Powers of X #6 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition. This is the final issue of Powers of X, and an actual review of both series will follow later.
COVER (PAGE 1): Moira standing over a pile of dead mutants on Krakoa. This includes characters from the “Year 100” timeline, so it’s evidently symbolic. The flowers resemble cherry blossom, traditionally a symbol of life’s ephemeral nature.
PAGE 2: The epigraph quotes Professor X: “And now we build.”
PAGE 3: The credits. The title is “House of X”; the small print reads “When they learn the truth.”
PAGES 4-10: “Year One”. This is an outright repeat of the opening scene from issue #1, where Xavier meets Moira at the fair and she lets him read her mind. There’s an additional opening page of Xavier walking through the forest on his way to the fair. Repeated here, the dialogue can be read as fair representing Krakoa’s apparent new dawn for mutants, seen as both a distraction and something that’s being embraced despite a nagging awareness that all is not well. (“So, are you enjoying the fair?” “I am. It seems like the kind of thing I should not enjoy, and yet…”) That, of course, could apply both to the mutants and to the readers.
PAGES 11-23: Breaking with the usual format of advancing through time over the course of an issue, we jump directly to the “Year 1000”. This is the information that Xavier picks up from Moira’s mind at the fair, so it’s effectively a flashback interposed in the Year One segment.
The Year 1000 sequences have always been bannered as “The X-Men, Year One Thousand”, and now we see why: the “Preserve” which we saw in issue #1 is in fact a Preserve for mutants, specifically Wolverine and Moira, who have been futilely working on a rebellion scheme all this time. The Librarian reveals that the world will end tomorrow when the post-human race is assimilated into the Phalanx. He’s considering whether to send Moira off world so as to prevent her death from rebooting history, or to kill her so that she can go back and alter the course of history. Before he gets to make his decision, the Librarian is killed by Wolverine, who then kills Moira in turn, ending what turns out to have been her sixth life.
The Preserve: We saw this place briefly in issue #1, when Moira and Wolverine were indeed seen briefly in shadow. They appeared to be naked in that issue, but perhaps that was just the lighting – they’re fully clothed here. In issue #1, the Librarian seemed to be suggesting that the Preserve was a remnant of the human race, but he actually said that its purpose was “to keep a record of the great sins of history … to preserve a remnant, something to point at, and hope to God they never have dominion again.” Apparently there was a period in this timeline where the mutants dominated – or, perhaps, being posthuman, the Librarian just lumps mutants and regular humans in together.
The inhabitants of the Preserve, other than Wolverine and Moira, appear to be mutants, but they don’t speak, and the Librarian treats them like farm animals. He doesn’t regard them as imprisoned, but rather seems to think the concept is inapplicable since they’re in their natural environment. Logan gives the expected inspirational speech about the inevitability of revolution – and appears to believe it – but of course he’s wrong. This is the end of the world, and no revolution came.
Logan and Moira’s age: Logan and Moira both seem relatively young, so something must be suppressing their ageing. Logan ages slowly, but he does get visibly older within a few decades, as seen in Old Man Logan. And Moira’s first life ended when she died of old age, according to House of X #2. Quite what’s going on here isn’t clearly explained, but the Librarian refers to them “hav[ing] the same blood type” and “depending on one another to survive” over a millennium.
The reboot: The Librarian is the first character to directly address the question of what happens to the previous timeline when Moira dies, sending her mind back in time to start a new life with the knowledge of the one before. The Librarian clearly believes that the process doesn’t just create a new timeline, but “annihilate[s]” the existing one. Moira seems to think the same thing later in the issue. This raises an awkward question of how anything she does can have meaning, and how she would be able to lock a desirable timeline in place if she finally found one (perhaps by killing herself in a way that was somehow permanent – and Destiny told us in House of X #2 that this can be done).
The Librarian plans to avoid this endless cycle of reboots by sending Moira off world before the Phalanx can kill her. Moreover, he believes that as long as Moira remains alive, posthumanity can break the cycle by being assimilated by a Dominion (and the first step towards that is being assimilated by the Phalanx). A Dominion transcends space and time, so if posthumanity can get to that level before Moira dies and reboots the universe, it will be unaffected by the reboot. On the other hand, the Librarian is not entirely convinced that being copied into the Phalanx while his physical body is destroyed really counts as surviving – indirectly querying the legitimacy of the revived mutants over in House of X. So he’s open to persuasion that killing Moira and giving her a chance to alter history might be the better way to go. Unfortunately, from the Librarian’s perspective, Moira has no useful ideas about how to do that.
Posthumanity: According to the Librarian, Moira and the X-Men in general have missed a crucial point. Though mutants are indeed the inevitable next step in evolution, there comes a point of technological advancement where evolution just doesn’t matter any more, because the control over the body offered by science is far more profound and useful. So the robots hold the mutants at bay for a bit, and then humanity ascends to machine-blended posthumanity, and the mutants are just a footnote. (The Librarian seems to imply that the robots are indeed unleashed by humanity rather than just arising spontaneously, since otherwise it’s not clear why the mutants don’t get to join in the posthuman ascension.)
Moira’s sixth life: This timeline, it turns out, is Moira’s mystery sixth life, which was skipped over in House of X #2. This revelation from the Librarian is what spurs Moira into a series of anti-machine schemes over her following lives. When we first saw this timeline, in issue #1, it appeared to be a continuation of the Year 100 timeline – complete with poor Cylobel still floating in the containment tank where Nimrod put her. But we now know that the Year 100 timeline is Moira’s ninth life, so apparently these similarities are more of an indication of how little impact Moira has really had on the course of history in the long run.
Moira’s voluntary death at the hands of Wolverine mirrors the end of her ninth life, in issue #3, where he also killed her so that she could go back and try again. This is presumably why Moira said “this is what you do” as her last words in that issue.
PAGE 24: A data page on the branching of humanity and the reasons why post-humanity – homo novissima – overtakes both humans and mutants. It’s all fairly self explanatory. The Krakoan letters are M for mutant, H for human, and PH for posthuman.
PAGES 25-29: A continuation of the fair scene. Xavier is horrified by what he sees in Moira’s mind, and reluctant to accept that the mutants always lose. Moira insists that this time round she’s going to make sure that they’re all together. At the same time, though, Moira makes clear that Xavier never changed in any of the worlds where she met him, and that she expects both him and Magneto to resist her plans – which raises the question of how successful she really has been at changing him, a theme that continues into the text pages that follow.. Still, they walk off into the sunset together.
PAGES 30-32: Text pages, headed “Moira’s journal.” For some reason entries 12 and 35 are blacked out, even though we only get entries 5, 12, 14, 17, 22, 29, 35, 48, 52 and 57 in the first place. These cover a wide span of X-Men history, so evidently Moira isn’t diarising very regularly.
Entry 5. Moira says that she recruited Xavier to her cause after allowing him to read her mind, though it’s taken months and he remains unacceptably hopeful, idealistic and generally Xavier-like. She’s reluctant to let him read her mind again, and notes that he’s dependent on her interpretation of past-life events, but seems to be planning to tell him the truth – since she knows he’ll end up reading her again at some point. Still, there’s a strong hint here that she’s spinning the history.
Entry 12. Redacted.
Entry 14. Moira writes about having become romantic with Charles Xavier (as established in Xavier’s back story under Chris Claremont) and worries about fracturing his psyche and breaking him. It’s not clear if she’s concerned about a break-up, or about the consequences of them being together. Her concern that fracturing his psyche will “eventually unleash something unexpected on the world” may refer to Onslaught, the psychic creature which was meant to be in part the dark side of Xavier’s personality.
