The Broken Land

“The Broken Land,” “Man on Fire,”
“Loss,” “Three Short Stories About Death”
X-Men Red #1-4
Written by Al Ewing
Art by Stefano Caselli (#1-3), Juann Cabal, Andrés Genolet, Michael Sta. Maria (#4)
Color art by Federico Blee

X-Men Red is a very bold and new kind of X-Men series, one with a premise that would have been entirely inconceivable prior to 2020. This is the series exploring the culture of the Arrakii mutants introduced in X of Swords, who now reside on a terraformed Mars that has been declared the capital of the solar system without consulting with any of the humans who happen to live there. Storm has emerged as the Regent of Arrako, and is the first Earth mutant to become part of the Great Ring, the Arrakii equivalent of the Quiet Council. She remains on that council, though Magneto has quit to take up residence on the red planet. Sunspot is also living on Arrako and appears to be gradually working towards some personal agenda, and Cable is there along with Abigail Brand, continuing on from where Ewing’s previous X-Men series SWORD left off. (Whoops, sorry, I meant to write about that after it concluded but never did. It was mostly very good.)

Ewing spends some time developing the members of the Great Ring, but the book is really about the Krakoan mutants and how they adjust to living with totally different customs and the question of how much they should attempt to shape the future of a people they have no history with. 

Sunspot initially seems the most eager to bring a bit of Earth culture to Mars, but it’s his way to play dumb while gradually working towards something bigger in plain sight. He and Brand are the mutants with the widest perspective – his experiences with the Shi’ar make him think on a galactic scale. But while Sunspot sees a universe full of opportunities, Brand can only see a great game of grim intergalactic politics and is plotting to decrease the wider influence of both Arrako and Krakoa.

Storm, always a person of great integrity, rejects her regal trappings and finds herself reliving the time she defeated Callisto in battle and took on leadership of the Morlocks but on a far grander scale. Practice has not made it any easier, and she seems to be so occupied by maintaining her credibility and spinning the plates of her many responsibilities that she can’t devote enough time to figuring out exactly what the now overtly evil Brand is up to. 

Magneto, on the other hand, comes to the red planet utterly humbled and broken, and finds himself accidentally accruing power and joining the Great Ring after defeating Tarn the Uncaring, the Arrakii’s answer to both Hitler and Mengele, in a duel. This story, which plays out in the third issue, is where Ewing makes it clear what kind of series he’s writing. It’s brutal and thrilling, and one which constantly tests the mettle of its leads. Magneto’s triumph over Tarn is one of the most exciting things I’ve read in a superhero comic in years. Ewing and Stefano Caselli pace the sequence masterfully, leaving room for suspense even after Sunspot uses Isca the Unbeaten’s power to never lose against her in order to make Magneto’s victory a foregone conclusion. Tarn, one of the best new mutant X-Men villains in years, had already been developed by Zeb Wells in Hellions and Ewing in SWORD, so his loss carries weight particularly in light of the Arrakii’s rejection of mutant resurrection. It hard to be Tarn for this plot beat to work – someone formidable, endlessly cruel, and already established to be the most hated man on Arrako. 

At the end of the third issue Ewing positions Magneto not just as a member of the Great Ring, but as a hero to all Arrakii for slaying Tarn. By the end of the fifth issue – which I’ll write about later on – circumstances shift power to Magneto’s seat on the Ring. It seems to me that Ewing is gradually writing a story in which Magneto gets to live the dream of his younger self as a beloved leader on an entire planet of mutants, but it’s all cursed. As we move ahead with this series it seems that the tension will be the question of what happens as Magneto acclimates to power in this world, and how it may pit him against his allies Storm and Sunspot. It looks a lot like Ewing is slowly building a situation in which Magneto may actually find himself in direct conflict with Charles Xavier and the X-Men, but in a totally fresh way. 

• Stefano Caselli, who has already done strong work on Marauders, SWORD, and Inferno, has risen to the occasion of Ewing’s plots. He’s very good with pacing and drama, and in depicting nuance in facial expressions. I was particularly impressed by a page in the third issue in which Magneto cycles through facial expressions in nine panels, his agitation subtly emphasized by the equally sized panels not neatly fitting into a grid. 

• Federico Blee’s color art is essential to this series, his bright palette of mostly warm colors always signaling to the reader that they’re on a planet with a very light and atmosphere. He does a lot of work to make sure everything feels alien and surreal and geologically pristine, and maintains a sharp contrast with scenes set in the cold lighting of Brand’s space station or the more blue-green hues of Krakoa. It’s incredibly thoughtful work, something which ought to raise his profile as a colorist in the medium. 

• The guest artists on the fourth issue are well chosen, and fit Ewing’s established MO from his past work on Immortal Hulk and Guardians of the Galaxy of making sure that shifts in art style are matched to shifts in narrative style. In this case, we get three vignettes on the theme of death before… well, we’ll get to that later. Juann Cabal and Andrés Genolet both do fine work in that issue, but I was most impressed by Michael Sta. Maria. I wasn’t familiar with his art before this issue, but I’d be quite happy for him to return to this book. 

The Death of Moira X

Inferno #4
Written by Jonathan Hickman
Art by Valerio Schiti with Stefano Caselli
Color art by David Curiel

Jonathan Hickman’s story ends here, and it feels like a proper conclusion even if he’s acknowledged in interviews that he’s not accustomed to leaving before getting to his planned ending. (I suppose he just kinda forgot about The Black Monday Murders and The Dying and the Dead when he said this, both of which stalled out indefinitely due to complications in the lives of their respective artists.) Inferno works because it pulls together the central threads of his run – the founding of Krakoa, the emergence of Orchis, and the fraught Moira/Destiny/Mystique situation – rather than gesture towards what could have been. The big status quo shifts of the second and third acts of this epic he had in mind may yet come to pass with other writers, or he could always come back around to writing them himself at some point. But whatever comes down the line is another thing altogether, as this issue provides a satisfying finale to the narrative he started in House of X. You could reasonably stop reading X-Men here, though the promo line at the end is apt: “To be continued, forever.” 

• “I see ten lives, Moira. Maybe eleven if you make the right choice at the end… but that is all.” 

Now we know why this is, as Mystique blasts Moira with the same gun designed by Forge that stripped Storm of her powers back in the original Claremont era. Mystique does this so she can kill Moira with impunity, but it’s clear enough that Emma Frost gave her this weapon to address her own existential concerns. Moira gets to be a human, as she longed for in her earlier lives, and everyone gets to rest easy knowing that one woman’s death wouldn’t mean wiping out all existence. The looming threat hanging over Hickman’s story is disarmed, while setting up Moira as a wild card for future stories. And to add insult to Moira’s injury of ensured mortality, she’s had one of her arms replaced with living technology, merging her with the very thing she’d been fearing all along. 

