Powers of X #2 annotations
As always, there will be spoilers, and page numbers reflect the digital edition.
COVER (PAGE 1): A montage of Magneto, Mystique, Toad, Sabretooth and Emma Frost against the background of Krakoa. Most of these characters don’t actually appear in the issue.
PAGE 2: The epigraph quotes Magneto, and once again, it’s new dialogue. Clearly, it’s superficially at odds with the next scene. More to the point, though, is the contrast between Magneto’s opening quotation about unbridgeable differences and Xavier’s closing line about togetherness. As we’ll see over the course of the issue, this story seems to be interested in a rather more permanent form of togetherness than Xavier would normally have in mind.
PAGES 3-7: Charles Xavier and Moira MacTaggert visit Magneto and form an alliance with him. This is presumably the scene which was listed in the House of X #2 timeline as “Moira and Xavier recruit Magneto”.
The timeline: This issue repeats issue #1’s structure of having four scenes, set respectively in “Year 1”, “Year 10”, “Year 100” and “Year 1000” respectively. This particular scene is listed as taking place in “Year 1”, but so was Xavier’s first meeting with Moira in the previous issue. But according to the House of X timeline, Moira and Xavier met in Year 17, while their recruitment of Magneto didn’t take place until Year 43. That’s 26 years apart, yet for Powers of X it still hasn’t bridged the gap between Year 1 and Year 10. So either the “Year 1”, “Year 10” stuff is figurative, or there’s something weird going on with time. (Or Hickman has made a mess of his timeline, but that doesn’t seem very likely.)
This scene isn’t explicit about precisely when it takes place relative to events in Uncanny X-Men. Xavier is now in his wheelchair, and he and Magneto regard each other as estranged old friends, but that doesn’t really narrow it down much. However…
Island M: Magneto’s island base in the Bermuda Triangle. I believe the name is new, but the island itself isn’t – it’s the place where Magneto was based in Uncanny X-Men #147-150. It’s also the same island where he was based in Moira VIII’s timeline, as seen briefly in House of X #2.
In Uncanny #147-150, Magneto had only just raised this island from the sea bed. It’s not to be confused with the island where he was based in the early Silver Age issues, which which much more mundane (and X-Men Index confirms that they’re different). Uncanny #150 is generally taken as the turning point where Magneto’s face turn begins, after he injures Kitty Pryde, has a crisis of conscience, and runs off to brood about it. He doesn’t appear in Uncanny again until issue #188 – however, by the time of his next appearance in Vision & Scarlet Witch #4, he’s already talking about “reassessing my values.”
This scene can’t take place before Uncanny #147-150, at least without heavy retconning. It wouldn’t fit with Xavier’s thought balloons, especially in issue #149, where he spends two pages reminiscing about how he hasn’t seen Magneto in ages. So the neatest place is for this to take place after issue #150, with Magneto returning to the island once the X-Men are gone. He did in fact return later, so that isn’t a problem. Admittedly, his behaviour here sits a little awkwardly with the Kitty Pryde scene having happened already.
The design of the island includes details that are directly redrawn from Uncanny #148. It’s meant to look Lovecraftian, though neither Magneto nor the X-Men seemed to get the reference in the original story. The implication was that Magneto had inadvertently raised R’Iyeh, the sunken city where Cthulhu was imprisoned in the 1928 story “The Call of Cthulhu”. Claremont dropped a couple more hints about the island being ancient and ominous, but never really did anything with the plot. The R’Iyeh thing was finally confirmed in Wolverine: First Class #12, though it uses one of Marvel’s own-brand Cthulhus, Quoggoth. Whether any of this actually matters to Hickman’s story, or whether he’s just using the island for visual interest and easy timeline placing, is impossible to say.
Magneto’s visions: Moira shows Magneto what happened to him in various previous lives. We see five: Magneto being blasted by a Sentinel (possibly from the life of Moira IV or V), Magneto in chains (resembling his trial from Uncanny #200), Magneto being generally angry (probably all of them…), Magneto held in some sort of suspended animation tank by Nick Fury (presumably after being defeated in the life of Moira VIII), and Magneto fighting a hideous monster (something to do with Apocalypse in the life of Moira IX?).
