House of X / Powers of X
But is it any good?
Pretty much everyone would agree that the X-books needed a shot in the arm. House of X and Powers of X are certainly that. People are talking again, in a way that they haven’t been talking in years. Not only that, they’re talking about the plot. Jonathan Hickman has begun his X-Men run by bringing out the high concept ideas from the off – Moira’s multiple lives, the mutant island of Krakoa, the apparent immortality through back-up copies – and for the most part, people have bought it. In both senses of the word. So, as an opening arc, job done. Nothing in the X-Men has produced this sort of reaction since the start of the Grant Morrison run, back in 2001.
A book like this is inevitably going to divide the audience to some degree. For one thing, it’s very different in tone and focus, which means it’s not necessarily what attracted some readers to the X-books in the first place. And more fundamentally, this is the sort of story where you either trust that it’s heading somewhere, or you don’t – and if you don’t, you won’t be having much fun with this. But so far, for the most part, Hickman seems to have kept people on board.
On a closer inspection, the actual content isn’t quite as radical as it might first seem. Everything Hickman is doing is built from long-established X-Men elements. The mutants’ inevitable subjugation by machines was a standard plot element for decades after “Days of Futures Past”. The mutant island has been done before with both Genosha and Utopia. The X-Men as radicals was done, in however ill-defined a fashion, by Brian Bendis. Professor X has had a cloned body before. The Phalanx are less central to the X-Men mythos but they’ve been firmly part of it for decades.
None of which is to say that Hickman isn’t bringing something new. On the contrary – he’s displaying the existing elements in a new way and bringing something different out of them. That’s what makes it recognisably an X-Men comic, despite the drastic shift of style with the data pages, and the pushing to the margins of most of the familiar characters. That and the art – Pepe Larraz and RB Silva don’t have Hickman’s profile, but they’ve done excellent work on these two books, both in a suitably familiar Marvel-superhero style. If the writing is going to go flying off into weird and unfamiliar places, then the art is able to anchor it in something more recognisable. And if the writing is going to shoot up to a scale where conventional characterisation gets shoved aside, the art can help to keep things more reassuringly human.
But Hickman is the designated auteur for this series… which is interesting in itself, because House of X and Powers of X are not merely the introduction to his X-Men run. They’re the introduction to an entire line of X-books built around the set-up that he establishes here. And most of those, of course, won’t be written by him. We’ve not quite had this before – other X-books reflected what Grant Morrison was doing, in terms of turning the school into a Hogwarts-style academy, but they never seemed to be part of an overall grant plan. The nature of Hickman’s grand plan seems to call for a bit more co-ordination than that.
And these two books are all about the grand plan. I’ve seen it said that these are really just one book, and certainly they’re billed as two series that are one. But at the same time, structurally they are two different parallel narratives. House of X is the present day and the establishment of Krakoa. Powers of X is the bigger picture, with the four time frames ascending through (most) of the issues, setting up the grander mysteries of the story. Yes, they’re part of a whole, but they’re different strands within that whole. One of the oddities of superhero comics is how the need to accommodate spin-off titles led to this sort of parallel structure becoming commonplace.
A better complaint is that House of X and Powers of X aren’t stories. This is true, and not just in the sense that they’re the opening act of a bigger picture. Things happen in House of X – Krakoa is established, the X-Men raid the Orchis Forge and destroy the Mother Mold, and dead heroes are restored to life from their back-up copies – but you’d struggle to say that they happen in a way that feels like a story with a start, middle and end. In fact, the establishment of Krakoa takes place largely off panel. Powers of X is even more scattershot, and makes essentially zero sense if you try to divorce it from the bigger picture.
But neither book is really trying to operate as a conventional story. This is an exercise in establishing a very different new status quo, and setting up some key concepts for the upcoming series, and then carefully arranging a whole armoury on the mantelpiece for future reference. Twelve issues of this would not normally work (and if you don’t buy into Hickman’s bigger picture, it won’t work for you). It holds together by hurling huge ideas at the reader, setting up a puzzle, and building trust that that puzzle is all going to pay off.
