The Complete Moira: Part 2
Last time we covered Moira’s history before the recruitment of the X-Men. This time, I’m going to go through her appearances from there through to her first published appearance, near the start of the Claremont run. This is, if anything, even more piecemeal than part 1 – that’s largely because these are mostly one-off stories published in no particular order. It settles down once we get to her debut.
Classic X-Men #43 (back-up) by Chris Claremont, Mike Collins & Joe Rubinstein (“Flights of Angels”, January 1990). This is the back-up strip which appeared alongside the reprint of X-Men #137, the climax of the Dark Phoenix Saga. The first page has a montage of flashbacks to the life of Jean Grey. They include an unexplained panel of young Jean Grey protecting Charles Xavier from an unseen attacker, while Moira bundles him to safety.
This ties into the vexed question of what on earth Charles and Jean were doing together before Jean joined the X-Men. X-Men #1 (1963) shows Jean arriving at the school with the rest of the team already formed, and seemingly not knowing much about it. Claremont established a back story where Xavier actually met her first, long before the other X-Men, and helped her to control her powers. What he didn’t establish was any good reason for the two of them to conceal that fact from the rest of the team. But occasionally he hinted at some sort of secret pre-X-Men adventuring career for Charles and Jean, which presumably contains the answer – and this flashback seems to be part of that. The most explicit reference is in Uncanny X-Men #381 (2000), where Jean talks about finding a secret cave full of treasure “before the founding of the X-Men, during a period when Charles Xavier and I worked alone.” It remains an undeveloped part of continuity, but apparently Moira’s involved in it somewhere.
Uncanny X-Men #273 by Chris Claremont and various artists (“Whose House Is This, Anyway?”, February 1991) Along similar lines, this story has a brief flashback in which Jean recalls Charles showing her Cerebro for the first time. Jean looks like a child. Moira is there, and for some reason she expresses doubts about the wisdom of the whole exercise – both the concept of being able to track mutants anywhere in the world, and the decision to involve young Jean. This scepticism about Cerebro seems odd in the light of the Hickman retcon, but maybe it’s all for Jean’s benefit.
X-Men: Origins – Emma Frost by Valerie D’Orazio, Karl Moline & Rick Magyar (“Will & Love”, May 2010). There’s room for debate about whether the X-Men: Origins one-shots are actually in continuity. Most of them fit well enough, but a couple of them are completely haywire. Emma Frost doesn’t pose any massive problems, though. It includes a scene of Moira and Charles visiting teenage Emma at home, shortly after her powers emerge, and trying to recruit her as a student. She tells them to get lost.
Uncanny X-Men #300 by Scott Lobdell, John Romita Jr & Dan Green (“Legacies”, May 1993). This has a flashback in which Charles recalls discussing his newly-formed X-Men with Moira. He insists that it’s a school; she calls them a “mutant strike force” and teases him about naming the team after himself. He also tells her about three possible future X-Men that he’s already identified – Storm, Colossus and Nightcrawler. Moira then tells him that Interpol has learned that Magneto is investigating the security arrangements at Cape Citadel (which he attacks in issue #1).
This fits with the common take on Moira as a sympathetic sounding board who’s sceptical about the superhero trappings of the X-Men – broadly, a supportive ally on the topic of the dream, but deeply unconvinced about the wisdom of dressing up in funny costumes and fighting people. Under the Hickman regime, this may be because she’s seen Charles going through the superhero team route before, and she’s waiting for him to realise that it doesn’t work. Quite why this flashback has scientist Moira relaying Interpol intelligence is a bit of a mystery. The HoxPox retcon may help to explain her gathering information that her role wouldn’t otherwise seem to justify.
There’s some vagueness as to how much involvement Moira had when it came to recruiting the original X-Men. Xavier’s recruitment drive is shown in a series of 1960s back-up strips, and since she’s not in them, any role has to be backstage. This flashback suggests that Moira is only just finding out who the X-Men are, but she ought to at least recognise Jean. The Emma Frost one-shot has her actively helping recruitment. And in Chaos War: X-Men #1, Claremont has Moira’s ghost say that she vetted all of the X-Men except for Jean – but obviously, HoxPox has retconned away Moira’s afterlife appearances. (Hardly the first time this has happened. But we’ll get back to that.)
X-Men: Legacy vol 1 #208 by Mike Carey and various artists (“From Genesis to Revelations”, February 2008). Among its many flashbacks, this has a scene of Charles showing Moira the blueprints for the Danger Room. Again, Moira expresses concern that Charles isn’t really training young mutants but developing a private army.
Moira has very limited interaction with the X-Men during their 1960s run (unsurprisingly, since she hadn’t been created yet). But X-Men: Deadly Genesis reveals that she opens a facility called Muir-MacTaggert Research & Development, a few hours from the X-Men’s school; Charles helps to design it. This is the home of the Mutant Genome Project (or “Project: Mutant”), where Karl Lykos briefly worked before becoming Sauron. Lykos’s involvement doesn’t seem to affect the plot of Deadly Genesis at all, so presumably it was just an attempt to nail Muir-MacTaggert onto a previously-mentioned part of Xavier’s back story.
Deadly Genesis suggests that Moira is spending extended periods at Muir-MacTaggert in New York, which begs the question of who’s looking after poor Kevin back at Muir Isle. It seems unlikely that she just locks him in his holding cell on his own for weeks at a time, but you never know. We never hear of any other staff from this period; maybe something awful befalls them at the hands of Kevin.
Deadly Genesis #4 says that “right after” the X-Men find Alex Summers, Moira helps Charles to do some tests on him, which is when she first meets Cyclops/Scott Summers. Their encounter is removed from Cyclops’ memory after Giant-Size X-Men #1, but we’ll come to that. Alex first appeared in X-Men vol 1 #54, in which Scott has already met him and already knows that he’s a mutant – something Alex doesn’t discover until later in the story. Presumably that was established in the tests mentioned in Deadly Genesis. Alex’s visit to Moira must take place before issue #53 (since after that, Xavier is meant to be dead, and he remains absent for the rest of the Silver Age run).
