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. 

Reign of X Mini-Reviews: New Mutants / Excalibur / Hellions

New Mutants 14-18
Written by Vita Ayala
Art by Rod Reis

Vita Ayala was a good choice to replace Ed Brisson on New Mutants – they have a very natural affinity for writing young characters, and immediately gave the series a focus and mission that was lacking in Brisson’s issues. Ayala has tightened up the core cast to a group of classic New Mutants characters – Mirage, Karma, Wolfsbane, Magik, Warlock, Warpath – and have put them in charge of an outreach program to help give structure and a sense of purpose to Krakoa’s youth, not all of whom know who or what they want to be in this new society. There’s enough action and adventure moments for it to work as a superhero series, but Ayala is writing a story about young mutants trying to find themselves and seeking out paths that don’t involve becoming a proper superhero and attempting to solve problems with violence. 

Ayala’s strength as a writer lies in their empathy, and the plot of this run of issues is largely driven by characters’ pain and emotional needs, and how this makes some characters lash out and others become confused by conflicting feelings. The main story is about the Amahl Farouk – the sinister telepath who is the host of the demonic psychic creature the Shadow King – also deciding to become a mentor to young mutants, and manipulating some particularly vulnerable kids who’ve been traumatized by their mutations to seek ways to change their circumstances. 

Ayala carries over the Brisson creation Cosmia for this plot – she’s a teenager who hideously warped her body and just wants to be reset in her original form so she can feel like a normal person again. This is a very understandable angst, and it’s hard not to side against the book’s own protagonists when they – mutants, but normal looking humans – try to tell her that her mutation is who she is and thus beautiful in its own way. Ayala is very good at puncturing the sort of well-meaning but patronizing things we say to people in pain, and doing it in a way that doesn’t totally undermine a character like Mirage’s wisdom and generosity. 

Rod Reis’ loosely gestural and very colorful art remains a major highlight of this series, and his skill for conveying nuanced emotion in facial expressions and body language adds a lot of depth to what Ayala is trying to achieve in their character writing. Reis is also terrific with atmosphere and nails the pages where Ayala asks for psychedelic horror or storybook grandeur. Ayala is aiming high, but Reis is elevating the material on every page. 

Excalibur 16-20
Written by Tini Howard
Art by Marcus To
Color art by Erick Arciniega

Given that X of Swords spent a lot of time establishing the terrain of Otherworld and gesturing towards the many story opportunities offered among its realms it has been very disappointing that in the immediate wake of that story Excalibur – the X-Men series focused on Otherworld adventures – brushed all that aside for five consecutive issues telling the convoluted story of Betsy Braddock coming back after seemingly dying in the crossover. 

There is some narrative value in this plot as it provided an opportunity for Tini Howard to get around to exploring the complicated relationship of Betsy and Kwannon, but I don’t think we get anything very deep here. Ultimately Kwannon forgives Betsy for inhabiting her body for many years and moves along in the role of Psylocke, but it feels more she’s making a legal statement after a court settlement than anything that feels emotionally natural. 

Howard’s writing is still frustrating. She has good ideas and a strong notion of who Betsy Braddock is, and I’m intrigued by her exploring the character by putting her through a series of failures. But the best elements of Excalibur are mostly conceptual, and I think she stumbles through plotting on an issue-to-issue level and in making use of her full ensemble cast. At this stage it’s pretty clear that Excalibur is ultimately a Betsy Braddock solo series with a large supporting cast, and not a proper team book as it’s sold. Rogue, one of the best and most beloved X-Men characters, has spent 20 issues of this series essentially playing the role of “Betsy’s friend” without any real story of her own. Gambit fares even worse, mainly playing the role of “Rogue’s husband.” Jubilee and Rictor get a little more to do, but their stories are presented as minor relative to things directly pertaining to Betsy. 

Unlike the second arc of Marauders in which Gerry Duggan took Kate Pryde off the board and used it as a way of exploring the other characters in the series, Howard took Betsy Braddock out of Excalibur so the other characters could mostly just talk about missing her and trying to bring her back. I like Betsy Braddock a lot, she’s one of my favorite X-Men characters, and don’t mind this sort of focus on her but it’s time for this series to be more honest about what it is. Rogue getting reassigned to Duggan’s new X-Men series is a good sign, both for the good of that character, and for Excalibur moving away from wasting major characters in the orbit of Braddock. 

Howard has clearly made some effort to tell a complete plot in any given issue, at least in terms of setting an obstacle and overcoming it, but for the most part these seem weirdly inconsequential. Maybe part of the problem is how abstract the conflicts tend to be, particularly in a set of issues like these where everything’s so psychic and mystical and not rooted in physicality or social dynamics. Even when this storyline gets a proper antagonist in the form of Malice, the story ends up defeating the concept of the character – a disembodied psychic creature that hijacks bodies – by fleshing out her backstory and giving her a body in the end. Howard aims for pathos in telling Malice’s story, but it mostly just comes across as corny and as a clumsy parallel to Betsy’s own history. 

Marcus To’s art continues to be pleasantly average in scenes that are mostly talking and hanging out, and egregiously bland and flat whenever he’s asked to draw anything particularly fantastical, which is quite often in a series largely focused on fantasy genre scenes and psychic abstractions. Given that Howard’s writing has come off much better when paired with heavyweights Pepe Larraz, R.B. Silva, Phil Noto, and Mahmud Asrar on X of Swords, it’s very likely that these issues would have come across much better if To was not the artist. 