It’s easy to understand Mystique and Destiny’s motives and Emma Frost’s resentment of Moira’s power, and even Cypher’s disgust for Moira’s self-serving anxieties. But it’s harder to get why no one seems willing to give Moira the proper credit for being the entire reason they have a Krakoan nation and the miracle of resurrection. Moira is essentially punished for the crime of attempting to preserve this thing everyone is so invested in, albeit with zero transparency and a hidden desire to finally snuff out the conflict of mutants, humans, and machines by “curing” the mutants. But as sad as this is for Moira, it’s yet another thing she can learn from, and the young mutant nation can move ahead without its secret extremely neurotic and negative puppet master. On a metatextual level, the same character who had ushered in the new era of X-Men had held on too much of the dark anxieties driving the old comics, and had to be taken out so the new way could flourish.

And hey, even if Moira dies at some point there’s really nothing preventing her from being resurrected with her powers intact, just like all the depowered mutants made whole in the Crucible ritual. There’s just no getting around the value of her accrued knowledge. 

• The long-awaited confrontation of Moira, Mystique, and Destiny plays out in the same nine panel grid structure that Pepe Larraz used in House of X #2 and Valerio Schiti used again reprising that scene earlier in Inferno. Just as in that scene set in Moira’s third life, she’s captive and passive as Mystique and Destiny stand before her – the former glowering and aggressive, the latter still and inscrutable behind her metal mask. You watch Moira cycle through emotions – denial, defiance, bargaining, depression, acceptance – and we see that history has simply repeated. Despite any expectations we had going into this scene, it’s Mystique and Destiny confronting Moira about her desire to “cure” mutants. 

• The cycle breaks upon the arrival of Cypher, who has been keeping tabs on the situation and intervenes. Cypher, the best good boy of Hickman’s story, the mutant master of language who stops violence with rational communication. Cypher wins with logic and negotiation – Mystique would be murdering a human, and she would be exiled and Destiny would be removed from power. By stepping away the two of them can remain on the council and gradually consolidate power, as he does as well. Mystique is frustrated, but Cypher reminds her – you just got exactly what you wanted. And he’s right, since Inferno is basically a story about Mystique winning and becoming even more powerful, except for not getting to murder someone she had already tortured and made human. 

• By the way, this is my favorite panel in this issue. It’s the very definition of hypocrisy. 

• The confrontation of Magneto and Xavier with Omega Sentinel and Nimrod turns out to be much more bleak, but of course how could it not be? The machines show themselves for who they are – so indifferent to the humans that they murder them to get them out of the way, and announcing to the leaders of mutantdom that they are their true enemy. Of course this is hardly news to Magneto and Xavier thanks to Moira, so it doesn’t really matter that they end up getting killed and resurrected without memory of this battle. But it’s interesting to see how the machines believe they’re a step ahead of the mutants, but are in fact several steps behind. They don’t know about mutant resurrection, and when Nimrod destroys Xavier’s Cerebro helmet, it has no clue what the actual function of that device is. This is wonderfully ironic as the technology behind Cerebro was reversed engineered from the Nimrod of Moira’s sixth life creating the archive of mutant psyches. 

• Before Hickman launched House of X/Powers of X there was a cryptic Marvel house ad teasing the run with these words on a white background – “When two aggressive species share the same environment, evolution demands adaptation or dominance.” And here at the end of his story we see exactly what this means as the two aggressive species – mutants and artificial intelligence – are at war with the exact same motivations. Omega Sentinel, driven by her experiences in a future where the mutants win, echoes Cyclops’ defiant words from House of X #1: “Did you honestly think we were going to sit around forever and just take it?” We side with the mutants, we know they’re the heroes of this story. When Cyclops says this it’s an inspiring moment, and when Omega says it it’s a menacing threat. But through all of this, are the mutants any less ruthless? Are the mutants not incredibly bold in what they claim for themselves, down to terraforming the neighboring planet and declaring it the capitol of the solar system? 

For many years the human antagonists of the X-Men were psychopathic hate mongers, and the Sentinels were just their weapons. It was very narratively flat. But at the end of Hickman’s story we have machines with the same desires to both survive and thrive as the mutants, and the humans of Orchis are motivated by traumas inflicted on them by mutants and an understandable threat of mutants as an aggressive and arrogant species. Of the many gifts Hickman gave to the X-Men franchise, this is one of the most crucial, and one most likely to become central to all subsequent adaptations. 

• I was a bit confused by Xavier causing a huge telekinetic blast after Nimrod crushed Cerebro, given that the character is known to only be a telepath. But I remember early on in Powers of X there was another scene in which Xavier appeared to be using telekinesis, though that could have been explained as Magneto using his powers to drift a USB stick to his hands. I have two No Prize-worthy explanations for this – first, it could be that all powerful telepaths have potential for telekinesis and it came out in a moment of extreme duress. Second, it could be that Xavier had telekinesis added to his powers in genetic modification of his body before resurrection so that he could have a defensive power in the mix. 

• We never see Xavier and Magneto learn of what happened with Moira, but I suppose that’s just a story for another day. Or maybe more like two weeks from now, as locating and protecting Moira seems to be central to the plot of Benjamin Percy’s X Lives and X Deaths of Wolverine event. 

• There’s a nice bit of continuity juggling with Forge’s de-powering gun here. Mystique references a conversation she had with Forge about it in X-Men #20, a scene that felt a bit navel-gazing and tossed-off at first but is now a major bit of foreshadowing. Emma Frost has a copy of the gun thanks to a story in Marauders which also felt vaguely unnecessary at the time, but now seems like it was probably deliberately coordinated with Gerry Duggan. 

• The final scene with the Quiet Council illustrated by Stefano Caselli is a sentimental farewell to the characters, but also serves a metatextual acknowledgment of what Hickman accomplished with his X-Men run. Something incredible was built, something meant to last a long time. And it will, as the story is passed on to Kieron Gillen, Al Ewing, Gerry Duggan, and Benjamin Percy in the months to come. The story doesn’t really end and that’s a triumph for Hickman, a writer who knows how often narratives are rolled back to a status quo after a writer leaves a corporate comic series. Like Moira and Mystique he’s gotten exactly what he wanted, but it’s still bittersweet. There’s always something else beyond what you want and what you need. This is why it’s good that it’s obvious that of all the characters he used Cypher as his proxy, the guy who ends up quite happy with what he’s built and what he’s gained. 

The Mutants Always Win

Inferno #3
Written by Jonathan Hickman
Art by R.B. Silva with Valerio Schiti and Stefano Caselli
Color art by David Curiel

“The mutants ALWAYS WIN.” 

That’s the line that made me audibly gasp. The revelation that the Omega Sentinel we’ve been seeing since House of X #1 is not quite the Karima Shapandar from previous X-Men comics but rather a version of her from the future who’d come back in time to prevent a “mutant hell” in which the new dream of Charles Xavier – “mutant ascension” - had come to fruition, laying waste to humanity, post-humanity, and AI alike. It’s the reversal of decades of X-Men comics, including Hickman’s own run – we’re always meant to look at mutants as the underdogs, we believe Moira MacTaggert when she says that no matter what the mutants always lose. But in the future of Moira’s tenth life, it all actually works. It works so well that Omega has to come back and start Orchis and get Nimrod online well ahead of schedule. 

