Inferno
INFERNO vol 2 #1-4
Writer: Jonathan Hickman
Artist: Valerio Schiti & Stefano Caselli
Colourist: David Curiel
Letterer: Joe Sabino
Editor: Jordan White
Inferno is a strange book with a strange role. With Jonathan Hickman departing the X-books, it completes his run, but without resolving what he set up. The X-office has decided to stick with the Krakoan set-up for a little while yet, instead of moving on to the next phase of the originally planned storyline. That doesn’t mean it won’t happen at some point, of course – the nature of comics is that everything tends to revert to its traditional status quo in the end. But for now, we’re sticking with Krakoa.
So, if that’s direction, how do you go for finality? Well, by paying off a few prominent storylines and moving those characters on to their next phases, which seems fair enough. Quite why any of this is called Inferno, mind you, is less than obvious. Yes, it’s a trademark, but they already did a series under that name in 2015. This has nothing to do with any previous Inferno story, and nothing to do with Madelyne Pryor, who was being set up for something over in Hellions. (Her story continues in New Mutants, to be fair.) It’s hard to avoid the suspicion that it’s called Inferno mainly because they’d already started foreshadowing something called Inferno.
Maybe not. Maybe it was always just a bit cryptic. So, what actually happens here?
Moira MacTaggert was set up with some fanfare as the power behind the Krakoan throne in House of X and Powers of X back at the start of Hickman’s run, but she’s actually done very little since then. As we kick off, she’s still insisting that the main thing for mutants to fear is machines and post humanity, and the specific omens of disaster are the emergence of Nimrod and the return of Destiny. Since Nimrod has already shown up in X-Men, Moira demands that steps be taken to remove any possibility of Destiny being resurrected – the obvious question whether this is really about the big picture or just about Moira’s fear of Destiny from one of her previous lives.
At any rate, Mystique gets there first and succeeds in both engineering Destiny’s resurrection, and getting her put onto the Quiet Council. Our sympathies have always been with Mystique given the way that Xavier has been stringing her along, and despite Destiny’s brutal murder of Moira in life three, it’s pretty clear that we’re rooting for Destiny to come back – besides, it’s been teased for so long that we’re expecting it. It has to be said, though – we never do get an explanation of why it was so important to have Mystique on the Quiet Council in the first place. Moira didn’t want it. Did Xavier and Magneto just want to keep Mystique in the fold so they could keep an eye on what she was doing with Destiny? It does feel a bit shaky when you stop to think about it.
Charles, Magneto and Moira try to bring Emma into their secret, and she promptly shops them to Mystique and Destiny – who, for all the hype, apparently hadn’t picked up on Moira of her own accord after all.
With Destiny’s help, Mystique promptly starts investigating Moira’s activities, and some frankly confusing scenes in Paris lead her to Orchis (who seemed to be keeping Moira under surveillance… or something). Mystique then arranges for Moira to get captured by Orchis and have her arm (which has a tracker device) cut off so that Xavier and Magneto will race to her aid and get stuck fighting Nimrod and Omega Sentinel, who kill them. Meanwhile, Mystique and Destiny confront Moira, who admits that she wanted to “save” mutants by “curing” them in some vague and unspecified way that would stop them ever becoming mutants in the first place. They remove her powers so that the timeline is now fixed, and Cypher intervenes to send her into exile. Moira’s involvement is removed and the whole Quiet Council now know the secret of how it was formed.
The return of Destiny is the most satisfying thing here. In fact, much of what this book does well is the neat reveals, both of the details of its own plot, and of long term elements of Hickman’s run. The bit about Mystique having plotted to manipulate Moira is rather confused, but the misdirection in issue #1, with a sequence of “Xavier” and “Magneto” taking the steps to gather Destiny’s resurrection elements, only for us to find out that it’s actually Mystique, is very nicely done. The idea that Cypher has been quietly in on all the secrets from the start makes perfect sense but still works as a twist. Somewhere in here, we also get the back story of Omega Sentinel, who hasn’t really done much beyond act as a sounding board for Orchis – but making her an inverted Kitty Pryde, in her own version of “Days of Futures Past”, is a neat little idea.