Entry 17. Xavier has “stopped trying to fight me on what humanity is”, which is not quite the same thing as him actually agreeing with Moira – it could easily mean he’s stopped arguing with her and started treating her as a resource. Xavier has had an idea of several mutants working in tandem, with one of them needing reality-manipulating powers. This obviously refers to the Five, the mutants who create the new clone bodies on Krakoa, and specifically the reality-warper Proteus – who is Moira’s son.
Moira says that she has found potential matches for both Charles and herself to produce such a mutant. The implication seems to be that Moira married Joe MacTaggert in this timeline (and only this timeline) because he was thought to be likely to father a reality-warping mutant with her. The suggestion that Moira also found a potential match for Charles may imply that his relationship with Gabrielle Haller was also instigated by this agenda, leading to the birth of Xavier’s son Legion. Legion and Proteus have in common the traits of being vastly powerful and hugely unstable.
Entry 22. Charles and Moira recruit Magneto, and Moira gets the idea of a mutant stronghold into this mind (which she sees as a good development). We saw this scene in issue #2.
Entry 29. “Apocalypse has made himself known to the world.” Apocalypse debuted in a cameo in X-Factor #5 (1986), and had his first fight against X-Factor in the following issue. Note that this comes before later entries which were pinned in earlier issues as “Year One.” This seems to confirm that Hickman is using “Year One” figuratively to mean anything from the past.
Moira describes this rather ranty, evolution-obsessed version of Apocalypse as being in a “raw, primal state”, and is particularly concerned about “the prevention of certain Omega-level mutants falling under his sway” – it’s not immediately clear who she has in mind.
Entry 35. Redacted.
Entry 48. Moira describes Xavier and Magneto’s approach to Mr Sinister, as seen in issue #4. Xavier and Magneto are acting without Moira’s approval and she’s not happy about it. Moira seems to see this as Xavier getting carried away, but there’s a definite implication that Moira has less control over Xavier and Magneto than she’d like to think, and that maybe they’re not being manipulated as much as her diary tries to suggest. Moira laments Xavier’s foolish belief that he can shape the world to his liking; either she’s being ironic, or her lack of self-awareness is remarkable..
Moira says that Sinister has produced his first chimera decades early, in the form of the mutant-gene version of Sinister himself. This refers to the mutants that Sinister was cloning in Moira’s ninth life (and perhaps others). Note that this version of Sinister already existed before Xavier and Magneto showed up, so something else has happened to alter the course of Sinister’s history – though admittedly, the overall history of the world differs massively between Moira’s ninth and tenth lives.
Entry 52. A cryptic reference to the split with Magneto, previously mentioned in House of X #2.
Entry 57. Moira explains that she’s been too active (as a supporting character in the X-Men, presumably) and needs to go back to the shadows to pursue her plan. To that end, she has decided to fake her own death using “a Shi’ar golem – a living husk” to test their theory that a mutant could be restored from back-up in the way that’s now being done on Krakoa. Where the Shi’ar fit into this isn’t immediately clear, but they keep getting namedropped throughout Hickman’s run. Note that what Moira is describing here seems to be very close to the clone mutants being created on Krakoa; if Moira considers them to be “golems” then that’s rather at odds with all the ceremonial stuff about how they’re definitely, definitely the real deal.
All of this still fits very oddly with Xavier’s thoughts in the stories where Moira died – perhaps this was one of the occasions when he restored his mind from back-up, to remove his knowledge of the plan.
PAGES 33-36: “Yesterday” – a rare example of a time frame not expressed in powers of ten. Magneto and Professor X visit Moira in her No-Space and talk about the upcoming meeting of the Quiet Council. (We saw that first meeting in House of X #6. While this issue is structured so that this scene appears to go directly into the firework display, in fact that display follows from the Council meeting, as we saw in House #6.)
This scene gives some further explanation about the make-up of the Quiet Council. The “Red King” space is vacant because Emma hasn’t nominated one yet; the “winter” group has “all” the “problem mutants” (which implies that Magneto doesn’t consider Apocalypse to be one); and the Hellfire faction are assumed to be controllable because Emma is loyal.
Mystique. Mystique would only agree to join if they promised to bring back her lover Destiny. This is going to be a problem. It’s very, very important to Moira that nobody on Krakoa should have the power to see the future. She seems to have two reasons for this – first, a precog could sense her in the same way that Destiny did in House of X #2; and second, a precog would apparently learn something which is being kept secret from the Krakoans. It’s possible, though, that Moira is merely anticipating the inevitable failure of Krakoa rather than having anything more concrete in mind – Xavier and Magneto seem a lot more confident than her that Krakoa could work. There’s a sense here that Moira sees Krakoa as a means to some unspecified end, while Magneto and Xavier want to make it work if they can.
Not explained here is why it was so important to get Mystique on side in the first place – clearly there’s a plot there. At any rate, the plan is to string Mystique along. The fact that they think they can get away with that might suggest that they don’t see this lasting all that long. On the other hand, since the stated plan is to revive everyone, you’d have thought Mystique must have been stipulating for a high place in the queue.
Destiny died way back in the 80s, so Xavier’s been keeping his backups for quite some time.
PAGES 37-41. A repeat of the celebration from the end of House of X #6, though with different voice over captions. This time, either Magneto or Xavier (it’s impossible to tell which) tell Moira that she’s built something wonderful and important in Krakoa but that it’s time to step aside now. There’s also a new coda in which Magneto states his determination to protect Krakoa, and Xavier is more quietly determined.
PAGE 42. The closing quote is Magneto: “I am not ashamed of what I am.” It’s from the previous scene, which strikes more of a defiant tone than the celebratory one we saw in House of X version. And that’s it – that’s the set up for the X-Men going forward.
PAGES 43-50. The “reading order” page and the trailers. (And the Stan Lee page). The reading order page now lists the first issues of the Dawn of X titles: X-Men #1, Marauders #1, Excalibur #1, X-Force #1, New Mutants #1 and Fallen Angels #1. Note the small print, which refers to “Dawn of X 19” and “Arakko 20”, perhaps suggesting that Krakoa’s estranged sister island will be coming to the fore next year. The Krakoan text on each page simply reads “NEXT” followed by the name of the title.
I’d say most of the Waid/Samnee daredevil run was not grim n griitty Miller redux, which is one of the reasons why it was so refreshing.
(So was the fondly remember Kesey/Nord brief run on DD in the 90s.)
Right, Mark Coale. I agree with you.
That was also the last time that DD was a comic that people were really excited to read.
My point was, what happened right after Waid left?
They turned the comic back to being a Miller redux, and people stopped caring about DD again.
Also, this idea that you have to enjoy Hickman’s big idea or you probably won’t follow the “Dawn of X” relaunch.
Well, quite.
If you don’t like the idea that mutants have their own island-nation and are not going to be facing persecution from human bigots constantly, then you probably won’t be interested to see how “Dawn of X” shapes up.
Just like if you didn’t like the idea of “feared and hated mutants, hiding in a school, and still fighting for a world that fears and hates them” you probably aren’t going to continue reading the X-Men comics.
Personally, I think something different that plays off of “mutants as the next stage of human evolution” and moves on from the stepping stone of “mutants are feared and hated by humanity” sounds promising to me.
You missed my point. I’m saying, like, perhaps the New Mutants might have appeared somewhere herein instead of quite so many pages wasted on repeated scenes, repeated data pages, just waves and waves of text telling you what the story is. So maybe you’re not gung ho about the new direction, you could come away from this with some interest as to what the New Mutants are going to do from here. At least deliver some kind of preview of what the line is going to be like. You had 12 THICC issues with which to do so.