X-Men: The Hidden Years #10 by John Byrne & Tom Palmer (“Home is Where the Hurt is…”, September 2000). Jean has recently been to space and had a first brush with Phoenix, so Charles takes her to Muir Isle for Moira to run some tests. Jean worries about why Muir Isle is being kept secret even from the other X-Men, and Moira gives her the usual arguments about security that you’d expect from a story that’s taking this at face value. We’ll come back to the question of what’s so secret about Muir Isle in future instalments. For now, suffice to say that this doesn’t quite contradict Deadly Genesis, since that story makes Cyclops aware of Moira, but not of Muir Isle.
X-Men: Deadly Genesis by Ed Brubaker, Trevor Hairsine & Kris Justice (November 2005 to May 2006). This miniseries contains a string of flashbacks and back-up stories, in which Moira recruits a group of her own students and brings them to Muir-MacTaggert Research & Development: Petra, Darwin, Sway & Kid Vulcan. For those who aren’t familiar, Vulcan turns out to be the third Summers brother, and a pretty important character; Darwin has later stints in the X-Men and X-Factor; and the other two are cannon fodder. Moira runs training sessions with her four students, and Kid Vulcan is particularly keen on the idea of being a superhero one day, but for whatever reason she keeps them separate from Charles’ X-Men. Maybe she’s thinking of them as spares; or maybe she just doesn’t want all her eggs in one basket.
Charles visits to watch one of the training sessions, and Scott is brought along to train with Kid Vulcan – again, Scott’s memory of this will be wiped later. One of the back-up strips also shows Charles and Moira having another stab at recruiting Emma Frost. By this point Emma has left home and become a Hellfire Club dancer. Once again, she tells them to get lost, and Charles erases her memories of the encounter. Moira is generally a bit disturbed by Charles’ casual track-covering (though it’s in character for him in the Silver Age time frame), no doubt because on some level she just has to trust him to keep his word to stay out of her mind.
We’ll return to Deadly Genesis shortly, but first…
X-Men vol 2 #2 by Chris Claremont, Jim Lee and Scott Williams (“Firestorm”, November 1991). This has a flashback in which Magneto – who was de-aged to infancy in Defenders vol 1 #16 – is handed over to Moira’s care on Muir Isle. Moira finds indications of an instability in Magneto’s central nervous system, suggesting that his powers may cause mental illness. Moira hopes to modify Magneto’s DNA to eliminate the instability, and then use the same process to cure Proteus. Note that while this idea only becomes central to the plot in 1991, Moira actually talks about it as soon as Muir Isle comes on the scene in the late 70s – but more of that in the next post.
X-Men vol 2 #1-3 establish that Moira does indeed try to use this process on Magneto, and also that it doesn’t work (or at least not for long). Those issues are ambiguous as to whether Moira already knows that the process is ineffective, but the plot only really makes sense if she finds out during the story. If so, the next few years – including the entire stint when Moira and Magneto first become allies – takes place when Moira privately believes that she has done something to alter his mind and make him more rational.
X-Men Unlimited vol 1 #2 by Fabian Nicieza, Jan Duursema and various inkers (“Point Blank”, September 1993). As an addendum to the previous entry, this has a brief flashback of Moira reading a book while toddler Magneto plays in a rockpool. The emphasis is slightly different here: as well as altering Magneto’s DNA, Moira hopes to simply raise him better this time around. The implication is that this is her second chance at motherhood, and a chance to avoid a repeat of Proteus – though her idea of what motherhood actually involves remains a bit suspect. Getting a second chance as a parent turns out to be a recurring theme in Moira’s stories, including the undertone that this is less about Proteus and more about proving something about (and to) herself.
Though Moira isn’t in it, Giant-Size Fantastic Four #4 (February 1975) is worth mentioning. It came out a few months before Giant-Size X-Men #1, it’s by Chris Claremont and Len Wein, and it’s the debut of Jamie Madrox. In that story, Madrox is a deranged naïf who has been living alone on a Kansas farm since his parents died six years ago, and stumbles into New York looking for help when his powers go out of control. (The implication is that Madrox has been completely isolated for six years, so I suppose we’re meant to take it that he’s been subsistence farming rather than selling his produce.) Charles Xavier shows up to calm him down and cart him away, promising to “cure his madness and teach him how to cope with his power”.
The next we hear of Madrox is in X-Men #104, which offhandedly mentions that Moira left him in charge of Muir Isle while she was away – so evidently he was cured pretty quickly and dropped off on Muir Isle for safekeeping, perhaps because he’s more used to the isolated life of the island. X-Men #126 mentions that he declines an offer to join the X-Men, and he’ll remain a background supporting character until he finally joins X-Factor in 1991.
X-Men: Deadly Genesis (cont.) And so we reach the massive retcon of 2006.
With the regular X-Men captured by Krakoa in Giant-Size X-Men #1, Charles asks to borrow Moira’s students. Despite her misgivings, she gives them the choice of whether to go (perhaps because she always viewed them as the understudies). Predictably, the hero-obsessed Kid Vulcan signs up the whole group, despite Moira encouraging him to reflect on it. Charles gives the makeshift “X-Men” psychic training which feels to them like months of work but in fact is merely hours. Moira protests about children being put at risk, but Charles insists that they need to know how to fight. Understandably, Moira is furious to learn later that her students have all apparently been killed in action, and amazed that Charles has responded by erasing Cyclops’ memory of events.
Moira records a tearful video diary about all this, in which she tells herself to “remember what a total and utter bastard Charles Xavier really is”, even though she knows she will forgive him. The whole story very much positions Moira as a frustrated and ineffective moral compass, and a victim of his manipulative single-mindedness. Tonally, that doesn’t fit all that well with Hickman’s interpretation, but there’s nothing here that causes fundamental problems; she knows the kids, she’s upset that they’re all dead. (The bigger problem for the Hickman run is Deadly Genesis‘ depiction of Krakoa, but that’s another story.)
X-Men Legacy vol 1 #217 by Mike Carey, Scot Eaton and Andrew Hennessy (“Original Sin, part 2”, October 2008). The first of many, many “Moira and Charles discuss the plot” appearances. This one is part of a crossover with Wolverine: Origins. Shortly after joining the X-Men, an angry and brainwashed Wolverine tries to murder Charles, and gets subdued. Charles and Moira discuss what to do with the raving lunatic.
Oh, and this is the chronologically earliest appearance of Moira’s signature jumpsuit.