The scenes of Destiny pre-arranging votes to get on to the Quiet Council and out manoeuvring Xavier and Magneto are fun too. Political shenanigans can be very dry but these double sized issues make them work. And Valerio Schiti’s art is fabulous – I love the reveal of Destiny entering the Council chamber or Emma reacting to Moira’s past lives. Schiti brings a lot of lightness and fun to the book, which stops it feeling like a tour of Hickman’s flowchart. When it needs to go epic, it can; when it wants to call back to a previous page, it nails it. Stefano Caselli’s pages aren’t quite on that level, but they are plainly fill-in work. For the most part, this is a gorgeous book to look at.
Does the Moira reveal work, though? A big part of the problem is that it’s never really clear exactly what’s being revealed. It’s rather tiptoed around. Reading between the lines, the suggestion seems to be that she was going to get all the mutants together on Krakoa and generously let them live out their days in paradise while quietly drugging the world with Krakoan medicines to get rid of future generations of mutants. This always seemed like a possible direction, given that we knew as early as House of X #2 that (1) Moira had developed a cure for mutant powers in an earlier life, and (2) Krakoan drugs were very, very emphatically for humans only.
But if that’s the idea, it’s not really spelt out – the role of Krakoan medicine and its human-only customer base doesn’t actually come up in this series at all. Of course, if that’s the idea, you can see why we might be tiptoeing around it. The Hickman run started in 2019. A lot has happened since then, to put it mildly. The idea that a vitally important wonder drug would be taken by everyone is, shall we say, an even tougher sell than it was then. And if the plot was going to be “Moira laces Krakoan drugs with the cure” then two years down the line, that’s become an anti-vaccination conspiracy story. You can see why you wouldn’t want to go there. But the vagueness about how exactly Krakoa fit in to anything that Moira was planning really blunt the force of Inferno‘s main plot.
Could be worse, I guess. You could have committed to a major storyline in two ongoing titles and an event mini about Russia.
For all that, I like Inferno – I just like the feel and the look of the book, and the sense of things fitting together. It’s not really about anything in particular; it’s just enjoying the playground that Hickman set up one last time and moving some major elements on to create a sense of resolution. But in a weird way, it still feels right, even if that may be hard to fully justify. In both its strengths and weaknesses, it certainly exemplifies Jonathan Hickman’s time on the X-books, which is perhaps the main thing it needed to do.
I know we’re all pretending the Rosenberg run didn’t happen, but it also seems weird to me that Hickman would follow it up with *another* story about how the mutant gene was being quietly erased from all of humanity via pharmaceuticals.
Actually, that was basically the M-Pox plot of the Lemire run that preceded it too, wasn’t it?
Excellent point about the problems of running an anti-vaccine story. I hadn’t put that together, but it’s surely why that plot point isn’t properly explained.
The idea with the Paris stuff is that Orchis is monitoring every gate they can to track mutants’ movements. The mutants know this (the Orchis cell is being monitored by X-Force), so Moira has installed an extra gate for her own use a few floors above the main one to avoid detection. Orchis twig to this and ramp up surveillance, which is duly logged by the mutants. That allows Mystique to intercept the info and use it for her own ends.
I’m not sure if that is the reason or if Hickman leaving meant that he couldn’t say it was the Krakoan drugs. The drugs are the only reason humanity is willing to recognize Krakoa as a sovereign nation. If Krakoa can’t trade the drugs to the world, then Krakoa has no leverage.
This makes sense with the original Life Ten timeline where the Children of the Vault emerge and the human world unites to fight them. It seems like there was a schism between humanity and mutants between the present and the time when the Children emerge in the alternate reality. As humanity is losing the war, the ask the mutants for aid, leading to a human/mutant alliance.
It seems like in Hickman’s original plans, the drugs were going to be removed. The post-Hickman direction isn’t following the plot Hickman was establishing.
I mean, it’s a conspiracy theory about a miracle drug, but it was also a conspiracy which was going to help humanity at the expense of mutants.
I’ve recently started reading Ultimate X-Men for the first time. I was amused to read about Magneto’s mutant sanctuary island where they all speak a special mutant language, and there’s an AI deep underground that is developing posthumanity in direct competition with the mutants. This was in, what, 2003 or something?