As it stands, there’s certainly a huge swath of people who are interested but will just follow the X-Men book because it’s the one seemingly with the main characters, and possibly Marauders which was at least teased. But that’s it. There was no appetizer whatsoever for pretty much any of these books. So if you’re not just drooling to see where everything goes from here, why bother collecting the line?
This was a pretty big, drawn-out ordeal and nobody can really guess what the stories or reading experience of any of the books will be like. The line is more important than this miniseries, and I think the miniseries failed to promote the line. I’d have much more faith in what’s to come if Hickman had previewed the line in at least some way for the hundreds of thousands of eyes that saw this story. Hopefully that makes sense.
Yes. I have stated that I find a great deal of problems with House and Powers, myself.
However, I feel that a change was desperately needed with the X-books, and a new direction was the change that was needed, instead of clinging to better days in the past yet again.
I like the idea of mutants having their own island-nation and opening up trade with the world, so that humans don’t just send Sentinels to kill everyone.
I am cautiously optimistic.
Also, “People didn’t like Frank Miller Redux on Daredevil, so X-Men shouldn’t try an updated classic approach” isn’t much of an argument. X-Men was the biggest comic in the universe just by plugging along as a consistent soap opera, because the characters and concept are so strong.
I’ll reiterate, if they had ever in the last 15 years at least tried a fresh update on the classic X-Men I would have a much easier time swallowing this “literally everyone now believes Magneto was right” stuff. It’s literally been since the 1990s since Marvel made an honest attempt to provide the kinds of X-Men comics that dominated the market.
@Chris V
Mark Waid and Chris Samnee’s Daredevil from a few years ago was starkly different from the dark and gritty Miller Daredevil and it was pretty great. But I think that just proves your point. What makes a book stand the test of time is when their creators have a clear vision for a story to tell, and don’t just do their mixtape of all their favorite parts of the particular characters’ mythology.
My absolute least favorite version of the X-Men from the past decade was the Gold Team book from a year or so ago where it felt like they were just doing a Claremont tribute book. I mean, say what you want about Bendis or Rosenberg but at least new things happened in their books.
On Bendis’ run on Avengers… I really enjoyed the first part of his run (I’m actually rereading it right now, among other things). I think he had some clear ideas about where everything was headed and that kept it interesting. For me, it was after Secret Invasion (but definitely by the time he relaunched New Avengers in like 2010) where it really just became all quips and seemingly random villains and storylines.
All that being said, I think HoXPoX is succeeding so far because it is charting a new path for the book by using the themes of the past instead of just trying to set the school up again with the same team from 30 years ago. I was worried that some of the Dawn of X books may fall back into that camp when I saw the titles (so many throwbacks and legacy titles from 30 years ago) but with the universe Hickman has set up, I don’t see how they could fall into that trap of just repeating the past. I suppose some of them could be just plain bad. My money is on “fallen angels” being the first book to be cancelled or retooled. The characters currently in the lineup bore me. I could be wrong, and I’ll probably read at least the first issue to be sure.
Obviously there are a hundred examples of horrible, uninspired retreads throughout comic book history that you can identify as anecdotal evidence of why my idea is bad. I’m not moved by this argument. I think you absolutely could have gotten away with an X-Men (1991) kind of launch with a fresh spin based on the fact that it’s been so damn long since we’ve seen anything like it.
I’m not talking about going back and trying to do Claremont, I’m talking about hiring a top notch writer and artist do a modern reset with the main characters and the original premise. Invent an interesting new threat, put a spin on the classic. I think this was too drastic, and I think it’s a shame that so many seem to have lost sight of how great the characters and concept are to the point that it’s all been totally abandoned.
Been a lurker here for some time, and I want to also note that this mini brought me back to the X-Men and comics in a big way. I found a local comic shop, subscribed to all the new x-books and been introducing the line to my kids and wife.
I have read about 70% of the X books from the beginning, but stopped reading in about 2008 when it seemed the line just wanted to live in nostalgia for the 80s-90s Claremont run. I loved that run in my youth, but I don’t need to read a new version of it. I want X-Men to embrace new ideas and chart a new course. I think HoXPoX has done that so far.
I should also note my wife read this mini and she doesn’t read any comics and knows almost nothing about the X-Men. She found it interesting, even thought many of the deep cut references she didn’t get. I find this series so strong because she really didn’t need those references to understand the story.
I just hope they give Hickman a few years to let this larger story take its course. If they plan to go back to relive X-Men 1991, I’m out again.
“Then, she goes on to spend her next life trying to stop the creation of the Sentinels.”
Which the librarian said were needed to hold off the mutants while humanity progressed. It still fits.
“Next, with life nine, she feels it is of the utmost importance to stop the Nimrod from coming online.”
Lives 8 AND 9 are the ‘Screw it, let’s try the villains’ lives. Magneto isn’t beaten by the machines (and Moira doesn’t reach the machine takeover time), and in the Apocalypse attempt, the machines come out on top again. Moira and Poccy can’t just avoid the issue. She can’t avoid that in any of her lives.
The year 1000 bit with the Librarian, I read it completely differently (but I don’t have the issue in front of me to check). This is what I thought was happening : the Librarian, already feeling conflicted about being absorbed into the Phalanx, was considering if it was wise to let them gain the knowledge he has about Moira — that she resets the timeline when she dies — since they would see her as a threat and hunt her down in the past. Reading between the lines, he was suggesting that it might be prudent to kill him before he is absorbed, thus allowing Moira, now armed with the knowledge of the real threat, to go back and have another chance at stopping it. And the real threat here is the Phalanx, not the post-humans, who are merely the agents who bring Earth to the Phalanx’s attention. This suggests that the X-Men will have to fight against whatever leads to these post-humans, and the big boss fight at the end of Hickman’s run will be the Phalanx (or the bigger versions of them).
I also got the strong impression that we don’t see Xavier’s eyes in the House of X sequences because he is infected by the Phalanx. During the Annihilation: Conquest miniseries the Phalanx infection was expressed in and around the eyes.
Brent
Yeah I agree with you RE Bendis’ Avengers. It was the first time Avengers had felt like an engaging book in several years.
It faced two issues
– Effectively the annual events made the book reboot every 12-18 months which read strangely at that point because it felt like there wasn’t really any ongoing stories, though in retrospect, it reads well if you look at it all as an ongoing story.
– Bendis’ run should have ended with Siege. It was the climax of everything before it and, much like the X-Books after Second Coming, Those Heroic Age Avengers books read like a gigantic anti-climax which just meander around for a while before he left the books.
Another long time lurker, first time posted here. First of all, just to be clear, my opinion is in no way meant to run down anyone who doesn’t agree. Matters of taste are always going to be subjective.
That said,this was much like Hickman’s Avengers run; not bad, per se, but so staggeringly dull, sparsely characterised and in love with its own brilliance, that I stopped reading a series after more than a quarter century.
Dear sweet baby Jebus, how can we have gone through 12 oversized issues to set up “immortal mutants live on Krakoa”? Forget about whether this premise interests or excites me (NO), how did this cost me the better part of a hundred bucks Canadian? It’s been said on here before, but everything intake series could have been set up in four issues instead of twelve, and four loosely laced issues at that.
Tremendously disappointing. I’ll check out the series when they hit Marvel Unlimited, but right now I’m just sitting around waiting for the next “nothing will ever be the same” event to reset the X-verse.
Because heaven forbid Marvel should actually focus its core titles on telling a damn story instead of burning down the bloody house to start again after four storylines/trades.
