X-Men Blue: Origins #1 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-MEN BLUE: ORIGINS #1
Writer: Si Spurrier
Artists: Wilton Santos (with Oren Junior) & Marcus To
Colour artist: Ceci De La Cruz
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Sarah Brunstad
COVER / PAGE 1: Mystique and Nightcrawler (in his Spider-Man costume) in action together. I think the thing in the background is meant to be the Stark Sentinel from Uncanny Spider-Man #4.
X-Men Blue: Origins. The title is a play on the ongoing series X-Men Blue that ran for 36 issues in 2017-2018.
PAGES 2-5. Flashback: Mystique resists Professor X’s mental control and falls off a cliff.
This is a straight recap of a scene in X-Men: Hellfire Gala 2023 #1. We were told in that issue that her body was taken away by the sea, and naturally she showed up again in New York in Uncanny Spider-Man #1.
The recap narrator is the mysterious Bamf that hangs around talking to Nightcrawler, invisible to everyone else, in Uncanny Spider-Man; for present purposes, though, he just gives us a bare-bones recap of Hellfire Gala.
PAGE 6. Flashback: Mystique escapes the Hellfire Gala.
Basically, Mystique picks herself up pretty much immediately, already obsessing about “my baby” (as she has been in Uncanny Spider-Man). She kills and replaces a random Orchis soldier and escapes that way.
PAGE 7. Nightcrawler asks Mystique to talk.
This issue takes place immediately after page 19 of Uncanny Spider-Man #4, although unfortunately the art doesn’t quite match up – in that issue it’s snowing, and Nightcrawler approaches her unmasked and a little more calmly.
The Bamf rightly gestures at Nightcrawler’s status quo in Uncanny Spider-Man and identifies that it doesn’t matter to this story at all.
PAGE 8. Recap and credits.
PAGES 9-12. Nightcrawler tries to calm Mystique, and she starts to recount the story.
Much of this issue is devoted to retelling and rewriting the existing accounts of Nightcrawler’s conception, gestation and birth, which come mainly from X-Men Unlimited #4 (1994) and Uncanny X-Men #428 (2003). I already recapped this in Uncanny Spider-Man #2’s annotations, but it’s so important to this issue that we may as well just repeat it rather than link to it:
- In X-Men Unlimited #4 (1994), Graydon Creed recounts the version of the story known to him. According to Graydon, Mystique “was the widow of a recently deceased German count”, who she may have killed; she was living with him simply for the money. Her cover was blown when she gave birth to Kurt. Some sort of mob – Graydon calls them “the royal family” – tries to kill Kurt. Raven changes to her original form to scare them and tries to escape with Kurt. She drops Kurt at a waterfall and flees to save herself. The mob then throw Kurt over a waterfall. All of this, of course, is hearsay. Later in the issue, Mystique gives her version, which broadly matches Graydon’s. She claims that she disguised herself as the villager and threw Kurt over the cliff in order to cover her own escape.
- In Uncanny X-Men #428 (2003), Chuck Austen spends an entire issue on a much expanded version. This account is basically consistent with X-Men Unlimited #4, though it names the Count as Christian Wagner and establishes that Raven was living with him under her real name. They were supposedly trying to have a child, and Christian was apparently infertile. Christian introduces her to Azazel, then posing as a ruler of a Caribbean island, who somehow knows that she’s a mutant, and seduces her as part of his plan to have lots of children on Earth (for reasons connected with the plot of “The Draco”). Raven murders Christian because he suspects Azazel of being the father. Kurt is born, and Raven lapses into her true appearance during the birth. A torch-wielding mob pursues her, and in this version Raven herself throws the baby off a cliff before making her escape. Austen is clearly aware of X-Men Unlimited #4 but makes no attempt to suggest that Raven has any agenda in living with Christian beyond his wealth, and doesn’t attempt to explain how Destiny fits in to any of this. In fairness to Austen, Destiny had been dead for years at this point. Austen’s version of the waterfall scene contradicts the earlier versions, showing Raven in her natural form and with no pretext that she’s posing as a villager. She’s just trying to kill Kurt.
The version that Mystique tells here is basically Uncanny X-Men #428, except for the point right at the end where she remembers going back to rescue Destiny.
PAGES 13-14. Nightcrawler uses the Hopesword to make Mystique remember.
The shattered image behind Mystique in page 14 panel 1 is Charles Xavier erasing her memories, a scene which we see on pages 32-33. The idea is apparently that his mental block has finally broken down, through the combined effect of his attempt to force her through the gates in X-Men: Hellfire Gala 2023 and the influence of the Hopesword.
PAGE 15. Mystique begins her story.
Mystique essentially credits her and Destiny as having an open relationship in which they spent extended periods of time apart – something which is pretty much forced by a whole bunch of flashback stories that appeared during the many years when Destiny was supposed to be dead.
