says in the end is that she intends to…invite people to this island. Uh, sure? I trust Hickman enough to pay off on this in some way, but this could just as well be an entire issue about Emma Frost needing a place to hold off-site meetings. 

Unlike the other issues of Giant Size X-Men, this one was not conceived with the artist in mind. The issue was originally meant to be drawn by Ben Oliver, and Ramón Pérez stepped in when Oliver had to bow out of the commitment. He did a good job with it, particularly in drawing the most uneventful pages where it’s really just Magneto hanging out on an island and looking off into the distance. He presents Magneto as a powerful but unknowable figure, but also someone with an obvious soulful interiority. His ability to convey this is crucial to the successes of this issue, since Hickman really went “show, not tell” in this story. 

Haunted Mansion

“Haunted Mansion”
Giant Size X-Men: Nightcrawler #1
Written by Jonathan Hickman
Art by Alan Davis
Color art by Carlos Lopez

The Giant Size X-Men special issues written by Jonathan Hickman were originally meant to be annuals for the first five ongoing series from the Dawn of X launch, and though this issue features none of the cast from Tini Howard’s Excalibur, it seems obvious that this issue was intended to be the Excalibur annual given that it’s illustrated by Excalibur co-creator Alan Davis and features a handful of core characters from that series as they appeared in the late ‘80s. The story also prominently features Cypher and Magik, who Davis drew in memorable mid ‘80s New Mutants annuals written by Chris Claremont. Hickman makes the most of Davis’ familiarity with these characters not just for nostalgia’s sake, but for rooting this story in which the Krakoa-era X-Men visit their old home in “classic X-Men” aesthetics of an artist who has had multiple runs on X-Men titles over the years. When the issue opens on interiors of the abandoned X-Mansion, it immediately feels authentically like you’re in the place if just because it’s Davis’ recognizable ultra-clean linework.

This is billed as a Nightcrawler story and while he’s very prominently featured in the plot as the leader of this mission, the most intriguing parts of the issue center on Cypher and further hint at something strange about the current state of his relationship with his techno-organic best friend Warlock. Though it was fairly obvious to anyone familiar with the character, this issue is the first to confirm that Cypher has been “wearing” Warlock on his right arm. This isn’t at all unusual for the character, but the weird thing here is that it is for some reason a secret he’s keeping this a secret. The first suggestion of this came in X-Men #7 where Cyclops stumbles into the two of them hanging out, and in this issue Cypher begs Magik to keep it a secret before explaining himself and she’s rightly sort of baffled why this would be a secret to begin with. Hard to say where Hickman is going with this thread, but I suspect it will eventually pay off on the panels in which he appears to infect Krakoa with the techno-organic virus – a form of the Phalanx – in Powers of X #4. 

Aside from advancing this plot, the issue is a straightforward mystery plot that resolves in a reveal involving the Sidri, a fairly obscure alien race introduced by Claremont and Dave Cockrum in the early ‘80s. It’s enjoyable entirely at face value, but even as a fairly throwaway one-off issue it does push the macro plot forward in terms of showing us the current state of the X-Men’s former headquarters, adding another alien alliance that may factor into Hickman’s slowly percolating cosmic plot, and nudging along the Cypher thread. Not bad, all told, and plus it’s always a pleasure to see Alan Davis draw Nightcrawler in action. 

The King Egg

“The King Egg”
X-Men #9
Written by Jonathan Hickman
Art by Leinil Francis Yu
Color art by Sunny Gho

Before Marvel formally announced Jonathan Hickman would be taking over the X-Men franchise they ran a few in-house teaser ads, the first of which was a white page with text that read: “When two aggressive species share the same environment, evolution demands adaptation or dominance.” So far we’ve seen Hickman address this theme with mutants vs humans, mutants vs artificial intelligence, and mutants vs homo novissima. This issue hits the theme on an intergalactic level, with the story opening in the distant past with the Kree Supreme Intelligence authorizing the genetic manipulation of the highly adaptive Brood as a weapon against their rival empire, the Shi’ar. The King Egg produces a patriarch which can sieze control over the intergalactic Brood hive mind and shift their purpose towards killing the Shi’ar. The Brood queens have responded to the threat by sending all their drones to destroy it. Here we have an advanced species subverting the adaptability of another species, and that species fighting for its survival at all costs. 

The majority of this issue is big action in outer space with the X-Men, Starjammers, and Shi’ar Imperial Guard fighting off the Brood. Leinil Francis Yu is always great with space battles, having previously done this sort of thing with Hickman when they worked together on the Infinity storyline in Avengers. There’s a great sense of scale and momentum in his pages – it’s all very much a comic, but the art conveys the feeling of a big budget movie. 

The story wraps up with a surprise twist – Broo, the mutant Brood student of the X-Men who has joined Cyclops and his crew on this mission, is compelled to eat the King Egg and suddenly becomes the king of all Brood. As a result of this, the mutants have effectively taken control of the Brood via the gentle and good natured Broo. This is a brilliant use of Broo, an extremely annoying character who now has a strong sense of purpose in the greater scheme of things. It’s still hard to tell exactly where Hickman is headed with this space storyline, but it’s safe to say we will eventually see the mutants try to use the Brood as weapons. But will Broo, always portrayed as a sweetheart, be down with this plan? Or will the serum created by the Kree in the King Egg override his every intention and push towards their plan in attacking the Shi’ar? 

Notes:

• The next issue is a tie-in with Empyre, an Avengers/Fantastic Four event about the Kree and Skrull uniting against Earth. It seems pretty likely the complications of the Kree’s meddling with the Brood will be the occasion for intersecting the plots? 

• Jean Grey’s monologue expressing the point of view of the Brood queens is a necessary bit of exposition, but I like how it’s also an expression of the character’s profound empathy.