Omega and Moira are mirrors of each other in Hickman’s story – the woman who knows the actual stakes and what can happen, and attempts to steer history towards a desired outcome. Moira uses Xavier and creates the X-Men, Omega uses Devo and creates Orchis. Omega even transfers her experience of the future into the mind of Devo in a way that directly parallels how Xavier gains a similar knowledge of Moira’s lives. The wheel turns, and as the old song goes, everybody wants to rule the world.  

Omega is also a mirror of Kitty Pryde in “Days of Future Past,” a point Hickman highlights in a bit of dialogue – “all my days of a future past.” The method of time travel is similar – the consciousness of the future Omega has overwritten the consciousness of the younger Omega, just as the older Kate Pryde inhabited the body of the young Kitty. Zoom out and consider that the primary mutant antagonists of Inferno are Destiny and Mystique and it becomes clear that Hickman is ending his run on a story that deliberately echoes the climax of John Byrne’s run. (And of course, Grant Morrison did the same thing in their own way.)

As he did through a lot of House of X and Powers of X, Hickman does his due diligence in explaining how his story fits in with previous continuity in the most low key way possible, in this case elegantly explaining that the Nimrod that appeared in Chris Claremont and John Romita’s classic mid-‘80s stories came from the same future as Omega, sent back in time after the mutants of her timeline crush the Children of the Vault and the humans, but before they “tamed the Phoenix” and destroyed the Phalanx Dominions. (This is the only time the Phoenix has come up in Hickman’s run, a decision that obviously quite deliberate in terms of getting the X-books out of some familiar ruts.) 

Omega isn’t the only character on the sidelines from the beginning of Hickman’s story that we learn is more crucial to the plot than had been entirely obvious. In the first quarter of the issue we learn that Cypher has never quite trusted Xavier, and in alliance with Warlock and Krakoa has been monitoring what he and Magneto talk about in private so they’re not left in the dark. This confirms something suggested by the previous issue – the majority of the text pages we’ve seen through this era of X-Men have been data collected by Warlock, who is bonded to Krakoa and feeding information to Cypher. All of this leads Cypher to become aware of the Xavier/Magneto/Moira arguments from the first issue, and Moira’s demands that Destiny be wiped from existence. We’ll see what he does with that knowledge next issue. Given that Hickman writes Cypher as a pure-hearted mensch, it’s probably something very heroic!

This is a satisfying payoff to one of the lingering mysteries of Hickman’s run, and the pages leading up to this reveal highlight how much of what the mutants have accomplished – the mutant language, the gates and the gate controls, the drugs for humans, solving the problem of how to feed Krakoa – are mostly thanks to Cypher and his collaboration with the island. We already kinda knew this, but it’s good to have this foregrounded when we consider who deserves the credit here. Xavier and Magneto take credit for the ideas of their silent partner Moira in their position as figureheads of the mutant nation, but without Cypher there’s nothing much at all. 

Magneto and Xavier find themselves at odds in this issue, but in a way that feels quite fresh. They talk about feeling haunted by Moira’s insistence that the mutants always lose, and Xavier stands firm in his belief that this is not true, while Magneto’s faith is rattled. Magneto sees the situation clearly – with the success of what they’ve built with Krakoa, he and Xavier are just two among the millions. Xavier insists they still have control, but Magneto knows this is increasingly not the case. Magneto, a man defined by his arrogance, is humbled while Xavier, a man defined by his optimistic dreams, refuses to let go of his positive vision. Xavier seems foolish in this scene, but  the next scene shows us that Omega only knows a future in which Xavier’s dreams of ascension and Magneto’s dreams of dominance come to fruition. 

Emma Frost, who learned of what was actually happening with Moira in the previous issue, lets Mystique and Destiny in on the truth in this issue. Or…at least some of it, as it seems as though she has only shown them Moira’s trauma in her third life where she is tortured and executed by the two of them. Emma is manipulating them and Destiny knows it, but it’s hard to say to what end – they’re all terrified of the threat that Moira’s death ends their timeline, but it’s hard to say how “they have to be stopped” doesn’t force a situation in which Moira’s life is in jeopardy. Later in the issue Moira is abducted by Orchis, and Mystique and Destiny make their way to the Orchis Node where she’s held and appear to be brutally torturing her. (Moira’s lost half an arm off-panel!)  

Of course this just lures Magneto and Xavier to the Orchis Node to find and save Moira, but they arrive just in time for Nimrod and Omega Sentinel to show up. It looks like Mystique and Destiny set a trap to get Magneto and Xavier killed as revenge, and maybe this is what Emma wanted too, though we know from the opening scene of the first issue that she has them resurrected. Whatever is going on, Emma Frost clearly has a plan. 

It’s hard to tell how much Emma is playing up a fear of Moira’s power as a thing that threatens to destroy their world to manipulate Mystique and Destiny, and how much is her genuine emotional response to her learning the truth of Moira and her past lives. Emma is clearly smart enough to understand that if they believe the world ends with Moira then Moira must be protected at all costs, but she’s also someone where it would make sense that she would deeply resent everything depending on this one woman. 

But in either case this brings up one of the biggest questions of Hickman’s run, which seems likely to be answered in the finale – if Moira dies, does a timeline die with her? We have no good reason to expect this is the case, since we’re going entirely on Moira’s knowledge of things and her knowledge of each of those timelines would end with her death. On an individual level, the world ends with all of our deaths. But these are the stakes of the story, the tension that’s been at the heart of this since the start of Hickman’s run. It’s quite possible Moira dies in the next issue and they’re all standing around like “oh hey, the world…is still here.” And then there’s Destiny’s prophecy from House of X #2 – “I see ten lives, Moira…maybe eleven if you make the right choice at the end, but that is all.” What is the “right choice”? 

There’s a great little scene before Mystique and Destiny meet with Emma Frost in which Destiny is introduced to the Stepford Cuckoos. They insist the five of them have outgrown any form of individuality and are embracing a collective sense of self, but Destiny tells them they each have very different futures ahead of them, some of them extremely traumatic. They’re shaken by the experience, which gives us a taste of how unsettling it would be to have even a casual conversation with someone who can see the future. Now the poor girls have to live with the prophecy, and we the readers get to see how much of it will play out in the stories to come. 

As we head into the final issue of Hickman’s run the epic scale of his story narrows to just a few key characters – Mystique and Destiny confront Moira, Magneto and Xavier confront Omega and Nimrod, Emma Frost and Cypher wait in the wings as the probable cavalry. 40 pages, maybe a little more, and it’s all over. Do the mutants always win? Let’s hope so, since Hickman’s made such a show of how that’s far more interesting and complicated than them always suffering and losing.

