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”.
I think Jean’s “I’m the only me” line is strong foreshadowing that there’s more than one Jean running around already.
Yes, it’s a callback to an older story – but that’s exactly what makes it good misdirection.
My first thought on the mutant organization tasked with mutant missing persons and murders would be the upcoming X-Force title (“The CIA of the Mutant World”, although it’s more of an FBI-style purview). Then second note in that section even mentions ‘FORCE protocols’.
@Chris V
But that was Moira’s 9th life. Whatever else Krakoa is, it’s not the 9th life. (According to the infographic, Xavier and Magneto were killed by Apocalypse early on in that one).
@Dave
Yes, of course. But there’s compelling mysteries written into the plot and there’s blatant ‘look I’m not telling you a thing, look at the thing I’m not showing you’ presented in infographic form.
“At some point that cloud will lift, and then we’ll see how individuals react to the new status quo.”
Yes! We don’t have to choose between mutants having a better life and a mystery about them being mind controlled. It can be both.
I assume at some point we’re going to find out who the main internal villain is (Charles? Cassandra? Moira?!) And once the X-Men shake off his/her manipulation they can pick and choose what parts of this utopia they want.
@K
And the fact that the line takes plane during the end of Inferno really hints at some sort of Madelyne Pryor connection (also featuring Sinister).
I can’t wait to see what happens next–although I hope the X-Men are not about to have their own Spidey “Clone Saga”.
Also, I echo the sentiments of others earlier in this thread for the thoughtful analyses. It’s the same way on other message boards too.
I was wondering if Moira might not be the villain too.
I’d expect she’s one person that Xavier can’t use Cerebro with, because it said that Moira’s mutant power was completely undetectable.
So, she’s probably outside the purview of everything going on with Krakoa….cloning, mind-control, whatever.
I’m wondering if she might be messing everything up in each lifetime.
Maybe it’s not purposeful either. Maybe she’s just a catalyst for things going wrong.
Then again, maybe Moira really isn’t Moira, but has manipulated Xavier with this story about Moira having been a mutant.
Then, the most interesting aspect of Hickman’s run has been all a misdirection….
Pasquale> e.g. how is the reality gem different than the power gem?
The Power Gem’s basically just a battery. You can use it to overcharge stuff and run it at higher power (which apparently includes things like super-strength), but it’s the Infinity Gem that does the least.
Thom: “And once the X-Men shake off his/her manipulation they can pick and choose what parts of this utopia they want.”
And the infighting over and within utopia is how it splinters and becomes something very different, with new factions drawn along new lines, human and machine alliances against cult mutant factions, etc. Woo-eee.
All this, and there’s still this larger narrative of biological vs. technological, and the parallels being laid out between them with collective consciousness-based societies. Is Moira on the other side of that line?
I would not mind an ending that rejiggered the face/heel alignment of characters, to freshen teams up.
We have been conditioned so much in the “West” to find good societies to be ones that embrace things like individualism, democracy, Capitalism….
Ideas about collectivism are usually viewed as dystopian.
This wasn’t always the case though.
There is certainly an older strain in literature which would present evolution as moving towards the collective over the individual.
Then, you have theories like those of Pierre Teilhard De Chardin, and their influence on someone like Jack Kirby or the novel Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke.
So, I’d very much be pleased to see Hickman digging in to this type of “overlooked” territory.
Rather than all the foreboding about “evil plots” and “mind control” and “manipulation”, it would certainly be a pleasant surprise to see Hickman making a wider point.
It just seems very disturbing and antithetical to our mindsets today that any society other than one which embraces core “Western values” could be valued as “good”.
@CJ
“Hickman’s writing reminds me a lot of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation.”
This is a pretty good comparison, at least in terms of execution. The big problem, of course, is here Hickman is on a franchise full of beloved characters, and failing to do anything distinct with any of the characters.
@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!”
It depends on the individual stories themselves, how they’re paced, how their stakes are built up, how invested the characters are in the stakes, and how invested we as readers feel in the characters and their stakes.
I’m currently rereading Remender’s Uncanny X-Force, and the Dark Angel Saga is still fantastic regardless of the fact Angel/Archangel was basically restored to normal a few years later, because within the context of Remender’s story, the conflict, confrontation, and defeat of Archangel is handled extremely well. And within the context of the tale Remender was telling, Archangel was as good as gone.
A good writer can get the reader to suspend their disbelief even if the nature of the stories being told impose limitations to long-term change.
