The Red Coronation

“I’m On A Boat” / “The Red Coronation” / “The Bishop In Black” / 
“The Red Bishop” / “A Time to Sow” / “A Time to Reap” / “From Emma, With Love”
Marauders #1-7
Written by Gerry Duggan
Art by Matteo Lolli, Lucas Wernick, Michele Bandini, and Stefano Caselli
Color art by Federico Blee with Erick Arciniega and Edgar Delgado

Marauders is a peculiar series, both the most radical of the new Dawn of X series in concept and the most traditional in its storytelling. Gerry Duggan is enthusiastically exploring the possibilities of the new ideas Jonathan Hickman introduced in House of X/Powers of X – the issues of trade and diplomacy that come from both Krakoan sovereignty and the miracle drugs that drive its economy, the rebranding of the Hellfire Club as the Hellfire Trading Company, the quirks of Krakoan gates, the utility of the resurrection protocols – and is doing it, in of all things, a pirate comic. I was initially wary of the clean, direct “house style” art and emphasis on humor and action/adventure, but seven issues into the series it’s clear to me that Duggan is playing to his strengths as a writer while taking Hickman’s concepts very seriously. 

This is an ensemble series, but the star is clearly Kitty Pryde. Pryde, who now wishes to be called Kate rather than Kitty, is mysteriously unable to pass through the Krakoan gates and can only get to the living island by boat. In the first issue Emma Frost, the White Queen of the Hellfire Club, offers Pryde a seat on the Quiet Council of Krakoa in exchange for becoming the Red Queen of the Hellfire Club and heading up both the distribution of Krakoan drugs and missions to rescue mutants around the world who cannot find a way to Krakoa. Pryde is accompanied by her close friends Iceman and Storm, the mutant cop Bishop, and the newly resurrected and reformed villain Pyro. Sebastian Shaw, the Black King of the Hellfire Club, is the book’s primary antagonist and is actively scheming against Frost and Pryde. 

Each lead character in Marauders gets some fun moments, but it’s pretty obvious that Duggan is invested in Pryde above all else, and is doing what he can to push the character forward after a few decades of stagnation. The usual problem with the depiction of Pryde is that she’s often written in an overtly nostalgic way by authors who grew up in the early 80s, and that she’s frequently presented as a moralist scold. The latter bit doesn’t have to be a bad thing – it is a legitimate personality flaw that’s been with her since the beginning and it can be genuinely interesting – but Duggan seems rather pointed in steering clear of all that and emphasizing the ways she’s become willing to make ethical compromises. Duggan’s Kate Pryde comes across as a young woman who is so sick of her usual goody-goody patterns that she’s becoming reckless in search of a new identity – she’s more ruthlessly violent, drinking heavily, getting tattoos, and leaning hard into the whole pirate aesthetic. She also seems very depressed and lonely, and I trust Duggan to dig deeper into that as he goes along. 

It doesn’t always work, particularly in the first few issues. There’s a text page in the debut issue in which Wolverine sends a message to Kate asking for a list of goods, foods, and beverages to bring to Krakoa that is both wildly unfunny and nonsensical given that he’s a person who can freely teleport anywhere he wants, and she’s a person who is stuck taking long boat rides everywhere. Duggan fumbles some early story beats by delivering things we’ve already accepted as the high concept of the series, such as Pryde becoming the Red Queen, as big issue-ending reveals. Storm, a Quiet Council member and second to only Cyclops in the chain of command of the X-Men, doesn’t quite make sense as a subordinate supporting character in this series despite her close relationship with Pryde and only seems to be in the book because Duggan called dibs on her very early. 

Duggan’s greatest strength in writing Marauders is that while the circumstances of the story are exploring new ground, the relationships and motives of the characters are firmly rooted in continuity without getting bogged down in rehashing old stories. Frost and Pryde, introduced in the same issue back in the Claremont/Byrne era, have a long and complicated history together, and Duggan pushes them into a new phase of mutual respect and collaboration after too often being written as petty rivals who cruelly condescend to one another. Storm and Iceman are two of Pryde’s closest friends in the X-Men, but are also two people who’ve had very painful histories with Emma Frost. When Callisto is reintroduced in the seventh issue, Duggan gracefully acknowledges her contentious relationship with Storm, her past with the Morlocks, and her brief career as a model. I particularly like when Callisto shows a grudging respect for Pryde taking the name of the Marauders, the kill crew who slaughtered the Morlocks and nearly ended Pryde’s life in the “Mutant Massacre.”

