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. 

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. 

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. 

Truth

“X of Swords: Chapter 12”
X-Men #14
Written by Jonathan Hickman
Art by Leinil Francis Yu with Mahmud Asrar
Color art by Sunny Gho

“X of Swords: Chapter 13”
Marauders #14
Written by Gerry Duggan and Benjamin Percy
Art by Stefano Caselli
Color art by Edgar Delgado

• I was wondering how Mahmud Asrar was handling the deadline crunch of seemingly getting put on a third of last week’s Stasis special while being assigned to draw four other issues in the crossover, but now we know the answer: He only drew the framing sequences of this issue, and the majority of the issue is made up of repurposed Leinil Francis Yu pages from X-Men #12. Jonathan Hickman has made use of the old “reuse the art” trick before, but this is a particularly bold move, reframing the history of the mutants of Arakko as told to Apocalypse by Summoner from the perspective of Genesis. Whereas Summoner was trying to mislead and trap Apocalypse, Genesis is telling him the hard truth of things. It’s like hearing the same song played in a different, far more melancholy key. 

This creative decision is as artful as it probably was quite pragmatic, though it does make you wonder what the compensation deal was like for Yu in this situation.

• It’s interesting to see where Summoner and Genesis’ accounts differ and converge, with some bits of their stories perfectly aligning on particular panels. The most blatant deviations come towards the end of the story, with Genesis revealing that the demons of Amenth had bred captured mutants to create a hybrid warrior race and the demon conjuring Summoners, and that Genesis indeed killed the prior host of Annihilation and was obligated to wear the Golden Helm of Amenth and command its armies. And though she put this fate off for many years, she eventually gave in and all of Arakko succumbed to Amenth. This led to the conquest of Dryador, and onward to the next goal of taking Krakoa. The final text page of this issue is heartbreaking, spelling out the truth of Arakko: The mutants there are “prisoners in their own land,” oppressed by the Amenthi hybrids, the Summoners, and the Golden Helm. What was previously implied is now very clear – Arakko must be liberated from Amenth and the mutants loyal to Amenth. 

• Isca the Unbeaten plays an interesting role in this story – her power to never lose compels her to side with inevitable victors, which directly led to her sister Genesis being corrupted by Annihilation and Arakko falling to Amenth. She’s a narrative echo of Cylobel from Powers of X, who was bred by Nimrod to betray her fellow mutants, but the notion of people who are genetically compelled to turn against their own is an odd and potentially contentious theme for Hickman’s macro story. However, just as Cylobel turns against Nimrod, it seems very likely that Isca will side with Krakoa by the end of this story. But whereas this is a redemptive act for Cylobel, wouldn’t this just be another convenient turn of events for Isca? And besides, how exactly is surrendering one’s loyalties not a form of being beaten? 

• The “vile schools” of mutant-Amenthi hybrid warriors is another echo of a plot point from Powers of X – the breeding of chimera as a warrior class of mutants by Mister Sinister. And what’s going to be the comic in this storyline to really engage with the vile schools? Hellions, the series featuring Mister Sinister as the lead.

• There’s such a sad poetry in Apocalypse having to face this brutal survivalist ethos he’s been living with for centuries from the perspective of now having Krakoa, and seeing in Krakoa a real possibility of true mutant culture and prosperity that is entirely alien to these Arakki people who can only see a zero sum game of survival or destruction. Genesis sees only softness and weakness in Apocalypse and Krakoa, but she has lost all context for true civilization. The Arakki fight merely to conquer and survive in their miserable lives, but the people of Krakoa have something to truly treasure and protect.  Genesis is blind to the power of that motivation. 

• Marauders #14 is a welcome tonal shift from X-Men #14, reorienting the story back to the perspective of the X-Men swordbearers as they meet their counterparts from Arakko for the first time at a banquet hosted by Saturnyne. Much of the story focuses in on Storm, who carries herself with absolute confidence as she rebuffs the romantic advances of Death, and on Wolverine, who is openly contemptuous of Brian Braddock for not taking advantage of Saturnyne’s love for him to prevent the tournament. There’s also a fantastic little scene in which the Krakoan captains Magik and Gorgon look for weaknesses in their opponents and test Isca, who manages to spook even them. 

• Stefano Caselli noticeably steps up his game for this issue, and really outdoes himself in drawing the surreal banquet hall of the Starlight Citadel. He does some stellar work with body language and facial expressions through the issue, and is particularly impressive in how he conveys so many distinct personalities and interpersonal dynamics in the party scenes. He was very well cast for this sequence of the story. 