Which is very necessary because, well, we’ve all been here before with great mysteries. The thing about mysteries is that while they’re still longing, you can project whatever you want onto them. You can believe that the pay off will be worth it. History is littered with puzzle box stories that fell apart when the reveal had to come, and all the speculation about where it was heading had to be replaced with a rather underwhelming reality. Remember Lost? Remember Bruce Jones’ Hulk? Marvel in the 90s got by for years by stringing out mysteries and convincing readers that it would all pay off in the end – and to be fair, the major plots were usually resolved, but not necessarily in a way that satisfied anyone.
Much of Hickman’s success in these first 12 issues comes from building trust that he absolutely knows where he’s going. There are mini reveals to start the ball rolling, which give the sense that big and unexpected things will happen here, and that it’s all been carefully mapped out. This is a world building exercise, even if it’s being built from pre-existing elements. In recent years it’s often been difficult to try and set up grand continuity-based mysteries because the approach to continuity is so lax that you can never really tell whether discrepancies are plot points, or not meant to matter, or just got overlooked. Hickman somehow manages to avoid that trap, despite his stories containing a bunch of things that seem to clash with established history – as should be obvious from some of the annotations. He does it partly by making clear that he’s intentionally revealing a hidden history, but also by throwing in enough continuity minutiae to send a message to the likes of me that, yes, he knows.
It works for Hickman. Will it work for a whole line? There’s something of a cult-like vibe to Krakoa in these twelve issues, a sense that it’s all a little bit too good to be true – even before you get to the inherent creepiness of killing characters and restoring them from back-up copies, or the obvious hints that all is not as it seems. What happens when other creators have to tell stories there? Hickman’s set-up goes some way towards providing a solution to that problem, since it’s clear that the inner circle of the Quiet Council know more about what’s going on than the average citizen of Krakoa (and Xavier and Magneto know more than the Council). So writers using those other characters can simply take Krakoa at face value.
But the general aura and style of the place under Hickman is so distinctive that you have to wonder whether it can survive the range of depictions from other creators that it’s about to experience. We’re going to get more conventional character work, we’re going to see Krakoa in a less stylised way, and I wonder how that’s going to work.
I’ve got this far without even starting to discuss the themes of the series – largely because this is twelve issues of set-up, and while Hickman is raising big ideas, precisely what he has to say about them remains nebulous right now. On that level, these are things that remain annotation-fodder for now. Whether it all comes together is a question that will only be resolved in the future; at this stage, it’s just about convincing us to come along for the journey.
There are certainly big ideas being put into play, though – though still ones with a clear precedent in the X-books. We’re back to the idea of mutants as the next stage in evolution; and like Morrison, it’s taken at face value here, instead of being just a device to explain why some people have super powers. But Hickman seems to be rejecting the idea that that makes mutants the future, on the basis that the future actually belongs to the machines. Quite why only the humans that should ascend to posthumanity, rather than humans and mutants both, is not exactly clear to me at this stage, but it’s early days.
Linked to all this are issues of group identity and individuality. In building yet another mutant island community, Xavier is creating a society that insists that the most important thing about everyone there is the fact that they’re a mutant. It’s a perfectly understandable view for a persecuted group but whether it’s a healthy end point is another matter entirely. Hickman is playing the old trick of repeating the same basic idea at different scales – that’s the basic conceit of Powers of X, though actually using the powers of ten for notional time frames probably caused more confusion than it was worth. At the grand, universal scale, society becomes a collective in which the individual is lost; at the level of Krakoa, national/mutant identity is displacing individuality; and at the level of the individual, copies are treated as interchangeable.
