X Lives of Wolverine / X Deaths of Wolverine

X Lives of Wolverine #1-5
X Deaths of Wolverine #1-5
Written by Benjamin Percy
Art by Joshua Cassara and Frederico Vincentini
Color art by Frank Martin and Dijjo Lima

X Lives and X Deaths was sold as an interconnected set of miniseries in the mode of House of X and Powers of X that would move the story of the X-Men into a bold new, post-Jonathan Hickman era. It’s not that. It’s two somewhat concurrent stories with haphazard plotting that are forced to connect at the end, and one of them continues from Hickman’s story in such a sloppy manner that it lowers expectations for what it is to come. The story has its merits, but it does not deliver on what was promised and was not at all a good idea as the first move after Inferno. 

The big problems of X Lives/X Deaths are rooted in the worst aspects of continuity in Marvel comics. The plot of X Lives is so steeped in continuity that it would be entirely incomprehensible to anyone who’s not read all the comics it’s referencing, and is only somewhat incomprehensible to me, a person who has read most of them. It’s actually amazing the degree to which Benjamin Percy makes this story impenetrable and unfriendly to new readers despite it being sold as a major event, which means it’s at least notionally a jump-on point.

 It’s not just that Percy is leaning so hard on continuity. People write stories like this all the time that are nevertheless quite accessible to readers. Percy’s story assumes too much of the reader – that they’re up on the ongoing subplots of his X-Force series, that they’re invested in all the lore of the Krakoa era of X-Men, that they know a lot about Wolverine and his history – and does not provide anything to help orient anyone coming in cold. The story begins in medias res and barely establishes its premise in the first issue, and then never fully clicks together as it goes along. The plot just seems to move in circles, and doesn’t even really pay off Percy’s ongoing story threads with Mikhail Rasputin and Omega Red. In narrative terms it barely moves anything forward, it feels like a lot of action-packed busy work that is overly dependent on Joshua Cassara making it all look cool. (He does, you can count on him for that.)

X Deaths is a different kind of bad continuity story, the kind that does not properly “yes, and…” someone else’s plot. This miniseries starts where Inferno #4 left off with Moira McTaggert running scared in Scotland after Cypher set her free through a gate one last time after Destiny and Mystique attempted to kill her. This is a very promising set up for the character, who is now powerless and alienated from the mutant nation she designed. Percy immediately adds a level of unnecessary peril – she’s got late stage cancer all of a sudden? – and then has Mystique hunting her down, even though that completely steps on the conclusion of Inferno, in which Cypher convinces her and Destiny to let her go and to focus on consolidating their power on the Quiet Council. It’s not out of character for Mystique to just do whatever she wants anyway, but this move signals that Percy cares more about his rather prosaic plot than having the ending of Hickman’s Inferno mean anything at all.

It gets worse for Moira from there. There’s some good on-the-run bits, but it’s all driving her towards a radical heel turn that doesn’t make sense with anything Hickman did with the character through his run. It makes emotional sense for Moira to feel betrayed, angry, and scared but the leap to “and now I want to wipe out the mutants” is nonsense. It’s a bizarre read on where Hickman left her, which was basically admitting that she still held on to the idea of wanting to “cure” mutants as a way of avoiding the same catastrophes over and over. She is not stating an agenda in Inferno, she’s being bullied by Destiny and Mystique because they have an awareness of why they killed her in her third life where she actively attempted to “cure” the mutants. 

Percy makes the leap from the character’s nuanced emotional breakdown to interpreting it as a cackling supervillain masterplan. By the end of X Deaths we see Moira reborn as an AI bent on destroying the mutants, and this simply makes no sense given that this is the character who went through incredible lengths to create the Krakoan nation and was desperately afraid of AI as an existential threat. None of this makes emotional sense, none of it works logically as a story. It’s cheap and pointless. I naively thought we wouldn’t be going back to pre-Hickman messy storytelling like this so soon, but it’s in fact the very first thing that happens once the guy wrapped up and left. It does not bode well for what is to come, even if Kieron Gillen, Al Ewing, and Gerry Duggan all seem poised to do far better. 