Hellions 7-12
Written by Zeb Wells
Art by Stephen Segovia
Color art by David Curiel

Hellions remains a highlight of the line as Zeb Wells explores some of the most warped X-Men characters with equal measures of dark wit and empathetic nuance. Wells is very good at making sure his eight characters get a roughly even amount of spotlight in any given story but in this run of issues we get a little deeper into the three weirdest cast members – Nanny, Orphan Maker, and Wild Child. The sorta contrived narrative reason for this is that after being resurrected from having died in Arakko the three have come back as “sharpened” versions of themselves, i.e., like even more themselves than they were before. In effect this means that Orphan Maker is even more petulant and childish, Nanny is more vindictive and monomaniacal, and Wild Child struggles with his profound primal urge to be an alpha while consistently finding himself in situations where he most definitely is not. Wells gets a particularly good scene out of this subplot in the Hellfire Gala issue in which Wild Child runs into his ex-girlfriend Aurora and finds that not only is she embarrassed by her past association with him, but she’s also with Daken, a bigger and more obviously alpha version of Wild Child. Wells manages to take the character’s plight - rooted in toxic masculinity and powerful incel vibes - and make it weirdly poignant without making him come across any less creepy and psychotic. 

Wells’ plotting is strong, particularly in the run of issues in which the cast is held captive by Arcade and Mastermind, but the pleasure of this series is in the genuinely funny dialogue and the way Wells gradually deepens the relationships between these demented and/or broken weirdos. Greycrow in particular has benefited from this as he demonstrated a fraternal warmth towards Wild Child, a respectful comradery with Havok, and a slow-simmering romantic chemistry with Psylocke. The broader question of the series is “can these people change and be rehabilitated?” and the ongoing story of Greycrow suggest that he can be if he continues to forge real connections rather than maintain an icy loner lifestyle that allowed him to see other people’s lives as useless and disposable.

Havok’s role in the series is to essentially be the “straight man” among the lunatics, but Wells does a good job of making it clear that he’s just as broken as the rest. In the Gala issue we are reminded that any status Havok has is due to him being Cyclops’ brother, and that authority figures like Xavier and Magneto seem to view him as a pathetic figure they must be superficially kind to as a favor to Cyclops. This feeds into the character’s delusion that he doesn’t belong amongst the Hellions, but also fuels the years of sudden volcanic anger and bad choices sparked by rampant insecurity that’s put him in this position.

Destruction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For Your Life

“X of Swords: Chapter 14”
Marauders #15
Written by Gerry Duggan and Benjamin Percy
Art by Stefano Caselli
Color art by Edgar Delgado

“X of Swords: Chapter 15”
Excalibur #14
Written by Tini Howard 
Art by Phil Noto

“X of Swords: Chapter 16”
Wolverine #7
Written by Benjamin Percy and Gerry Duggan
Art by Joshua Cassara
Color art by Guru-eFX

And now the story gets a little weird! But of course, “weird” is a human word…

• Marauders picks up on last week’s cliffhanger in the most jarring way possible, zooming ahead to the aftermath of Wolverine murdering Saturnyne – the inevitable conquest of Krakoa and the rest of Earth by the forces of Arakko and Amenth. But of course Saturnyne is seemingly omnipotent in her realm, and so she’s only just messing with Wolverine and showing him the actual stakes of the situation. This all supports the notion that it’s in Saturnyne’s interest to defeat the Arakkii and flush the influence of Amenth out of Otherworld lest they inevitably conquer the rest of her domain, but Saturnyne’s actions over the course of three issues complicate matters further by capriciously rigging the contests against the Krakoan swordbearers in increasingly absurd ways. She’s playing a game, but it’s hard to tell exactly what it is. 

• Marauders #15 continues on from last week’s issue in further developing the characters from Arakko at the banquet before the contest. The White Sword’s tension with the family of Apocalypse and Genesis is highlighted by his utter disgust for War attempting to poison her opponents at the parley, while Redroot and Death ponder the ways living in a far less horrific world has made the X-Men “weak and soft.” It’s remarkable how familiar these characters and their milieu have become over the past few weeks – it’s all so rich that it would be a shame to see some of them go at the end of this story. 

• We get our first glimpse of Death’s mutant power as he murders a servant with a glare at the banquet. This scene is handled very well by Stefano Caselli, who paces it very nicely and conveys how effortless and meaningless this gesture is for Death. It’s interesting that this power is only a minor variation on that of Gorgon, who also hides his eyes to hold back his own version of a death gaze. (And of course this carries over to Cyclops, though he’s not in this story.) 

• Isca the Unbeaten is further developed in both Marauders and Excalibur, in both cases suggesting that she’s a decent person who feels inclined to spare her opponents the inevitability of her victory. It’s increasingly obvious Isca is going to be hanging around the X-Men for a while after this, and I welcome it. She has so much potential, and the concept and design of her is so strong.

• Excalibur #14 begins the contest phase of the storyline and immediately upends all expectations by giving us an abrupt anticlimax in the duel of Betsy Braddock and Isca and then a forced marriage rather than a battle. Betsy’s apparent death in her fight with Isca is strange and abstract, and also unrelated to any power we know Isca to possess besides that she wins any battle she’s in, so it seems very likely whatever happened to her is the intervention of Saturnyne’s magic or perhaps her brother Jamie’s reality-warping power. 

• The forced marriage of Cypher and Bei the Blood Moon is a wild curveball, but makes sense if Saturnyne’s true goal is to weed out the Amenthi influence on the Arakkii and get the Krakoans and Arrakkii on the same page – i.e., purging Amenth from Otherworld. This sequence is a lot of fun, and I love that Bei is able to “speak” in a way that is intuitively comprehensible to everyone else but is by technicality indecipherable to him as a result of his power. So of course he’s fascinated by Bei, and though Bei’s thoughts on the matter are opaque she seems pretty enthusiastic about marrying – and violently protecting – this cute little golden-hearted dork. But still, as amusing as it is for this tall warrior woman to embrace the notion of marrying him, it’s hard to grasp why given the limited information we have about her life. 

