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. 

Season Of Change

Inferno #1
Written by Jonathan Hickman
Art by Valerio Schiti
Color art by David Curiel

Before reading this issue I had a feeling of vague dread about it, nervous that the end of Jonathan Hickman’s run on X-Men was premature and a bad compromise that kept more mediocre comics moving along while denying the promise of what we had been told was a long term three act story. I’m still a little sore about that possibility, but the first issue of Inferno is such a strong and exciting start to paying off plot threads started in House of X and Powers of X that whatever happens down the line, this story will probably feel like a satisfying conclusion. 

Let’s just go scene by scene…

• The opening sequence calls back to the opening of House of X, but with Emma Frost reviving Xavier and Magneto. A cool bit of symmetry and foreshadowing. The cover of Inferno #2 seems to directly refer to this sequence, but given Hickman’s aversion to covers that spoil plot action it’s probably like how a few covers of Powers of X referred to plot from previous issues. 

• The text pages updating us on Orchis’ aggressive advances in scale and the mutants’ failed attempts at attacking the Orchis Forge do a nice job of establishing that the stakes have been raised and many things have been happening since we left off from Hickman’s X-Men series. It essentially serves the same effect as the opening scrolls in the Star Wars movies, advancing plot that you don’t really need to see and throwing you into an action sequence set up by this information. This information also gives us a tiny pay off to Broo becoming king of the Brood, a plot point from X-Men that was probably intended for something bigger and more dramatic. Oh well, at least it’s not a total loose end. 

• X-Force’s attack on the Orchis Forge introduces Nimrod and shows how easily it can dispatch mutants as formidable as Wolverine and Quentin Quire. This is another matter of establishing stakes, but more importantly it sets up the Orchis leads Devo, Gregor, and the Omega Sentinel trying to figure out how it is that they’ve been assaulted by the same mutants over and over again. Gerry Duggan’s X-Men series has been teasing at Orchis learning of mutant resurrection but this sequence is far more interesting in that their speculation is further off the mark – Devo is doubtful of the mutants making a scientific breakthrough – and not quite grasping the scale of what has been accomplished with the Resurrection Protocols. A lot of the tension in this issue comes from Orchis lacking a lot of information but having acquired enough data to be right on the verge of figuring out some potentially catastrophic things. 

• We flash back to Mystique and Destiny confronting and murdering Moira MacTaggert in her third life, recreated by Valerio Schiti in a direct panel to panel copy of the memorable sequence illustrated by Pepe Larraz in House of X #2. Hickman has used this trick before, most notably in his Fantastic Four run in which Carmine Di Giandomenico redrew Steve Epting’s excellent scene depicting The Human Torch’s supposed death. The variance in the scenes comes on the fourth page in which we get some new dialogue from Destiny that we certainly could not have been privy to prior to later reveals in House of X and Powers of X. The ending of the scene has a significant change in dialogue that suggests that the Larraz and Schiti versions of this sequence are presented from different perspectives and memories – probably Moira’s the first time since that one focuses on her fear and pain, and Destiny’s in this one since it focuses more on her message and vision of the future. 

• We see Moira in her present life, somehow holding the burned research book from her third life. Hickman and Schiti make a point of showing us this thing, which given our current understanding of how Moira’s lives work simply should not be possible. Hmmm.

• Moira’s movement triggers an unusual spike in Krakoan gateway activity that leads the Orchis network – which we see includes the ape scientists from X-Men #1 and Hordeculture from X-Men #3, two more random loose threads from the series that it’s nice to see in the mix here – to realize that Moira’s location is unique and presumably both important and deliberately hidden. The spike was likely caused by her use of a No-Space, a mutant technology that would be unknown to Orchis as well as nearly all living mutants. Hordeculture, who we learn has been instrumental in Orchis’ understanding of Krakoan biological technology, figure it out: Moira has two totally different portals. X-Force’s intelligence agents discover that Orchis is on to something, but you get the horrible feeling that this won’t be enough.

• Moira returns to her No-Space to be confronted by Magneto and Xavier, which gets a huge amount of exposition out of the way. Moira has become understandably embittered by her isolation, and resentful of these men have been surveilling her while also failing to stop the emergence of Nimrod. The crux of this scene is Moira reiterating that as she sees it, the two greatest threats to their mission are Nimrod and Destiny. She instructs them to use their knowledge and privilege to wipe out the possibility of her resurrection, which they appear to carry out separately. The sequence with Xavier collecting Destiny’s preserved genetic materials from Mister Sinister is presented quite ominously, with Sinister appearing even more Satanic than usual. This calls to mind the promise of his betrayal in Powers of X, in that he knows far more than Xavier realizes, and that Moira emphatically did not want Xavier and Magneto to form a partnership with him, aware of what other versions of Sinister did in her previous lives. 

• A text page establishes that Black Tom Cassidy, whose powers allow him to commune with Krakoa’s living flora, has been suffering from seemingly psychotic episodes and dreaming of both being consumed by the island and machinery moving under his skin. This is an ominous lead-in to a scene with a rather chipper Cypher waking up to meet with his two best pals in the world – Krakoa itself and Warlock, a techno-organic creature related to the Phalanx. We see an echo of the sequence from Powers of X in which Cypher seems to infect Krakoan flora with the techno-organic virus, but this time it appears more benign. This panel – in which we see Cypher’s mutant hand, a living machine, and vegetation in apparent harmony – is also essentially another version of Black Tom’s nightmarish vision. File under foreshadowing. 

• We see a ceremony in which Storm coronates Bishop as the new Captain Commander of Krakoa, as Cyclops steps down from the position as lead captain. Cyclops will remain a captain, but Storm is surprised – “normally you’ve never given these things up without a fight,” a low-key nod to the classic Uncanny X-Men #201, which Hickman previously had Storm reference upon Cyclops’ resurrection in House of X #5. The scene also establishes Psylocke as Gorgon’s replacement and emphasizes the captains’ increasing independence from the Quiet Council’s supervision. 

• The final scene is a Quiet Council sequence in which Moira’s urging to remove Mystique from power leads Xavier and Magneto to a rather ineffectual and wishy-washy suggestion to the rest of the council to consider the possibility of stepping down if they…like, want to, or something? It’s clear that they have not really thought this through, and Nightcrawler and Sebastian Shaw are particularly dubious of the proposition. This move entirely backfires as Mystique moves to replace Apocalypse’s seat on the council with…Destiny, who enters the council chambers very much alive. This startling cliffhanger is essentially Hickman’s equivalent to Grant Morrison’s Xorn reveal in New X-Men – “X-Men emergency indeed, Charles…the dream is over!” 