It’s bad enough that Percy has pushed Moira in such a ridiculous and awful direction, but in doing so he casually shot down a few plot beats that had potential to be much more thoughtful and interesting stories. For one, I’d been personally waiting quite hopefully for a story in which Moira’s ex-boyfriend Banshee learned the truth and was reunited with her, but when that happens in X Deaths it’s largely off panel and just set up for an outrageous and overtly psychotic bit of gore. There is a confrontation between Xavier and Moira in the fourth issue, but it’s so rushed and tossed off. We never got to see Xavier and Magneto learn what was happening with Moira in Inferno, nor will we get to see her get a meaningful conversation with them after it. It’s all just clumsily trampling on character beats in the interest of a plot that isn’t particularly thrilling or interesting. 

Midway through the series Percy appears to add a clumsy retcon to Powers of X, something I figured would be somewhat off-limits and sacrosanct at least for the time being. Thankfully this is a misdirect, as we see in X Deaths #4 that Moira has somehow gone to the far future where Wolverine is in the same Preserve where he and Moira were kept by the Homo Novissima in her sixth life in Powers of X. It’s not the same one though, and the Phalanx’d-up Moira seems to have traveled to this spot in her 10th life with the goal of ascension. That Wolverine, now also Phalanx’d-up, heads back in time and… I guess prevents something at the end? It’s not super clear to me. At least the Phalanx’d-up “Omega Wolverine” looks cool. Federico Vincentini did a pretty good job drawing that version of the character, as did Adam Kubert on the covers. It’ll be a cool toy.

This story is baffling in so many ways, not the least of which is that up until this point Benjamin Percy has been a very good and disciplined writer on Wolverine and X-Force. I strongly suspect that part of the problem with this project is that the X Lives story was probably originally meant to run through Wolverine and/or X-Force, but got nudged up to event book status in the way that Chip Zdarsky’s concurrent Devil’s Reign event was originally just intended as a particularly eventful arc in Daredevil. The X Deaths end of things feels very wedged in at the last minute, likely out of editorial flop sweat wanting to lead readers directly out of Inferno rather than jump ship with Hickman, and needing to buy time before they could be ready to launch Gillen’s Immortal X-Men and Ewing’s X-Men Red. I’m giving Percy the benefit of the doubt here. I think this whole thing was rushed and pushed in weird directions as a result of outside pressures. I’m also willing to believe that Hickman was indeed fully on board with everything here with Moira, and that maybe he had intended to write it himself. But the slapdash nature of this series means that whatever Hickman had in mind has been put on the page in a way that is extremely unsatisfying, illogical, and confusing. 

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. 

Lost Love

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Out Of The Vault

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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. 

This Is What You Do

“This Is What You Do”
Powers of X #3 (2019)
Written by Jonathan Hickman
Art by R.B. Silva
Color art by Marte Gracia

“This Is What You Do” is an issue that dials back expectations somewhat. After four consecutive issues of game-changing plot and dense world building, this issue zooms in on a particular plot thread – the year 100 X-Men’s suicide mission to take down Nimrod – and focuses on shading in established ideas and delivering a plot payoff that firmly establishes the stakes of the next sequence of the story in which Cyclops leads a team against Orchis in the hopes of preventing the creation of Nimrod altogether. The big reveal at the end of the issue that this is all taking place in Moira’s 9th life ties together most of the plot action in the first act of the story, explaining how Xavier knew to have Mystique apprehend the Orchis plans that set in motion Cyclops’ mission. 

The reveal is excellent and I particularly like Moira 9’s death scene as she’s killed by Wolverine to get on with her mission in her 10th life. “This is what you do,” she tells him as he readies himself to stab her, a turn on his classic “the best there is at what he does” catchphrase that feels both oddly hopeful and grimly fatalistic about Wolverine’s role in any narrative. Moira has a perspective on him that’s closer to that of the audience than anyone in the story. (The scene also visually echoes Wolverine’s mercy killing of Jean Grey in Grant Morrison’s “Planet X” arc.) 

The trouble is, at least on my end, is that I’ve spent enough time trying to predict the plot of this story that I’d already figured out that the “future” was in Moira 9’s lifetime. There is a nice sense of validation in correctly parsing the clues, but it’s been a lot more fun to be entirely surprised with plot developments, as I was last week with the Phalanx reveal in the far future storyline. I can’t imagine I’ll be able to resist further speculation as it is a big part of the fun of following all of this, but I have to keep in mind that it’s most enjoyable when Hickman is several steps ahead of me and catches me off guard. 

