House of X #5 annotations
As always, this contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
COVER (PAGE 1): Apocalypse walks through the reeds. Not much to do with the content, aside from the fact that this is where he enters the modern-day story – so far, we’ve only seen him in the future time frame of Powers of X.
PAGE 2: The epigraph sees Professor X stressing the differences between humans and mutants – very different from his traditional approach of emphasising the similarities.
PAGES 3-10: The Five use cloning to create new bodies for the X-Men who died in the space mission last issue, and Professor X… well, restores them from back-up. The final pages are a repeat of the pod-person scene that opened issue #1.
We already knew that the X-Men were bringing people back from the dead – that was clear when all five of the Stepford Cuckoos showed up in issue #1. There’s more on the mechanics of all this later in the issue, so I’ll come back to the broader implications then. In the meantime…
Lorna Dane: This is Magneto’s daughter, Polaris, who was already hanging around with him in X-Men: Blue prior to the relaunch. Like a lot of characters, she’s become much more separatist in tone under Hickman – Lorna has lived most of her life among non-mutants, not least her foster parents, and used to be an “extended supporting cast” X-Man who lived a basically normal life, so it’s curious for her to be questioning whether there’s anything good in humans at all. Lorna is also playing up the father/daughter relationship much more than usual; she wasn’t raised by him, didn’t know him all that well until X-Men: Blue, and generally hasn’t thought of him as a father figure.
(If you’re saying “Hold on, wasn’t Polaris introduced as the daughter of Magneto only for that to be revealed as misdirection within the same storyline”, then yes, she was – but she was retconned into being the actual daughter of Magneto during Chuck Austen’s run, and it’s stuck.)
“Society”: This is the title of the story, and its major theme. As Magneto tells it, the mutants have been on the run for years, but now, with an island to call their own, they can build their own society and develop their own culture. Of course, this has happened before, with Genosha – a story Hickman has gone out of his way to mention several times – and it didn’t end at all well. Magneto chooses not to mention that.
Much of what we see in this issue is about the mutants of Krakoa developing their own social rituals; you can decide for yourself how much everyone is comprehensively buying into it and how far it’s a performative exercise in bonding the group. Bear in mind many of these mutants have recently arrived, presumably leaving behind friends and family. On the other hand, mutants have been showing up at the X-Men’s school for years without showing much interest in the life they left behind… What’s very clear throughout this issue is an emphasis on the group over the individual; Storm’s public ritual with the revived X-Men validates them as the real thing, but also immediately stresses their mutant-ness as a bigger deal. And the Five – established characters all – really do and say nothing beyond acting out their socially-mandated role. Their status in mutant society has become more important than their individuality.
“The Five”: The five mutants whose powers, combined, can rapidly grow new clone bodies to revive dead mutants. There’s an echo here of the “Five Lights”, the first new mutants to emerge after M-Day. For the benefit of those of you who aren’t regular readers…
Goldballs: Fabio Medina is a character from Brian Bendis’ Uncanny X-Men run, where he was a student of Cyclops’ breakaway “mutant revolution” group under the name Goldballs. Something of a comic relief character, he basically had the power to fire golden balls every which way and hope that the confusion favoured his own side. He was more recently used as a supporting character in the Miles Morales Spider-Man series. The idea that the golden balls are eggs is entirely new.
Proteus: Uh-oh. Proteus is a reality-warping mutant who first fought the X-Men back in X-Men #125-128 (1979). He’s usually a dangerous maniac and not somebody that you want to trust your species to – the data pages will address this later on. Proteus was last seen in Astonishing X-Men #11 (2018) where he blew up, but he’s an energy being and it wouldn’t be the first time he’s returned from the dead. More to the point – and not mentioned here – Proteus is the son of Moira MacTaggert. Given how important she is to Hickman’s story, that feels like it should matter. Proteus was also on the list of Omega level mutants in issue #1.
Elixir: Josh Foley is a high-powered mutant healer who’s been associated with various second-tier X-Men teams since 2003. He was on issue #1’s Omega level list too. Before House of X, Elixir was hanging around with Emma Frost.
Tempus: Eva Bell is another of Cyclops’s trainees from Bendis’ Uncanny X-Men run. She hasn’t been used since. She wasn’t on the Omega level list in issue #1, but she has previously been described as “nearly” Omega level (in Uncanny X-Men Annual #1, 2014).
Hope Summers: A regular in Uncanny before House of X, Hope is the quasi-messiah figure who was the first mutant to emerge after the Scarlet Witch removed all mutant powers on M-Day. Her main power is the ability to copy the powers of other mutants in her area, but she’s also been shown stabilising and controlling mutant powers in the past, so her co-ordinating role here is nothing new. In Generation Hope, there was a suggestion that her minds of her team were becoming linked in some way, which would fit with Hickman’s themes. The data page later suggests that something similar has happened to the Five, who “have become an inseparable family unit and are almost never apart from one another.” Note that her syringe has Mr Sinister’s diamond logo.
“Separate, yes, they are great mutants…”: Magneto is being really generous to Goldballs here, to make the events fit his preferred narrative.
“Together, these five mutants have made us whole”: Presumably because, as we’ll see, they’re engaged in a systematic attempt to revive the dead of Genosha.
“Temporally evolved to their desired age…” A similar device has been used in the past to explain why Xavier and Magneto are both younger than their back stories would suggest. Xavier got a new cloned body from the Shi’ar after being infected by the Brood; Magneto was turned into a baby and aged back to adulthood. It helps with the sliding timeline.
Cerebro: Magneto seems to be claiming here that since some unspecified time in the past, Professor X has been using Cerebro not just to find mutants, but to copy their “mind – the essence, the anima”. This is… frankly creepy, since there’s no suggestion that he’s asked anyone’s permission for this. And later on, the data pages will tell us that Xavier has a copy of the mind of every mutant – yet he can’t possibly have got everyone to agree. Admittedly, Cerebro has always had dubious privacy issues, but this is something new.
Magneto is keen to stress that this procedure absolutely, definitely results in the new cloned mutant acquiring not just a back-up copy of the original’s mind, but the original’s “soul”. As we’ll see, the Krakoans have a whole ritual later on to stand around chanting about how very true this is.
Cyclops’ visor: Note that the cloned Cyclops doesn’t need his visor. Xavier gives him one just before downloading the mind into his body. Traditionally, Cyclops’ inability to control his powers was attributed to brain damage caused by a head injury suffered when he jumped from a plane as a child – but that shouldn’t apply to the clone. Does the clone actually need the visor? Or is he just wearing it to validate himself as “Cyclops”?
“Did it work?” The X-Men evidently knew they were going to die and be restored from back-ups. That makes more sense of the conversations between Nightcrawler and Wolverine in the previous issue.
PAGE 11: Credits. The story title is “Society” and the small print reads “The House of Xavier – Here They Come.”
PAGES 12-17: The revived mutants are paraded before the people of Krakoa so that everyone can do some ritualistic chanting about how genuine and authentic they are. This is all about the Krakoans generating their own rituals as they build their own society, though at the same time everyone seems a little too on board with this. The Krakoans seem to be well aware of what the Five do, presumably because many of them were in fact revived by the Five. The ritual also stresses mutanthood over individuality (“His name is Cyclops, but he is more than that…”) If these mutants are in fact largely people who have been revived by the Five, perhaps that has something to do with their cult-like embrace of Krakoan culture.
The revived X-Men all get asked a question to demonstrate that it’s really them, though we don’t see all of their answers. Cyclops alludes to the time Storm claimed the leadership of the X-Men from him in Uncanny X-Men #201 (1986). Jean’s answer – “I’m the only ‘me’ that ever was” – is heavily ironic, considering that she’s been copied in the past both by Phoenix and by her clone Madelyne Pryor. (Madelyne was herself animated by a part of Jean’s soul retained by Phoenix – is this Jean really any more authentic than Madelyne?) Penance – apparently the codename Monet is now going by – simply refuses to be touched, and her air of distance is taken as the proof of her authenticity. This is a pretty low standard of proof.