PAGE 8: The credits. The small print in the bottom right reads “The world of Moira and the man called Magneto.” Last issue, it was “The world of Xavier and the woman called Moira”, so perhaps we’re getting a chain here.
PAGES 9-12: “Year 10.” On the face of it, an extremely straightforward scene in which Professor X and Magneto explain the plot to Cyclops (and demonstrate that they’re very much on the same page now). The data that Mystique and Toad stole from Damage Control in House of X #1 turn out to be the plans for the “Mother Mold” Sentinel factory that Orchis are building in outer space. Magneto and Professor X want Cyclops to lead a strike force to stop it. They say they’re afraid that this is the point in history where a version of Nimrod emerges, picking up on the idea from House of X #2 that some version of an anti-mutant Sentinel AI always appears.
PAGES 13-19: The “Year 100” sequence. On Asteroid K, the surviving X-Men similarly discuss the data that Cardinal and Rasputin retrieved last issue. Basically, it’s an “indexing machine” which is a doohickey that tells them where to find the “Genesis Protocols” that they’re actually looking for. These seem to be in “SalCen” which, as pointed out in the comments for last issue, is probably short for Salem Center, the town nearest the X-Men Mansion. Unfortunately, Percival – the one who died last issue – was the one with cloaking powers, so attacking without him is going to be a suicide mission. There’s a couple of pages in here that check in with Nimrod too, but they mainly serve to establish his mad child emperor persona.
Apocalypse: The data pages in issue #1 said there were eight mutants on Asteroid K, but the issue only identified six. Number seven turns out to be Apocalypse, now allied with the X-Men. They treat him as a leader, and he seems to be working with other mutants to resist the machines. He’s also noticeably more reflective than usual, which may have something to do with his upcoming role in Excalibur – he certainly doesn’t act villainous, beyond the obvious bit of being called Apocalypse. He raises a very good point: sure, artificial intelligence emerges in every timeline, but why does it always turn on mutants?
Krakoa: The plant guy on the asteroid is indeed Krakoa. He says that his “body once belonged to a mutant who could communicate with anything”, and that he retains that mutant’s powers. This is pretty obviously Cypher. Having first become techno-organic thanks to Warlock, does Cypher wind up repeating the exercise with Krakoa? As the first man/machine bridge in the X-Men mythos, Cypher seems to be an important character for Hickman, particularly given what happens in the “Year 1000” sequence.
PAGE 20: A data page about Nimbus, a worldmind created in the far future of the Year 1000 (so evidently these data pages aren’t written at any precise time frame after all). This essentially has future humanity (“post-humans”) creating their own version of the Kree Supreme Intelligence, putting it in a Nimrod body, and sending it out into space to take over the planet Nibiru, where it eventually becomes a Worldmind.
The Kree Supreme Intelligence: a long-running Marvel Universe concept, and described fairly straightforwardly here.
The “Badoon infestation of the early 31st century”: this was the set-up for the original Guardians of the Galaxy, as introduced in 1969, and a familiar Marvel Universe future element.
Nibiru: Nimbus takes over the planet “Nibiru”. According to the theories of “ancient astronaut” proponent and pseudohistorian Zecharia Sitchin (1920-2010), Nibiru is a giant planet which visits Earth every 3,600 years, and is responsible for creating ancient Sumerian culture. More recently, the name has become associated with a pseudoscientific doomsday theory in which Nibiru is supposedly going to crash into the Earth imminently. (Sitchin himself did not subscribe to this theory, not least because on his calculations, the planet isn’t due back until 2900).
PAGES 21-24: Year 1000. Nimrod and the Librarian discuss how Nimbus was a plan to attract the attention of a higher civilisation, which duly arrives in the form of the Phalanx. The Librarian explains that humanity want “Ascension”, and all this is explained further in the data pages immediately following. We see more of the future city, and the written language seems basically Asian in style. It certainly isn’t Krakoan.
PAGES 25-27: Data pages on “types of societies”, both “planetary” and “galactic.” This sets out a scale of interstellar societies based on the extent to which individual minds have become hives – the general implication is that progress up the ranks means becoming giant planetary hiveminds. This isn’t exactly the sort of progress that most people would be keen to achieve.
