The Complete Moira: Part 3
Three posts into the series, we finally reach Moira’s first published appearance! (For part 1, see here; for part 2, see here.)
X-Men vol 1 #96 by Chris Claremont, Dave Cockrum and Sam Grainger (“Night of the Demon”, December 1975). And here we are. Moira shows up at the X-Men’s Mansion, responding to the invitation from Professor X (which we saw her receive in Classic X-Men #2). This is the point where she gets introduced to the X-Men, who at this point consist of Cyclops, Banshee, Storm, Colossus, Wolverine and Nightcrawler. Later retcons will establish that Moira has met Cyclops and Wolverine already, but neither of them remember it. Sean is immediately taken with Moira, kicking off their romantic subplot which will later settle into a long-term status quo.
Moira and Charles both tell the X-Men that she has been hired as the new housekeeper, to look after the house and the X-Men while he’s away. At that point, the demon Kierrok attacks, and Moira promptly gets a machine gun from the armoury to fight it – though Banshee actually bundles her to safety before she has the chance to use it, and the X-Men defeat Kierrok without her. This story is reprinted in Classic X-Men #4, which adds a page of Moira and Charles having a private conversation where they reminisce about their past relationship.
So, a few points to note here. Chris Claremont seems to tinker with his ideas for Moira after the character is already up and running. The obvious question, with hindsight, is why on earth Moira pretends to be a housekeeper when she first appears. It’s not even an especially good pretence, since Storm immediately asks why on earth the Professor is revealing the X-Men’s secrets to a housekeeper – so he has to make clear that he knows and trusts her. Plus, Moira is a Nobel prize winning scientist, and she’s using her real name. Now granted, fair enough, it’s 1977 – the X-Men can’t Google her, and certainly can’t be expected to recognise the names of every Nobel prize winner. But you’d think Moira would at least bother with a pseudonym.
The closest we ever really get to an explanation for the housekeeper pretence is that Muir Isle is so sensitive that even the X-Men aren’t supposed to know about it – a plot thread that makes it as far as Muir Isle’s first appearance before being quietly dropped. As we’ll see, Moira is actually here to help Charles with the nightmares that he’s experiencing at the moment. (Those are due to Lilandra Neramani trying to make psychic contact with him from the Shi’ar Empire – a plotline that will sort itself out without Moira doing anything.) The idea seems to be that Charles is hoping Moira can help out with this unobtrusively and then go home without having to tell the X-Men very much. This sort of ultra-secrecy actually fits better with the Hickman retcon than with the way things transpired originally.
X-Men vol 1 #106 by Chris Claremont, Bill Mantlo, Bob Brown & Tom Sutton (“Dark Shroud of the Past”, August 1977). This is a fill-in issue told in flashback, set shortly after Moira’s arrival. It has a brief scene of Moira helping Charles with his nightmares.
X-Men vol 1 #97 by Chris Claremont, Dave Cockrum & Sam Grainger (“My Brother, My Enemy!”, February 1976). The first published scene of Moira helping Charles with his nightmares. It establishes them as a former couple, but it also shows Charles being very apologetic for something that happened in the past. That plotline is repeatedly mentioned in Moira’s early issues, but gets completely dropped when the circumstances of their break-up are revealed a few years down the line. Again, it seems to be an idea that was started and swiftly revised out. These days, it can probably be taken as a reference to the events of Deadly Genesis.
X-Men vol 1 #98 by Chris Claremont, Dave Cockrum & Sam Grainger (“Merry Christmas, X-Men…”, April 1976). Moira joins the X-Men and some of their supporting cast on a Christmas visit to New York. She and Sean soon wander off on what seems to be their first date. Soon after that, the Sentinels attack the X-Men and kidnap Banshee, Wolverine and Jean; Moira helps plan their rescue, but aside from that, she doesn’t do much else in terms of the main plot – because at this point, she’s a slow-burning background subplot. The added scenes from the reprint in Classic X-Men #6 give her a little bit more to do, but nothing terribly important. Moira also has a cameo in the X-Men story in Marvel Holiday Special 1991 (which leads directly into this story) and shows up in Marvels Epilogue (which retells this story), but neither of them adds much as far as she is concerned.