• The Wolverine issue pushes the absurdity of Saturnyne’s competition to another level, first by making Magik’s battle against the monstrous Pogg Ur-Pogg an arm wrestling match she cannot possibly win, and then by having Wolverine kill Summoner in the surreal realm of Blightspoke and having the point go to Arakko because they were told it was a fight to the death and Summoner was the one to die. Then Wolverine is roped into another duel as a result of the agreement he made with Solem off-panel earlier in the story, and when Wolverine defeats War in battle, the point also goes to Arakko. Saturnyne is plainly rigging the contest against Krakoa… but why exactly? It makes sense for her to want to mess with Wolverine and Betsy specifically, but what is she actually up to? I suppose we’ll get that reveal next week. 

History

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing People

“Let Them Be Snakes,” “Blood Work,”
“Nothing People,” “Love Bleeds”
Hellions #1-4
Written by Zeb Wells
Art by Stephen Segovia
Color art by David Curiel

The premise of Hellions is basically DC’s Suicide Squad but on Krakoa – a crew of violent antisocial misfits being forced into service of their government, in this case on the premise of giving purpose and therepeutic treatment to these people who’d otherwise be a drain on their society. This is an intriguing way of getting deep into irredeemable sociopaths like Greycrow and Empath, or looking for some explanation to the madness of the deeply strange Nanny and the Orphan-Maker. The complication in the series is the inclusion of Havok as the “straight man” in the mix – a guy who’s ordinarily a straight-laced X-Man but has a history of unhinged violence and sinister behavior even if that’s induced by outside forces as in the unfinished aftermath of his “inversion” at the end of Rick Remender’s Axis event. The story provides a context for honestly exploring what years of inconsistent writing, shunting drastically between classic heroism and mind-warped psychosis, would actually do the psyche of a man.

Zeb Wells, who wrote a brief but excellent run on New Mutants in the late 2000s, is a welcome return to the X-fold. He’s very good with understated nuance in character writing, high-stakes plotting, and mining and interpreting the subtext of continuity (particularly from the late ‘80s) in ways that don’t actually necessitate having read the source material. But it certainly helps, particularly in the case of this first arc in which the Hellions are sent to destroy one of Mister Sinister’s clone farms and discover that his most famous clone Madelyne “The Goblin Queen” Pryor is there turning the remnants of Marauders clones into zombies. Pryor is a very complicated figure, but Wells boils her story down to one simple, emotionally resonant idea: Even if she’s dismissed by everyone as an insane clone of Jean Grey who messed up their lives, she is still very much a person in her own right. She’s the woman dismissed as a “crazy bitch,” driven mad by other people refusing her personhood, particularly when she’s been wronged and all that’s been erased. Havok, who once fell in love with Pryor, is one of the few people to actually see her as a true person, but he’s also the one most susceptible to her cruel manipulations as we see in a series of scenes rooted in erotic femdom horror. No one can see this woman clearly.

Wells’ other narrative anchor is exploring Psylocke, who is no longer Betsy Braddock but fully Kwannon, the Asian psychic ninja whose body she had possessed through decades of publishing. Wells’ Kwannon retains the essence of Psylocke as she existed for many years – intense, sullen, ruthless – with the implication that Betsy’s presence in this form was strongly influenced by the suppressed Kwannon persona or at least the memories carried by her body. She’s presented as essentially the Hellions’ chaperone on behalf of Mister Sinister, but given her history as an assassin for The Hand, there’s a lot of doubt cast on her motives for agreeing to this. A text page, presented as a case review from the perspective of an unnamed character that I presume to be Nightcrawler given some contextual clues, foregrounds this by speculating at what point Psylocke fully asserts herself as the master of this group rather than Sinister, and trying to remind the other Krakoans that this is not in fact their friend Betsy that they love and trust. 

The major strength of Wells’ Hellions is that it’s a book eager to explore a lot of characters – or characterizations – that would otherwise be swept under the rug. This is true both in-story and in a metatextual sense, and he’s good at addressing the latter without getting in the way of the emotional reality of the former. I’m looking forward to where he goes with this. 

The Accolade of Betsy Braddock

“The Accolade of Betsy Braddock” / “A Tower of Flowers” / “Three Covenants” / “Fall Back and Think of England!” / “Panic on the Streets of London” / “Watch the Throne” 
Excalibur #1-6
Written by Tini Howard
Art by Marcus To
Color art by Erick Arciniega

Serial stories don’t always click right away, but you can usually tell when an ongoing story has the potential to grow into something better as it goes along. Tini Howard’s Excalibur series seems like one of those to me. Howard is relatively new to writing for comics, and while she hardly comes off as green, it’s clear enough that she’s still in the process of learning on the job and finding her voice. In working on this series she’s essentially being mentored by Jonathan Hickman, and as she is now she reminds me a lot of Hickman when he himself was being mentored by Brian Michael Bendis in the early days of his career at Marvel. You can sense intelligence, passion, and ambition in the writing, but it’s muffled somewhat. Howard is good with dialogue and clever with her concepts, but there’s something missing or buried in the mix at the moment. My theory is that in playing “by the book” in pacing her plot in these issues, she’s denying a more peculiar personal narrative rhythm that would be more enticing. But you need to master the rules to break them well, so maybe that’s just what this arc is for her. 

Excalibur is the series in the new X-Men line that is exploring the concept of “mutant magic,” and is expanding on ideas set in motion by Jonathan Hickman that reimagine Apocalypse as a mutant mystic with ancient scores to settle. These elements of the plot are very interesting and entertaining, and I particularly enjoy the way Howard portrays Apocalypse as a man with an elaborate agenda that involves constantly manipulating the Excalibur crew to his own advantage, but also as a figure who is generally benevolent to the other leads despite having been their archenemy up until recently. 

The series is also about Betsy Braddock taking on her twin brother Brian’s role as Captain Britain in the wake of her ceding her identity as Psylocke to her former host body Kwannon following them splitting off into two separate people. Betsy has been one of my favorite X-Men characters for a long time, but I’m pretty cold on this version of the character – largely because I’ve never found the Captain Britain mythos at all interesting, but also because a lot of the body horror and complex identity issues that went along with the baggage of her living in another woman’s body was very intriguing to me. The version of Betsy in this story feels like someone different from the character I had some investment in. She’s more of an ordinary superhero now.