Wolverine’s memory of all this is presumably erased as part of the mind-wipe which Xavier gives him in another flashback, later in the storyline. That explains why he doesn’t recognise her when she shows up for the first time. But according to Chaos War: X-Men #1, Thunderbird also sees Moira in some video calls during his brief time as an X-Man. If that’s right – and granted, it’s Chaos War: X-Men, full of ghosts of characters who turned out not to be dead after all – then perhaps Charles wasn’t so concerned about keeping Moira herself a secret until a little bit later. More about the whole secrecy thing next time, though.
Classic X-Men #2 by Chris Claremont & Dave Cockrum (October 1986). This reprint of issue #94 has an added scene in which Moira crosses paths with little Rahne Sinclair (who has just missed the school bus) and then gets a telegram – yes, a telegram – from Charles, asking her to come to America and help.
And that leads into Moira’s first published appearance… which is where we’ll join her in the next post.
I share some of Dazzler’s misgivings about working with villains, and I agree the Operation: Paperclip analogy is a good one.
If this were a redemption plot I’d be more on board with the whole thing, but this plainly isn’t about redeeming Apocalypse or Mr. Sinister. Neither one has or has shown any remorse for past actions, and both are still basically just continuing to do their own things (Apocalypse manipulating people over in Excalibur, for example).
Take Hawkeye, Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver joining the Avengers. Hawkeye made some bad choices and did some stupid shit; Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver were basically indoctrinated by Magneto. They all wanted out of villainy and regretted it… so Captain America gave them a second chance.
On the other hand, every time creators tried to put Sabretooth (a guy who committed mass murder for fun!) on a good guy team I rolled my eyes at the idea.
But Xavier working with Mr. Sinister and Apocalypse is an ends-justify-the-means story, not a redemption story.
Oops. Hit “send” too soon.
Having said all of that, there’s more for me to enjoy than not in this new direction, so I’m digging things for the most part so far.
While the fact that Sinister has been given such an important position on Krakoa feeds in to the “ends justify the means” aspect of the plot, there is a wider reason why it is important that the mutant villains are all welcome on Krakoa.
They’re the biggest threat to human/mutant peace.
What good does it do to set up an island nation for mutants if only characters who have never been a threat to humanity are welcomed on Krakoa?
Xavier can preach about Krakoa wanting to coexist with the wider world, but if all the evil mutants are attacking humanity and talking about taking over the world, humanity is going to continue to hate mutants.
By keeping all the evil mutants on Krakoa and forcing them to follow the laws of Krakoa and being kept under supervision, it takes away the biggest threat to humans coming to accept mutants.
Obviously, it goes further than that.
Xavier and Magneto want to use Sinister’s DNA database.
Shaw serves a purpose with his wealth and business contacts.
Apocalypse is very important to Moira’s plan.
However, they’re also being managed while they’re on Krakoa.
They’re being forced to follow the law of “do not kill humans”.
Apocalypse isn’t trying to cull humanity while he’s being kept busy being one of the ruling triumvirate of a mutant society.
This discussion of Thunderbird got me thinking — couldn’t Xavier make a soul imprint of an important baseline human (like Stevie Hunter or Super Doctor Astronaut Peter Corbeau) and, in the event of their death, bring them into the mutant fold by resurrecting them in an empty clone body? Someone agreeable to the scheme, with relatively low-key powers?
I agree with Chris V. that it doesn’t make sense to have Sinister and Apocalypse running around ruining the Krakoan message of peace with humans. Better to have them on Krakoa to keep an eye on them.
I also agree that this isn’t a redemption story for either of them, and I don’t think it’s meant to be. If that’s what Xavier or Xavier/Moira wanted, there would be a lot more education actually happening on the island. Remember when Xavier was interested in that kind of thing?
I’m still of the opinion that the whole Krakoa set-up is a smokescreen for a different plan that Xavier and Moira (and Magneto?) have cooked up. Otherwise, why all the mystery and subterfuge and creepy little half-smiles? I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we never saw Xavier’s face until *after* he was assassinated and resurrected. That’s such a Hickman “bigger plan” kind of move.
Anyway, the whole point is: why rehabilitate villains when your *actual* plan doesn’t require it? Why not just keep them docile so they don’t interfere with your scheming?
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we never saw Xavier’s face until *after* he was assassinated and resurrected.”
Could that be because he had Fantomex’s face prior to a new clone body being grown? And the shooting gave him cover for the resurrection while also serving some other agenda, and he was behind it all because we didn’t actually see him get shot…
Karl-I believe it was established that Cerebro only works with mutants, not with humans.
I am 100% willing to entertain all of those ideas. I know Hickman is encouraging readers to believe that everything is above board on Krakoa, but we’re not going to trust him, right?
Obviously i don’t buy into really any aspect of the premise, but I do think there’s more to it than just keeping your enemies close. The “all mutants can be trusted” nonsense and the concept of mutant identity they’re projecting seem to be more the heart of it. Either way, from my perspective I don’t understand why pretty much any villain would sign up, let alone all of them? What’s in it for them? Krakoa doesn’t seem to align with any of these characters’ existing motivation. We’re just asked as readers to swallow so, so much.
I really don’t understand what’s in any of this for the average mutant, let alone villains (aside from eventual betrayal and taking over the island, obviously), and if you’re going to take all of these villains off the board it would make more sense to me if they showed the world they meant business by just rounding them up and imprisoning them. I think that would be a better way to neutralize mutant threats than letting villains run the government.
Immortality is one of the big draws to join Krakoa, obviously.
Apocalypse is one of the ruling triumvirate on the island.
Sinister, yeah, it’s pretty much all a game to him, and he was given a position on the Quiet Council.
Exodus needs a cause to believe in, and Krakoa certainly serves as a grand cause.
Plus, he’s back with Magneto.
There’s a lot of mutant supremacy talk from Xavier and Magneto, especially with Magneto proclaiming that mutants are the “new gods”.
Krakoa really does feed a lot in to the motivations of the majority of the mutant villains.
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If you round up evil mutants and imprison them, then you’ve created a massive prison system.
The whole purpose of Krakoa will be guarding the villains in the jails.
Everything will revolve around which evil mutants are going to break free next.
This way, everyone is given a chance for “redemption”.
They don’t have to change who they are, but they must follow Krakoa’s laws.
If they don’t, Sabretooth was made an example of, as the ruling council will send you to Hell.
Basically, all the villains have one more chance. If they mess up, they’re going to Hell, which is worse than any mortal prison.