Solve For X

Inferno #2
Written by Jonathan Hickman
Art by Stefano Caselli
Color art by David Curiel

Mystique dominates this issue, appearing on around 75% of the pages as the story shows how she manipulated her way into resurrecting Destiny and getting her voted on to the Quiet Council in the seat vacated by Apocalypse. As a shape shifter Mystique gets what she wants by never appearing to be what she really is, and in this issue we’re nudged to consider something that’s been right in front of us the whole time: Maybe Mystique and Destiny are actually the heroes of this story, and not the antagonists? After all, their invention in Moira MacTaggert’s third life is what put her on a course towards creating the nation of Krakoa, and their combination of foresight and information gathering via infiltration appears to be the only thing that’s giving the mutants an advantage over what appears to be the inevitable attack of Orchis and Nimrod in the next issue. 

As Jonathan Hickman’s X-Men story comes to a close it looks like each of his three tentpole events asks us to consider that the worst person we know has made a great point – first with Magneto realizing his dream of a united and superior mutant nation, second with Apocalypse’s survivalist ethos proven to be justified, and now with Mystique and Destiny securing the future by any means necessary just as they were trying to do in their first major storyline Days of Future Past. 

At this stage of the story our protagonists Moira MacTaggert, Charles Xavier, and Magneto appear to be hamstrung by their pragmatic natures. They cling to a sense of control over their grand designs and scramble to adjust to the unexpected chaos introduced by Mystique and Orchis. All three of them are tripped up by their arrogance and pride, though only Xavier and Magneto seem to be aware of this being one of their shortcomings. There’s no question in the narrative that what they’ve done to create Krakoa has been a net positive, but we now see the limits of their vision, particularly as they let Emma Frost in on the big secret and it all looks terrible from her perspective. 

This issue of Inferno is illustrated by Stefano Caselli, one of the two primary artists of the Marauders series and one of Hickman’s earliest Marvel collaborators back on Secret Warriors and then later on Avengers during the Time Runs Out phase. It makes sense that Caselli was assigned this issue of the series – the narrative doesn’t really demand anything particularly iconic or imaginative, and the plot is mainly a series of conversations that play to his strengths in drawing faces and body language. It’s meat-and-potatoes art, but like… high quality meat and well-prepared potatoes. 

• Mystique’s scheme to revive Destiny is revealed in this issue, and it turns out we already watched most of it in the previous issue, which raises the question of whether or not Xavier and Magneto even attempted to wipe out the possibility of her rebirth as demanded by Moira. The surprising element is that Mystique fulfilled the psychic transfer requirement by imitating Xavier and manipulating Hope into doing it for the first time with “his” encouragement. There’s something rather sweet about this moment – it plays on Hope’s emotional vulnerabilities but also comes across as a kindness, a show of faith in her talent and capabilities. The scenes that follow with Mystique taking care of Destiny as she copes with being overloaded by the past and future rushing into her mind at once is more bittersweet, particularly as Destiny realizes the degree to which Mystique had become unmoored and unhinged in her absence. I hope whichever writer inherits Mystique and Destiny after this story spends some time unpacking this, it’s very ripe.

• Emma Frost is bribed into voting for Destiny because Mystique has stolen something she was desperately seeking – a seemingly sacred item called the Kara Katuça, which she was attempting to  acquire from the unnamed hidden society introduced in a conspicuously random scene at the Hellfire Gala in Hickman’s final issue of X-Men. It’s an odd thing to wedge into the story at this late stage – we only have around 40 or so pages left to go – but I suspect this thing with a name that translates to “black box” in Turkish may end up as a deus ex machina device in battling with Nimrod.

• Emma Frost is the first mutant to be let in on the secret of Moira MacTaggert in a scene that is set by the Winged Victory of Samothrace at the Louvre in Paris, the same place where Xavier and Magneto recruited her as the first member of the Quiet Council back in Powers of X #5.  (Also, more obviously, the depiction of Emma reading Moira’s mind is a direct visual callback to Xavier doing the same in Powers of X.) 

This makes some sense of why Hickman placed Moira in Paris – this scene was very likely sketched out from the start – and the deliberate recurrence of the sculpture makes me wonder why it was chosen to appear in these pivotal scenes. The first time around I thought the work, which is believed to have been created to commemorate a naval victory, was just a nod to Emma taking to the seas in Marauders. But at this stage it seems more like it’s setting her (or Moira, who is more directly visually contrasted with the sculpture on panel) up to be the “goddess of victory” at the end of this arc. The first issue certainly telegraphed a savior role in the first scene, in which we see Emma resurrect Magneto and Xavier presumably after a disastrous Nimrod/Orchis attack to come in the next issue. 

As for the scene itself, Emma quite understandably is furious to have been strung along as she has been through all of this, just as Mystique was upon realizing Magneto and Xavier were playing her for a fool. But she also understands how serious the situation is, and I suspect as we move through the end of this story and into the X-world beyond Inferno that this is the start of her taking on an even larger leadership role.

• The most startling moment of this issue comes in a rather quiet scene between Omega Sentinel and Nimrod in which she tells the developing AI that she’s been monitoring its progress and that it is ready to see what she really is. This line is also the epigraph at the start of the issue, and the previous issue also opens with a line from Omega Sentinel as the epigraph. This strikes me as the set up for what could be a Rabum Alal-level reveal in the third issue, and made me realize that through all of this I have never once given any thought to Omega Sentinel or her presence in the story from the very first issue of House of X.

I went back through all of her scenes and the pattern is clear – from her first lines she is constantly critiquing Orchis and telling them that their plans are likely to end in disaster. Her role as a critical observer is ambiguous, and it’s unclear if she serves any particular master. Director Devo and Doctor Gregor seem to defer to her, but do not answer to her. The alternate timeline version of Omega Sentinel works in tandem with Nimrod but their relationship is also ambiguous, as it defers to her at some points. Her perspective is consistently cold and seemingly neutral. 

So what might she really be? Hickman’s story has an odd recurring theme of characters who are programmed in some way to betray – Cylobel in Powers of X is genetically altered to do this, Isca the Unbeaten’s power dictates that she do this. The alternate Omega remarks on this theme as it’s introduced. The odds seem good that Omega Sentinel will be compelled to betray Orchis, but I don’t think it will be in favor of the mutants. I think it’s more likely that she represents the interests of what will eventually become homo novissima. As a human fully bonded with machines she’s certainly a form of post-humanity. And it makes a lot of sense for this major theme to come around to some sort of conclusion at the end of Hickman’s run. 

I do appreciate the notion of Omega Sentinel not being what she seems coming up in an issue largely focused on Mystique getting what she wants by not seeming to be what she is either. It now seems like Omega and Mystique have been placed in parallel through the entire story as thematic echoes. 