But as much as I’m personally bored by the Captain Britain-ness of it all, Howard hits those marks with full commitment. I appreciate how fully she’s leaping into the fantasy elements of this series, but feel that her efforts are undermined by Marcus To’s art. To is a strong draftsman who is particularly good at drawing body language and facial expressions, but his work lacks style and flair. His pages are highly functional but sort of drab and ordinary, and do a poor job of conveying the exotic beauty of Krakoa or the more spectacular fairytale imagery he’s called upon to illustrate when the story goes full-on fantasy. There’s no poetry in his linework. He’d probably do well with a more traditional comic series that focused more on comedy or soap opera, but he’s all wrong for a book like this which needs you to buy into high drama and wild imagery. 

This problem reminds me of the early phase of Chris Claremont’s work on the original New Mutants series, where he was paired with industry legend Sal Buscema for about a year before Bill Sienkiewicz took over and radically redefined the style and tone of the book. Buscema, like To, was an incredibly talented draftsman with a clean and old-fashioned style. But his dependable style was at odds with the aims of the series – it was stodgy instead of youthful. Sienkiewicz’s offbeat and highly distinctive style brought out the tensions in the series, and opened Claremont up to exploring elements of horror and abstraction that added a new dimension to a comic about mutant teenagers. Howard’s Excalibur needs this sort of aesthetic shift. The mysticism needs to be emphasized with atmosphere and style. It should feel more surreal, more fantastic. To is far from a bad artist, but he’s not serving the material well and gets in the way of the reader fully believing in Howard’s magic. 

Final Execution

“Final Execution”
Uncanny X-Force #31-35 (2012-2013)
Written by Rick Remender
Art by Phil Noto

Most fiction writers have a theme they work through in a majority of their work, and for Rick Remender it’s unbreakable cycles of violence. Remender’s run on Uncanny X-Force, which I would say is the best X-Men story to ever be published as a spin-off title, is a meditation on how violence only begets more violence, and that the notion of “redemptive violence” is just a rationalization. This is a very subversive but totally appropriate story to tell in the context of X-Force, the X-title that was conceived as a hyper-violent “proactive” form of super-team and had fully transformed into a clandestine “black ops” kill squad in the Craig Kyle/Chris Yost run just prior to Remender’s tenure. Kyle and Yost also wrestled with their characters facing trauma and moral rot in their stories, but it was still pretty clear that the primary point of their X-Force was “wow, these baddies are SO BAD, they DESERVE to die.” Their run was conceived during the George W. Bush administration and it’s very much an artefact of that era and the “War on Terrror.” 

Remender began his Uncanny X-Force with a despicable act of “proactive” violence – Fantomex murdering a child clone of Apocalypse in cold blood – and every story that came after that initial arc came out of unexpected consequences of that action. The entire run, which concluded in the extended “Final Execution” arc, is a critique of the very concept of X-Force. The core characters – Wolverine, Psylocke, Archangel, Fantomex, and Deadpool – are all poisoned by their cruelty and unjustifiable killing, and two of them die as a result of their actions. Remender’s cast are all characters who have had their bodies transformed against their will to become weapons for someone else’s use, and in the case of Fantomex, he was born and raised in an artificial environment to be a killer. They all want to act of their free will after having that taken away from them at some point, but can’t extricate “living weapon” from their identities. It’s “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” but these people have adamantium claws, psychic knives, razor wings, and a LOT of guns. 

Psylocke is at the center of most of Remender’s stories because she’s the character with the most moral conflict over what they’re doing and the greatest self-delusion about what she has become. She’s the reader surrogate in some ways – initially on the side of X-Force but increasingly aware that they’ve been kidding themselves all along. At the start of the second phase of “Final Execution,” which is illustrated by the subtle but rather stylish Phil Noto, Psylocke has lost both of her love interests – she was forced to kill Archangel when he was corrupted by Apocalypse’s cult, and Fantomex was executed by the sadistic Skinless Man shortly after he and Psylocke finally consummated their lust/hate dynamic after she’d hit rock bottom emotionally.  She’s a broken person, but she knows why. She just wants to get out of the cycle.

Psylocke’s relationship with Archangel was established in the early ‘90s by Fabian Nicieza in X-Men. It was an inspired match – they’re both from posh backgrounds, but had experienced similar physical transformations against their will. They had similar angst, but also shared a hedonistic streak. Remender’s pairing of Psylocke and Fantomex is similarly brilliant, but for darker reasons. Shortly after the two hook up, Psylocke cruelly dismisses Fantomex by telling him that he is a “living contrivance, a product… a hall of mirrors with no end” and that “there is no YOU to have feelings for.” She’s not wrong about this, but it’s also apparent that she recognizes this because she sees herself in him, or perhaps more accurately, what she fears she has become after the trauma of having her mind and body tampered with so many times over. Fantomex wants Psylocke because she is who he wants to be, and Psylocke lusts for Fantomex because he’s given in entirely to the absurdity and brutality of his nature. 

“Final Execution” is necessarily bleak in the resolution of its primary character arcs. There is some minor joy in Deadpool embracing his best impulses and serving as a demented sort of father figure to the second child Apocalypse, but Wolverine’s storyline ends with an act so horrible it shatters his illusions about trying to be a father figure/role model to the youngest generation of mutants. He knows he’s nothing but a hypocrite, and he’s doomed to live in a constant cycle of violence that will always result in the deaths of people he loves. Wolverine and Deadpool can’t change – the market demands nonstop bloodshed from the both of them, and so the reader is complicit in this terrible loop of misery and destruction. The readership has an endless desire for redemptive violence, and Remender is at least doing his best to show them that it’s a false premise. He’s been doing the same story with different characters in Deadly Class for the past few years, and you can tell he only gets more weary and cynical about this as he goes along.