PAGES 18-20: Data pages about resurrection. Page 18 largely just spells out what we saw in the earlier scenes, also confirming that Mr Sinister has a nearly complete library of mutant DNA “carefully constructed with the help of Xavier” – we saw that alliance being formed in last week’s Powers of X. The possibility that the revived mutants might be changed in other ways (“designer modifications”) is floated – again, do you really trust Sinister with this?
This whole scheme depends on having all of the Five on hand, though the data pages float the idea of using power-copiers such as Synch or Mimic. Synch was a member of Generation X, and he died in Generation X #70, but that’s obviously not much of a problem. Mimic’s origin story is actually a lab accident, but the possibility that it activated latent mutant powers has been raised before, in Marvel Comics Presents #59 (1990).
At any rate, this is clearly not the sort of facility that future writers (and perhaps even Hickman) will want to have around indefinitely, and the fact that it depends on having all of the Five plus a telepath, plus access to the DNA database, plus access to the back-up minds, means there’s plenty of scope for it to be taken away in future. If I were Goldballs – the most absolutely essential member of the group and the one who’s far and way the most expendable in terms of his broader significance to the X-Men – I’d be watching my back.
Except… what the Five are basically doing, according to everything we’re told in this issue, is preparing a clone body from a stored DNA sample and accelerating it to adulthood. And for all the ritual we see here, Mr Sinister’s been doing that for years using equipment he’s knocked up in his lab. So how much of all this is for show? Or is it about minimising the X-Men’s reliance on Sinister (or even on technology generally)?
Proteus: His insanity is addressed here. As per previous continuity, his power tends to consume his own body, leaving him to hop from host body to host body, consuming each one in turn. The claim here is that an endless supply of freshly cloned bodies has solved the problem and solved his psychological problems. We’ll see. Curiously, we’re told that Proteus’s bodies are always created using Professor X’s DNA – Proteus can possess anyone, but why not use his own DNA? And how does this fit with the final note on the same page, which insists that there has been no experimentation with putting the wrong mind in the cloned body? Isn’t that exactly what Proteus is doing? At any rate, this is pretty much a red flag that we’re getting a story about a mind/body mismatch at some time during the Hickman run.
Scale: The X-Men are indeed trying to revive the entire population of Genosha, which is going to take ten years, assuming some other telepaths can be brought in. This is presumably what makes an explosion in the mutant population credible again, per the projections we saw in issue #1.
Ethics: There’s a protocol that prevents mutants from being resurrected until their death has been confirmed or Cerebro has failed to detect them for a month. This is meant to prevent actual duplication. All right, but… the obvious question in all this is whether the clones really are the same person. The data pages and the X-Men are keen to insist that they are, but at the same time Hickman throws in lines that make clear that there’s really nothing aside from ethics to stop you from doing this while the original mutant is still alive. The back-up-restored mutant will be identical to the original in mind and body, but if you believe in the soul – and in the Marvel Universe, you should – then you should probably have some serious issues with this.
Other obvious questions raised by all this: How do we know that the X-Men who died on the station were the originals? What happens about Wolverine’s adamantium – does Proteus have to smoothe over that sort of thing, or do people just get a reset? (Note Warren is no longer Archangel.) And how would any of this work with Moira MacTaggert?
“FORCE conventions”: It’s the first we’ve heard of these, but if they apply, they apparently supersede the (ethical) resurrection protocols. That sounds bad, doesn’t it?
PAGES 21-22: Professor X, Emma Frost and Beast attend a drinks reception at the UN after the Security Council recognise Krakoa as a nation. Emma has plainly been telepathically manipulating the ambassadors.
This isn’t really how the recognition of countries work, but more to the point it’s an incredibly confrontational way of going about it – Emma isn’t just engineering a win, she’s doing it in a way that will make it obvious to the national governments what has happened. If the X-Men were trying to be subtle about this, they’d have gone for the people back home who were giving the instructions. Professor X goes out of his way to tell Emma that she’s made a sacrifice by doing this, and that something nebulously bad is going to happen to her (though it might just be a crisis of conscience he has in mind). He seems entirely unbothered.
In response to Emma’s joking suggestion that he make her “governor of a province”, he replies that he has “much bolder things in mind” – more foreshadowing.
PAGES 23-24: Data pages about “mutant diplomacy”, though the second one is just a map. Again, this is a bit ropey in terms of how things work in the real world, but we’re basically told that all but a handful of countries have either made a trade deal with Krakoa, or are in discussions for one, in order to get those pharmaceuticals that were mentioned back in issue #1. Then – and more important going forward – we have a list of countries that have outright refused a trade deal, all of which are described as “naturally adversarial”. The previous scene showed us that the X-Men are not above simply forcing people to play ball, so perhaps there’s also something about these countries – or at least the more significant ones – that makes that less of an option.
They’re a mix of real-world and Marvel Universe states. The real ones are Iran, North Korea, Russia (which was going to vote against Krakoa in the Security Council in the previous scene), Brazil, Venezuela, Honduras and Kenya (we’ll come back to Kenya). The fictional ones:
- Madripoor. A southeast Asian island nation which features heavily in Wolverine stories and is generally portrayed as rather lawless. Its objections are “political”. In recent years, stories have wavered all over the place as to who is actually running the place, but I believe it’s currently meant to be crimelord Tyger Tiger.
- Latveria. Dr Doom’s country, for “political” reasons.
- Santo Marco. The country that Magneto briefly conquered in X-Men #4 (1964). We last saw it in Weapon X #14 (2018), where Weapon X helped a group of rebel fighters to overthrow the government, so its inclusion here on “ideological” grounds is curious.
- Terra Verde. This looks like a misprint. Marvel does have a “Terra Verde” – Diablo tried to conquer it in Fantastic Four #117 (1971). But it has nothing to do with the X-Men, so it’s much more likely that Hickman is thinking of Tierra Verde, where Wolverine helped to overthrow the government in a 1989-90 storyline.
- Wakanda. Home of the Black Panther, and so technologically advanced that “they do not need mutant drugs.” That doesn’t stop them from making the list of potentially hostile countries, along with three countries listed as “Wakandan Economic Protectorate.” Two are fictional (listed below), but the third is Kenya, a strange inclusion. It is, however, the country where Storm lived before joining the X-Men.
- Azania. Originally an apartheid-era South Africa stand in from the 1988 Black Panther miniseries.
- Canaan. A country briefly conquered by Moses Magnum in a Deathlok storyline from 1993. These two have probably been included on the basis that they’re well established to border Wakanda.
PAGES 25-29: Professor X and Magneto welcome the mutant villains through the portal to join the Krakoan community, despite Wolverine’s misgivings. Apocalypse says he’ll be a good citizen because Krakoa is the realisation of his dream of mutant dominance (which, he says, is what he was trying to foster all along). Professor X doesn’t seem to have a problem with this.
Obviously, having decided to prioritise mutant-ness over all else, Professor X and Magneto have to accept the villains – and we’ve seen already that they’re prepared to shelter the likes of Sabretooth. But while Apocalypse is submitting himself to the Krakoan regime, he’s also ringing more loud alarm bells that things aren’t right at all here, even if Xavier clearly thinks everything’s going just fine.
Apocalypse: The first time we’ve seen him in the modern time frame in this series. In the past, he’s been presented as pursuing conflict as an end in itself, but he’s also appeared to believe that the mutants ought to come out on top. It’s worth noting that we last saw Apocalypse in the “Age of X-Man” crossover, where he seemed to undergo some sort of epiphany through being forced to live out a life as a father and religious teacher – it’s too early to tell whether any of that feeds into his role under Hickman.
None of the other villains get any dialogue, though some are foregrounded. Here’s who they are.
Page 26, panel 1 (left to right):
- Wildside. A long-standing D-lister who started as a member of the Mutant Liberation Front. Last seen allied with Emma Frost in X-Men: Blue‘s “Mothervine” arc last year.