PAGE 16. Flashback: Raven hires Irene to work for Christian.
We’re not given any clear explanation of why Mystique worked for Christian beyond the act that he had “resources”, which is all we really need here. The bit about Mystique recruiting Irene to come and join her in the castle in the guise of a maid is completely new. The scene with Azazel posing as a business associate at a party, and then seducing Raven, comes from Uncanny #428.
PAGE 17. Flashback: Irene asks to start a family.
Obviously, this is the big retcon: Mystique and Destiny are Nightcrawler’s parents, which by many accounts is what Chris Claremont wanted to do in the first place. More of that in a bit.
Mystique says here that she couldn’t understand why Irene encouraged the affair. On page 31, we’re told that Irene deliberately engineered the creation of Kurt for various plot reasons (which, again, we’ll come back to). That doesn’t outright contradict Irene’s statement here that she hasn’t had a vision in months, but it certainly raises the possibility that Irene is actually just upset herself at having taken the decision to have a child and then abandon it.
‘There were other pregnancies…” Leaving aside characters that we’ve seen in alternate timelines, there are only two existing characters who Mystique might have in mind here. One is Graydon Creed, her son by Sabretooth. The other is Destiny’s daughter Justine Chase, an extremely obscure character from a handful of Howard Mackie X-Factor stories in 1997.
PAGES 18-20. Nightcrawler questions the mechanics of all this.
Let’s take this together with…
PAGE 21. Data page: a memo from Dr Nemesis (a regular in predecessor title Legion of X) about how Mystique’s powers work.
Basically, what Nemesis is saying – in line with Mystique in the previous scene – is that her powers go beyond shapeshifting to actually copying the DNA of people she has met. Presumably this somehow sits on top of her underlying DNA, since if she changed all her DNA to become an exact copy of someone else, she’d erase her own mutant gene.
But the basic idea here seems to be that Mystique can become biologically male by copying a male target, and therefore she can father a child. Moreover, when she fathered Kurt, she was copying Azazel (possibly among others). This retcon allows Kurt to be the child of Mystique and Destiny while doing minimal damage to “The Draco”, a storyline which turned on Kurt being Azazel’s son, but only required a genetic link.
PAGES 22-25. Flashback: Mystique continues her story and Kurt is born.
All of this is a complete rewrite of Uncanny #428. In the original story, Christian is broadly sympathetic, and Raven kills him in order to cover up her affair with Azazel. This version wants Mystique to be more sympathetic and so gives her a slightly better reason to kill him.
The doctor attending the birth is drawn as the same one shown in Uncanny #428.
PAGES 26-27. Flashback: Mystique flees the castle.
This is a heavy rewrite of the earlier stories; Mystique no longer tries to dispose of the newborn, but tries to leave him in a safe place while she doubles back to rescue Irene, only to lose both.
PAGE 28-29. Nightcrawler unmasks.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t match the lead-in scene in Uncanny Spider-Man #4 at all, where he was already unmasked. Oh well.
PAGE 30. Flashback: Irene introduces Raven to Rogue.
We’re not directly told why Irene felt the need to disappear for five years, but she resurfaces just in time to get Raven to help runaway Anne Marie. This flatly contradicts Rogue’s account of her first meeting with Mystique in X-Men Unlimited #4, where Rogue is a tomboy runaway clutching a shotgun. However, that flashback itself claims that Rogue is on the run after putting a boy called Cody Robbins into a coma, as shown in the back-up strip in Classic X-Men #44. But that’s completely impossible, because Rogue is already living with Mystique in that very back-up strip. With this issue added, the scene in X-Men Unlimited #4 is so intractably inconsistent with other stories that it should probably be dismissed as non-canon.
Disregarding X-Men Unlimited #4, the other main source of information about Rogue’s childhood before meeting Mystique is a series of flashbacks in Rogue #2 (2004), which does confirm that she ran away from home.
Irene is drawn awfully young here, considering how she looks by the time Rogue reaches adulthood and joins the X-Men.
PAGE 31. Flashback: Destiny explains why she conceived Kurt.
For one brief moment, Azazel has to be a major threat here in order to justify Destiny bringing him into the picture. Basically, she’s saying that she engineered the conception of a child who would sabotage Azazel’s plans in “The Draco” and prevent him from ruling the world.
“That old witch Szardos” is Margali Szardos, Kurt’s adoptive mother. Apparently, it was desperately important that Kurt should be raised by her in order to set up his life to go in the right direction.
PAGES 32-33. Flashback: Charles Xavier erases the memories of Raven, Irene and himself.
Since Xavier isn’t in a wheelchair, we must be back in the pre-Silver Age, before he lost the use of his legs. (If it was after he regained the ability to walk then the X-Men would already have fought Mystique’s Brotherhood for the first time and Destiny would be much, much older.)