Uncanny X-Force does end with a “happy ending” of sorts in its epilogue. Fantomex returns to life, but as three clones – he originally had three separate brains, but an error in the cloning made a body for each clone. The darkest aspects of his persona ended up in one body, and his kindest aspects were isolated in a female version of himself. In the end, the primary Fantomex takes Psylocke to meet his “mother,” a fictional construct who raised him in “The World,” the articificial reality where he was created. Psylocke questions the reality of the situation, and Fantomex essentially just shrugs it off. Does it matter? Can they just be happy, even if it’s fake? After all the chaos and pain and death, the only reasonable thing either of them can do in the end is embrace a happy fantasy. Sometimes the only escape is delusion and oblivion. 

We Call the Ship Blobsy

“The Butterfly Effect Begins” / “We Call the Ship Blobsy” 
X-Tremists #2-3 (2019)
Written by Leah Williams
Pencils by Georges Jeanty
Inks by Roberto Poggi

X-Tremists is a mini-series that is part of a larger story called “Age of X-Man” which was devised as an event to be published in the interim period before Jonathan Hickman’s arrival as the new principle writer of X-Men comics this July. It is a sideways version of “Age of Apocalypse” in which X-Man – an immensely powerful clone created by the “Age of Apocalypse” version of Mister Sinister from Cyclops and Jean Grey’s genetic material and who is essentially that dystopia’s equivalent to Cable – forces the majority of notable X-Men characters to be shunted into his bizarre version of a utopia. X-Man’s world is peaceful, and a place where only mutants exist. But because X-Man is so essentially warped by his origin as a clone, he’s decided that all physical, romantic, and familial relationships are inherently bad and obsolete in a world where all new children are created in labs. 

As with “Age of Apocalypse,” the story plays out in a set of mini-series that explore different facets of this new alternate reality. The tension in each series mainly comes down to characters slowly realizing something about their existence is off, and experiencing flashes of their true lives. Most of the series involved are pleasantly mediocre and mostly suffer because their premise is overextended in five issues and the art is drab and uninspired. The best of the series by quite some distance is X-Tremists, which is written by newcomer Leah Williams and illustrated by Georges Jeanty, who previously collaborated with Joss Whedon on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer comic book. 

The title is very misleading in that there is no group of characters called X-Tremists, and the series is actually about the agents of Department X, who are tasked with enforcing X-Man’s draconian laws forbidding any sort of sex and romance. Unlike a lot of contemporary X-Men titles, in which the selection of cast members seems somewhat arbitrary, Williams was very deliberate about the characters selected for her story. Three of the main characters – Iceman, Northstar, and Psylocke – are canonically queer, and have been essentially forced back into the closet by X-Man. Jubilee is a young mother, and has had all her memories of her son erased from her mind. 

And then there’s Blob. Blob has been written as a villain all through his publishing history, and has always been presented as a vile, pathetic fat man who only ever works as a henchman for either Magneto or Mystique. Unlike the other characters, who have had something important about themselves taken away by X-Man, the Blob of this world has been given a much better life in which he can actually be his true self. In a world where being unique is celebrated and all sorts of body types are acceptable, he’s no longer forced into villainy by society’s disgust for his obese form. He’s allowed to be a proud and upstanding citizen. In this context, he’s widely respected as a hero and a leader. He’s well-read and thoughtful. Despite the creepiness of Department X’s mission, he’s a gentle and forgiving pacifist.

And he’s in love with Psylocke. But unlike in the real world, where his self-hatred and a justified assumption that everyone finds him repulsive would lead him to repress a crush like this, he’s kept this to himself here because of the laws he’s expected to enforce. Blob is pushed to reveal this to Psylocke in the second issue in a tearful and often poetic monologue. Blob’s confession is very considerate in a self-loathing sort of way – he makes a point up front about how he never intended to “impose” his feelings on her and was content to keep it to himself – but he refuses to apologize for having those feelings in the first place because allowing himself to love her was something that made him feel alive.

The big surprise for Blob, and for the reader as well, is that Psylocke is not repulsed by him. In the third issue she returns to his home to have tea and borrow some of his favorite books, and she ends up having her own soliloquy about her complicated and painful relationship with her body. The version of Psylocke in this story is the current iteration, who just recently was returned to her original form as a posh British woman after having inhabited the form of an Asian ninja for nearly three decades of publishing. Williams’ Psylocke has been dealing with dysmorphia and an eating disorder since she was a teenager, and being trapped in another woman’s body was a respite from all this. “I never felt that way toward Kwannon’s body, only mine,” she tells Blob. “It was so much easier to be kinder to myself through her body. I did not struggle with my eating disorder when I looked like her. Because she is not me, and she IS beautiful.” 

Blob and Psylocke don’t consummate their feelings, and continue to follow the laws they enforce. But the intimacy they’ve developed is profound for both, and carries into how they interact in the remainder of the story. It’s sad in the sense that poor Blob’s deep love is unrequited, but quite beautiful in how they open up to one another. It would be awful if future writers don’t run with what Williams establishes about Blob’s true nature, or how she articulates Psylocke’s fraught relationship with her original body. It certainly makes the most of the editorial decision to revert Psylocke from her far more iconic (though racially problematic) form. 

Williams is young and relatively new to writing comics, and comes to the industry after some success as a YA novelist. Her perspective is fresh and her fandom for the X-Men in particular is quite intense. The difference between her approach to this series – as well as recent one-shots she wrote focused on Emma Frost and Magik – and that of most anyone else who has written X-Men comics in the past few years is quite stark. For one, the tight focus on a set of five carefully selected core characters and diving deep into their major themes and inner lives is the opposite of some of the other “Age of X-Man” series or, say, how Matthew Rosenberg has been writing the concurrently published Uncanny X-Men series, which follows the characters who were not zapped into X-Man’s alternate world. 