And yeah, the focus on Russia, not just in X-Men, in Avengers and Winter Guard and probably elsewhere, is a problem that’s going to be difficult for Marvel to navigate, particularly given the long lead-in time each comic has. Also the Vampire Nation at Chernobyl as seen in Wolverine.
I think Paul’s probably correct that whatever plan Hickman had for the mutant medicines likely had to be curtailed in light of COVID.
I wonder about connection between anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories and the genre conventions of how ‘miracle drugs’ are portrayed in fiction, where any kind of government-supported pharmaceuticals are suspicious at best, and usually quite obviously BAD.
Maybe it’s me , but I didn’t realize we were supposed to be rooting for/sympathizing with Destiny and Mystique.
This isn’t an accusation of Paul or a criticism, but I think he views Inferno favorably because he always said from the beginning that accepting Hickman’s slow build relies on expecting the disparate elements to eventually pay off. And if you’re committed to reading and covering every single issue of every single X-book, this is naturally an expectation you want to have, or else the entire enterprise would be a miserable affair.
So I think it’s natural for Paul to be satisfied with Inferno because it delivered some form of payoff at all, even if he can’t quite justify that satisfaction.
Mark-As far as I can tell, we’re not supposed to sympathize with any characters from Hickman’s run.
You support Mystique and Destiny as the only ones who are going to stop Moira’s genocide plot against mutants, which is a good thing. That also means you are supporting Krakoa’s mutant supremacist agenda which is going to lead to the subjugation and extinction of humanity though, so you might want to temper your support.
I guess there’s no one else to cheer for and Xavier/Magneto did toy with Mystique for absolutely no reason, so they’re probably the most sympathetic characters out of the bunch of despicable individuals.
“With Destiny’s help, Mystique promptly starts investigating…” .
This one paragraph spells out the whole plot, which is a couple of issues’ worth. But it’s a series of four double-size issues.
“But if that’s the idea, it’s not really spelt out”.
Talk about generous. To repeat myself (and I’m sure it won’t be the last time): One. Single. Panel.
Aro-tron-Obviously, there are different reasons based on the example of fiction being used, but I think a number of examples are meant to evoke real-life examples.
The medical experimentation done to African-American, Native American/Indigenous Canadian peoples. The very real eugenic programs and forced sterilization of poor people across the globe.
I think Mystique has a bit of sympathy since Xavier and Magneto aren’t just lying to her about Destiny, they’re actively stringing her along, despite knowing they won’t actually resurrect Destiny due to Moira’s orders. If they just lied to Mystique and said her Cerebro copy was corrupted or destroyed for some reason, they’d still be assholes, but it’s stringing her along for their own benefit that damns them completely. The cruelty is a step beyond.
That said, I wasn’t a big fan of this generally, and the half-assed reveal of Moira’s true plan is the killer for me. I think Paul is right that they’re playing coy to avoid an anti-vaxx message, but it just has to be about the mutant drugs, honestly. Hickman spent three years constructing an intricately designed puzzle box, and in the end, all it contained was half a Post-It note. For a miniseries that basically stalled out most of the X-line for nearly a year, that’s not nearly enough.
I’m wondering if since Xavier/Magneto had bought in to Moira’s propaganda so deeply, that they were planning to betray Moira at some point and bring back Destiny, or at least hoping that Moira would change her mind about Destiny. After all, Destiny was a fellow mutant. It really doesn’t make sense that they’d keep Destiny’s DNA sample and Cerebro record if Moira wanted them to never bring her back, unless they did hope to eventually bring her back.
I think Mystique on the Council was nothing really more than her just being an obvious person to put there. She’s always been a political mutant, between assassination attempts, spying, and Freedom Force. In the list of people you would recruit, she’s definitely B-tier beneath the Professor, Mags, and Apocalypse but higher than Exodus. It puts her in power, but Xavier and Magneto didn’t really seem to be that worried about the Council’s power in general.
I do agree that Xavier/Mags figured that they’d eventually get through to Moira and bring Destiny back. They were patronizing enough to Moira that I can definitely believe that they either figured they’d get through to her, or eventually just tell her to suck it up.