- Random. An X-Factor supporting character from the Peter David run. He was last seen hanging around on Utopia, which was a few years back. Barely a villain.
- Mister Sinister. Seriously A-list, and not actually a mutant. And curious that he’s arriving here, when his diamond logo was already on Hope’s syringe earlier in the issue.
- Lady Mastermind. One of the daughters of Mastermind, and a long-running minor villain. Briefly a member of the X-Men during the Mike Carey run circa 2007. She hasn’t been seen in a few years.
- Mesmero. B-list hypnotist villain dating back to the late Silver Age. Last seen manipulating a version of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants in X-Men: Gold. Unequivocally a villain.
- Animax. A very minor character from the Brian Bendis run who has the power to create monsters (like the one she’s riding here).
- Mentallo. Not principally an X-Men villain, but he is long established as a mutant. He was last seen as an ally of Reverend Stryker in the recent Weapon X series.
Page 26, panel 2 (left to right):
- Sebastian Shaw? It certainly looks like the long-running Black King of the Hellfire Club, and Emma Frost’s old partner in villainy… but, er, he was seemingly murdered by Emma in X-Men: Black – Emma Frost #1 (2018). There’s a bit of wiggle room in that issue, but not much.
- Selene. I know tons of characters look kind of like this, but trust me, that’s Selene – exactly as shown on the cover of X-Men #11 (2014), right down to the skull she was carrying. Last seen as a member of the Power Elite in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Captain America.
- Emplate. Monet St Croix’s brother, and a major villain in Generation X.
- Exodus. Identified as an omega-level mutant in issue #1, Exodus is a Big Deal. He used to be a fanatical follower of Magneto – and was loyally following him when we last saw him at the tail end of X-Men: Blue – but evidently went his own way at some point for reasons yet to be revealed.
- Gorgon. A Hand leader introduced in Mark Millar’s Wolverine story “Enemy of the State.”
- Callisto. Long-time leader of the Morlocks and, again, barely a proper villain.
Page 28, panel 1: Most of these are either unrecognisably blurry or I’ve already mentioned them, but on the left-hand side next to Emplate are…
- Forearm. Another member of the Mutant Liberation Front.
- Daken. Wolverine’s estranged son. He was seemingly killed in Hunt for Wolverine: Claws of a Killer #4 (2018), but he was brought back as a reanimated henchman by Persephone in Return of Wolverine (which is basically how Wolverine returned from the dead, so perhaps Daken got better in time too).
Page 28, panel 5: Left to right, again (and ignoring Apocalypse):
- Azazel, Nightcrawler’s biological father, and a mutant who claims to be a demon. I know. He comes from the Chuck Austen run, but was last seen in the tail end of the recent Weapon X series, hanging around selling favours to politicians.
- Masque. Another long-running Morlock with more sadistic tendencies. Last seen as a member of the Brotherhood in X-Men: Gold.
- Black Tom Cassidy…? Well, this is odd. The guy in the wing collar with the red symbol on his chest certainly looks like Banshee’s cousin Black Tom Cassidy, but didn’t Powers of X #4 tell us that he was already involved in running Krakoa…? What are he and Sinister doing in this group, exactly?
- Lady Mastermind again.
- Frenzy. Long-time footsoldier Joanna Cargill, who started as a henchman for Apocalypse in early X-Factor, then became one of Magneto’s Acolytes, and eventually joined the X-Men for a while. She’s an odd inclusion in this group too, because she hasn’t been a villain for ages, and she actually showed up to fight Nate Grey alongside the other X-Men in the recent “X-Men: Disassembled” story.
- Marrow. Sometime terrorist, sometime late-90s X-Man. She was allied with Emma Frost in the recent Uncanny X-Men issues too.
Some of these characters are really quite strange choices for a generic crowd shot of villains. Is it just random selection to make up the numbers, or is there a reason…?
PAGE 30. A quote from Magneto, again stressing mutant-ness as an overriding consideration.
PAGES 31-33. The reading order and the trailers. “NEXT: FOR THE CHILDREN” and “THEN: I AM NOT ASHAMED OF WHAT I AM”.
Jean’s line (“The only ‘me’ I’ve ever been”) is almost directly from Uncanny X-Men #242 when she and Storm reunite.
I was really surprised that Hickman didn’t drill down into Proteus’s origin. As Moira’s son, does he exist in other timelines? There really ought to be more about him.
Xavier’s idea of “uploading” someone into a husk made me think of Jean holding Xavier’s mind in her own head in New X-Men…a more advanced version of that.
Has anyone decoded the next issue text, like “xx_orbi__06”? I looked at all the previous ones but the only consistent interpretation was that “os_” referred to the Moira IX Year 100 era.
Oops–“The only ‘me’ I ever was.”
Also: very nice of Xavier and Storm to parade them around Krakoa totally naked and still covered in Goldball-egg yolk. Hickman is trying to creep us out on multiple fronts.
I figured that Monet said “no touching” partially because if she is Penance, she’s used to touching = slicing up your hand?
My favorite thing about this issue was the two-panel dialogue between Cyclops and Storm. Reminded me of how I liked the Wolverine / Nightcrawler character beats in HoX #4
> Cerebro: Magneto seems to be claiming here that since some unspecified time in the past, Professor X has been using Cerebro not just to find mutants, but to copy their “mind – the essence, the anima”. This is… frankly creepy, since there’s no suggestion that he’s asked anyone’s permission for this. And later on, the data pages will tell us that Xavier has a copy of the mind of every mutant – yet he can’t possibly have got everyone to agree. Admittedly, Cerebro has always had dubious privacy issues, but this is something new.
There’s also the times he’s lost all his data, like when Banshee blew it all up in Phalanx Covenant (Xavier was seen lamenting this a few issues later). Or Evil Robot Cerebro from the late-90s.
> Cyclops’ visor: Note that the cloned Cyclops doesn’t need his visor. Xavier gives him one just before downloading the mind into his body. Traditionally, Cyclops’ inability to control his powers was attributed to brain damage caused by a head injury suffered when he jumped from a plane as a child – but that shouldn’t apply to the clone. Does the clone actually need the visor? Or is he just wearing it to validate himself as “Cyclops”?
Well, Joss Whedon already retconned that to be down to repression or something? (Also, you’d think that would have been fixed last time he came back from the dead already)
> Proteus: His insanity is addressed here. As per previous continuity, his power tends to consume his own body, leaving him to hop from host body to host body, consuming each one in turn. The claim here is that an endless supply of freshly cloned bodies has solved the problem and solved his psychological problems. We’ll see. Curiously, we’re told that Proteus’s bodies are always created using Professor X’s DNA – Proteus can possess anyone, but why not use his own DNA? And how does this fit with the final note on the same page, which insists that there has been no experimentation with putting the wrong mind in the cloned body? Isn’t that exactly what Proteus is doing?
Using Professor X clones is particularly odd if they have the ability to clone literally every mutant. Besides the general principle of using someone with a healing factor or otherwise being super-tough…. wasn’t Psylocke around for the tail-end of the Proteus/Morph thing in Exiles, where Morph’s body was completely immune to Proteus’ burnouts? If they have the DNA of literally “every mutant”, surely Changeling (Morph’s MU counterpart) is an obvious option?
> Scale: The X-Men are indeed trying to revive the entire population of Krakoa…
[sic]
> The back-up-restored mutant will be identical to the original in mind and body, but if you believe in the soul – and in the Marvel Universe, you should – then you should probably have some serious issues with this.
Which should have particular implications for Nightcrawler, with the whole “bamfs ate my soul/heaven’s rejected me” thing.
> Here’s who they are.
This comes back to the whole pod-person thing, where Everyone Is Completely On Board (even to the point of rewriting their characterisation to fit, as you note with Polaris). Never mind the wisdom of inviting guys like Selene and Gorgon on-board… why are *they* interested? Why is EVERY mutant apparently willing to cut most or all ties and move to Krakoa?