Rosenberg’s Uncanny is a fascinating mess that began with great promise as he focused on the return of Cyclops and Wolverine but quickly devolved into a narrative trainwreck as his core cast bloated to over a dozen members, and each successive issue was packed with yet more characters popping in from out of nowhere in glorified cameos. Rosenberg is hardly alone in the “all-you-can-eat-buffet” approach to casting X-Men comics, but his recent work is the most egregious example yet. It is all too transparent that when given the opportunity to write a 12-issue X-Men run, he decided to prioritize packing in as many characters he liked as possible without, you know, actually giving those characters any meaningful story beats. The plot is rushed and often nearly incoherent, and moments that ought to have landed as emotional and tragic, such as the pointless killing of Wolfsbane, don’t connect at all. (The latter in large part due to the slapdash art of a rando fill-in penciler.) 

It isn’t just that Williams is sensible in her narrative choices, but that unlike the majority of people writing these things these days she actually has something to say. She’s working through her own lived-in experiences with body issues and queer identity, and pushing themes that have been in the subtext of X-Men comics for decades to the surface. She writes her characters as people, not just IP to trot out joylessly, or a box of action figures to haphazardly spill out on to the living room floor. She loves the characters she writes, and badly wants you to empathize with them and connect like she has. The bar in comics is very low now, and writers really can just nod in the direction of woke ideas and expect rapturous applause from small pockets of fans on social media. But Williams goes deeper, and there’s a heart and generosity to her writing that was crucial to Chris Claremont and Scott Lobdell’s work on the franchise at its commercial peak in the ‘80s and ‘90s. A lot of writers have certainly attempted to bring that back, but Williams does it effortlessly because this is clearly just the sort of person she is. 

Capital Crimes

“Capital Crimes”
Uncanny X-Men #272 (1990)
Written by Chris Claremont
Pencils by Jim Lee
Inks by Scott Williams

“Capital Crimes” is the seventh issue of the nine-part “X-Tinction Agenda” storyline that ran through Uncanny X-Men, X-Factor, and New Mutants in the fall of 1990. It’s a very frustrating story in that the Uncanny X-Men issues, written by Chris Claremont and illustrated by Jim Lee at the pinnacle of their talents, are as exciting and visually thrilling as superhero comics get, while the remainder of the story is largely incoherent and unattractive. Louise Simonson, who wrote the New Mutants and X-Factor issues, doesn’t seem especially inspired but is as at a massive disadvantage in that her artists are nowhere near as exciting as Jim Lee. Two of her three New Mutants issues are illustrated by a young Rob Liefeld who is obviously scrambling to meet deadlines while inkers like Joe Rubinstein wipe out nearly all traces of his ridiculous charm, leaving only messy, ugly pages. (The third is drawn by a total rando doing a fill-in issue.) Her X-Factor issues are illustrated by Jon Bogdanove, who would be fine enough in other contexts but whose lumpy linework looks extremely drab and old-fashioned in contrast with Lee’s dynamic and densely rendered pages. Flipping through a collection of “X-Tinction Agenda” today is jarring, but does adequately emphasize how original and exciting Lee’s art was at the time. It’s somewhat comparable to the roughly concurrent seismic impact that Mariah Carey, Garth Brooks, N.W.A., and Nirvana had on their respective genres in music. 

At the time of “X-Tinction Agenda,” Chris Claremont had been writing Uncanny X-Men and most of the spin-off titles for 16 years, and had worked with some of the best illustrators in the history of the medium – Dave Cockrum, John Byrne, Paul Smith, John Romita Jr, Barry Windsor-Smith, Arthur Adams, Bill Sienkiewicz, Marc Silvestri, Alan Davis, John Buscema – and had learned how to write to make the most of their respective styles. Claremont very quickly learned how to best utilize Lee and capitalized on his skill for drawing sexy, idealized bodies and the sort of action scenes that made most blockbuster movies look bland by comparison. “Capital Crimes,” in which the reunited X-characters escape captivity in the fascist slave state of Genosha, is basically a string of “FUCK YEAH!!!” hero moments executed with precision and grace by Claremont and Lee. 

The story doesn’t just pay off on the events of the story thus far, but gives readers moments they’d been hoping to see for years, like Wolverine fighting the newly dark and blade-winged Archangel, or Cyclops reasserting his role as the leader of the X-Men. A lot of the most thrilling bits are character-defining moments for new members like Gambit and Cable, and in the case of the recently transformed Psylocke, character-redefining as she takes on a full-on action hero role as a psychic ninja with a machine gun. 

My favorite element of this story is the villain, Cameron Hodge. Hodge started off as a supporting character in X-Factor but was gradually revealed as a crazed anti-mutant maniac with a militia called The Right over the course of Simonson’s runs on X-Factor and New Mutants. At this point, he was barely human – just a head attached to an enormous grotesque mecha-scorpion with robotic tentacles, spikes, guns. As illustrated by Lee, it’s one of the most memorable and terrifying character designs of the era. There’s never any adequate explanation of how Hodge became attached to this vast killing machine, or even how he ended up in a position of great power in Genosha, but it hardly matters. Claremont essentially writes Hodge as a completely unhinged version of George H.W. Bush. He’s lost all connection to his humanity, and is little more than a gleefully sadistic maniac with a psychotic grudge against all X-people, but especially his old rival, Archangel. 

Claremont clearly loves writing Hodge’s over-the-top dialogue (“♫What a day, what a day for an auto-de-fé♫”), and Lee obviously delights in the creepy spectacle of his mechanical body. It makes no sense at all that while Hodge has appeared in subsequent stories, he’s only appeared once more in this form, basically as a mini-boss in the late-‘00s crossover “Second Coming.” This should be one of the definitive recurring X-Men villains, and yet. It’s hard to understand why many artists wouldn’t leap at the chance to draw this version of Hodge, but then again, attempting to compete with what Lee accomplished with the character in these issues seems very difficult and the other art in the crossover demonstrates just how badly you can look in comparison. 

