X-Men #7 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the collected edition. And since we’re running behind, I’m going to see if we can keep this week’s annotations posts a bit shorter. But there’s a lot to say about this issue.
COVER / PAGE 1. Apocalypse with his sword, smashing a stained glass window version of Nightcrawler.
PAGES 2-3. Melody Guthrie gets word that her Crucible ritual is today.
Krakoa. Note that in the establishing shot, there’s still smoke rising from the volcano on the atoll that appeared in issue #2.
The Akademos Habitat, the Sextant. The home of the characters from the X-books’ various teen teams.
Melody Guthrie. Melody Guthrie is one of the miscellaneous siblings of Cannonball who eventually turned out to be a mutant. It’s a large family – officially her first appearance is in New Mutants vol 1 #42, but that’s as one of a number of generic background children. She didn’t get a first name until Uncanny X-Men vol 1 #444, where she showed up as a flying student at the school. Not that long after, House of M hit and Melody – or Aero – was depowered. So basically she’s a minor background character who was very briefly promoted to slightly more prominent status before being relegated again. The name Aero is currently being used by an unrelated character who has her own series, so we’ll see if Melody is allowed (editorially speaking) to take it back again.
Melody was last seen in the recent Fearless miniseries, where she was among the attendees at a superhero summer camp for girls; only the first half of that series if currently on Marvel Unlimited, so it’s always possible something more significant happened in the back end.
The characters sitting around the table are Melody’s siblings Cannonball (Sam Guthrie), Icarus (Josh Guthrie) and Husk (Paige Guthrie). Icarus died in New X-Men vol 2 #27, but he’s evidently been resurrected. The guy in the background is Skin, who has nothing to do with this sequence.
“That coffee the green kid is famo–“ Refers to an exchange about the excellent but apparently slightly suspect coffee in New Mutants #1.
PAGES 4-5. Recap and credits. The story is “Lifedeath” by Jonathan Hickman, Leinil Francis Yu and Sunny Gho. “Lifedeath” was the title of Uncanny X-Men vol 1 #186 (with a sequel in issue #198). The original story focusses on Storm coming to terms with the loss of her powers.
PAGES 6-8. Cyclops and Wolverine discuss Crucible.
I’m not sure how the daily cycle works for the Summers family in their house, but evidently this is the “night”. Logan seems to be saying that he never sleeps well. That doesn’t quite sit with Wolverine #1, where he’s pretty happy about the state of affairs on Krakoa, at least at the start of the issue.
It’s been strongly implied in previous issues that Jean is currently in a relationship with both Scott and Logan (we’ve seen in the floorplan that her bedroom has connecting doors to both). Hickman has consistently treated that as something that the characters accept as the current status quo and don’t feel the need to talk about, but hasn’t explained how it came about.
Chandilore. An apparently beautiful location in the Shi’ar empire. Over in New Mutants, Cyclops specifically cashed in the X-Men’s favour from the Shi’ar Empire by having a portal put there. There’s an implication that he has an ulterior motive here – but he does pitch it to Wolverine as a sightseeing trip.
Crucible. We’ll see later that Crucible is basically a ritual in which depowered mutants get themselves killed in combat with Apocalypse in order to earn the right to be resurrected (and thus get their powers back). I’ll come back to that, but suffice to say neither Cyclops or Logan is particularly happy about it, but neither seems to want to push the point very much – even though Scott goes out of his way to point out that this is somewhat uncharacteristic for them.
“We have to have a way to deal with this particular problem…” As we’ll see later, “this particular problem” is the mutants who were depowered on M-Day trying to get their powers back by mass suicide, thus overloading the Five. One of the functions of Crucible is to offer a route to re-powering which is so unattractive as to dissuade people from taking it up.
The implication seems to be that the depowered mutants are still being backed up on Cerebro, since nobody suggests that Melody is going to lose all of her memories after M-Day.
“Go find a priest.” On Logan’s suggestion, Scott decides to go and discuss the moral dimensions with “a priest”, i.e. Nightcrawler. Nightcrawler is probably the most religious of the core X-Men (certainly the most Christian). He’s shown an interest in becoming a priest at times.
PAGE 9. Cyclops briefly sees Cypher separate into three.