Xavier leaves Mystique with the knowledge that she’s Kurt’s mother – consistent with what she knew when they first met in Uncanny X-Men – but warns that her mind will invent a story around what it still remembers, which might be even worse. Mystique says that “he made me think I abandoned you”, but Xavier’s actual dialogue implies that this was the story that Mystique herself came up with.
Presumably, Uncanny X-Men #428 is now to be taken as the version of events that Mystique remembered. That’s a bit awkward because Uncanny #428 is not presented as a flashback, but simply as a story set in the past.
PAGE 34. Nightcrawler and Mystique embrace.
PAGE 35. Trailers. Since this is a one-shot, we’re directed to Uncanny Spider-Man #5. The Krakoan reads BLUE BLOOD – even though the equivalent page in Uncanny Spider-Man #4, pointing to the same issue, read FADE TO BLUE.
The only trouble I have with this is that, as recently as Immortal X-Men #8, Irene is shown to be significantly older (already gone grey) at Project Black Womb, which would’ve been at least a decade before Kurt was born. But oh well
In ‘things only I am likely to care about’, I will say I was fascinated by Xavier’s warning to Mystique being really adjacent to the psychoanalytic idea of ‘the Quilting Point’ – where new information and memories sort of end up having to merge with old ones, and where both have to align with each other and such might subtly get tweaked to do so.
On a less navel gazing subject, I love the way modern Marvel has empowered writers to canonize Mystique and Destiny. There’s a little something to be said that the one queer coded couple they’ve embraced were untrustworthy villains and that now they’ve added polyamory and gender queerness to the mix. But that also kind of plays on the subversive quality of both the characters and traditions within queer culture. There’s a positive reading that puts it in contrast with Iceman being especially homonormative and allowing antihero characters more space to reflect a different vision of queer culture.
Happy for any comic that makes me want to write a paragraph each on queer theory and Psychoanalysis. Makes my lil critical theory heart grow 2 sizes.
Note Destiny in the background of the scenes on pp. 10, 15-16,and 22, including as a pregnant maid in three different panels.
Destiny’s age does raise some questions. Shouldn’t she be too old for childbearing? Mystique can change her DNA, ok, but what about Irene? Of course now she’s been deaged after being resurrected. I suppose, even with the sliding timescale, Gillen’s scenes with Sinister in 1919 suggest that her lifespan is longer than an ordinary person’s, so perhaps… It’s best not to think too had about it. I’m also wondering about Kurt and Rogue’s respective ages, given this retcon. And wouldn’t that make Creed younger than them, which doesn’t really fit?
‘There were other pregnancies…” Not all pregnancies result in a living child, so while it may be an allusion to Graydon or Justine, it might also imply that Raven wasn’t always successful at making her DNA cocktails.
As hinted by her supple thighs in her old costume, Destiny’s secondary mutation is that she’s eternally 20 years old between the bottom of her ribs and the top of her knees.
My impression was that the scene on pp. 32-33 was taking place a little while after Uncanny X-Men #177-178–so Xavier would be walking, Rogue would have recently joined the X-Men (and Mystique & Destiny would have reconciled themselves to Rogue being in his care, but still concerned about her), and the “lingering sense of a favor owed” would mean that Mystique wouldn’t try to directly attack Xavier again (well, for a while).
Now, how a 90-year-old-or-so Irene Adler would be able to carry a pregnancy to term is a whole other question…
@Douglas: It’s been a while, but I think the favor owed was from their first meeting on panel, where Mystique made reference to owing him a favor in standard Claremont “hint at backstory” style. So that’s saying the scene with Xavier happened well before she met Kurt as an adult, and that the lingering feeling of a favor owed was Mystique reconciling her false memories of dumping baby Kurt with her actual love for him.
It’s not really possible for that scene to take place after Uncanny #177-178, given Destiny’s age. She already has grey hair when she debuts in X-Men #141, though she’s only seen out of costume for a couple of panels, and she’s unambiguously elderly by the #170s. Also, she tells Xavier that she wants teh memories erased so that she can “focus on my wife and daughter”, which makes no sense if Rogue has already left.
This whole story takes place in the latter-day Fox X-Men movies, in which characters apparently age a maximum of 2 years every decade.
Or, Destiny is a mutant who ages slower than ordinary humans because secondary mutation/.cloned bodies/ experiments/ magic/ Superboy Prime punched the Marvel Universe and it made her young right up until she gained 30 years at once.
All I know is, I’m happy we got Claremont’s origin for Nightcrawler, and then Kurt forgave Mystique and wants to help her. Whether she deserves it or not, that’s the Nightcrawler I want to read about: a good person who wants to help everyone no matter what.