In that light, the somewhat marginal space for character work in these two titles makes sense. There is characterisation in here, but it’s on the margins, because this is a story being told at the level of society rather than individuals; or rather, the very marginalisation of individual characters is a big part of the point. It’s another thing that I suspect will change pretty rapidly once the line as a whole gets up and running, potentially diluting the coherent tone that Hickman has developed on these two books; perhaps it was a smart move to give him a clear run on these early issues to get it all going. You can’t have that many monthly books all taking place at the society level. We’ll be back in more conventional territory soon enough, even if it’s not in X-Men itself.
Hickman’s new status quo may be built from pre-existing elements, but the end result is novel. It’s not the island, but simply the fact that in Hickman’s set-up, the mutants have the upper hand. That’s what makes this different from Utopia, which was a refuge for the last remnants of mutantdom. It’s not exactly like House of M or Age of X-Man either, since both those stories came closer to just removing the humans from the equation. The result seems to pitch the X-Men somewhere between Attilan and Wakanda.
These aren’t really two stories. But they are a convincing statement of intent that the X-Men are going somewhere both different and interesting.
For me it kind of boils down to two things…
1) Do I want to read a line of books in which the X-Men have bought into a crazy fascist mutant supremacist immortality cult because the plot demands it?
No.
2) Do I want to read a line of books in which the X-Men have bought into a crazy fascist mutant supremacist immortality cult because they’ve all been altered or brainwashed in some way, only two snap out of it years later?
Not really.
… they never seemed to be part of an overall grant plan…
Pun intended?
I am definitly on board with this new direction having been very bored and uninterested in many of the X books over the last 10 years.
I’m rather interested to see how some of the non-Hickman books will go into standard character development with the larger world-building in Hickman’s work simply as background. The fact that I have reserved all of the coming books at my local comic shop shows just how interested I am to see how this narrative develops, even if the side books all take it in a different direction than Hickman’s central texts will.
Great review Paul, thanks for that.
I’m willing to give it the benefit of the doubt and see where theis is going. I haven’t been this invested/interested in the X-men in at least a decade.
I’m glad you mentioned Bruce Jones’ Hulk run. That’s one I remember starting out strong but almost completely falling apart about halfway through it after the Abomination turned up. It became clear around the end of that story that Jones didn’t have any particular end in mind and was more or less making it up as he went. But at least the opening Romita Jr Arc and the two ones which came after it were great fun, suspenseful and significantly better than what came before.
Even if this falls apart with the spin-off books, I won’t mind. I’ve enjoyed every issue of these minis, and that’s more than I can say about most X-books for a very long time.
I do plan to pick up X-Men and New Mutants because I’m curious to see how much each series tackles the themes/mysteries built so far. And even if I don’t like them, I’ll definitely be following the storylines closely here.
Oops — I meant to add:
When I think of a series that immediately squandered an amazing set-up, I automatically think of Nowhere Men. I still read those first 6 issues every once in a while.
Hoping this doesn’t turn into that level of fiasco. Don’t think it will.
Immortality by continually dying in terrible pain, before waking up in a Fabio egg, has got to be the worst possible type of immortality.
I’m digging it so far. Is it perfect? No, but it sure is interesting. Like others have said, this is the most jazzed I’ve been about the X-Men in YEARS. That’s worth something, right?
For those interested, Hickman answered some reader questions over here:
http://www.adventuresinpoortaste.com/2019/10/14/x-men-monday-32-jonathan-hickman-answers-your-house-of-x-and-powers-of-x-questions/
Mainly, I’m wondering if swinging couples is part of mutant culture, now.
“Remember Lost? Remember Bruce Jones’ Hulk?”
Remember Hickman’s Avengers? Remember Infinity? What the fuck was Infinity even about?
@Col_Fury
“Is it perfect? No”
Which X-books have been perfect?
@ Ben – very well said!
At the risk of presenting a false dichotomy, what we seem to have here is one two failures of writing:
Either Hickman has so utterly failed in grasping the character of half his cast that he has no problem fitting them for armbands and tiki torches…
Or, Hickman has so utterly failed in his pacing that 12 issues in (equivalent to, what,16 regular issues?) he hasn’t seen fit to introduce a character I can cheer for, who see’s through against the ethno-totalitarian regime on Krakoa.