Marauders has been illustrated by four different artists in the span of seven issues, and while they’ve all been somewhat bland and functional, they’ve all matched up stylistically so the series at least has a consistent visual aesthetic. It feels somewhat churlish to complain about the strong draftsmanship of Matteo Lolli, Lucas Wernick, Michele Bandini, and Stefano Caselli, but I do wish they had a bit more flair. They’re not exactly miscast for the tone or subject matter of the book, and Lolli is particularly good at drawing some of Duggan’s most imaginative action sequences, but it looks like it could be any mid-list Marvel book as opposed to what is effectively one of the flagships of the newly ascendant X-Men franchise. I just wish it looked more fresh. 

All told, I’m glad I held off in writing about this series because it’s been better with each passing issue, with Duggan deepening his characterization and steadily heightening the stakes. He’s even managed to make Jason Aaron’s Hellfire Kids characters from his dreadfully goofy Wolverine and the X-Men run a worthwhile set of antagonists in this, which is borderline miraculous. (That said, why does he take these awful little kids more seriously than Donald Pierce, a character who was presented as one of the more unhinged and terrifying villains of Chris Claremont’s original run?) But despite minor quibbles, I feel like Duggan is headed in the right direction and am grateful for his efforts in evolving Kate Pryde as a character. 

Ghosts

“Ghosts”/“Retribution”/“Salvation”
Uncanny X-Men 207-209 (1986)
Written by Chris Claremont
Pencils by John Romita Jr.
Inks by Dan Green

This run of issues near the end of John Romita Jr’s tenure on Uncanny X-Men is the climax of years of ongoing plot going back to the late John Byrne period, paying off on story elements involving the Hellfire Club in “The Dark Phoenix Saga” and the bleak future timeline introduced in “Days of Future Past.” This story, which I’ll collectively refer to as “Ghosts” as that is the title of the trade paperback in which it is all collected, is also the prelude to the radical overhaul of the series’ cast and status quo that would happen after the subsequent “Mutant Massacre.” Chris Claremont very obviously intended this story arc to mark the end of an era, and a transition into a phase where the influence of his most ambitious contemporaries – most notably Alan Moore – would be more apparent. 

“Ghosts” is primarily the conclusion of the Rachel Summers plot thread that had carried through Uncanny X-Men for about two years at this point, but originated in “Days of Future Past.” Rachel was introduced in that story as the daughter of Cyclops and Jean Grey in a grim future in which the Sentinels were largely successful in snuffing out mutants, and Rachel was a brainwashed “hound” used by the government to hunt down other mutants. Rachel eventually makes her way back to the present, and gradually insinuates herself into the X-Men. She’s a very troubled character – she is rattled by the notion that her very existence is impossible in this timeline given that Jean Grey had died, she has severe PTSD from her experience in the future, and becomes an existential threat to everyone once she gains access to the extraordinary power of the Phoenix force. Everyone is terrified of Rachel’s power, knowing that her much more stable mother was driven mad by the same power and killed an entire planet on a whim. Near-omnipotence in the hands of someone this sad and broken? Yikes. 

Claremont deliberately avoids retracing the steps of “The Dark Phoenix Saga,” and writes a different sort of tragedy. Rachel’s trauma and anger don’t result in a Dark Phoenix meltdown, but do lead her to other forms of self-destructive actions. At this point in Rachel’s story, she’s fallen into a deep depression, and feels extremely isolated from her friends, and is overwhelmed by guilt and grief. In “Ghosts,” Rachel has a series of vivid dreams in which she is murdered by Wolverine, and essentially wills that scenario into being as she decides to hunt down and kill Selene, the vampiric Black Queen of the Hellfire Club. Wolverine, clearly afraid of this leading to either a Dark Phoenix situation or her simply becoming more like him, feels compelled to stop her. She refuses to stand down, and tells him the only way to stop her is to kill her. So in the final panel of the issue he pops his claws into her chest. It’s suicide-by-Wolverine. 