> Lady Mastermind. One of the daughters of Mastermind, and a long-running minor villain. Briefly a member of the X-Men during the Mike Carey run circa 2007. She hasn’t been seen in a few years.
She was the head of the rival studio in Age of X-Man’s Nightcrawler series just a few months back, no?
Lots of people bringing up the folly in trusting Sinister, which a) of course, but b) Moira IX had to have been fully aware of this, as she’d seen him betray the mutants (and executed by the humans for his reward). Presumably, she/Xavier/Magneto are planning for this.
re: CJ
Yeah, someone couldn’t have given them a towel or something? 🙂
re: Paul
My first thought was “Wait, what about Wolverine’s adamantium?” It didn’t occur to me that Proteus could “fix” that bit.
Also, I’m definitely getting a “this is totally a cult now” vibe from this issue. I was kind of getting that in earlier issues but it’s super creepy now.
I wonder if the inclusion of Xavier’s DNA in Proteus’s clones has anything to do with the Ultimate version, who was the son of Moira and Xavier. There was so much speculation based on the look that Xavier was actually the Maker, but maybe there will be a reveal that he’s the Ultimate version? It’s been a while since I’ve read it, but a lot of the Krakoa stuff echoes ideas from later in the Ult. X-Men series with Tian.
Marvel also showed off a Russel Dauterman variant cover for one of the Dawn of X books. It shows off Jean in all her various costumes, and the inclusion of Ultimate Jean Grey seemed a bit odd. Maybe there will be some connection revealed.
The idea that all this time Goldballs has been shooting hundreds of eggs out of his body is absolutely ridiculous and quite disgusting.
The Five are reminiscent of a group of mutants in another story who were used to support a creepy new status quo.
In Mike Carey’s X-Men event, Age of X, the psychic world containing the last “surviving” mutants was held together by the Force Five – Hellion, Rachel Summers, Legion, Psylocke, and Unuscione.
Hope Summers’ group, when she had one, was the Five Lights.
One more ‘red’ issue left. Is it safe to assume it will have to do with Moira? Or The connection between X^3/Year 1000 and the present narrative? Both?
What’s the earliest dead mutant we know has or can be resurrected? Text pages in this issue mention Synch, who died back in 2000 (real world time), as potentially being able to be involved with the Five, so presumably he’s back or coming back. So Cerebro’s been capturing minds since 2000, at least.
Had Cerebro been upgraded when Destiny died, considering how she connects to Moira’s storyline and someone who could link present day stories with the Year 100/1000 timelines from PoX? Resurrecting Destiny would be a huge incentive for Mystique to go on a suicide mission, which otherwise seems uncharacteristically self-sacrificing of her.
Cerebro got wrecked twice in the 90s, but Hickman does mention offsite backups (Muir Isle being the no-brainer) so it could be earlier than that. Depending on how far it goes, you could end up with replacement or rival members of the Five – Sway doing time manipulation, the Morlock healer swapping for Elixir, Synch instead of Hope. Funnily, the only member of the Five that seems irreplaceable is Goldballs.
Agreed. The post-resurrection scene really does lean heavily into the creepy cult vibe. Honestly, there’s so much evidence that something is off-kilter or just plain wrong under the surface, that I’m still expecting some sort of major swerve.
The blatant use of mind control, mind-reading, mind-downloading, and so forth, coupled with the use of Cerebro and Xavier’s own attitude and behavior, makes me wonder how many of the mutants on Krakoa are already compromised. How many villains are being controlled or brainwashed? How many of the resurrected mutants have loyalty built in? How many mutants get an extra dose of Krakoa obedience zapped into them at the same time they’re taught the language?
The entire Krakoa culture-elitist, separatist, supremacist-doesn’t bode well. Mutants are setting themselves apart in the same way the Inhumans always did, becoming -more- alien and inscrutably weird instead of the human-mutant integration that was the hallmark of Xavier’s dream.
The Five are becoming some sort of weird linked family… will they become a hive mind? Are they going to be like, the mutant version of the Uni-mind… or are we hinting towards what we saw in X1000, with the Phalanx assimilation?
Certainly, this version of the X-Men has abandoned heroics and integration for mutant unity and isolation, “inviting” all of their old foes to join them under dubious or mysterious circumstances, and there’s no way this can end well. Hell, XAVIER has to know there’s no way this can end well. For people like Mystique, Sinister, Apocalypse, and so many others, it’s a case of the scorpion on the frog’s back–it’s not if they’ll betray the X-Men, but when.
So with three issues to go–a quarter of this introductory storyline–we’re definitely set up for a massive twist yet to come. Sure, we know where this is going with the Dawn of X titles, but there’s still time to pull the rug out from under us again.
And the unlimited resurrection apparatus really can’t be allowed to stand for long, otherwise it’s going to be as meaningless as shooting a Madrox. How long before we learn that you can only be resurrected so many times before pattern degradation kicks in (you get a six-pack of clones and that’s it… or 12 regenerations and that’s it…) How long before someone decides to experiment with booting up multiple copies of the same person, or an accident occurs and you end up with duplicates? You know someone’s gonna break that toy.
At least Hickman is giving us plenty of material to think about and debate…
There are many hints that something to do with the clones is leading towards more and more of a hive-mind mentality.
It was even discussed in one of the issues, that Sinister’s tampering with the chimeras led to the creation of a hive-mind in the clones.
I don’t have the issues in front of me, so can’t check.
The bit about “no wrong minds placed in a clones body” is, I think, a hint about Sinister moving the whole cloning procedure away from simple clones, and to creating chimeras.
I think that will be shown to be the limitations of cloning.
It begins to erode individuality and creates a hive-mind, as we are already seeing, and as has been foreshown in the future scenes.
Yes, everyone must obviously know that Sinister is going to betray them somehow, eventually.
Why give him this power?
Plus, why didn’t Moira warn anyone about Sinister?
She was always so concerned about the Nimrod.
Nothing was mentioned about her pointing out the obvious, “Oh, letting Sinister in charge of all of this is going to end very badly too”.
Why not?
Maybe she did, and that’s the schism between Xavier/Magneto and Moira.
Maybe not.
Maybe this is the plan all along. That the next stage in evolution is the “ascension”, and the clones and the hive-mind is all necessary.
Maybe this is going exactly the way Xavier (and Moira?) wants it to go to guarantee there is some sort of future for humanity and mutants.
So what are the other Krakoa-aligned Omegas up to? Presumably something just as important as resurrection.
If everyone were being mind-controlled then presumably there’s at least one Omega-level telepath behind the scenes.
I don’t think that there is any particular need to believe in souls in the Marvel Universe. At least, not as something that clones lack. There is a lot of evidence that people can be cloned and be fully functional there.
As for Proteus being in a clone body from Xavier, maybe that is an obvious exception because his original body was consumed by his power years ago?
Can someone confirm the status of Madrox as a mutant? I remember in PAD’s X-Factor that he belonged to some different closely-related race but not actually a mutant (distinction without a difference?).
@Chris V
Yeah, in Moira IX’s timeline, it’s stated that Apocalypse enslaves Sinister, so some warning about what that guy did should’ve been passed on.
@Michael
I really hope that HoXPoX itself has one more twist. It’s funny; as much as I’m happy that maybe the X-Men can avoid DoFP, all I want is for something to go wrong or at least see a dissenting mutant opinion.
-CJ – “My favorite thing about this issue was the two-panel dialogue between Cyclops and Storm. Reminded me of how I liked the Wolverine / Nightcrawler character beats in HoX #4”
I think that’s the thing that this book seems to be lacking, real character interactions that have heart. Hickman loves his important people saying important things, and he can world-build like no one else, but his stories usually lack those interpersonal connections that the X-Men (at their best have been known for). This was my biggest fear when I first heard he was coming to X-Men.
I’m beyond excited that the X-Men have a spotlight on them in such a big way once again and I am really enjoying these books. I don’t know that they will be among my favorite X-Men stories ten years from now (compared to Whedon’s or Morrison’s runs, or something like the Phoenix Saga or even Age of Apocalypse). How often will I want to reread these stories a decade from now? Time will tell.