• Colossus is revealed as the new 12th member of the Quiet Council at the end of the issue, which feels like a sensible move, particularly as he fills out what is essentially the X-Men table. This would feel like a fairly unremarkable element if not for the oddly ominous final panel, which tigthens in on his face as Xavier announces “in him, we can trust.” It seems to deliberately signal that something’s not right here but I don’t think we actually have enough space in the plot for there to be some Colossus twist, particularly as this is the first we’ve really seen of Colossus in Inferno or Hickman’s entire story to date. There was a similar move in the previous issue in the ascension of Bishop to Captain Commander, and my sense is that Hickman is stoking paranoia but both characters are poised for big heroic moments. 

• Next issue looks to be rather brutal and bleak as Nimrod and Orchis are prepared to strike. I can’t wait to see the chaos. 

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. 

Fireworks

“Fireworks”
Planet Size X-Men #1
Written by Gerry Duggan
Art by Pepe Larraz
Color art by Marte Gracia

• Is there life on Mars? Well, now there is. It was clear enough to anyone paying attention that this issue would be about the X-Men terraforming Mars, so going into the issue it was more about discovering exactly how and why this was being done. There were some things we already knew coming in – a need to replace their pharmaceutical facilities in the Savage Land to meet production goals, the pressure of learning that Nimrod was online and they couldn’t wait much longer on this part of the long-term plan of expansion – but in this story we learn that above all else, claiming Mars was about giving the Arakkii a proper home and getting around the problem of Earth suddenly being the host of millions of powerful, warlike mutants with no respect for humanity. 

• The miracle of a circuit of omega mutants transforming a dead world into a planet that can permanently support life is remarkable and quite a thing to behold on the page – oh man, look at those X-Men go! It’s the freakiest show – but the real flex on display in this issue comes at the end in a text page in which Mars is renamed Arakko, humans are forbidden to go anywhere besides one particular zone devoted to diplomacy, and the planet is declared the capital of the solar system. Oh, right, and Arakko is the “first” mutant world, implying an empire to come. Well, I sure hope someone – like, say, the lead writer of the franchise who developed most of these ideas and only has four scheduled comic issues for the rest of the year – writes more about all of this! 

• Pepe Larraz continues to dazzle with the sheer scope of his artwork and his gift for designing evocative new characters and settings. I don’t think there’s a lot of other artists who could’ve pulled this issue off with as much cinematic grandeur, but I say “cinematic” as though anyone working in cinema has approached some of the feats depicted so gracefully on these pages. The issue is full of things he’s designing from scratch that will become the basis of who knows how many other artists’ work – the Lake Hellas Diplomatic Ring, Port Prometheus, and the key Arrako leaders Xilo, Sobunar, and Lactuca – but the most incredible spectacle is how he manages to depict the transportation of millions of Arakkii mutants to their new planet. Every one of these pages is worth staring at and dissecting, the guy is just outstanding. The work he accomplished here cements him as one of the top tier definitive/transformative X-Men artists along with John Byrne, Arthur Adams, Jim Lee, Joe Madureira, and Frank Quitely.

• It feels a little strange that this issue wasn’t written by Jonathan Hickman but Gerry Duggan delivers here in a big way, conveying the grandeur of this moment while keeping it grounded in the characters, most especially Magneto and Jean Grey. Duggan pulls off a balancing act of writing in his own voice while matching Hickman’s tone, certainly much more so than any other writer in the stable. Some of this comes down to both of them understanding what they have in Larraz, an artist who thrives most when asked to do very narratively ambitious things. Duggan and Larraz have previously worked together on Uncanny Avengers and the two have real chemisty, so this issue sets the bar high for what they’ll be doing together soon on X-Men. 

• Magneto is the star of this issue and the prime mover on the project to transform Mars into Arakko, and in this act he cements himself as a savior to his people on par with Xavier leading the creation of the Resurrection Protocols. And of course, there’s Apocalypse, who rescued the Arakkii from Amenth in the first place. The Great Men of mutantdom have in fact done miraculous deeds for their kind – why wouldn’t people follow them? Also, I don’t know if this is something Hickman and Duggan had in mind, but Magneto essentially giving “Lebensraum” to his liberated brethren is quite a thing for a Holocaust survivor. 

• Absalon Mercator is the only omega mutant of Earth who does not participate in this very literal act of world-building, though we do see Magneto turned away from his mysterious realm in Otherworld. Clearly something is planned for Mercator, so the question is…when? 

• I am not a scientist by any stretch, but the science in this issue seems fairly legit! The final text page gets into more details from the perspective of NASA and is attributed to Thom DiRocco, who turns out to be a real scientist that Duggan follows on Twitter, so it’s a reasonable to assume he was consulted on how to do this story as correctly as possible. 

• It’s hard to fathom what it would be like to respond to the events of this issue as a human being. The notion of Mars suddenly being an inhabitable world full of powerful mutants with a totally alien society is wild, but living in a reality in which mutants are capable of doing these godlike feats would be a lot to process even if you’re already used to the idea of mutants and superheroes. I understand why a lot of people would feel frightened, but I feel like a lot of people would be awed and probably process this in religious terms of miracles and acts on behalf of God. 

• It would seem the great error in all of this is the declaration of Arakko as the capital of the solar system when Arakko is definitely NOT on the same page as Krakoa and we know from X of Swords that this is a society that up until a few weeks ago was on a path of brutal conquest. Now, sure, some of that was due to the influence of Annihilation, but c’mon. Magneto, with his goal focused on expansion, is taking a massive leap of faith here – or, really, he’s just blinded by hubris. Also, it’s more than a little condescending to force Planet Arakko into a diplomacy role to teach them a better way of existing. And Storm rather bluntly speaks to greatest benefit of having the Arakkii on Mars – it’s basically a whole planet of incredibly powerful randos who can be a cannon fodder defense one planet away from Earth.

• The Arakkii being pushed into a diplomatic role is also not the best move given that they know almost nothing about Earth, much less the Shi’ar or any of the other Marvel alien societies. Maybe their lack of history with anyone besides the Krakoan mutants makes them theoretically neutral?

• It’s worth noting that the Arakkii precognitive mutant Idyll’s prophecy from X-Men #14 was clearly referencing what would eventually happen on Mars, the red planet.

The Beginning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lost Love

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. 

One War, One Mutant

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

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

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

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

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

Some notes: 

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

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

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

Wait And See

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Oracle

“The Oracle”
X-Men #6
Written by Jonathan Hickman
Art by Matteo Buffagni
Color art by Sunny Gho

My favorite narrative threads introduced by Jonathan Hickman in House of X – the machinations of Orchis, the confrontation of Moira and Destiny, the suicide mission on the Orchis forge, the looming threat of Nimrod, Xavier and Magneto using the promise of resurrecting Destiny as a method of manipulating Mystique – come together in “The Oracle,” the best single issue of an X-comic to come out since House of X/Powers of X gave way to the Dawn of X. Given that we’ve had to wait a bit for this to come together makes it feel like a payoff, but it’s still just set up. We now have a full sense of Mystique’s arc for the Hickman X-Men mega-story, and it’s something that pulls together everything that’s ever been interesting about one of the franchise’s greatest antagonists: Her nihilistic cynicism, her duplicitous and conspiratorial nature, her deep love for Destiny, and her limitless capacity for spite and bitterness. At the end of this issue Mystique is set on a course to become a threat to the grand project of Krakoa for reasons that make a lot of emotional sense. Even if she ends up doing horrible things, it’s easy to be on her side in this. 