In the first panel, Cypher appears with a normal arm instead of his techno-organic one; Warlock is sitting in the chair opposite; and the tree of Krakoa behind them has a face. In the second panel, Warlock is absent, the tree has no face (though it speaks in some sort of incomprehensible symbols), and Cypher has his techno-arm back. It’s all very suspicious, and Cyclops registers it, but immediately concludes that he can’t have seen it. More alarm bells that something is not at all right on Krakoa.
PAGES 10-13. Nightcrawler tells Cyclops about the mysterious tower.
We’ve seen this forked tower before. In fact, the whole establishing shot of the landscape repeats Emma Frost’s introduction to Krakoa in Powers of X #5. The fact that all those buildings were already on Krakoa before the X-Men had really moved in always seemed a bit odd.
Nightcrawler has teleported into the inaccessible tower. He doesn’t normally teleport into places he can’t see, because materialising inside another object could be fatal. This is uncharacteristically risky – yes, they’ve established it’s hollow, but that doesn’t mean there’s no chance of appearing inside a table or a light fitting. Perhaps he was reassured by the prospect of resurrection.
The implication seems to be that the island has made the tower just for him, because as a teleporter, he’s the only one who can get inside.
Interestingly, while Kurt is meant to be the man of faith, he’s being much more critical and thoughtful about the conditions on Krakoa than other characters we’ve seen; he accuses Cyclops of blind faith. Perhaps it’s the fact that Kurt already has an especially strong philosophical commitment to a worldview that doesn’t fit with Krakoa. He’s being offered things that look wonderful, “and all it costs is the suspension of everything I used to believe”. This seems to suggest that he’s lost his faith but remains troubled by the thought that this is a place of temptation – which in Christian terms, tends not to come from the good guys.
“Are we really going to sit around and just watch a mutant die?” Yes, you are. And this is one of the clearest indications yet that something’s just wrong here.
PAGES 14-17. Exodus tells the children about Crucible.
We haven’t seen that much of Exodus until now, but he’s certainly serving his traditional role here of a religious zealot. Exodus isn’t explaining the position to older mutants; he comes across as if he’s running a Sunday school, and the children’s responses are a bit cult like.
Scarlet Witch. Wanda was indeed responsible for depowering most of the world’s mutants in House of M, with the “no more mutants” line. The “pretender” line has come up before and basically refers to the fact that she used to be presented as a mutant, but has since been retconned into something else.
Exodus says that the depowered mutants were “trapped in a body that was a prison.” Doubtless many of them felt that way, but there were presumably other with massively inconvenient “powers” that were pretty much happy to be rid of them – the likes of Beak, for example, who was not at all happy about being “re-powered” in X-Men: Blue. There’s an obvious irony in Exodus complaining (reasonably enough) that Wanda thought she knew what was best, at the same time as taking the religious leader role for the children – though of course there’s no indication that Exodus is imposing his will on the children, which is the real moral distinction.
PAGES 17-33. Melody dies in the Crucible, and is reborn with her powers.
Nightcrawler makes clear that he argued against the Crucible. He recognises that the risk of depowered mutants committing mass suicide had to be addressed somehow, but disapproving of the solution because, well, it’s self-harm and suicide. For him, entering the Crucible is an act which causes intangible harm to yourself and to the world around you, and is therefore a sin.
Nightcrawler appears to have been outvoted by a combination of pragmatists who don’t really care about the mechanics of the solution, and Apocalypse (and Exodus, presumably) promoting it as a mutant-nationalist ceremony to cement the values of their new society. Apocalypse’s spiel to Aero, however ritual, is all about talking up mutants as the master race, and depowering as not merely a personal loss but something literally degrading. Apocalypse really is in full-bore fascist territory here, and the fact that the X-Men are comfortable with this – or rather, that their discomfort doesn’t push them to actually doing anything about it – is troubling.
EDITED TO ADD: Note, by the way, that the other character who seems to have a real problem with Crucible is Cannonball, who is hesitant when speaking about it in the opening scene, and has to be stopped by Paige from intervening during the ceremony itself. Cannonball, of course, doesn’t live on Krakoa. One reason for using Melody in his story may be that it gives him a reason to be there.