(Except for Azazel, who flat out sucks)
@Mike: Yeah, really good point. The whole ongoing storyline has been taking Nightcrawler to his lowest point as a slavering monster, then back to himself yet ignoring people in need. It’s easy to focus on the retcon itself and not the fact that this is where he opens up to the person who’s hurt him worst, whether or not she meant to. This puts him in a good place for the last issue of Spider-Crawler.
Amazing issue, easily the best of the Fall of X bunch and one of my favorites of the entire Krakoa era. It directly imbues Mystique with emotional depth, complexity, and at times outright messy and contradictory motives and reasoning that has always been alluded to but rarely ever spelled out so explicitly. I was floored and genuinely shocked at how unapologetic the story is as a queer/trans allegory, especially for Marvel. I would happily read an entire series dedicated to exploring this new relationship dynamic between Kurt, Mystique,and Destiny.
And see you in hell, Azazel! Cautiously optimistic for possible Scarlet Witch/Quicksilver/Franklin Richards recons.
“However, that flashback itself claims that Rogue is on the run after putting a boy called Cody Robbins into a coma, as shown in the back-up strip in Classic X-Men #44. But that’s completely impossible, because Rogue is already living with Mystique in that very back-up strip.”
Fans have been debating whether or not the flashback in Classic X-Men 44 is supposed to be the same as the story Rogue described in Uncanny 185 about Cody for decades. The boy in Classic X-Men 144 is named FREDDY while the boy in Uncanny 185 (which X-Men Unlimited 4 is referencing) is named Cody.
I’m not liking the idea that Mystique can alter her DNA to create sperm that will father a child that will inherit the powers of someone she’s touched. if she can do that, then why can’t she just copy the powers of anyone she’s touched? Nemesis even rates that possibility in the data page. At some point, some writer will have the X-Men in trouble and Mystique will turn all the bad guys into pigs and explain she shook hands with Proteus or something. If Mystique can manifest the powers of anyone she’s touched, she’s too powerful. We saw this with the Scarlet Witch. Englehart explcitly stated that she was only able to create the twins because her powers were boosted by the magical energy of hundreds of witches and that creating life was impossible for her power under normal circumstances. And later writers STILL made her into a reality warper. Sooner or later, Mystique will be a power-copier.
@Joseph S.- Yes, Nightcrawler supposed to be older than Rogue- he was in his twenties when Rogue joined the X-Men as a teenager. But in this story, 5 years after Kurt was born, Rogue was surviving on the streets for a month. Assuming she was 9, that would make her four years older than Kurt.
Also, Xavier walking when Rogue was old enough to spend a month on the streets makes no sense. Remember, he was already in the wheelchair when he met an 11-year old Jean.
I’m not liking this story’s attempt to portray Mystique sympathetically. She had her chance to be a mother to Graydon Creed and she left him for dead. Who’s to say she wouldn’t have turned on Kurt the same way? Spurrier himself said that Arthur made a monster out of Mordred when he wrote the Black Knight. If Arthur made a monster out of Mordred, then how didn’t Mystique make a monster out of Graydon? Even as recently as Immortal X-Men, we saw that when Destiny downplayed the chance of innocent people being killed in a plan, it made Mystique LESS likely to agree to the plan.
@Moonstar Dynasty: the scene in which Kurt questions how Mystique could father a child stood out to me. He questions how it’s possible and she gets mad at him. I was like, “why is she so mad just because Kurt is asking how she could be a biological father? That’s not fair, because he’s making the point that she’s not biologically male…”
“… ooooooohhhhhhhh.”
@Moonstar Dynasty It’s not a matter of anyone she touches. Mystique can already turn into anyone. The implication, stated outright on Doctor Nemesis’ page, is that she instinctively knows how to change her DNA to be who or whatever she wants to be, but she can’t get X-Genes. She didn’t intentionally give Kurt an X-Gene that gave him Azazel’s powers, she just gave him some of Azazel and Baron Wagner’s DNA (probably what she built the necessary mechanisms around instead of making her own entirely from scratch) in addition to her own. The result is a kid whose X-gene has attributes of Mystique and Azazel, but more heavily Azazel’s. It’d be fun if they use this to improve Kurt’s teleporting by saying he was never in any danger of getting stuck in a wall or something due to minor precog from Destiny, letting him start to teleport to places he cannot see and has not been (still within his limited range).
One weird thing about this issue is that it’s trying to portray Mystique sympathetically while Kurt is cosplaying as Spider-Man. While in the Spider-Books, Peter and Miles are caught between Madame Masque and Janice Lincoln- and Janice is redeemable because her father tried to steer her toward non-violent crime because he really loved her, while Madame Masque is a monster because her father forced her to become a violent criminal because he only saw her as a means to an end. But that applies to Mystique as well- if she truly loved Rogue, she would have kept her out of the Brotherhood.