The Kardashev scale: Nikolai Kardashev (1932-2019) was a Soviet astrophysicist, and his scale was a hypothetical three-tier scale of civilisations, essentially based on whether a society had harnessed the energy of its planet (Type I), its solar system (Type II) or its galaxy (Type III). Earth, on his definition, was not quite at Type I yet. Kardashev’s scale is basically about technological progression as measured by energy use. Given that we’ve just finished talking about Nibiru, it’s maybe worth stressing that Kardashev was a mainstream SETI thinker.
The Technarch and the Phalanx: Having set up the man / mutant / machine trio in the previous issue, Hickman evidently has an interest in the X-Men’s longrunning notion of techno-organic creatures who straddle the machine line – and note again that Cypher, long associated with this kind of thing, was one of the handful of characters who got proper attention in issue #1. The techno-organic concept stems from Warlock in New Mutants, and his race, the Technarch, were introduced at the same time. The Phalanx are very similar, with more of a hive mind, and come from the Nicieza/Lobdell era in the 90s.
Inverting the original explanation of how they interacted, Hickman has the Phalanx as the superior beings (presumably because in his scheme, hives are superior). If the Phalanx like a world, then they assimilate it into the collective. This is “Ascension”, which the Librarian was asking for.
If they don’t like a world, then they infect it with the techno-organic virus which eventually leads to a Babel Spire being built, and a Technarch being summoned to wipe out the world. This refers to the plot of the 1990s crossover “Phalanx Covenant”, as supplemented by the short-lived Warlock solo series from the M-Tech imprint. In those stories, the Phalanx were supposedly trying to contact the Technarch, not grasping that the Technarch would wipe them out. It’s not quite clear how those Phalanx fit into Hickman’s description; perhaps he would view them as Phalanx-infected people rather than true Phalanx. At any rate, Hickman seems to be retconning the original Phalanx/Technarch relationship into simply What The Technarch Believe.
The name “Kvch” for the Technarch’s home comes from the 2008 Nova Annual – though in Hickman’s version there are plenty of them, all called “Kvch”, and all unaware of the other.
PAGE 28: The Stan Lee page.
PAGE 29: Closing quote from Xavier about the importance of unity – obviously taking on new implications in the light of all that material about hive minds.
PAGES 30-32: Finally, the reading order again, and the previews. They read: “NEXT: THIS IS WHAT YOU DO” and “THEN: ONCE MORE UNTO THE BREACH”
Another really interesting issue.
I’m fascinated by Hickman’s look at the whole Sentinel concept and the idea of why they always come for mutants. I’m all for moving past the whole idea that Days of Future’s Past is inevitable.
I was thinking recently (and correct me if I’m wrong) but one of the few things that the X-books have done well in recent decades has been the use of Magneto who post Eve of Destruction (and Morrison’s run), he hasn’t really been used for the most part as an outright villain had, for the better part of this entire decade, has been a member of the X-men in one form or another. It’s been a significant improvement on what they did with him following his “death” at the end of the Claremont era in the 90s (the awful Fatal Attractions, the whole Joseph mess, whatever the hell he was doing in Antarctica which I don’t recall going anywhere and the eventual Genosha stuff.
We don’t know for sure yet if the Magneto in the future scenes is Erik
The Technarch’s perspective on the Babel Spires doesn’t come from Phalanx Covenant (specifically, the “Lifesigns” X-Factor/X-Force/Excalibur part), which was pretty vague on why the hell the Phalanx were trying to beam a message to their “parent race”. It came from the short lived M-Tech Louise Simonson/Pasqual Ferry Warlock series from some time later, which didn’t seem to think much of the whole Phalanx thing and had tje Magus turning up to eat them.
[The Annihilation Conquest crossover, which the Nova Annual mentioned was tangential to, had an Ultron-controlled Phalanx create a Babel Spire to use as a giant forcefield generator, rather than anything related to the above]
(Of course, “Lifesigns” was a bit of a mess in general – the X-Force and Excalibur issues don’t link up at all well. In particular; X-Force makes a *big* thing about Cannonball & Wolfsbane being transmoded, which is completely dropped thereafter, and the rescue crew show up in a way explicitly rejected in the earlier issue…)
Thanks, I’ll fix that.
Phalanx Covenant is…not the best storyline, though it’s miles better than the incoherent nonsense that is Onslaught and more or less the entire line circa 1995-1999.