• Since starting this site I’ve paid a lot more attention to X-Men comics fandom, and doing that can be like stepping into a weird alternate universe in which everyone dislikes Wolverine and finds him boring. I can’t relate. But this issue, as with most Wolverine comics written by Benjamin Percy, makes a great case for why he’s such a widely beloved character. His brutish no-bullshit attitude is a necessary contrast with the pomp and circumstance of Saturnyne’s banquet and the absurd formality of her contest. When he stabs her on the last page it is a genuinely cathartic moment, even though it’s quite clear there’s no way he’s successful in this tactic. 

Muramasa and Skybreaker

“X of Swords” Chapters 3 and 4
Wolverine #6
X-Force #13
Written by Benjamin Percy
Art by Viktor Bogdanovic
Color art by Matthew Wilson

“X of Swords” Chapter 5 
Marauders #13
Written by Vita Ayala
Art by Matteo Lolli
Color art by Edgar Delgado

• These three chapters of X of Swords mark the story’s first narrative gear shift, as the spotlight narrows to a pair of solo stories starring Wolverine and Storm as they go off in pursuit of the swords assigned to them by Saturnyne. There’s a trade-off here – a loss of momentum, but a deeper focus on character and the weight of responsibility bearing down on these two core X-Men members. If the shipping schedule of this crossover were different, these issues might have slowed things down too much, but if we’re burning through the “quest” issues in two or three weeks with a few issues at a time it’s making good time and allowing the reader to invest in Krakoa’s champions before they head off to war. 

• The Wolverine and X-Force issues are one story split between two issues, with the X-Force issue being fully a Wolverine comic as the rest of the cast – or even the basic premises of that series – is part of the plot. Benjamin Percy’s plot moves along the X of Swords story while working well as a discrete two-parter in which Wolverine must find a Muramasa blade and discovers he can only do that by literally going to hell to find one. These issues introduce Solem, one of the Swordbearers of Arrako, who is positioned as Wolverine’s new archnemesis in the absence of Sabretooth. Whereas Sabretooth is Wolverine’s opposite number, Solem is more of an inverted version of Wolverine – a warrior with adamantium skin, who embraces aesthetics and hedonism just as Wolverine is more salt-of-the-earth and ascetic. 

There’s a certain amount of hubris in aiming to give a major character like Wolverine a new central villain, but given the status quo now it’s sort of necessary. Percy has set up an interesting contrast here, and Solem is immediately charming – an arrogant lothario with poetic sensibilities and a history of causing chaos in Arrako just for the thrill of it. There’s a lot of potential here, if just in exploring a character who is basically a hyper-violent Frasier Crane. (Wolverine, of course, would be the Martin Crane.) 

• I particularly like the opening scene of this mini-arc in which Wolverine confronts Krakoa, which very succinctly gets a lot of exposition out of the way while reaffirming Wolverine’s commitment to the promise of the Krakoan nation state and his spirit as a warrior, and showing us that he’s come to distrust the sentient island itself. It’s very true to Wolverine’s nature, but this moment is notable as it’s a rare occasion in which someone has questioned the character of Krakoa and its motives in this era. 

• It’s interesting to me that while DC Comics’ current event Death Metal and its predecessor Metal strain to evoke a “heavy metal” aesthetic, X of Swords and these two chapters in particular actually do a better job of that without necessarily advertising it as part of the project. Even aside from all the Arrako elements of the story, just look at those pages in which Wolverine’s adamantium skeleton emerges from the literal fires of hell – you can practically hear the speed metal riffs come through the pages. The fact that these issues are illustrated by Viktor Bogdanovic, whose work looks quite a bit like that of Death Metal artist Greg Capullo, only encourages this comparison. 

• The Marauders issue tells the story of Storm going to Wakanda to collect her assigned sword Skybreaker, which is complicated by her fraught relationship with Wakanda royalty since divorcing Black Panther and giving up her crown, and that there is a major taboo of Skybreaker leaving Wakanda soil. Vita Ayala, who makes their Hickman-era X-Men debut here as a guest writer before taking over New Mutants and launching Children of the Atom after this event, has a very good handle on Storm and embraces the complexities and contradictions of her life rather than try to pare down her story. Ayala makes this part of the point of the issue, as Storm seamlessly segues between different aspects of her character – mainstay of the X-Men, goddess, Wakandan royalty, political leader, thief, ex-wife. Aspects of Storm’s identity shift like the weather, but the plot emphasizes that her indomitable will and absolute conviction in doing whatever it takes to do the right thing are immutable characteristics. 