As I mentioned in the annonations, the damnable thing is that it’s a great execution, so I can see how people who either like or tolerate the premise would enjoy it. More power to those who do, but I am not in that camp.
I’m just amazed that in all of this *nobody* is telling a story about mutants that have rejected Krakoa. I know Hickman and co. have plans for several of these characters, but a series focusing on Kate Pryde, Karma, Polaris, Wolfsbane, and Firestar and their struggles to distance themselves from this new society could be an interesting counterpoint.
I was always baffled by the positive reviews of Bruce Jones’ Hulk. Banner wanders around with no agenda while mysterious things happen around him, and then in the final issue of a five-part arc, he turns into the Hulk for about four pages. Then the arc would end with no explanation for anything that was happening. Repeat for eight more story arcs (or however long it went … I dropped it after the second arc made it clear Jones had no idea where he was going with anything).
Thank you, Paul, for doing these deep dives into each week of HoXPox. They’ve been super insightful and I’ve honestly looked forward to them each week as much as the issues themselves (along with reading all the comments to go along with it).
I can honestly say if it weren’t for the old X-Axis site, I probably wouldn’t be reading comics today. I read comics until I was in high school (almost exclusively X-Men) but fell out of it for a while and didn’t read comics for several years. Eventually I got to wondering what was new with my favorite mutants and instead of picking up a comic, I searched the web and came across your old site. That was around 2005 or so. I eventually ended up picking up Ultimate X-Men in the TPB at some point, then Origin and Joss Whedon’s first volume on Astonishing, and somehow that snowballed over the last 14 years into a full on addiction to the medium of comics spanning from all things X- related, to a few other mainstream titles, to several indie books all on a monthly basis. And though I don’t think I’ve ever commented before (before HoXPoX at least) I’ve still been reading your reviews for all that time. Just thought now was as good a time as any to say thanks for all of it.
“I’m just amazed that in all of this *nobody* is telling a story about mutants that have rejected Krakoa.”
That would seem to me like a natural story to tell as well to flesh out this new status quo. For some reason, I thought that’s what Fallen Angels was going to be about, but re-reading the solicits, I really don’t know why I got that impression.
@Paul
“Nothing in the X-Men has produced this sort of reaction since the start of the Grant Morrison run, back in 2001.”
I’ve heard this a lot in regards to HoX/PoX. It’s like everyone forgets about Joss Whedon’s run on Astonishing. It was a pretty huge deal at the time. Also, It had more in common with Hickman’s mystery aspects and odd characterization than Morrison’s run did, IMO.
Re: Job
If I had to pick just one off the top of my head? Classic X-Men #27’s backup strip. Perfect.
Yeah I think it just isn’t very good and isn’t very X-Men. I’ve said in an earlier thread and I agree with Paul that it’s difficult to see how this is going to work across an entire line of comics. I think the bad far, far outweighs the good and I think they could have done a much better job to mitigate the risks of this whole enterprise without detracting from whatever people see in this that they consider strengths.
I’ll be very surprised if this lineup of books sells particularly well, and I don’t think any of this will ultimately have been worth it.
“If I had to pick just one off the top of my head? Classic X-Men #27’s backup strip. Perfect.”
The one that does kind of a ’50s B-horror movie riff? Really?
Not that I’m disagreeing! That was one of the first X-Men stories I ever read, and I love it. Just surprising to see it referenced by a fellow X-fan as a favorite. 🙂
Re: Jason
That’s the one! You have good taste, my friend. 🙂
I think the point about this relaunch living or dying based on the readers’ trust is spot-on. I still have some serious reservations going forward, mainly because I remember waiting from him to get to the part of his Avengers run where the team would finally start acting like heroes, only for it to end with Captain America and Iron Man punching each other to death and letting the universe explode. Oh, well.