I seem to recall reading something years ago that it was a storyline that changed dramatically from the pitch to what was actually published, though at least they had a better idea of it than anything happening around Onslaught.
I like the idea of the Phalanx as this big bad zombie robot plague that seems unbeatable, but its entire subconscious will is to become a good meal for a technarch. It’s a clever, original life cycle. It was a good retcon of a bad story, and it’s unfortunate if the retcon is now being retconned.
It’s probably worth noting that Nibiru was also known in the 20th century as “Planet X”.
Someone noted the idea of Moira being a Hive in her own way–albeit serially in time and not parallel.
I was totally sure the monster that Magneto sees in the vision was the Shadow King, but I don’t think they’ve ever fought?
Moira is referred to as “Moira MacTaggart” now, and you have to wonder, if this is her tenth incarnation, how marrying Joe MacTaggart fits into her plans–the marriage didn’t go well for her. I guess Proteus / Mutant X’s birth is singled out on HoX #2’s timeline, so it could be deliberate.
Glad to see I’m not the only one confused by the 26-year-long Year 1. I hope the whole timeline ultimately holds together. It will be so satisfying if Hickman can successfully tell his entire story in and around established continuity.
Also, why would mutants-of-the-distant-future want to join the Phalanx? I realize that’s for future issues to explore, but it seems so antithetical to the ethos of mutant culture to erase all differences.
Interesting that their choice inverts the whole mutants v. machines trope introduced earlier in the issue, though. Maybe they plan on subjugating machines in some way, like they have humans?
That panel of Magneto fighting a monster looks a lot to me like a panel from the late Claremont era, where Magneto was talking about being driven out of the Hellfire Club by the Shadow King. It’s a scene that’s never been elaborated on, but I think the two panels are similar enough that this could be a direct reference.
It seems clear now that year 10 and year 100 are mirror storylines that will parallel each other through to the end – and year 1 and year 1000 are also mirroring each other but in less obvious ways.
I think Moira is definitely still around in year 1000 in some form and that is where she will finally find the last piece of her plan that she and Xavier were missing all along.
> I was totally sure the monster that Magneto sees in the vision was the Shadow King, but I don’t think they’ve ever fought?
There’s a brief flashback to an otherwise-unseen Magneto/Shadow King fight toward the end of the Rogue/Savage Land/Zaladane story, where Magneto refers to feeling sick about the high cost of his survival. Oddly, IIRC, he also associates the Shadow King with the Hellfire Club as part of it.
So after four issues…
Who are the main characters?
Who are the villains?
What is the plot?
Is any of it connected to the actual 616 X-Men?
Why does any of this matter at all?
———-
I do really like highlighting the man vs mutant vs machine aspect a lot.
Why do the machines always hate mutants?
Because unlike man, mutants are actually a potential threat to their evolutionary dominance.
Maybe ‘Year one’ is just anything/everything in the past (when it’s used as a regular page caption and not in the timeline chart).
Worth noting that the 4 asteroid inhabitants standing around in issue 1 seem to be the horsemen of Apocalypse here – Wolverine is War, Xorn seems to be Death, Krakoa and ‘Magneto’ are the other two.
I’d assume Moira is still alive in all time periods here, as otherwise the timeline we’re seeing can’t exist, going by HoX #2.
I may have picked up on an Easter egg not mentioned here.
Percival’s ability to cloak them from machines reminded me of when Roma resurrected the team after Fall of the Mutants, made them invisible to technology (seemingly indefinitely until writers forgot about it), and gave them the Siege Perilous. I had to google the rest because I’m not big on Arthurian legend, but the name “Siege Perilous” refers to an empty seat at the round table and apparently the knight Percival was associated with it somehow. I have a feeling none of this will be important to know; just a cool allusion from Hickman to a particularly weird bit of X-Men history.
Thanks Paul. This issue the text pages just didn’t work for me for some reason. Appreciate the notes.
Great point about Percival, and I’d bet on it being significant.
I don’t know whether it was made explicit in the Onslaught comics, but the plot overview that was published separately, and was different from what saw print, had Onslaught trying to create basically a hive mind, a “togetherness” of minds that would accomplish Xavier’s dream by eradicating prejudice against mutants along with all other individualism.
