X-Men: Hellfire Gala 2023 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-MEN: HELLFIRE GALA 2023
“The Hellfire Gala”
Writer: Gerry Duggan (with Jonathan Hickman)
Artists: Adam Kubert, Luciana Vecchio, Matteo Lolli, Russell Dauterman, Javier Pina, R.B. Silva, Joshua Cassara, Kris Anka, Pepe Larraz & Valerio Schiti
Colour artists: Rain Beredo, Ceci De La Cruz, Matthew Wilson, Erick Arciniega & Marte Gracia
Letterers: Virtual Calligraphy
Design: Tom Muller with Jay Bowen
Editor: Jordan D White
COVER / PAGE 1. A montage of assorted characters in their Gala costumes, with Nimrod and Dr Stasis looming ominously behind them.
PAGE 2. Flashback: Emma and Cyclops discuss whether to tell Ms Marvel that she is a mutant.
This is the “previous conversation” that Emma referenced in X-Men #23, when she broke the news to Scott of Ms Marvel’s death in Amazing Spider-Man #26. It’s not made clear here what prompted Emma to raise the question of telling Ms Marvel that Cerebro detects her as a mutant. But we’ll see in the next scene that Emma sees Kamala as a popular figure who would be good for mutant/human relations.
PAGES 3-6. Ms Marvel is resurrected on Krakoa, and learns that she’s a mutant.
Ms Marvel’s established back story has her as one of the people with latent Inhuman lineage whose powers emerged when the Terrigen Bomb spread a cloud of mutagenic Terrigen Mist around the Earth following 2013’s Infinity. This was the period when Marvel were trying to shoehorn the Inhumans into the role that mutants traditionally served as the Marvel Universe’s all-purpose origin story. A decade down the line, I can’t think of any other characters with that origin story who are still in use, and you can see why Marvel might want to prise Kamala away from it.
“You’re an Inhuman and a mutant. We didn’t even think that was possible.” Much of the Inhumans vs X-Men arc from 2016-2017 turns on the point that the Terrigen Mists were generally fatal to mutants.
“I understand you and the White Queen know each other from some business with the Infinity Stones.” The Infinity Wars miniseries from 2018, where Kamala and Emma were on the “cosmic Avengers” team that Loki recruited to stop Gamora from destroying the universe.
The Champions. Teen superhero team introduced in 2016. Technically I think they’re still active, but their book was cancelled in 2021. The original team included both Ms Marvel and the teenage version of Cyclops who, at the time, was time-travelling from the Silver Age as part of Brian Bendis’s All-New X-Men.
“We’ll call upon your family later, and we’ll rewrite their last few days.” Emma may not realise this, but Fallen Friend: The Death of Ms Marvel has a lot of characters attending prayers at Kamala’s mosque in commemoration of worshippers understood to have died or vanished in Amazing #26 – which, as far as the civilians are concerned, includes both Kamala and Ms Marvel. A whole bunch of superheroes show up for that, though not any of the X-Men. (Wolverine attends, but this is after he quit Krakoa in his own series.)
PAGE 7. Recap and credits.
PAGES 8-9. The Stepford Cuckoos welcome guests to the Hellfire Gala.
The Mykines Lighthouse Keeper. As in the last two years, we’re on the island of Mykines. The unnamed lighthouse keeper has appeared before, and he can be seen flirting with Jumbo Carnation in Duggan’s Marauders vol 1 #17 (on page 12).
I’m not going to attempt to identify every background character in these group shots, because we’d be here all year.
Forge’s proposals to solve housing shortages and food insecurity were previously mentioned in X-Men #22 as his suggestion for regaining the hearts and minds of the humans.
PAGE 10. Cyclops responds to the alarm at the Treehouse.
Cyclops. This leads in to the X-Men story in Free Comic Book Day 2023: Avengers / X-Men, where a mystery Orchis agent breaks into the Treehouse, poisons it, and steals the Captain Krakoa battlesuit. Cyclops is defeated and thrown from the building to his apparent death.
Juggernaut has been on the X-Men before, during the Chuck Austen run. He’s most recently been in the cast of Legion of X. The little bow tie on his armoured costume is adorable.
PAGE 11. Mystique and Destiny argue.