Hickman isn’t even trying to get anyone to suspend disbelief. The people who are still into the story are holding out hope for resolutions and explanations that will justify all the crap writing thus far.
The benefit of HoXPoX being so high-profile is it really shines a light on Hickman’s strengths and failings as a writer, which far too many people seemed glad to overlook in the past.
I recently read his two SHIELD miniseries, which is just a mishmash of big ideas with very little actually happening, and then looked online for reviews to see what other people thought. Almost everyone more or less said the series is very hard to describe but they knew they enjoyed it, which is a tacit admission that they didn’t understand it but the art was pretty. The same is true for reviews of Infinity, but at least in that case, a number of people could see the bad writing for what it was.
@Job
“A good writer can get the reader to suspend their disbelief even if the nature of the stories being told impose limitations to long-term change. Hickman isn’t even trying to get anyone to suspend disbelief.”
That’s what I mean by leaning into the limitation instead of trying to write around it, yes. Turning a weakness into a strength. Mining the high concept potential of a nation that’s effectively conquered death.
I think there’s a lot of potential there, if that indeed is where Hickman’s going.
‘Pages 18-20.
Scale: The X-Men are indeed trying to revive the entire population of Krakoa’
Don’t you mean Genosha?
So 9 issues in, I finally understood that HoX/PoX actually means “Hocus Pocus”.
Too much retcon in this issue for my taste, esp. Lorna, Goldballs and Cerebro.
Also shouldn’t Goldballs have appeared in HoX #4 as committing one of the biggest genocide ? I’m pretty sure a lot of potentially future mutants have been killed during the years when the (unviable) eggs were used as, well, goldballs.
@Emmanuel
That’s not how eggs work.
Uncanny X-Force stands nearly alone in the last decade of X-Men comics as properly conveying the stakes that the story needed.
It’s a rare quality, and the vast majority of superhero writers don’t have it these days. And even the ones who do can’t possibly sustain it month after month all the time.
Far smarter to write a mystery to keep the reader invested in the solution, than to try to keep the reader invested in high stakes in a superhero universe.
@YLu
“That’s what I mean by leaning into the limitation instead of trying to write around it”
But I’m not agreeing with you. It means the characters face no risk. It means the suicide mission to attack Mothermold had minimal drama, since there was nothing at stake if they all died.
@K
“Uncanny X-Force stands nearly alone in the last decade of X-Men comics as properly conveying the stakes that the story needed.”
Absolutely. Marvel is often at a loss for “definitive stories,” ala Dark Knight Returns or Watchmen, because their series are often too open-ended and caught up in the conventions of the genre to stand out, and for me, the first half of Uncanny X-Force stands out as one of Marvel’s definitive stories of all time. Besides God Loves Man Kills, it’s easily my favorite self-contained X-Men story.
“Far smarter to write a mystery to keep the reader invested in the solution, than to try to keep the reader invested in high stakes in a superhero universe.”
While I’ve been critical of the haphazard way Hickman has chosen to reveal plot points and scenes in HoXPoX (for example, the Moira issue providing climactic revelations when we’ve barely seen Moira yet, the Cypher scene providing redundant info implicit in the Krakoa text and future scenes), certainly the approach is keeping readers confused and guessing, invested in the information being withheld. Despite all its faults, and despite all of Hickman’s faults on everything he writes, the man’s work is ALWAYS INTERESTING at least, which can be said of few other writers.
The clone bodies and backup personalities is the key identifier of “hard sci-fi” – particularly popular now is the Altered Carbon series of books and the Netflix show.
@Job
“It means the characters face no risk. It means the suicide mission to attack Mothermold had minimal drama, since there was nothing at stake if they all died.”
You can’t do a beat for beat story like that now that we know about the Resurrection Five, sure, but there are plenty of ways to create stakes even without the possibility of protagonist death. Even in that particular story, there’s the hanging threat to baseline humanity — still very much mortal — if the X-Men fail and the crazy Mother Mold wakes up.
I’ve fixed the Genosha/Krakoa thing.
@YLU
“there are plenty of ways to create stakes even without the possibility of protagonist death”
Of course there are, but Hickman hasn’t established any. Now that Mothermold is gone, the world has been intimidated/manipulated into recognizing the Krakoa nation, the X-Men and all mutants are explicitly immortal, Year 100 is an alternate timeline, and Year 1000 doesn’t have any understood connections to the present struggle, what’s left?