I’d bet on seeing the Shadow King at some point. I don’t know whether he ever really wanted a hive mind, but certainly a commonality of feeling with everyone else as slaves and him as king. And the last line Claremont wrote in his original Uncanny run had SK claiming he wouldn’t settle for the earth when he could have the stars.
@Thom H.:
“…it seems so antithetical to the ethos of mutant culture to erase all differences.”
What TF exactly is mutant culture in practice? The concept of mutant culture seems so antithetical to the ethos of the X-Men. “Mutant culture” seems like something for humans to fetishize and perhaps for supremacist mutants to promote (and even still it’s totally undefined), not for the X-Men and its writers and its readers to be discussing seriously. They’re just people, just like us. That’s, like, the whole point of the X-Men.
Though, in fairness, it appears that quite literally everyone has lost sight of that.
The original Siege Perilous was a chair at the Round Table that only the knight destined to find the Holy Grail (ie Percival, later retconned to be Galahad, the Gambit of Arthurian myth) could sit in without being instantly killed. How this equates to a mirror that one can step through and be turned into a ninja is something perhaps only Chris Claremont knows.
Yes, there do seems to be hints at the Shadow King wanting some sort of hive-mind, in the sense of everyone connected to and controlled by him.
There were hints given by Claremont that the Days of Future Past scenario was somehow being instigated by Shadow King.
That the “Mutant War” story that Claremont never finished was supposed to reveal that the Shadow King was in control of the human government.
Plus, in the X-Men: True Friends mini-series, the Shadow King was revealed to be affiliated with the Nazis.
So, it definitely seems that the Shadow King was interested in eliminating plurality and difference.
Cara-Siege Perilous was also used in Andre Norton’s Witch World series of novels.
Claremont pretty blatantly copied the idea from Norton, rather than the original Arthurian legend.
Although, Norton does give some mention to the Arthurian legend when she introduces the Siege Perilous.
“How this equates to a mirror that one can step through and be turned into a ninja is something perhaps only Chris Claremont knows.”
The Siege Perilous never turned anyone into a ninja.
Cara, I thought that was an amazing observation.
I don’t quite know how powerful the Shadow King is. Sometimes he rivals Xavier’s power, at other times he is foiled by Kid Storm and Gambit in the latter’s first appearance in Uncanny X-Men #266. IIRC Storm even “wills” his influence away. In any case, he can probably control–what, many dozens?
Since we’ve been seeing a lot about Hive-ish mutants in this work, I wonder if Hickman will have some take on Jamie Madrox.
I think that Moira IX must somehow be the 8th-and-so-far-unseen mutant in Year 100. Curious that we haven’t seen Moira X in the Year 10 era so far.
I liked this issue–not as much as the whopper of HOX 2 but eager to see this battle happening on multiple fronts.
@Dazzler: Yeah, I think there’s a definite push and pull in the X-books about whether mutants are “just like us” or whether they constitute their own species and culture. And depending on who’s writing them, there’s a difference in what mutants want: to be accepted as basically human or to be left alone to develop their own way of living.
Clearly, right now Hickman is exploring the latter option. And I find that very interesting. Your mileage may vary, as they say, and I have no problem with that. The tension is built into the books, and we fall on different sides of the spectrum. No big deal.
One thing I’m not going to debate is whether this is a topic that should be discussed by readers because honestly: look at where we are and what we’re doing.
When Moira VIII meets Magneto in Octopusheim, it’s her year 24 (the same year that Moira IX and Apocalypse return from space).It stands to reason that when Xavier and Moira X meet Mags in Octopusheim this issue, it must be around her year 24, and certainly not year 43 as indicated on the timeline page. Though that would allow ten years between (the end of) X1 and X2. I suppose it’s possible that Magneto simply raised Octopusheim earlier in Moira XIII’s timeline?
Year 43 would seem to be a reasonable place to situate UXM 147-150. The Mutant X/Proteus issues (UXM 119-125) would have already occurred,and Magneto plays something of a role in that as it was in a battle with Magneto that Mutant X’s containment cell was ruptured. (Much like the Moira I-X retcon imbricated Destiny and Mystique into her narrative, I suspect Hickman is finding points of continuity to do that with other characters.)