But of course Mystique, a master of manipulation and subterfuge armed with the foresight provided by her dead wife, would be several steps ahead of Xavier, Magneto, and Moira. And all you need to do is look at the Winter table of the Quiet Council to glean how she pulled this off – Mister Sinister would have the means and the knowledge to tip her off, and Exodus has the telepathic power necessary to activate a Cerebro unit. Flash back to Magneto telling Moira of the composition of the Winter table – “it’s where we parked all of our problem mutants.” It’s also worth noting that Schiti’s art in the Quiet Council scene depicts barren branches and leaves falling from Krakoa’s trees. Winter has come.

(By the way, there’s a neat bit of symmetry in that Destiny seems poised to occupy the third seat on the Autumn table, and the corresponding seat on Arakko’s Great Ring is occupied by their precognitive mutant Idyll.)

And of course the specific things Moira was trying to avoid – Nimrod coming online and Destiny being resurrected – have come to pass in large part because her actions have either accelerated the timeline or forced the issue. And while Nimrod is an unambiguous nightmare, it actually remains to be seen whether or not Destiny will be the problem Moira fears or if she simply represents a threat of having her motives and methods undermined that’s more personal than structural. 

Schiti’s work on this issue is some of the best of his career to date, and it’s clear that he’s done his best to level up to the demands of the story and to absorb some of Pepe Larraz and R.B. Silva’s stylistic decisions to keep a sort of visual continuity with House of X/Powers of X. Schiti does some outstanding work depicting facial expressions and body language – just look at Sinister’s delight upon Destiny’s entrance, and how Xavier’s body shifts from a defeated slump to a stiff and anxious posture upon seeing her. He also does nice work with Hickman’s recurring image of reflected faces, particularly Sinister’s ghoulish eyes on Xavier’s helmet and Xavier and Magneto on Destiny’s featureless and inscrutable metal mask. 

• The title Inferno is, of course, repurposed from the major crossover event headed up by Louise Simonson and Chris Claremont in 1988. This is also obviously an echo of Hickman’s prior repurposing of Secret Wars for the finale of his Fantastic Four and Avengers mega-stories. The title suits the story in the sense that everything is about to burned down either literally or figuratively by a scorned woman – Mystique in this story, Madelyne Pryor in the original. But it’s also worth noting that the original Inferno was unique in that all of its story threads – the mystery of Madelyne Pryor, Magik and Limbo, Mister Sinister and the Marauders, X-Factor believing the X-Men to be dead – effectively concluded all major plot threads Simonson and Claremont had established starting around 1983. Maybe this establishes a tradition that can carry into future comics and the movie franchise: “Inferno” doesn’t have to be a particular story, but rather a spectacular crisis that pays off on years of plotting. 

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. 

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. 

Swarm

“Swarm”
Written by Jonathan Hickman
Art by Mahmud Asrar
Color art by Sunny Gho

“Swarm” picks up where Jonathan Hickman left off with his brief run on New Mutants, with that group back on Krakoa and in possession of an egg that Wolfsbane stole and brought home with her just for kicks. As it turns out, it’s a Brood king egg and the Brood have tracked it back to Earth, and are invading Krakoa in swarms. It’s the most conventional story Hickman has done so far in the main X-Men book, but it’s advancing his larger space opera macro plot and delivering a jolt of action film energy that the series has been light on amidst the more philosophical focus of recent issues. 

If you are new to all this, you should know that the Brood are an alien race that Chris Claremont and Dave Cockrum introduced in the early ‘80s and are rather transparently the Marvel version of the xenomorphs from the Alien franchise. Hickman’s use of the Brood emphasizes the creepy otherness of the species, particularly in the scenes of the issue in which we observe teeming masses of Brood crawling through the husks of the space whales they use as organic spaceships. Mahmud Asrar, a familiar X-Men artist of the recent past who fills in for Leinil Yu on this issue, is particularly good at drawing the creatures in action sequences in which they’re still quite scary even as Cyclops, Magik, and Mirage wipe them out.

 I’ve never been particularly fond of the Brood, but Hickman and Asrar make me rethink my position on them as a threat. They emphasize just enough of what makes them distinctive to keep it from feeling such a blatant Alien rip-off while nailing the coolest visual aspects of “what if the X-Men fought a thousand xenomorphs?” 

This is the first traditional multi-part story of Hickman’s run so I’m going to hold off writing about the bigger story, so let’s move straight to notes…

• Vulcan features heavily in this issue, and will be central for at least another two issues going on the covers for those comics. Vulcan is a very complicated character – he’s the biological brother of Cyclops and Havok, but was raised in Shi’ar space and has a complicated backstory that involves both the history of Krakoa and a Marvel cosmic event by Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning that I never read called War of Kings in which Vulcan, leading the Shi’ar, clashed with Black Bolt of the Inhumans leading the Kree. Hickman calls back to that story in this issue with a text page recapping the ending of War of Kings, in which Black Bolt and Vulcan are lost in the Fault, a rip in the fabric of time and space. This page is followed by a page of Vulcan lost in the Fault which directly echoes a page from Hickman’s FF #6 in which Black Bolt is lost in the Fault.  

I’m a lot more intrigued by Vulcan’s connection to the history of Krakoa, which was introduced as a massive retcon in Ed Brubaker’s Deadly Genesis miniseries. In this issue we see Vulcan after getting wasted with Petra and Sway, two recently resurrected mutants who were part of a failed second iteration of the X-Men that Moira McTaggert and Charles Xavier sent to Krakoa before the assembling the third wave of X-Men including Storm, Wolverine, Nightcrawler, and Colossus from Giant Size X-Men #1. This is a crucial element of the Krakoa story that Hickman has yet to address – like, what does the Krakoa we know from House of X onward have to do with the hostile monster island from the first modern X-Men comic? What was the early process of getting Krakoa the sentient being on board with being Krakoa, the mutant nation? And how do Petra and Sway feel about living on Krakoa when Krakoa murdered them?