@Karl_H
Regarding the theory that we didn’t see Xavier’s face before he was assassinated, because he was still in Fantomex’s body – it’s not impossible, but it is very unlikely. Because we’ve seen his face in the Doug/Krakoa flashback. If he was in Fantomex’s body before the assassination, it would place that flashback as happening before Avengers vs X-Men, meaning Doug knew the plan for (our) years before anybody else (apart from Moira and Magneto).
Now, obviously, Doug hasn’t been a very important character in the past decade, but he has been appearing here and there. He even had a starring role in All-New X-Factor. But the flashback made it seem like working on Krakoa was all Doug was doing all the way up to HoXPoX.
Obviously, you could come up with a timeline where that all works. But… he’s also wearing his current costume in the flashback. He has the TO arm, which he didn’t have before HoXPoX. All of which points to the flashback happening a few months before HoXPoX, which means Xavier wasn’t occupying Fantomex at the time.
…I probably could have kept this shorter.
“Jean has recently been to space and had a first brush with Phoenix” – This happened in Hidden Years? I’ve never read it as the general opinion always seems to be that it’s not worth bothering with.
“Plus, the hints given originally for Sinister’s motives were that he was trying to breed a mutant powerful enough to defeat Apocalypse.
That doesn’t work with Hickman’s ret-cons.” – They became more than hints over time, didn’t they? It’s pretty well established that he wanted a Summers/Grey child to be the anti-Apocalypse.
Looks from one of the upcoming covers like Sway and Petra have had their resurrections.
@Chris V: “If you round up evil mutants and imprison them, then you’ve created a massive prison system.”
So do something in character and call it a rehab center. Have a book about it. Redeem yourself or you’re in lock-up for the sake of mutant PR. That sounds fair to me, and it sounds like a stronger concept for a monthly than what we’re getting.
“Basically, all the villains have one more chance. If they mess up, they’re going to Hell, which is worse than any mortal prison.”
I don’t like that either and I don’t think it’s very heroic or in character. A detention/rehabilitation center just sounds better all around.
Honestly I don’t think immortality would have as broad appeal as you think. And I don’t see why you have to live on this lame island in order to reap the benefits of this clone nonsense.
We just don’t agree on Krakoa feeding a lot in to the motivations of the majority of villains, because it involves having to live on the aforementioned lame island. They’re criminals and evildoers, so if they like the supremacy angle obviously they have designs on taking over more than just one lame island where there’s nothing to do but have luaus. It’s just not believable to me.
Obviously, they expect that Krakoa’s intentions are much grander than to run an island-nation.
There’s propaganda about mutants becoming the dominant species on Earth.
That entails more than hanging out on an island.
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Well, there are rules to the cloning process.
If a doctor says that you have to pay a billion dollars for an immortality treatment, you can say, “That’s really stupid. Why should I have to pay a billion dollars for immortality treatments?”. Well, those are simply the rules.
Either you want immortality or you don’t.
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The detention center story doesn’t interest me.
You know that mutants are going to escape from the prisons all the time.
So, Sabretooth escapes from the detention center, goes to Europe, goes on a killing spree, and is caught again.
The human authorities are going to feel the need to do something about this pretty quickly.
Krakoa claims it can contain these evil mutants, but they keep escaping and causing chaos.
I think Krakoa needs to have UN inspectors sent to the island.
Besides, Moira, Xavier, and Magneto’s plans obviously go much deeper than simply rehabilitating evil mutants.
They don’t want to spend all their time trying to do that.
That’s just part of the larger goal to end the never-ending violence between humans and mutants, it’s not the end goal, in itself.
I think the interesting angle on the ex-villains is how the shift to Krakoa has made a lot of groups’ opposition to the X-Men irrelevant.
The Acolytes are the prime example. They are believers in Magneto’s brand of mutant supremacy, and the need to actively pursue and defend – if not attack – to preserve it. Well, now that’s what the X-Men are doing too, and they’ve got Magneto on board and offered a chair to Exodus, so what’s left to fight about?
Pyro’s a good example, too. Longtime villain and terrorist, largely an asshole, unrepentant murderer. But given the Krakoa setup, where he’s still asked to commit violence (with restrictions), to drink heavily and face no lasting consequences to anything he does, he cracks a beer and rolls with it. There’s precedent to his pragmatic streak – he stuck with Freedom Force longer than nearly everyone – but his desire to fight against mutant oppression is simply irrelevant when Krakoa exists. He doesn’t need to kill Robert Kelly, just buy him off with profits from drug dealing. (He’s dead, just illustrating the principle.)
How many ex-Brotherhood members are in similar boats where Xavier’s turn has made their opposition to the X-Men moot? Mutant Liberation Front? Hellions? Dark Riders, even? Nasty Boys? The Morlocks, for sure. Moving to Krakoa is 100% upside for them (not that they’re really villains aside from Masque). Were they in these groups to kill, or were they in them to not die?
There are big exceptions, outright psychopaths – Apocalypse, Sinister, Emplate, Selene, Omega Red, probably most of the Marauders – some of whom have already been addressed to some extent thus far, and Hellions is dealing with a bunch. But the Krakoa setup cuts to the heart of the motivations of a big swath of X-villains in ways that Utopia did not.
All of this plays to Moira’s hands, who gets a small army of battle-ready mutants in the short term for defense of Krakoa, and an increased pool of breeding-ready mutants with combat-useful powersets in the medium term. She’s tried rallying all the good guy mutants before. They lost. Everyone died. This is her solution. Will it fail eventually? Well, duh. But in the meantime, the books can team up anybody and realign virtually everyone.
@Chris V: Most mutants don’t know what a Mummudrai is (it’s a Shiar concept that Morrison made up), so wouldn’t understand the rationale. Even if she were banned, how could they keep her out apart from posting guards at the portals? Even that might not work with her telepathy.
Karl_H is talking about using a non-Cerebro way to copy baseline human minds. The Red Skull and Hate-Monger have transferred their minds into cloned bodies before.
As for Magneto’s, Moira’s, and Xavier’s plan, they’ve been spouting a mutant supremacist line, openly saying they want mutants to dominate the planet. Moira’s journal is pretty anti-human, and she tries to get Xavier to agree. Moira’s key to her plan is to get Xavier to stop being the good man he was in her previous lives, even when he was radicalized and created Faraway in her fifth life. From life VII to IX, Moira becomes increasingly radicalized, assassinating the Trasks and their children, getting Magneto to declare war on humanity and take over the U.S., then allying with Apocalypse and helping him kill the Avengers and conquer the world. Her declaration in life X is that she and Charles will “break all the rules”. Incontext,doesn’t that seem ominous?