For these reasons, I am happy that Hickman is only writing 1½ X-books after this. I think him steering the ship and letting others flesh out the characters could make for some of best comics we’ve seen in the X-books in years.
On another note, I didn’t take Xavier to be putting the visor on Cyclops for show, but maybe to stop the optic blast before it materialized and began to think along the same lines (“Did they clone him along with the head trauma?”) This immediately made me think about Wolverine’s skeleton and then others too. Chamber’s blown out chest? Cable’s techno-organic body parts? Cypher’s Warlock arm? Beast’s blue fur (which wasn’t part of his natural mutation)? I know most of these characters haven’t been resurrected yet, but I wonder if there’s a plan in place specific to each or some overarching fix-all (such as Proteus just working it into whatever it is he’s doing).
“Mutants are setting themselves apart in the same way the Inhumans always did, becoming -more- alien and inscrutably weird instead of the human-mutant integration that was the hallmark of Xavier’s dream.”
Yeah, I think there’s a natural tension between “mutants and humans should coexist peacefully” (Xavier’s dream) and “mutants are the next step in evolution” (genetic reality). I mean, the latter means that humans should be a little worried about mutants aggressively replacing them, right? Hard to integrate when you’re also scared of becoming genetically obsolete.
“Hell, XAVIER has to know there’s no way this can end well.”
That little half-smile during Xavier’s conversation with Magneto makes me think that he’s bringing things to a head on purpose. To what end, I don’t know. But definitely not for a good reason.
If Cerebro has had these abilities all along, makes me wonder about the Danger Room and or Danger.
I wonder how far back this “mind torrent” Cerebro goes. Presumably not back to the Silver Age (when it would beep in terror and was made of vacuum tubes and could be fixed with a screwdriver).
“mind torrent”
Oh no, it’s the Napster X-Men!
Charles Kazaa-vier. (With Sinister.exe spyware)
I feel like there’s a potentially interesting metafictional reading of this whole set-up, but I’m way too lazy to write it up.
Lorna was Magneto’s right hand on Genosha and was one of the most powerful individuals on the island and then after the genocide she went though she came out angrier then this at humanity. The genocide was sort of forgotten about for years for her and now remembered.
Actually I thought the scene was mostly in character for Lorna, especially knowing Havok was just killed by a Sentinel and her friends as well rescuing Mutants from man’s stupidity. Or in Lorna’s own past words.
https://i.postimg.cc/J8vt1yGw/8-EEC1950-385-F-4922-8154-5-EB99-EC7-B315.jpg?dl=1
Hickman already had the deck stacked against him with regard to how bad he is at characterization in favor of plot and ideas and exposition.
Now he’s literally made every single character expendable and magically replaceable. It’s quite hilarious how bad an idea this is. It’s all just action figures being shuffled this way and that.
I’m sure the status quo in this issue won’t stick, but my god this is bad writing.
The villains appearing en masse was a scene that annoyed me more than most scenes so far (though like Paul I was bothered by the courtroom scene with Sabertooth on trial, and unlike Paul perhaps I’ve been bothered by a lot of the rest of this story so far). For starters, it’s a bit weird the costumes in which some of the villains appear. Joanna Cargill hasn’t worn her Marauders costume, or worn her hair like that, since the Messiah Complex era. Marrow looks like she did in the late 90s. Is Pepe Larraz googling these characters to draw them, or are these costumes meant to have significance vis a vis the timeline where House of X is taking place?
Paul’s notes this time really highlight the mutant-over-individual thematic thrust of the issue (which I think most everyone is rightly interpreting as the X-men becoming a cult), but the arrival of the villains this issue flipped a switch in my head, turning me into a relentless crank. So, did these diverse villains all get some message telling them to walk through the Krakoa gates wherever they were at 3pm Eastern Standard Time on a specific date? So that they’d get there all at once like that. I know the appearance of the villains joining the heroes like this is an old cliche in comics which I shouldn’t be too hung up about––and I’m usually not hung up about it in most comics where it happens––but it is handled so poorly in this scene. It’s more plausible when a few of them approach at a particular time, like when the villains propose joining Captain America’s crew in Civil War, or when the 198 filter in to the X-mansion grounds gradually after Decimation. It makes more sense that the Breakworld refugees arrive all at once at the X-mansion, because they come already packed into a couple of spaceships. But these villains clearly come from all over the world, from different time zones, and they have dispositions that are not necessarily all that compatible with one another. Why are they walking through the gate all at the same time, on the same day, with no established hierarchy of who’s leading who? Apocalypse appears without his horsemen, Sinister appears without the Maurauders…(for that matter, Sinister comes alone, when in the last issue we’ve seen that the Sinister participating in all of this is the one from the Kieron Gillen Uncanny run, who is accompanied by hundreds of clones of himself). But more than all of this so far, I’m bothered that all these villains are just fine with knuckling under and chilling with the X-men just because Professor X has picked out some nice real estate for them. The implication is that they are all placing their role as a mutant above their personal desires for their lives, or that they’re intimidated when big villains like Apocalypse decide to answer this invitation and so they just fall in line, but I don’t believe any of this from any kind of character perspective. These are for the most part very separate characters, who are supervillains often because they don’t get along and won’t respect authority. What could really appeal about the life Professor X is offering them? Is Hickman’s Maxfield-Parish-style cliched pastoralism really so appealing to characters who thrive in places like Madripoor?
Certainly Hickman goes out of his way to suggest that the conformism of this new mutant culture is creepy, but I think these pages more particularly point out the way in which Hickman sacrifices minute-to-minute continuity in his narratives to make the points he’s drawn up in an outline. Here is the part of the outline where he ups the stakes by showing that even the villains are on board with this new X-cult. Sequence of events and psychological evolution of character really have no place or purchase in Hickman’s view of story; they never have. Jeff Lester on Wait, What? has compared Hickman to a dungeon master, and he is very much like a dungeon master, more than he is like a novelist. A dungeon master develops a realm full of prompts for stories, and relies on the players to provide the characters to fill that space. He or she also relies on players to motivate their characters into stepping into the right spaces in order to take up the adventure, whether or not their character moves them to place themselves where the DM wants them to be. Hickman writes in much the same way, creating a dynamic premise for a story, and lots of active “dungeons” in which story can later unfold (that’s why we get all these “files” and maps of Krakoa, and lists of countries not on board with the program, etc.). But he leaves his characters up to…who, exactly?
As readers we don’t have the agency of players. What does Hickman expect us to do with the premise he sketches out? Often it seems as if Hickman is looking to us to fill in character based on what we know of the X-men’s previous appearances in other comics. Hickman’s only attempts at character-based dialogue are to quote or recapitulate lines characters said in previous stories. Thus his Jean Grey quotes herself to Ororo from their meeting during Inferno. Otherwise Hickman’s characters, in all of this superhero stories, talk in a kind of groupspeak, comprised of two voices. There are leaders, and there are followers. The leaders all speak in the same tone. Hickman’s Professor X talks like his Reed Richards, his Magneto sounds like his Doctor Doom. His followers are even more disturbingly of one voice; they hardly betray any individualization at all. This probably comes from his writing style, as described in his appearance on Kieron Gillen’s Decompressed podcast: He writes all the dialogue he thinks he’ll need for a scene, and then after the fact he assigns it to characters. It makes it exceptionally difficult to tell when Hickman is self-consciously writing certain characters as pod people. Some of them are physically, literally pod people in this issue, so that clears that up, but they spoke in exactly the same voice before they died and were resurrected, as well. I think it’s well worth noting whenever Hickman betrays his dungeon-master characteristics as a writer, and this is one of the big places: he is tone-deaf to character, and he counts on you, the reader, to paper over the gaps for him. Just as a DM has no need of individualized characters to create his/her story prompts, Hickman ignores character and aims at big ideas and a strangled non-linear plotting, making it the reader’s job to piece together the elements of the plot and the big ideas, since they come at us all out of order. That can be fun for a while, but without interesting characters to follow it is a very hard status to maintain. I think the last 4 or so issues of these series have really begun to demonstrate the strain of maintaining a story in which every character is either hidden (Professor X behind his helmet, Moira is actually in physical hiding most of the time) or written weirdly out of character (Polaris in this issue is absurdly off-brand, but even a fairly straightforward, obvious character like Sabertooth comes off strange, with all the strenuous anti-humor in the court scene about him being rude––Hickman is never more painful to read than when he tries to be funny), or is supposed to be a pod person or a cult member (all of the mutants, basically, including good guys and now––depressingly––all of the mutant villains as well). A writer with a more balanced skill set might give us a character that was airlifted into this new status quo––someone we could identify with, whose experience would indicate to us that things are not what they seem to be. Beast fulfills that role in the Claremont/Byrne run, when the X-men are captured by Mesmero and turned into circus performers. The shift in the characters is jarring, but because we see the shift through Beast’s eyes, we know that things are off-kilter. Of course, Hickman doesn’t want us to be able to tell for sure if something’s really wrong, and he doesn’t want us to know yet what it is, but the fact that he’s three-quarters of the way through his story and hasn’t tipped his hand yet really hammers home that this series is a prologue for a longer story to come, and not a unit you could read in isolation.