The soul. Nightcrawler also raises the awkward question of how this whole resurrection thing fits with the soul. He raises three possibilities: (i) the soul doesn’t depart for eternity because somehow it knows it will be needed again; (ii) the soul is drawn back from the afterlife upon resurrection; (iii) the real Nightcrawler is relaxing up in heaven and he’s just a clone. This has always been an obvious philosophical quandary raised by the Five’s resurrections – and it’s clear that we are meant to take these as the “real” characters, since otherwise, er, Wolverine’s dead. But Kurt is the only character actually asking these awkward questions – and again, Cyclops’ first response is to say he doesn’t really want to think about it. (Indeed, at the end of this long discussion, Cyclops is “convinced” only of the fact that Kurt has questions – he seems to treat it as a mildly diverting academic debate.)
Kurt also makes the obvious point that if you’re religious, eternal life on earth may not be all that great. Don’t you want to go to heaven some time?
The wills. Some mutants have been expressing the desire to be reborn in other bodies. House of X has acknowledged that this might be a theoretical possibility, and it was always inevitable that someone would raise it. Scott and Kurt both seem to agree instinctively that this is a bad thing, and that taking the opportunity to upgrade yourself is one thing, but changing your body into something else (or someone else’s) is not. Neither is able to clearly articulate a moral justification for drawing the line there.
“I think I need to start a mutant religion.” This sounds like trouble, because surely Apocalypse and Exodus have done that already. What Kurt seems to be proposing, then, is a rival religion. Given everything that Kurt has said, it’s surely not going to be uncritically accepting everything that Apocalypse is saying and doing.
PAGE 34. Trailer. The Krakoan reads NEXT: ACANTI. The Acanti are gigantic whale-like aliens who were enslaved by the Brood back in Uncanny X-Men vol 1 #158.
My vote is for Melody’s new superhero name to be Wispa.
So they forgot about Josh Guthrie and inserted his one panel cameo at the last second, right?
A story about a Crucible in which a community is demonizing a (scarlet) witch… Nothing disturbing about that at all…
I think the reasonable objection to resurrecting someone in another’s body is that your DNA belongs to you and others don’t get to use it without permission. Though there’s still the problem of what happens when some really powerful mutant feels like giving permission.
@ Daibhid: Wispa! I suppose any other delicious fluffy chocolate would also do 😀
More seriously, an excellent issue with some weighty themes. I still dislike the stiff artwork .. and how did Melody become this badass swordmaster based on some of the poses? Girl should be a quivering wreck who still perseveres.
Nonetheless, I loved it. It’s very creepy and deeply unsettling watching the ostensible “heroes” passively watch a suicide ceremony take place. Frankly it’s almost gross. But it emphasises how weird and different mutant culture is becoming from human culture. Is that good? Who knows… And I’m glad the characters are at least acknowledging it.
My main complaint of this series is how very episodic and self contained each issue is. It feels lacking in a thread. But each vignette is building up our understanding of life in Krakoa, with Cyclops as our lynchpin.
Before I forget: I’d like to see a
later Crucible issue where some beloved minor character doesn’t fight to the bitter end and is merely slayed with no promise of ressurection. That would set hares running.
While resurrection raises interesting philosophical questions and, no doubt, has the potential to produce some interesting stories, I can’t help but think that Cyclops is right here. Of course on a meta level it seems we should be suspicious of much that is going on (which gives me hope that Hickman is headed somewhere and isn’t going to completely ruin the mutant metaphor) I have to ask, hasn’t the endless string of comic book resurrections already complicated the notion of the “soul”? Sure there are contradictory examples in continuity. But if we accept that the resurrected X-Men don’t have souls, that they’re akin to Strong Guy when resurrected by Layla Miller, then what about Cyclops, Jean, Psylocke, Colossus, Banshee, Doug, vampire Jubilee, Wolverine, Xavier’s clone body, everyone resurrected during Necrosha, the time all of reality was reconstructed by Phoenix in the M’krann crystal etc etc?
I think at least one of the Guthries should take the name “Hillbilly Marvel” assuming DC no longer holds the trademark.
I feel like the question of “do they have souls at all” is really more “are they pod people,” which was meant to be settled by HoXPoX, which assured us that they are not.
The question that remains unsettled is whether the person who died is still dead and just replaced by a copy who can’t tell they’re not the original.
And honestly, there is no way that they would put in print “actually this is just like the Clone Saga when we thought for a while Peter Parker had been the clone for the last couple of decades.”
It’s just being used as a basis here for raising reasonable questions.