Cassandra Nova’s sole reason for existence is to make sure that Xavier’s dreams don’t come to fruition.
What would she do on Krakoa?
Her whole reason for being on Krakoa would be to make sure that Krakoa fails.
I think it is best to just not involve Cassandra Nova with Krakoa.
I’m not sure what your intent is with your final paragraph.
Is this supposed to be directed at me?
I’m not sure how it addresses or contradicts anything that I wrote.
Moira’s purpose is to end the continuous cycle of conflicts between humans and mutants, which has always led to a horrible future for everyone.
The only quibble is that we know from Xavier’s contacting Namor that Namor doesn’t think that Xavier believes what he is preaching.
I get the idea that in this story mutants have positioned themselves as the villains in their own story. That’s not lost on me. It’s one of the things I dislike most about this. My point is that these characters are supposed to be people who have lived actual lives in a real world.
Speaking for myself, there’s not much for me on some boring jungle island. No matter what you offered me to go live there and have nothing to do but attend luaus all the time, the island provides none of the things I want out of life. It seems like a boring place for actual characters to live, if we were treating these ciphers as actual characters.
I scoffed at the concept of reading a comic about the development of this society, and it definitely still sounds awful, but in my opinion they needed to establish what actually goes on, what these idiots do all day, what’s in it for these people other than immortality so they can do luaus forever. It sounds like a living hell.
Dazzler-They’re not the villains, nor are they the heroes.
It’s back to the Operation: Paperclip metaphor.
You mentioned how the US became the villains by being willing to make a deal with the devil to win the Cold War.
I pointed out that the USSR wasn’t exactly morally pure either.
Who were the good guys and who were the bad guys?
The humans also aren’t portrayed as the heroes in this story either.
It’s more about the “common person” being caught between two extremes.
The “good guys” are the characters (everyday humans or mutants) who are interested in the bigger concepts like co-existence, ending the constant violence, etc.
Moira, Xavier, and Magneto’s goals to stop the genocide of mutants and ensure that mutants have a future is a positive for which it is worth striving.
It’s about “means and ends” not about “good guys versus bad guys”.
However, I agree with the intent of your final paragraph.
That is probably my biggest critique of this relaunch.
“I don’t like that either and I don’t think it’s very heroic or in character. A detention/rehabilitation center just sounds better all around.”
Or they could let them use their abilities and knowledge, but then you’d want them killed instead.
From what we already know of Krakoa – apart from partying there’s an education system that offers self-development opportunities for adults as well as the mutant minors. (‘No students and teachers, we all learn from one another’ is how it was described in the book – or something like that). And most of the mutants we’ve seen so far seem to be involved in the running of Krakoa. So there’s plenty of, uhm, let’s call it government-contract work. (Apart from the ruling council and the security and crews of Hellfire ships we’ve also seen mutants working on cultivating the drug plant fields).
I’d say that covers schooling and employment. (Are they paid? Is this a socialist utopia? Those things are mostly blanks, so far).
There’s other blanks, obviously – what if a mutant wants to work in a field that doesn’t exist in the Krakoan economy? If Krakoa is indeed technology averse, that limits work-from-home opportunities (is Krakoa averse to technology? They still have their planes and ships, X-Force is still using some sort of computer technology… nobody is asked to give up their phone when arriving through the gate…). But – they do have those gates. That go everywhere. And unless the island is in lockdown, which so far happened once, the mutants seem to be free to come and go. Which would mean that there’s nothing stopping one from living on Krakoa and working on Wall Street. (Well. Work visas and stuff would be an issue. Let’s handwave it away saying it’s covered by the drug treaty).
So that’s education and employment. Housing and living expenses are covered for everyone on Krakoa, by Krakoa. What’s left? Entertainment? Even if you can’t stream Netflix on Krakoa, you can just gate to a show, concert or whatever anywhere in the world. Same goes for visiting friends and family. (They might not be able to visit you back – again, this is kind of a blank. X-Factor is supposed to cover that – Northstar’s husband is on Krakoa, that was confirmed by the creators).
I was looking for a flat recently and I have to say – Krakoa would be nice. As long as they put up a gate in Warsaw.
I would guess that Krakoa is a communal and money-less society, based on some of the hints given throughout.
Although, Shaw was discussing economic policies when the Quiet Council was formed.
Obviously, he would want a cut-throat Capitalist economy.
However, Xavier allowing him to run the drug trade (which we learned his was corruptly profiting from, for a while) and to keep his property outside of Krakoa is probably the best way to accommodate Shaw.
[…] Three posts into the series, we finally reach Moira’s first published appearance! (For part 1, see here; for part 2, see here.) […]
Funny thing about Operation Paperclip: von Braun and his team wanted to defect to the US before the war and sought out and surrendered to US forces. Only a handful of the people sent to the US had any connection with war crimes.
Eh, Von Braun is a highly morally questionable figure, himself.
He was pretty much in the same boat as Eichmann.
He was “just following orders”.
He realized what the Nazis were doing and there was never any questioning about the work he was doing.
He knew of the concentration camps and was in charge of selecting slave labour from camps to build the weapons to help the Nazi cause.
Von Braun also officially joined the Nazi Party in 1937. He then joined the SS in 1940. So, he doesn’t come across as unwilling to support the cause.
He surrendered to the Americans because the Nazis were pretty much defeated.
He had a choice of being captured by the Soviets or surrendering to the Americans, and he chose to find the American forces in order to surrender.
It wasn’t a noble act, it was basically saving his own ass.
I mean, you could say, “Well, he was just trying to save his life.”
However, a morally upstanding figure would have agreed to going to jail rather than take part in crimes against humanity.
@Chris V: Nova would be a challenge to the “us vs. them” mentality that Xavier is creating, especially using Genosha. Since she’s still alive, it’s hard to imagine her not being involved or at least referenced.
My paragraph on Moira’s, Magneto’s and Xavier’s plans were meant for all the people debating on whether they were villainous, but it does contradict what you were saying. Moira’s ideas were ending mutant-human conflict is mutants dominating baseline humans, probably by immoral or even genocidal means.
There’s no proof that their plan involves genocide.