Precipice

“Precipice”
Uncanny X-Men #238 (1995)
Written by Scott Lobdell
Pencils by Joe Madureira
Inks by Tim Townshend

Most of the best X-Men stories are, in some way, about failure. The heroism of the X-Men is more in how they persist in trying to do the right thing and stand up to oppression, not in them frequently succeeding in their goals. “Precipice,” a high point in Scott Lobdell and Joe Madureira’s mid-‘90s run, is largely about the X-Men acknowledging the limits of their idealistic philosophy and suffering for it. 

The story starts with Charles Xavier confronting the X-Men’s prisoner, the murderous psychopath Sabretooth, and admitting that he’s given up on his attempts to rehabilitate him and give him a second chance among the X-Men. Xavier is magnanimous but stern when confronting Sabretooth – it pains him that he can’t figure out how to curb Sabretooth’s homicidal rages, or integrate him into the group as he had with Wolverine, Rogue, or Gambit. Sabretooth is too far gone, and he knows it. He taunts Xavier, bragging about how he never wanted to be saved, and that he loves having the power to kill with impunity. Xavier can only counter Sabretooth’s argument with moralism and reason, but he knows he’s wasting his time. More than any other major X-Men antagonist, Sabretooth represents pure amoral id. He has no ideology, no agenda. He’s just a sadist and a savage. Xavier owns up to his failure, and decides to pass him along to government custody. 

Sabretooth is, by design, the dark opposite of Wolverine. They have more or less the same powers – healing, claws, enhanced senses – but Sabretooth is bigger, and stronger. Wolverine has a nobility and morality in contrast with his violent rages, but Sabretooth is a total nihilist. The only thing he seems to care about at all is causing pain and satisfying his base urges. “Precipice” is the conclusion of a long-running B-plot through much of the mid-90s in which Sabretooth is held captive by the X-Men in the mansion, where he largely behaves like a mutant version of Hannibal Lechter, with various women in the X-Men – Jean Grey, Boom Boom, and Psylocke – playing the Clarice Starling role in different ways.

All three of those women appear in “Precipice.” Jean, who had previously intimidated and belittled Sabretooth, sticks to the sidelines and supports Xavier in his decision. She certainly sees no point in trying to redeem this guy. Boom Boom, a compassionate but not particularly clever member of the junior X-Force squad, faces Sabretooth on her own, furious to realize she had fallen for his ruse when he had been pretending to be mentally impaired following an encounter with Wolverine that seemed to partially lobotomize him. “I trusted you!,” she shouts while slapping him in the face. “I believed your brain was all out of whack! I was there for you when everybody else had written you off!” Sabretooth, ever the sadist, just tells her that she’s an idiot, and then plays on her considerable insecurities about her white trash family and feeling like a loser among the X-Men until she retaliates by hitting him with an energy blast that sets him loose.

Sabretooth’s casual manipulation of Boom Boom is so heartbreaking. She’s not stupid, just guided by raw emotions and obvious self-loathing. Her compassion is real, but also just a transparent desire to stick up for broken losers – like herself, like her own father. Sabretooth and Boom Boom’s dynamic is a dark mirror of Wolverine’s more wholesome relationship with Jubilee, another teen character with a very similar personality and superpower. What if Wolverine was a sociopath? What if Jubilee had no self-esteem whatsoever? 

Psylocke observes this moment between Sabretooth and Boom Boom, and is there to intervene when he’s set free. Psylocke and Sabretooth have a shared history – the two faced off in the issue during the Mutant Massacre storyline in which she joined the team. Back then it was a deliberately mis-matched fight, with the frail and demure Psylocke seeming like easy prey for this brutish psycho. She managed to defeat him, and proved herself as X-Men material. This time around, the duel seems more evenly matched, as Psylocke is now in her Asian ninja body. But it doesn’t go nearly so well, as her attempt to use her psychic power backfires on her, and he eviscerates her. 

The issue ends with Sabretooth having escaped, Psylocke being on death’s door, and Boom Boom in tears, knowing that her emotional weakness may have led to Psylocke’s death, and the inevitable deaths of whoever else gets in the path of this unhinged maniac. The issue starts with Xavier and his top lieutenants having to admit they can’t redeem Sabretooth, and ends with them being proven correct in the most awful way. Boom Boom has to face up to the reality that her faith in the notion of redemption had only made her the perfect mark for an ultra violent con man. 

“Precipice” is more upsetting in the context of Lobdell and Madureira’s previous story focusing on Sabretooth in the alternate reality Age of Apocalypse event. In this world, where Xavier died young and the X-Men were founded by Magneto, Sabretooth is a heroic figure and essentially has Wolverine’s role in the group. Madureira, whose art is so stylized and dynamic that some might not notice the elegant nuances of his cartooning, draws these Sabretooths very differently. The AOA Sabretooth stands tall with good posture, and carries himself with obvious pride. The “real” Sabretooth is always slouching, and moves like a cross between a tiger and gorilla. Madureira draws him with vacant eyes and cruel toothy grin, like The Joker as a wild animal. 

The heroes in the story have softer features, and emote with big eyes and display their confidence – or lack thereof – in how they carry their arms and shoulders. Madureira portrays Jean Grey as empathetic and uncertain, Cyclops as strong and decisive, Bishop as angry and conflicted, and Xavier as cold and aloof. Psylocke appears bold and defiant, while Boom Boom looks defensive even when she’s being confrontational. Madureira rightly gets a lot of credit for his excellent sense of design and his intuitive skill in making his pages look vibrant and uncluttered, but he’s just as brilliant in conveying a lot of information about characters without the writer needing to explicate much about their interiority in dialogue or exposition. 