At the beginning and end of the issue we see Destiny and Mystique together in flashback, as Mystique is told a vague prophecy that lines up with her experiences in the present. I love seeing them together because it’s the only time you ever see Mystique be vulnerable or deferential with another person. Destiny is the only person she truly trusts and admires, and there’s an implication that she’s also somewhat responsible for her political radicalization. Hickman’s characterization of Destiny is not far off from Chris Claremont’s depiction of her in the 1980s, but he leans harder on her essential spookiness and her icy ruthlessness. “They want us blind for some reason,” she says, accurately sensing that the removal of her special form of sight is deliberate. Moira’s fear of Destiny is rooted in her traumatic experience with her at the end of her third life and is tied to her tremendous guilt for her actions in that timeline, but I also get the impression that she understands that if anyone would call bullshit on the Krakoan mutant togetherness project and have the means to build a faction of skeptical mutants it’s Destiny and Mystique. Moira’s anxiety about this has now guaranteed that it will come to pass. 

The panel in which Mystique shouts “I WANT MY WIFE BACK!” at Xavier and Magneto is the emotional climax of the issue, but has more power in that Hickman is finally spelling out something that’s been elided for decades due to editorial policies, though it was screamingly obvious to anyone who read Claremont’s comics. This isn’t actually the first time the nature of their relationship has been made canon, but it’s certainly the most important. The metatextual aspect of this adds to a few extra layers of pathos to the story, particularly when you consider that Claremont’s writing implied they’d been living together as a lesbian couple for several decades and that they were as out with that as they were about being mutants, though Mystique’s shape-shifting always gave her the option to pass. 

One of the ways Xavier and Magneto are using their leverage over Mystique to their advantage is by having her spy on the Orchis station to make sure that the X-Men’s mission in House of X was actually successful, as they all died out of range of Cerebro and no one had retained their memories when they were resurrected. She returns with a good news/bad news message: Yes, the Mother Mold was destroyed, but it seems as though Dr. Gregor and Director Devo are moving along in creating something that looks quite a lot like Nimrod. We don’t actually know what the Orchis scientists are doing, though it’s connected with Gregor’s odd plan to revive her husband who died in the X-Men’s raid, but it moves that plot along in a way that invites speculation. It moves Mystique’s story forward by complicating her motivations – she cares enough about her people to want to stop Orchis, but not enough that she is willing to do anything more until she gets Destiny back. She tries to use this as leverage over Xavier and Magneto, and fails. The bitterness sets in, and it’s clear those men have no idea how much of a mistake they’re making by protecting Moira. 

Some notes: 

• Hickman has been writing Xavier and Magneto as a gay couple in subtextual ways, so it’s interesting that they’re the ones thwarting the reunion of a lesbian couple whose relationship is now entirely official in the text. 

• The plot point of Dr. Alia Gregor seemingly attempting to revive her dead husband in the form of Nimrod is a clever thematic parallel with Mystique’s quest to revive her lost wife, but also a cruel irony in that by raiding the Orchis forge, the X-Men apparently hastened the creation of the thing they were desperately trying to prevent. And I like that there’s a more poignant emotional context for the origin of Nimrod – it’s not just motivated by MUTANTS BAD, but rather a consequence of mutant aggression.

• Matteo Buffagni did a wonderful job as a fill-in artist on this issue, and his Sean Phillips/David Mazzucchelli-ish inky noir qualities were very well-suited to this particular story. I’m particularly fond of how he drew the subtleties of body language in the Destiny/Mystique flashbacks and how the surreal aspects of Krakoa appeared when filtered through his blunt realism. 

• The page revealing Mystique’s appearance in disguise in earlier scenes in the Orchis station was brilliantly executed, and recalls a similar trick Hickman used in his Avengers run showing the reader how the boy who became Starbrand had been in the backgrounds of scenes through the issue. 

• This is the first issue of an X-Men comic since House of X #1 to not include text pages, and the issue contains a few extra pages of art instead. They made the right choice here for the story, but I think that breaking the formal pattern was a subtle nod that this issue was meant to seem particularly heavy. 

• Gotta love the very low-key introduction of SENTINEL CITY on Mercury. Yikes!

Global Economics

“Global Economics”
X-Men #4
Written by Jonathan Hickman
Art by Leinil Francis Yu with Gerry Alanguilan
Color art by Sunny Gho

It’s remarkable how quickly Jonathan Hickman’s radical new vision for the X-Men has become the new normal, to the extent that this issue in which Charles Xavier, Magneto, and Apocalypse go to the Davos World Economic Forum to discuss the destabilizing effect of their new flower drugs on the global economy lands as a “yes, of course” rather than a “wait, what?” Truly, this is the All-New, All-Different X-Men. 

“Global Economics” builds on threads established in the first issue of House of X, and brings back two characters introduced in that issue – Chinese ambassador Ma Mingyu and the plainly sinister U.S. ambassador Reilly Marshall. Over the course of this story Reilly is revealed to be plotting an assassination attempt on the Krakoan leaders, but that plan is foiled by Cyclops and Gorgon. The bulk of the issue focuses on Xavier, Magneto, and Apocalypse addressing the concerns of the global elite and stating their intentions and goals. Each of them play to their strengths: Apocalypse intimidates with his enormous size and vast historical perspective, Magneto lays out the mutants’ plan to turn the capitalist system against humans to gradually negate their power and influence, and Xavier takes off his Cerebro helmet for the first time in the series to offer a message of love and faith in the possibility of coexistence. 

Xavier and Magneto’s respective monologues contrast their essential differences – idealism vs cynicism – but also the way the other’s perspective informs their current actions as they work together as the leaders of mutantdom. Magneto’s anger and ego are apparent in his gloating about the way he intends to whittle away the humans’ economic power, but he’s also set aside overt terrorism and violence in favor of pursuing soft power. Xavier is earnest in his desire for peace and expression of love towards all, but refuses to back down from claiming what is “rightfully ours.” For once they are on the same page philosophically, but in their words you see both the seductive qualities of their approaches to rhetoric but also the weaknesses that will no doubt lead to both of them making mistakes over the course of this run. It seems inevitable that Magneto’s self-aggrandizing anger – “you have new gods now” – will lead to something terrible happening. Xavier’s naïve hope will certainly be taken advantage of by some cynical, opportunistic force. 

