X-Manhunt Omega annotations
X-MANHUNT OMEGA
“X-Manhunt Finale: Dreams End”
Writers: Murewa Ayodele & Gail Simone
Artists: Gleb Melnikov, Federica Mancin & Edni Balám
Colour artist: Brian Reber
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Tom Brevoort
This double-sized one-shot is the final part of the “X-Manhunt” crossover. For annotation purposes, I’m going to treat it as an X-Men special.
X-MEN
Cyclops. When trying to reconcile with Rogue in a flashback set after “Raid on Graymalkin”, he makes an optimistic case for the post-Krakoan diaspora as offering a range of different mutant dreams; he seems to be rationalising Krakoa as a dream that went wrong because it was one-size-fits-all.
Nonetheless, he insists that Professor X has to be kept in prison. His official argument is that Xavier is worth sacrificing to preserve deals with the US government (which, to be fair, was Professor X’s stated reason for handing himself in to the authorities in the first place), but he seems to believe that Professor X deserves to be there for the atrocities he committed in House of X, and he resents the trauma that Professor X has inflicted on him over the years. He doesn’t know that the crew of the Agnew were simulacra, something which seems to surprise Professor X (who, on one reading of the original scene, was trying to heavily hint to Scott that all was not as it seemed). Professor X suggests that Cyclops is caught between hating him and not wanting him to leave.
Cyclops regards Professor X’s escape as a disaster for mutantkind that will prompt another Orchis-style purge, and sees it as a personal failure to protect mutantkind. He then has another of the panic attacks we saw in X-Men #3, which leads to his powers raging out of control until Wolverine stabs him to subdue him. Cyclops says later that it “wasn’t deep”, which really isn’t what the art shows – but then Wolverine recovers from ridiculously excessive injuries sustained in the same scene within a matter of pages anyway, so just write it off as artistic licence, I guess.
He still wants to arrest Professor X even after all that, but doesn’t press the point when nobody else seems that interested. Ultimately, he seems relieved that the Professor is at least leaving Earth and leaving his life.
Rogue. She initially suspects that Cyclops has some hidden plan which isn’t being shared with her, and which explains why he wants Professor X to stay in jail. As a reformed villain (like most of her team) she believes in redemption. Still, the two X-Men teams appear to be on otherwise reasonable terms after “Raid on Graymalkin”, and Rogue tells Cyclops that we’re “still X-Men… all of us”. In Uncanny, she’s previously tended to talk about her team as keeping the X-Men alive.
Magik defends Cyclops against Rogue’s scepticism, and is (understandably) confused about their lack of trust in him.
Gambit is serving as a teleporter, using the Eye of Agamotto.
Wolverine gets to give Cyclops the pep talk about not putting everything on himself.
The rest of the X-Men teams are around but have relatively less to do: Kid Omega, Beast, Psylocke, Temper and Juggernaut for the Alaska team, and Jubilee, Nightcrawler, Calico (with Ember), Deathdream, Ransom and Jitter for the Louisiana team. Ransom is impressed by Temper (“What a woman!”) – they had a similar brief exchange during “Raid on Graymalkin”.
SUPPORTING CAST
Professor X. Shi’ar technology removes his brain tumour and allows for remarkably rapid recovery. He decides that he’s just going to leave the Earth with Lilandra and retire from any involvement in mutantkind, but then decides to visit the X-Men one last time to say goodbye properly. He delivers a farewell telepathic broadcast, presumably just to mutants in the X-Men’s circle. He ends by encouraging Cyclops to reopen the school.
He says that “I haven’t been myself for a long time”, and that with the tumour removed, “For the first time in an age, I feel clarity.” There’s obviously a back door being set up here to excuse a lot of questionable behaviour, though you’d have to go a long way back to get him off the hook for everything that he’s conventionally blamed for – fundamentally, Professor X has been doing questionable things since the early Silver Age.
Lilandra Neramani. She demonstrates her amazing plot-advancing skills with a bit of amateur brain surgery.
Storm. She dithers about how mutantkind should cope with a tainted figure with the symbolic power of Professor X. Her Storm Sanctuary apparently has five engines – in Storm #6, there seemed to be only one “Storm Engine”, which was the alien from Storm #1. That appears to be the one we see here, loaned to John Wraith as a mech. It’s not clear whether the other five engines are the same sort of entity, or something different.
She declines to get directly involved in the hunt for Professor X because she doesn’t trust herself to keep control of her cosmic powers. But later on she remotely takes down Cyclops from the next continent, in order to let Professor escape – which must involve drawing on those powers.
Sage. Arranges a whole bunch of distractions to help Professor X and Lilandra get off earth.
John Wraith. Sage sends him in with a mech to deal with Magik, who very conveniently has happened to conjure up a kaiju for him to fight. As in the X-Force chapter, he’s obsessively quoting the Bible in his dialogue, far more so than he did in the past. This can’t just be a dialoguing quirk, because it’s different writers involved.
Magneto shows up for the farewell beach scene.