Wow, that was more vitriolic then I intended. The crazy thing is, I can actually see why people might have liked it, but it SERIOUSLY is not for me.
But if we already saw the Phalanx absorb the Earth in the X-1 million or whatever, then they already do exist “out” or beyond the timeline like the Librarian says here, so the fact that that specific Life-6 Librarian wasn’t the one to do is moot.
Isn’t it?
I don’t know what the Phalanx can do where at this point. This “story” gets so far out there into convolution and sci-fi concepts masquerading as fiction, it’s past being fun to speculate, as far as I’m concerned. Hickman will decide this one way or the other, and write what he wants to write in order to justify his decision. True, that’s what all writers do, but few writers a) attempt such dense world–building and then b) demand that we pay attention to every tiny detail of it, instead of concentrating our attention on any organically flowing story. What’s been so exhausting and ultimately purposeless about this series for me has been the time spent trying to piece together which Moira life this part is taking place in, which Moira life this other part is taking place in, and hey, which version’s Cylobel is this? I don’t want to be mean to anyone on this thread, but when I read a couple of comments where people mentioned hoping that she and the others from the year 100 timeline show up in the regular series, it cracked me up in a pretty mean and cynical way. We’ve had maybe 2 scenes with Cylobel, and she’s hardly spoken in either one. I don’t see how anyone can have any attachment to this character, or to Rasputin, or to Cardinal. Calling them by their character names seems ridiculous. They have no characters. They’re place-holders, literally amalgams of other X-men, and like the principal X-men characters, they are cannon fodder for Hickman’s big ideas for the series. Let’s not forget that the only action in this series was when Hickman sent out half of everybody’s favorite X-men and killed them in deep space, only so he could bring them back as goldballs. So gross.
When people on these threads compare Hickman to Claremont, I think what they’re referring to is the graceful way Claremont was able to weave character and plot together, giving each a sense of verisimilitude, and the lack of that feeling in any of Hickman’s writing. Hickman really has no ability to do create smoothness or verisimilitude, and as a result, we got an enormous double-series of books just to set up a future premise cobbled together from various previous X-men ideas. This series does some interesting things, true. But it does them in the least interesting or promising ways available. It offers a wraparound explanation for many of the hanging threads of Claremont’s X-men; it explains what Moira is doing in her first appearance, (now seemingly posing) as the X-men’s housekeeper. It gives purpose to Moira’s death, a story that was handled not so memorably at the time, and it ties Mystique and Destiny much more indelibly to X-men lore in general––no longer just supervillain operators, they now have a retroactive reason to be near the X-men, and always being interested in the X-men’s business (since they must know Moira is with the X-men in some capacity). The more secretive and manipulative Xavier of the Scott Lobdell era, who had agents all over the place and files on the X-men that the X-men had never seen, gets a place in the psychological makeup of the character––here we see that Xavier has been fighting this battle on two fronts all along. The series makes sense of Mr. Sinister’s various and extraordinarily vague motives throughout the years (he wants mutant DNA because Xavier & Magneto commissioned him to get it, and he goes about getting it in all these wacky different ways because he doesn’t remember that quite after Xavier wipes his mind of everything about the meeting but the impulse to do the job). If the series can’t tie up Apocalypse’s various villain motivations over the years into a similarly neat little bow, I don’t think anyone would really fault Hickman for failing to do that. Though considering how much of the series seems to hinge upon Apocalypse doing some kind of moves in the background, it’s disappointing how little Apocalypse is utilized in the series as any kind of character. He gives a couple of typical Hickman alpha-male speeches and we learn very, very little about him.
Most importantly, the series provides a definitive answer to the burning question relatively little addressed: why, if Xavier wants peace between mutants and humans, are the X-men a paramilitary squad? Why aren’t they a publicity team, for instance? Mostly, they’re paramilitary, and to that end Professor X trained them relentlessly in a combat simulator. HoXPoX makes it implicitly clear that Xavier can make the X-men a paramilitary team because he’s seen the future, and he knows he’ll be fighting the humans and the machines. Certainly, this is more than Claremont ever attempted––partly I think because Claremont knew that tear would be the kind he’d fall into if he poked at it. Still, it’s a great question, and really, all kudos to Hickman for taking it on.
I wish I liked Hickman’s answers as much as I appreciated him tackling these questions. The Moira retcon is the central element from which all of Hickman’s other retcons spring forth, and while I appreciate the ingenuity of it all, I can’t help but notice it’s done almost entirely without the benefit of any character development. The Moira retcon, when it appears in the series, reads like an illustrated Wikipedia entry about the character. And because Hickman needs Xavier’s and Magneto’s and, in a last minute surprise, Moira’s motivations to be kept ambiguous (and since they turn out to be the main characters in this series), we don’t really get to learn much about their feelings over 12 issues. We get a lot of distanced presentation of the characters, but very little emotional involvement in the decisions they are making. And because Hickman loves these authority figure “this is how it’s going to be” speeches––indeed, he often seems as if he isn’t able to write much dialogue besides this––we see these principal figures in the pageant only as they want to be seen from the outside. Since they all want to be seen as mysterious and authoritative, we see them that way. Emotional insight beyond that presentation of self is denied us, even when Xavier seems to be shedding tears at the death of the X-men (you know; the characters this comic used to be about); we never see his eyes, from which his tears seem to be flowing.