Nightcrawler’s line about starting a new religion definitely seems to connect to Cardinal from Life 9. The discussion of being reborn with more / better traits is also setting up the chimeras from Life 9 too, I think
The tower also seems like it’s a mirror to Nimrod’s monolith in Life 9. (They probably aren’t the same.)
Everyone pointing out that they’re behaving uncharacteristically is some relief to me that the cultishness is intentional. I’m glad at least some characters are discussing the odd creepiness of where they are now.
Totally loved Cypher splitting into a “trinity”.
Haven’t both Cyclops and Nightcrawler been dead before? They may be the best people to answer their own questions about the afterlife.
So thinking this through, the whole setup should be deeply troubling to Kurt. I mean, he wasn’t just someone who went to Mass on Christmas and Easter: he’s always been shown as a devout Catholic and, as Paul pointed out, was a seminarian at one point. I don’t think Kurt is just worried about whether or not people’s souls are in their bodies. Krakoa would disturb him on a more fundamental level: it eliminates the consequences of sin.
Start with the parallels between Krakoa and Eden. Catholic teaching does not hold that the story of Eden is literally true. It explicitly teaches that much of the story is metaphorical apart from one fundamental truth: that humanity was doomed to lose its Earthly Paradise because of the inevitability of sin. Humans were only allowed to stay in the Garden as long as they were ignorant of the concepts of good and evil, but that degree of innocence is unsustainable in the face of human nature.
Kurt would absolutely know this. He would look at Krakoa, a tropical paradise where all of his physical needs are met, and he should find it disturbing. In fact, he should see right through it. More than anyone else in the book, he should be convinced that the Krakoan experiment can never work, which may explain why he’s been so ineffective on the Quiet Council. If Krakoa is in fact doomed, he could be either resigned to being unable to convince people to behave themselves or he’s simply being ignored.
And if Apocalypse has convinced people to fight to the death in exchange for eternal life, he’s probably been pegged as the Serpent.
There’s another parallel here as well. In Matthew 4:1-11, Jesus was tempted to turn rocks into bread, to jump off a tower and be saved by angels, and to rule the world if he’d abandon his faith. That’s not all that far off from what Krakoa is providing. Krakoa is offering an unlimited supply of food in exchange for, well, nothing really. Anyone who dies is saved by the cloning process – and it may be significant that Kurt has his own tower. Mutants will be a respected global power, so long as they do what Krakoa wants.
Am I reading too much into this? Probably. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Kurt wasn’t thinking along the same lines.
So now let’s see if the writers did their homework.
Evilgus: I want to see what happens if someone actually beats Apocalypse.
I’m not sure if this has been raised before, but the creepy Cypher/Warlock scene this issue made me wonder if Moira X’s grand plan involves converting Krakoa and all its inhabitants into immortal techno-organic beings and thus beating humanity to the punch. It would help to explain why it’s so important to get all of them in one place (recall the various tiers of collective consciousness described in HoXPoX), why Doug/Warlock is so integral to the whole setup, and why the powers that be think uploading and downloading the X-Men from the cloud is a perfectly normal thing to do now. And it’s a better explanation for why they can’t have precogs on the island: It’s not just that they don’t want people learning that the mutants always fail, it’s that they don’t want them to know what they’ll become if they stay.
Additionally, having Cannonball and his siblings watch joyfully as their nude sister floats in front of everyone summons uncomfortable memories of Husk and Angel in the Austen run.
Who was the guy with headphones in the Crucible arena?
I think we are supposed to be more okay (or more torn) when Sam says “She wants this”. That doesn’t help me though. I can imagine Apocalypse doing this kind of thing one-off in secret, but now I _hope_ that the X-Men reboot into Life 11 if only to erase this behavior. I mean, look how appalled we are at the X-Men ditching Gambit in Antarctica!
@Evilgus
I thought that Wing (the poor sap who got depowered and then taunted to death by Danger in Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men) would be a good role for that–or here, really; same power!
Maybe they decide to let you be resurrected with any powers you want only if you beat Apocalypse, to get rid of all those silly wills on the basis that obviously nobody who got depowered could possibly do it.
And then of course somebody will.
Cyclops and Wolverine were definitely flirting with each other on the moon. Or at least Cyclops was flirting with Wolverine.
Really good (and creepy) issue.
I’ve heard others commenting that Wolverine and Cyclops were flirting, but I’m not so sure. I read it as:
W: “Jeannie in a bikini.”
