The X-Axis – w/c 1 January 2024
Just two books this week and, yeah, well.
X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #120. By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Phillip Sevy, Ceci de la Cruz & Travis Lanham. The third and final part of the “Blood Dawn” arc and, yes, it’s the story I feared it was going to be. Expressing your emotions is a good thing, these people are seriously injuring one another in order to express their emotions, therefore that’s a good thing. And… no it isn’t? Obviously? This is the sort of thing that Arakko had to be rehabbed from in order to work at all. Let’s just file this one under “Well, that’s a premise I fundamentally reject” and forget about it, shall we?
FALL OF THE HOUSE OF X #1. (Annotations here.) Mmm. Yeah, it’s not the best start to the year, is it?
Look… House of X and Powers of X game-changing, rule-rewriting stories and if you’re going to invoke them you’ve got to do better than being just okay. And this is just okay at best. It’s not catastrophically awful or anything, but it’s not working.
Just for starters, there are at least two big issues here. One is Orchis. In Jonathan Hickman’s stories, Orchis are obviously a mirror of the X-Men and Krakoa. They’ve got Alia Gregor trying to create resurrection to bring back her husband, they’ve got Omega Sentinel doing her own Days of Future Past, and so on. All of that has clearly been dumped by this point, and look, I can understand a mindset that this isn’t the time to be doing “fascists are quite like us when you stop to think about it”. But it hasn’t been replaced by anything, which means Orchis is now mostly a bunch of thugs who take turns with the personality trait. They’re too over the top to function as a proper metaphor for anything in US politics, but they’re too grimdark to be pantomime villains in a romp. They’re just slight, and yet they’re being asked to serve as the main villains for the whole line for half a year.
The other issue is that none of this seems to emerge organically from the “Fall of X” stories we’ve been reading up till now. Not only is there no apparent continuity with where we left the characters last month – and we already did a jump forward in time at the start of “Fall of X” – but there’s no real sense that anything we’ve read in the last few months feeds into this at all. Except, bizarrely, in Iron Man. What did the last few issues of X-Men have to do with this? Why aren’t characters like Ms Marvel and Firestar doing anything of importance? Or Cable, or Bishop, or Alpha Flight, or anyone from Realm of X? There’s no sense of things building to a head here – rather, a sense that we’ve been killing time for several months and now we’re cutting to the end, just because. And that’s not great either.
The art’s pretty good on the whole. There are a few bits that feel slightly rushed – the courtroom sequence isn’t great. But that closing page with Polaris is lovely, the 9-panel grid page with Cyclops and Alia Gregor is very nicely done, and Krakoa uprooting itself from the island looks fabulous, even if it makes absolutely no sense.
All told, though, this is very average. And the title promises a lot more than that.
I note that the end of Infinity Comic #120 teases the idea of Sunspot overseeing some kind of “X-Men Unlimited” project (“no limits!”). I also note that the end of LAST year’s end-of-year story teased the idea of Xavier doing the same…
At least Lorna has a cool costume now. I’m not completely sold on the helmet but the bodysuit looks good.
I don’t think Hickman’s point was that “Orchis is just like us” so much as he was asking us to examine the implications of Krakoa and question the morality behind an island nation based on mutant supremacy. It had the added benefit of giving nuanced/shades of grey to all sides in the conflict Hickman had created. Which is one aspect to what made Hickman’s run so fascinating, to me.
Unfortunately, the idea that Krakoa might have been, in any way, a bad idea (even after the reveal that it was created as a trap by Moira in this iteration of Life 10) had to be immediately jettisoned after Hickman left.
Surprisingly, the last vestiges of this idea were kept, to an extent, by Percy with Wolverine…even though Percy also turned Moira into a psychotic Silver Age supervillain after Hickman.
It’s a pity what a whimper the Krakoa era is going out on.
I thought I had more to say, but no, that pretty much covers it. I appreciate all the work done during this time and I’m sad that it’s lead to… not much.
Deciding to break from Hickman’s plans and extend the Krakoan era turns out to have been a dreadful mistake.
@Chris V- Gillen also seemed to keep the idea that Krakoa was a bad idea. He had Selene point out that Krakoa’s ideals mean nothing to her because she likes eating people. He had Xavier point out that taking Sinister in was a mistake because “a useful monster is still a monster”. And Enigma’s words deliberately echo Magneto’s remarks in Jerusalem, suggesting that Enigma’s creation was a result of Krakoan hubris.