• Perhaps the greatest flex of Hickman’s X-Men thus far is making two of the most annoying characters from Jason Aaron’s awful Wolverine and the X-Men run, the cutesy Brood mutant named Broo and Kid Gladiator, tolerable in their appearances in this issue. He doesn’t really do much to change either character – Broo is basically still a baby monster who’s always like “indubitably!” and Kid Gladiator is still a child version of Gladiator who is always like “RAD!” – but they’re both a lot less aggravating in this context than in Aaron comics where it seems like he was rather convinced they’re the most hilarious things in the world. Broo, always a novelty character up to now, has a clear utility in this issue’s plot too. It goes a long way.

• Always a pleasure to get even just a page of Hickman’s Sunspot! 

Crucible

“Lifedeath”
X-Men #7
Written by Jonathan Hickman
Art by Leinil Francis Yu
Color art by Sunny Gho

Let’s start with audacity of the title. Given that this is an issue about an event called Crucible that is mentioned by name many times over, it would be sensible to simply call the issue “Crucible” or similar. But no, Jonathan Hickman can’t quite ever be bold enough, so he named it “Lifedeath,” after one of the most famous and acclaimed Chris Claremont stories in which Storm struggles with life after losing her powers. It makes sense: This is an issue about what becomes of the million mutants who lost their powers to the Scarlet Witch’s “no more mutants” spell in House of M, and how to be reborn with their powers they must first die. It’s the core dilemma of the original Storm arc taken to a new extreme, with Nightcrawler and Cyclops on the margins of the story pondering the spiritual implications of the Krakoan resurrection protocols. 

Hickman takes his time doling out hints of what Crucible is through the first half of the issue, indicating the solemn intensity of the occasion and how heavily it weighs on the other characters. The context is revealed as we see Exodus explain the reason for the event to a group of mutant children around a fire in the forest, emphasizing the great evils of the Scarlet Witch and the horrors she inflicted on mutantdom with just three words. The children repeat language from the text pages referring to the Scarlet Witch and M Day in House of X #4 – “the pretender,” “NO MORE” – and suggest that an emerging part of Krakoan culture is the vilification of Wanda Maximoff and, by extension, the Avengers. This indoctrination makes sense, particularly given the extreme lengths the Krakoans must go to rectify her deeds, but the reader is aware that Scarlet Witch is still written as a heroic figure in Avengers comics. It now seems inevitable that she will enter this story at some point and have to reckon with a mutant nation indoctrinated to think of her as a Hitler figure. 

This scene is the first indication of what Hickman is planning for Exodus, a somewhat underdeveloped villain created in the 1990s that he’s placed on the Quiet Council. The main thing about Exodus is that he’s from the distant past – he was raised in the 12th century but held in stasis by Apocalypse for centuries – and that he’s a zealot who aligned with Magneto’s most extreme beliefs but was more harsh and unyielding. It would seem that Exodus’ zealotry is being positioned as a parallel to Nightcrawler’s spirituality here, as we see Nightcrawler wrestle with moral questions and decide that he must start a mutant religion for those questioning their faith in the context of Krakoan culture and the implications of endless rebirth. If the pure and heroic Nightcrawler is offering a theology based on kindness, forgiveness, and pursuit of peace, Exodus is clearly fostering a more violent and unforgiving fundamentalism in his young followers.

In the final third of the issue we see that Crucible isn’t merely about a depowered mutant dying to be “made whole” in resurrection, but rather a sacrement informed by Apocalypse’s “survival of the fittest” ethos. Melody Guthrie, the younger sister of Cannonball and Husk, must face the hulking and enormously powerful Apocalypse in a duel in which he taunts and tests her. The mutants of Krakoa don’t want to deal with mass suicide of depowered mutants – they want a show of dedication to fight for their people. They must be found worthy. 

This makes sense, but is also sort of troubling. The ritualistic nature of this speaks to both Apocalypse and Exodus’ roots in the distant past, and shows how their taste for bloody sacrifice and symbolism is shaping the emerging culture of Krakoa. This is another contrast with Nightcrawler’s sensibilities as a Catholic – he’s a very New Testament sort of guy, after all. It will be interesting to see how his hippie-ish brand of Christianity informs a new religion based upon many ideas that his culture has disproven, or at least called into question. 

Some notes:

• Hickman continues to tease the details of Cyclops, Jean Grey, Wolverine, and Emma Frost’s apparently bisexual polycule situation. I realize some would love for this to all be spelled out and made full canon, but I actually prefer him sketching this out in ways that suggest something as filthy and overtly queer as the reader wants it to be. Don’t get hung up on the plausible deniability, get excited by how far he’s willing to go to suggest that Wolverine and Cyclops are regularly fucking each other. 

• I love that Cannonball, always an incredibly normal and down-to-earth dude, is just getting used to raising a family in the alien Shi’ar culture and comes home to discover that everyone he knows has created a new culture that’s maybe twice as strange. But hey, his dead siblings are alive, so he’s he to complain? 

• We finally see Warlock separated from Cypher’s arm and it’s very odd and creepy. It’s hard to tell whether this is hinting at something bad, or just showing us that Cypher is just a really weird guy with very unusual friends. 

Hordeculture

“Hordeculture” 
X-Men #3
Written by Jonathan Hickman
Art by Leinil Francis Yu
Inks by Gerry Alanguilan and Yu
Color art by Sunny Gho and Rain Beredo

The biggest surprise of Jonathan Hickman’s X-Men and New Mutants so far has not been about plot developments – all that renovation was left to House of X/Powers of X – but rather about the tone: Who could’ve predicted from all that heavy and portentious setup that it’d be so funny? New Mutants is played like a sitcom, and while X-Men has been doing a lot of world-building and filling out big ideas, it’s been very light-hearted and sorta goofy. In this issue the X-Men discover that their newest enemy is a group of ecological terrorists comprised of four elderly women who are rather transparently based upon the cast of Golden Girls. That may sound awful, and it probably would be in the hands of a lesser creative team. But Hickman’s dry wit and Leinil Yu’s designs make it all work, and this quartet of scientists is played for laughs while revealing themselves to be a credible ongoing threat to the X-Men and Krakoa. 

I like to imagine the original pitch Hickman gave to Marvel editorial in which he had to explain that from now on flowers would be central to the X-Men mythos, and that they would need to have enemies going forward who would want to steal and breed their special mutant flowers. Hordeculture – NOT Whoredeculture! – are a group of rogue botanists who were radicalized by their experiences in the agrochemical and biotech industries and have decided to take it upon themselves to sieze control of the world’s food supply and return to the world to a “natural state” with seven billion fewer people on it.