@Joseph S- Whether Graydon Creed is older than Kurt is a subject of debate. X-Men Unlimited 4 implies that Kurt is older than Creed. Creed ran for President once, so he would have to be at least 35 but he also hid the fact that he was the son of Mystique and Sabretooth so he could have lied about his age as well. It’s worth noting that in the Sabretooth limited series in 1993, the Berlin Wall is mentioned before Sabretooth romances Mystique. Since construction on the Berlin Wall started in August of 1961, Graydon Creed could have been no older than 31 at the time of that story.
@Michael: this is not the first time Mystique has been portrayed sympathetically. It happened following Destiny’s death, when she’s been concerned about Rogue, etc. Also, sympathetic Marvel villains is nothing new. Multi-dimensional super-villains are nothing new, either. This issue doesn’t excuse or sugarcoat Mystique’s crimes. I see nothing wrong with portraying a fictional character with humanity, even if they’re objectively bad people.
@Adder Moray: I believe you meant to “reply” to Michael.
@Mike Loughlin: Your take re: sympathetic villains is spot on. Mystique is still a murderous, socially maladjusted psychopath. I just now have the benefit of viewing her through new lenses through her decades of guilt as 1) a failed parent, and 2) a victim of emotional extortion and mental distortion at the hands of Destiny, who I now view as the ultimate form of the classic emotional manipulator (how can you ever really prove, disprove, or trust anything an emotionally manipulative partner who can actually see the future says?); lenses that thoughtfully inform (but never excuse) her pattern of behavior and makes me feel sorry for her.
Re: biological father scene: I loved this one too because I read it as an emotionally deranged adult woman struggling to be vulnerable and to articulate her thoughts and feelings of a buried trauma with an estranged son for the first time. It’s a new dimension for Mystique that still reinforces the cornerstones of her personality: her menace, her intensity, her dismissiveness, her petty cruelty. It’s all there in this issue and it’s great.
And we’ve already seen disconcerting evidence of Destiny’s terrible traits as a partner since she’s been resurrected, but wow, Spurrier really goes for her jugular in this one-shot. Would love for this to be interrogated more post-Fall because everyone involved is so much more interesting (and despicable) as a result of this story.
Shoutout to 4th-wall breaking Bamf/Legion in this issue too: He strikes a great balance of being funny and touching in equal portions throughout.
This direction for Mystique has been set up by Hickman, whether intentionally or not.
Xavier and Magneto decided to toy with and manipulate Mystique, basically because they could.
They were doing Moira’s bidding, but she had nothing to do with the two deciding to mess with Mystique’s mind.
Then, Mystique causing the resurrection of Destiny is the only reason that mutantkind ended up being saved from Moira’s plan to eliminate the X-gene.
I also don’t agree about Mystique and Rogue as per the Brotherhood. Unintentionally, Claremont set up the same dichotomy between Xavier and Mystique which Hickman used for the different sides in the man/machine/mutant struggle. Mystique truly believed in her cause and that she was a revolutionary. It makes sense she is going to bring her daughter into her revolutionary cadre. Regardless of how Mystique has been written as Rogue’s mother, it shows a flawed person, rather than an outright evil character. The Brotherhood were opposed to Senator Kelly and his anti-mutant political platform. Mystique believed she was in the right.
It’s the same as Xavier recruiting young pupils to fight his war. Was Xavier wrong to do this? Does it mean he never cared about his X-Men by forcing them to fight for his ideology? He was doing what he felt was right.
The mechanics of this which make no sense to me are (is?) doing a Fall of X mini about Nightcrawler which don’t include this part and need a separate one-shot.
Gotta love how this reinforces the bloody Draco as being THE most important Nightcrawler story.
“so perhaps… It’s best not to think too had about it.”
Yeah, just go with the flow and accept what we have been told and move on. I suppose when you just look at the Nightcrawler stuff, it almost makes sense, but best no think about too much about how Rogue and Graydon Creed correctly fit into all this.
“Gotta love how this reinforces the bloody Draco as being THE most important Nightcrawler story.”
I know, right?
So basically with regards to Mystique, she can copy people’s forms but only copies their DNA if she touches them?
So she copies people’s DNA, but not their superpowers? Forget the X-gene, if she shapeshifted into Spider-Man, she wouldn’t be able to climb walls and bench-press a tank. If she looked like Johnny Storm, she wouldn’t be able to burst into flames. Sooo… I guess there’s a carve-out where she doesn’t/can’t copy mutated/augmented DNA? That’s the only way to really make it work.
The Dr Nemesis datapage quite clearly suggests she could mimic powers if she gave it some thought / tried really hard.