@Paul: “ Orchis is now mostly a bunch of thugs who take turns with the personality trait. They’re too over the top to function as a proper metaphor for anything in US politics, but they’re too grimdark to be pantomime villains in a romp.”
In the last several years, US politics has been more over-the-top than at any point in my lifetime. Orchis could easily parallel the far right’s playbook, and sometimes they do, but I agree that metaphor is imperfect.
The strongest connection between Orchis and US politics is their use of media and obfuscating/ brazenly defying the truth while openly demonizing any and all minorities. The “invasive species” line is one of the few times that comparison has hit, mirroring right wingers calling the influx of undocumented immigrants an “invasion.” Duggan, however, is not the writer to make such a comparison work, and is more interested in the supervillainy. Orchis is too free to do whatever they want out in the open. How do they keep getting away with overtly evil deeds? They conveniently have every politician and law enforcement group in their pockets. Ugh.
I think Orchis works better if they have a public face (anti-mutant PR, etc) and keep their more exaggerated villainy out of the public eye. I would rather see them taken down after their deeds are revealed, but having a portion of bigoted MU citizens continue to think Ochis was the good guys. They could become recurring X-Men villains, although the Friends of Humanity, the Right, and other anti-mutant groups can continue to fill the same role.
I think there’s several problems with Orchis. The first is that there’s just too many of them for the writers to develop. Currently their core members are Feilong, Stasis, MODOK, Gregor, Moira., Karima and Nimrod. Traveller was introduced and had a few appearances before a whole story in Unlimited was dedicated to getting rid of them.
The second problem is this- Hickman established that Orchis were basically pawns of Karima and Nimrod who were seeking to absorb humanity into a Dominion. So that basically made Orchis pawns of killer robots. What’s more, a Dominion has no personality.
According to Gillen, it was decided before Immortal X-Men 1 that his run would lead to the Enigma AI at the end of 2023. I can see the reasoning. Realizing that a Dominion had no personality, the writers realized that the Final Boss of the Krakoan Era had to be one of the X-Men’s core villains. So the writers apparently settled on an AI with the personality of Mr. Sinister. And Children of the Vault strongly suggested that Enigma is the Dominion Karima and Nimrod serve.
But this decision caused several problems. First, it meant that Orchis was just pawns of Enigma. So writers focused less on developing them. Second, Enigma is supposed to be the Final Boss of the Krakoan Era but we’ve hardly seen it so far. We saw a few lines of dialogue in Sins of Sinister and then a couple of pages at the end of Immortal X-Men 18. It would have worked better if we saw Enigma in the issues between Sins of Sinister and Immortal X-Men 18, while still leaving its nature a mystery.
The third problem was that Gillen wasn’t ready to finish Enigma’s creation until Immortal X-Men 18. That meant the other books had to go into a holding pattern. Some of the elements from recent issues will be used- according to the solicits and covers we’ll be seeing Doom’s X-Men and Illyana in future parts of the Fall of the House of X crossover- but a lot of it seemed like filler.
I agree that “ok” doesn’t cut it when you set about comparing yourself to one of the most impactful and well-liked X-men stories of the last 30 years in HoX/PoX. It bugs me that all of these plot lines feel miles away from Hickman’s intent. Where is Devo? He seemed like he was in charge of Orchis under Hickman. If they sideline Nimrod and Karima, that seems like an even bigger mistake. I’ve been enjoying Immortal but making the Dominion a Mr. Sinister god is less interesting to me than a giant collective conscious of uploaded beings. That at least is new. Oddly, I feel like the Children of the Vault miniseries had the stakes and scope of mutants vs tech vs posthumanity down better. That seemed more in line with Hickman’s ideas.
@Jeff- Hickman established in Inferno that Devo was just a figurehead- a normal human whose memories were tampered with by Karima to trick people into thinking he founded Orchis. Since then, the writers have understandably avoided focusing on him.
While I am in general agreement that Duggan’s work is underwhelming, I have to take issue with the many people saying, in effect, “This would be better if Hickman had stayed.” While the story would obviously have been *different*, I doubt it would have been *better*. Hickman reliably writes *brilliant* setups, but fails to land the ending. Which is what excited me so much about the Krakoan Era — there was no need for Hickman to do an ending. And the rest of the X-office preferred not to do whatever it was that he had outlined for an ending, which also suggests that it wasn’t a strong-looking story.