C: “Scott in a speedo.” (“hey now, Jeannie is mine too, imagine me in revealing underwear as a cold shower.”)
W: “Who wouldn’t want that?” (“yeah okay, I acknowledge our rivalry sarcastically”)
I could be wrong though; they certainly have built up tension over the years.
Actually, we are probably heading towards Sinister using Crucible as an excuse to make one of his chimeras.
Now it seems obvious in hindsight.
Quite a strong issue, as far as the ongoing work of world-building and myth-making is concerned. It compellingly portrays how radically Krakoa has changed the very definitions of life, self, community and death according to a kind of ethno-nationalist rationality that hits on key ethical and moral questions with some profoundly uncomfortable and dissonant results.
As far as character work is concerned, it seems a moot point by now to say that it’s distinctly bland. All of this reads best from a more plot-focused perspective, as counter-intuitive as that sounds when reading the X-Men. Morrison’s run, for all its artifice, had loads of heart. While Hickman’s…
Having said that, Nightcrawler reads well this issue: devout, articulate, emphatic and profoundly concerned with the needs of others. Loads of readings could unfurl from this particular story, and that’s great to witness.
Am kind of fond of the homoerotic twists and turns, although I think there, characterisation would mean everything. I remain profoundly disappointed with most of the line in terms of character-writing, while increasingly compelled by a wider story which isn’t about the X-Men at all, but about mutantdom.
That being said, I nearly wish the inevitable catastrophe (redemptive or otherwise) would come already, so some emotion could actually seep into the stories. I think Storm/Frost’s exchange over in Marauders is one of the few tender or moving moments in recent issues, and even that feels very decompressed.
@Tim XP:
“Additionally, having Cannonball and his siblings watch joyfully as their nude sister floats in front of everyone summons uncomfortable memories of Husk and Angel in the Austen run.”
I’m fairly sure when Dusk is taking her face off and Skin is holding Cannonball back, it’s because both siblings are at the point of losing control and breaking into the arena to intervene. I don’t think they were passive (let alone comfortable) spectators.
@CJ:
I understand what you’re saying, and I think both readings hold. I’d say the scene is teasing at some queer leeway while avoiding confronting more reactive straight sensibilities head-on. Their words don’t need to read as ironic because there is such a concrete homoerotic reading already there. On the other hand, it is distinctively abstract: we don’t even see their faces, let alone how they regard each other.
Tim XP-There’s a scene in one of the House/Powers issues where Doug Ramsey first arrives on Krakoa, before the other mutants.
It seems like he secretly infects Krakoa with the techno-organic virus.
However, I’m not sure how this relates to Moira’s plan.
It seems that he purposely hid what he was doing from Xavier.
If it were part of Moira’s plan, I would assume he wouldn’t be doing it behind Xavier’s back.
Unless Xavier isn’t as intimately involved with Moira’s plan, and Moira and Doug have a closer pact than Moira and Xavier.
That was the one aspect I’ve had trouble reconciling with my own interpretation of Moira’s plan…other than that it won’t be good for mutants.
I do find Nightcrawler questioning if they still have souls (again) to be interesting.
It came up in House of X, and it made sense, because it was Nightcrawler.
Now, he’s bringing it up again.
Sure, it might just that he finds all of this very troubling with his faith.
It may be Hickman just repeating a theme he finds to be interesting.
I wonder if it’s not meant to be read as some type of foreshadowing though.
Someone mentions that the question was settled in House of X.
Not really. As far as I remember, it was brushed away by Xavier.
He seems to be offering platitudes multiple times throughout House/Powers though.
He’s a very unreliable narrator.
So, if the only solution to Nightcrawler’s question came from Xavier assuring everyone that “Cerebro was downloading their souls back in to their bodies”, yeah, I’d say that’s not very reassuring.
The characters do seem to be acting quite soulless, much of the time.
Although, yeah, I also don’t know where you go with that line of speculation.
I’m also sure this isn’t setting up another “Clone Saga” with mutants.
Taibak-House of X and Powers of X were littered with religious allusions.
There’s no doubt that we’re meant to be reading Krakoa in religious terms, as a Heaven for mutants.
It even seems to offer almost every mutant their deepest desire.
Mystique is an outlier, because she wants the one thing that Krakoa cannot give her (Destiny).