Of course, Krakoa throws their plan into chaos and they successfully steal Krakoan flowers for their studies. The X-Men lose, and this sets up inevitable chaos down the line. This issue is just…planting seeds…for later developments, but it’s a rather fun bit of narrative gardening.

This issue is the first where we get a glimpse at the new interpersonal dynamic of Cyclops, Jean Grey, and Emma Frost. It’s been a very long time since these characters were all together in print: They were the central love triangle of Grant Morrison’s New X-Men in the early 2000s, but Jean died at the end of that run and it’s only just now that all three are alive together at the same time. Hickman is clearly having a lot of fun with this, and is deliberately subverting expectations while leaving all salacious details to the subtext. So from what we’ve seen in this and the last couple issues: Jean and Emma have a catty rivalry but also respect one another as friends and colleagues, and there is a strong insinuation that there is an open relationship situation in which Emma gets to “borrow” Cyclops from time to time, but Jean is his primary partner. (Presumably a fair trade-off for Jean to hook up with her housemate Wolverine now and then.) What a fun, sexy time for them all.

Some notes:

• As the X-Men accumulate new enemies from the worlds of science, politics, and business please note that almost all of them are elderly and/or white. They all have very understandable political agendas that are more about seizing or maintaining power than any kind of overt bigotry. They act in self-interest and self-preservation to either perpetuate the status quo or bend it to their advantage. This is a major improvement over the various human enemies X-Men writers have been working with for ages.

• Yu continues to nail key panels. Let’s take a moment to appreciate the body horror of this panel, which low-key reveals just how sinister the women of Hordeculture can be…

•…and this glorious reaction panel, which ought to get a second life on social media. 

Summoner

“Summoner”
X-Men #2
Written by Jonathan Hickman
Pencils by Leinil Francis Yu
Inks by Gerry Alanguilan
Color art by Sunny Gho

“Summoner” is clearly built to continue some momentum from other recent X-Men comics – we’re still spending time with Cyclops and time-displaced children Rachel and Cable, there are references to the events of the New Mutants and X-Force comics from last week, and the plot advances the Arrako/Apocalypse/missing Horsemen thread from Powers of X – but the actual content of the issue feels more like coasting. 

That’s fine, since we’re still finding our bearings and getting used to how familiar characters behave in the new status quo. In the case of the leads in this issue, we’re still seeing Cyclops form a traditional family unit out of his bizarre set of blood relations. It’s maybe slightly weird that the other characters don’t call attention to this, but it makes a lot of sense that Rachel and Cable – who is a teenager at the moment, having killed the older version of himself in Extermination – would be eager to finally have the dad they always wanted. You know, a dad who is physically only about 10-15 years older than either of them, but a dad nevertheless. 

I quite like Hickman’s take on Cyclops. He’s leaning into the character’s rich and complicated back story without directly referring to it, and presents him as though all the bizarre facts of his life are just lived reality and weird to others but mundane to him, kinda like someone who's been a celebrity all their life. As a reader fully aware of the context and subtext, it all reads as “this is a total weirdo” and “this is a capable leader who’s seen it all and isn’t easily rattled.” Kind of a chicken-or-egg thing with him, really. Hickman has fun with Cyclops’ dialogue too, allowing the character to poke fun at his weird life and history of bad decisions based in horniness. And then there’s this line, which shamelessly panders to everyone who was VERY HYPE about the layout of his house on the moon in the previous issue…

The rhythms of this issue feel similar to the more low-key world building issues at the early stages of his Avengers run. It’s a straight-forward adventure, but the meat of the issue is in establishing some new concepts by having the heroes encounter it in the field. In the case of this issue, it’s the notion of “Summoners,” the magic-wielding heroes of Arrako, the lost twin of Krakoa. At the end of the issue a fragment of Arrako merges with Krakoa, and the Summoner meets with Apocalypse, who clearly intends to bring back the rest of Arakko and make Krakoa whole again. This is not tremendously thrilling in and of itself, but it’s reasonable to assume this is headed towards some climactic resolution in the near future. Hickman seems very aware of that, and wisely leans on jokes to make this a fun read. (I quite like the callback to Sunspot’s “…and that’s why people love me” from last week’s New Mutants in the Cable dialogue. Maybe this is going to be a runner?)

Leinil Yu’s art leaves a bit to be desired in terms of depicting facial expressions but he excels at illustrating freaky monsters and exotic terrain, and that’s what really matters in this issue. His best image in this issue, in which the trio of X-Men ride through tall grass towards the Summoner in the distance, is very striking in its simple, elegant composition and owes a lot to the cinematic tradition my friend Sean T. Collins calls “monumental horror.” The monsters are cool looking, but this shot is genuinely creepy. 

Pax Krakoa

“Pax Krakoa”
X-Men #1
Written by Jonathan Hickman
Pencils by Leinil Francis Yu
Inks by Gerry Alanguilan
Color art by Sunny Gho

Welcome to the new normal. “Pax Krakoa,” the first proper issue of Jonathan Hickman’s flagship X-Men series, has the feeling of the opening episode of the second season of a television show. After all the major paradigm shifts of House of X/Powers of X we’re coming back into the story in a more low-key way, and just getting a feel for the new world of the X-Men. We get a sense of what X-Men field missions are like, we see what domestic life on Krakoa is like for some of our heroes, and check in on Orchis after the X-Men wrecked their Mother Mold. There’s some action at the start as the X-Men attack an Orchis base, but even that scene is mostly just Cyclops and Storm spouting exposition that brings the reader up to speed on recent changes and the X-Men’s new mission. 

This could be dull in narrative and plot momentum terms, but since everything is still so new it’s just a pleasure to take in some smaller character moments. The issue is largely focused on Cyclops, and establishing Hickman’s take on the character. This version of the character is very much in line with the mutant survivalist radicalism that was central to his depiction from the mid 2000s through the mid 2010s, but relieved of the burdens of being played as a pariah or terrorist, this Cyclops gets to be portrayed as a purely heroic figure.

Hickman is relatively subtle in shading in Cyclops’ flaws, which mainly come down to his myopic idealism. His line early in the issue – “we called incremental change ‘progress’ when what we’ve really needed was a great leap forward” – resonates in a very earnest DSA sort of way, but the use of the phrase “great leap forward” comes across as Hickman nodding to the catastrophic failures of Mao’s Communist revolution that Cyclops himself is not fully considering. Later on he tells Polaris about how he felt when his son Nathan was born, and while his dialogue is certainly expressing his emotional truth, the reader (and Polaris) know very well that he’s telling a very simplified version of the story where he didn’t in fact make several huge mistakes. He yadda yaddas years of bad decisions and failures to arrive at a “because I believed in a thing, now it’s real” conclusion about the new Krakoa status quo, and Polaris asks him if he actually believes it. Of course he does! He’s Cyclops. He’s the best there is at what he does, and what he does involves monomaniacal focus and a lot of self-delusion. 