The X-Men’s battle with the Sentinels plays out in issue #99 and #100, with no Moira involvement.
X-Men vol 1 #101 by Chris Claremont, Dave Cockrum & Frank Chiaramonte (“Like a Phoenix, From the Ashes!”, October 1976). Jean Grey has become Phoenix, and is in hospital recuperating from the experience. (Per later retcons, Jean has actually been replaced by the cosmic Phoenix, while the real Jean is in suspended animation underwater – but that’s years down the line.) Moira duly shows up at the hospital with the other X-Men. More waiting room scenes can be found in the Classic X-Men #9 back-up strip, and in the added pages in Classic X-Men #10-11 (which reprint the Moira-free X-Men #102-103). Aside from keeping the nightmare subplot ticking over, Moira’s contribution to these stories is basically to hang around and look worried along with everyone else.
X-Men vol 1 #104 by Chris Claremont, Dave Cockrum and Sam Grainger (“The Gentleman’s Name is Magneto”, April 1977). Now this is more important. Worried that she hasn’t heard from Jamie Madrox in a while, and fearing “an accident” at Muir Isle, Moira completely abandons the housekeeper schtick and asks the X-Men to investigate. Most of the team are coming from Ireland (where they’ve just had a thrilling adventure with some leprechauns), but Moira and Cyclops fly directly from New York to join them. It turns out that Magneto has been restored to adulthood and escaped. The inexperienced new X-Men team are completely outmatched by Magneto and wind up staging a tactical retreat, taking Moira and Jamie with them. Magneto, having proved his point, simply leaves the island a little later.
Most significantly, this is where we learn about the Muir Isle Mutant Research Centre. Cyclops is understandably angry that he hasn’t been told about it before. As presented here, despite the name, it’s actually a prison complex, designed to cage the most dangerous mutants in existence (though the only inmates actually identified are Unus, Dragonfly and “Mutant X”, which later turns out to be Moira’s son Proteus). Moira tells Cyclops outright that she hopes to “cure” their hatred for humanity, and she appears to mean doing it through science – essentially the same plot that rears its head again in 1991. Moira also says that this is her life’s work, begun when she and Charles were students and a couple. This story is also the first mention of Moira being a professor at Edinburgh University, though she can’t have spent much time there if she was at Muir Isle, and she seems to have given it up when she went to help Charles with his nightmares.
The obvious question is: why is Muir Isle so secret that even the X-Men ideally wouldn’t have known about it? Claremont seems to drop the idea, but as far as we can tell from this story, Muir Isle seems to be some sort of illegal prison which is experimenting on the inmates. Basically, early Muir Isle is presented as a very dodgy place indeed. Claremont seems to decide that he doesn’t really like this take, and it rapidly gets revised into a straightforward scientific research facility, with Moira as something of a public figure. The idea of Muir Isle as a prison won’t really come to the fore again until we get to Excalibur. Again, Hickman’s retcon arguably helps make sense of some of this by giving Moira something else that she and Charles might ideally be trying to keep secret from the team.
Moira doesn’t say in this story that she got as far as actually altering Magneto’s personality, and the idea doesn’t come up again until 1991. Given Magneto’s behaviour when he gets restored to normal, there’s little evidence of the plan working, but maybe Moira just assumes that even an altered Magneto is justifiably angry about his imprisonment.
For whatever reason, Moira seems surprisingly relaxed about getting back to Muir Isle to sort the place out after this incident (particularly given that her son is there), and won’t return until issue #110. In the meantime, though, Moira goes back to tagging along with the X-Men…
Iron Fist vol 1 #15 by Chris Claremont, John Byrne & Dan Green (“Enter, the X-Men”, September 1977). Claremont engages in a little cross-promotion between his two titles, as the X-Men drop by to visit Jean Grey and Misty Knight, and Wolverine starts a fight with Iron Fist. This issue has a very brief scene of Moira going on another date with Sean, in which she tells him that she is unsure whether she wants to “get involved” further, given her past relationship with Charles. That angle never gets developed in X-Men.