The Quiet Council are ruling over Krakoa as a godhead.
There’s even a Holy Trinity (Xavier, Magneto, Apocalypse), although it’s not exactly the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Xavier refers multiple times to the non-triumvirate mutants as “their children”, placing Xavier in the role of a monotheistic god.
The Quiet Council send Sabretooth to Hell.
I’d say Hickman is very aware of what he’s writing in this issue.
I still can’t decide which is worse, Hickman turning the Avengers into multiversal mass murderers.
Or Hickman turning the X-Men into a cult that lets Apocalypse ritualistically murder young women after passing undemocratic laws about who gets to live.
Taibak-Here’s another verse for you…Matthew 16:26.
“For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”
@salomé Tim XP is referring to the scene at the end when Aero is resurrected, not the fight to the death (where the Guthrie siblings react understandably, unable to control themselves any longer at watching an old enemy beat down and kill their sister). But when she’s reborn she’s naked, as we have scene several times now. It kind of makes sense the more I think about it, especially given the ritual aspect of the Ceuxible, but anything, even good stories, that recalls Chuck can’t be good.
Chris: Yes, but if the religious allusions are going to be this blatant, the religious characters should pick up on it. That’s especially true for Nightcrawler since Catholic theology is pretty explicit when it comes to sin and temptation so everything about Krakoa should be setting off alarms in Nightcrawler’s mind. Yes, Krakoa is *superficially* Heaven, but between the hedonism and the murder cults, yeah, I’d say it’s pretty soulless.
So we shall see. I’d guess Hickman just keeps using the symbolism, but there is a lot of room for a story about Nightcrawler’s faith here – and it should end with him leaving Krakoa.
Of all the X-Men, Nightcrawler is absolutely the one most qualified to question the very nature of resurrection and the condition of the soul. After all, not only has he received a Catholic education and seminary training of some degree, but he’s been dead. Like, really, truly dead. Like, really, truly, soul chilling in -an- afterlife, dead.
Of course, there was also that plot thread about how when Kurt came back to life in his body made of Bamfs, it was meant as a one way trip and he’d never be allowed back into Heaven as well… which will probably be retconned/explained away as he was in -an- afterlife, but not the actual Heaven-place-you-go-when-you’re-a-dead-Christian. It would make sense, given the involvement of Azazel in that storyline as well.
Given the amount of characters we’ve seen in various afterlives who have either come back or been revealed to not be dead after all (remember when Bucky was in the Legion of the Unliving?) and given the revolving door manner in which so many other mutants have come back before (remember when Logan wrestled the Angel of Death to return to life?) (remember when Persephone brought him back?) I suppose we’re in for a massive explaination that all afterlives we see are just transitory holding states for the soul, such as it is, and there’s no such thing as permanent death in the Marvel Universe.
*shrug*
Also, while people make a deal about Scott and Logan flirting, I caught the bit on page 10 where Scott says “That’s some view” while staring at Kurt’s ass. I mean sure, Kurt -does- have a great ass, but are we meant to read that subtext or what?
Also, the whole “here’s a naked girl standing in front of a cheering crowd” is really creepy when you consider Aero is either a teenager or still close to it, depending on how old we think she is. You’d think mutants would at least have some notion of modesty and propriety, unless they also claim to be evolved past the point of body image.
Also… holy shit, so the plan to repower mutants is to let Apocalypse ritually murder them? I suppose the end goal is to make sure that the Official Canonical List of Mutants Who Have Died is literally everyone. But if this whole story concept doesn’t end in fire and tears and the revelation that someone’s been manipulating and controlling them all along, it’ll be a surprise. There are FAR too many cracks in the facade, off-kilter characters, and weird decisions for this to be a logical outgrowth of the X-Men without some form of influence upon them.
Tim XP-Oh, one thing. Doug Ramsey is so important to Moira’s plan, because he is the only one who can truly communicate with Krakoa.
That same scene in House/Powers showed that Xavier really couldn’t communicate with Krakoa, he just thought he could.
Moira would know that Doug and Krakoa could form a deep bond from life nine, with DougKrak.
As far as I know, Warlock isn’t an important part of Moira’s plan.
I don’t think Warlock is meant to be on Krakoa, since he’s not a mutant.
I think that’s why Scott was so confused when he saw Doug, Krakoa, and Warlock sitting there.