Later in the issue we spend a bit of time with Cyclops’ confusing extended family at his house on the moon. (The Blue Area of the moon, to be exact – the place where Jean Grey killed herself in the “Dark Phoenix Saga.”) Cyclops lives with his two brothers, his time-displaced son, his daughter from an alternate future, Jean Grey (their marriage seems to be reinstated?), and Wolverine. There is a strong implication that Jean Grey is in a polyamorous relationship with both Cyclops and Wolverine, which is quite a thrill to behold. I have no choice but to stan this heroic mutant polycule on the moon. This scene is pleasant and fun, but also supports the general theme of Cyclops hammering his deeply bizarre life into a happy new shape, and the mutants of Krakoa more generally deciding what “normal” is to them now that they’ve stepped away from human society and are building a new one. Maybe in mutant society, the Summers-Grey clan is as normal as it gets. 

At the Orchis Forge we finally get to meet Doctor Killian Devo, the organization’s leader, and see the immediate aftermath of the X-Men’s suicide mission to foil their plans. At least 32 Orchis soldiers and scientists were killed in the raid, and Devo’s line lamenting this – “Mutants, just look at what they have done” – directly echoes the language used in the internal X-Men memoranda laying out the numbers of how many mutants have been killed by humans in various attacks and genocides. Hickman portrays Devo as an idealist who truly believes he’s working for a greater good – the “last hope of humanity.” His personality is set up as a parallel to Charles Xavier, and so is his visual representation – like Xavier, he also wears a machine that covers his eyes but provides him with a more expanded range of vision. So here we have three leaders – including Cyclops – with grand vision, but no one can see their eyes. 

We also check in with Doctor Alia Gregor, who is quite traumatized following the death of her husband Erasmus, who died as a suicide bomber in House of X #3. Devo comes to console Gregor and speak well of Erasmus, showing him to be a decent and considerate leader. The issue ends on an intriguing bit of information – Gregor apparently has figured out how to resurrect him – that could potentially even out a mutant advantage the Orchis people aren’t even aware of yet. 

Some notes:

• Note how the Orchis scientists de-evolve themselves into apes as a last ditch effort to fight the mutants. Also, “all these apes have PhDs!” is a classic line. Never let anyone tell you Hickman isn’t funny. 

• One of the mutants rescued by Storm and Polaris is not a mutant at all, but rather an artificially evolved posthuman from The Vault. This character is Serafina, who was created by Mike Carey and Chris Bachalo in the “Supernovas” arc about the Children of the Vault. It would seem that Hickman is a drawing a line from this pre-existing concept to the homo novissima species from the far future timeline of Powers of X. 

• We spend a bit of time with Storm, who appears to be over-extending herself in the pursuit of bringing as many persecuted and captive mutants as possible to salvation on Krakoa. Storm seems to be particularly zealous about the Krakoan nation in this run so far, and I’m curious to see where Hickman is going with her. 

• I love every establishing shot of the Orchis Forge in this issue, and in previous issues of House of X. It’s always so visually interesting and sets a mood in a way that feels very Star Wars-y, but very unlike what you typically get in comics, where establishing shots are generally quite dull for no good reason. It would seem that Hickman is drawing a lot on the Empire in his depiction of Orchis, and even the gradual reveal of Doctor Devo recalls the way The Emperor was not introduced right away in the original film series. 

• Wait a minute, does Alia Gregor have a shard of M’Kraan crystal?

• Now that this issue is out, the blessed run of 13 consecutive weeks of Hickman issues has come to an end. The next issue of X-Men won’t be out for a month, but there will be an issue of New Mutants written by Hickman in between. I will be writing about every Hickman-written issue of X-books as they come out, but I haven’t decided on what I will do with non-Hickman material. I will write about anything I find particularly interesting as it comes up, but I may only cover the spin-offs in chunks of issues or story arcs at a time, or skip some things entirely.

It Will Be Done

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

How do you write your way out of this? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• What is the “true purpose” of Cerebro? 

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

• Where is Moira X now?

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

• What happened in Moira’s sixth life?

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

• What about the drugs for humans? 

Once More Unto the Breach

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We Are Together Now, You and I

“We Are Together Now, You and I”
Powers of X #2 (2019)
Written by Jonathan Hickman
Art by R.B. Silva
Color art by Marte Gracia

The second issue of Powers of X is largely spent moving plot forward in three of its time periods – Charles and Moira recruiting Magneto for what will presumably become the Krakoa plan, Charles and Magneto sending Cyclops on a mission to disable the Mother Molds before they can create Nimrod, and the future X-Men (led by Apocalypse!) moving forward in their plan to attack Nimrod. The really wild stuff goes down in the +1000 year period, in which we learn that what we’ve seen there is not Earth but rather Nimbus, a “worldmind” created by the humans and machines in the interest of attracting a “Type III civilization.” The Type III civilization that shows up at the end of the issue is none other than the Phalanx, the hive mind cybernetic species that was at the center of several stories written by Scott Lobdell in the 1990s. 

The Phalanx were based partially on the Technarch, the abstracted technological race introduced by Chris Claremont and Bill Sienkiewicz in New Mutants in the 1980s with the characters Warlock and Magus. The connection between the Technarch and the Phalanx – and the “techno-organic virus” that’s connected to both concepts – is clarified and reworked by Jonathan Hickman in this issue. If you are not familiar with how this has worked in the past, you will only be unnecessarily confusing yourself to concern yourself with those back issues now. As it stands as of this issue, there is a clear hierarchy of artificial intelligence in X-Men comics that follows a powers of ten scale: machine > hive > intelligence > Technarch >  worldmind > Phalanx. At the end of the issue the blue inhabitants of Nimbus – there’s been no indication of who or what they are – willingly submit themselves to the Phalanx, asking for “ascension,” the process by which the Phalanx add an intelligence to its collective self. Perhaps Nimrod’s archive of mutant consciousness, which is in their possession, is the primary offering here?