GUEST CAST.
Maggott is still in his cocoon from Storm #6.
NYX. There are cameos by Anole, Ms Marvel, Prodigy, Laura Kinney and Sophie Cuckoo – and Mammomax, for those interested. Ms Marvel is at the beach scene.
X-Factor. Pyro and Cecilia Reyes have brief appearances on a wild goose chase looking for Professor X. Angel shows up for the beach scene farewell, and Granny Smite and Xyber are in the opening flashback montage. Havok and Frenzy have a cameo at the end.
X-Force. Forge makes the beach scene, and Tank, Captain Britain and Askani also cameo in a flashback.
Extraordinary X-Men. We get a cameo of Kate Pryde, Emma Frost and Iceman training Melée, Axo and Bronze in their dance studio. Kate and Emma make the beach scene.
Page 39 also has cameos for Mystique (showing no signs of her injured state from the end of her miniseries), Banshee, Sunfire and Thunderbird (in his Krakoan redesign rather than his costume from Weapon X-Men).
FOOTNOTES
Page 1 panel 3: “And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.” This is a quote commonly misattributed to Friedrich Nietzsche. In fact, according to QuoteInvestigator, it wasn’t attributed to him until 2003, by which time it had been doing the rounds for decades. Leaving aside people making the same basic observation in different language, clearly recognisable versions of the quote can be traced back to 1927, but the earliest available source – an article in The Times – claims it to be an “old proverb”.
Page 2 panel 1: This is an echo of X-Factor on the red carpet in their first issue, though it’s the current (post-Havok) roster that’s shown.
Page 2 panel 2: X-Force’s mission in the Marianas Trench was shown in flashback on page 1 panel 2 of X-Force #6. The art here wrongly shows Sage with the team, but she had quit the team by that point.
Page 2 panel 3: This is just a generic image of a training session in Extraordinary X-Men.
Page 2 panel 4: This is Cyclops as a prisoner of Orchis during “Fall of X”, with his eyelids sewn shut.
Page 3 panel 4: “During the fall, Orchis almost ended all of us, and it’s ‘cus they took out Phoenix.” In X-Men: Hellfire Gala 2023.
“But Jean is a galaxy away now, far from anyone’s reach.” In Phoenix, obviously. In fact, Cyclops is in telepathic contact with Jean in that book, and Jean seems to have no trouble getting in touch with the likes of Captain Marvel either… but Rogue’s assumption is reasonable.
Page 4 panel 2: “If his freedom sparks a schism among the mutant factions…” Cyclops alludes to the X-Men: Schism crossover from 2011 which split the X-Men into two camps during the Utopia era.
Page 5 panel 3: “The beginning of the first Krakoan era.” The art shows Professor X resurrecting the X-Men near the start of House of X #1.
Page 5 panel 4: “Fall of the first Krakoan era.” I think this is meant to be Professor X on the verge of killing Moira in Rise of the Powers of X #3, although she ought to be a child.
Page 6: The destruction of the Agnew happened in Fall of the House of X #4. The line in the original story was “Officer, what are you doing with our warheads?”, and the other guy was saying something else entirely. How any of this fits with the claim that the Agnew crew are mere simulacra is difficult to fathom, but that’s the story.
Page 9 panel 1: Reynisfjara is a real location in Iceland. It’s a black sand beach; it was used as a location in Game of Thrones.
Page 9 panel 5: Note the Marauder hovering in the background.
Page 18: The Biblical quotes are correct.
Page 24 panel 2: “Moira is safe – tucked away in a place of her own choosing.” Moira got her own private timeline in Rise of the Powers of X #5.
Page 28 panel 4: “We always lose.” Cyclops is alluding to one of Moira’s predictions about the fate of mutantkind in the Krakoan era, based on her knowledge of other timelines.
Page 36 panel 4: This is the Dark Phoenix Saga, obviously.
Alternately boring, dumb, confusing, annoying, and maudlin, this was a bad comic. The ending felt completely unearned. Scott surviving a light stabbing was laughable. Oh, and the plot will be resolved in another comic? What a waste of pages.
Paul> He says that “I haven’t been myself for a long time”, and that with the tumour removed, “For the first time in an age, I feel clarity.” There’s obviously a back door being set up here to excuse a lot of questionable behaviour, though you’d have to go a long way back to get him off the hook for everything that he’s conventionally blamed for – fundamentally, Professor X has been doing questionable things since the early Silver Age.
I mean, he was cloned a new body after the Brood Queen thing, mortally injured and unconventionally healed after X-Cutioner’s Song, shot in the head at the end of Messiah Complex and brain-damaged further by Exodus before he healed him, killed in AvX, resurrected by possessing Fantomex’s body, and then went through at least two more cloned bodies in the Krakoa era.
There is no possible way he’s had a brain tumour through all that.
I blame the editor for the incohesiveness and inconsistency of this storyline. I do believe it was created solely to set up Hickman’s Imperial and move Xavier and Lilandra into place for that.
Ah, but it was a mutant tumour!