One of the laws of Krakoa is that “no mutant must ever murder a human”.
I guess you could say the X-£Men are now morally ambiguous, but to be that’s not much better than being the villains of their own story. Their whole deal used to be optimism and altruism in the face of hatred and persecution. I liked that.
@Chris V Laws are made to be broken. X-Factor has an exemption, and it’s not clear that Moira considers herself bound by them. There’s no evidence, but it’s not unthinkable. In her last life, she joined with Apocalypse in attacking humanity, killing the Avengers. How many innocent people do you think died then, comparing it with the Age of Apocalypse? Her response to it is to find out when Nimrod was created and try to prevent it. When a person like that says she’s going to break all the rules, isn’t the prohibition against genocide a rule?
*X-Force
We have no idea what “breaking all the rules” means.
In her past lives, she’s sided with Magneto and Apocalypse.
It doesn’t seem like she’s ever followed any rules.
Why would her claiming she was “breaking all the rules” have anything to do with creating a law on Krakoa?
So, she decides that her and Xavier should make a law on Krakoa that “mutants must not kill humans”, just so she can then later break that rule?
To be fair, you could argue that Moira knew that she was going to die in her life with Apocalypse, and reality would be reset.
If you have the power to erase all your actions, morality begins to become less clear.
Are you really killing anyone, if your life is the same as a simulation?
Part of what Hickman seemed to be saying with Moira was that her powers have been dehumanizing for her.
Moira doesn’t even believe that their plan will work. She believes that mutants are doomed, no matter.
Also, were Moira and Apocalypse the villains in life nine?
It was a war between humans and mutants.
The humans weren’t the heroes either.
Isn’t that the nature of war?
World War II is often considered the most sterling example of a “just war”, where the good guys fought the forces of Nazism.
However, let’s not forget the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo, nor the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan.
Are those heroic actions?
There’s also a big, glaring hint in that conversation between Xavier and Namor, where Namor doesn’t believe that Xavier actually believes what he is preaching.
That’s probably the biggest hint that there is something more going on with Moira, Xavier, and Magneto’s plan than simply mutant supremacy.
I think the line “breaking all the rules” makes the most sense in the context of her final life revealed in Powers of X #6, in which she saw the endgame of the human/mutant conflict, and it fundamentally broke her understanding of about how that conflict works. The endgame isn’t extinction or replacement, but ascending to a higher order of civilization. And her dogged belief that a war against machines was critical made her overlook the role that human technology played in advancing that race, faster than mutation ever could. Xavier, Magneto and Apocalypse’s core philosophies are all, in her view, dead wrong.
And so she’s breaking the rules that bound her past lives, where she tended towards picking sides and violently backing them. She’s making alliances between all the mutant factions, even the genocidal ones. She’s dragging Xavier and his brood towards mutant supremacy, though Xavier resists. With Krakoa, she’s trying to pull the mutants away from human technology and towards mutant technology, based on Krakoa’s organic self, to repair (see: Domino) and potentially enhance mutants – post-mutants, if you will. If she lets mutants continue to traffic in human tech, that’s just helping humanity ascend, one Forge or Beast invention at a time.
She’s reorganizing mutant culture into being an actual thing, with communal living, apparently open relationships, pushing the idea of mutant fashion, etc. Someone asked in another thread, about Ariel, if we’d seen any doors in Krakoa, and I could only spot one example (New Mutants #1, pages 10-13). We’ve seen little hints that it’s taking root – the Five are described as becoming extremely close and almost symbiotic through their collaboration. But much of it is still lip service at this point. Emma Frost just takes “mutant fashion” as something new to be snobby about. Meanwhile in Excalibur, you’re got Apocalypse trying to create a dedicated form of mutant magic.
Krakoa’s potential economic dominance, as Magneto explains in X-Men #4, is another rule broken. Xavier and the Hellfire Club have always been rich, but using economic means of achieving mutants domination is a new approach. And as the mutants get richer, the more they can divert capital away from financing human technology that ultimately helps humanity ascend.
Finally, it seems inevitable that the mutant drugs will be revealed as having “side effects” (100% intentional) of raising the chances of X-genes popping up in those that take them and/or any children they have. All mutant leader philosophies centre on what the natural relationship between humans and mutants should be. Moira breaks that by asking – should there be humans at all? Not through war, but through capitalism. Does the Quiet Council know this? Do Xavier and Magneto?
What I can’t place is Moira’s endgame. She seemed pretty unimpressed by the whole notion of civilization-level ascension. She can only protect mutant kind by preventing humanity from achieving it, but does she just want to beat humanity there, or does she have another ultimate goal in mind? No idea,
@Chris V: What “breaking all the rules” means is the question. Going from lives 7-9 Moira she’s breaking more and more rules of morality.She didn’t come up with the law against killing humans, Jean Grey did and the Quiet Council passed it. Xavier’s already issued an exemption to X-Force. In the end, a law is a rule.
@Chris V: “If you have the power to erase all your actions, morality begins to become less clear.
Are you really killing anyone, if your life is the same as a simulation?”
Then doesn’t genocide become conceivable?
“Moira doesn’t even believe that their plan will work. She believes that mutants are doomed, no matter.”
She’s afraid they are. This is a desperate gamble. Desperate people can do bad things, just look at Hickman’s Time Runs Out.
“Also, were Moira and Apocalypse the villains in life nine?
It was a war between humans and mutants.
The humans weren’t the heroes either.”
Moira said he would be considered evil, and they started the war. Apocalypse killed Xavier, Magneto, and the Avengers. When he conquered America in Age of Apocalypse, he indiscriminately killed civilians. That’s pretty villainous.
Xavier’s conversation with Namor could mean he’s being controlled by Moira, which is why he’s rebooted his mind twice.
1.)Moire doesn’t plan to reboot reality again with life ten.
It was made apparent by Hickman that Moira wants to end the constant cycles.
If she intends genocide this time, it’s because that’s what she wants for her final life-time.
Destiny told her that she has “ten, possibly eleven lives”, and that’s it.
You keep looking at a genocide by mutants against humans too.
There’s also some glaring hints that Moira’s real plan is to kill off every mutant.
I’m not saying that’s her real plan, obviously I don’t know, but there are some hints given that her real motivation is to eliminate the real problem, which is the existence of mutants.
2.)”Time Runs Out” seems to share the same themes as House/Powers.