The next few issues of X-Men bring the nightmare storyline to a head, as Lilandra debuts and the X-Men fight the Imperial Guard – all without Moira playing any part, despite it being the reason she joined the cast in the first place.
X-Men vol 1 #109 by Chris Claremont, John Byrne & Terry Austin (“Home are the Heroes!”, February 1978). The X-Men and Moira finally return to the Mansion, now accompanied by Phoenix, Lilandra, and Jean’s parents. Moira allows Alex Summers (Havok) and Lorna Dane (Polaris) to join her on Muir Isle, thus starting to establish the wider supporting cast who’ll be based there for years to come. By this point, Moira and Sean are unequivocally presented as a couple. This is the issue where Weapon Alpha makes his first attempt to recover Wolverine for Canada; Moira gets knocked out in the opening seconds of the fight and plays no further part.
X-Men vol 1 #110 by Chris Claremont & Tony deZuniga (“The ‘X’-Sanction!”, April 1978). The whole nightmare storyline is resolved, so Moira decides to return home to Muir Isle. (You’d figure she’d have a bit more urgency about getting back to Proteus, but seemingly not.) Moira and Sean are considering settling down together, but he stays with the X-Men for now.
This is the issue where Warhawk traps the X-Men in their own Danger Room. Moira’s contribution to the plot is to be the gullible one who lets Warhawk into the building. Warhawk has metal skin and you might have thought his plan would be to pose as Colossus. Astoundingly, his actual plan is to claim that he’s come to fix the telephone, and Moira believes him. It’s not her finest hour.
Moira, Jamie, Alex and Lorna are all living on Muir Isle together by the time of Marvel Team-Up vol 1 #69 (another Claremont story, in which Spider-Man and Havok team up against the Living Pharaoh). Moira isn’t in that issue, because she’s visiting Edinburgh for the weekend.
X-Men vol 1 #119 by Chris Claremont, John Byrne & Terry Austin (“‘Twas the Night Before Christmas…”, May 1979). After a year’s absence, the Muir Islanders return, to start the build towards the Proteus storyline. They appear in a subplot where they meet up with Phoenix in Edinburgh, planning to spent Christmas in the city before travelling up to Muir Island for Hogmanay. It’s going to take them four issues to get there, so it’s a good job the book is now on a monthly schedule.
Classic X-Men #26 by Chris Claremont, Kieron Dwyer & Terry Austin (October 1988). The bonus pages in this reprint of X-Men #120 add a subplot where Jean and the Muir Islanders are hanging around at Cape Wrath waiting for their boat to Stornoway. (This is a mad way of getting from Edinburgh to Stornoway, but it’s probably Claremont’s attempt to square the conflicting references in his own stories. Maybe Jean just really, really wanted to see the most northwesterly point on mainland Scotland.) Moira and Jean talk about how Jean can hold on to her humanity after becoming Phoenix.
X-Men vol 1 #122 by Chris Claremont, John Byrne & Terry Austin (June 1979). The Muir Islanders finally set sail from Stornoway to Muir Island. Moira is now mainly worrying about whether Phoenix can control her power and – in what will become her recurring role – Moira would like to run some tests.
X-Men vol 1 #125-128 by Chris Claremont, John Byrne and Terry Austin (September to December 1979). And so we reach the first full-on Moira MacTaggert story, the Proteus arc. After a week of running tests on Phoenix, the Muir Islanders belatedly notice that Proteus has escaped from his cell by jumping to another body (intruder Angus MacWhirter) and fleeing to the mainland. Well spotted, Moira. Excellent parenting there.