Deleting Destiny’s backups and telling Mystique, or just lying to Mystique that something happened but keeping them around, would be a declaration of war to Mystique. Yeah, it’d at least be direct rather than playing with her heart, but then they’d immediately have to do something to deal with her. Mystique’s not exactly a trusting person. They’d have to claim Destiny was part of a general failure that ruined a large number of mutant backups for Mystique to not immediately assume this was deliberate. Even then, Mystique would probably immediately start doing her own investigation into the mass backup failure. All they gain is that Mystique might not immediately assume that it was a direct targeted attack against Destiny.
And that’s assuming this was X/M’s opening move. After months of them stringing Mystique along, no way is she believing *any* story that includes “and so Destiny’s backup was lost but it’s totes not our doing”.
Yeah, I 3rd or 4th the idea that Xavier and Magneto were always planning to bring Destiny back against Moira’s wishes. For all they knew, she was just scared of Destiny because of Life Three. Moira obviously couldn’t tell them that she was trying to cure mutants again and Destiny would find out and murder her again.
@Rob: This is another problem I have with the whole “X-gene” idea. The most logical story to tell about it (a cure) is SO BORING. It’s about all mutants on Earth, so the stakes are too big to care about. There’s no disagreement among mutants about whether the cure is good or bad unless the writer decides to rewind Rogue’s personality by a few decades. And the action is a gene slowly disappearing from the human race over the course of generations. Absolutely no drama.
At least Hickman wrapped it up in some other interesting ideas: revelations about Moira, status quo change for the main characters, big fight with post-humanity. Otherwise, curing the X-gene is a snore-fest. Such the opposite of Days of Future Past: actively killing or interning mutants at least has immediate and personal stakes. But that story’s been done to death, too. Can we tell stories about mutants that aren’t about trying to wipe them all out anymore?
Perhaps the craziest part of the Omega Sentinel reveal is it being revealed that in her timeline the mutants ethnically cleansed Earth and then went on to commit galactic genocide because it turns out all those supremacist red flags were actual red flags, not just Hickman’s typical quality of character writing, but then that being brushed past because it turns out that Omega is yet another Kill All Humans evil robot anyway.
I don’t think it was brushed past by Hickman. Other writers don’t care because “mutants are good”. Hickman wanted to tell a story where no one can ever win.
Why anyone thought this would be a good idea for a serial superhero narrative where mutants need to be a viable property, I will never understand.
Humans win…Mutants go extinct.
Mutants win…Humans go extinct.
Machines win…Everyone goes extinct.
Humans and Mutants align…Humans turn on mutants.
Humans and Machines align…Machines win.
Hickman said in an interview that he wanted to examine “what it means for mutants to win”.
The problem is that he completely changed the rules of the game in order to punish the reader for sympathizing with mutants all these years. He showed us the dystopian future of Magneto wins or Apocalypse wins again, rather than playing by the rules and showing the reader what happens if Xavier’s dream succeeds. He immediately takes that away by saying, “That’s a child’s fantasy. Xavier’s dream is impossible.”, which is unfair to the reader who has followed these characters for years.
I admit there is an interesting premise here about characters always fighting against the future.
Mutants believe they are destined to inherit the planet simply because they are “born as the next stage in human evolution”. Humans inherently have an inborn need to fight against the future.
Then, Hickman shows us that the real destiny of everything is Machine evolution. Machines are the true next stage in evolution. The end point of all evolution is a “machine-god”. Everything is evolving towards that point. We then see mutants taking up the same cause as humans, to fight against the future.
Omega Sentinel is then cast in the role that the mutants once held. The Machines are destined to inherit the Earth due to Machine superiority over mere physical flesh and blood. Omega Sentinel sees her destined future taken from her by mutants, the same way humans wanted to take away mutants’ destined future.
Moira steps in as the only one who can offer an alternative to the future. Give mutants some type of future, but let humans inherit the future. Humans and mutants can both survive. Unfortunately, Moira’s vision of the future also involves a genocide against mutants.
as much as it makes sense, I’m not too keen on the krakoan drugs being Moira’s secret plan to cure mutants – not only the drugs never come up but there’s whatever she’s doing at Paris that I feel we were supposed to learn more of until Hickman had to change direction.