This issue is mainly about the necessity of collectivity for both the survival of a people and its potential to thrive on increasingly larger scales. We start in the zero year with two bitter rivals, Xavier and Magneto, forging an alliance with the understanding that their people are unlikely to achieve much unless they unite as visionary figureheads. In the present, on the nascent nation-state of Krakoa, we’ve seen real progress – X-Men and “evil mutants” cooperating and living together with a shared goal. Moira states it outright in her pitch to Magneto: “I believe the one thing I haven’t tried yet – all of mutantdom as one – is the thing that means more than just surviving, but thriving and assuming our rightful place on this Earth.” 

The final pages of the issue lay out models of society in orders of magnitude based on the Kardashev scale of measuring a society’s technological advancement. The Phalanx are at the top end of categorization – a collective society that controls an entire galaxy, or multiple galaxies. It’s an imperial force, consuming and integrating lesser societies. In the terms outlined there, we see in this issue the X-Men move from machine (solitary individuals) to hive (a team, basically), with the goal of leveling up to an intelligence (a society.) (Perhaps Krakoa is the beginning stage of an eventual organic worldmind?) It seems obvious now that a central tension of Hickman’s X-Men will be the necessity of a mutant society and the difficulty of attaining such a thing from within and without. Naturally this narrative seems to hinge on Magneto – can he embrace a collective ethos, or will his ego and rage get in the way? 

Notes, Annotations, and Speculation:

• Nibiru, the former frozen gas giant that was transformed into Nimbus, is based on a pseudoscience doomsday hoax positing that a planet-sized object would collide with Earth in the early 21st century. Hickman kept the part about Nimbus being on an elliptical orbit beyond Neptune, but resisted the temptation to refer to Nibiru by its other common name: Planet X.

• Hickman has mentioned the Kardashev scale in an early interview about HOX and POX, noting that he would explore “how mutants bend the Kardashev scale.” In this issue we see how the machines bend the scale as they evolve into Technarchs, worldminds, and Phalanx. But what about the mutants? Is it possible that the mutants, in alliance with the Shi’ar, have also leveled up in the distant future? And when the blue person mentions attracting “universal predators,” could it be that one of these is…the Phoenix? The distant future version of the Phoenix seen at the end of Grant Morrison’s New X-Men run, where we see Jean Grey in the “white hot room,” looks a lot like a collective mutant intelligence. Or perhaps “mutants bending the Kardashev scale” is more about what happens if mutation is introduced to the Phalanx on a galactic level.

• While the other covers in these parallel series seem to correlate to the events of the story told in the pages, this issue’s cover does not at all, at least in a direct sense. Of the characters depicted on the cover – Magneto, Mystique, Emma Frost, Sabretooth, and Toad – only Magneto appears in the issue, and Emma Frost has yet to pop up in the narrative. But it works in a broader thematic sense, in that this issue is laying the groundwork for a mutant society that attempts to integrate traditionally villainous and antagonistic characters. These are the characters who represent a resistance to the sort of conformity and collective identity that comes so easily to the machines.

• The promo art for Powers of X #4 tease the revelation of the “true purpose” of Cerebro, the helmet we see Xavier wearing at all times in the present. Cerebro has traditionally been used as a mutant-finding device, and as a machine that amplifies psychic powers. But could it be a way of creating a collective mutant intelligence? And could that, in turn, be the thing that leads to the creation of Nimrod’s archive of mutant consciousness 100 years down the line? It would advance Charles’ agenda of mutant solidarity, and also push mutants up the scale of civilization. I also suspect it would open up Charles to a terrible mistake given that he’s using a machine, and this story is positioning machines as the enemy and chief competitor of mutantdom.

• As the first act of the story comes to a close with the Phalanx reveal and all necessary set-up exposition out of the way, next week we finally get to see…. y’know, the X-Men! Doing X-Men things! I’m very much looking forward to Hickman’s versions of Nightcrawler, Husk, and Monet.

The House That Xavier Built

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One Down

“One Down”
All-New X-Men #26-29 (2014)
Written by Brian Michael Bendis
Pencils by Stuart Immonen
Inks by Wade von Grawbadger

Stuart Immonen has been working steadily in mainstream comics since the early 1990s but has over the course of this decade become one of the best and most widely imitated artists in the industry. If Marvel has a “house style” in the mid-to-late 2010s, it’s a post-Immonen look, and the two artists drawing the initial wave of Jonathan Hickman X-Men comics – R.B. Silva and Pepe Larraz – are highly gifted pencilers whose aesthetics nevertheless boil down to “I can’t believe it’s not Stuart Immonen.”

It certainly takes a lot of skill to mimic Immonen. His draftsmanship is excellent, he’s brilliant with facial expressions and body language, and he’s particularly gifted in rendering lighting for dramatic effect. Larraz and Silva, while each having some identifiable stylistic flair on their own, have come to draw their pages with very Immonen-ish designs and rhythms, and the particular line weights of his illustrations. They didn’t always draw quite like this, so it seems like a reasonable assumption that they’ve adjusted to market demands. If that’s the case, the very fact that they are drawing the ultra-hyped House of X and Powers of X launch would prove that to be a winning strategy. 

Immonen himself has not worked for Marvel for over a year, and has shifted his attention to other projects after completing a run with Dan Slott on Amazing Spider-Man with issue #800. This was the culmination of a period in which Immonen was clearly Marvel’s top artist, during which he only worked on high profile comics with top writers – Fear Itself with Matt Fraction, All-New X-Men with Brian Michael Bendis, Captain America with Rick Remender, and Star Wars with Jason Aaron. Though Fear Itself was the flagship title of a crossover event, his work on All-New X-Men was his true star-making work. Immonen, whose aesthetics have shifted over the years while always retaining core strengths, had fully solidified into what is now his iconic style with All-New X-Men. His style was a fresh look for the X-Men – very earthy and grounded in its action, and elegant in rendering the emotional details of Bendis’ very soapy approach to the series.

All-New X-Men #26 is the opening chapter of Immonen’s final arc on the series before handing the book over to rising star Mahmud Asrar. The story is mostly about the return of the future Brotherhood, who were the antagonists of the “Battle of the Atom” crossover from a year before. The primary cast of All-New X-Men were the time-displaced original five X-Men from the ‘60s – teenage versions of Cyclops, Jean Grey, Beast, Iceman, and Angel. They were brought to the present by the adult Beast to emotionally torture the adult Cyclops after Cyclops appeared to have murdered their mutual father figure, Charles Xavier. 