The Islanders summon the X-Men for help. Moira explains that Proteus is her son Kevin. He has two fundamental weaknesses: his constant need for new host bodies, and metal. The X-Men and Moira set out in pursuit of Proteus, and while the X-Men try to deal with matters in a conventionally heroic way, Moira just tries to shoot Proteus dead with a specially-prepared snipe rifle. She does have a thought balloon where she says that she loves him, but there’s a distinct sense that Moira’s been mentally prepared for this for quite some time, and long since wrote him off as a lost cause. And the X-Men do end up killing Proteus in the end, so this is probably intended to read as if Moira is both (a) very hardcore and (b) ahead of the X-Men in terms of the seriousness of the situation, rather than (c) incredibly cold towards her son.
Moira pursues Proteus to Edinburgh, where he’s planning to possess his father Joe MacTaggert. Moira meets Joe at his home and they argue about Joe’s refusal to give her a divorce. That isn’t how Scots divorce law worked even in 1979, but let’s assume it’s different in the Marvel Universe. (In the real world, even if she didn’t want to rely on Joe’s behaviour, she would have been entitled to a divorce by this point simply on the grounds of over five years’ separation.)
Moira tells Joe about Kevin, having never previously disclosed Kevin’s existence to him. Predictably, this leads to another argument, which Moira briefly considers killing Joe herself, and then leaves. Proteus arrives, kills Joe, and takes his body, at which point he takes on Joe’s hatred for Moira and starts going after her. The X-Men arrive to help and Sean in particular is surprised to learn that Moira is married, something else that she hadn’t mentioned to him before either. (Early Moira is very, very secretive – despite the fact that Joe talks as though his marriage to the famous scientist is public knowledge.)
Proteus torments Moira for a bit, but the X-Men kill him. Moira mourns the death of Joe and Kevin, but is also relieved to be free of them, so that she can start a new life with Sean. We’ll see in several future stories that Moira’s feelings about Proteus appear to be very conflicted; sometimes the emphasis is on the loss of her child, but there will also be a focus on Moira getting a second chance to either parent a child (ie, Rahne) or solve the puzzle of an out of control mutant (ie, Legion). The net effect is to treat Proteus as less a character, and more a challenge that Moira failed to solve.
At any rate, this story clears Moira’s old family off the board, leaving the way clear for her to start a new life with Sean.
The Proteus arc also claims that Moira is not a mutant and doesn’t register on Cerebro, but we have to take it that that’s an aspect of her Hickman-era powers. It’s hardly infallible – it can’t pick up Proteus either.
X-Men vol 1 #129 by Chris Claremont, John Byrne and Terry Austin (“God Spare the Child…”, January 1980). This is usually classed as the first part of the Dark Phoenix Saga, but it opens with a brief scene of the Muir Islanders waving goodbye to the X-Men. Sean, who lost his powers a while ago, finally decides to quit the team and stay behind with Moira.
One last story to complete this chapter of Moira’s history:
Classic X-Men #36, back-up, by Fabian Nicieza, Mark Bright & Joe Rubinstein (“Outside In”, August 1989). Moira is still mourning Joe and Kevin, who have symbolic (but empty) graves on Muir Isle. Kevin’s original body is still in Moira’s lab and she toys with bringing him back from the dead. The mechanics of this are impenetrable technobabble, but Moira appears to be saying that Proteus’s mind is somehow linked to his DNA code, that if a new Proteus body was cloned then the original Proteus’s mind would somehow be drawn to the body. Needless to say, this issue is extremely Hickman-friendly because it asserts that Proteus’s powers can, in some incomprehensible way, restore an original soul to a copied body – which is basically what Proteus is doing on Krakoa.
The story also has Moira hoping that this time round Kevin might turn out better (which, unfortunately, it tries to tie in with the circumstances of his original conception). At any rate, Sean persuades her to leave the past behind her and she symbolically destroys Proteus’s original body.
But this idea isn’t forgotten quite yet. Even though Moira doesn’t actually bring Proteus back, she does keep a record of his DNA, as revealed in Excalibur vol 1 #73 (which specifically refers back to this back-up strip). So Moira is very much keeping her options open with Kevin – something that also fits rather nicely with his eventual role in the Five. (Assuming that’s really him, by the way. For some reason, in the annotations of History of the Marvel Universe #6, the Five’s Proteus is described as “presumably Kevin MacTaggert”.)