• As good as the Marauders issue as a solo Storm issue, it slows some of the momentum of the larger X of Swords story. Whereas the Wolverine and X-Force issues have the same essential narrative purpose as this in terms of focusing on one character and the sacrifice they must make to compete in Saturnyne’s demented tournament, the former story continued to introduce new information about Arrako and its people. Those issues flow more naturally from the previous two chapters, whereas the Marauders issue feels more like a tie-in. It has the vibe of a very good annual, not so much a continuation of the story established by Jonathan Hickman and Tini Howard. 

• Text pages in all three of these issues continue the trend of giving background information on each of the realms of Otherworld. The most interesting of these is certainly the page for Mercator, which keeps up the mystery of that realm’s regent, but heavily suggests that it is indeed presided over by Absalon “Mr. M” Mercator, the missing omega level mutant previously mentioned in passing in House of X #1 and the Hickman pages of the Incoming! special. I’m personally very intrigued to see how this character will be presented, and I like this as a potential new context for an underdeveloped and obscure character with godlike powers. 

X-Book Mini-Reviews: Marauders, Cable, Wolverine, X-Men + Fantastic Four

Marauders #8-12
Written by Gerry Duggan
Art by Stefano Caselli (8, 10, 11)  and Matteo Lolli (9, 12)
Color art by Edgar Delgado

Gerry Duggan was just beginning to hit his stride where I left off with this series and with these issues he’s fully in the zone. The magic of this book is in how deftly he balances his exploration of the new Krakoa status quo and a firm grasp of characterization and character history. He does excellent work in restoring Callisto to her Claremont-era greatness as a queer punk anti-hero with a strict code of honor, and pulls off a minor miracle in reinventing Jason Aaron’s absolutely horrible kid Hellfire Club as a legitimate threat under the name Verendi. I love the way he writes the fraught character dynamics of his central cast of Storm, Emma Frost, and Kate Pryde with all the nuance of years of publishing without requiring a reader to have actually read any of those comics. And bless him, he’s even doing his best to acknowledge years of Kate being written as a bisexual woman, though it doesn’t seem as though he’s allowed to state this in the text.

These issues keep up a strong Claremontian momentum even with a significant break in the publishing schedule as a result of the pandemic, though the issue in which Kate is finally resurrected is oddly anticlimactic given how much the question of whether or not she even could be resurrected is positioned as a major plot point. But Kate’s actual return in issue #12 makes up for this bum note – Duggan and Matto Lolli present her with a renewed swagger, and set up the next phase of the plot so enticingly that it actually feels disappointing we have to move away from this story for three issues to get through X of Swords. 

Cable #1-4
Written by Gerry Duggan
Art by Phil Noto

Whereas Duggan’s Marauders is centered on political intrigue and the nuanced relationship of its trio of leading women, his Cable solo book is positioned as more of a light-hearted wish fulfillment story for boys. Duggan is working with the teenage version of Cable established by Ed Brisson in Extermination – a young man who’s killed the older version of himself we’ve known for decades for the crime of not being good enough at his job. On a macro level, Duggan’s story is about this boy gradually and inevitably becoming the old man, but in these issues it’s mostly just presenting Cable as an adventurer and establishing his five-way romance with the entire Stepford Cuckoos hive-mind. This is clever – the Cuckoos are established as clone/daughters of Emma Frost, and Cable is the time-lost child of Cyclops and a clone of Jean Grey, so it’s a play on their dynamic while also just depicting Cable as this ultra-stud. (We also see that Armor has a crush on him – mutant ladies sure love a Summers man.) 

Phil Noto’s art is typically fantastic in these issues, with his usual flair for clean design, vivid colors, and expressive faces. He’s very well-suited to Duggan’s writing style, adept at both action scenes and conveying his humor. He does a particularly good job in giving the five Cuckoos distinct expressions and body language, and in playing off the odd dynamic of the teen Cable meeting Deadpool for the first time while Deadpool was friends with his older self for many years. 