Kate Pryde‘s inability to use the gates was a major plot point in the first Marauders series and has never been explained. We’re being reminded of it now because it plays into the post-credits sequence.
Mystique and Destiny were also arguing in FCBD 2023: Avengers / X-Men. In that story, they’re in the Gala when Destiny stops and announces that “Something’s happening”. She says that “A soldier has returned to the field of battle and matters are more complicated.” She then asks where Rogue is, and is told that “She just flew off at mach three.” Destiny then insists that they have to leave at once, and drags Mystique away, despite Mystique’s protest that they should wait for Rogue to get back. Destiny replies that Rogue will find them when the time is right.
Since Rogue doesn’t “fly off at mach 3” until page 17, this argument is apparently earlier in the evening. Obviously, Destiny knows what’s going to happen (or picks up on it in the course of the evening) and has absolutely no intention of being around for it.
The Rogue & Gambit miniseries ended with Destiny obtaining a mind-controlled Manifold and putting him away for later. Destiny also discusses this plot thread with Rogue in X-Men #24, where she asks Rogue to trust her and insists that “Mutantdom dies with Manifold” (meaning, presumably, that if Manifold dies, then mutantdom dies too – therefore, Manifold must be kept safe at all costs). None of this is directly referenced in this issue, probably because it would make the backdoor for the cliffhanger a bit too obvious.
Romeo is Iceman’s Inhuman love interest, most recently seen in the Marvel’s Voices Infinity Comic Iceman arc from last year.
PAGES 12-13. Professor X talks with Ms Marvel.
Xavier broadly agrees with Emma about the desirability of Ms Marvel coming out as a mutant but he’s a lot more sympathetic to her needing time to decide. By the standards of the last few years this is a relatively friendly version of Xavier – he even takes off his helmet for her, and Rasputin IV stresses its significance when she appears – perhaps because Kamala looks up to him as a superhero authority figure, and he’s getting to do his old teacher/mentor routine with someone who trusts him.
Rogue’s Terrigen poisoning is a storyline from Duggan’s Uncanny Avengers run in 2015-16.
PAGE 14. Rasputin IV speaks to Ms Marvel.
“I have come from a future with gifts of the five, but not the Five.” Presumably, Rasputin is referring to the fact that she’s a chimera of five mutants.
PAGE 15. Dmitri and Wyn.
This page is a trailer for Jonathan Hickman’s upcoming G.O.D.S., and it’s credited as being co-written by Hickman. Wyn debuted in the G.O.D.S. story in FCBD: Avengers / X-Men, a vignette where he meets Dr Strange on a rooftop and they exchange some cryptic comments about good and evil. Dmitri is new.
For reasons which aren’t made clear, Wyn asks Magik whether, at the start of the Krakoan era, “one of you stood at the top of the world and told a gathering of humans” that “mankind had new gods now”. He’s referring to Magneto’s address to the human ambassadors in House of X #1. Magik wasn’t there for that scene, but evidently either Magneto or the Stepford Cuckoos have relayed it to her.
PAGES 16-17. The Avengers leave to deal with an emergency.
Kingpin and Typhoid Mary arrived on Krakoa in issue #20 and haven’t really done anything yet; this issue suggests that Kingpin will be playing a bigger part going forward.
The Avengers are leaving to appear in the “Uncanny Avengers” story in FCBD: Avengers / X-Men, in which Captain Krakoa attacks the Capitol – citing the same “new gods now” line mentioned in the previous scene. Per that story, Captain America declined his invitation to the Hellfire Gala his year; Orchis try to assassinate him, and Rogue goes to help.
“The rumours of a civil war on Arakko are beginning to spread.” In current issues of X-Men Red.
Sebastian Shaw is not at the Gala because, presumably, he’s been tipped off about what’s about to happen.
PAGES 18-20. Meet the new X-Men team!
Cyclops and Jean are standing down, because Talon and Synch have plenty of experience – subjectively, they’re centuries old thanks to their time in the Vault. The newly elected team are Synch, Talon, Cannonball, Prodigy, Frenzy, Dazzler, Jubilee and the Juggernaut.
PAGES 21-22. Oh. Never mind.
Nimrod smashes down from space and kills… if not all of them, certainly most of them. We’ll see later that Synch, Talon and Juggernaut definitely survive, but Dazzler, Cannonball, Prodigy, Jubilee and Frenzy are all graphically killed on panel. So right now, there is no X-Men – or if there is, it’s just those three.