Next time: Wolfsbane. And Legion.
I think this is what you are saying in the above, but just to make sure, we do know from Hickman that Moira being a mutant does not register with Cerebro.
I love watching a new character take shape, as well as the insight into Claremont’s writing process. Thanks again for putting these retrospectives together.
It’s interesting to observe that if you make a new minor character mysterious enough that you can graft anything on to them later and it *kind of* makes sense.
“The mechanics of this are impenetrable technobabble”
What, in a Nicieza story? Surely not!
Paul> This is the issue where Warhawk traps the X-Men in their own Danger Room. Moira’s contribution to the plot is to be the gullible one who lets Warhawk into the building. Warhawk has metal skin and you might have thought his plan would be to pose as Colossus. Astoundingly, his actual plan is to claim that he’s come to fix the telephone, and Moira believes him. It’s not her finest hour.
As I’ve said before, I have some sympathy for Moira in this – it’s the Marvel ████ing Universe. A repairman who happens to have metal skin is not the most ridiculous of scenarios, especially to someone whose “life’s work” involves studying super-powered people.
“A repairman who happens to have metal skin is not the most ridiculous of scenarios, especially to someone whose “life’s work” involves studying super-powered people.”
The dude had a metal face and this is what she thinks to herself:
“Pull yourself together, woman. You’ve seen plastic surgery before. The poor man. He must get this reaction a lot.”
I doubt that, Moira.
It is pretty funny to read how Moira was always a psychopath with a nonsense backstory.
I’ll give ol’ Hickman some credit there.
I wonder how many characters by now have had their mutant status changed by writers despite Cerebro existing, and Moira, Charles and Beast being mutant genetics experts with easy access to DNA, and events like M-Day which would help establish who was definitely a (former) mutant?
Moira
Quicksilver & Scarlet Witch
Squirrel Girl
Cloak & Dagger?
Any others?
Dave: Namor. Although in his case, it made perfect sense for him to be retconned into being a mutant.
Wasn’t there something in X-Factor, ignored everywhere else, about Jamie Madrox not being a mutant?
Well, Peter David’s retcon was that Jaime duplicated for the first time moments after being born (I don’t know if that was actually a retcon or if David went back to something that was established earlier).
David’s reasoning was that if mutant powers emerge in adolescence, Jaime Madrox must be something else. But that can be squared away just by saying ‘another kind of mutant’, since Jaime isn’t particularly unique here. Nightcrawler was born blue, fuzzy and tailed. Others, too.
@Mordechai Buxner:
It wasn’t so much that Madrox wasn’t a mutant, just that he was a different species of mutant, as his powers were present from birth (literally), rather than developing during puberty.
Those are called “changelings” in the Marvel U.
Where did you see that Neutrino? I thought that Changeling had the same definition in the Marvel Universe as our own world’s folklore.
As far as Uncanny X-Men #110, I remember getting that issue and wondering why Colossus was calling himself “Warhawk” on the cover and trying to kill the X-Men, including himself.
Extensive biological research has determined that mutant abilities emerge at puberty, unless it would be interesting for the subject to have had them earlier.
Curiously, Hickman said the reason Moira was the best choice for the role he gave her is precisely because she’d been a non-mutant human the whole time.
I don’t really understand that, though. Would the retcon be somehow less convincing on an established mutant?
Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch were mutants but now aren’t. Squirrel Girl too, though I doubt her mutant status ever had any actual story impact.
Mimic. Original 616 version. Whether he is or isn’t a mutant depends on who you ask,
Personally I’d be much less repulsed by this story if they used a new character (or at least a newer one, maybe Eva Bell?) instead of Moira. New character, new approach to the human/mutant conflict. I wish they were confident enough to go that route.
Layla Miller could’ve fit, too. Has she appeared since the end of the Madrox X-Factor?
@YLu I tend to think that Decimation was the big problem for making it an established mutant. That was a truly fundamental threat to mutantkind, and we know more or less what all the remaining mutants were up to in its aftermath, so it’s harder to cram in the idea that they were playing a long-term game and weren’t justifiably losing their minds over what Wanda did. Moira, being human and also dead, can avoid that issue altogether.