I think this point is where I always part ways with Hickman, because I always have a lot of trouble negotiating the scale of Hickman’s thematic and plot ambitions with the growing size of his writerly inadequacies. I find the premise of the X-men very appealing, but only because it’s wraps around a group of characters I love. But I haven’t seen those characters yet in Hickman’s story. There are a host of good ideas at play, but the story Hickman’s telling is not leading in any very strong direction, because it’s been a story that a) hasn’t emerged out of characters acting in characteristic ways, and b) doesn’t develop by following characters making individual choices. There are some character choices made, but they are all incredibly remote from the action of the books. Basically, Professor X and Moira MacTaggart make some character-based choices. But during the parts of the story we see they have already made these choices, and we are only witness to their aftermath––and that doesn’t build any kind of drama. The narrative structure we’re left with in the meantime is kind of like the bones of some sort of essay imagining a kind of speculative war between artificial intelligence and a kind of mutant eugenics cult for the right to evolve past one another. The evolution of this story so far has been frustratingly absent of any organic flow or development. We’re given loads of specific information about timelines, geography, histories and false histories (Hickman is always most animated when he’s implying some kind of conspiracy theory), but we’re repeatedly denied the connective tissue between the different timelines, the different thematic elements introduced in the various chapters, and a lot of the basic choreography of events that would enable us to look at this as some kind of story.
The promise implicit in this approach is that Hickman will deliver a long, exceptionally thorough run on the X-men, which will make this initial series make sense and read as a grand prologue to what is to come, and for those who are down for that journey, um…bon voyage? Recalling the painful slog of Hickman’s endless Avengers runs, I can’t imagine that this will bear any better fruit than what Hickman has created before. Hickman’s whole combined Avengers run was about planets colliding; I don’t recall any important character development for any Avenger within that duration, save that Roberto DaCosta buys AIM. I think it’s a very real probability that Hickman’s upcoming X-men run will deliver a vast, nearly abstract mutant-vs.-machine war, with nary a character moving in any direction. It’s interesting because Chris Claremont was an X-men writer not unknown for his grand ideas for the series, either; and yet what I remember most about the Claremont stories were the moments for particular characters. Those grand concepts for the series moved very slowly in Claremont’s conception of the narrative; but the books felt very productive because we might spend an issue getting deep into particular characters, with just a check-in to that larger plot. I remember very fondly the issue where Rogue reveals to Storm her fear of not being able to control her powers. We learn about Rogue’s childhood, about the trauma of her powers manifesting, and then we get a whole section in which Storm works with Rogue and allows her to try and develop a sense of control over her powers. The whole story is about self-control, which trouble both Rogue and Storm in different ways at that point, and it ends with the government stepping in and depowering Storm by mistake, in an attempt at exercising civic control over mutants. So that background story Claremont was building, of the U.S. government turning upon mutants, is developed in a small way, while 3/4s of the story is the characters learning about one another. The story is thematically consistent, and exciting to read. It really endears us further to Rogue, and it allows us to see Storm in a new light, as a leader that nurtures the individuals on her team. That’s the kind of issue that made me love the X-men. And so it frustrates me to see the Hickman brand applied like ketchup over the X-men. On the one hand, his reconceptualization of the X-men’s story is a real potential renewal of the X-men’s saga, the way the Grant Morrison run renewed it after years of deterioration into purposelessness. But on the other hand, the awkward mechanics of Hickman’s writing, his disinterest in character, and his fluctuating, stunted sense of tone mean that this new lease on relevance for the X-men’s grand narrative is at the same time saddled for the foreseeable future with the writer least capable of successfully exploiting the opportunities he himself has created. Will these stories to come be any good? I’d like to believe they will be, but I don’t have that confidence in Hickman. I want to like these current stories a lot, but I can’t help but feel as if they are falling apart before my eyes––not in terms of the overall plot, which I’m sure is emerging just as Hickman planned it to unfold, but in what I guess I’d call the larger syntax of writing, that magical merger of theme, plot, character and tone that some writers are able to blend so well. I can’t shake the intuition that when this story is over we will have learned nothing further about any of the individual X-men, about their plans, their hopes for their own futures. And how will they fight their way out of the clone-stuffed, fanatical cult they find themselves in? I’d love for them to do it; but I doubt that’s where Hickman is going with all this. He doesn’t really believe in superheroes; he prefers authority figures, kings and science daddies. And I begin to think that it was, corny as it sounds, Claremont’s belief in his characters’ dauntless heroism that made his comics as exciting as they were. His X-men might face a bleak future, an oppressive government, or increasingly threatening villains; they might get captured, they might get enslaved; but they were always going to keep fighting. What are Hickman’s X-men doing now that they’re maybe a part of this creepy cult? I can’t tell what they’re doing. I don’t know what any of them are thinking, or how they’re feeling. And at the end of it all, what I’m left with is that absence of personalities populating this story. That’s what I feel in these stories most keenly so far.
With this issue, and the series as a whole to this point, Hickman has maneuvered himself into a really difficult position. The strength of the comic is how big and bold his world-building ideas are, but for all the talk of how this story has set up the next decade of X-Men comics, it’s plain that can’t be true unless this new status quo falls apart rapidly — otherwise, what are they all going to *do* in a typical issue, other than stand around their island and talk about how nice it is to be functionally immortal now?
The “resurrection” scene is so over-the-top creepy, and the ready acceptance of every single character so hard to believe, that an element of brainwashing and desperate peer pressure seems implicit.
But because it’s Hickman, I still have to wonder if that’s me reading things into the scene that aren’t meant to be there, and we’re really supposed to believe that a strong PowerPoint presentation was enough to convince everyone — ranging from a former Catholic priest to the former lord of Limbo — that their souls could be backed up on a hard drive and loaded into a new shell as needed. If nothing else, the protocol against having two copies around seems to put the lie to that idea — it’s either a clean transfer of “you” or it isn’t.
Assuming for the sake of argument that normal storytelling rules are still in effect here, Moira’s failure to appear in the modern-day timeline up to now seems significant and not a little foreboding. Is it possible that Xavier and Magneto don’t know she faked her death in life X, and she’s actually going to show up at the last minute to try to dismantle this whole plan before it goes awry?
@Alan L
“For starters, it’s a bit weird the costumes in which some of the villains appear.”
Meh, we have Jean wearing her awful Marvel Girl costume and calling herself Marvel Girl again for no apparent reason. I’m guessing this is all just an alternate Moira X timeline that will get erased when Moira hits golden #11. (Although Jean is still wearing the dumb costume on the cover of Hickman’s ongoing.)