In the first issue of the series, we see Moira holding a burned notebook with names of scientists who presumably worked with her on the cure during her 3rd life. If her jumping point is what she did on 3rd life, it probably wouldn’t even require krakoan medicine.
Anyway, while I get why people were disappointed by this series, I liked a lot about it. Making a central character’s motivations so vague and up to fan theorizing is a narrative failure, but I liked seeing Irene back, the political shenanigans and Cypher having his best character moments since the New Mutants Annual #2.
I also like how machines are also framed as a class opressed by humanity – it gives an extra nuance to the human-mutant-machine power dynamics.
Inferno is keeping with the Krakoa-era trend of reusing old names in opaque ways. Excalibur, Marauders, Hellions, Fallen Angels, etc all have almost nothing to do with the original properties. Perhaps to signal Krakoa as a moment of reinvention and make a definitive break with the past. I’m fine with it, better something new than a predictable rehash of old stories.
@Ceries
I didn’t read Omega’s revelations as being brushed off. She’s clearly not meant to be sided with cause she’s mostly vengeful, but her line before killing Magneto mirroring Cyclops’ is meant to invoke a genuine pain. The way the series end is hardly positive either.
So… if natural selection is a key part of evolution, then shouldn’t mutants be physically and mentally superior to humans in relation to their environments, and eventually out-compete them for resources? I’m just wondering because I could see Hickman making natural selection a key component of the bad futures. Either mutants or machines or post-humans will win, and the losing groups will probably die out.
If we’re building to an exploration of competition vs. cooperation, I’m here for it.
I don’t know if Hickman was going to go there, but it would be nice if the X-books’ creative teams started looking at what does and doesn’t work when the above disparate groups have to create a future together.
Miyamoris-Her cure in Life Three is a vaccine though. She says she is giving mutants a choice. They can take the cure if they want. Destiny says the government will take her cure and force it on all mutants. It can’t be the same cure as Life Three.
I think that scene is just a clue being given by Hickman to let us know that Moira is not to be trusted.
I like to look at Hickman’s run as a puzzle where the reader needs to find the clues to solve the puzzle.
The drugs were named L, I, M. LIM is a type of protein which has been implicated in causing cancer.
Moira’s line in Life Three, “Mutants are a cancer in need of a cure.”
Naming the drugs that is Moira (and Hickman’s) clever little hint to the true nature of the drugs. They are Moira’s “cure for cancer”.
I can’t see Hickman naming the drugs L, I, M as a coincidence.
Mike-Exactly. Mutants don’t actively pursue purposeful ethnic cleansing of humans in the original Life Ten future. They conquered the human race and then sat back and waited for more and more mutants to be born until the non-mutant population was bred out of the gene pool. Humans were naturally going to go extinct.
I don’t think competition versus cooperation was where Hickman was going though. He seems to see competition leading to a bad future, but also seems to see it as natural and unavoidable.
We saw humans and mutants cooperate in the original Life Ten timeline fighting the Children of the Vault. Afterwards, humanity still betrayed mutants, leading to another war.
Hickman seems to be saying that the extinction of one or the other is unavoidable, unless someone like Moira steps in to subvert nature.
Then, he questions if Moira’s amoral actions are worth the cost and seems to conclude that Moira is also wrong (since it involves genocide, obviously).
I’m sure I recall Hickman saying somewhere that this book was originally going to be called Immortal X-Men, but that title got co-opted for an ongoing. Inferno was the back-up title. Maybe on Jay and Miles?
I fully expected Inferno to end both the Krakoan drugs and the Resurrection Protocols as story elements. Both of these alter the wider Marvel Universe beyond the X-books in quite a fundamental way; I thought they would be temporary elements to establish Krakoa as a nation, which would go away when their plot purpose had been served. If the plan had been for the drugs to be a secret mutant cure, which I think does make sense, then this would have been the moment that plot element went away.
If we conjecture that keeping the drugs around is part of allowing the writers to keep playing in the current status quo that they enjoy, then being ambiguous about Moira’s cure makes perfect sense – means you can still do that reveal later. Of course, Paul’s point about Current Events is also a good one, and I wonder if when the time comes Marvel might look for some other reason to pull the plug on the miracle cure for Aunt May.