PAGES 23-27. Everyone fights Nimrod.
Magik can’t teleport the human guests to safety because her powers are blocked by nanotech. That happened while she was fighting a Stark Sentinel and got a small cut on her face in X-Men #23.
Iceman is seemingly killed – although he’s got a solo book starting next week, which suggests Orchis are jumping the gun in proclaiming him Definitely Dead. Oddly, the two characters shown reacting to his death are Romeo and Kate Pryde, who was dating him immediately before he came out as gay. (Christian Frost, or Jean Grey as his oldest friend present, would have been more obvious choices.)
PAGE 28. The Stark Sentinels attack.
The X-Men’s fight against the single Stark Sentinel was in X-Men #23.
“Jean, can you reach Storm?” Yet again, Storm is somewhere else when the big disaster is happening. In fairness, there’s a civil war on.
PAGES 29-31. Dr Stasis, Karima Shapandar and M.O.D.O.K. arrive.
Stasis infiltrated the pharmaceutical factories in a subplot during last year’s Hellfire Gala, and X-Men #22 revealed that millions of humans would have taken the drugs and be susceptible to M.O.D.O.K.’s device. To be honest, it doesn’t speak brilliantly about Krakoan production standards that nobody noticed this in a whole year.
Hordeculture. Orchis obtained the details of how to hack the Krakoan gates from Hordeculture’s Opal Vetiver in X-Men #22.
PAGES 32-33. Kate Pryde takes out a Stark Sentinel.
Her good old fashioned technology-disruption power still works – and again, we’re reminded about the gates thing.
Kingpin seems genuinely concerned about Mary. Note that Karima dismisses him as a “human” even though she’s in Orchis – Karima is more interested in AI.
PAGES 34-36. The fight brings down the tower.
Either Juggernaut is just a big powerful thing that Nimrod can chuck around, or his magic is supposed to make it particularly easy for him to be thrown through stuff.
PAGES 37-40. Jean Grey is murdered.
This sort of “I am extremely powerful and you can’t stop me doing what I want” speech is something Jean has delivered to a number of villains over the Duggan run – this time she’s explicitly announcing her intention to alter Orchis’s minds – but this time Orchis have seen her coming, and Moira gets rid of her. Moira seems to view this as revenge on Charles as much as anything to do with the wider agenda.
Orchis’ supply of Blightswill was previously established in Bishop: War College. It cancels mutant powers.
PAGES 41-43. Professor X surrenders and freezes all the mutants present.
When he tries this stunt on a worldwide level later, the trained X-Men are mostly able to resist, but presumably it’s a different matter when he’s this close by. Some of them do manage to resist the direct instruction to go through the gate, even at this range.
PAGE 44. Dr Stasis dictates terms.
“Right now, they [the gates] all point off-Earth.” Xavier says later that they’re meant to point to Arakko, but Stasis doesn’t actually say this. We’ll come back to this.
“Nightcrawler just went on an assassination spree.” In Before the Fall – Sons of X (under mind control, obviously).
“A mutant clone caused an inferno in New York again.” The Dark Web crossover – the clone is Madelyne Pryor. This one actually doesn’t have anything to do with Orchis.
“The first time a returned mutant is found on Earth, we will kill a human…” The word “returned” seems to be significant here, since obviously some mutants are still on Earth at the end of the story, and it seems unlikely that Orchis are planning to kill an increasing number of humans every time the mutant Avengers appear in public. With the nature of exponential growth, they’d run out of humans rather quickly.
PAGES 45-46. Dying Jean gives Angelica her new mission.
The thinking here is that since Firestar has always been something of an outsider to the X-Men, she’s the one who can be passed off as a secret informant and therefore infiltrate Orchis, with a bit of judicious manipulation of Stasis’ mind.
PAGE 47. Professor X orders mutantkind through the gates.
“Go, my X-Men” is obviously an inversion of “To me, my X-Men.”
PAGES 48-49. Mother Righteous claims Atlantic Krakoa.
Page 48 panel 1 is part of the departure montage, with Nightcrawler – who quit Krakoa after Before the Fall – Sons of X – managing to resist using the “Red triangle” psi technique. That’s why it was brought up again recently in X-Men Red.