I guess one of the problems here is how long this story has stretched out for. As soon as the revealed the second Essex clone (with a different card suit) it wasn’t hard to immediately jump to, there are four of them and the original is the big bad. And that was what? 15 months ago? Too much weight for something that is going to get reset 1 month later
Ok looking at my own comment history in May of 2021 I thought the dominion would be Moria, so maybe not that obvious, although my logic was the same, it had to be someone already introduced.
Jeff-I couldn’t agree more about Children of the Vault. I loved it because it read as if it was continuing Hickman’s original premise.
Michael-That puts Devo in the same position as Xavier with Krakoa. Moira manipulated Xavier into founding Krakoa as her trap to eliminate mutants. So, with that in mind, that’s saying that Xavier should have been sidelined after the reveal that Moira was the mastermind behind Krakoa.
It’s another part of that interesting juxtaposition between Orchis and Krakoa. Devo’s fear of the “Other” placed him in a position to be used by Omega Sentinel for her own ends. She is using Orchis to eliminate the mutants who may stand in her way and then plans to eliminate the humans in order to achieve her real goals of Machine supremacy. The same way Xavier became a pawn in Moira’s end game.
Of course, if Orchis are simply a bunch of Nazis, it’s best to not portray their Hitler as an unwitting pawn. It was never necessary to turn Orchis into one-dimensional evil villains. The current role of Orchis could be filled by the Friends of Humanity or any of the other hundreds of mutant-hating bigots introduced through the history of X-lore.
Alexx-The issue is that people got wrapped up in the ideas Hickman brought to the book with House/Powers and wanted to see those ideas continued to be explored. What we got after Hickman was much more comic book-y in tone.
Gillen is certainly a better wordsmith than Hickman. I don’t deny that.
As far as where Hickman was going, he gave a bit of an outline in “Inferno” #3’s timeline data page (for the alternate Life 10). One aspect that looked like it became more interesting with what we got was the Children of the Vault presentation. Having post-humanity offer a future utopia at an incredibly high cost fit with Hickman’s themes better than Life 10-A where they were simply conquerors.
I think, though, based on what we have seen since Hickman left is that the X-writers are using many of Hickman’s ideas he left on the table when he quit. They are just adapting the ideas to fit their own style. So, we get a Nathaniel Essex Dominion instead of Hickman’s original idea for the Dominions. I think the ending of the Krakoa era is going to stick closely to what Hickman envisioned.
Hickman sucks at ending his own stories.
No matter how awful this is I bet it is a superior read to whatever he did on that parallel earth where he wrote the end.
Genosha actually would have made for better real world parallels, especially with Magneto at the helm, since Genosha already had an indigenous population. But because Krakoa magically pops up in the middle the of the ocean, they could do mutant supremacy / ethno state without settler colonialism, indigenous displacement and ethnic cleaning. I can see why they wouldn’t want to open that can of worms but again, Nazi hunter Magneto really made the parallels to Israel hard not to see…
But anyway I agree Duggan’s run has been pretty dismal, even if there have been enjoyable parts and characterization, it really can’t hold a candle to the promise of Hickman’s original concept. Still, holding out hope that Gillen will stick the landing.
I still don’t get why they did not use Genosha over a setting that eats people
@Chris V- the difference between Xavier/Moira and Devo/ Karima is that Karima tampered with Devo’s mind. In Inferno 3, Karima says “I took Dr. Killian Devo’s eyes and replaced them with.. something more effective. I changed his reality. I repurposed his mind. He believes — because he has seen it– that he has lived through what I lived through and came back from the future… He believes that I saved him.. and that together, he and I– human and machine– travelled back in time to save the world.”
So no. Devo’s fear of the Other didn’t put him in a position where Karima could manipulate him. He was horribly violated by Karima and had false memories implanted that she saved him. He’s a VICTIM, a puppet, and is therefore less important that people like Feilong or MODOK who joined Orchis of their own free will.
Incidentally, the previews for Rise of Powers of X 1 are out and in it Nimrod describes Karima as being sent back in time by a Trickster Dominion. not a Trickster Titan as in Inferno 3. It looks like Enigma sent Karima back in time.
In other news. preview images for X-Men Forever have been released and they show Stasis and Stellaris working together. So it looks like Stellaris’s plot IS going to be resolved. So that’s one of the only major Chekov’s guns that hasn’t been fired yet. I guess the only major outstanding ones are Manifold and Doug.
It’s like Hickman had a list of things he wanted to wreck forever.