This issue establishes the new role of Gorgon as a “captain” of Krakoa charged with protecting members of the Quiet Council. Gorgon is a relatively recent Marvel creation – he was created by Mark Millar and John Romita Jr for their best-selling “Enemy of the State” storyline in Wolverine in 2004, and his since been featured in many series as an antagonist but rarely in actual X-Men books. Hickman has a history with the character, having featured him in both Secret Warriors early in his Marvel career and later in Avengers World. Gorgon’s monologue in this issue lays out his change of heart, renouncing his previous service of Hydra and The Hand and embracing the visionaries of the Quiet Council. He’s “enlightened,” which means he’s embraced a brutal sort of mercy – he obeys the Krakoan law of “kill no human” but leaves an entire crew of assassins horrifically maimed. It’s not fully necessary, but it would be nice to see a bit more of how Gorgon came around to this change of heart, and his apparent reconciliation with Wolverine, who recommended him to this new position. 

Notes:

• Leinil Francis Yu continues to shine in small details on this series, particularly in the establishing shot of the dining room and all the well-rendered shots of food. I can’t imagine that when he signed on for another go at the X-Men he anticipated having to draw steak in two different issues, but he’s done well with it. 

• Very curious to see where Hickman is going with Reilly Marshall. In the first issue of House of X we learn that he’s a former black ops agent for both S.H.I.E.L.D. and S.W.O.R.D., but has a hidden affiliation that he managed to keep from the Cuckoos’ psychic probe. Is he involved with Orchis? Or perhaps some other concern that we haven’t learned about yet? One thing I find interesting about Marshall’s designed is that the other human characters introduced in House of X and this issue have extremely distinctive appearances that speak to their races and cultures, whereas he’s got the generic secret agent James Bond look – a blandly handsome clean cut white man. Seems pointed. 

House of X

“House of X” 
Powers of X #6 (2019)
Written by Jonathan Hickman
Art by R.B. Silva with Pepe Larraz
Color art by Marte Gracia and David Curiel

Powers of X #6 is the end of the beginning; the final notes of the overture to what is promised to be Jonathan Hickman’s grand mutant opera. Now that the full shape of House of X/Powers of X is known, we can see that this was very much the origin story of the Krakoan nation, and how this bold new plan for a unified mutant front was devised with the knowledge of Moira MacTaggert’s nine previous lives. It’s so simple when put that way! 

This issue is focused on Moira, and its primary action is centered in the far future timeline of the ascension, which we now know to be the end of Moira’s previously unknown sixth life. It’s not quite clear how Moira is alive this far into the future, much less fairly young looking, but she’s there in the preserve that was introduced in the first issue of POX along with the Wolverine of this timeline. They’re the captive of the Librarian who set up the ascension plan with the Phalanx, who turns out to be homo novissima, the end-stage hyper-evolved product of centuries of genetic engineering. The machines, the Nimrods, all of this extermination of mutantdom? All just a diversionary tactic to keep mutants from interfering with the process of breeding something far beyond human or mutant. 

Wolverine kills the Librarian after Moira extracts everything she needs to know to carry over to her next life. And then her next three lives after that. It’s unclear how she ended up on the path that brought her and Wolverine to the Librarian’s preserve – a story for another day, I hope – but it’s now much more understandable how her 7th, 8th, and 9th lives were so angry and desperate. This leaves the Moira of this timeline, our timeline and the one she believes to be her last life, in a position of desperation and some degree of repentance for having been involved in so many awful things. The House of X has to work. 

The centerpiece of the issue is a set of Moira’s diary entries that fill in lot of details about how the House of X plan came together with Charles Xavier and Magneto, and explain how this retcon fits into previous X-Men continuity. There’s some very casual bombshells dropped in these pages – for example, the revelation that Moira and Xavier both became the parents of reality-warping mutants (Proteus and Legion, respectively) because they knew they would need someone with that power to enable the mutant resurrection protocol and deliberately found mates who would produce this sort of offspring in combination with their own mutant genes. I actually gasped upon reading that bit. 

We learn a lot about how necessary it was for Moira to break Xavier’s inherent optimism and idealism, and how difficult it was for her to deal with the “casual arrogance” of Magneto. She notes that Sinister has turned himself into a chimera mutant, decades ahead of schedule compared to the other timelines. There’s also some oblique explanation for how the plot of the Magneto/Moira storyline in X-Men #1-3 by Chris Claremont and Jim Lee – the best-selling comic book story of all time! – fits into all of this. 

The story ends with Xavier, Magneto, and Moira meeting after the Krakoan nation has been established, and the Quiet Council is nearly complete. Moira is in hiding, as she’s been for many years. It would seem that the only people aware of her being alive or her role in this grand plan are Xavier and Magneto. 

Moira seems very paranoid in her isolation, and is deeply afraid of the notion of Destiny being revived to placate Mystique, or of precognitive mutants in general because she fears what would happen if the other mutants discovered that mutantdom is snuffed out in every iteration of her life. This makes some sense given that she has up to 2000 years of regrets and anxieties to live with, but it also seems like a deep-seated fear of Destiny in particular after her ordering her agonizing death at the end of life three. And what does she actually fear Destiny telling the other mutants – that mutantdom is doomed every time, which many probably would believe anyway given everything they’ve personally experienced, or that in her third life she tried to wipe out mutants herself? 

Hickman ends HOX/POX on a high note, but undercuts the sense of triumph with Moira’s nagging doubt. What if this is still not enough? What if the mutants resist this attempt at species-wide unity? What if mutants really are doomed, just as they’ve been in all of Moira’s previous lives, and most every other future and alternate timeline in the history of the franchise? These are the stakes going forward, and they’ve never been higher.  

So now we look ahead to the new X-Men series by Hickman, which begins next week. Hickman has planted seeds for major stories with most of the X-Men’s major antagonists: 

• Orchis will certainly seek retaliation for the destruction of the Mother Mold, and will be an ongoing threat for sure. 

• Nimrod will inevitably be created at some point in his run, and we’ll probably see the beginnings of the genetic engineering that will eventually lead to homo novissama. 

• Apocalypse will begin a quest to find his original Horsemen on Arrako, the lost twin of Krakoa. 

• We’ll need to explore the mystery of what Mister Sinister has done to take advantage of the genetic archive, and how he may have sabotaged or corrupted the resurrection protocol.

• “Inferno 2,” anyone?

•  It’s only a matter of time before Destiny is resurrected, and we’ll get to see whether Moira’s fears are valid. How will all the mutants of Krakoa respond to learning about Moira and her many lives? I suspect that the deeply nihilistic Mystique will be not be pleased, and this will set her up to go rogue.

• Sabretooth’s breakout from imprisonment and pursuit of vengeance. Perhaps he is recruited by Mystique? We’ll see. I’d be more excited for him to just claw his way back up to the surface and go on a rampage at the worst possible time…like, say, after the resurrection protocol is inevitably broken. 