What the Moira retcon does for the larger X-men mythology is actually pretty gross and uncomfortable. It’s true that Claremont had a penchant for tying his characters together in unforeseen ways (secret brother! adopted half-sister from a parallel dimension! father’s not dead after all!). Readers at the time might have seen this as cloying (Grant Morrison references this in Supergods, saying something to the effect that nothing in the mutant’s lives seemed by accident), but if that was cloying, Hickman has gone and tightened the strings much more uncomfortably tight. Now Proteus and Legion are, rather than simply villains that cut close to home, relatives resentful of our plucky heroes, the result of deliberate experiments Moira and Xavier are undertaking to produce supermutants that can somehow resurrect other mutants. Mr. Sinister’s fixation on the Summers clan isn’t just a crazy villain doing schemes concentrated on particular characters and their family members, but he’s also doing it because Cyclops’ father figure, Professor X, ordered him to do it. Apocalypse has a previous relationship with Krakoa––the only cool revelation in all this tightening of the screws. And Xavier founds the X-men not because he simply has this idea, but because Moira needs him to. I suppose you could even say that the all-new, all-different X-men went to Krakoa in the first place because Moira knew Krakoa was going to be important for mutants, and Xavier was trying to make overtures to it even then (was he angry when his X-men put their heads together and shot it into space?). Everything in the X-men’s grand chronicle that fit together a little close for comfort in the past now gets shoved all face-to-face to fit in the same plot elevator. It’s not that Hickman did so, since other X-men authors of the past did so as well. But the degree to which he has attempted to bind all these characters together under single manipulator’s motivations ends up making the X-men’s story seem small, even as it tees up this new status quo for the X-men. They X-men figures who have seemed so critical in the past suddenly seem like mafia men out of Mean Streets, squabbling over tiny patches of territory. Magneto––once the leader of a nation––is now a consigliere. Cyclops––who has had major evolving character arcs, growing from a dutiful leader with no confidence into a lovelorn adventurer, into a distraught would-be adulterer, into a happily married man, into an active and only slightly ashamed adulterer, into a pragmatic strategist with confidence to spare––is now like a sergeant or something. He’s not even a made man, since he still gets sent out on suicide missions––Xavier still insists he take the fall. And even though the X-men have been allegedly fighting hatred and bigotry for ever and ever, there’s this much bigger war with artificial intelligence brewing on the horizon, and so whatever they were doing, it wasn’t worth much of anything. It feels like a diminishment of what the X-men have been up until now. I suppose in terms of sales figures, this was sort of what the X-men needed, and the reception to the book is reminiscent of the reception to the Grant Morrison X-men. But I feel extremely skeptical that this new focus and clarity of purpose for the X-men will lead to expansive new story prospects beyond whatever Hickman has set up for his run. The streamlining of the X-men’s story into something that was always leading up to a war with artificial intelligence and post-humans does not make for any more expansive a storytelling environment than did Hickman’s Secret Wars “campaign.” Sure, all the writers got to riff on comics that had come before in their Secret Wars spin-off series. But how much of that riffing even resonated with readers? Those Secret Wars books didn’t stick around, and no one seemed to miss them once they were gone, or even remember that they’d been around six months later. That much looser story premise was not the fertile ground it seemed to be for other writers to grow their own stories. This new premise Hickman is presenting is, I feel, far too streamlined, far too much of a linear story, to provide much ground for these other books to be their own independent stories. How are the New Mutants or the Fallen Angels going to establish a place of their own in this narrative? And if the narrative purpose of these spin-off books is simply to support this ongoing narrative of Moira’s mission, the fall of Xavier’s kingdom of pod people, and a potential invasion of the Phalanx from the other end of history…are the stories in these spin-off books really going to matter? It’s not like the stories in all the Secret Wars books had any meaningful impact on the larger Secret Wars narrative. This is another case of Hickman seeming to be generous with his story premise, being seen sharing his narrative with other creators, while behind his back he’s simply playing it out exactly as he always intended it to go. So far, none of the X-men on any of the X-men teams have had more than an absolute zero impact on the narrative Hickman has built. Is he now going to pivot his story to include these characters he has so far written as pod people? I recall that for Hickman’s Avengers run he brought in a bunch of unexpected characters, including Cannonball and Smasher and Shang Chi––and then he made them pivotal to almost no part of the narrative of those books. When it comes down to it Hickman hardly notices team members apart from the authoritative leader figures and the ones that discuss philosophy with the leaders. He offers them only the most superficial character development, and his occasional issue where someone like Smasher narrates and takes the lead always proves to amount to nothing. Mike Carey developed Frenzy into a more lively and interesting character while never featuring her as the narrator of an issue. But Hickman will never do such a thing. He isn’t interested in the individual X-men. He’s interested in this––as people have commented on others of these threads––Asimov-style Foundation of the X-men, this Dune-scaled exploration of a war for evolutionary ascendancy––and I don’t see a point at which this narrative can smoothly descend far enough to pick out individual characters and see their journeys begin to move us. I can’t shake the feeling that even though this plot seems to open up a new direction for the X-men, it’s actually more of a cul-de-sac in which these rich and interesting characters will gather dust, waiting, like us the readers, for something to really happen.
And thanks very much, Paul, for undertaking these really interesting annotations. You revealed many layers of interesting depth and detail in this series; far more than I would have found by myself.
@Alan L
Wow, what a thoughtful post.
> “Why would anyone get attached to characters like Cylobel / Rasputin / Cardinal interesting when they have had no panel time nor have personalities?”
Speaking for me, it’s not attachment as much as it’s a desire to see an interesting possibility get developed. Like, when I first saw Storm in the 1980s, my thoughts were “cool costume, cool design, cool powers.” That got me interested in seeing the bodyswap with White Queen, battle with Callisto, romance with Forge, etc. Also, they represent the legacy of characters I care about now (“Aw, Kitty and Peter have a badass genetic descendent”).
> “Hickman is unable and / or unwilling to provide any characterization to the X-Men.”
Well, this is the crux of it: in the Claremont days, there was no doubt about how any character felt and how they reacted to events. You can have paragraphs of text in thought bubbles telling you about Colossus felt about killing Proteus or Cyclops feeling ambivalence about Madelyne. Knowing the mind of a powerful person is interesting because I know their motivations and hopefully a good writer would put them in situations that “bring out their truths.”
On the other hand, an interesting plot alone can be exciting all in itself, even if its story is full of relatively-underdeveloped characters. I enjoyed the mysteries and questions brought up in the two series, figuring out or trying to deduce what was going on. Certainly I prefer it to watching the same characters I’ve read about for decades going through the same state of affairs they have been since the 1980s. It’s a fallacy to think that you have to choose between plot and characterization, but I think the X-Men could use a shake-up to their formula.
So basically everything you didn’t like about HOX #2 I loved. But…
> “The X-Men are diminished under Moira; the X-Men’s efforts seem diminished if all this is to contend with a war with AI.”
I actually think Moira should die by the end of Hickman’s run for that reason. I want the X-Men to carry some intrinsic motivation, and this last issue made me root for that kernel of hope that Xavier still probably feels despite Moira’s efforts.
I’m loving the AI angle because it means mutants can’t just say “evolution favors us, bye humans”, it just means humans will figure out how to make evolution itself irrelevant to domination. Mutants can’t claim to be the best just because they’re next.
I don’t want to come off like characters don’t matter. You made a lot of good points about character arcs being radically altered here. And if the writers of the ongoings don’t address those issues, that’s a missed opportunity. But at least for now it’s working for me so much that I can’t shut up about it.
I’m enjoying the few commenters falling all over themselves insisting that this clusterfuck actually makes sense. It’s okay that it doesn’t make sense. The only issue is, was it worth it?
For $72 stretching over 12 issues and 3 months, was it worth it to be left with mind-controlled immortal pod X-people?
The oddest thing I find in the Moira revelations is the idea that instead of just stealing Joe MacTaggert’s genetic material, she went through the whole business of marrying him and being his wife. The former seems preferable on so many levels, even before you get into how he was physically abusive.
I hope Hickman explains this, though I worry it’s quite possible he won’t.
And the series has still yet to answer the most enduring mystery: Why the hell does Hickman bold-and-italicize some words while only italicizing others, often in the same word balloon???
I really miss Mike Carey writing the X-Men.
I do, too. For me it was one of the greatest runs on the main or main-adjecent X-Men title ever.
Alan L is my new hero.
While the series shines a light on an ambitious woman shunted aside by impossibly arrogant and self-important men, for most of his existence as a character, Charles Xavier hasn’t been defined as an alpha-male. He’s been defined, in part, as a disabled man — an identity as subject to discrimination, disadvantage, and underrepresentation as Moira’s own. And so, in giving Moira voice and agency as the hero of this story, Hickman diminishes the heroism of one of the few disabled protagonists anywhere in comics.
@Alan L
“the degree to which he has attempted to bind all these characters together under single manipulator’s motivations ends up making the X-men’s story seem small”
This is great insight, and the reverse of this is something I’ve come to appreciate while rereading Claremont’s X-Men. He constantly keeps adding new characters and concepts to the series and mythos, but not with any grand scheme in mind. He introduces the Shi’ar and Lilandra during the first Phoenix saga, then just keeps Lilandra around and sends Xavier off into space with her for fun. It’s not a subplot laying groundwork for the next huge crossover event, it’s just utilizing the greater canvas he himself help expand. Hell, when Corsair is introduced, we know almost immediately that he’s Cyclops’s father, and this is never addressed for literally years. Some of this led to scatterbrained long-term plotting, but at least the book never lost a sense of freewheeling, that you never knew who or what the cast was going to encounter next.