Mystique should have been a Great Captain, not a Council member, if you ask me. I guess she technically ran Madripoor for a while, but she’s much more of a field leader than a politician. I guess Chuck and Erik did try to put Cyclops on the Council as well, so they are at least consistent.
As a book? Issues 1 and 3 very enjoyable. Issues 2 and 4 fine to decent. Could probably have used another dialogue pass, which has been true for a lot of the line. With a writer as known for/marketed as dropping clues as Hickman, you gotta make sure you don’t accidentally drop the wrong surname in a scene.
[…] Paul O’Brien reviews the strange enjoyment of Jonathan Hickman, Valerio Schiti, Stefano Caselli, et al’s Inferno. […]
I actually applaud Marvel for trying something high concept and ambitious with the X-Men…. but the Krakoa era really hasn’t been my thing.
I’m waiting for the pendulum to swing back so I can jump on board with the inevitable back to basics relaunch.
Maybe I’m just getting old.
How come the machines didn’t take over the skrulls, or kree, or shi’ar, or any of the other advanced civilisations that have been around since before humans evolved? It doesn’t seem very inevitable to me.
Also why wouldn’t the Celestials/Eternals put a stop to it when all the genetic shenanigans of earth are so important to them?
Si-I think it could be explained by the fact that the Kree, Skrull, and Shi’ar all had quite homogeneous societies.
Machine evolution is said to take place alongside the evolution of post-humanity. Humans needed to turn to bio-technological engineering in order to compete with mutants. This creates a self-feeding loop where each advancement in post-humanity creates an advancement in Machine intelligence, until post-humanity reaches its evolutionary deadend, whereas Machines can continue evolving until they reach the endpoint of all evolution: a Dominion.
Apparently, the Skrulls, Kree, and Shi’ar never faced those same evolutionary pressures of having two related but separate species evolve alongside each other on their planets.
Uncanny X-Ben-I’m pretty sure the Phalanx were supposed to be the Celestials in his original roughdraft, when Hickman was hoping he was going to write the Eternals rather than X-Men.
The Kree and Skrulls were shown to be at evolutionary dead ends in an X-Men Annual from the ‘80s by Chris Claremont & Alan Davis. It involved a test of character that Wolverine passed, thus allowing humanity to keep evolving. While none of that makes any sense, there’s semi-obscure canon evidence that AI would not consider the Kree & Skrulls an existential threat. My head canon theory is that the MU’s major alien races with extremely advanced technology developed safe guards to prevent their machines from rising up.
IIRC, the Supreme Intelligence set off a Nega-bomb to destroy a lot of the Kree population to try and jumpstart evolution in “Operation: Galactic Storm.” I don’t know if that plot thread was ever referenced again.
Also, the Skrulls had mutants, as seen in late ‘90s X-Men. They enlisted Prof. X to help them. I don’t recall seeing them in the last 20 years. The Skrulls used artificially-created Power Skrulls during Secret Invasion, so maybe they killed off/cured their mutant population early on and were moving into post-humanity (post-Skrullanity?).
Yeah, I couldn’t remember the backstory for all those alien races. I thought they were at evolutionary dead ends.
This is, basically, what Moira was attempting to accomplish. To take away the competitive evolutionary population pressure of mutants before humanity created a Nimrod. She knew from Life Six and Life Nine that the creation of the Nimrod AI is the point of no return, it begins the acceleration of technological progress which gives birth to post-humanity, which marks the end of humanity and mutants.
Without that evolutionary pressure facing humanity (the knowledge that their species is going extinct and being replaced by the next stage in evolution), humanity won’t turn to bio-technological engineering to compete for survival. There will be no creation of a Nimrod AI.
Moira’s plan was basically to place humans in the same state as the Skrulls and Kree: as an evolutionary dead end. The baseline human species would survive. An end to the cycles she had been forced to witness in life after life.
I think Marvel learnt lessons about the themes of their stories being misconstrued in light of current events after the whole Captain Hydra-America deal. I don’t blame them aborting the Krakoan drugs angle asap. But it feels like the Krakoa era is now another half-realised X-Men storyline they’re scrambling to rework. I mean, Moria’s change of position is very jarring.