Having said that, the X-Men books have had so little going for them for so long that I’m willing to give him a long leash on Dawn of X. Whatever he’s planning has to be more interesting than mutants choking on poison gas for a year.
The X-Books themselves end up behaving a lot like Moira lately: “let’s try this direction! Oh, it didn’t work…let’s start over, #1s all around.” I hope that even if the cultish creepy pod immortal mutants don’t sell across the ongoings, that Marvel doesn’t assume they were wrong to try something different.
I don’t remember the last time I was interested in the overall direction of the X-Men.
I echo Brent about these columns. I read X-Axis around when it formed back in the Usenet RACMX days when I worked at my LCS in high school. Good god I’m old.
@Col_Fury
You have to start going around qualifying your reviews with, “Well, it was no Classic X-Men #27’s backup strip, but I liked it!”
For the record, I might name the Remender/Opena issues of Uncanny X-Force as “perfect” (specifically the Apocalypse Solution story and the end half of Dark Angel Saga). Any criticism I may have of them is related to setup/payoff in other issues.
Nate S
Regarding Whedon’s run – My memory of the fandom during the Whedon run was that there was plenty of interest from fans and obviously it sold like crazy but that there wasn’t that much actual discussion/debate on the forums on at the time.
Whereas a few years earlier, every issue of Morrison’s run was generating an absolute tonne of discussion/speculation etc (as did Claremont’s X-treme X-men which was weirdly incredibly popular, or at least had very vocal fans).
And Morrison’s run was obviously setting the agenda for the line in a big way while Whedon’s run existed off as its own thing rather than being the book that the line was built around (as New X-Men was).
The upside is that it reads fantastically as its own isolated story and especially as a direct sequel to Morrison’s run).
But of course the main story for the X-books at the time was the House of M and it’s fallout and that all played out in X-men and Uncanny etc. I’m not sure it’s even directly mentioned in Whedon’s book at all.
The other issue at the time of course was the significant delays and time between issues.
For me now looking back, I had the bar set pretty low for this. After the last few years of where the X-Men have been paired with a general dislike for Hickman’s narrative tendencies (I think they work in some cases, but didn’t think they’d work at all with X-Men) it made me at least fairly cautious about this series. But I found it pretty exciting and honestly found myself counting down the days until I could read the next issue. And while it’s far from perfect, HoXPox is a setup to the next couple of years of storytelling, and on that front it definitely works for me. It’s definitely Hickman, but I think it’s him at his best.
I’ve often said in the past while reading a Hickman story that he should have a book where he teams up with a writer who does excellent characters and dialogue. I think Hickman is great at world-building, setting up mysteries and tying all the loose ends together, but if someone else would come in and actually flesh out the characters it could make for some really great comics.
So now, with Dawn of X, it looks like I sort of get my wish. Hickman set up the overall plot, and other writers are coming in to develop it and fill out the landscape. I am honestly more excited than I have been in quite some time about the X-books. I’m planning on reading all the books at this point.
I think how good (or bad) the DoX books are will be the true testament to whether HoXPox succeeded or failed. But I’m beyond excited to see how it works out either way.
@Andrew
“Regarding Whedon’s run – My memory of the fandom during the Whedon run was that there was plenty of interest from fans and obviously it sold like crazy but that there wasn’t that much actual discussion/debate on the forums on at the time.”
Yeah, I’d actually forgotten about Whedon. I think a few things happened:
1. Incredible delays (Cassaday ain’t speedy)
2. A return to status quo, more or less. Yes, it was a status quo that people at the time had been pining for, but returning to it wasn’t really new or striking. Whedon just managed to write the status quo relatively well.
3. No real bearing on anything else going on in the X-books at the time, and later (after it was ridiculously late) it was actually ignored by other books.
4. I wouldn’t call the pacing glacial, especially not compared to Bendis or Jones, but it certainly took its time.
5. Not a whole lot was added to the mythos. SWORD pops up now and then, Armor is still a regular background character, and Danger stuck around for a while. That’s kind of it.