And so this crossover ends on a complete thud. Within a span of a year, we have had two crossovers, and both of them have done little to assuage my concerns about the direction of the X-Men under Tom Brevoort. The FtA titles have been directionless and anemic at best. Hopefully, things will get better when the comics will have to synergize with the MCU. By so far, I’m not optimistic.
The Other Michael> I blame the editor for the incohesiveness and inconsistency of this storyline. I do believe it was created solely to set up Hickman’s Imperial and move Xavier and Lilandra into place for that.
I would not be shocked if one or more of the X-writers had plans for Xavier (probably Simone, since the whole tumour thing was hers), but Hickman had enough pull to override them.
I would ALSO not be shocked if X-Manhunt was not yet planned to be a thing as late as Raid on Greymalkin.
Kind of insane how vindictive this feels; they’re handing off Xavier back to Hickman after doing a retcon that has basically meant that his whole characterization of him is now just cause he had a tumor. At least when this happened with New X-Men Morrison wasn’t around for Marvel to put them through a humiliation ritual.
Getting rid of Xavier and downgrading the importance of Graymalkin seem like the most interesting things to do at this point. The entire line is dull at the moment, so it’s not going to improve the quality of any of this, but things like reviving the arguments about Xavier, Xavier with a brain tumour, or Greymalkin after Orchis were a few of the direst aspects of the relaunch. Taking those types of things away from the X-titles now can only be for the better.
This being Marvel, of course it would always end up some type of crossover.
Although, they missed comedy gold with Xavier’s condition.
Rogue:Sugah, you have to understand Xavier’s behaviour has been caused by a tumour.
Scott:It’s not Attuma.
A lot of people didn’t like the idea that Storm is using enough energy to power five cities for a hundred years in her Sanctuary. Ayodele has Storm much more ostentatious than other writer- Storm is usually prideful, yes, but not the kind of woman who pulls Tony Stark stunts like buying out all of Disneyworld. I’ve heard it suggested that this has to do with Ayodele’s Nigerian background- I’m not sure how true that is.
Sage seems to have difficulties understanding sarcasm, which is not how she’s usually written.
The story suggests Illyana has multiple magic swords. Since when?
Where did Scott get the demon Kaiju from? Normally ,I’d assume Illyana summoned it but she seemed to be unconscious when he ordered it to awaken. Maybe Maddie loaned it to him?
“He doesn’t know that the crew of the Agnew were simulacra, something which seems to surprise Professor X”
Xavier said that he made sure the names of the simulacra were connected to the Arthurian chroniclers so Scott would figure it out. Apparently Scott either never looked at the names or is very very slow on the uptake.
Scott wanting to return Xavier to Graymalkin knowing he’d be tortured there after learning Xavier didn’t kill the crew of the Agnew was just insane. It was a real Moral Event Horizon moment.
Interesting to confirm that Xavier knows Moira is alive.
A lot of people didn’t like that Storm’s lightning arrow knocked Scott off the ship without harming him.
Would Storm had let Scott fall to his death if Rogue hadn’t rescued him?
Quentin says that no one is powerful enough to teleport an entire spaceship despite the fact that Manifold teleported an entire spaceship during Fall of the House of X.
A lot of people didn’t like Scott’s panic attack scene. Ayodele confessed that he wrote the scene.
But the panic attack plot was just a bad idea from day one, no matter what MacKay’s apologists claim. In Simonson’s X-Factor, Scott was having hallucinations. In X-Factor 18, after Hodge tricks Scott into thinking Jean is still the Phoenix, Scott nearly kills Jean with his optic blasts until Leech saves her.
When MacKay introduced the panic attacks plot he apparently wanted to do a story about mental health. But the problem is that the last time Scott was having mental health problems he WAS a danger to the team. So it’s totally reasonable for people to worry that he would be a danger to the team if he was having panic attacks.
So then Ayodele took it to its logical conclusion and decided that Scott WAS a danger to the team when he was having panic attacks. I’m not sure how Scott can continue leading the X-Men now since we’ve seen that his panic attacks make him a liability in the field. And worse. he’s endangered his teammates TWICE because he kept leading while suffering from mental health problems.
Why would Scott’s visor be designed so that it malfunctions if he has panic attacks? You would think that his visor would be specifically designed so that people DON’T get hurt if he panics?
Agreed that Scott should have been hospitalized after Logan stabbed him.
“There’s obviously a back door being set up here to excuse a lot of questionable behaviour”
Note that Lilandra says “it was altering your behavior”. I agree though that it doesn’t make sense for the tumor to have altered Xavier’s behavior before he died and was resurrected in Immortal X-Men 10. But the tumor does explain away his leaving Ms. Marvel and Anole to die, as well as why he didn’t tell anyone about faking the deaths on the Agnew or Lilandra’s egg.
I’m pretty sure Ayodele is taking Ororo as a goddess literally and is writing her as Oya. He even introduced Sango into his Storm story recently. It seems to be what Ayodele’s interest is in writing the character.