Krakoa’s Atlantic outpost has been mentioned a few times in the Krakoan era but we’ve never really seen much of it. At any rate, Mother Righteous apparently gains power from collecting things which have some sort of iconic quality to them. But, for whatever reason, she’s preserving the Atlantic version of Krakoa. No doubt we’ll find out why in due course.
PAGE 50. Mutants worldwide file through the gates.
The mutants in Madripoor will doubtless include all of the ex-Morlocks who set up home there in Marauders.
Only Kate and Emma are expressly shown resisting at the Gala itself.
If everyone’s walking to the nearest gate, how long must this be taking?
PAGE 51. Data page – more about the red triangle protocol.
The alias “Hazel Kendal” for Emma Frost comes from Duggan’s Invincible Iron Man #6.
PAGES 52-53. Jean continues to brief Firestar.
Of note here is the appearance of Curse, who died in X-Men Green and has apparently managed to get herself resurrected on Krakoa despite being, shall we say, a low priority due to her innate nuisance factor. Curse’s resistance to psychic control is part of her powers, as established in the X-Men Green arc, which is why she’s able to object to Xavier’s directions.
PAGE 54. Jean bids farewell to Cyclops.
Cyclops has survived his fall, which is pretty remarkable, though you have to wonder what sort of treatment he can expect at the local hospitals.
The Treehouse is on fire, and presumably we won’t be seeing it again except as a ruin.
PAGE 55. Jean bids farewell to Wolverine.
Consistent with the modern reading that she loved him too – you could argue that she wants to be in contact with Wolverine in her dying moments, but equally it might just mean that Cyclops was the higher priority in case she didn’t have time to get to both.
It’s not clear where Wolverine is, but he quit Krakoa in this week’s Wolverine and evidently he’s been at a gate somewhere, resisting the command to go through. Jean specifically wakes him up from his trance – possibly so that he can defend himself against the Orchis soldiers who might otherwise have been able to pick him up and chuck him through the gateway. Or maybe she just wants the satisfaction of letting him kill them.
PAGES 56-58. Destiny tells Mystique to listen to Professor X, and Exodus bundles the Five through a gate.
Note that Destiny does go through the gate, which tends to suggest that her powers tell her that whatever lies on the other side is acceptable – at least in the long run. Mystique refuses to co-operate and falls to her apparent death while trying to resist Professor X without the benefit of his training. But… Dr Stasis does point out that her body is taken away by the sea. You’d think he’d know how this works.
M.O.D.O.K. is pleased that the Atlantic Island has disappeared off the satellites, which presumably means Mother Righteous told Orchis she was going to do that – otherwise they’d be puzzled.
PAGES 59-60. Lourdes teleports the remaining mutants away.
Kingpin sides with the mutants against Orchis – he’s married to a mutant, after all, and the relationship appears genuine. He’s duly taken away with the group.
PAGES 61-62. Lourdes dies from the effort.
Lourdes’ death here is an echo of her original death at the (human) Hellfire Gala in Classic X-Men #7.
We never get a clear group shot of exactly who’s in this remaining band, but it seems to include Emma Frost, Kate Pryde, Synch, Talon, Bishop, Psylocke (Kwannon), Rasputin IV, Daken, Aurora, Northstar, Angel, Forge and Ms Marvel, along with a few characters who aren’t easily identifiable in the Hellfire costumes. Firestar remains behind to begin her new cover. Quite how Ms Marvel managed to resist Xavier is not obvious, but maybe Emma helped.
PAGE 63. Orchis celebrate.
Looks like we can add Juggernaut to the list of the dead. Again, Moira seems preoccupied with revenge on Professor X.
PAGES 64-65. The remaining X-Men find themselves locked out of the gates.
“So that’s how that looked.” Kate is referencing her own attempt to walk through a Krakoan gate in Marauders vol 1 #1.
PAGE 66. Orchis kill all the humans at the Gala.
Well, of course they do. They’re witnesses.
PAGES 67-72. Rogue rescues Professor X.
“You invited Nathaniel Essex onto the island, and he almost ended all life on Earth.” Sins of Sinister, which the compromised Quiet Council decided to make known to the general public in Immortal X-Men #12.