1) Moira
2) Krakoa
3) Goldballs
4) The Summers-Grey dynamic
5) arguably Apocalypse
I’m sure there’s more. All these things that would have worked *better* with some one/thing else, and equally well with any one/thing else. It’s kind of weird.
To be clear, I don’t think Hickman actually did set out to ruin various bits of lore through malice or whatever, but an awful lot did get stomped, for better or for worse.
“House of X and Powers of X game-changing, rule-rewriting stories”
I think it’s a little too charitable to refer to these 12 issues as “stories.” They established a new status quo and a handful of concepts. They didn’t actually tell a story, nor did they set one up, nor did any such story eventually get told.
“It’s like Hickman had a list of things he wanted to wreck forever.”
I’m not sure it’s fair to say he wanted to “wreck forever” a character that hadn’t been used in almost 20 years.
“Hickman reliably writes *brilliant* setups, but fails to land the ending.”
I mean, part of the problem is that the “setups” aren’t stories themselves. They’re just premises and concepts. He can’t write an ending to a story he never actually started.
@Chris: I get the sense that Krakoa was chosen and shaped to be a place for mutants only, or very close to that.
Much of the plot relies on the idea of a sort of ethnic separatism – or as close to that as one can make with Marvel biology.
Would it have been better if Hickman stayed on? It’s not like the tortured genius only gave us HOXPOX and Inferno, there were ~30 issues of X-Men and New Mutants between them. And they were awful. I mean, Hickman had no story, his X-Men was 20 issues of further set-up and lore.
The Mystique/Destiny plot thread was the only one that was set up, developed and resolved. And it was good! But it was the only one.
Anyway. We now look to the future and the future is the past.
Two weeks ago I’ve seen a post from 4chan supposedly describing the post-Krakoa x-books because the poster had insider knowledge. The list included a Gail Simone written Uncanny X-Men led by Jubilee. I’ve seen the post because Simone shared it on Bluesky with a ‘hahaha’ comment.
Yesterday Marvel revealed the FCBD issue that will include a Jubilee story by Gail Simone and ‘hints to the future of the X-Men’.
Now, Occam’s razor suggests that somebody knew about the FCBD issue and the rest is made-up. But if it isn’t, the x-line was described thusly:
No mention of Orchis or Krakoa, Scott and Jean nowhere to be seen, classic Beast is headmaster of the reopened school.
The books, supposedly, will be:
Uncanny X-Men by Gail Simone
Iron Man and the X-Men by Dan Slott (‘X-Men as Avengers’, whatever that means)
Three Deadpool books conceived by Rob Liefeld – Deadpool and the X-Men, Uncanny Deadpool and Deadpool&Wolverine
All-New Wolverine (Laura again, no creator mentioned)
Uncanny X-Force and Dark X-Force, no creators mentioned
Ms Marvel and the New Mutants by Rainbow Rowell, a school book with new characters
Uncanny Ms Marvel by Nadia Shammas
It may all be bullshit and I wouldn’t mention it if not for the FCBD announcement. But should it check out… I mean, I’d be interested in a Rainbow Rowell mutant kids book.
@Krzysiek: I wouldn’t put too much faith in Uncles Who Work at Nintendo
There were rumors of Simone’s involvement with the FCBD issue before the announcement.
@Krzysiek: Considering that list doesn’t include the just announced Wolverine series (Logan version) drawn by Greg Capullo, I’m skeptical.
I mean, I hope it’s bullshit, because other than the Simone and Rowell books (and maybe a new Laura ongoing, depending on the creators), this would be dire.
I was just surprised to see Simone laughing it off and then being confirmed for the FCBD story.
And, well, why would she be writing that if she wasn’t supposed to do something post relaunch…
Marvel’s FCBD 2024 lineup (including Simone writing that Jubilee story) was already announced back in mid-November, it’s just that Marvel kept very quiet about it (presumably to keep the attention on Fall of X) until they suddenly started promoting it yesterday.
So it’s absolutely not something that “confirms” that “insider” report…
I think whoever posted the 4chan report eventually admitted they made it up. It shows all the signs of being made up. In particular, the sales on Kamala’s last miniseries were disappointing- they were barely enough to justify another miniseries. There’s no way she’d get to headline TWO ongoing series. Kamala is one of those characters with a dedicated fanbase that will get angry if you kill her off or turn her evil but whose books and movies don’t sell well. Which means she’s probably stuck being an Avenger or X-Men for the foreseeable future with the occasional miniseries. There’s worse fates.