This is not to say there weren’t any surprises in this issue. The introduction of the human Church of Ascendency and their ritualistic transformation into cyborgs at the top of the issue provides some backstory for the plot in the distant future plot thread with the Nimbus worldmind and the Phalanx. It’s also a bit jarring for Cardinal and Rasputin to apparently die along with the rest of the future X-Men so early in the story after such an auspicious debut, though it would not be unreasonable for them to pop up again one way or another. But given Jonathan Hickman’s stated love of “The Phalanx Covenant” and prominent use of characters and concepts for that story, the fate of these characters may be a nod to the way Scott Lobdell gave Blink a memorable debut in that story only to quickly kill her off and have her reappear in a different and even better form shortly afterward in “Age of Apocalypse.” 

Apocalypse’s role in this story is interesting. The Moira 9 timeline is essentially an inverted “Age of Apocalypse” in which Apocalypse, under the influence of his consigliere Moira, takes the Magneto role in the story as the flawed replacement for Charles Xavier, and Nimrod replaces him as the despotic monster presiding over a dystopia. This Apocalypse is still very much Apocalypse-y right on down to having four horsemen, but he’s also rather noble and willing to sacrifice his supposedly eternal life in order to complete a mission to give hope to the mutants of Moira’s next lifetime. His final battle with Nimrod is poignant and echoes the Magneto/Apocalypse duel at the end of “Age of Apocalypse,” except for the lack of catharsis. Magneto got to rip Apocalypse in half while he gloated at him; Apocalypse just gets womped on by four Nimrods at once before the singularity unleashed from Xorn’s black hole skull seems to swallow up pretty much everything. 

“This Is What You Do” breaks some rhythms established by the previous issues, most obviously by deviating from the HOX/POX/HOX/POX pattern, and the established format of Powers issues showing us story in each of its four eras. This works out pretty well in terms of keeping the story from feeling too rigid in its rhythms, and allows for some traditional superhero action after a lot of rather cerebral info dumps and talky scenes. There’s a terrible tendency in contemporary comics, particularly those produced by Marvel, for action to be doled out in a way that suggests the writer is merely servicing genre conventions and giving the artist something “fun” to draw, and this is very much not that. Hickman and R.B. Silva provide big payoffs and high drama, and present action scenes fully grounded in the horror of violence. They effectively convey the bravery of these X-Men and the cold cruelty of their robotic enemies.

Silva’s art continues to evolve into an increasingly expressive and nuanced style as he moves through this series. He’s clearly having a lot of fun with his inking process – there’s a liberal usage of Ben-Day dots for shading, judicious deployment of digital blur effects, and a clever use of fingerprints in rendering Wolverine’s scorched body in the final sequence. I love the way both he and Pepe Larraz are combining the best elements of digital and physical illustration to produce pages that convey a slickness with an underlying loose kinetic energy of pencil and ink on paper. 

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 Uncanny Life of Moira X

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes and observations:

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

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

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

The Last Dream of Professor X

“The Last Dream of Professor X”
Powers of X #1 (2019)
Written by Jonathan Hickman
Art by R.B. Silva
Color art by Marte Gracia

Last week in House of X we were presented with a new status quo for mutants in which Charles Xavier gave them a homeland in the form of Krakoa, and they were poised to inherit the world within two decades. For the first time in ages, the future was bright for the X-Men! But here we are one week later in Powers of X #1, and we are confronted with the notion that just because nature dictates a mutant future, humanity can still intervene and change course in a genocidal act of self-preservation. Bleak visions of the future are a big part of X-Men mythology, but the futures presented in Powers of X may be the most upsetting yet if just because they are contrasted with the radical optimism of Krakoa and the potential of a mutant planet. It resonates with our moment in history too much for comfort – the threat of seemingly inevitable progress kicking oppressive forces into overdrive as the powerful desperately cling to their position. 

Jonathan Hickman pulling the rug out from under us straight away focuses the story on the central theme of X-Men: The dream of a better world, and the nightmare of what happens if the dream is not realized. In what is effectively his second issue, he’s established the stakes of his X-Men. The story, particularly the sections that are presented as historical texts, reveal that the establishment of the Krakoan nation state sets in motion a battle between mutants and humans – and their machines – that’s not resolved for hundreds of years. Dr. Alia Gregor’s forecast of mutants becoming the dominant species doesn’t turn out to be the case. 100 years later and there’s just 10,000 mutants left and almost all of them are living in Shi’Ar space. It’s heartbreaking.