There’s really no way for anyone in this story to know what happened with Moira. That’s a case of the author channeling information through the characters.
I think the general idea of Xavier “not quite being himself”, at least in this context, most likely refers to Krakoa-era, overly conspiratorial, slightly affectless, generally opaque, mask-wearing Xavier, rather than a wider stretch of time and storytelling.
I can’t be bothered with making a list of everything wrong with this comic, but…
Yes.
This was astoundingly shit.
Magik has certainly had her sword drawn very differently over the years, since it debuted. Sometimes it’s a sabre, sometimes it’s a broadsword, sometimes it has a conventional hilt, sometimes it has a spider-leg deco. The most static is her big anime sword with the black lines, but even that varies in size and detail.
Having multiple swords doesn’t sound like a good idea to me, but I can see how you’d make a case for it.
Specifically, and re: SanityOrMadness:
I’m thinking back to the post-Fantomex, “X” ressurrection, and the jumpcut to Xavier in the context of the Krakoan era.
…
Actually, how was that explained at all at the time? It can’t just be my shoddy memory? Wasn’t something very obviously missing there, in terms of whats and hows of character continuity and development?
I’m ready for the next relaunch.
Paul, are you misremembering the name of “Exceptional X-Men” as “Extraordinary”?
Harvey X had the same tumor as Xavier. I guess he could have been saved if the X-Men knew about Lilandra. Oops!
I guess the X-Men never asked Sandra for help in curing Harvey. Instead they relied on Xorn the Healer Who Almost Never Heals Anything.
Scurvy was suffering from the same tumor as Xavier and Harvey and he claimed two other people were. I hope that Lilandra left the X-Men instructions on how to cure it.
Magneto, who had the closest relationshi0p with Xavier, has no lines this issue.
Forge appears in this issue, even though he was La Diabla’s prisoner in X-Force 9.
Kamala doesn’t seem mad about Xavier leaving her to die. And why was Kamala on the beach in the first place? She only met Xavier twice. Everyone else on the beach has known Xavier since before the formation of Generation X.
A lot of people felt Emma’s crying was out of character.
Why were Bronze and Melee sad that Xavier left? They didn’t even know who he was until Emma told them in Exceptional X-Men 7.
For that matter, why is everyone so sad that Xavier left? With Illyana’s powers, it takes instants to get from Earth to Chandilar- he might as well have moved across the street.
The consensus on the internet was that this issue was horrible.
@SanityorMadness. the Other Michael- According to Breevort, originally he planned on using the Phoenix book to relaunch Marvel’s cosmic books. But later on they changed their mind and decided to go with Hickman’s Imperial. As late as July 21, 2024, Breevort was saying on his blog that Phoenix would be used to restart Marvel’s cosmic titles. So yeah, it looks like the decision to go with Hickman was made relatively late- during or after Raid on Graymalkin. It looks like Simone’s idea was that Harvey X, Xavier, Scurvy and Prisoner X all had the same tumor. But then Hickman came along and asked for Xavier, so we got X-Manhunt.
@Chris V- Jean knew about Moria and could have told Charles and/or Scott.
Apparently many people here have much more fondness for the Krakoa era than I do.
My own recollection is that it was such a mess of unrealized promises, unadressed important questions and endless, unreadable resolution ever since “Sins of Sinister” that I have to wonder if the people complaining about this current batch were around at the time.
Jean:And Moira, who proved herself to be an incredibly selfish individual time after time, and even skinned her ex-boyfriend, was given the ending she always wanted in a pocket dimension created by the Phoenix.
Scott:Why?
Jean:To fulfill a prophecy made by Destiny many lifetimes ago. She made the correct choice in the end, you see?
Scott:Huh. Hey, I’ve got this great joke about Xavier having a tumour.
Luis-Yes, post-Hickman Krakoa was a mess. It’s why I dropped everything except for the Gillen written titles (which were at least decent, and so issues even above average). The X-line prior to Krakoa was terrible for years. That doesn’t excuse the current line also being dull and uninspired.
X-Men readers are rewarded for a three year period once a decade for putting up with one horrible direction after another for decade after decade since Claremont. It’s why I finally cut the cord and am done reading X-books.
The Hickman Krakoan Era had a ton of interesting potential but the retreat where it was decided to go away from his plans and double down on Krakoa feels like a big mistake, at this point. While Ewing and Gillen did some really cool stuff in the era following, there were enough bad and incoherent stuff to sink it – most notably the complete massacre of Moira as a usable antagonist in X Lives of Wolverine. By the time they got to the endgame with the Hellfire Massacre the game was lost.
Idk if Hickman’s direction would have worked. It’s hard to know. But even it failed, I think it’d have been a more interesting failure than the one we got and even if we still ended up in the current era, with a reboot and a return to a more classic status quo, hopefully more interesting ramifications from the previous era than the confused dithering we’re getting.
Yeah, this one was terrible. The writer of Storm making her more omnipotent and always-right with every issue is getting absurd – Ewing did a far better job recognizing that while she may play the goddess, the result is that she kept making commitments and not keeping them.