The nega-bomb in Operation Galactic Storm turned the kree into the ruul, who had tentacles for hair and powers a bit like the X-Man Darwin. This was “fixed” by Peter David, as was his wont, when Captain Marvel (Genis) rebooted all reality.
Si said: The nega-bomb in Operation Galactic Storm turned the kree into the ruul, who had tentacles for hair and powers a bit like the X-Man Darwin. This was “fixed” by Peter David, as was his wont, when Captain Marvel (Genis) rebooted all reality.
Oh, it was more convoluted than that. The Nega-Bomb did start the Kree mutating, but also killed a lot of then. But the Ruul were created shortly before Maximum Security when the Supreme Intelligence got a time-manipulating crystal created by Immortus in Avengers Forever and used it to accelerate the post-Nega-Bomb Kree evolution, basically getting one generation there when it would have taken many generations.
For that matter, the whole “Kree and Skrulls are evolutionary dead ends” thing dates to Avengers (1963) series #97, the one where Rick Jones gets reality-warping powers and ends the Kree-Skrull War. The Supreme Intelligence directly states it while expalining how he was able to trigger Rick Jones’s “evolutionary potential” or whatever.
Claremont’s Horde story was playing off of that earlier revelation. Claremont, after all, came into Marvel partly in association wit Roy Thomas, since his first credit was the “Sentinels are convinced to attack the Sun idea used in the Roy Thomas/ Neal Adams X-Men run. And Claremont’s early X-stuff definitely riffed on the Thomas/Adams X-Men.
(Another Roy Thomas protege, Steve Engelhart, also briefly referred to the “Kree and Skrull as evolutionary dead ends” thing briefly in his own Avengers run when he established the backstory of his pet character, Mantis.)
Claremont’s Horde story in that annual strikes me as part of what he was doing by that point in the 80s, shifting the X-books towards more and more dark fantasy elements.
So the “evolutionary dead ends” thing becomes a kind of cosmic trial against a demonic entity like Horde, we get things like the Adversary as a major arc villain, Roma and the Siege Perilous, the original Inferno storyline, and the Shadow King being revised from “evil disembodied telepath still aiming for revenge on Xavier” to “primordial, possibly multiversal force of evil.”
Si & Omar: thanks for the additional info! I read the Englehart Avengers, and I remember the involvement of the Kree & Coati, but not the “evolutionary dead ends” theory being part of it.
As much as I like big, out there concepts in super-hero comic book, the ending to the Kree/Skrull War was so stupid. “Rick Jones ends the war with psychic projections of Golden Age Marvel characters made solid”- oy.
I like Inferno and parts of Fall of the Mutants, but I think putting the X-Men in fantasy-based scenarios works about as well as putting them in space. The Adversary feels like a character who walked in from another genre. I like the Horde Annual fine, but the cosmic elements are much weaker than the character pieces. The leprechauns of Cassidy Keep are pretty incongruous with the rest of the Juggernaut/ Black Tom story. I flat-out don’t like the Kulan Gath issues. Maybe the Shadow King story was going somewhere, but the (almost Claremont-less) Muir Island Saga was probably not the intended destination. Excalibur v1 was it’s own thing, and the often-humorous tone fit better with the fantasy pieces.
Inferno (the original one) worked because it had more horror elements. Horror is a better fit for the characters, I think. There’s already body horror inherent to some mutations. The tension of “fighting for a world that hates and fears them” can be shifted to horror easily. Almost all X-characters have significant trauma in their back stories. Mr. Sinister a mad scientist a la Frankenstein, fits right in.
I agree that fantasy was not a strong fit for the X-men despite being an obvious interest for Claremont.
As one-off stories or even brief arcs, I really liked it: the Kulan Gath two-parter, the Asgardian adventure co-starring Alpha Flight and New Mutants, the Horde annual, the New Mutants issues with Cloak & Dagger, even the Mojo annuals. All of those stories gave us looks at our heroes in idealized, horrific, or funny versions, which was a great way to explore character, as Mike L. mentioned.
Once fantasy tipped over into the ongoing plots, though, I lost interest. Especially with Roma and the Siege Perilous. There just stopped being any story rules at all, and the down-to-earth tone of the book disappeared altogether. It’s the same problem as Krakoan resurrection — once the X-men are saved from death not just once but twice by a goddess, what are the stakes anymore?