@Brent
“I’ve often said in the past while reading a Hickman story that he should have a book where he teams up with a writer who does excellent characters and dialogue.”
He was paired with Bendis on Secret Warriors, at least in the beginning. I have no idea what that book was like, though. No one talks about it anymore, not even in discussions about Hickman. And say what you want about Bendis (the master of terrible plotting), but he certainly would be a useful dialogue writer to be paired to someone like Hickman.
“I’m just amazed that in all of this *nobody* is telling a story about mutants that have rejected Krakoa.”
Actually that would be the perfect plot for a comic titled “Fallen Angels”, considering what the original comic by that name was about.
@Job
I read that Secret Warriors series back when it was coming out. That was during the time period where I was really into anything Bendis did. I don’t remember liking it all that well and have never revisited it. I think that was Hickman’s first major marvel work and I always suspected Bendis’ contribution was minimal at best. Either way, I’m not sure Bendis is great at character development (outside of Ultimate Spiderman at least) but he’s still far superior to Hickman.
On perfect X-Men stories, I’m really partial to the Whedon run and Peter David’s X-factor from the same time period. Neither are perfect, but somewhere between the two is my ideal X-book. Remender’s X-force was pretty stellar as well. All three of these involve relatively limited casts, definitive writing that couldn’t be mistaken for another creator, and simple storytelling mostly disconnected from the greater Marvel universe and whatever line-wide relaunch/crossover was happening at the time.
“E is for Extinction” and “Apocalypse Solution” are candidates for perfection.
UXM #170 (Storm vs. Callisto, so much plot, Paul Smith art) and X-Force #44 (cool weird Adam Pollina art, new direction for X-Force) are issues I would read in a continuous loop.
@Brent
From the AiPT article:
“Erik Eliason asked: A lot of writers in the line of X-Books have talked about the level of collaboration in the line and how it’s higher than what they’ve dealt with at other companies. I was wondering if you could reflect on what that looks like and what brought about that focus.
Jonathan: We knew we would only get one shot at this so we decided not to f–k around. ”
I’m excited. We’ll have to see what ends up happening, but I hope it’s an interesting success.
@Brent
“On perfect X-Men stories, I’m really partial to the Whedon run and Peter David’s X-factor from the same time period. Neither are perfect, but somewhere between the two is my ideal X-book.”
PAD’s (second) X-Factor run is so weird to me. Besides the fact he never seemed to have a regular art team, his subplots would just meander forever until they finally found themselves front and center in a story. I know that’s kind of a normal PAD thing, but it struck me as so weird in X-Factor. Granted, they were all interesting ideas/plots/subplots, but boy did that book need structure.
That said, the very first issue was pretty perfect. Maybe my disappointment has more to do with how no successive issue lived up to that one.
@ Job
The delays were obviously an issue when it was coming out, though obviously not as bad as something equally prominent, such as The Ultimates.
The flipside is that both books are amazing in their collected editions and read fantastically like that.
Whedon’s run was an is a great read but it just didn’t generate the same interest/talk that the Morrison run go at the time of its publishing.
Also fully on board with HOX/POX—which still feels like a little miracle. I was neither much of a Hickman fan when I came to these titles nor remotely interested in reading more X-Men comics. And yet these work for me, and well.
Contrary to the popular opinion that Hickman is all about ideas, which I would have previously parroted, I think the mission to stop the Mother Mold was tense and touching. I was really wrapped up in the story.
And I do think that these books form a story. They really are Asimovian, in that the arc is a progression of understanding. We begin with one idea of how the future is fated to play out and end with another.
Interested as anyone else in where things go from here, but if nothing that follows measures up, I’m pleased with the ride I’ve been on so far.
Since we’re all commenting on our statuses as X-Axis vets, it’s been at least 20 years for me, but I never read the Usenet stuff.
@Andrew
“Whedon’s run was an is a great read but it just didn’t generate the same interest/talk that the Morrison run go at the time of its publishing.”