I’m hoping this isn’t the end of the “Cyclops panic attacks” thread from X-Men – I thought having him have some real consequences to his mental health from having to be the one to hold everything together for so long was interesting (especially as we got the progression from House of X, where he was content to just be a soldier and let Xavier and Magneto call the shots, to having to once again carry mutandkind by the start of From the Ashes).
The ending here was just bizarre. Magneto doesn’t say a word, they act like getting to space is an imposition, and Ms. Marvel has somehow become the mutant version of Poochie, where we have to include her even when it makes no sense.
Lastly, I’ll just say that the timing on Raid on Greymalkin and this crossover was a mess. I hope they can plan better in the future.
Storm being an orisha makes perfect sense, as there are living human orisha at times, and Oya is right there. The only problem is, Storm comes from the wrong part of Africa, by a lot. It’d be like England having a patron saint from Türkiye.
Anyway, Krakoa was an era of big promises that didn’t deliver, right from the start. Remember the big storyline about various mutants scrambling to collect magic swords, only for the X of Swords event to not have much to do with swords at all? There were good bits, and overall I think the quality of the line was better than it is now. But it was never my thing. Too messy for the status quo.
Yep. It’s very true that Ororo is not from Yorubaland, but the writer is Nigerian.
@Salomé H ‘post-Fantomex, “X” ressurrection, and the jumpcut to Xavier in the context of the Krakoan era. […] Wasn’t something very obviously missing there, in terms of whats and hows of character continuity and development?’
Yes.
In interviews, Hickman claimed that Xavier was still in Fantomex’s body when he was assassinated in, what was it, the first arc of Krakoan X-Force? But there was nothing about it in any of the books, so I guess Hickman was covering for the fact that he didn’t know / didn’t care about the ‘call me X’ ending of Soule’s Astonishing X-Men.
Xavier was also presumed dead by the world and all the X-Men right up to the release of House of X #1.
What bugs me still, five years later, is that Taylor had Jean establishing a UN-recognized mutant ‘nation without a country’ in X-Men Red. There was a way to get to Krakoa organically, if the writers/editorial wanted to. They just didn’t.
Claremont wanted to retire Scott back in the early 1980s and found out that he could not. I fear that a similar situation applies to Xavier. Even more than Scott, he is too integral a part of the core of what is generally understood as being the X-Men.
Much like, say, Steve Rogers being field leader of the Avengers, it is one of those things that people will complain about endlessly, only to complain just as intensenly the minute it is changed.
Retiring Xavier isn’t a bad idea; those who compared the previous situation to that just after Onslaught were not wrong, and Xavier doesn’t have much of a clear role anymore.
But it won’t stick, because the characters won’t be allowed to have resolution. They are doomed to go back to what is perceived as a classic or iconic situation. Maybe Imperial has some plot that will try to give Charles a more resilient reason to be apart.
No-Prize : Charle’s terminally malignant “mutant” tumor and Scott Summers’ panic attacks anxiety disorder only fully manifested due to their X-treme stress caused by the Fall of X; on a similar note , Magneto’s current Stephen-Hawking degeneration happened only after he got magically-resurrected , which as was suggested on a 4chan storytime thread , maybe makes his whole physical body now made entirely of magick , which is why its deteriorating because its responding to all of the magickal fluctuations in Marvel Earth-616 , which have been extremely volatile recently (see all the 2024 Marvel stories with Dr Strange , Ghost Rider , Blade , Hulk , even Thor)
Maybe Scott would have known the Arthurian chroniclers if Xavier ever taught anything at the school beyond Buzzsaw Dodging 101 in the Danger Room.
I feel that Emma is crying because with Jean and Xavier off in space, she inherits the mantle of “most powerful telepath on Earth” and is going to be taken out in the variety of embarrassing ways that they were to “preserve the mystery” of whatever Marvel crossover is going on at the time.
“Professor X has been doing questionable things since the early Silver Age.”
I’m okay with some of those questionable things. He got Jean to fight crime in a miniskirt. Respect.
Si: Um. I don’t know if you meant it as a joke or not, but England DOES have a patron saint from Türkiye.
It seems like Brevoort’s main goal with the X-books is to be commercially successful. And he does have some hits on his hands, so he’s arguably fulfilling his mission. But the storytelling has really taken a hit, at least in the core books.
I’m curious to see if it plays out the same way the New 52 did at DC: some bestsellers of solid quality and a lot of middling crap that gets ignored because the line is too big and there’s too much attention paid to replacing the failing books. It seems like the “churn” at the bottom is just beginning.
Yeah, afraid I don’t have much to contribute other than some (maybe overwhelmingly redundant) negativity…
But the Emma moment struck me as especially off, as well.
Why turn this into her moment, at all, in the first place? Wouldn’t it be a climax (to the Krakoa era specifically, but also to the history of their relationship) if Magneto and Xavier had their moment?