@Job
I feel you’re veering closely to the ‘Superman’s so powerful, you can’t write a story about him’ argument. Which isn’t true regarding Superman – and it isn’t here. Even if we accept that the mutants are immortal and safe, that still leaves plenty of space for stories about what they actually do now that they don’t have to struggle every day, what society they build and how they interact with the outside world. For starters.
In order to state that there are no stakes left, you have to willfully ignore all of the clues that something’s not right on Krakoa.
I mean, even if the mutants have won the human/mutant/machine war (which isn’t at all certain at this point in the story), then at least Hickman is promising an internal conflict between the X-Men and Charles (or whoever is pretending to be Charles).
I don’t see how anyone can be certain that this retooling of the X-Men has failed when the setup hasn’t even been finished yet. It doesn’t make sense to predict ultimate failure when you’ve only got 3/4 of the story so far.
3/4 of the setup to the story.
Surely there’s another big shoe to drop with the man-mutant-machine war. Despite their “victory”, it’s already been set up — all of those constructo-bot sentinels were hanging out on Mercury. And Mystique getting “lost” on Sol’s Anvil is yet more setup probably on that plot line.
@ChrisV:”We have been conditioned so much in the “West” to find good societies to be ones that embrace things like individualism, democracy, Capitalism….
Ideas about collectivism are usually viewed as dystopian.”
That’s a very good observation actually. And good sci fi (which HoXPoX feels like, to me) should challenge us and shake us out of our tree a bit. And hey, the mutants are *meant* to be uncanny and creepy… It’s fun to experience that as a reader, looking in. They’re bloody scary!
And I’m sure we have a few more Moira related twists to come. You could write a whole series of What-Ifs on this series alone 🙂 looking forward to a decent Hickman interview in the fullness of time!
Personally, if Hickman is finally moving away from the idea that mutants are superheroes, yes, there are plenty of interesting directions left to explore.
I wouldn’t mind that, at all.
Especially, as it’s something different for Marvel.
No one picks up a science fiction novel and says, “Gee, the humans have all this advanced technology now. They’ve colonized the stars. There’s absolutely nothing that the author can do with this plot!”.
Only if we shoehorn the X-Men in to having to behave like superheroes could we possibly be looking at Hickman’s set-up being problematic.
If Hickman is following Morrison’s advice (plus, Hickman does enjoy writing science fiction more than straight superheroes anyway), then we should be looking at the future of X-Men in terms of science fiction, rather than as another superhero title.
Maybe I’m wrong, but the solicitation for “Dawn of X” reads, “Will the X-Men still fight for a world that fears and hates them?”.
I get the feeling that the answer may be “no”, and that opens up a lot of new possibilities.
@Krzysiek: Thank you. That’s the perfect way to phrase it.
@Ivan: Oh, absolutely. Just assuming that for the sake of argument. I expect the next installment of Year X3 to be instructive on that front, as well.
@Thom H
“In order to state that there are no stakes left, you have to willfully ignore all of the clues that something’s not right on Krakoa.”
In order to presume something’s not right on Krakoa, you’d have to presume Hickman is intentionally writing awkward dialogue for the characters, rather than writing awkward dialogue because he is terrible at characterization.
@Krzysiek
“I feel you’re veering closely to the ‘Superman’s so powerful, you can’t write a story about him’ argument.”
Did you mean “you can’t write a GOOD story about him”? Because I can’t think of a good story about Superman from the last 20 or 30 years, besides the one Grant Morrison wrote about him dying.
@Job
“In order to presume something’s not right on Krakoa, you’d have to presume Hickman is intentionally writing awkward dialogue for the characters, rather than writing awkward dialogue because he is terrible at characterization.”
Stuff like teaming up with Apocalypse and other villains, Xavier being okay with Emma’s coercive methods, and Xavier dressing up like Cassandra Nova have nothing to do with awkward dialogue.
“…Year 100 is an alternate timeline, and Year 1000 doesn’t have any understood connections to the present struggle, what’s left?”
Well first off, Year 100 is actually Moira’s past. Secondly, it had stakes, as the Nimrod files were important. Last, you definitely don’t know that year 1000 has no connections. That’s really reaching for backup to the ‘no stakes’ argument.
Maybe it’s because I read ‘Seveneves’ shortly before this story started publishing but I’m enjoying it.