Powers of X tells a story in four time periods: The very beginning of the X-Men, the present tense of the X-Men ten years later, the remaining X-Men of 90 years from now, and the distant future of the X-Men in their 1000th year. The pages set in the present mostly move along a bit of plot with Mystique carried over from House of X and allow for a bit more time with the current Xavier, though he’s no less inscrutable than he was in House of X. This scene is mostly interesting in setting up a question of what exactly Mystique has stolen and brought back to Xavier and Magneto, and for establishing that Hickman has a good handle on Mystique, a woman who is always working in her own interest and is constantly running some con or another. 

The oblique opening scene set in the past is the most fascinating bit of a rather dense and eventful issue. The young Charles Xavier is confronted on a park bench by Dr. Moira MacTaggert, who speaks rather cryptically but reveals that she knows him rather well though he believes he is meeting her for the first time. This is a puzzling moment for longtime readers as it is long established that Moira and Charles were once young lovers and that she was a crucial figure in helping him establish the X-Men. The scene ends with Moira inviting a confused Charles to read her mind, and with his surprise at what he finds there. We won’t know about what he sees in her head for at least another week or so. 

Something is off about Moira. That much is signaled in the moments just before Charles sees her, as he looks up to the sky and watches birds circling overhead – traditionally a bad omen that can signal a coming storm, or the hunting of prey. Moira’s tone is knowing but ambiguous, and she is coming to Charles just after his great epiphany about “a better world and my place in it.” Her timing seems rather deliberate. Is Moira a predator of sorts here? Is Charles her mark, or a patsy? 

Moira’s most cryptic dialogue accompanies images of three tarot cards which are illustrated with images of characters and settings from the X-Men’s 100th year, which make their proper debut a few pages later. 

I have minimal knowledge of tarot, but crowdsourced a reading of these three particular cards on Twitter and every interpretation was about the same. Here’s a few of the ones I found particularly resonant with the themes Hickman is laying out with regards to Charles Xavier:

you're absolutely positive about a course of action, but it's going to lead to a major shakeup in ways you didn't expect and will be uncomfortable (this doesn't mean don't do it). don't rely on substances/sex to get you through, they will make the discomfort worse. https://twitter.com/noradotcool/status/1155939469582721024

my read would be the magician is the path you wanted, the tower came in and shook everything up radically, and the devil is how you deal with the aftermath, probably you've been indulging in some harmful behaviors and need to stop to keep moving/heal. https://twitter.com/cortneyharding/status/1155951708284968960

Pride goeth before the fall, which you know, but you just can’t help yourself  https://twitter.com/redrawnoxen/status/1155937015809970176

The magician is the goal
The tower what needs to fall for that to come through
The Devil the catalyst for the next transformation https://twitter.com/henrydarthenay/status/1155944493125758976

It seems likely Hickman is establishing the primary theme of Xavier’s arc not just for House of X and Powers of X, but for his entire run to come. The goal, the obstacle, and what must be done to overcome it. So…is Xavier’s plan with Krakoa in the present the goal, the obstacle, or the catalyst for the next transformation? 

A century later things have gone terribly wrong. Hickman and artist R.B. Silva present a vision of the future that borrows thematic and visual elements from the most famous dark timelines of the X-Men’s past – “Days of Future Past,” “Age of Apocalypse” – but mostly feels fresh and distinct. The X-Men of this era are vaguely familiar – entirely new characters who look like mash-ups of classic characters. Hickman relies on historical information in text pages to establish the backstory of this future and keeps the story pages focused on emotion and action. Long story short: We’re in the last days of a war between the Man-Machine Supremacy and what remains of the mutants, and these X-Men are the product of a breeding program by Mister Sinister that goes horribly wrong, mainly because the mutants decided to trust their future as a species to a Machiavellian mad scientist who calls himself Mister Sinister. 

Our three main characters in this era represent three forms of bred mutants. Rasputin is a Chimera class mutant, a nearly unstoppable being made from the combination of Colossus, Kitty Pryde, Quentin Quire, Unus the Untouchable, and X-23/Wolverine’s genes. Cardinal, basically a red Nightcrawler, is an Outlier, a mutant designed for war who nevertheless developed spiritual and pacifist tendencies. Cylobel is a hound with an unreadable “black brain” bred by the Man-Machine Supremacy to infiltrate and betray her own kind. Cylobel is captured by the machines and brought to their leader, Nimrod the Lesser. Cylobel’s programming backfires on her masters – she has betrayed them, and not the X-Men. Her last act before being deposited into a system that will break her body and mind down to nothing more than data to be processed in the interest of further understanding “the mutant anomoly,” is an act of defiance. She embraces her martyrdom and swears that even if it takes “a thousand years,” mutants will endure and wipe out their oppressors. 