Why would Emma, of all people, be reduced to tears, when much of her relationship to the X-Men took shape regardless of Xavier, and in a much more direct rapport with other X-Men (from Banshee to Scott, from Iceman to Kitty)?
And why is the reponse nearly homogenous across the board? Why have Kitty there at all, if you’re not going to at least gesture in broad strokes to the traumatic clusterfuck that was the collapse of Krakoa?
Why are the young’uns from Uncanny present, and not the Extraordinary ones?
And why are characters who were previously unaware of Xavier’s existence in the first place being given space that could and should have been given to a broad variety of younger X-Men characters and trainees?
…Oh god. I could go on and on…
@Luis: I think you’re perfectly aware that most of the people responding like this (i.e., expressing their disappointment with ‘From the Ashes’) were reading the Krakoa-era comics, indeed.
Echoing @Chris V and @Ryan T, I think a large part of us were likewise disappointed with the latter half ot the “Krakoan Era”, and expressed our frustrations on this same site, on a relatively regular basis. The throughline was lost completely, and some specific characters and plot lines were really badly handled.
The fact that Hickman’s incomplete yet genuinely ambitious attempt at rewriting X-Men mythology culminated in sprawling mess of inconclusive plots, disappearing characters and story themes, and redundant titles, doesn’t mean we should be satisfied, by default, with ‘From the Ashes’.
It’s fair for folks to be frustrated with the loss both of what was most enjoyable about Krakoa *and* of the opportunity to address multiple plot points left hanging since it ended.
And I’ll reiterate what others have said:
Warly Krakoa was still far more consistent, as a wide-line setting, than the line has been for ages now.
Even at their worst, “Extraordinary X-Men” and “X-Men: Red” were far better than the core titles we’re getting now, and more ambitious in their scope, writing and character dynamics.
The answer is in your question, actually: loads of unrealized potential will beat trite repetitions of the same routine every single time. At least in my personal opinion – and I think others here might feel the same.
@Moo: Please, at least feign to reign in the creepy sexism…?
@Krzysiek Ceran: Thank you! That was helpful.
I can’t imagine an “Annotated Krakoa” that wouldn’t be completely riddled with “god-knows-why-or-how” footnotes…
Yes, I am “perfectly aware”, even if saying as much makes me wary of how you will respond, @Salloh.
To be honest, I am halfway through concluding that Brevoort literally can’t win this battle, due to no fault of his.
There is only so much that can be done in the reality of facts, and I think that his mission as he sees it is actually to find out what can be made to work and what can not, while somehow bridging the status quo from the rather ugly (creatively more than emotionally) fallout from Krakoa to something more workable while also not going against the grain of the upcoming movies and series.
Maybe I am biased towards him, but IMO he has been wildly succesful, if perhaps a bit too lenient with some esoteric proposals. I expect that to change soon enough.
As it happens, I also agree with him that Storm _has_ become too big (in a manner of speaking) for the X-Men.
I don’t think that running along with the unfortunate direction that Al Ewing gave her and making her an Avatar or Host for Eternity itself makes any sense either in or out of the story, but I suppose that is still better than simply deciding that she is again some sort of natural leader and having her lead a team for yet another iteration when those are not even her best stories by any measure that I can think of.
Unless the point _is_ to make Storm into, I don’t know, Mutant Perry Rhodan? I suppose that has its own appeal, but you would need a conscious editorial decision to run with that for at least a few years – and perhaps without consideration for what that means to her viability as a X-Men adjacent character.
Maybe that is the plan?
I think what Brevoort is trying to do is fairly straightforward (within the parameters of his remit from the commercial side of the business). He’s not trying to compete with Krakoa in terms of a single unifying theme because that would be futile. Instead the aim is to have as wide a range of books as possible and make them stand up on their own terms, which is basically how he ran the Avengers office anyway. Unsurprisingly, the result is that the books that work well tend to be best when they’re allowed to do their own thing, and that line-wide crossovers run into the problem that the books aren’t really set up in a way that they want to interact with one another.
As a fan of the Krakoan era overall, I’ve given FtA a chance. I bought the first issues of all the ongoings, and 1 or more issues of most of the minis. As of now, I’m down to 2 ongoings (Extraordinary and X-Men) and a miniseries (Cable). The quality and originality aren’t there, mostly. My frustrations with Krakoa were overcome by my interest. The same isn’t happening here.
As for Brevoort’s stewardship, there are too many instances of poor plotting, characterization, and coordination to let him off the hook. The Rogue/Cyclops schism, for example, has dragged both core X-Men titles down and still hasn’t been adequately explained. Arguing about Xavier? That’s a weak justification. Stuff like that feels like it wasn’t worked out beforehand, and even if it was it falls flat on the page.
@Luis: I’m sorry, maybe that was unnecessarily sharp. I felt the question itself was loaded with sarcasm and a sense derision. Still, no need to respond that agressively.
I’ve been rereading some later Outback issues which, for all of my fondness for them, have their own huh, well, issues. But it’s one of my favorite eras. I think this has made me extra (and maybe disproportionately) reactive about recent stuff – including X-Men: Omega.