“the arrival of the villains this issue flipped a switch in my head, turning me into a relentless crank”
More or less, same here. It’s like a 10-year-old’s attempt at fan fiction. “And then all the bad guys realized the good guys were right and they’re like hey good guys we want to join you and the good guys were like oh hey bad guys yeah that’s just great and everything was great.” Again, this is probably a timeline that’s about to be jettisoned, but it’s a really, really, really dumb timeline.
“for all the talk of how this story has set up the next decade of X-Men comics, it’s plain that can’t be true unless this new status quo falls apart rapidly — otherwise, what are they all going to *do* in a typical issue, other than stand around their island and talk about how nice it is to be functionally immortal now?”
Exactly. He gave them magical we-can-do-everything-now powers. Hickman is bad at characterization to begin with, but this is so dumb it negates even potential characterization if nothing is at stake. Yeah, it’ll probably all get wiped out as Moira dies and makes it to her last life, #11. Still, this is a dumb detour to get there.
@Alan L
Thanks for your cranky comment – you’ve put into words what I Long felt about Hickman but couldn’t quite explain even to myself, much less others.
@Job
I don’t think we’ll hit a reset at the end of Hoxpox. Things are now lined pretty perfectly with what we’re seeing in Dawn of X solicitations. I think this is it.
More generally on Hickman – he’s got the reputation of a chessmaster clockworker or something, but… In his Avengers run Ex Nihilo and Abyss kill millions in the first issue. And then they become Avengers. Their victims are never mentioned again.
Also he put Beast on the Illuminati and didn’t give him even half a plotline in all his run. Hardly clockwork plotting there.
Also – I didn’t know that bit about him writing dialogue and then assiginig it to characters. Is that true? That’s dreadful.
I was going to write a more detailed comment but Alan L has done a far better job than I could have. Bravo sir!
The only thing I will say is that Hickman really cannot write these characters well at all. It is now confirmed that clones or not, these characters are no different from the originals so all that bad dialogue is Hickman.
I am not optimistic for this run. While no writer can deliver a truly original story for the X-Men, his mish mash of previous themes (Genosha/Krakoa, Cloning) combined with his bad characterization is going to make this a more difficult read than his Avengers run. The X-Men are probably the one franchise outside of Spiderman that needs some interesting character interaction to hold it together. Everything has already been done.
Even worse, he is choosing to reference 20 year old storylines that weren’t that memorable and the current audience may have no clue about. Who is this revamp targeting? New readers and the old ones or just hardcore X-Men history buffs?
Madelyne Pryor? Inferno? Clones? Info dumps on X-Men History and revisions? Hard pass.
If it was anything other than Big Two superhero comics, I’d expect the resurrection apparatus to get undone by the end of the story, for the obvious reasons. But this is Big Two superhero comics, so I think it could very well be meant to be new status quo.
Think about it: What would actually be lost if death is off the table for these characters? There are no stakes if we know they won’t die? We already know they won’t die! Not permanently. When Wolverine “died” (for the second time!) did anyone buy it, even for a second?
Mark Waid talks about how it’s important for writers to avoid what he terms “fake drama,” his example being “Oh no, will Superman really get angry enough to kill Luthor?” The idea is there’s no real suspense there because everyone knows the answer’s going to be no. Well, you could argue that all major deaths in Marvel comics these days are fake drama.
I think it could actually be clever if, instead of fighting this limitation of corporate comics, they leaned into it, exploring the SF idea of a subspecies that can functionally live forever.
Misc. thoughts on other bits of the comic:
Surely a Sinister with an x-factor counts as a mutant every bit as much as the female Sinisters count as women.
I don’t think Emma necessarily used telepathy on the Russian delegate, who clearly still has enough antipathy to give the mutants the ol’ stink eye at the reception. And she abstained, instead of voting in favor. I read it as Emma employing more traditional, real world means of coercion.
@Alan L
“So, did these diverse villains all get some message telling them to walk through the Krakoa gates wherever they were at 3pm Eastern Standard Time on a specific date?”
Sure? I don’t see what’s so strange about that. Why would it be preferable to let them set their own time table and wander in whenever?
Possibly the guy who looks like Black Tom is supposed to be Mikhail Rasputin.
The only thing that annoyed me was the literal use of “eggs” for Goldballs’ balls when I could have done with them having “discovered that they were genetically dense and could be used as the equivalent of eggs”.
I don’t see the difficulty with the villains all gathering together to be transported. Clearly this is a pre-arranged thing. It doesn’t mean they were all standing around together when they were *contacted*. And as I pointed out in the annotations, at least two of these people seem to have connections with Krakoa already, so there’s possibly something going on here that we’ll come to in future issues.
@YLu: “Think about it: What would actually be lost if death is off the table for these characters? There are no stakes if we know they won’t die? We already know they won’t die!”
The difference is that now the characters themselves know that they won’t die. (If they accept this definition of “won’t die”.)
I’m willing to give Hickman some more time before I determine whether this relaunch is successful or not. He hasn’t even finished the setup yet. Setup is what he’s good at, so I’m happy to follow where he leads. There will be plenty of time for characterization in the spin-off books, most of which Hickman isn’t writing.
The X-Men have come back from the dead in so many convoluted and ridiculous ways, I’m frankly glad there’s a mechanism this straightforward to explain subsequent resurrections. At least until it all falls apart, which it absolutely will.
Maybe the prohibition about creating second versions of any one character is borne out of fear that the second copy *won’t* be the same as the first. The X-Men certainly have some experience with that. In other words, if there are two Jeans running around, maybe only one of them will have a soul.
Finally, I haven’t followed the franchise closely for a long time, but it seems to me that it doesn’t really matter what costume each second- and third-tier character is wearing. Sloppy writing? Maybe. Or maybe this story is about wrenching the X-Men away from their current status quo and some of the smaller details just don’t matter.
It matters when we’re encouraged to pick over the smallest details in search of clues, as this series clearly encourages us to do – in its writing, promotion and blatant attention-grabbing tricks like ‘oooh, look, there’s no Life 6 on this detailed infographic I wonder whyyy’.
For that to work every detail really needs to be perfect, every decision made on the page – informed. When the story includes several timelines and we’re supposed to question which timeline we’re observing, even a background character depicted in their 90s costume becomes important because it looks like a clue. Even if it’s not supposed to, as I guess is the case here.
@AlanL “He writes all the dialogue he thinks he’ll need for a scene, and then after the fact he assigns it to characters”
Except that isn’t what he said in that podcast. He said he prefers to write all the dialogue separately, in a text document, and then add it to the script in Final Cut. It’s easier *for him* because he likes to get it all out and then figure out what needs to be changed based on the art that comes back.
As for the cult bit, I’m just gonna say I feel we’re *meant* to feel uncomfortable about all this. About the fanaticism and the loss of individualism. But at the same time, I also feel that its tapping into a very specific well of minority experience and desire that is extremely hard to explain and appreciate if you’ve never had to deal with it yourself (and there’s nothing wrong with that!). In every movement, sooner or later, activists/dissenters reach a point where the larger cause is what matters the most and individual losses are not only acceptable but almost encouraged. Is it wrong/creepy/dehumanizing? Absolutely. But you sacrifice your present individuality for the sake of autonomy and acceptance for future generations and the hope that what you accomplish will make it easier for those who follow.
Perhaps I am giving Hickman far too much credit (wouldn’t be the first time), but I think the very fact that it feels so strange to those of us who are used to the status quo and the X-men *wanting* to be embraced by humanity means he’s getting at least some of it right.
Beyond that, much as I disagree with a lot of what you said, do wanna say that I appreciate everything you wrote. I’ve missed this kind of discourse about the X-men in recent years and it’s nice to see this run inspiring so much debate and discussion, no matter which side of the argument you fall on.
Yes, if nothing else this finally is a book with ideas worth discussing in it. Though in my opinion that says less about Hickman than about Marvel editorial – Hickman is probably the first writer who’s coming to x-books who can be confident he has at least two to three years to actually develop his ideas and a longer metaplot since… Bendis, I’d say? And Bendis is many things, but an ideas metaplot writer he’s not.