@Nathan Adler
I minored in disability studies in grad school, and actually wrote a thesis on the X-Men and disability! In other words, WARNING:IMHO&TLDR
I find Xavier to be a problematic character in terms of disability representation. He falls into the “exotic” stereotype of the disabled – his disabled body is designed to ironically contrast with his advanced mind (the same way Daredevil’s blindness is in ironic contrast to his advanced senses), effectively reducing his disability to the downside of the “blessing and a curse” superpower trope. Tellingly, we never see Xavier actually living as a disabled man – managing his wheelchair, struggling with accessibility, etc.
In addition, Xavier is sort of a dubious character. On a fundamental level, his powers are inherently manipulative and amoral. Sometimes writers play this up deliberately (like Hickman) – other times they don’t seem to realize they’ve written him as a creep (Claremont’s weird kink stuff, the infamous Silver Age panel where he confesses he’s in love with Jean). Purely as a concept, Xavier warps the X-Men’s narrative architecture thanks to his role as patriarch and his absurd power levels. Writers either have to sideline him or pointedly ignore him, because otherwise he hijacks the story. This is most apparent in the films, where he’s definitely an alpha-male and essentially the protagonist, and his discourse with Magneto and Logan reduces the rest of the cast (including, it must be said, major and beloved female and PoC characters) to bit parts.
Finally – I think there are a number of superhero characters and stories that have represented disability more effectively than Professor X. Oracle, Flash Thompson as Venom, and Robotman in the Morrison/Way Doom Patrol all spring to mind. In the X-books alone, if we expand the conversation to include mental disability/illness, I found Si Spurrier’s Legion series to be insightful and moving.
Alright, that was a lot to throw out into the conversation… but really, you aren’t discussing the X-Men honestly if you shy away from the minority allegory. I hope I haven’t come across as preachy, condescending or aggressive – obviously, this stuff is extremely important to me.
Not technically part of the issue, but whats the deal with the Emperor Sunspot “foreshadowing” variant cover?
Back to the topic at hand… I think HoxPox plays with Xavier’s problematic aspects in some interesting ways. It moves Xavier away from a confused, partly-stereotyped portrayal of disability (as well as the tedious ideological conflict with Magneto) to instead play up his more ambiguous role as patriarch and autocrat. What remains to be seen is if 1) what Hickman has to say about Xavier’s leadership and 2) if all those other X-Men characters who we actually care about are given agency and meaningful roles to play.
Based on HoxPox, I’m confident we’ll get 1), but I suspect 2) will mostly be handled in the secondary titles by the other writers. I’m okay with that, as long as the line as a whole is balanced between the personal and political, but it’s pretty damn clear the Hickman books will lean toward the speculative/political side, and I completely understand why people don’t have time for that.
It seems like everyone is guessing too much about where the X-line is going from this point, without reading anything that comes next.
The coming relaunch is already a failure without even reading one comic of “Dawn of X” so far.
I can understand the problem that people have had with House and Powers, and a lot of that criticism is warranted.
However, Hickman isn’t doing most of the writing of what comes next. It’s being left to other writers who I’m sure will concentrate more on characterization.
I feel that Hickman’s run does open up new story possibilities going forward.
The idea of mutants having their own island-nation, the fact that mutants are using concepts like trade to attempt to overcome hatred and discrimination against them by humans…these are certainly very interesting directions to take the X-Men concept in the future.
The point of Moira’s vision isn’t just to defeat the Phalanx, but also to ensure a future existence for mutants.
Also, this idea of post-humanity isn’t unique to Hickman, but seemed like something that Claremont wanted to explore with the Reavers.
Humans couldn’t compete with mutants naturally, so humanity would begin to turn to technology as a way to compete with mutants.
The Reavers were the one enemies that the X-Men were unable to beat when Claremont left the books.
The idea of the X-Men fighting against hatred and persecution hasn’t been pushed aside.
Instead, House and Powers showed that the constant state of warfare between humans and mutants leads to a bad future for everyone.
By becoming post-humans in the future, not only do mutants end up on the verge of extinction, but humanity is going to lose everything that made it human in the first place.
The Phalanx are the enemies of both the humans and mutants.
As someone else pointed out, by attempting to use technology to overcome evolution, humanity caught the attention of the Phalanx.
Everything is about cycles here. The continuing cycles of hatred, the continuing cycles of mutants and humans escalating, it always leads to a bad future for everyone, both humans and mutants.
Plus, having their own island-nation isn’t that much of a change as some seem to believe.
Was hiding in a mansion really that different from having their own nation?
This way, the mutants have to actually interact with the rest of the world.
I’m also not sure that Moira is the hero.
She feels she has the right to manipulate Xavier and Magneto.
She was the one who has tried to change Xavier’s dream by convincing him of the “truth about humans”.
She’s the one who has grown so pessimistic because she believes that mutants are probably already doomed.
She’s the one who has been seeking out strong males…Magneto, Apocalypse, Xavier.
Remember, she’s the one who saw Xavier as an alpha male before he showed these inclinations.
She told him she was looking for her “strong man”.
Xavier replied with something like, “I’m not that strong.”
It seems like Moira’s powers have dehumanized her.
@Arrowhead: I not only hold an Honours degree in Disability Studies, and worked as an advocate for eighteen years but was born with a condition that makes me the recipient of multiple disabilities and I grew up with a disabled parent;)
There’s certainly been a problem with Xavier from the get-go, but that’s no surprise with Stan as he similarly perpetuated it with Daredevil who was just another blind “second-sense” stereotype from literature, like Zatoichi and going all the way back to Oedipus (and even Brother Jorge from Eco’s Name of the Rose which I let him get away with because he was slyly referencing Borges). When he first appeared in the book, we should have been clued in by the sight of his wheelchair, which looked like the airport chair us crips ride in: everything else in the comic was sleek and high tech and futuristic. At first I couldn’t figure out why this was the situation in the comic. But after chewing it over, it was obvious X-Men was secretly scared of the radicalness of its critique: in its futuristic world, virtually everyone reading the comic would be classified as a “mutant.” Rather than leave the audience members in the uncomfortable position of thinking of themselves as disabled, the comic had to create “a really disabled” person, someone who fits our social stereotype of what a crip is. In the end, despite its possibilities, X-Men never really challenged the terms of the debate (except perhaps through Claremont’s subtle creation of the Morlock community). But it generally told us that with hard work and “spirit” we can overcome, but it still left intact a division between “us” and “them,” those whose bodies succeed and those whose bodies fail. It has other issues as well. The often touted suggestion X-Men was an allegory of racial tolerance has also been somewhat suspect to me: Professor X formed the X-Men “to protect mankind from those… from the evil mutants”. The X-Men were initially more interested in protecting their oppressors than fighting for their freedom. The X-Men are “mutants who use their awesome abilities to protect a world that hates and fears them”. Ensuring equality early on seemed secondary. And things hadn’t changed thirty years later with the introduction of Bishop. That is, Bishop was a member of Xavier’s Security Enforcers, a group supposedly created to allow mutants to police themselves, but were in reality a team of mutants who eliminated (the irony this time being that a black man led them).