In the same way that after the Legacy Virus was done you had ‘No More Mutants’ and then the Inhuman Cloud, so this is repeating Cyclops’ ‘lets go be seperatists on an island’ idea. But, to be honest, this is probably what they should have done at the end of the Claremont era, rather than returning to an easily exploding mansion house in New York.
I wonder if this thing will start to skew off if Xavier gets killed? After that you’ve got psychics like Marvel Girl and Psylocke for the soul implanting thing who perhaps can’t do it quite well enough, perhaps they can’t produce bodies for Proteus quick enough…
My two pence on when the series is going, for what it’s worth, is that as this world is clearly not the regular 616 it’s going to be about trying to find some way to send more than just Moira and her memories to the next iteration. Just data, part-personalities, entire beings, I don’t know yet, but I think that’s where it’s going. Is Gateway still around any more?
@Alan L: Thanks for the interesting read. I disagree with you on many points, but I see where you’re coming from.
No, Hickman doesn’t tend to tell stories about people. He tends to tell stories about societies. They’re not Claremont and they’re not trying to be Claremont, but they’re definitely stories. And no, I don’t particularly relate to the individuals. But I do relate to the groups. As an Israeli Jew I very much relate to the feeling of wanting a culture free of persecution and endless attacks, on our own terms. And as a liberal person in the modern day who is vaguely aware of history, I know that many of the institutions we respect and rely on have ugliness at their beginnings, so I very much relate to the non-mutants on the outside of this new society being terrified by what they’re being kept in the dark about. I find both sides here endlessly compelling, and for me that makes this more than just a clever riddle (though it is that as well, which I find absorbing in and of itself).
CJ’s invocation of Foundation is well-placed. I love cerebral science-fiction. I love Foundation to bits. I love Westworld Season 1, and I love Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and I’m loving this. I love how you’re never quite sure here whether to trust the mutants or not. For instance, we’re told that the Five feel “completely fulfilled” (not an actual quote), but on the other hand I remember Generation Hope, and I remember that the bond she creates among a group involves a heavy dose of emotion manipulation. I’m fascinated by Moira and the futures, and the idea that there’s an inevitable ending that needs to be averted, and at the same time I’m not positive they are going in a different direction, because you’ve got the X2 humans calling the machines their gods, and in parallel you’ve got Magneto saying that mutants are humans’ new gods. Sometimes I’m rooting for the mutants and sometimes I’m terrified of them, and to me that’s great, challenging storytelling.
Seriously y’all, some of you are getting so worked up based on speculation. The level of comments b(here and in general) seems to indicate that at the very least there’s a renewed interest in the franchise. But the thing about this as compared to Infinity and SHIELD etc is these two series (that are one) are self-contained and launching a new status quo. Every “red” issue gives us a piece by which to reread the rest. We can judge how effective the writing is once it’s completed, which happily is very soon.
The two in one is going to be relevant I think beyond a sales tactic. The new X logo seems to represent this separate/conjoined status as well. Man/mutant, mutant/machine, individual/collective, mother/father. So far I’m still willing to follow along. Hickman’s pulled together some pretty interesting threads in a coherent way. And I think if this is ultimately decentering Xavier (underscoring the ways he’s always been suspect) in favour of Moira, this could be a really interesting to move beyond the blockages that have persisted in the franchise for nearly two decades.
Joseph S.: The level of comments b(here and in general) seems to indicate that at the very least there’s a renewed interest in the franchise.
Indeed. I won’t be reading any of this until it’s on Unlimited But looking on from the outside, there is reason for me to think that what Hickman is doing must be interesting, because people are, well, interested.
@YLu
“Stuff like teaming up with Apocalypse and other villains”
I mean, Apocalypse is literally a member of one of the X-Men teams in the November solicitations.
@Dave
“you definitely don’t know that year 1000 has no connections”
I know, that’s why I said it has no UNDERSTOOD connections, because nothing we’ve seen about Year 1000 is clearly connected to the present-day story, so far as we can understand it. For us to recognize the stakes of Year 1000, we’d have to understand how it’s connected. Thus far, it has none.
@Joseph S
“We can judge how effective the writing is once it’s completed”
We can judge how effective the writing is once it’s completed, or once we read a single issue, or once we read a single scene, or once we read a single page, or once we read a single panel.
Welcome to opinions.
As far as Superman, the problem really isn’t the character, but the nature of franchise characters.
Yes, it’s true that Superman hasn’t been interesting in a very long time, other than Grant Morrison’s work on the character.