The future Brotherhood, who originally present themselves as the X-Men of the future, are mainly focused on trying to get the original X-Men to return to their place in the timeline, but turn out to be driven more by a hatred of the X-Men and their failures. The future Brotherhood is led by a son of Charles Xavier who looks just like his father and has all of his powers, and has a grudge against the X-Men for not honoring his dad and his vision. “They stand on my grave and they speak of his legacy and they have done nothing but make a mockery of it,” he explains near the end of this arc. “The X-Men murdered him and then went on like nothing happened. They moved into his house and they took his money and they didn’t even have the courtesy to keep his name on the school he built.” 

Charles Junior may be a psychopath with childish grudges, but he’s not entirely wrong. His read on the X-Men and their reckless behavior – “You don’t think about how your actions affect the future!” – is entirely correct. Bendis was affectionally critiquing years of X-Men comics, and tying together the larger themes of family and legacy at the center of his X-Men. Everything in the Bendis period comes down to the question of what the X-Men ought to be in the absence of Xavier, and there’s never any tidy answer. Charles Junior, who turns out to be the secret love child of Xavier and Mystique, has valid concerns about what the X-Men do in his father’s name but despite appearances, he’s very much the product of Xavier’s absence. He looks just like his father and is also a powerful psychic, but he lacks his old man’s moral compass and humanitarian vision. He’s much more like his spiteful and manipulative mother. 

There are two sequences in the “One Down” arc that stand out, almost entirely as a result of Immonen’s top-notch artwork. The first is the opening scene of #26, in which the adult Cyclops checks in on the teenage Jean Grey in her quarters. The two characters had mostly avoided one another up until this point in Bendis’ story. It’s very uncomfortable for Cyclops to be in the presence of the teen version of his late wife, and ultra weird for the teen Jean to be around the adult version of the guy she finds out she marries later in life.

Immonen illustrates this scene with remarkable nuance – you hardly even need to read the dialogue to pick up on exactly how the characters feel and are relating to one another. Immonen captures the odd emotional reality of the situation, and the confusing intimacy of their conversation. Cyclops feels an easy rapport with any version of Jean, but is doing everything he can to behave appropriately around her despite his feelings. Jean can’t help but be attracted to him, and admits she prefers the adult Cyclops to his younger self. “It’s like, instead of hoping you’d grow up to become this man, you DID become this man,” she tells him. He does the right thing and pulls away in this moment, and Jean is visibly frustrated.

The second is the extended sequence in #27 in which the future Brotherhood ambush the X-Men in their own home, which at the time is the former Weapon X facility in Canada. Raze, the future son of Mystique and Wolverine, has entered the building under the guise of a wounded X-23, warning about the presence of a shape-shifter. Triage, the X-Men’s young healer, tends to her wounds. “You’re the healer?,” Raze says as he transforms into his true form and slashes his throat. “You first.” Immonen nails the beats of this reveal, and then goes on to perfectly render a sense of claustrophobia and terror as the Brotherhood cut out the power in the facility and start picking off team members. 

Bendis is known for writing to artists’ strengths, and it seems clear that he took note of Immonen’s skill for lighting when deciding to set a key action scene in an underground bunker lit only by creepy pilot lights. Colorist Marte Gracia does great work here too, presenting all of these scenes in a wash of dull red ambiance. A lot of superhero comics suffer for a vagueness of setting, but Immonen and crew keep you in fully aware of physical space in these issues, and it enhances the overall tense and anxious feeling of the story.  

Everything Is Sinister

“Everything Is Sinister”
Uncanny X-Men Vol 2 #1-3 (2012)
Written by Kieron Gillen
Pencils by Carlos Pacheco with Jorge Molina, Rodney Buchemi, and Paco Diaz

By the time Kieron Gillen got the opportunity to write Mister Sinister, the character was firmly established as one of the most prominent X-Men antagonists, but also one of the most confusing. Sinister, who was originally introduced by Chris Claremont and Marc Silvestri as the mysterious new archvillain of the X-Men following the rehabilitation of Magneto, was never given a concrete backstory during Claremont’s original tenure on the series. He’s responsible for sending his Marauders to murder the Morlocks in the “Mutant Massacre,” but we never find out why until a retcon a decade after that story was published. In “Inferno” he’s revealed to be the mastermind behind the creation of the Jean Grey clone Madelyne Pryor in an elaborate scheme to mate Jean’s genetic potential with that of Cyclops’ despite Jean’s seeming death at the time he set the plan in motion. Claremont’s Sinister isn’t a character so much as a plot driver, and given his assumption that he would be writing X-Men indefinitely, there’s a sense that he was going to get around to the origin and motivations of Sinister at some point in the ‘90s. 

Claremont set the basic template for Mister Sinister – master manipulator, mad scientist, obsessed with cloning, and knowingly camp in his villainy. Silvestri’s brilliant original design for the character looked like Colossus as a goth glam rocker. Later writers built on this with retcons, most notably that he was not actually a mutant but a Victorian scientist named Nathaniel Essex who was genetically enhanced by Apocalypse. Fabian Nicieza deepened Sinister’s obsession with Cyclops’ family line, but also cemented the trope that Sinister is always plotting something but mostly just taunts the X-Men rather than do anything actually scary. Writers just kept giving Sinister more powers too, to the point where it just seemed like he was borderline omnipotent. (But yet, always so easily defeated?)

Kieron Gillen took it upon himself to take everything previous writers had done with Sinister and not just make sense of it all but position him as a thematically logical archnemesis for the X-Men. He doesn’t contradict anything important about the character – he’s an amoral Victorian dandy mad scientist obsessed with mutants – but he revealed what he’s been working towards all this time. Basically, he’s been tinkering with mutant genes and cloning all this time to turn himself into a hive mind species. It’s the ultimate expression of egomania – he wants to replace both humans and mutants on earth with endless iterations of himself in a distinctly British version of a fascist utopia. It’s “God made us in His image” taken very literally by someone with the means to be like “Oh, I can do that too.” 

Gillen had finally made sense of Sinister’s motivation, but the real fun is in how he wrote his dialogue. The character had always been written as a pompous megalomaniac prone to monologues and melodramatic gestures, but Gillen really leaned into it and emphasized that when it comes down to it, he’s just a messy bitch who lives for drama. It’s all a big game to him, and he loves playing the villain. He chose the name Mister Sinister!  Gillen writes Sinister as a demented sort of artist, and playing the part of over-the-top scenery-chewing supervillain is a deliberate part of his persona. He’s not about dogma or nobility like Apocalypse or Magneto – for him it’s just ego, a barely-concealed erotic obsession with Cyclops and Jean Grey, and a perverse sense of fun.