@Arrowhead: I not only hold an Honours degree in Disability Studies, and worked as an advocate for eighteen years but was born with a condition that makes me the recipient of multiple disabilities and I grew up with a disabled parent;)
There’s certainly been a problem with Xavier from the get-go, but that’s no surprise with Stan as he similarly perpetuated it with Daredevil who was just another blind “second-sense” stereotype from literature, like Zatoichi and going all the way back to Oedipus (and even Brother Jorge from Eco’s Name of the Rose which I let him get away with because he was slyly referencing Borges). When he first appeared in the book, we should have been clued in by the sight of his wheelchair, which looked like the airport chair us crips ride in: everything else in the comic was sleek and high tech and futuristic. At first I couldn’t figure out why this was the situation in the comic. But after chewing it over, it was obvious X-Men was secretly scared of the radicalness of its critique: in its futuristic world, virtually everyone reading the comic would be classified as a “mutant.” Rather than leave the audience members in the uncomfortable position of thinking of themselves as disabled, the comic had to create “a really disabled” person, someone who fits our social stereotype of what a crip is. In the end, despite its possibilities, X-Men never really challenged the terms of the debate (except perhaps through Claremont’s subtle creation of the Morlock community). But it generally told us that with hard work and “spirit” we can overcome, but it still left intact a division between “us” and “them,” those whose bodies succeed and those whose bodies fail. It has other issues as well. The often touted suggestion X-Men was an allegory of racial tolerance has also been somewhat suspect to me: Professor X formed the X-Men “to protect mankind from those… from the evil mutants”. The X-Men were initially more interested in protecting their oppressors than fighting for their freedom. The X-Men are “mutants who use their awesome abilities to protect a world that hates and fears them”. Ensuring equality early on seemed secondary. And things hadn’t changed thirty years later with the introduction of Bishop. That is, Bishop was a member of Xavier’s Security Enforcers, a group supposedly created to allow mutants to police themselves, but were in reality a team of mutants who eliminated (the irony this time being that a black man led them).
I think the reason that X-Men was so reactionary in its original incarnation was that Lee and Kirby saw more of the Nazi in the concept of mutants than minorities.
Mutants were portrayed as a “master race”, with Magneto coming across as a crazy ranting Hitler, talking about genetic superiority.
The X-Men were fighting to save us little guys from the “master race” that Magneto represented.
We finally saw a little of what Claremont would really bring to the surface with the Sentinels story-arc.
@Chris V ‘Also, this idea of post-humanity isn’t unique to Hickman, but seemed like something that Claremont wanted to explore with the Reavers.’
Hickman isn’t hiding his inspirations. There’s an interview from a few months back – I can’t find it now, of course – where Hickman praised Mike Carey’s run, specifically naming the Children of the Vault as a concept with great potential that was ignored by later writers.
(The Children were a group of post-humans sequestered away in a complex were time was sped up, so they were about a thousand years ahead of common humanity when they emerged).
“The Reavers were the one enemies that the X-Men were unable to beat when Claremont left the books.”
Well, the X-men never actually fought the Reavers when Claremont was on the title, did they? And no, the Muir Island team of X-men don’t count…and as soon as Claremont left, the Reavers were slaughtered by Fitzroy and his Sentinels…
“By becoming post-humans in the future, not only do mutants end up on the verge of extinction, but humanity is going to lose everything that made it human in the first place.
The Phalanx are the enemies of both the humans and mutants.
As someone else pointed out, by attempting to use technology to overcome evolution, humanity caught the attention of the Phalanx.”
I’m not a huge fan of Hickman, and while I had my problems with HoxPox, the new status quo and the above change in the reason for the X-men does also make cautiously optimistic to see what will happen next.
Yes, you’re going to have to accept all of Hikcman’s retcons and squint at the history of it side-eeyed to make it work, but it is what it is. Just go with it, try and enjoy the ride, and if it doesn’t work out, Marvel will just reboot it all anyway in a few years.
Just go with it, try and enjoy the ride, and if it doesn’t work out, Marvel will just reboot it all anyway in a few years.
I think one can safely remove “if it doesn’t work out” from that sentence.
In addition to Homo novissima and Children of the Vault, do the Neo count? They were “as far being mutants as mutants are beyond humans,” but I think they were some sort of off-shoot of mutants.
Please don’t construe this as a defense or any love for the Neo.
@Nathan Adler
Fascinating stuff. The idea that Xavier serves the function of “the real disabled person” to facilitate the audience identification with the other characters never occurred to me before. I think, at their most cloying, the X-Books pull a similar trick with race/sexuality/etc. At their worst the X-Men exploit real-world tragedy and oppression of minority to support a fantasy of persecution – me and my friends are special but society hates us – while deemphasizing actual minority experience. Which is how you end up with completely horrible and incoherent shit like Kitty scolding a black kid abouthow “mutie” is just as bad as the N-word.
In terms of actually addressing disability, the Morlocks come close, and if you squint then physical mutants like Nightcrawler and Beast also count. Cyclops relies on assistant technology, and Rogue’s powers have been used as a metaphor for a billion different things but disability seems applicable in some depictions.
(All of this reminds me of that ungodly godawful Ultimate X-Men story where a bunch of the X-Men start taking a power-enhancing steroid-metaphor called “banshee” that, among other things, allows Cyclops and Rogue to control their powers. But even though the drug works as a treatment for chronic and severely-debilitating conditions, there’s no suggestion it could be studied or used clinically, because “Xavier’s is a drug-free institution.” And then Professor X grows Wolverine claws and fights a velociraptor.)
In terms of mental illness/disability… well, superhero comics have a shitty record of depicting the mentally ill, to say the least. But as someone who grew up with religious PTSD and suffered through catatonic depression (requiring electroshock therapy, which actually helped quite a bit), Archangel has always resonated deeply with me – the “broken angel” imagery, maintaining the facade of normalcy, getting “better” without actually being fixed. X3 was garbage but that self-mutilation scene with Angel’s wings at the beginning hit me like a truck. Rogue, Nightcrawler, Cypher and again Spurrier’s Legion also mean a lot to me for different reasons.
@wwk5d: Storm’s X-Men team beat the crap out of the Reavers in their first appearance when the X-Men attacked them at their Outback base, and later took it for their own.
@krsysiek
Hickman’s Ultimates run featured a compound of artificially evolved humans obviously inspired by the Children… forget what they were called.
He also had Xorn and Zorn running a mutant nation called SEAR. Might be interesting to look back at those issues as a prototype for his X-Men run.
@Chris V
I was thinking it would be neat to see Orchis fund a “Brotherhood of Humanity” or “Super-Sentinels” team with post-human supremecists (Hodge, Pierce) and Weapon X types (Deathstrike, Weapon H, Nuke, evil Fantomex) as well as somewhat-sympathetic former allies (Juggernaut, Karima, Agt. Brand) who feel baffled and betrayed by the mutant nation. Kind of a capes-and-tights take on Brexit-style reactionary nationalism.
@JCG
I know that, but that was the version before Donald Pierce and Lady Deathstrike showed up, which is what Chris V was referring to.
And as much as he’s overexposed, I’m still really looking forward to seeing how Deadpool responds to all this.
How does the Age of Apocalypse fit in to all of this? I don’t know if anyone has discussed this or not, but I’ve been thinking about it for a few days now. I think that Age of Apocalypse pretty much set up a mutants win scenario. What was Moira’s plan there?
Firstly this story most definitely took place in her tenth life after she knew mutants always lose. If David is a product of her meddling, then that means he could only exist (and therefore go back) during her tenth life. How ironic is that? She has a hand in creating the thing that kills Xavier, who seems to be her last hope.
And where does that leave her plan? If she gave up on that timeline, killed herself and just started over, she probably wouldn’t understand what had happened. How would she know David’s existence was her own doing? Even if she succeeded in her next life of getting Xavier away from the attack, would David still show up and actually kill Magneto as he’d planned? Since Magneto also factors into her plan, would Moira then try again, and find David follows them wherever she goes?