The point wasn’t that Stark was the villain and Rogers was the hero.
The point was that the pointless feuds between the two supposed heroes, instead of the two sides coming together and finding a solution to a real problem, led to the end of everything.
Hickman seems to be saying the same thing with House/Powers.
The pointless never-ending battle between humans and mutants always ends in a horrible future for everyone.
3.)Her plan in life nine wasn’t to create the Age of Apocalypse.
It was to live long enough to discover what is the cause of Nimrod always being activated.
She was using Apocalypse.
He was a means to an end.
4.)If you are right about Xavier’s conversation with Namor, then Moira is the villain of the story, but Xavier is not the villain.
Allan M-Part of the point of showing Moira in the future was also to show that the war between humans and mutants didn’t just lead to the death of all mutants.
It also led to humanity losing everything that makes it human.
Both sides end up losing due to the never-ending battle.
Moira could just as easily be opposed to seeing humanity lose its very humanity as she is to seeing mutants going extinct.
Everyone seems to assume that the drugs from Krakoa are meant to increase mutant births.
What if it’s the opposite?
What if it’s to top humans from giving birth to mutants?
Also, Xavier and Magneto have already gone against Moira’s plan.
They brought Sinister on to Krakoa.
Why did Moira not want Sinister on Krakoa?
He tampered with genetics and created the Chimeras in her past life.
The Chimeras developed a hive-mind, quite similar to the Phalanx.
So, is this move towards symbiosis part of Moira’s plan for Krakoa, or is it a sign that things are going very wrong on Krakoa already?
How much control does Moira really have on Krakoa?
Obviously, some of it is her plan…but, we don’t know what aspects are her plan versus what is Xavier or Magneto continuing with their own dreams.
Now, remember, when Mystique kills Moira in one of her early lives, she tells Moira to embrace the mutant cause going forward, or the Brotherhood hunt her down and kill her before her mutant powers activate.
How could they do if reality resets everytime Moira dies?
Thanks to Destiny.
Destiny is dead though.
Moira makes sure that no one on Krakoa is going to bring Destiny back to life.
Why is she so afraid of Destiny coming back to life?
Why would she care that Destiny can see the future?
Wouldn’t that be helpful? “Oh, Nimrod is about to come online. You must do this and this right now!”.
What is the real reason Moira doesn’t want Destiny brought back to life?
Is it because Destiny and Mystique will realize that Moira’s plans have changed? That she doesn’t believe that mutants have a future, so she plans to solve the problem of these never-ending cycles by eliminating the mutants.
Is this why she fears Destiny; because of the promise made by Mystique?
Also of note, when the Reaver shoots Xavier in X-Force, Xavier is saying something, but doesn’t get to finish his thought.
It seemed like he was saying, “Don’t shoot me. You don’t understand. We’re trying to save humanity.”, or something similar.
That seemed to be the hint given by Percy.
That would seem to point to the larger plan being to stop post-humanity, the Man-Machine Supremacy, the ascension, and the Phalanx.
All of which end up being the enemies of both mutants and humans.
@Allan M: “I think the line “breaking all the rules” makes the most sense in the context of her final life revealed in Powers of X #6, in which she saw the endgame of the human/mutant conflict, and it fundamentally broke her understanding of about how that conflict works.”
That’s romantic, but it’s not true. That was her *sixth* life revealed. Afterward she basically declared war on humanity, becoming increasingly violent with each succeeding one. Her reaction to Ascension was to try to stop it. How do you prevent humanity from advancing, other than dominating it so thoroughly that it stagnates, or killing it?
“And so she’s breaking the rules that bound her past lives, where she tended towards picking sides and violently backing them.” Those weren’t rules they were choices that increasingly violated rules of morality.
A separate mutant culture has already been tried with Faraway in her fifth lifetime. So what’s she trying that requires breaking all the rules, and Charles Xavier to no longer be good?
“Krakoa’s potential economic dominance, as Magneto explains in X-Men #4, is another rule broken. Xavier and the Hellfire Club have always been rich, but using economic means of achieving mutants domination is a new approach. And as the mutants get richer, the more they can divert capital away from financing human technology that ultimately helps humanity ascend.”
That’s not breaking a rule, that’s working with them. As the owner of this blog has said, economic dominance doesn’t make sense for a country with only three exports. The most profitable drug yields $13.5 billion per year, around $40 billion if all three drugs matched it. That’s not much on a world financial scale. Weapon X didn’t get its funding from banks.
“Finally, it seems inevitable that the mutant drugs will be revealed as having “side effects” (100% intentional) of raising the chances of X-genes popping up in those that take them and/or any children they have.” That would also be a crime against humanity. Or it could simply kill a lot of them. As I posted before, the drugs are referred to in the order L-I-M, which is also a protein sequence involved in cancer.
There were no humans left in life six during Ascension.
It wasn’t humanity that was ascending, it was post-humanity.
For all intents and purposes, in the future of life six, humanity was as extinct as mutants.
Both sides lost the war.
How do you stop humanity from ascending?
By trying to fight against humanity’s turn to post-humanity (which is caused by humans adapting to compete in their never-ending battle against mutants) and to replace their reliance on the technology that leads to that point with a bio-organic form of tech.
Also, isn’t Krakoa marketing one of their drugs as a cure for cancer?
I mean, yes, they could be lying.
However, it would seem like they would try to keep cancer out of the conversation if their big plan was to give everybody drugs that caused cancer.
Surely, medical facilities are giving this cancer curing drug to cancer patients, and it’d be easy to see if the drug does actually cure cancer.
If the cancer patients don’t recover, I think that’d create a lot of major questions about these Krakoan drugs.
Plus, in the latest issue of Marauders, Yellowjacket is hired by the Hellfire Club.
We read in his internal monologue, “I thought these guys were supposed to be planning the extinction of humanity? They seem pretty fly for wanting to kill of all humans.”
If the big reveal is that Krakoa is planning the extinction of humanity, you wouldn’t have some random character randomly reveal this in a random issue of a random comic.
“Oh? Krakoa is planning the extinction of humanity? Good thing that the villain Yellowjacket revealed this in the pages of Marauders #6 a year ago!”
1.) Every time she does something different in a new life, that’s a reboot. There are no constant cycles. She’s been told that she only has “ten, possibly eleven lives”. She wants to stop mutants from always losing in her final life.