Professor X claims here that the mutants were supposed to be going to Arakko (which he was never told on panel) and that since he can’t sense any of them, he assumes that they’re all dead. Since Arakko is another planet, this depends on him being able to reach it using the previously-established telepathic relay system. Professor X doesn’t seem to be saying that he actually sensed them die – surely if that had been the case he’d have picked up on it while they were going through the gates. (Mind you, he apparently didn’t notice that he was losing contact with them as they went through the gates either. Maybe he just wasn’t able to pay attention to that sort of thing.)
The very fact that Destiny chose to go through the gates – having previously spent several issues teeing up a cosmic-powered teleporter – rather suggests that everyone will be back in the end, and that the reason Xavier can’t sense them on Arakko is that they went somewhere else. But we’ll see.
Xavier returning to Krakoa on his own (and the “Population: One” caption) seems to echo him going to live on Genosha after it was reduced to rubble by Sentinels. And is the population really one? What about Krakoa itself? What about Mr Sinister and Fenris, down in the Pit?
PAGES 73-76. Trailers, which are particularly keen to stress that Ms Marvel is an X-book now.
Oddly, the list of upcoming books includes Ghost Rider #17 (which is part of a crossover with Wolverine) but not this week’s Invincible Iron Man #8, which picks up Emma Frost’s story as she turns to Iron Man for help with the Stark Sentinels. Iron Man winds up bundling her into his armour in order to get her to safety from a Stark Sentinel, and the issue ends with her being rocketed to safety against her will.
PAGES 77-78. Kate falls through a gate.
Apparently Kate is now the only person who can use the gates. This one takes her to the Krakoan embassy in Jerusalem, which is where Magneto addressed the ambassadors in House of X #1.
Salomé H.: Cosign from me as well. Austen’s gross, misogynistic sexualization of female characters in addition to his penchant for poisoning characters and setting them back by years (e.g., Angel, Nightcrawler, Polaris, Havok, Husk, Stacy X, Iceman…) have no equals.
And the problem with the bad vs boring argument in this case is that the wholesale damage Austen did to large swaths of A- and B-listers persisted for years after his run ended, to the point where there was little to no appetite to use certain characters for a period or address their regressive arcs head on. “Bad but interesting writing” isn’t worth that trade-off.
Duggan, by contrast, hasn’t (yet) written anything as actively repulsive, and his fantastic rendering of Synch and organic elevation to first string is still a minor miracle. And while I’m sympathetic and even in accord with most of the measured criticism of Duggan in these parts, it is nowhere near comparable to the nuclear wasteland of Austen’s peerless run.
@Moonstar Dynasty: In all fairness, you might be giving Austen a bit too much credit there – it was only two or three years after him that Carey picked up Iceman, and Brubaker got Polaris and Havok, and they both largely proceeded as if Austen’s run never happened.
And of the heaps of garbage the author of “She Lies with Angels” unloaded on us, the only things that really stuck after he left were Azazel, Polaris being Magneto’s daughter, and the mess with Cassandra Nova (because no one picked up on the notion that she was meant to be Ernst). All bad, but I don’t know that I’d say he left more of a mark than that.
I know I read the first few issues of the Brian Wood run, and that it sicked, but I don’t remember a single thing about it other than the cast being all women.
Re: Duggan vs. Lobdell- I agree that their usual quality is similar, but here’s the main difference I’ve noticed: Lobdell set up plot points he never resolved, while Duggan resolves plot points too easily and quickly. I get the impression they’re both “yes men” for their respective editors, however.
Wasn’t it Wood’s run where they happen to find a Chinese baby in Hungary, and Jubilee just decides to keep him?
It was.
@Diana
“He’s essentially telling his critics to go elsewhere.”
“Essentially” is doing a hell of a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. He’s pointing out folks -can- go elsewhere.
@ylU: Except they can’t. That’s kind of the point. There isn’t going to be a single contemporary X-book for the rest of 2023 that isn’t Fall of X.
@Mike Loughlin: “Re: Duggan vs. Lobdell- I agree that their usual quality is similar, but here’s the main difference I’ve noticed: Lobdell set up plot points he never resolved, while Duggan resolves plot points too easily and quickly. I get the impression they’re both “yes men” for their respective editors, however.”
This is more of what I was getting at, and Lobdell does have his share of really unremarkable stuff post-AoA.