A large portion of “Everything Is Sinister” is basically Mister Sinister doing a classic “villain explains his evil plot to the heroes” monologue, and he’s loving every moment of it. He actually mentions on panel that he’s been dying to tell the X-Men – and specifically Cyclops – all about it for a very long time. It’s a performance, and he knows that this particular story is just a dress rehearsal for a bigger arc later on in Gillen’s run. When Sinister taunts Cyclops at the end of this arc – “Next time we talk, you’ll be more hated than I’ve ever been” – he’s absolutely correct, which would imply that Sinister is a something of a metatextual character. He knows what Gillen knows about editorial plans, but the other characters are on the same page as the reader. 

Gillen’s version of Mister Sinister has become the dominant iteration of the character since this story was published, but some writers have done better with this than others. Jonathan Hickman used a version of Sinister in Secret Wars to great effect, pushing him even further into bitchy camp. (Hickman loves writing a petty elitist, so of course he’d gravitate to the Gillen Sinister.)

But still, this hasn’t stopped writers like Jeff Lemire, Cullen Bunn, and Matthew Rosenberg from writing Mister Sinister more recently as a gloating chump, and essentially as a “mini-boss” in their larger narratives. Of course, part of the beauty of Gillen’s conception of the character is that it makes sense of the existence of off-model Sinisters showing up in lesser comics. He’s basically given the Mister Sinister the canonical equivalent of Doctor Doom’s Doombot doubles. (“Oh, that wasn’t the true Doom, that was just a Doombot” has been a way for writers to retcon previous stories they dislike since John Byrne wrote Fantastic Four in the ‘80s.) 

Of course, given that Hickman is now in charge of the X-Men mythos going forward and is an avowed fan of Gillen’s concept for Mister Sinister, it can be taken as a given that there won’t be any dull or wasted uses of the character for at least a few years to come. The future, as the character is wont to say, is distinctly Sinister. 

Torn

“Torn (part 2)” 
Astonishing X-Men #14 (2006)
Written by Joss Whedon
Art by John Cassaday

I am not a fandom-y person, and don’t really go in for “shipping” and all that. It’s just not how I’ve ever engaged with fiction. That said, if I have an OTP – “one true pairing” – in all of fiction, it’s Scott Summers and Emma Frost. It’s not because I want to be either of them, or that I fancy them, or that I think it’s a particularly romantic pairing. It’s more just that there is something about the combination of these characters that rings very true to me. 

It makes a lot of sense to me that Cyclops, after falling out of love with Jean Grey, would gravitate to someone who could offer the same telepathic radical transparency but without Jean’s idealism. Both Jean and Emma can see him for exactly who he is, but whereas Jean judges him for his weaknesses, Emma accepts him as he is. She finds him interesting and wants to help him be the man he yearns to be. That gives him permission to be vulnerable. He’s exhausted by having to always live up to Jean’s example and expectations. 

It makes sense that Emma Frost would be attracted to a man with his power, ambition, and nobility. Emma is innately drawn to status, but also to puzzles and broken things. She is a domme, and likes to assert power and influence over him. But just as she gives him the freedom to let down his guard and be something else, he’s accepting of her desire to follow a more noble calling with the X-Men rather than with the Hellfire Club. While other X-Men doubt her motives and morality, Scott takes her at her word and gives her his full respect and admiration. 

They found each other at the perfect crossroads in their lives, where she was ready to be “good” and he was finally willing to loosen up and be a bit “bad.” Over the course of their relationship – which in publishing time runs from around 2002 up through 2014, mostly told in stories written by Grant Morrison, Joss Whedon, Matt Fraction, Kieron Gillen, and Brian Michael Bendis – they bring out the best and worst in each other. There’s something very honest about this love story, and how it begins and ends in very messy ways. 

While Grant Morrison established the Scott and Emma romance in New X-Men, it was Joss Whedon who fully developed it during his run on Astonishing X-Men with artist John Cassaday. Whedon’s story picks up where Morrison left off, with Scott and Emma officially together shortly after Jean Grey’s latest death. Morrison only ever wrote Scott and Emma’s romance as an illicit psychic affair, but Whedon gets to explore the dynamics of them as an actual couple. He’s the one who establishes them as partners in leadership, to the chagrin of most of the other X-Men – Scott defers to Emma in many decisions, and this is where her ruthlessness starts to seep into his own attitude. This is the beginning of his gradual political radicalization. 

Whedon fully dives into the Scott and Emma relationship in Astonishing X-Men #14, the second part of the “Torn” story arc. This issue is primarily focused on a confrontation between the two of them that echoes the sort of “psychic therapy” she gave to him during the Morrison run, but with a more aggressive “tough love” bent. Emma starts by prodding at his weak spots – his idealistic love for Jean, his envy of Wolverine’s macho charisma, his insecurity over his position as the leader of the X-Men – but he resists that approach. He’s aware of all that, he’s done the work to move on. But she’s really just softening him up so he can get to his darkest secret, a repressed memory of him as an adolescent deciding that the only way for him to have full responsibility his devastating eye-blasts would be to make sure he couldn’t control them and had a failsafe in the form of his visor. At the end of the issue, Emma gives him the control he’s denied himself, but in doing so effectively cuts off his access to the power altogether. It’s hard to tell whether she’s being cruel or kind, even if she’s only doing this as a pawn of the demented psychic being Cassandra Nova. It’s both. 

This plot could set in motion the end of their relationship, but it only makes them stronger. Whedon’s removal of Cyclops’ power echoes what Chris Claremont did with Storm in the ’80s, and uses it as an opportunity for him to prove his mettle and leadership skills without relying on the brute force of his mutant gifts. The power returns in time, and along with it his inability to control it, but Scott interprets what Emma did for him as a gift. He wants someone who will call out his weaknesses and illusions, he wants someone who will help him become a better person. It’s all he ever wants, really – he’s always been written as myopic and obsessed with being the best he can be. And Emma, a curious combination of dominatrix and school teacher from the start, has always been someone who wants to break someone down to build them up. Whedon saw what had been on the page for years and took it to a logical, if not entirely romantic, conclusion.