“There’s also some glaring hints that Moira’s real plan is to kill off every mutant.
Like what? Her comments are always anti-human, as were her later lives.
2.) The point of “Time Runs Out” was heroes actually contemplating genocide, with Mister Fantastic and the Black Panther trying to force themselves to do it. Why should Moira MacTaggert be better than they were, especially after nine lifetimes? (How is a debate about whether genocide is ever acceptable pointless?)
3.) It said “with little time left — little lives left –, she embraced the idea of evolutionary dominance. Survival of the fittest. She even made herself look like Apocalypse. She and Apocalypse didn’t even come up with the plan to prevent Nimrod from being created until more than 50 years after his coming online during her ninth life. Even if she wasn’t a disciple, didn’t you condemn von Braun for working with the Nazis?
Moira doesn’t want Sinister on Krakoa because in her ninth life he eliminated the mutant leadership, then his chimera went defective and destroyed Krakoa.
Every one of Moira’s lives were different, but every life after she realized she was a mutant revolved around the constant battles between humans and mutants.
That’s a cycle.
Moira lives her life, something goes wrong, she dies, and starts her life over again.
That!s a cycle.
Her mutant power and her lives have always been about cycles.
The fact that Moira has herded all mutants on to Krakoa, which is a creature known to feed on mutant energy to live, and it was revealed that Krakoa was feeding on all the mutants, seems pretty ominous to me.
Sure, there was platitudes given about why no one should worry about this…but you don’t trust the drugs, why would you trust that Krakoa isn’t slowly eating all of the mutants?
2.)No, that was not the point of “Time Runs Out”. That was a plot aspect of “Time Runs Out”.
The point Hickman was making was about how the Marvel Universe no longer had heroes.
Cap and Stark continued their feud which started during Civil War, as everything ended around them.
Cap was treated as the more noble, to be sure.
However, Hickman wanted to show that Cap and Stark allowed their ideologies to guide them, instead of being able to come together and save reality.
3.)Moira needed to survive until Nimrod came online, so she could have the information she needed to stop Nimrod.
Yes, she doesn’t trust Sinister because he created the Chimeras, and they developed a hive-mind.
This was reminiscent of the Phalanx, from an earlier life.
Also, there’s something very off with the idea that Moira wants to see mutants win in the end.
Moira’s last life before Destiny and Mystique found out about her, she believed that mutants were a cancer that needed to be cured.
Destiny orders Moira to be burned alive, and says that they will always hunt down Moira and kill her, until they finally kill her before her mutant power develops; unless Moira works for the mutant cause.
It seems that Moira’s concern involves something else than victory for mutants.
She never cared about mutants until Mystique and Destiny threatened her.
Remember, Destiny is now dead in the current reality.
“There were no humans left in life six during Ascension.”
Whether Homo Novissima counts as human is up for debate. They use “us” and “we” when discussing the human side of the conflict. Presumably their genetic structure is still baseline human before it’s altered. Is a cyborg still human? Are the Fantastic Four? What’s the alternative besides stagnation?
“How do you stop humanity from ascending?
By trying to fight against humanity’s turn to post-humanity (which is caused by humans adapting to compete in their never-ending battle against mutants) and to replace their reliance on the technology that leads to that point with a bio-organic form of tech.”
That’s what I was saying. Apart from genocide, the only way to prevent post-humans is to dominate humanity so thoroughly that anything that can lead to transhumanism, like genetic engineering and cybernetics, is suppressed, and baseline humans stay at a dead end until they go extinct.At best, it would be like House of M, which Hickman said was an inspiration, with increasing numbers of humans suffering from “Dead-End Syndrome”. Magneto’s declaration of mutants as the new gods is actually increasing baseline humans’ attempts to match them, as seen with things like Xeno, Hordeculture, etc.
The drug “I” (probably for infection) is officially described as an adaptive antibiotic, which wouldn’t affect viruses and cancer.Xavier later says they can cure most common maladies like influenza, ALS, and “many” cancers. That would require some genetic rewriting of the patient.
Yellowjacket is just repeating the widespread fear of mutants replacing baseline humans.
Hickman is making a pretty clear picture in Powers of X that post-humanity has given up everything that made humanity worth preserving in the first place.
If the only way to keep a species alive is to take away everything that made that species special in the first place, is it worth the price of continued survival?
This is a question that Hickman is asking.
His answer seems to be that humans and mutants have both lost in the end.
The machines triumphed, as humanity has become more and more like the machines, while mutants are going extinct.
In the life-time where we saw post-humanity triumphant, the Phalanx are coming to allow ascension, and then scouring the Earth of any other life.
Hickman isn’t making the point that humanity should aspire to becoming part of the hive-mind of the Phalanx.
What is the alternative? Co-habitation and mutual aid.
You are saying that the only way that the human race doesn’t stagnate is through genocide.
The implications of such are haunting.
—————————————-
The plan could be to have mutants create a society where humanity’s needs are taken care of by the mutants.
If mutants have an utopian island paradise on Krakoa, where they are functionally immortal due to cloning, their larger goal could be to create an utopian society on Earth for everyone.
Then, humans would no longer have need to fear and hate mutants.
Yes, Magneto’s declaration is increasing this trend towards post-humanity.
This could be seen as an example of Magneto refusing to give up his own ideology, which Moira said was something that Xavier and Magneto needed to do.
Moreso, it is a sign of Hickman’s theme of recurrence. Each life-time of Moira’s is dominated by the ever-increasing hostility between mankind and mutants.
The never-ending wars will always lead to the end of everything.
—————————————–
Regardless of Yellowjacket’s motivation, you don’t reveal the ending of a mystery story somewhere at random in the middle of the story.
If you are reading a crime fiction novel, you don’t have someone on page 64 say, “You know, I think Mr. Plum did it with the candlestick for revenge.”, and then at the end reveal that Mr. Plum used a candlestick to kill the dead person for revenge.
Late but @ neutrino you are 100% correct on my getting Moira’s lives in the wrong order, which fundamentally tanks my whole thesis. Ah well. Back to the drawing board.
I do still find the whole economic angle of Dawn of X to be really interesting, though.
[…] previous posts, see part 1, part 2, part 3 and part […]
[…] previous chapters, see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part […]
Actually, the scene where Xavier attempts to recruit Emma in X-Men Origins: Emma Frost is referred to in X-Men vol. 3 #13, so it’s presumably canon.