Wolverine #1-5
Written by Benjamin Percy
Art by Adam Kubert (1-3) and Viktor Bogdanovic (1, 4, 5)
Color art by Frank Martin (1-3) and Matthew Wilson (1, 4, 5)

In all my years of reading X-Men comics I have rarely regularly followed a Wolverine solo title, largely because those series seem rather inconsequential and I prefer the character as part of a team dynamic. It’s like how I love cinnamon in an apple pie, but wouldn’t really want to eat cinnamon by itself straight out of the spice rack. Benjamin Percy, however, is a guy who just wants as much Wolverine as he can get and is obviously having the time of his life as the primary author of the character in both his solo series and X-Force. Percy has a firm grasp on exactly what makes Wolverine work and is fluent in the particular cadences of his dialogue, and his enthusiasm for the character is infectious, so much so that the two narrative arcs in this run of five issues are only so-so in plot terms but are nevertheless very enjoyable just for all the great character moments. 

I’m particularly fond of Wolverine’s interactions with Magneto, a man who has caused him great agony over the years that he’s now forced to answer to as one of the leaders of Krakoa. Percy is very interested in the nuances of how these old men who are very set in their ways adapt to an entirely new status quo – they are both going about it in good faith, but there’s only so much of the past you can ignore while working for a better future. 

This mix of “same old” and “totally new” seems to be the narrative crux of this series, and that extends to the art as well, as classic Wolverine artist Adam Kubert is trading off arcs with relative newcomer Viktor Bogdanovic. Kubert’s art is solid as ever, though his tendency towards unusual page layouts is kicked into high gear with these issues. He’s very good at drawing Krakoan landscapes and biotech, and it’s apparent he’s excited by the challenge of working with Pepe Larraz and R.B. Silva’s designs. Bogdanovic’s art is extremely similar to that of Batman artist Greg Capullo, to the point where you could just pretend it’s actually Capullo drawing the book. This is fine, though I’d like to see him evolve more into his own style as he clearly has the raw skills down. 

X-Men + Fantastic Four #1-4
Written by Chip Zdarsky
Art by Terry Dodson and Rachel Dodson
Color art by Laura Martin

Chip Zdarsky is a writer that leads with humor and delight, but always grounds his stories in compelling dramatic questions. To some extent that’s the job of a superhero comic writer, but it’s not tremendously common for people to actually achieve that balance, particularly when Marvel comics that lean humorous are nearly always full of unfunny soy jokes with no narrative stakes. This miniseries, in which the X-Men and Fantastic Four clash over the question of whether or not Reed and Sue Richards’ omega-level mutant son Franklin belongs on Krakoa, presents as a high-stakes story, even if the actual resolution of the Franklin question feels like a shruggy compromise. But even if the ending feels a bit inconsequential, the philosophical clashes are handled thoughtfully and Zdarsky’s handle on the personalities and voices of all the core characters is impressive. Terry and Rachel Dodson, no strangers to either the X-Men or Fantastic Four, do typically excellent work in their ultra-clean and dynamic style. The ending of the story hints at a further conflict between Reed Richards and Charles Xavier down the line, but even without that thread this miniseries leaves me with the feeling that I’d be happy to get more X-Men and/or Fantastic Four comics written by Zdarsky in the future.

Crucible

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some notes:

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

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

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

Society

“Society”
House of X #5 (2019)
Written by Jonathan Hickman
Art by Pepe Larraz
Color art by Marte Gracia

“Society” is perhaps the most radical issue of House of X/Powers of X thus far in terms of how it relates to X-Men comic books produced by anyone prior to Jonathan Hickman. The resurrection protocol hinted at in earlier issues but revealed here flips something that had become a crutch of the X-franchise – the tedious cycle of killing off characters for dramatic effect and then muddling through increasingly dull and convoluted ways of bringing them back – into something that is now simplified and central to the emerging mutant culture. The issue presents the process as a sort of spiritual ritual, and Charles Xavier’s crucial role in it positions him as a messianic figure for all of mutantdom. The Krakoan nation, the big plans for the future, the X-Men, the creation of a distinct mutant culture – that’s all well and good, but this is what really seals the deal for all of mutantdom to follow his rule. 

This is a brilliant conceit, and the scene in which Storm reintroduces her reborn brothers and sisters to the Krakoan people is one of the most moving and powerful sequences in the history of X-Men comics. This is mutant culture, this is mutant pride, this is justice and revenge. This is Storm, written as she ought to be for the first time in around 30 years. She is now the high priestess of mutants, a true and iconic leader of her people. No other character in the canon could have carried this scene. You get her natural gravitas and commanding presence, her radicalism, and her long personal history with the characters being resurrected. Her sense of joy, triumph, and righteousness in this moment is overwhelming. Pepe Larraz’s rendering of her face and body language is brilliant in conveying the essence of her character. As with his depiction of Nightcrawler, it feels like we’re really seeing these beloved but often poorly handled core characters again for the first time in many years.