Reading issues where Banshee gets shot, and other X-Men hurt by comparatively minor villains, also made me wonder about what could counter this recent turn towards powermaxing every character:
“YOU are an Omega, YOU are an Omega, EVERYONE IS AN OMEGA NOW!”.
I think the Legacy Virus was, generally speaking a bad idea (mostly because it didn’t really hold, either as a ressonant metaphor for the AIDS crisis, or within its own storytelling logic).
But I wonder if *something* like it, or the aformentioned magical nature of Magneto’s latest ressurection, could be used effectively to level the field a bit.
There is something about the constant revving up of most of the X-Men’s abilities that really messes with the metaphor itself, and with the stories you can tell about mutants in general.
Storm is maybe the perfect example of this – though she has her own, convoluted publishing/personal history to boot…
*There was no need *for me* to respond that agressively.
And I apologise more generally if I’ve been rude towards other folks.
As noted , I’m aware my comments aren’t coming from the most joyful of places at the moment, as I’m very frustrated with the present status quo.
But I wouln’t want to make anyone else feel uncomfortable with my unfiltered moodyness, and this may be a good reason to comment less – not more.
@SalomeH, you’re on to something there, making x-gene mutants tied much more to magick , something Claremont and Davis tried to do during their classic runs in Uncanny Xmen and Excalibur , and which Tini Howard also did during her entire runs on the XBooks, could be used to No-Prize explain their arbitrarily randomly fluctuating power levels over the years as well as reasonably nerf them from becoming much too powerful for conventional regular stories , except of course when it’s convenient for crossovers , which is what is already being done usually with Dr Strange and the rest of the Marvel Magickians anyway to prevent them from singlehandedly resolving most if not all Earth-616 metahuman crises LOL
And considering that canonically in Marvel-616 a) there is a confirmed “M-gene” (introduced in the 00’s origin story of SpiderQueen) that allows natural-born users to exist ala J.K. Rowling’s Potterverse , and b) virtually all of Earth’s metahuman species (especially x-gene mutants) are actually secretly direct descendants of Deviants , whose once-chaotic genes have already stabilized into orderly configurations (as revealed by Kieron Gillen in the other year’s AXE Judgement crossover) , its own headcanon that once upon a time the X-genes and M-genes were one and the same in the same way that biological species have the same common ancestor , such as for example , ursines and canines (along with pinnipeds and mustelids) , such that in Marvel-616 , the first x-gene mutants were magickians and the first magickians were x-gene mutants , which is reflected in the fact that oldest surviving x-gene mutant (who isn’t the result of a timely-wimey paradoxes I.e. Steve Foxe’s Threshold and Jason Aaron’s Tribe Without Fear) “Saul”/“Garba Hsien” of the Externals is also a natural-born magickian
The current iteration of the Ultimate universe has done a decent job of keeping power levels reasonable. Peach Momoko’s Ultimate X-Men is a little too outside the superhero norm for me, but maybe another alt-universe version of the X-Men could keep the team recognizable while bringing the power levels back down to earth.
I once wondered if DC would not benefit from taking advantage of their Lords of Chaos and Order (originally introduced in Doctor Fate stories, I believe) to occasionally create events that reset the status quo to some extent – creating mysteries, ressurrections, and changing power levels arbitrarily.
Something like the period of uncertainty that came after Crisis on Infinite Earths or even the New 52, when many questions simply had not been answered yet.
I think that could work. A nice way of converging real life needs to sometimes shake the status quo to create new storytelling opportunities with the obvious convenience of keeping access to decades of past stories that will always have their own fans and their share of nostalgic appeal. And I don’t know about you, but I think it could be exciting to have a few years of, say, Superman being powerless – or powerless except when exposed to Kryptonite, or only at night – or Batman being a literal inhuman Man-Bat, or even a full vampire – etc.
I like overpowered characters just fine – Wendell Vaughn / Quasar is one of my favorites – but at some point it just becomes hard to write stories without establishing a separate continuity. Some oscillation of power levels is necessary in practice if only to keep challenges a real story possibility.
I wonder if something like that could be done in Marvel continuities. Arguably that has been done with the first and second Ultimate Universes, but that feels a bit too hands-on to me, since the Maker is so involved with the creation of this second UU.
If I am being very sincere, I feel that the shared continuity may have become a bit too heavy and convoluted for anyone’s good. It may be informative that space-oriented events have become so frequent. We will have Imperial now, and before that – we had Empyre and King in Black in 2020, at roughly the same time as X of Swords. I honestly don’t remember if I knew of “The Last Annihilation”, but it happened in 2021, I just learned. Same for Infinite Destinies. 2022 had Destiny of X (actually a new phase of the Krakoa Era) and A.X.E.: Judgement Day, but also Dark Web (which crossed over with Spider-Man) and five other events involving other editorial offices.
I will stop there. It has become an odd situation, where events are almost expected to have no lasting consequences, which surely is a bit of a strange situation.