Proteus is obviously going to play an important role in the plot somehow, this was obvious since HoX 1 when he was included in the list of Omega level mutants. Being a reality warping mutant, this gives Moira X (and Hickman) some leeway, I think, for some sleight of hand. I wonder if Moira XI and Moira XI may end up being related.
@CJ, something’s obviously going to be revealed about Moira IX’s life after the “Apocalypse War” but it seems to me that the X3/Year100 events must be occurring in the same timeline as Moira X based on what we have seen of Krakoa, the seeds, etc.
Not reading the book, but on the year 1-10-100-1000 being odd relative to the actual timeframe:
The numbers are 10 to the power of X, X being 0, 1, 2, 3. So, literally Powers of X.
The ‘year one’ thing makes sense if the meeting with Magneto (nine years before the present day) is the starting point of the grand plan, and telling Xavier about it years earlier was just a sort of prequel – “This is what we’re going to do, but you need to spend the next 26 years pretending you don’t know…”
Interesting to see Emma Frost prominently on the covers, when she hasn’t played any part in the stories yet.
And I suppose it’s inevitable after the first three, but this one felt more like filling out the required length of a 12-issue limited series – I suppose we can’t expect world-changing every single week.
I think it’s more that the earlier issues all introduce big new ideas. This issue is more concerned with advancing the plot for the elements that are already in play, although it also pust the notion of hybrids on the board, in the form of Cypher/Krakoa and the Phalanx.
Today I learned the word ‘imbricated’.
I hadn’t thought much about the pre-Genosha/Moira fake death schism, but now, knowing that the recruitment is specifically about Moira X’s schemes, it gets pretty interesting. Was it a schism à trois? Or did Xavier and Magneto remain aligned (as seems to be the case presently, assuming Darth Helmet is indeed Xavier) and Moira X was the odd one out, leading to the fake death?
I think it’s pretty fun how many villains Hickman is surfacing in such a short time. Magneto, Apocalypse, and Sinister all play big parts; the Shadow King hints you all are picking up on; Nimrod of course is huge; and I have to assume Cassandra Nova won’t be ignored, considering Genosha (and her obsession with a Cerebra that is styled identically to the mobile unit we see here). Hell, the only X-Man we’ve really interacted with is Cyclops, and he’s hardly playing the part of hero.
Lastly: where the hell is Bishop?
As others have said, I have to believe that one panel is a reference to the one panel flashback of Magneto fighting the Shadow King in issue #274(?). In fact, I thought that as soon as I saw it and smiled. Hickman is pulling really deep cuts.
I really enjoyed X-Men: Grand Design, but to be honest, this is a better celebration of X-Men history while also telling an engaging and original story. I had high hopes for a Hickman X-Men run and this is exceeding them so far.
@dave
Re: Hive Minds
Hickman & co are riffing on evolution and the idea of mutants as the next stage in evolution. Particularly after this issue, I got the sense they may be interested in evolutionary transitions. In “The Major Transitions in Evolution”, John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry detail significant shifts such as the development of chromosomes and the emergence of multicelluarity. Most/all of these transitions involve previously independent or autonomous entities merging into a single replicating unit.
Perhaps then the idea is that mutants are the next stage of evolution, not because they are a separate and more fit species from humans, but because they will complete the next transition. I think it was Ernst Mayr in “What Evolution Is” who described humans as part way between individualism and eusociality. Maybe mutants will become (more) fully eusocial. The Technarch and Phalanx may represent even further stages of such transitions.
There seems to be references to the concept of the Singularity in all of this too.
The repeated mention of “Ascension”.
I saw “post-human” mentioned in this issue, at least.
The fact that most of this revolves around technology and AI.
I wonder just how “unified” mutants are now. Like, are there still Morlocks hiding underground? Are they all working together, even if begrudgingly? Right now, none of the protagonists are really surprising since Xavier has worked with them all in the past.
@Andy Walsh I don’t remember if this point is in Szathmáry’s follow-up or the original, but they detail the importance of fitness particularly at a new hierarchical transition. What would be interesting is to understand how technology–ultimately AI–affect the fitness landscapes at those transition boundaries.
The repeated mention of “Ascension”.
I saw “post-human” mentioned in this issue, at least.
The fact that most of this revolves around technology and AI.