However, Grant Morrison showed that there are interesting stories one can still tell with Superman.
How interesting has the X-Men franchise been since Chris Claremont left the book?
Yes, some of the spin-off books were more interesting, but it seems like most writers ran out of things to say with the X-Men a long time ago.
We’ve been stuck in endless “mutants are going extinct” and “humans want a genocide against mutants” repeating plots for a few decades now.
It’s just the nature of recurring comic book characters.
I hadn’t been able to care about the Hulk since sometime during the Peter David run, until Al Ewing recently was able to do something different with the character.
Characters just end up stagnating when they’ve been continuously published for fifty or more years.
It takes a talented writer with the right ideas to freshen up the concept and make it interesting again.
Then, eventually, that writer leaves and the book returns to mediocrity or boredom again for years.
“Alan L says:
September 20, 2019 at 7:09 AM … etc.”
Man, that was an amazing, smart essay, Alan. Kudos!
I think a problem is that we don’t know where Hickman’s story is moving.
I don’t feel that his characterization was horrible on the Fantastic Four, or really on the Avengers, overall.
Mr. Fantastic has always been a stuffy character.
Johnny was written as a wild youngster type.
Ben Grimm had some truly moving character moments.
I don’t remember his writing on Susan though. Maybe I’m forgetting, or maybe he was weaker on the female character.
With Avengers, we saw the heroism of Captain America coming through.
He carried over the character of Tony Stark pretty well from the one we saw in Civil War too.
The characters in House and Powers have been too cardboard so far for me to feel that there isn’t something behind Hickman’s writing.
Also, the fact that Jean Grey now seems to be “Marvel Girl” again.
People are judging Hickman’s lack of characterization for characters who may be mindless clones or Hickman might have a point about a hive-mind.
How can you fault Hickman’s writing, if in the end it’s revealed that the characters were acting so mechanical and out-of-character for a reason?
Hickman can’t abandon his plot just to serve the reader.
These characters don’t seem like the ones we have read about for all these years….Well, is there a reason?
If the answer is “no”, if it’s just shoddy writing and characterization, then the umbrage against Hickman is justified.
If the narrative is meant to feed the larger plot, then it’s a disservice to Hickman to judge him for accomplishing what he is attempting.
I don’t think that’s too much to ask for a twelve-part series that will last for three months.
Ah, but now you’re assuming we’re actually going to get at least the ‘is it shoddy writing or is it the plot’ answer in 12 issues.
Also – 12 issues is a lot to ask for if someone’s put off by the characterization (and isn’t compelled by the other stuff).
Yeah, I have expectations.
I expect that House/Powers will serve to set up the new status quo.
If that’s not the case, I probably won’t be following the X-books in to the relaunch.
@Krzysiek
“Ah, but now you’re assuming we’re actually going to get at least the ‘is it shoddy writing or is it the plot’ answer in 12 issues.”
Indeed. It seems clearer with every issue that there’s too much to wrap up in this one (sigh, two) series.
“Also – 12 issues is a lot to ask for if someone’s put off by the characterization (and isn’t compelled by the other stuff).”
Bingo. “Please spend $60 to figure out whether or not you’re satisfied with this characterization.” Please. I wasn’t satisfied with the characterization in issue #1, but I gave it a little leeway to get started. Now it’s almost over and we’re not really any closer to understanding whether this is poor writing by design.
@Job
You seem upset that Hickman didn’t send you a synopsis of the entire story so that you can understand everything that’s happening from page 1, and in absence of that synopsis, you have decided that the story you made up instead is the only possible one but you don’t like it AT ALL.
So far, everything in the series points to something being off with Xavier, and to pretend that it’s bad storytelling because you don’t know the entire story before the story is over…well, that’s just silly, dude.
@Maxwell’s Lame McCartney Song
“You seem upset that Hickman didn’t send you a synopsis of the entire story so that you can understand everything”
I’ve made it clear that my issue is not that I don’t understand elements of the story. It’s that I have substantial problems with the things I do understand. Read better.
“you have decided that the story you made up instead”
I’ve made up no such thing. Read better.
“you don’t like it AT ALL”
I made it very clear that Hickman’s writing, including this, is always interesting. That doesn’t mean the story turns out to be any good. Read better.
“to pretend that it’s bad storytelling”
Oh, am I pretending it’s bad storytelling? Is it objectively good storytelling? Silly me, how did I not recognize its objectively good qualities?