I may easily be mistaken in my perception that Marvel would benefit from a bit of compartimentalization of continuity sharing… but I sure get the sense that it is approaching that situation of its own.
Who knows, maybe instead of following characters or more recently creators we may be reaching a time of following specific continuities.
I like the idea of magic and the X-gene interacting (Magik, Scarlet Witch, etc.), but I prefer the X-gene to be a simple sci-fi concept. It’s a gene that occurs occasionally and gives people powers. Maybe throw something in about the X-gene warping regular physics (hence mass shifting, energy generation, wether control, etc.)?
Marvel has a problem with its cordoned-off families of titles. Events happen in spin-off books that no one bothers to mention again. X-titles are chock full of content that should have greater impact on the Marvel Universe, but just doesn’t. I think this started in the Jemas/ Quesada years, when Kang conquering the world in Avengers and Xorneto turning Manhattan into a concentration camp had no impact on the rest of the line. I don’t mind as long as the comics are good, but I wish someone would keep track of big changes and events and make sure other Marvel series reflected them.
I think that you can have any two of: compartmentalization, a shared universe, and constant “big stuff happening” storytelling.
Try to do all three, and things fall apart. And if you reboot continuity and go right back to doing all three at once, you’ll soon need to reboot again, as DC keeps learning.
I wouldn’t neccessarily think of magic, itself, as the key to this problem, as I know a lot of folks are putt off by more fantasy-inclined aspects of the X-Men mythology.
But within Marvel’s (increasingly complex) cosmology, extending to the creation of the human species itself, I do wonder if a better writer could pull off a stunt that’s abstract yet compelling enough to place in action some kind of wider explanation of the ebbs and flows of mutant powers.
It could at least provide some background, no matter how vague, to a lot of the inconsistencies in how they’re represented.
Morrison’s “encoded for extinction” and secondary mutations moved a little in the direction of complicating and deepening the baseline X-gene sci fi concept – although maybe in slightly confusing ways.
But after Krakoan mutant circuits and the like, I think something in similarly broad strokes (about mutant co-habitation – or whatever the reasoning might be) could help a little.
And I think there’s something potentially very satisfying about a story about depletion, failed expectations, back to basics, etc. – though maybe that’s more down to my personal taste.
I think the problem is that every writer seems to do big stories taking characters in one direction and, whether they make it to the end or get cancelled, the character is then taken off in a completely different direction that jars with the previous (see Immortal Hulk turn into that weird Hulk that was either a literal rocketship or teleporting series that got cancelled after a year). Iron Man has lost his company three times in the last twenty years, that seems to be more of a thing than his alcoholism now. And I’ve not read this crossover but Xavier has gone off to space with Lilandra, like he did in Uncanny #200? Although, if this ends up with Jim Lee drawing the book again and putting him in his cool space armour again, that’s one repeat I will approve.
I suppose this happens because writers don’t want to feel they are having to deal with directions from other people and want their chance to show what they can do but it makes it difficult for me to care about any title which could change wildly in no time.
I liked this more than others. It was messy, but I get the long-term X-Men problems it’s trying to address. If Scott can move forward as a character and the franchise can move forward without Xavier being an asshole controlling things in the background, then I say this was worth it.
Found the character stuff to be genuine, although inconsistent with other portrayals. The strength of the Brevoort era for me is that each book can be its own thing. That makes it poorly suited for crossovers. The Cyclops that Mackay is writing is not one who has a recurring beef with Rogue, etc.
I don’t want to disparage the art, but I think for this to feel more like a satisfying finale they needed a bigger name doing the entire issue instead of 3 artists that aren’t really known to the readers. Cool moments like Red Surfer would have worked with Stegman’s style, but less so here.
X-Manhunt over all was my ideal type of crossover. Quick, not really interrupting anyone’s stories and staying focused on characters over linewide plot mechanics. Personally I’m not looking forward to Xavier being in Imperial. Hickman writes the character well, but I’d be just as fine with the character being written out entirely.
There’ve been many worse X-Overs over the decades that interrupted active storylines to a greater extent. This was a pretty effective get in, get out, and get back to work type of diversion.
My two biggest takeaways from the X-ManHunt Omega, first what is a little bit of stabbing amongst former members of a throuple.
Second, Hickman clearly still has the juice with regards to Brevoort. Brevoort commisions an X-Men crossover clearly designed to setup Xavier and Lilandra for Imperial.
It all leads back to Hickman…haha!
[…] OMEGA. (Annotations here.) Well, that’s two crossovers under the current editorial office, and neither of them has […]
Is this the point when From the Ashes jumps the shark?
@Michael: Cyclops wasn’t hallucinating, Hodge was using holograms. Panic attacks shouldn’t be portrayed as making the sufferer dangerous to others. Cyclops’s visor keeps his optic blasts under control no matter his emotions.
@Scott: Xavier has always backed off when the X-Men asked him to leave, not controlling things in the background, especially in the last few years.