For that matter, Moira’s multiple lifetimes, complete with reset, kind of works like the whole AI simulation idea.
Essentially, from the perspective of a “current” Moira, each lifetime is one iteration of the simulation, with Moira using the knowledge from prior iterations to change impacts, and able to reboot it again. Her mutant biology allows her to do the same kind of iterative learning that AI does, to the point that the actual timeline is essentially unreal, “virtual,” for her.
On another level, things like Franklin Richards’s reality alteration power function in ways that can easily be analogized to some fo the wilder transhumanist/futurist predictions about nanotechnology, simulationism and other such stuff.
Even something as simple as telepathy and the astral plane is basically depicted, in the comics, as if there’s this “virtual” version of individual minds, which can be read, modeled, and even reconfigured by external commands, all done in a kind of avatar-filled field fo representation that plays out analogously to William Gibson-style cyberspace.
So part of this may be Hickman noticing all those similarities in the way futurist narratives depict some of these things and the way comics and soft sci-fi fiction (almost accidentally) ended up with very similarly functioning metaphors.
And that makes sense: this stuff is always a hyperbolic projection of its own cultural sphere’s and time period’s anxieties and desires, so there’s bound to be some convergence.
Also, and unrelatedly, isn’t Hickman’s take on anti-mutant AI actually a reversal of the direction in which the Claremontian themes eventually went?
The original Nimrod stuff seemed to be about Nimrod being created by humans with a “kill all mutants” directive and eventually moving beyond it.
And both that story and the earlier, late 1960s Thomas/Adams Sentinel stuff eventually wraps with the machines themselves “mutating” to attain independence and the non-“mutated” ones choosing self-destructive options when they recognize this.
In the older Thomas and Claremont stories, it’s never the AIs that hate mutants, but rather AIs being programmed *by humans* to eliminate mutants, and then either being shown as stunted, limited, and eventually destroyed by that directive or eventually transcending it. (Bastion is really weird, since it went all in on hating mutants after it was turned into something more like a *human* than a machine. By a magical gemstone named for a mythical chair.)
My wife and I were spitballing some theories back and forth yesterday, and everything made sense at the time, only for the tower to potentially crumble now that I’m trying to spell it out here. I may not have all the whys or hows sorted out exactly, but here are some whats, potentially…
The entire timelines of X2 and X3 are the end of Moira IX’s life. She is the unseen mutant on Asteroid K, and it’s because she’s now blue-ish (due to either whatever Apocalypse has already done to her, or possibly what he will go on to do once the group gets whatever they need the index thing for). This extends her life to the point where she becomes the Librarian from X3. Her personal goal is to catalogue all mutant knowledge and “ascend” with the Phalanx hive mind, because somehow after she unites with them and all of the mutant knowledge of the world, she’ll be able to “die” and start her last (last?) life with ALL the knowledge acquired previously. It’s like the idea of running a near infinite number of simulations, as a few others have mentioned above, or like someone with a genie using his/her last wish for infinite wishes. Quite why she’s doing this, I’m not totally sure yet. It could be an explanation for why Apocalypse is so willing to sacrifice everyone for the mission because he knows what Moira is ultimately doing and knows his “present” isn’t permanent, much like Magneto did what was necessary with his expendable soldiers back in the original Age of Apocalypse story. This theory may also explain why some of our classic dystopian future stories (Bishop or Cable’s origin stories, for example) don’t easily line up with the X2 or X3 timelines here; X2 and X3 again are only Moira IX’s timeline, so they’re not permanent.
Maybe?
I agree with the theory that we are seeing events across the two books from two different timelines. Specifically Moira life 9 (powers of x) and life 10 (house of x). The series should end with Moira’s 9th life ending being revealed and connecting it to life 10. Life 11 is where we will start the new series as I recall Hickman saying that Moira was just a plot device (in response to the plagiarism accusations that recently surfaced).
I suspect that is exactly right and that Moira will not be a central focus post this event. Although I do wonder where life 6 went and when we will get that reveal.
One nitpick though: I really hope he is going to have a better handle on writing these characters in Dawn of X. The dialogue in the Magneto and Cyclops scenes was wooden, stilted and flat for me. Then again, I never found his dialogue in Avengers particularly good either. It is the bigger picture that keeps me coming back.