And the beautiful love/hate story between Storm and Forge turns into a quest to stop an ancient malevolent force? And they live in a fantasy dimension together for a year? That’s a long way off from Lifedeath, which at the time was one of my favorite X-men stories because of how real it felt (with fantastical elements, of course).
“Horror is a better fit for the characters, I think.”
Somewhat along those lines. I’m surprised they’ve never done a Mutant Massacre sequel. I know the original story wasn’t horror, but the name “Mutant Massacre 2” would be the perfect name for an X-Men-style homage to/riff on slasher films.
Just throw some disposable mutant teenagers together in some location or another and do the Friday the 13th routine with a deranged serial killer picking them off one by one. For authenticity, hire a lousy writer. Make sure the quality of the writing is at the same level of direct-to-video film quality.
I think they did that with Joe Casey’s “Poptopia” story-arc featuring “genetic cleansing” villain, Mister Clean.
Claremont most likely switched his style after “Mutant Massacre” because the book was getting too grim and dark during the Romita Jr. era.
I wasn’t suggesting that they do yet another story about a community of deformed mutants who live in tunnels/sewers getting wiped out by someone. Just saying that the title “Mutant Massacre” sounds somewhat horror/slasher film-esque, and moreso when you add a “2” at the end. It sounds like the name of some direct-to-video slasher sequel. They could do a riff on that iwith all the slasher film tropes (mutant teens getting killed immediately after or during sex, final girl character, etc). And it would have to be as bad as it sounds.
This might be my head-canon, but wasn’t the mutant supremacist talk implied to be the result of Onslaught in Si Spurrier’s Nightcrawler’s book? I assumed this was a retcon to make it so that all the weirdness at the start of Krakoa could be shoved off on Onslaught and the X-Men could be made explicitly good guys again. The ritual suicide by combat is definitely implied to be a result of Onslaught.
No, I’m pretty sure that’s one of the positives that the X-writers want to maintain about the utopia of Krakoa.
The Onslaught reveal was meant to clean up the creepiness involved with resurrections. Onslaught was driving the resurrected mutants to not care about living anymore. Their purpose in living seemed to be gone now that they had access to immortality. That was simply Onslaught’s doing. Now, they are much happier and healthier mutant supremacists.
Hickman’s intention seemed to be that immortality was a trap. It was the existence of the resurrection process, itself, which was a curse, playing in to his themes about competition and survival driving species to evolve.
Since Hickman was leaving and Krakoa is now not creepy in the least, they decided to explain away the hints of that aspect to Krakoa by saying it was Onslaught.
From what everyone says, Rosenberg’s run was basically another mutant massacre.
It was more of a mutant murder marathon than a singular mutant massacre, though.
…I quite liked it. I actually like it even better now, knowing everybody drops dead because mass Krakoan resurrections were just around the corner. But I liked the ‘backs-against-the-wall, taking-our-enemies-before-we-go’ approach. It would be unbearable as a long standing status quo, but for a 12-issue story it works pretty well.
It’s a shame that the first ten issues of that volume, which are the lead-in to Age of X-Man, are crap. Makes it harder to recommend the volume as a whole. But I like Rosenberg’s #11-22.
Oh, and it finally buried the Cyclops/Wolverine hatefest started in Schism. By that point I was extremely tired of that story, rearing its ugly head over and over again. So another point in Rosenberg’s favor.
The thing about the mutant drugs is, Inferno shows that they were Beast’s idea. So if the original plan was that they were all part of Moira’s long game, the X-writers have clearly committed by now to go in a different, contradictory direction.
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Way of X was saying Onslaught was exacerbating societal problems that were already there, as big metaphor-for-something entities in cape comics do. He wasn’t causing them. And the solution was Nightcrawler’s Way of the Spark, by giving mutant lives purpose again in spite of immortality.
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@Skippy – Hickman did indeed say Inferno’s title was going to be Immortal X-Men, until they decided to reserve that for the upcoming ongoing. BUT they were already hinting at something called Inferno as early as the Sinister Secrets in HoX/PoX, surely before any of those decisions came to be. Which makes me wonder if the Inferno hints were originally supposed to be hints for a completely different thing.