I don’t think I understand Destiny’s age. Here she looks maybe thirty something, but within a couple of decades (we can use both Kurt’s and Rogue’s ages as checkpoints) she will look her Claremont-era age, maybe 70-80?
Hard to imagine she won’t be copying powers fairly soon. Power creep only goes in one direction in mainstream superhero comics.
[…] BLUE: ORIGINS #1. (Annotations here.) It seems a bit odd to label this as a one-shot rather than as part of Uncanny Spider-Man – […]
I note that the discussion about Mystique’s powers has set it up that she could be the captured Spider-Crawler at the end of Uncanny Spider-Man 4.
Also, while I was really happy to see Destiny return and to have her and Mystique together again, I am becoming less and less okay with their characters, given the terrible things that they both keep doing (more recently Irene than Raven, but Raven did plenty of terrible things when Irene was dead). I love the relationship, I wish there were more crazy family drama moments with Rogue, Gambit, and Nightcrawler and less of Irene being a manipulative, terrible person. There’s a fine line of snark that people have hit upon with Emma that could be used with Irene (for example when she asked Xavier and Magneto “you want to me tell you how that vote will go?”).
Liked the idea, don’t like the execution.
Unnecessarily complicated tweak to Mystiques powers, she could have just been able to tweak her own DNA.
And I absolutely hate that she didn’t abandon/sacrifice Kurt.
Why can’t bad guys be bad guys anymore?
She’s still a many times over murdering terrorist, but she has to be a good mom?
“Why can’t bad guys be bad guys anymore?”
While Hickman didn’t invent or start this trend, he seems to have led the charge of sort of doing away with the notion of “bad guys,” having traditional villains join with heroes against a greater existential threat.
I don’t really know how I feel about it. On one hand, allying heroes with “post-villains” allows for a clash of personalities and inter-character drama. But it also feels like stories that require such alliances should be higher-stakes – like, even if the villains weren’t villains, they’re so unlikeable that the heroes wouldn’t want to “team up” with them on a regular basis anyway.
That’s one of the many suspension-of-disbelief-breaking aspects of the Krakoa era for me, that all the X-characters would be fine mingling with dozens of formerly terrible individuals.
And like . . . I’ll give Hickman the benefit of the doubt here and assume this wasn’t his intent, but if he was working off the notion that members of a minority group would all unconditionally stick together and defend each other, boy would he have a terrible understanding of how minority groups operate.
X-Ben: I mean, she’s still not a good mom. She messed up her situation with Rogue, she still chose to listen to Destiny and not track down Kurt once she knew the truth, and she still did a terrible job with Graydon Creed.
She still sacrificed Kurt, but either in order to save the world or to not upset Destiny by destroying her machinations, depending on how you want to read things. (I think it’s more the latter.) This wasn’t about making her a good person, but cleaning up bits of the background that made her a weaker character, IMO. She no more threw Kurt away as a distraction because she couldn’t escape a mob at night through a forest. She no longer fell for Azazel. She chose to reveal herself to baby Kurt and damn the consequences of others seeing her. To me those are all much more Mystique than the woman in the original story and the Azazel additions. She’s a fanatical person about the things she cares about, she’ll let things burn if she doesn’t get her way, she makes mistakes, and you should never turn your back on her, but she’s also very very good at what she does.
(Random bit — my head-canon on X-Men Unlimited #4 has always been that Mystique was telling the worst possible version of the story while still wallowing in her grief over Destiny. Her whole “I threw you over the falls and I didn’t care muahahahaha” speech was so over the top.)
Tangential Mystique/Destiny question
If Mystiqye was Holmes and Destiny was Irene Adler, who was Moriarty? I presume it has be to someone else too
“who was Moriarty?”
Probably Wolverine, they’ll do a mini-series to force Paul to update his Wolverine chronology.
No-Prize: 616-Nightcrawler still inherited his Y-Chromosome from 616-Azazel
This is why 616-Mystique DIDN’T get the daughter she hoped to conceive
Even if 616-Mystique is now apparently an Omega-Level Metamorph (but Not Yet a genuine Omega Mutant) produce viable sperm capable of impregnating 616-Destiny , she would be able to contribute only her own X-chromosomes , so all of the offspring she would sire in her male form would all be biological females themselves.
Yet 616-Nightcrawler is a biological male who can sire male children himself (with Kymri in the alternate future of Christ Claremont’s Xmen: The End)
So 616-Nightcrawler still has a Y-chromosome himself. Where would he get it from ? From 616-Azazel of course!