Unpopular opinion maybe but I feel Lobdell was more uneven than people remember. Remember the sucky post-Davis Excalibur issues? Magneto reverting into a cackling sadistic villain for Fatal Attraction? The equally gross and bizarre implication that Legion raped his own mom after turning back in time? the general unremarkable-ness of his post-AoA material?
As for bringing up Austen: I was mostly thinking of X-Men Green, which was horrible.
@Diana: “There isn’t going to be a single contemporary X-book for the rest of 2023 that isn’t Fall of X.”
Yeah, that a big part of the problem – it’s his work that’s setting up the status quo for the majority of new/ongoing books.
But really, what gets me the most is, I cannot think of any instance where an author defensively brings up how many other people are enjoying their work that doesn’t come off as simplistically dismissing criticism.
I’m no fan of Duggan, but I can’t blame him for his statement given the horrendous amounts of abuse creators get when their work on a given franchise is considered sub-par.
Yes, he should be able to shoulder some robust and well-thought out criticism, but given that so much hateful madness is probably peppered in with that (that’s not a dig at anyone here, just general internet zeal), I don’t blame him for not spending an age on a better response that will get shredded regardless.
@Miyamoris: yeah, Lobdell’s bad is very bad. I think there’s about an equal amount of pretty good Lobdell stories (Generation X w/ Bachalo, AoA, the low-key one-offs like Uncanny 297 & X-Men 8), but he usually falls in the middle, at least to me. I agree that the average quality of his writing took a dip post-AoA, but I think the post-Onslaught quiet issue was one of his best.
Austin’s run was a historic misfire, but I stayed with it and only tapped out at the end of “She Lies with Angels.” I didn’t like most of it, but I kept coming back to see what craziness would pop up next. The same can’t be said for the runs of Brubaker, Fraction, Wood, or most other writers of the last 20 years.
@Miyamoris: I suppose we should be glad he didn’t wheel out that old chestnut, “my books sell”
“my books sell”
Grant Morrison used that one from time to time as well.
I don’t subscribe to this “Austen is better because we remember him” nonsense. By that logic, Hitler is better than every other German chancellor, or pretty much almost every other world leader.
“Lobdell set up plot points he never resolved, while Duggan resolves plot points too easily and quickly.”
I don’t see unresolved plot points in corporate comics as a fault of the writer. I’d be hardpressed to name a series or run with dozens of issues that didn’t have its dropped subplots. What’s more important is whether the individual issues that move those subplots forward are engaging.
Like the whole Joseph subplot, and whether or not he’s an amnesiac and de-aged Magneto, was handled fairly well under Lobdell. The lack of resolution under Lobdell was disappointing, but Lobdell hadn’t gotten to that point yet, so I don’t blame him for not resolving it.
@Josie- Lobdell has admitted to tossing out subplots without knowing what to do with them.
@Diana
Duggan’s comment is from like two years ago, way before Fall was on anyone’s horizon.
“Lobdell has admitted to tossing out subplots without knowing what to do with them.”
I think that’s a bit different than a dropped plot point. Lobdell was known for making things up on the fly (see Onslaught), which is a bit different than introducing something and never getting around to finishing it.
As I understand it, Lobdell’s general approach to long-term plotting was simply to make it up as he went along, not least because that made it much easier to incorporate editorial mandates. He had a reasonably clear idea of what direction he was going in but not necessarily of where it would take him.
In all fairness, there seems to be a fairly solid consensus that during the time of Onslaught there was no clear direction to solve the plot.
Lobdell did what he had to do. Having a better writer in his place would probably not change much.
I don’t want to give Lobdell all that much leeway because, y’know, sex pest and all, but let’s also recall that the mid-to-late-’90s had ridiculous amounts of editorial interference – Kelly and Seagle could probably attest to that.
The editorial interference in the Seagle & Kelly run (which I really liked at the time) was blatant- all of a sudden, the new characters were mostly gone and Gambit and the Excalibur characters were back, for example- and disappointing. The runs lasted about a year, and feel unfinished.
Lobdell’s run reads like a bunch of stuff thrown at the walls that mostly petered out. I know Bob Harras was a very hands-on editor (to the detriment of the writers, based on what writers other than Lobdell have stated), so he shares the blame. Be that as it may, I stand by my assessment that Lobdell (who had many more issues to work with than Seagle & Kelly) didn’t resolve plot points throughout his run.