• We’ll certainly see the Phalanx again, but I wonder if the notion that the worlds Moira inhabits in each of her lives dies with her is just a bluff. It doesn’t make much sense, and Hickman has put way too many pages into establishing the notion of the Phalanx absorbing the offering of the mutant consciousness archive to just never show us what happens. The Librarian makes a point of stating that once the Phalanx merges into a Dominion it will exist outside of time and space, and I believe that is the path to this popping up in the main timeline down the road. Also, it seems very likely that the Moira 6 version of Wolverine will be merged with the Phalanx, and the Librarian mentions this as a possibility in passing. Given the layers of abstraction in the Phalanx/Dominion concept, it would be narratively useful to give it a familiar face in the form of the franchise’s most popular character.

• It can’t be too long before things with the Hellfire Club go wrong, and I suspect the long term arc of Hickman’s run will bend towards Magneto doing something horrible and breaking off from Xavier. I think he’s setting the readers up for a heartbreak right now.

Some lingering questions:

• How exactly is Moira alive in the far future of life six? There’s a line about her having the same blood type as Wolverine, but that only barely makes sense. If that’s the hand wave explanation, then OK, sure, but it’s awfully flimsy.

• I’m not quite sure why this issue, HOX #2, and HOX #5 were color coded as red. This and HOX #2 are both Moira issues, but she’s not in HOX #5 at all. I suppose they are all big reveal issues, but in that case, wouldn’t POX #3 with its Moira 9 reveal also be one of those?

• How were the full capabilities of Krakoa discovered? Moira clearly learned about this from Apocalypse in life nine, but when did she and Xavier begin work on this in life ten? And how does this relate to the formation of the second class of X-Men in the original Krakoa story back in Giant Size X-Men #1? 

• What will Moira do with what she learned from the Librarian in life six? Is the X-Men’s longtime association with the Shi’ar actually about Xavier courting a galactic society as a form of ascension? Or is that more about forming the alliances that led mutants to end up in Shi’ar systems in her ninth life? 

• Surely there’s a good number of mutants who aren’t totally into the Krakoan mutant society thing, right? We don’t see any dissent among the ranks in this story, but I have to assume this will be part of the narrative in Hickman’s X-Men and the assorted spin-off series going forward. 

Something Sinister

“Something Sinister”
Powers of X #4 (2019)
Written by Jonathan Hickman
Art by R.B. Silva
Color art by Marte Gracia

The plot of House of X and Powers of X is focused on the decisions of Charles Xavier, but eight issues into this twelve issue story we have had very little insight into the man and what is driving him. When he appears in the story he’s inscrutable and unknowable, and he’s defined entirely by his actions. Jonathan Hickman puts the reader in the position of what is must be like to actually be in the character’s presence. His mind is a mystery, but everyone else’s mind is an open book to him. He’s got an elaborate agenda, but it’s hard to understand what he’s doing at any given moment. You get the sense that he’s a benevolent figure, but he doesn’t make it easy to trust him. 

The majority of “Something Sinister” is focused on Charles Xavier advancing his plans in two time periods, and trying to parse exactly what he’s doing is just the same as working out what Hickman is setting up in this issue. The first scene, in which Xavier and Magneto visit Mister Sinister and attempt to con him into building an elaborate archive of mutant genetic samples, seems to set up the return of the core X-Men who died in the previous issue. The second scene, in which Xavier brings Cypher to Krakoa to commune with the living island to develop a bond that can lead to establishing a nation-state there, fills in some crucial back story and establishes a connection to Apocalypse. 

The gears of plot are moving towards a payoff, so the thrill of this issue is more in the character details. The Sinister scene is remarkable and hilarious, and builds on Hickman’s previous use of the character in Secret Wars by establishing “Bar Sinister” as official canon rather than just an alternate reality thing. Hickman’s Sinister, which is heavily indebted to Kieron Gillen’s reinvention of the character as a glam mega-narcissist who has cloned himself into an entire species, is a delight. He’s the ultimate queen bitch, and the presence of the theatrical and flamboyant Magneto pushes him to up his game as a melodramatic scenery chewer. 

The first text sequence of the issue is a cheeky mutant gossip column written by Sinister featuring blind items about various mutants, and it’s inspired. It’s also the first narrative nod towards storylines that will exist after HOX/POX is over – apparent ethical non-monogamy in the mutant society, a bit more hinting about Apocalypse’s original horsemen, something about Madelyne Pryor, and an item that forces everyone to go look up the word “progerian” and try to figure out who that could be referring to. (If we’re taking this literally, it best describes Ernst, who was heavily implied by Grant Morrison to be a reformed and reborn Cassandra Nova.) 

Speaking of Cassandra, please note that Xavier’s wardrobe in the Cypher scene is notably similar to that of his evil twin, and that makes the otherwise benign and hopeful sequence echo the scene in “E is for Extinction” in which Cassandra grooms Donald Trask to prepare the mega-sentinels that caused the Genoshan genocide. I suspect Hickman is just trying to spook us with this and add to the general sense of unease about Xavier in this story, and that this is more like the positive version in which Xavier sets up the opposite of his sister’s evil actions. 

Miscellaneous notes: 

• I like the way Hickman nudges the reader to consider the perspective of certain text pages. The page outlining the interface with Krakoa designed by Cypher to delegate responsibilities suggests that it’s internal X-Men information until the final bit in which there is speculation on whether Forge has a “massive subterranean laboratory” for development of Krakoan biotechnology. Suddenly it seems more like an Orchis intelligence report. And if that is the case, how exactly are they gathering some of this information? 

• Note the vast gulf between Charles Xavier’s ambitious plans for Krakoa and him knowing virtually nothing of its history until Cypher directly communicates with it.

• The sequence at the end of the issue in the distant future with the blue people – it’s still unclear exactly who these people are – confirms that they are attempting to upload Nimrod’s archive of mutant consciousness into the Phalanx. The issue concludes with the blue people waiting to find out whether the Phalanx will accept this offering. There’s a mirror of this plot point in the Sinister sequence, in which Sinister explains that he introduced mutant genes into his own carefully bred genetic system, and we see that the version of Sinister who agrees to collaborate on a mutant genetic archive is the first mutant Sinister. 

• Also, while it’s pretty clear that Hickman doesn’t plan on drawing too much on loose ends of other people’s stories, it is worth noting that his Sinister is directly inspired by Gillen’s version of the character and that version of the character was studying/experimenting on the Phalanx.

• This issue was advertised with a caption promising to reveal the “true purpose” of Cerebro, and while that didn’t quite happen, it now seems like a safe bet that Cerebro may be a psychic archive of mutant minds directly inspired by Moira X’s knowledge of Nimrod’s archive and connected to the plan we see Xavier set in motion with Sinister in this issue. 

• Cypher passing on the techno-organic virus to Krakoa via his Warlock arm probably doesn’t bode well, given that it’s a form of the Phalanx. Hmmm…

• RB Silva has revealed himself to be particularly inspired in drawing physical comedy in this series, first with how he drew the physical mannerisms of his oddly cute Nimrod, and now in the slapstick antics of the various Sinisters. He gets some amusing little moments with Cypher and Safari Xavier in this issue too.

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.