This is after all the ONLY reason why 616-Nightcrawler was able to magickally imprison 616-Azazel on 616-Earth because of their familial biological relationship using “blood magick”
BTW it was already shown in Immortal X-Men that 616-Moriarty was the same character as in the OG stories, its just the identity of only 616-Sherlock Holmes that’s changed (it’s Mystique LARPing as a transman)
And Dr. Nemesis/James Bradley is a wannabe know-it-all who doesn’t actually know it all.*
Instance 1: he insists that 616-Cloak and Dagger are NOT X-gene mutants when readers already know 616-Hell-Lord Despayre himself confirmed to them that they are though intentionally magickally modified by himself
Instance 2: In Legion of X , he theorizes sans any peer review at all that all 616-Marvel gods such as Hercules and Thor and even the Abrahamic God/YHVH (i.e. The One Above All) are originally literally the creations of Earth-humans pure imagination , when its been proven that is simply FALSE (the divine pantheons of Earth subsist on and are substained by Earth-human worship belief but their canon origins PREDATE the very existence/emergence of humanity) .
Instance 3: This is after all the so-called self-proclaimed “super-genius” who had to be forced to grudginly accept at proverbial gunpoint the existence of magick such that he had an actual nervous breakdown upon confirming for himself that Marvel-616 vampires are indeed supernatural and not simply super-scientific as he biasedly believed.
Jon R said: (Random bit — my head-canon on X-Men Unlimited #4 has always been that Mystique was telling the worst possible version of the story while still wallowing in her grief over Destiny. Her whole “I threw you over the falls and I didn’t care muahahahaha” speech was so over the top.)
There’s also the fix from Cullen Bunn’s Uncanny X-Men series — the one with Magneto running the team on a war footing — that states that Mystique’s shapechanging destabilized her personality over the decades.
@Jon R,Omar- In fairness when she’s telling the story she’s thinks she’s telling it to Graydon Creed (who’s ironically the most like her of all her children despite being human) but she’s really telling it to Nightcrawler who’s disguised using an image inducer. When she realizes it’s Kurt, she says “When I learned you were alive, I wanted you to believe I was better than the person I had become.”
Villains becoming post-villains/protagonists weakens the pool of interesting opponents, but it’s reeeeeally easy to flip them back to being bad guys:
Magneto: they’re bringing him back to life, despite his express wishes. That betrayal could flip him.
Apocalypse: worked with other mutants, then A
Arakko was the subject of a genocide and civil war involving his family. The X-Men and their ilk failed him, failed mutantkind no less!
Mr. Sinister: still evil.
Mystique: manipulated and hurt by Xavier. Got Destiny back, but she’s just been killed in Immortal X-Men. She won’t be happy about that.
Except for Pyro, Blob, Juggernaut, Black Tom, and a handful of others I’m probably forgetting, most of the villainous mutants haven’t been interacting with others on the page. After the Hellfire Gala and Fall of X, it’s easy to see disillusioned mutants returning to antisocial behavior.
Whatever happened to image inducers? Did anybody ever do a story where mutant politics turned on them as a tool of human oppression? They were common back in the days when there were only a few dozen mutants and most of them visually passed as human, but seemed to disappear around the time the population of mutants and tendency of mutants to look non-human exploded.
Maybe you have Xavier or Jean to cloud peopples minds instead?
@Mike Loughlin- It’s not clear if Destiny is dead or just stabbed. People survive stabbings all the time.
@Mark Coale- the problem is that would be inconvenient for Xavier and Jean. What if, for example ,a non-human looking mutant wanted to go outside while they were sleeping? Image inducers make much more sense.
ASV said: Whatever happened to image inducers? Did anybody ever do a story where mutant politics turned on them as a tool of human oppression? They were common back in the days when there were only a few dozen mutants and most of them visually passed as human, but seemed to disappear around the time the population of mutants and tendency of mutants to look non-human exploded.
As I recall, there’s a brief bit during the Dark Phoenix Saga — or somewhere int he Claremont/Byrne run — wherein Nightcrawler reflects that he chose to stop hiding his appearance using an image inducer, apparently much to Xavier’s displeasure.
So there sees to have been at least some consideration of rejecting image inducers on the grounds of mutant pride and implied solidarity with all the other visible mutants out there, unattached to Xavier’s wealth and connections.
And a little Googling tells me two things:
1) Nightcrawler’s thoughts about choosing to dump the image inducer are from Uncanny X-Men (1974 series) #130.
2) The backup story in Classic X-Men #4 is about Wolverine convincing Kurt to go without the inducer. There’s an extended dialogue in which Wolverine takes apart Kurt’s defenses of using the inducer, beginning with the line, “What’s the matter, misfit? You ashamed of the face you were born with?”
And it’s worth noting that we DID see Sunspot use an image inducer to disguise himself to trick Vulcan in X-Men Red 9. So apparently the X-Men still occasionally use them to trick villains but not to disguise themselves as normal-looking humans.
“While Hickman didn’t invent or start this trend, he seems to have led the charge of sort of doing away with the notion of “bad guys,” having traditional villains join with heroes against a greater existential threat.”