@Josie: disagree about the Joseph plot, I thought it was poorly handled from jump. Like everything, mileages vary…
“Austen’s run had some parts that were actually quite alright (Juggernaut’s redemption, Northstar’s inclusion on the team), but honestly, I have to say that even his… let’s call it randomly insane approach to plot twists and characterization was at least memorable.
It’s been 20 years, and that run is still alive in memory. It’s not a good memory for the most part, but it is alive, while tons of comics from just a few years ago are dead. Nobody cares one way or another for most of the Utopia, Regenesis or ‘we live in Limbo now’ eras and books they were comprised of.”
I think other folks have addressed this in different ways already, but I personally hate the idea that the utter hideousness of his run imparts it with some kind of intrinsic value for being just that: distinctively bad.
And I think we all know when we’re talking about Austen, we’re not talking about conceptualization, plotting, or characterization specifically – we’re talking about everything, down to most nauseating minutae of dialogue and the nasty political implications of the lot.
Whoever decided to pair him with Sean Phillips for his Northstar issue was kind of brilliant: the style of each is so dissimilar that the tonal discrepancy it causes benefits the whole story.
Even then, do we want to go there? Northstar is a superhero who is GAY and a successful entrepreneur that is GAY and Xavier can only be interested in approaching him because he’s GAY and the child knows he’s GAY and then explodes on his GAY face.
It packed a lot of punch, in isolation. But I don’t believe we’d be having the same conversation if the visual storytelling hadn’t grounded the loud cliches and histrionics.
There’s another major issue to this line of thinking: Austen was as remarkable as he was because he was, for the most part, an Anti-Morrisson. Heck, for all the comparisons we might make amidst Lobdell/Duggan/Austen, Austen was the equivalent of a Lobdell comeback:
Retract on the politics of weird; streamline the basic narrative situation; reestablish the team as proper spandex superheroes; tell us who to root for; readjust the scale; reemphasize the personal drama; play the old hits.
That, to me at least, seems to be the primary backdrop for any degree of particular attention Austen’s run might still draw.
Brubaker et all were left in the ungrateful position of trying to make meaningful stories through a franchise that was not a priority, and the most recent peak of which had as much to do with ruptures as it did with continuity.
That doesn’t argue in favour or against their work, per se – but they were working with vary variable boundaries of what X-Men Stories were ultimately about. Is Polaris channeling the ghosts of Genova, or is Nurse Annie being a bit of a predator again?
Claremont wrote in counterpoint to Morrison, and that created some exciting dynamics. After most of the reverse engineering of Morrison’s run is done, without any kind of global shift in direction other than “things are a bit shit, yeah?”, it’s harder to gage what to do.
Duggan is not in that position: he is part of the core team of writers running a line completely bound together by a massive reboot to the concept of the X-Men itself. That’s why it’s so disappointing when he fails to capture some of the massive opportunities afforded by the Krakoa era: this should be, by definition. ripe for experimentation.
…
I have no idea where this rant was meant to end.
But definitely with a sense that the reason more recent conversations about Lobdell’s run are more lenient, despite all of its problems, is because the deeply discrepant degrees of creative freedom each writer confronted (or benefited from) have only become clear in retrospect.
…
Yeah. That!
Austen came across as a fairly nice enough guy when he appeared on Cerebro recently, and his overarching plot ideas (the mutant bloodlines/tribes) didn’t sound completely dreadful… And there are things in some of Hama’s X-books that are just as silly as exploding communion wafers. I didn’t read them, though, so I can’t speak to the execution.
@Karl_H: the biggest difference is that Larry Hama’s Wolverine run is awesome, even though it’s not totally consistent. Hama has credit with the readership that Austen never earned.
@Salome H: your comment about Duggan wasting the potential of Krakoa is a good summation of why I don’t trust his writing, even if I enjoy some of the individual issues or scenes.
In terms of Austen: while bad sometimes beats boring, his run definitely sucked. I’m not going back through the comments, but I think we all agree on that.
I think way back when, Paul wrote that Austin’s run was full of good ideas, badly done. Twenty years later, that still seems right.