I am assuming she doesn’t start over, because she’s afraid she can’t start over (this being Life X and all) so that gets us to the Age of Apocalypse. But if you actually read the book, Moira is on the wrong team. She’s with the humans in Europe. In this situation (finally a life where mutants are on top), why would she switch sides then? Or did she?
We know that Apocalypse awoke earlier than expected after Xavier’s death, and I believe it’s explained as somehow triggered because David went back in time and mutant stuff started happening before it should have. But couldn’t Moira have snapped when Xavier died, and just went back to the Apocalypse plan from Life IX? With nowhere to turn, she could have waken him from his sleep early, have Apocalypse do what Apocalypse does to keep Nimrod from coming online (take over half the planet). Moira goes into deep cover as a spy for Apocalypse, joining the High Human Council… to what end? Who does she marry in that reality? Bolivar Trask. What better way to get access to the Sentinel programs and be able sabotage anything closely resembling a nimrod than to be in bed (literally) with the guy building them.
When you really think about it, how different is the emergence of Krakoa from what Apocalypse did in that timeline? It’s less violent, but Apocalypse really seems on board with the plan Xavier has in place. Apocalypse also had Sinister setting up breeding pits and ways to mass produce a mutant army. Even though Xavier may not be headed in that direction, I’m not sure he’s as in control as Moira wants him to think he is.
And finally, if Moira remembers all her lives and I don’t know if it’s been set up or not if she has a super-human eidetic memory or not, but even if that’s not the case, Bishop recalled somethings from the erased timeline. Could Moira have as well? Could she have seen basically her dream come true only to have it snatched away, but have no idea how to bring it back?
Will this factor in to Hickman’s story? Probably not. When I first started thinking about it, it didn’t make sense at all. But the more I remembered about things we’d read in HoX+PoX, and remembered stuff from the AoA, it seemed possible that was what was happening.
@Brent
AoA / Earth-295 survives Moira Trask’s death, which shouldn’t be given her powers. And besides, wouldn’t that put her on Life 11?
Destiny and Mystique are not seeking out a treacherous Moira to kill her like they promised Moira 3, so that could fit with your idea.
On the other hand, I think she would conclude from AoA that humans and mutants just kill each other in the end–humans and mutants lose, so I’m not sure she would desire to recreate it.
AOA ends with the Human High Council launching a nuclear attack on America.
It doesn’t sound like the life Moira is seeking.
Besides, Marvel later ret-conned the AOA as an alternate reality, even though it originally was not.
I was thinking that it might have been a good story if Moira had found a way to create an utopia in one of her early lives.
She dies young…say in the random plane crash.
Then she keeps trying to recreate that perfect world, but she just can’t manage to do it.
She remembers most of the major events in that life, but the exact minutiae is lost to her, so it just won’t work, no matter how hard she tries.
Moira can only control her own actions, so actions by others would be outside of her control.
Now she realizes she only has one or two lives left to recreate that ideal world.
That’s not really the story Hickman wants to tell though.
That’s a story about Moira, and I don’t see Hickman’s story revolving around Moira.
Moira is just a major character, but as I said, I don’t think Moira is meant to be the hero.
I’m sure people have already said it but the thing that most struck me about the series is that, as desperate as Marvel have been over the last decade to turn the Inhumans into the X-Men, this series managed to in 12 issues do the reverse. The mutants now have their own creepy society apart from everyone else with their own language, customs, and everything else. And characters We’ve known and loved for decades truly ACT inhuman.
I find it all fine I guess as just a change in status quo that will at least be something different than what has been done with the franchise over the last 60 years and like everything else at Marvel will eventually be washed away to accommodate the next refresh. But I really question if Marvel could never successfully get over the Inhumans as characters, will they have much better luck transposing the concept over their historically #1 franchise? And, even if it does work to a degree, couldnt it have worked even better if we’d just had something more traditional?
If AoA was only an alternate universe, then how does Bishop (partly) remember it? How did the M’kraan crystallization get undone? Was it just a coincidence that Holocaust, Nate, Dark Beast and Sugar Man all ended up in 616? That doesn’t work at all. Silly Marvel.
“Most importantly, the series provides a definitive answer to the burning question relatively little addressed: why, if Xavier wants peace between mutants and humans, are the X-men a paramilitary squad?”
I don’t think it addressed this. Unless you take it that there were never any X-Men in lives 1 to 3. And then, what, in life 4 she shows Xavier her 3 previous lives, with no X-Men and no mutant tragedies (aside from her own death at the Brotherhood’s hands), and THAT prompts Xavier to create the X-Men?
At some point, in one of the lives, Xavier came up with the X-Men on his own. I even read somewhere (might’ve been here) someone praising how this story kept Xavier’s dream as the original driving force for the X-Men.
How about: the psychic feedback from Legion’s death and subsequent reality warp scrambled all memories of the 616 reality, including Moira’s. If Bishop only had fragmented memories of 616, and Destiny’s precognition was temporarily attuned to the AoA timeline, then I can accept Moira’s memories of her prior lives were overwritten. Eh, that’s my no-prize explanation.
@Chris V
I actually really like this as an alternate backstory for Moira. Trying to recapture something you lost is poignant and relatable. Oh well, the road not taken.
@Luke H
Great insight about the Inhumans. The difference is the Inhumans existed for centuries as a separate civilization, while the X-Men were born into human society and tried to integrate before choosing to secede.
@Arrowhead:
It’s not just that the X-Men tried to integrate, it’s that a good number of them actually did. I honestly can’t understand why someone like Polaris (not that she’s ever been written consistently) or Karma would go along with this.
1. Alan L is a Golden God. I would die for him based on that legendary comment
2. His issue on characterization isn’t that no writer he’s curated will choose, unlike Hickman, to write these characters; it’s that every character is reduced to nothing in the overall narrative. X-Men is traditionally a character-driven comic, but everybody aside from maybe 3-4 characters will be window dressing in the grand scheme of things. There won’t be a Madeline Pryor, for instance, whose personal character arc takes on a life of its own and alerts the course of the story.. Characters will just act in service to the larger narrative.
Also, the main thing I don’t get about people who just love this and aren’t complaining is that all of the characters are completely on board with all of this even after everything we’ve seen. where is the room for internal conflict when everyone has signed up for this and nobody sees any problems? you would think that the greatest character work to be done would involve characters questioning the premise talking to each other and having differing viewpoints about what all is happening here. Instead they all just smile and are very excited about pod people and suicide missions and cult stuff and mutant supremacy and separatism. it doesn’t ring remotely true that virtually every character in X history is on board, and what sorts of smaller quibbles and disagreements could they have in the grand scheme of things when they are all on board as extremist religious zealots? Iceman doesn’t like onions on his pizza? That’s about as much internal conflict (aka real, three dimensional charters interacting) as I envision.
3. the Age of Apocalypse is a great example of how none of this really fits or makes sense and is being very conveniently shoehorned into one narrative where clearly everything doesn’t actually fit or make sense. and of course things like the broader implications that Xavier is responsible for all of the reprehensible things Mr. Sinister did, which is just one unintended consequence, can only really be undone with ultra convenience Moira’s 11th life exit strategy, which is an exceptionally lazy, bad plot device.
And just to emphasize, the new origins of Proteus and Legion might be very compelling and tie together and make everything even more tragic, but it is the most unconscionable s*** imaginable that Moira and Charles have done to conceive these tools. Because that’s all they are, tools and weapons, not children. It’s incredibly disturbing and basically unforgivable. Being an absentee father because you’re busy with some other greater mission is a blemish that can enrich character and that can be worked on and developed and redeemed. Creating a baby for the purpose of being a tool / weapon is just beyond evil.