Hickman’s Nimrod is delighted by her spunk. This version of Nimrod resembles the character created by Chris Claremont and John Romita Jr but has the personality of an effete elite who masks their inhumanity in politeness and shallow declarations of empathy. In addressing Cylobel, Nimrod prefaces extraordinarily cruel statements and actions with effusive apologies. You immediately recognize this guy. You’ve read his op-eds. You’ve seen him on cable news. He’s what happens when polite society is built on systemic injustice that stops looking anything like cruelty to the people on top. Nimrod doesn’t hate the mutants, he pities them! He is so sorry they are not at his position in the hierarchy. It’s so sad they must be killed! Silva draws Nimrod as a pastel behemoth with broad and cartoonish mannerisms not too far removed from the cute and cuddly Baymax in Big Hero 6. The design is just a tweak on Romita Jr’s original look, but it’s smoothed out a bit so he looks more like an Apple product. He’d make a great stuffed doll. 

Cylobel may have accidentally predicted the future with her “a thousand years” line. In the issue’s final scene we’re a thousand years from the day Charles met Moira, in the era of “ascension,” and meet a bald blue humanoid called Librarian who is attempting to recover information from Cylobel’s preserved body in Nimrod the Lesser’s archive. The Librarian is accompanied by a small drone – Nimrod the Greater. This scene is rather oblique, but ends with two important bits of information: The “human-machine-mutant war” has ended in a surprising way, and the current residents of Earth have kept some remnants of humanity in a place called The Preserve. The issue ends with a shot of a man and woman lurking in The Preserve in shadows. They look a bit like…Mystique and Toad?

A few stray notes:

• In the tarot sequence, the magician card is Rasputin and the devil card is Cardinal. This makes some sense in that context, but I’m more intrigued by the way these two characters essentially split the spirit of Xavier’s ethos in half – one represents the idealistic fight, and the other the dream of peace. Rasputin is bred for war, but Cardinal retains too much of his ancestor Nightcrawler’s spirituality to embrace the potential of his weaponized genes. 

• Much in the way that Pepe Larraz stepped up his game in House of X, R.B. Silva reveals the full extent of his talent in this issue. Silva has been working on X-Men comics for the past couple years but has mainly been working on rather bad material – he drew a good chunk of the absolutely dire X-Men Blue/X-Men Gold series written by Cullen Bunn and Marc Guggenheim. But whereas those comics were largely exercises in rote continuity mining and pointless nostalgia, Powers of X gives Silva the opportunity to create, and a lot of the energy of this comic comes from his obvious delight in designing his own world. You can see the influence of modern video games as well as traces of Joe Madureira’s designs from “Age of Apocalypse.” He also integrates the particular geometric elements of Chris Bachalo’s design for Omega Sentinel in that character’s descendent here without compromising his aesthetic identity. There’s still a good amount of Stuart Immonen influence in Silva’s art, but that’s receding as Silva asserts his own identity with crisper, cleaner linework that leaves more of the lighting effects to colorist Marte Gracia.

• This issue gives us our first look at a “No-Place,” which was mentioned in passing in House of X #1 in the text page outlining the use of Krakoan fauna for mutants. A “No-Place” is a Krakoan habitat that exists outside of the Krakoan collective consciousness and is created by an artificial Krakoan flower. The No-Place, a zone that should not be, is depicted as dark and upside-down to great, mildly unnerving effect.

• Charles Xavier seems to have developed telekinetic powers in the present. He has canonically only ever been a telepath. 

• All four sequences of this story involve an attempt to access forbidden or lost information, but we do not know what that information could be or why it is needed. The story threads in the present and in year 100 leave off with emissaries passing off information to their superiors – in the case of Mystique, to Xavier and Magneto, and in the case of Rasputin and Cardinal, to a superannuated Wolverine and the remnants of the X-Men. 

• The heavy themes around betrayal in the future sequences of this issue suggest Moira and Mystique are not to be trusted in the past and present. (Of course Mystique is never to be trusted.)