I mean, Romeo and Juliet really should have worked as an X-Men story, Northstar turned out to be a good addition to the team, and the Juggernaut’s redemption arc seems to have stuck. The execution was utter shit – and, even accepting that getting Nightcrawler out of the priesthood was probably necessary, the less said about “The Draco” the better – but the basic ideas weren’t terrible.
@Talibak- Fabian Nicieza had already suggested the Juggernaut was considering reforming in X-Men Forever.
@Michael: But it was Austen who actually wrote the redemption arc.
Are new posts appearing?
1.
Looking back over the issue and thinking about Moira. Under Hickman, she was one of the most calculating planners, armed with a knowledge of future possibilities maybe greater than even Destiny, always working toward an increasingly elusive goal. Now, it’s just SHE REALLY MAD.
Has losing her rebirth ability made her abandon solving the problem she’s spent ten lifetimes working on? Is there a conceivable way that what she’s doing now is a logical ‘next thing to try’ in the series of attempts she’s made to fix things?
2.
Maybe her plan this life somehow involves fading into the background and building a batshit crazy robot of herself and manipulating outcomes until she gets an opportunity to become that Dominion everyone’s all worked up about? (I forget, do Dominions transcend Moira lives/timelines?)
And maybe Hickman leaving the books was just a big fakeout and HE’S GOING TO COME BACK AND WRITE THE BIG MOIRA/DOMINION STORY THAT WRAPS EVERYTHING UP!!!! AND… AND…
2.
I can’t post the second half for some reason.
I’m not sure what the issue is. For some reason your post triggered the spam filter.
“Has losing her rebirth ability made her abandon solving the problem she’s spent ten lifetimes working on? Is there a conceivable way that what she’s doing now is a logical ‘next thing to try’ in the series of attempts she’s made to fix things?”
Karl_H: that’s a really good question, and it feels like the answer just isn’t there. Her escalation into full blown cartoon villain territory can maybe be made to make sense by the complete panic of mortality, and a radical loss of control over the timeline itself.
Even then, that would need to be accounted for through proper time spent with the character and figuring out her status quo – and with the exception if Dr. Stasis and Nimrod himself, all these personal histories have been completely overturned or ignored in favor of a new supervillain team.
And it’s very hard to imagine Moira wouldn’t have, from this new standing as a master strategist, some kind of back up plan in case the status quo broke as bad as it did in Inferno…?
Muir island, for one, which seems to have disappeared for a good while now: why would she not forge any partnerships or projects whatsoever outside of Orchis?
Maybe I’m missing something, myself.
2.
Maybe her plan this life somehow involves fading into the background and building a batshit crazy robot of herself and manipulating outcomes until she gets an opportunity to become that Dominion everyone’s all worked up about? (I forget, do Dominions transcend Moira lives/timelines?)
And maybe Hickman leaving the books was just a big fakeout and HE’S GOING TO COME BACK AND WRITE THE BIG MOIRA/DOMINION STORY THAT WRAPS EVERYTHING UP!!!! AND… AND…
Just for the record , Jubilee’s adopted baby , Shingo , is Japanese , not Chinese , or at least he’s confirmed half-Japanese (for all we know he could be “Hapa” half-whatever) his biological father was a Japanese super-soldier-type assassin codenamed pretentiously “The Future” who Brian Wood tried to make into the final big-bad-boss of the final story* of his run (before he got MeToo’d for being a worse sexpest than Scott Lobdell, like his BFF Warren Ellis) who conquered the version of the X-mansion at that time (he wanted to retrieve his son from the custody of Jubilee) with an army of generic goons and vampiric monster vineplants who later killed him when they turned on him anyway (it was obvious the surprise twist is due to a rushed ending because BW suddenly quit/was fired)
* it was all nothing but hype , since it started big (Wildchild/Sabretooth-wannabe Tion and Bling/Mercury/Pixie/Armor-fusion Sprite were mortally wounded in an opening salvo sneak attack , but barely survived due to being given emergency monsterplant transplants that should have had an effect on them , but this plot point was immediately forgotten entirely by everyone the moment that BW quit/was fired) but rapidly ultimately fizzled to sheer inconsequential irrelevance , in large part because the art on it was seriously mediocre , like a bad version of Ashley Wood tsk tsk tsk
Correction : like a bad version of Sean Philips , the artist who did most of Joe Casey’s run , not Ashley Wood , I got the two confused .