The retcon also requires someone who’s been in a position to know Xavier and Magneto for a long time, which narrows it down further. Amelia Voght fits the bill, but again, she was basically just chilling with Exodus post-Decimation.
Unrelated, but Hickman’s retcon provides a rationale for why Moira MacTaggart, Scottish scientist, is highly proficient with machine guns and sniper rifles (?!?) from her life spent hunting the Trasks down. But honestly, I always loved that she was just that hardcore. Has the X-Men armoury ever been mentioned again?
@Chris V: From the Marvel wikia, introduced in X-Factor. https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Killcrops_(Mutants)
So, the more we learn the more sense Hickman’s retcon makes.
Also interesting to see the rose tinted glasses on nostalgia in work considering how slapped together Moira’s back story was and how little sense it made.
Sorry if this is a dumb question but is Moira still dead in present day 616? If so, why can’t she be resurrected?
re: Daniel Lichtenberg
Moira’s alive in the present day. HoX/PoX revealed she faked her death using a “Shi’ar golem.” She’s currently hiding from the general population but Xavier knows she’s alive.
Ahh, the old “Fake your death with a Shi’ar Golem” trick. Works every time.
@ASV Layla Miller has appeared in Rosenberg’s books. She was in the Multiple Man mini, though that was a Layla from one of the futures depicted in the book; present day Layla appeared very briefly in Uncanny #11 – Madrox was with her before being drawn into the plot. She claimed not to know stuff anymore (though she also made ‘Logan’s favourite dish’ before he dropped by and he wonders if she did know he’d come after all) and was taking care of her infant son.
That stuff about Warhawk feels familiar. Did it come up here in the last couple of months? Or on J&M?
With her on-again, off-again mutant reading and seeming precognitive power, would Layla Miller be allowed on Krakoa?
Well, Peter David’s last word on her was that she’s a mutant with the power of resurrecting people sans their souls. And the ‘knowing stuff’ bit came from a literal injection of knowledge on herself by her grown-up future-self. (Which, honestly, I found deeply unsatisfying).
But why she sometimes popped up on mutant scanners and sometimes not (‘you know, it comes and goes’ – Messiah Complex) was, I think, never firmly established. Or I forgot.
Anyway. Mutant resurrection powers. Not only would she be allowed on Krakoa, there could be an interesting story here – she might be an alternative to the Five. Or a story about how the people brought back by her are different from the people brought back by the Five.
Although… in all fairness… I much preferred her when ‘knowing stuff’ was her power. The resurrection stuff never particularly grabbed me.
Was the name “Kevin” really established in the original Proteus storyline? I could have sworn that he went unnamed there, and that “Kevin” was established by the 1990’s cartoon series.
I know he had the name before the cartoon show.
I’m not totally sure when he was first named Kevin, but I know he was called Kevin in the Classic X-Men back-up strips that featured his burial and the aftermath.
Correct, Moira never refers to him by his first name during the storyline – she calls him “Proteus”, “Mutant X” or “my son” (and strangely nobody seems to bother asking her for a proper name).
The name seems to have originated in the Classic X-Men back-up strip, which has a direct shot of the tombstones.
I’m surprised you don’t mention that in the blog post itself, as part of the “distinct sense that Moira’s been mentally prepared for this for quite some time, and long since wrote him off as a lost cause”. Using names like “Mutant X” seems to be a way of depersonalising him, as you explain it.
@Krzysiek Ceran: She was also supposed to have the ability to see alternate timelines, which might make her a threat to expose Moira. Just the rumor that she could see the future would be enough to get her banned. Krakoa doesn’t know about Peter David’s pronouncements. Her resurrection ability would raise uncomfortable questions about what happens to the soul when the Five resurrect someone. Hickman dodged the question when it was asked.
Wait, Layla was seeing alternate timelines? Are you referring all the way back to House of M?
I disagree with Dazzler. It seems to me that Moira is the perfect character for this role.