Also, there’s no way Marvel would do two X-Forces at the same time again- they seem to have realized that was a mistake. Every time they want to do two “dark” X-series at the same time during the Krakoan era. it was always X-Force and Hellions or X-Force and Dark X-Men.
I sure hope that list is bogus.
Two X-Force books is two more than I feel to be desirable.
X-23 ought never to be called “Wolverine” except perhaps as a lesson that she must be her own person. That was supposed to have happened back in 2016, if it was to be done at all (it was not).
Ms. Marvel is indeed not popular enough to sustain to ongoings at once… although the idea of having her as the headliner for a new “teens school” book is good.
I don’t expect Marvel to trust Rob Liefeld so much these days to launch three books “conceived by him” (whatever that means) at once, either.
It could be interesting to have the Ms. Marvel teen school book, though. And an Iron Man / X-Men book at the current time is a good idea as well. It could do good character work if the writer is NOT Gerry Duggan, and it is just the right time to do some plot work on reminding the X-Men that they are not the center of the universe anymore.
@JD Well, obviously I didn’t know that.
Rii the Destroyer’s power, like Isca’s, raises a lot of questions that make him hard to use in a story — erasing people from continuity retroactively? (What if he went after Moira?) Luckily he never gets to use it in this story and will probably never appear again.
(Although with Orlando, you never know)
@Karl H- Yeah, there was a Justice League Annual with a guy with a similar power and it was pointed out in the story that using it on heroes that have helped save the universe was a REALLY dumb idea.
Like there being too much multiverse stuff now, seems like the “heroes returning from lost continuity” (like Triumph and Sentry) is making a comeback too, unfortunately.
@Michaeol – I hope that is true. I don’t want to live in the darkest timeline that has 3 ongoing Deadpool series.
Here are my guesses at what a post-Krakoa lineup will be, using 10 titles as the basis. I have no inside information and make no pretensions of having it.
2 standard team X-men books
2 dark/covert ops X titles, one almost definitely being an X-Force and maybe another being a Maddie lead book
1 Wolverine solo book – inevitable
1 younger team X title – if they are smart, they will have a couple older mutants with a fanbase (like some of the original New Mutants) as mentors, some of the cast will be new, some will be existing characters
1 X-Factor book – the concept will be bizarre, the execution will be uneven, and it will have a devoted (but small) fanbase who are terribly distraught when it is cancelled after 6 months
1 Deadpool book – does Deadpool count as an X-book? Sure, let’s count it here because a movie is coming out.
1 Arrako book – until they are wiped out in a line-wide crossover to show the amazing power of this new threat, despite being an Arrako book, it will mostly focus on the Earth mutants who are living on Arrako/Mars (when the book starts calling the planet Mars, that is an indication they will be wiped out within 6 months)
1 criminal heist type book – there are enough of them on the X teams that they could support their own book, and this is the place for using villains who were reformed by their time on Krakoa or calling dibs on them so they don’t slide back into villainy (top candidates for the team: Mystique, Destiny, Gambit, Rogue, Ahmal Farouk)
@Karl_H: I thought Ril was destroying his victim’s sense of self, memories and all that, not literally deleting the past.
But of course he didn’t actually do any of that, so who the hell knows.
I look forward to ten years hence, when Hickman gets to write “HOXPOX Forever” and we get to read the “true” ending to Krakoa as he saw it. (If he’d ever firmly mapped it out. I think the Slack channel cohort would have been an influence).
I also think it’s a crying shame we never got a Moira/Orchis series to flesh out the baddies. Especially Karima. They are all still so paper thin.
I feel bad for any writers who are leading the books from here. Regardless of how good they are (I really like Simone, for example!) there’s absolutely no goodwill. It’s a poisoned chalice.
“1 X-Factor book – the concept will be bizarre, the execution will be uneven, and it will have a devoted (but small) fanbase who are terribly distraught when it is cancelled after 6 months”
Years ago, like pre-Hickman, there were rumors that Seanan McGuire would be doing an X-Factor book (coming off the heels of her Age of X-Man: Nightcrawler book, I guess) and obviously that didn’t happen. It’s a shame. I feel like she would have been a better X-writer than some of the ones we did get. (I’m sorry, but I’d take her over Benjamin Percy or Tini Howard, at least where the X-Books are concerned.)
Luis -“shaped to be a place for mutants only, or very close to that.