I mean, CC led the charge as well as invented it, having the X-men team up/make alliances with Magneto, The Hellfire Club, and Freedom Force. The success of it varied but it isn’t like Hickman was doing anything really groundbreaking…
@wwk5d- Yeah, but the problem with what Hickman did was that he had the X-Men ally themselves with MOST of their major villains at the same time. He had the X-Men allied with Magneto, Apocalypse, Sinister, Mystique, Shaw and Selene. Since Percy’s characterization of Beast made Dark Beast redundant, that left a serious shortage of villains, and to counter that Hickman had to either invent his own villains (Orchis, Hordeculture) or use relatively obscure villains (the Children of the Vault).
I’d argue “shades of grey” in popular culture has been an issue since the 90s, maybe the 80s depending on how you feel about the loner anti-hero/vigilante.
I prefer more rounded characters. Magneto going from Claremont’s failed redemption to Lobdell’s mustache-twirler sucked. Dr. Doom and Lex Luthor are much better characters when they have a twisted code of honor or believable motivations.
I’d argue that giving villains the promise of Krakoa only to have that promise shattered can add an extra layer of motivation and even pathos in future stories.
People seem to be ignoring the fact Hickman did the same thing in his FF and Avengers books too, and arguably also Secret Wars. It’s one of his tropes that’s become way too predictable.
And of course, in addition to bad guys no longer being “bad guys,” the heroes conspire to act like bad guys. This is a trope I hate because of how ridiculously he writes it.
The smartest “leaders” of the heroes are engaged in secret, morally questionable activity for the “greater good.” Except realistically, nobody elects or supports leaders who are acting mysteriously toward the greater good. People support leaders who act explicitly in the best interests of the followers. Yet Hickman’s “smartest leaders” are never smart enough to articulate the greater good to anyone else.
I think this mimi-series is the best thing Spurrier has contributed to the Krakoan era so far, and this was one of very few issues that I felt genuinely and completely engaged with. I love how much tighter the plot and characterization are when there are less moving parts involved.
I also think within wonky mutant logic (and let’s not pretend there’s any other kind), the explanation works well enough. Granted, there’s nothing to suggest Mystique can mimic multiple people (or emulate elements from different people) at the same time, which slightly muddies the reasoning.
Still, if she’s being rewritten as a sort of intuitive genepath with the ability to archive and restore information, her assuming a physical shape partially based on Azazel (among others) is as sound an explanation as any. Though I would much prefer it if Azazel wasn’t in the picture at all.
About Mystique’s general characterization, it feels very silly to criticize the issue for being sympathetic towards her. If anything, it’s working beyond the highly gendered and deeply sexist trope of “crazy lady bad evil uh”, and actually ground her instability in experiences of emotional and psychic trauma,
I’m not sure I can get behind this though:
“There’s a little something to be said that the one queer coded couple they’ve embraced were untrustworthy villains and that now they’ve added polyamory and gender queerness to the mix. But that also kind of plays on the subversive quality of both the characters and traditions within queer culture. There’s a positive reading that puts it in contrast with Iceman being especially homonormative and allowing antihero characters more space to reflect a different vision of queer culture.”
This is a very generous reading, and I’m excited about the ways queerness and grandness are now explicit (and not allegoric) elements in X-Men mythology.
But it’s impossible to pretend there’s not a tactical, cynical, and conservative undertone to Iceman (lead of a solo title, no less) being a picture perfect example masculinity, while the centennial lesbians who genderfuck Nightcrawler into existence are very much Evil Mutants.
It reflects the crucial problem with the X-Men, at large: of course the Morlocks exist, but they are either vanquished, violent, or out of the picture. Hickman got to flirt with the idea of a romantic triangle between Logan, Scott and Jean before everyone proceeded to act like that never even happened. We get a tremendously varied amount of backgrounds, but our central heroes remain pretty much the same.
X-Men positions itself as a metaphor about minorities, while consistently sidelining and othering 1) real minorities and non-normative relations and 2) undesirable, unlikable mutants.
I don’t think that’s a subtle commentary about assimilationist versus anti-assimilationist politics. I think it’s a fundamental problem with the premise, and with editorial policy.
…
Still. That was so GOOD!
*… queerness and transness, I meant to say!
Did any bad guys really reform in the Krakoa era? Maybe Blob, but even that just continues his Age of X-Man arc. Greycrow maaaaybe.
It seems for almost all the bad guys, society just got so permissive that their bastardry became either normalised (Apocalypse) or superfluous (Pyro). All you have to do to re-evil them all is put them back in Manhattan.
Yeah I mean that’s the big problem.
None of them did anything to redeem themselves.
They just were pardoned because of their DNA and got to hang out on sexy time vampire island.