For starters, it had to be a non-mutant. Her power is passive, so giving the role to someone like Eva would radically complicated the premise, since her power is moving through time, and Moira’s ability is something else altogether. Now you might argue that Rachel Grey Summers would be a good candidate, given that she actually has time based powers (Chronoskimming or temporal astral projection), but like Tempus this would over complicate things.
Moira X, on the other hand, provides as perfect compliment to Professor X, and it works precisely because she has already been inscribed in the entire history of the franchise. Professor X was always a jerk(!), especially in the silver age. (I mean, really.) But Deadly Genesis all but destroyed the character, effectively sidelining him until Hickman resurrected him (Soule’s X character is meaningless for now, but certainly did nothing to rehabilitate him). So Charles then symbolic father is supplanted by the symbolic mother, Moira X, who has been behind the scenes all along. This actually works, although it doesn’t make her any less of a morally dubious character.
This role as the symbolic mother works on a meta level, something the line needed to radically shift the ground. As Paul and many commenters here have pointed out, there have been many slightly odd “mother” references, as with the Cuckoos and Emma, subtly drawing our attention to, at the very least, Hickman’s investment in motherhood as a theme.
@Krzysiek Ceran: It’s from her Marvel wikia entry and listed as “formerly”, so apparently it is. How the Krakoan PTB react to that depends on how paranoid they are.
@Joseph S.: …something the line needed to radically shift the ground.
I like your reading a great deal, but I wanted to pull this out: is there much realistic doubt that there will be no radical shift of ground over the *long* term? I suspect that Hickman has (and always has had) a plan to “put the toys back in the box” and restore a more traditional status quo at the end of his run.
I’m curious about that, because I suspect the whole thing was conceived with no fore-knowledge of the Disney/Fox merger, and may have been thought of as a way to permanently remove mutants from the broader context of Marvel Earth. They could do that simply through isolation, or in connection with a Krakoan dimensional shift plot device. Either way, I can imagine them thinking about this as a fairly radical break a couple years ago, and now having to be prepared to backtrack whenever mutants get introduced to the MCU.
I’m not sure. I was thinking about it, and I now wonder if Marvel’s original plan for mutants was to send them away during Age of X-Man.
Marvel expected that the Inhumans would become just as popular as mutants.
They’d send the mutants to the Age of X-Man reality, and have a couple of X-books taking place in that alternate reality.
Then, they’d heavily push the Inhumans as replacing mutants in the Marvel Universe.
Due to the fact that fans didn’t care about the Inhumans (plus the fortuitous fact that Disney got the movie rights), Marvel realized they had to change direction.
Why would you put Hickman on a book if you wanted it on the side-lines?
Marvel realized that Hickman’s name would make the X-Men their top selling franchise again.
If their intent was to sideline the mutants going forward, they’d just offer the job to any of their core roster of writers.
Much like how Age of X-Man played out.
I doubt there were any plans of permanence for Age of X-Man. First, everyone in that world is a mutant. That means no hates and fears, no sentinels, no next step in human evolution, none of the defining parts of the mutant story. Of course, that might have been the idea, to transpose all that to inhumans and let the X-Men wither like a cut-rate Ultimate Universe.
Second, every single story told in Age of X-Man was “We’re in a world without love, but I’m so damn horny”. It was built to self-destruct.
Third, surely they’d have done it five years ago if they were going to do it. At the very least they’d have done it at the end of that X-Men vs Inhumans thing.
It’s an interesting idea for a serial though, to just completely change the setting. I think Savage Dragon did it a couple of times? Personally I think Age of X would have been the most interesting setting to stay in.
Editorial has been very clear that Rosenberg’s Uncanny run and the Age of X-Man stuff was basically a time-killer while the Hickman era was getting up and running. Age of X-Man was never intended to be a series change of status quo or permanent.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Hickman’s X-stuff is a pitch (more or less) for the movies. Disney buying Fox and re-acquiring the X-Men movie rights had been in the works since at least November 2017 (that’s when it was announced to be possible and I’m sure it was being worked on for a bit before that; it wasn’t actually finalized until March 2019, even though it was a pretty sure bet the whole time).