The resurrection protocol puts every major X-Men character back on the table with minimal fuss, and keeps writers from having to mess around with continuity to just use whatever characters they want to write. The Matthew Rosenberg mini-run that directly preceded HOX/POX in which he killed or severely wounded a large number of major characters with the full knowledge of what Hickman was about to do now feels particularly hollow, childish, and pointless. Three of the characters resurrected in this issue – Cyclops, Jean Grey, and Wolverine – had been brought back to life in three different stories in the very recent past, and this renders those comics particularly pointless. Each of those stories was overly complicated, sweaty, and dramatically inert. In the words of Charles Xavier, “NO MORE.” Hickman has closed off the possibility of other writers doing these sort of bad stories indefinitely. This is a huge gift to the reader. 

Xavier isn’t just keeping his X-Men in circulation. He’s reviving hundreds of mutants he has catalogued, and rebuilding the mutant population of the earth. The resurrection plan is ongoing, but it’s clear enough that this miracle machine of rebirth won’t last for long. The resurrection mechanism relies on five specific mutants – Goldballs, Tempus, Proteus, Elixir, and Hope – and the use of Cerebro as a method of cataloging and preserving mutant minds. The vulnerabilities of this system are obvious, and are bound to be dismantled at some point. And given that mutant culture is now so focused on organic technology, it’s a glaring problem for something so crucial to involve a machine when machines are the enemies of mutantdom. The notion of preserving mutant consciousness is clearly derived from Moira’s knowledge of Nimrod’s archive, so what happens when some version of Nimrod inevitably becomes a reality in this timeline? Surely this is all very vulnerable to technological attack and exploitation.

And then there’s Mister Sinister. All of this is possible thanks to his archive of mutant DNA, but we already know that Sinister is up to something with all of this. What will be the actual cost to Xavier’s deal with this devil? We’ll probably get some idea of this next week.

Some questions about resurrection:

• Was Wolverine reborn with adamantium via reality-warping Proteus hand-waving, or will he need to re-up with the new body? I would quite like to see Magneto put it back on his skeleton to atone for ripping it out back in “Fatal Attractions.” 

• Similarly, has being reborn stripped Warren Worthington III of his Archangel metal wings and the genetic tampering of Apocalypse? I would hope not, as I vastly prefer Archangel to Angel on a visual and conceptual level. 

• Is this resurrection system at all compatible with Moira’s reincarnation power? Could Moira X be copied as Moira XI is born into a new timeline? 

This issue is extremely bold and sets up a lot of story to come, particularly in the final sequence in which all of the “evil mutants” who were not already on Krakoa arrive to join Xavier’s mutant society. But given that we have three more issues in this story, much of the dramatic momentum built up over the past 8 issues comes to a halt by the end. The issue is powerful in terms of giving the X-Men a major triumph, both in defeating their “great enemy death” as Storm puts it and in fully establishing Krakoa as a sovereign nation thanks in some part to the psychic nudging of Emma Frost. But unlike previous episodes, there’s less “now what???” urgency. 

But there are a lot of good questions going into the final three issues of this story: 

• Where is Moira X now? And what has she been doing in the more recent past? 

• What happened in Moira’s sixth life? 

• How will Orchis find out that they did not actually kill eight major X-Men, and can this moment please involve Cyclops pulling a “surprise bitch, I bet you thought you’d seen the last of me” on Dr. Alia Gregor? Surely this will result in a major panic on their end that will hasten the creation of Nimrod. 

• What will happen with the Phalanx as it absorbs Nimrod’s archive of mutantkind in the distant future of Moira 9’s timeline, and how will this reflect on what is happening in the standard timeline? And will Cylobel figure into this?

• How exactly did Moira learn about the true capabilities of Krakoa, and how did the mutants come to know of the major applications of Krakoan fauna that we’ve seen in the story so far? 

It Will Be Done

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

How do you write your way out of this? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• What is the “true purpose” of Cerebro? 

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

• Where is Moira X now?

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

• What happened in Moira’s sixth life?

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

• What about the drugs for humans? 

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. 

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. 

Ghosts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?”