Fever Dream

“Fever Dream”
Uncanny X-Men #251 (1989)
Written by Chris Claremont
Pencils by Marc Silvestri
Inks by Dan Green

The image on the cover of Uncanny X-Men #251 of a crucified Wolverine is both boldly sacrilegious and totally appropriate to the character. Wolverine is, at the core of things, a hyper-masculine martyr fantasy. His rapid healing power and indestructible metal skeleton make him effectively unkillable, but he is constantly in agony. His power gives him license to be brave and reckless in ways that would be suicidal for anyone else – he’s routinely broken, burned, and gored while other characters are barely scratched in combat. It’s not just that he’ll “get better,” it’s that he’s willing to experience excruciating pain in order to do the right thing. This is a lot more important to the character than mere endurance and invincibility. Wolverine suffers for us all. When Donald Pierce and the Reavers crucify him in the Australian Outback on an X – just a cross turned sideways, after all – they’re deliberately mocking his martyr shtick. 

“Fever Dream” is the climax of a storyline in which Chris Claremont dismantles his second team of X-Men, the group of eight characters he focused on in the three years following the Mutant Massacre in 1986. Up until the Massacre, the cast of the X-Men had been relatively static since 1975, with only minor variations in lineup. After the Massacre, half of the core cast was written out, with Storm, Wolverine, and Rogue remaining alongside four new members – Psylocke, Dazzler, Longshot, and Havok. (Colossus returned a bit later, while Nightcrawler, Kitty Pryde, and Rachel Summers were sent off to the spin-off series Excalibur and sidelined from nearly every key X-Men story until 1998.) This time, however, Claremont was not as interested in shuffling the cast so much as entirely dissolving the concept of the X-Men as a team. From issue #252 through #274, there are no X-Men, just assorted X-Men characters scattered around the world having adventures in small groups and pairings. It was radical enough to alter the cast of the most successful comic in the American market in 1986, it was even more so to do away with the cast entirely in 1989. This phase of the series represents Chris Claremont at his most narratively ambitious. 

As we come into “Fever Dream,” nearly half the cast is already gone. Longshot had quit, Rogue had disappeared through the portal of the mystical Siege Perilous, and Storm appeared to have died. (She didn’t, but let’s not get into that here.) The remaining members – Psylocke, Havok, Colossus, and Dazzler – were off on a mission on the other side of the planet while Wolverine, who had been disappearing periodically from the main X-Men comic to appear in his own concurrent solo series by Claremont and John Buscema, had arrived back at the X-Men’s secret base in Australia to be ambushed by Reavers, a gang of rabidly anti-mutant cyborg psychopaths. At this point in the story, Wolverine’s healing powers had been exhausted and slowed down considerably, and there’s some question of whether or not he can actually survive the Reavers’ torture. This just feeds into the Reavers’ sadism – nearly every member of the group is a cyborg as a result of being mutilated by Wolverine’s claws, so they’re all very invested in having revenge on him. 

The majority of the story is focused on Wolverine’s visions while nailed to the cross, all brilliantly illustrated by Marc Silvestri at the peak of his skills, but the most significant part of the issue is the B plot revealing the fate of the four other X-Men. When the group return to the Outback to discover that the Reavers had returned, they panic and weigh their options as the gang approaches, ready to murder them all. Psylocke, a powerful telepath with increasingly dubious morality, makes an executive decision to use the Siege Perilous, a mystical portal that had been gifted to the group by the goddess Roma, as a retreat. The premise of the Siege is that those who pass through it will be judged and given new lives – the pure of heart will be given their fondest desires, and the rest will get their just deserts. 

The sequence in which Psylocke gently coerces her teammates into giving up their lives as they know them is one of the most unsettling moments in Claremont’s initial 17 year run on the series. Colossus, Dazzler, and Havok question the logic of running away – surely these four immensely powerful superheroes could hold their own against a group of psychos they’d already defeated once before – but Psylocke nudges them through regardless. Havok is the one to openly question whether he or the others have been psychically hijacked, but is still forced through the portal. 

It’s not entirely clear why Psylocke makes this extreme decision. She’s the most physically vulnerable character and probably the most afraid of a gang of maniacs with machine guns, so it checks out that she’d be the least inclined to face them. It’s a decision that comes as much out of her physical anxieties as her ruthlessness, a character trait that had been slowly evidencing itself over the past few years of issues. She was a demure, posh British girl on the surface, but as cold and cruel as Magneto when she had to be. 

Psylocke’s decision sets in motion nearly two years of plot, as the X-Men gradually reappear in “new lives” after passing through the Siege Perilous, but more importantly sets up the most drastic and lasting change to her character for about 30 years. A few issues later, in the first full X-Men storyline illustrated by Jim Lee, Psylocke would surface in Hong Kong, to be transformed by the Mandarin and the criminal organization The Hand into their perfect weapon – a psychic ninja assassin. As part of the process, they gave her an entirely new Asian body. Psylocke, the woman who forced her friends to give up their lives and identities, had been stripped of her mind, her agency, and her body itself. It’s a cruel karmic punishment. 

Claremont had been obsessed with psychic possession, body swaps, and variations on physical and psychological domination and subjugation for years – almost always a reflection of his obsession with kink – but this was by far the most radical move he’d made, and the most lasting. Psylocke’s  transformation into an Asian woman was only recently undone in 2018, mostly out of concern that it was problematic in racial terms. It was, for sure. But it’s also deeply fascinating, and created many opportunities to delve into the character’s complicated relationship with both her body and mind, as well as allowing for a creepy subtext about British colonialism. 

“Fever Dream” is as bleak as X-Men stories get, which is really saying something. Near the end of the issue, the Reavers’ leader Donald Pierce destroys the Siege Perilous, refusing to give Wolverine the option to escape through it, and casting some doubt on what might happen to the other characters as a result. But there’s some hope. Jubilee, then a brand new character who had secretly stowed away at the X-Men’s compound, witnesses Wolverine’s crucifixion, but also sees him tear himself off the cross. On the final page, the two meet for the first time. The broken, bloodied hero addresses her in the last panel: “So, kid…you gonna give a fella a hand, or what?”