(Personally I would have loved if Taylor got at least another twenty issues of X-Men Red.)
Anyway – Hoxpox is talkworthy because there’s ideas and laying of building blocks for several years’ worth of stories. And no other x-writer has done that for years now, since every book had maybe a year (12 to 18 issues) to look forward to. Hickman gets 12 in his first three months.
I’m still loving this. I get a few people feel it lacks the characterization they want. But this is about the characters acting ever so slightly off. And I’m enjoying the journey that gets us there. The set up is so fun.
And there’s enough character “beats” to keep me going. I hope we see some prominent characters who haven’t featured yet… Such as Rogue, Kitty, Colossus or Gambit. Even if only for a panel or two, like Polaris.
@ChrisV: yeah, I reckon we’ll see that continued cloning doesn’t pay off. It’s an interesting conceit though. How do some characters really feel about it – surely Nightcrawler who genuinely believes in a eternal soul isn’t cool with the idea? And how does it impact on a person to know that they can just come back again and again? Death no longer has a meaning.
That said, it gives a new spin to the classic you’re not an X-Man until you’ve died and come back at least twice…
@Si: “the idea that all this time Goldballs has been shooting hundreds of eggs out of his body is absolutely ridiculous and quite disgusting”
That’s why it’s so good! It’s utterly repugnant. And suddenly Goldballs is one of those mutants with a gross power.
I’m sure Hickman has previously said his favourite characters include Emma, Monet, Goldballs (and Cannonball and Sunspot). This issue shows it.
Emma always seems so fun to write, and to draw 🙂
Hickman’s writing reminds me a lot of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation. Foundation was about a collection of short stories about the future collapse of an empire and what humans could do to mitigate the effects of collapse. The stories were brief and the protagonists were rarely fleshed out. Most characters have zero characterization. All they knew is that a crisis was coming and they had to encounter it with brains. If you liked it (and I loved it), you were carried along by the plot and the mystery of wondering did today’s decision solve tomorrow’s problem.
I have the same excitement about Hickman: plot over deep character arcs. I really want to see the X-Men be about something else besides the slow march to genocide, whether it’s like New X-Men (“let’s flip the table and be about a new phase of evolution”) or this one.
Since this is my first Hickman comic, I haven’t gotten fed up with his characterization (or lack thereof). But it’s the plot that brought me back after not caring for years–and anecdotally, I think that’s the case for a lot of people. It’s not just the latest season of the Summers family soap opera.
And yet, there’s been some wasted opportunity for characterization. We need to see a non-mutant outside of Cult of X reacting to this. So far we’ve seen Orchis (hostile), UN inspectors (adversarial / hostile), and secret court (hostile). The exception is the FF in HoX #1, who are already expressing a problem with what’s going on. How would Beast feel about Trish Tilby interviewing him about the changes? Or even Val Cooper? And again, the casual mention of Proteus without mentioning Moira left me emotionally cold. That really should matter.
I’m not surprised that all the villains would show up at once, given that a mutant nation is about to be founded and Xavier and Magneto are headlining it together, and anti-mutant hysteria is once again at genocidal levels, assuming recent continuity. (And that is a big assumption.)
And as ill-advised and unpalatable an alliance with unsavory mutants may be, again, if mutants are being killed in the streets, then it must’ve occurred to some of them that a team-up is preferable to the usual infighting which will leave them dead. I’m not saying it’s a good idea and that backstabbing won’t happen, though.
I haven’t been getting HoX or PoX, but I have been reading you synopses Paul. The intricacies of Hickman’s plot and storytelling sound intriguing, but I have to ask: does this story present even a single likable character anywhere in it? Are the X-Men, as a group, at all sympathetic? I’ve been tempted to pick it up, but it seems like the X-Men, as individuals and as a whole, come off pretty badly.
@Krzysiek: There’s a big difference between “one of Moira’s universe-changing lives is a complete mystery” and “what costume is Marrow wearing today.”
I’m not saying costumes don’t matter, but certainly Jean’s reversion to Marvel Girl is more important than whatever is going on with background villain #4.
Some of these things seem like potential clues and some just seem like nitpicks because readers have a beef with Hickman’s writing style or storyline or work on the Avengers. I don’t think the answer to the HoXPoX mysteries is going to be revealed by scrutinizing minute details.
You’re probably right, but my point is that it’s impossible to tell what’s a clue and what’s a nitpick. Especially when we try to judge something like dialogue – is it off-putting and jarring because the characters are telepathically manipulated and / or pod people… or is it just clunky and accidentally poorly written?
Re: Proteus: I’ve always struggled with understanding how reality-altering powers work (e.g. how is the reality gem different than the power gem?). In this context, couldn’t Proteus fill the role of the other 4 mutants by altering reality to, say, stabilize/synergize mutant powers? Then I thought, perhaps no other mutant can fill his specific role of fostering reproductive viability of eggs — doubtful, considering the range of mundane and weird powers. THEN I thought, couldn’t they just keep replicating him to fill all 5 roles? The only objection is the ethics of their 1-mutant-clone rule, but they’re also okay with burning out his body in a matter of days/weeks, so who’s going to object? Then I figure it might be too costly to replicate so many Proteus clones, that 4 long-lived mutants is more practical. Then I realized I was devoting way too much time thinking about this 🙂
I’m just worried that this is going down the path to something we’ve seen a hundred times before in superhero comics, and that it’ll mainly be remembered as a character assassination for the X-Men.
That this is all just a master plot by some villain, rather than mutants deciding that after the events of Rosenberg’s run, they’ve really, finally had enough.
I’ve gotten more and more of that type of vibe after this issue.
That’s my main concern.
“Professor X was possessed by Shadow King, and manipulated all the other good mutants to follow him.”, or something along those lines will be very upsetting to me.
That’s not a direction I have any interest.
Also, we already know that the “immortality” thing won’t last.
We saw in scenes set in the future that chimeras of different mutant characters exist, but that most of “our time period’s” mutants are no longer alive.
Obviously, this isn’t going to last.
Hickman’s already shown us it won’t last.
Plus, people are trusting Xavier when he says that he is implanting their souls back in their bodies.
Except, Xavier seems very much of an unreliable narrator.
Why are you trusting what Xavier is saying?
Especially when the clones don’t seem to be acting normally.
More likely, he’s using Cerebro to create some sort of hive-mind with the clones.
“Goldballs – the most absolutely essential member of the group and the one who’s far and way the most expendable in terms of his broader significance to the X-Men”.
He’s also the easiest one to resurrect without his own presence in the 5 – all they need is for him to have left a number of ball/eggs in storage.
“blatant attention-grabbing tricks like ‘oooh, look, there’s no Life 6 on this detailed infographic I wonder whyyy’.”
I really WANT stories to be grabbing my attention. Who doesn’t???
I find this all incredibly compelling, much more so after this episode. Hickman’s set up a dozen or more paths for the next few years — for himself to write, but also for other writers who do focus on character-building. And, oof — what tremendous opportunity for character evolution along these new paths.
* Mind control. I like to hope (and I could be wrong) that Hickman has intentionally been vague with his core X-Men characters because they’re all under a telepathic cloud of acceptance (at which was hinted strongly in this issue with Emma’s malfeasance). At some point that cloud will lift, and then we’ll see how individuals react to the new status quo.
* Immortality as a new pivot point for heroism vs. villainy. Clearly the promise of resurrection is what drew most of those villains in — and surely plenty of heroes are happy with it. But probably some aren’t, on both sides of that line — for moral reasons, perhaps for biological reasons, etc. Once that schism percolates, who will be seen as the villain — one who adheres to the cult of immortality, or one who fights against a status quo of mutant salvation?
* Specifics of resurrection. I agree that Jean as Marvel Girl is not just “Hickman and Pepe like the costume”; there’s likely more there. Did she choose to be resurrected as that pre-Phoenix form? Or was that chosen for her, despite the claims of the data page?
There are so many more directions this can go in. Will they all end in places that we’re happy with? Of course not. But I love the setup.