Morrison’s run was also punctuated with a lot of surprising developments.
• Genosha’s destruction
• Beast getting assaulted, and also the possibility he’s gay
• Cyclops and Emma
• The U-Men as metaphor for transgenderism
• The school becoming an actual school
• Mutant town and Kick
• Xorn, Dust, and Fantomex
• The Weapon Plus program and Wolverine’s “true” origin
• Quentin and the students
• Xorn’s true identity
• That dumb future story
Yeah absolutely.
It’s one of the things that made that run so exciting at the time – that and it was generally paced as a series of small arcs within the larger ones, plus the one-off issues.
One of the great things about Hox/POx has been the feeling of each new issue being an “event” and the conversation that comes from it.
And that’s a great feeling. Even if it doesn’t totally work, it’s at least engaging and interesting to talk about in a way that very few X-books in recent years have been.
Well, the obvious difference is that Morrison introduced new ideas with each new story, which ranged from single issues to five issues in length.
Hickman just slow-dripped new ideas over the course of one not-really-a-story, in a way that often made no logical narrative sense but would give the appearance of providing a bit of substance per issue.
Re Whedon, while he did get a lot of attention at the time, he was really just writing one title rather than doing anything to change the wider direction of the line. In fact, one of the problems with that period is that nobody was really setting a direction for the line more broadly. Bendis has similar issues – he wrote a book about Scott’s splinter team and a book about the time travellers, and the actual regular X-Men just drifted.
Was Whedon’s run concurrent with Milligan’s run on X-Men and Claremont’s return to Uncanny? If so, yeesh, that was a rough time for the line.
I don’t know, it all just feels so hollow – which is a criticism I’ve had before about Hickman comics, come to think of it. Big ideas that should be interesting, delivered in a way that leaves me completely cold and detached.
That’s why I find the Morrison comparison so odd – New X-Men expressed its high concepts through its characters, and Hickman either doesn’t want to or doesn’t know how to do that. His Moira just isn’t compelling, and everyone else is a plot-driven cipher.
Think I’ll wait for the next relaunch, Dawn of X just feels like the proverbial fruit of the poisoned tree at this point.
@ Paul.
That’s a great way of putting it.
@Job
Yes the 2004 “Reloaded” relaunch was
Whedon – Astonishing
Claremont – Uncanny/Excalibur
Chuck Austen followed by Milligan – X-men
Also:
District X
Cable/Deadpool
Liefeld’s X-Force mini
As Paul said, while Whedon’s Astonishing was clearly the flagship, it was off in its own storyline and there was nobody actually overseeing the X-men line as a whole.
House of M a year later kneecapped the line pretty badly and it all sort of drifted.
Though that was just the starting point. Whedon was wrapping up his Astonishing run in the run-up to Messiah Complex, and the line at that point was Brubaker’s Uncanny, Carey on adjectiveless (soon to be Legacy), Kyle&Yost on New X-Men and David on X-Factor – a much, much stronger line-up.
(Wait, actually I just checked that and it looks that the final issue of Astonishing actually came out after Messiah Complex has already ended – just how late was that book?)
Regarding Secret Warriors, I remember reading Bendis somewhere (this was years ago, so I don’t have the link) saying that Marvel basically asked if they could put his name on the opening arc to help give the book attention since Hickman wasn’t well known at the time, and he never actually wrote a word of it.
@Si “Immortality by continually dying in terrible pain, before waking up in a Fabio egg, has got to be the worst possible type of immortality.”
My impression was that backups only happen at regularly scheduled intervals – to put it in game terms, you’re restoring from the last autosave, not from the moment before you died. So you wouldn’t remember any of that pain, or really any of the circumstances of your death.
Going back to something from several weeks ago…
In the article linked by Col_Fury in this thread, where Hickman answers some questions, he mentions that one of the big errors that went to print was the Xavier/Forge flashback. Forge has been drawn in an incorrect outfit and they decided to cover it up with coloring, except then Marte Gracia was in hospital, so even that they didn’t do to the extent they wanted to… or something.