In the next issue, Rachel is bleeding out in Central Park near the Guggenheim. She’s weak, and can’t keep the thoughts of thousands of passerby out of her head. She’s only alive because her telekinetic powers are strong enough to mitigate the severe damage Wolverine did to her heart and lungs. She quickly discovers that Selene has killed again, and Wolverine’s intervention has done no good at all. Despite her condition, she’s still so powerful that she can locate Wolverine from across town and torture him from afar. 

These scenes, like most anything in this period of the Uncanny X-Men, work in large part because John Romita Jr’s art is so grounded in the reality of mid-80s New York City. Romita Jr draws street scenes with remarkable accuracy, and keeps the reader very aware of physical space. Claremont takes advantage of this during this run, keeping stories close to the ground and full of vivid, specific locations. The character design follows suit, as Romita Jr gradually transitions most of the characters away from traditional superhero costumes in favor of stylish street clothes with the colorful aesthetics of superhero outfits. At this stage the X-Men mostly look like a new wave band. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the best the characters have ever looked and it’s sad that almost no one draws the characters as punky hipsters after Romita Jr and his successor Marc Silvestri did so well with this look in the ‘80s. 

As Rachel continues to stumble through Central Park on the edge of death, the X-Men clash with the Hellfire Club and Nimrod, the nearly unstoppable Sentinel from Rachel’s future. It’s the unlikely culmination of years of X-Men/Hellfire Club rivalry, as the enemy factions team up to take down the immensely powerful robot. Half of the core Hellfire Club characters perish in the battle on the bramble, and the rest establish a truce that would last through the remainder of Claremont’s original run on the X-books. This plot development came less than a year after Claremont had fully transitioned Magneto from arch-villain to Charles Xavier’s replacement as headmaster of the school, and highlights his narrative boldness at the time. The Hellfire Club had been the primary antagonists of the X-Men comics for half a decade, and were now being set aside. Claremont was ready to bring in new threats, and to make the moral center of the series more ambiguous. 

Whereas the end of “The Dark Phoenix Saga” ends with Jean Grey’s suicide on the moon, Rachel’s arc concludes by embracing a different sort of self-negation. As Rachel staggers through the park, barely holding her body together, she is dazzled by Spiral’s magic and lured into the Body Shoppe with the promise of being given an entirely new life. Spiral is, of course, a nefarious character, but Rachel is too weak and too psychologically tormented not to be the perfect mark. It doesn’t take much to seduce Rachel into giving up her entire life. All she’s ever known is agony, horror, and failure. Claremont writes Rachel’s final scene as half happy ending, half pathetic tragedy. Rachel departs Uncanny X-Men as a coward, as someone who refuses to face responsibility for her actions and embraces the promise of absolution and/or oblivion. 

This is obviously not the end of Rachel Summers, but it is. This is the clear ending of Rachel’s arc, and true to Spiral’s promise, we never do see this version of Rachel ever again. Rachel Summers reappears about a year and a half later as one of the stars of Claremont’s Excalibur series, and she’s basically a new person. The Excalibur version of Rachel is far less tortured, written as more overtly queer, and fits in more with the deliberately light and goofy tone of that series. There’s some merit to this version of the character and some other later iterations of Rachel by other writers, but all of the pathos is drained out. Rachel, over time, becomes nothing more than a stand-in for Jean Grey in the X-Men during the periods when Jean is dead. The more Rachel has been established as a generic hero or Jean replacement, the further writers get from anything that made her compelling, including her queerness. Attempts to pair Rachel off with men, particularly Nightcrawler, have been incredibly unconvincing and dull. Nothing has really worked with Rachel since Uncanny X-Men #209 for a simple reason: Her story ended. If only anyone, especially Rachel’s creator, could have left well enough alone.