Much of the plot relies on the idea of a sort of ethnic separatism – or as close to that as one can make with Marvel biology.”
It couldn’t be so hard to do with Genosha considering how the last few arcs involved scouring it.
But Genosha also can’t have a mysterious past with a twin sentient island that becomes a planet.
“Genosha also can’t have a mysterious past with a twin sentient island that becomes a planet.”
I dunno. That may be one of the most X-Men-esque things about the whole concept.
You have not heard of Shonega, for it no longer exists. This proud mutant land was split between Anegosh and Genosha. Anegosh was banished to Amenth, while Genosha was diminished and overrun with human parasites, but lo and behold, for it rises once again…
@Si
I can understand if you don’t like what Hickman did with these properties but I fail to see they are in any way wrecked.
1) Moira – she’s been dead and unused for 20+ years. How would bringing her back into circulation be wrecking her? And it wasn’t Hickman that decided to have her start cutting off faces of ex-lovers. She was a much more subtle villain under his pen.
2) Krakoa – I must be missing what Hickman did to “ruin” Krakoa. It’s just a continuation of what Aaron did in Wolverine and the X-Men. And if Hickman doesn’t use it, it will just go unused.
3) Goldballs – again, what’s wrong? That they are eggs? And who cares about Goldballs besides Brian Michael Bendis? He’s a complete joke character.
4) The Summers-Grey dynamic – how? Because of two panels hinting that they’re a thruple with Wolverine? The dynamic is still the same from my POV.
5) arguably Apocalypse – I actually think this one has the most legs because it will be less sensible for him to be in direct opposition with the X-Men going forward, but we’ve had his shtick for 40 years and it really bottomed out in the Milligan run, so who cares. I’m sure someone will find something for him to do.
Well, here’re some more X-Men rumors post Krakoa. Read at your own expense…
* Beast is replaced with a clone Beast with his original Pre Krakoa personality and memories
* The Trickster Dominion, Enigma, is defeated as a result of a Moira clone resetting timeline and the Phoenix. The Moira clone is depowered, basically reverting her to her Pre HOXPDX characterization. Robot Moira is killed.
* Resurrection is gone after the Phoenix revives everyone who died during Orchis reign but it makes the resurrection protocols circuit no longer function properly
* Orchis is defeated by an invasion of Earth by the Arakki organized by Tony Stark and Emma Frost
* Krakoa, the nation, is disbanded, but Krakoa the mutant and a bunch of nameless mutants leave Earth for space on the Arakki shipsnsince they believe earth is no longer safe for mutants. Most of the mutants remaining on Earth are the villains and various historical X-Men members
* As a show of unity the Xaviers school is reopened, with Kamala attending class there for her higher education.
* Xavier, with Sinister inside his head, is imprisoned in the Xavier school basement since as long as Sinister is in his head he’s a danger.
Well, Original Flavor Beast replacing War Crime Beast is basically confirmed by X-Force solicitations.
And the recent Timeless oneshot teased a Prisoner X confined in the Danger Room.
Gotta say some of those rumors are a little… “eh”.
I don’t really want too much back to basics after all this.
I really liked that the Krakoan era was a good way to resurrect and reintroduce all sorts of obscure or unjustly killed characters.
And resetting Beast and Moira after all this is… well, I guess unsurprising. We knew it could and would happen.
Are there people who would prefer Heel Beast over either OG Human Hank or Ever Lovin Blue Eyed Beast? Seems most people have been waiting for return of the wise cracking likable Hank for a while now.
@Mark Coale: I wouldn’t say I prefer Heel Beast, but I think he makes a good villain as a well-meaning extremist. I like Fun Beast better, but his character drifted away from that persona years ago. Hopefully, any reset button pushed brings that Beast back in a way that works. Fingers crossed…
Well, I think that the X-Office wants to reset everything back so that they can synergize with the MCU (for what it’s worth).
Reminds me of the attempted justification for going back to spandex when they transitioned from the Morrison era to the Whedon era.
Oh well, at least it’ll mean I’ll have less bad X-Men comics to read each month.
@Mike Loughlin Most people would call 300,000 people in December and 3 million for 2023 an invasion, including the black mayors of Chicago and New York. It’s hard to put Orchis as only right-wing, when supposedly progressive elements are attacking Jews in NYC and calling for a genocide. There’s even a propaganda campaign against the victims of an attack that started at a festival. I wonder if Orchis’s narrative wing claims most of the mutants’ victims are women and children.