At the time of the announcement (November 2017) X-Men Gold & Blue were about halfway through of what ended up being their run. At the time of the finalization (March 2019) was right around the start of Rosenberg’s Uncanny #1 (which was the lead-in to Age of X-Man).
I recall a Cullen Bunn interview where he (basically) said even the X-Men Gold & Blue books were time-killers, but maybe they just ended up being time-killers when Marvel learned they’d be getting the X-movie rights back.
The timeline lines up, in any case.
In that case I wonder if Rosenberg saw “time killing” and misread it as “killing all the time”.
Ha! 🙂
X-Men: Blue did have a job to do, in that Marvel needed to get rid of the time-line breaking original five before the relaunch.
I would also hazard a guess that Marvel hiring Hickman happened sometime during the X-Men: Gold run.
I think Marvel expected Guggenheim’s “back to basics” book to get a lot more attention than it did, and Marvel realized they needed to come up with something major to make up for the damage done when they tried to convince us that the Inhumans were so much cooler than mutants.
Anyway, at the very least, I think we can safely assume that Hickman’s run was never meant to side-line mutants in the Marvel U.
I just realized something else that happened in November 2017: C.B. Cebulski became the new editor in chief. He’s on record as a big X-Men fan, and Wolverine’s his favorite.
But yeah, I can’t see the Hickman launch as intended to sideline the X-characters. No way.
Voord, The toys always go back in the box, it’s comics, I have no doubts about that. The X-Men will eventually be back in the Mansion in Westchester and it will be touted as a grand return.
That said, as the world changes, so too must the stories we tell. The silver age and the Bronze Age and the 90s have some shared elements but they’re also distinct from one another and a reflection of their eras. Expanding the line to the extent we saw in the 90s troubles this, because a line that size needs a strong captain and that ship was without a rudder for far too long.
Krakoa likely won’t last in this form for more than a couple years, maybe five, who knows. But I do think this could be a shot in the arm to help shift the line to better reflect the present.
The relationship between Charles and Magneto is a good example of this. The often touted analogue between MLK and Malcolm X doesn’t hold water anymore, and not just because we’ve come to realize that Xavier is a jerk(!). Our understanding of the complexities of MLK and Malcolm’s positions alone make that allegory untenable any longer.
This is what will stick, for me, encapsulated in page 28 of Powers of X 6:
Moira: I have loved you. I have hated you. And all the emotional complexities in between. NOT ONCE in all my lives have you changed…
Xavier: Thank you.
Moira: It’s not a compliment.
For me, this says it all. Like pretty much everything in HoXPoX it functions both as a meta-commentary on the line as well as in story. But the take away, especially for a franchise like the X-Men, has to be a recognition that change is inevitable and trying to do the same thing over and over again, because it once worked in a different time and place and context, is foolish.
Did the MLK description ever hang on against scrutiny?
Wasn’t that something that Stan Lee said later in interviews? You know, at the same time when he took credit for making Magneto Jewish? (Hint: He did not!)
I mean, I don’t remember MLK’s dream involving African-American people pretending to be white folks until the white people saw the error of their ways and came to accept minorities.
Plus, it was obvious that Lee (maybe) and (especially) Kirby saw mutants more akin to Nazis than to a persecuted minority.
Outside of the Sentinels story, we had Magneto making proclamations about a “master race” and “mutants are superior”.
The 1990s lost its captain, arguably… When Claremont’s direct influence was axed awag
Claremont was considerably better at throwing ideas at the wall than in making them stick. At the end of the day, he just wasn’t much of a captain (or an editor). Jim Shooter and arguably John Byrne deserve a lot more credit for the golden era of the X-Men than they are usually given.
That said, the 1990s were very destructive for comics, mainly due to purely economic pressures that the publishers just could not find it in themselves to resist properly. The line (and the mutant sub-line) did not suffer because the creative personnel were not skilled enough to sustain the weight, but because higher-ups did not want to hear creative personnel at all.