What are people’s impressions of Hickman’s giant Incursions storyline?
I remember it being a massive system of moving plot elements with the nature of the incursions gradually being revealed in bits and pieces, but this taking a very long time and a lot of attention. I’m just thinking about what to expect as far as solving this new puzzle…
I don’t see how Hickman can seriously be accused of plagiarizing that novel.
I’m not familiar with that novel, but I read the description through reviews on goodreads.
I mean, we’re getting in to territory where people could then accuse Back to the Future of plagiarizing Heinlein’s “By His Own Bootstraps”.
That would just be ridiculous.
I wouldn’t describe Hickman’s dialogue in that scene as “wooden,” but it certainly doesn’t sound like Cyclops. Xavier is acting off so it’s hard to judge. Magneto and Mystique I think he had a handle on. But Cyclops seems out of character for sure.
If PoX is life 9 then it’s odd that PoX started with THE Moira/Xavier meeting, which is the key point toward the start of life 10. And there are current / year 10 scenes in PoX, which are definitely not in the Apocalypse timeline.
@Dave
I think the idea is that Hickman’s attempting to trick you into thinking X² & X³ are the future, but they’re actually Moira’s *past*, not that X⁰ and X¹ are also life IX.
I like how all this talk of AI in the font this site uses, makes it look like Al Kennedy naturally hates mutants.
What does Cyclops typically sound like? To me, he has always sounded like 1) a hyper-effective field commander who is almost perfect under pressure and 2) someone generally angsty who is unable to come out of his shell emotionally.
HoX/PoX Cyclops honestly sounds to me like the most archetypal Cyclops I’ve read in a while. There’s a mission about mutants, it needs to be done, so it gets done, no question. He seems more secure of himself and trusting of Xavier, which we haven’t seen in a long while.
There could still be something going on, but to me he sounds more like Cyclops than he has in the past 10-15 years.
@Thom H.:
The idea that this discussion validates the idea of mutant culture is absurd. It’s like if I bought up the idea of murder and you said murder is a bad idea and then I said if it’s such a bad idea why are we discussing it
Mutants, by definition, are neither a race nor a species and they have no culture. No elements of mutant culture exist. It’s a meaningless phrase. Culture is borne from things that just aren’t present among mutants, and mutants have virtually nothing in common. Even krakoan is just an English code rather than a proper language. Food, music, traditions. Mutants share zero of any of this. There is no mutant culture until it’s invented, which it clearly hasn’t been. It’s in your head
Dazzler-We are talking about fiction here. Mutants don’t exist either. They had to be invented.
The concept of a race or species isn’t necessary for the creation of culture.
See: LGBTQ or any number of sub-cultures in myriad societies.
Morrison showed how culture is important in a minority gaining acceptance in a majoritarian society.
So, the idea that it “it clearly hasn’t been (created)” is lacking. It’s just been mainly ignored since the Morrison run.
Nobody here or in the books has described so much as a scintilla of what mutant culture might consist of. By my count we have a band named Juggernaut (who isn’t even a mutant; and we have no clue what their music might even be like), mutant fashion was lazily name-dropped once (and all we saw was a designer who was a mutant with extra arms who just dressed like a prick) and we have the code “language.” That’s it.
This isn’t an issue of fiction vs reality, this is an issue of trying to have a serious discussion about something that doesn’t exist. Cyclops exists and i can describe him. Mutant culture does not. I won’t even challenge you to define it because it’s not a thing. It’s entirely undefined nonsense. Words like race and species and culture have meanings, and even in this fictional reality none of them apply to mutants
“What is mutant cuisine like?” “What constitutes mutant fashion?” “How would you describe mutant music?” “What customs and traditions set them apart?” “What can you tell me about the mutant way of life?” None of these questions can be answered, because mutants don’t have a culture of any sort. They have nothing in common, no native region of the world, no commonality at all, nothing. I’m not trying to be argumentative, but there’s just no substance to this notion
I imagine that Krakoan, like most such fictional languages, isn’t meant to be a substitution cipher in-story. It’s written as such to give interested readers the ability to have fun decoding it, but that’s purely for the readers’ sake and there’s as much in-story reality behind that as there is to invisible characters appearing as white ghosts.