But for me the weirder flashback is still the Sinister recruitment scene. As noted many times in many places, Xavier’s in the hoverchair that debuted in 1991. The scene seems to imply that Xavier gave Sinister the impulse to delve into mutant DNA. But Inferno was earlier than 1991, cloning Jean was earlier, Mutant Massacre earlier still and running an orphanage to experiment on mutant kids was way earlier than all of the above.
And there were later retcons and flashbacks where I’m pretty sure Sinister was into mutant DNA back in the early 20th century, though I can’t point to a specific example. He definitely was experimentind on a kid Xavier… although that wasn’t technically mutant-focused.
Anyway – having read these annotations, HoXPoXToX and random theories on the internet, I’m still confused what to make of this scene.
@Si “Immortality by continually dying in terrible pain, before waking up in a Fabio egg, has got to be the worst possible type of immortality.”
I think worst has to go to the immortality curse version of Greek mythology, where the humans are immortal, but never stop aging. Starts out better than the egg, but gets so much worse.
I’ve only been observing all this HoxPox stuff from the sidelines, but what it reminds me of is when Marvel got Warren Ellis in to reboot the lower-tier X-books in 2000ish. As I remember Ellis wrote the first arcs of each of those then handed them off to other creative teams.
I also recall that it didn’t go very well — aside from, I think, Steven Grant’s X-Man — so that perhaps doesn’t bode well for what comes after HoxPox.
Brian Woods took over on Generation X, and far improved what Ellis had done with his Generation X revamp.
Even X-Force, Edgington basically kept the same tone and direction as Ellis had set.
Ellis basically set up the X-Force revamp as an “Stormwatch-lite rip-off”, and that was what Edgington picked up and continued.
I think, if you want to find a bigger issue with “Counter-X”, it was that Ellis’ initial vision for two out of the three books wasn’t exactly interesting.
He vastly improved X-Man, but that wasn’t very hard, because X-Man was pretty much unreadable.
The real problem with “Counter-X”, though, was basically just the sales.
Ellis’ revamps did little to increase the flagging sales, and Marvel just canceled all the books.
Well, except that Bill Jemas decided to continue using the X-Force title for Milligan’s X-Statix, at first.
I’ve got to say, I don’t “trust that it’s heading somewhere” – in fact, I’m pretty confident that it’s not. But I really enjoyed this series as a story in itself, for the bits that it did resolve and the way the whole thing was presented. I don’t think Hickman and the other writers are going to be so good with the part where you have to tell a story in the situation he’s set up, but I hope to be proved wrong about that…
/// I’ve been drawn back to X-Men by this relaunch and will probably carry on with the main title and possibly New Mutants. The creative teams on the other titles don’t interest me that much. I lost interest in X-Men round about when Gillen finished and Remender’s X-Force ended. Certainly Bendis (and Aaron to a lesser extent) finished me off.
/// Seems like what’s being set up allows an incredible amount of wriggle room. If it’s well-received (which I guess = sells well) then it’ll be considered one of those few fixed points in X-Men history. If it doesn’t then there’s enough stuff – clones, rewritten timelines, Xavier possibly not Xavier – to allow it to simply be changed or forgotten. (If I’m honest I’m still not completely sure what happened to the Marvel Universe after Hickman’s Secret Wars. Wasn’t it all sound and fury…?)
/// Many thanks for all the annotations. I loved them and found them incredibly useful.
Yeah, basically nothing changed in the Marvel Universe after Secret Wars.
It eliminated the Ultimate Universe, and made a few superficial changes.
I don’t think that’s Hickman’s fault, in any way.
Hickman’s work was to end the Marvel Universe.
It was left up to Marvel editorial to decide what happened to the Marvel Universe afterwards.
Marvel Comics is very adamant to not reboot their universe in the way that DC does every time it needs a sales boost.
Marvel just used it as an excuse to push the “All New, All Different Marvel” direction.