He looked again, and Warlock was gone.
Doug Ramsey is another character who is written wildly differently between series, considering his portrayal in House/Powers/X-Men versus New Mutants, and that’s all being written by the same writer.
So, something is going on.
He was acting normal and having fun in New Mutants, but on Krakoa, he acts very creepy.
It has been a looong time since I liked a X-book as much as this one. I did not expect to like Nightcrawler in this priest-like role nearly as much as I did in this issue. His dialogue was really good here, as was Scott’s.
Oddly, Apocalypse also had some interesting lines. This issue may have answered my questions on what the heck he is doing there.
He is a superb manipulator, and he is in top form here, selling the Crucible at precisely the sweet spot. He deviously presents it as not strictly necessary, yet highly meritorious. “It is a kind of life. Nothing wrong with it.” Such wording. You can practically complete the sentence on his stead: “… if you do not mind being mediocre while surrounded by the most marvelous beings”.
This is pretty much the X-Men #1 that I expected months ago. One who makes intelligent questions and somewhat answers them.
It would be nice to think that weird cults and peer pressure resulting in alarming practices *had* to be the result of mind control or outside influence.
But we see it every day. See the example of a certain chain of fitness clubs in America.
Taibak-Except, he plans to create a mutant religion now. Which, I somehow doubt is going to be exactly compatible with Jesus’ teachings.
Maybe Nightcrawler is subtly being warped by Krakoa too, being given what he’s always wanted, a chance to be a prophet.
Who knows?
Remember, it mentioned in House/Powers that Krakoa probes each mutant’s mind as soon as they arrive through the gate.
It’s supposed to be innocent and harmless, but that was another of Xavier’s platitudes.
It seems like, perhaps, Krakoa is trying to discover what desires are in a character’s mind that it can unlock for them, so that they’ll only feel at home on Krakoa.
Much like a drug.
I remember when Thor spoke to Steve Rogers’ ghost, even though Steve was actually just re-living his history or whatever.
“he’s always been shown as a devout Catholic”
Except for the pre-marital sex.
Luis-Krakoa is supposed to represent Moira’s merging of the dreams of Xavier, Magneto, and Apocalypse.
That way it appeals to the widest number of mutants.
K-I’m not a member of this fitness club, are you a member of this fitness club?
How many people are members?
Because, we’re meant to believe, based on Krakoa, that everyone should be wishing they could be a member of this fitness club.
I mean, the X-Men already had a cult to believe in, Xavier’s original dream.
Even if some of them proved to be mindless sheep who followed Xavier blindly, surely some of them would have rejected what seems to be a repudiation of everything they were taught to believe.
Based on prior characterization, many of the X-Men had come to see Xavier as less and less trustworthy over time. His dream was worth believing in, even if the man was flawed and suspect.
It’s hardly believable that every mutant in the world would prove so easy to manipulate, unless there’s something else involved.
Probably the clearest on-panel evidence of outright mental tampering we’ve seen is Pyro in Marauders #3. He’s badly hung over and drooling, yet when Shaw says of Shinobi “He’s a Shaw”, Pyro immediately springs to life to yell “AND A MUTANT!” the call-and-response we’ve seen since the HOXPOX resurrection ceremony. A call and response that he likely hasn’t heard before, much less felt the need to shout. A reflex implanted during resurrection, perhaps.
Xavier is undoubtedly part of the picture here, but I wonder if the tight-ish rules about food on Krakoa are because Krakoan-grown food is being used to drug the mutant population to make them more susceptible to indoctrination into cultish practices. Lots of real-world precedent for this in cults. Which is why characters who don’t seem to spend a lot of time there are mostly normal (Kate, Bishop, Emma, Shaw, Cannonball) and those who eat non-Krakoan food are normal-ish (Wolverine).
I feel that there’s something to be said about Hickman’s wanting to portray mutants as “the other” and test our own biases.
However, I’d be a lot more comfortable with it simply being that if Hickman’s “mutant culture” didn’t bear a striking resemblance to so many classic portrayals of a dystopian society from our own popular culture.
While far from exactly the same scenario, I saw certain part of this very issue as liberally reminiscent of Logan’s Run.
I don’t see why he would turn to our own dystopian artwork to create a mutant culture representing “the other”.
There was that one story, I can’t remember where, in which Scalphunter was now living as a cook, keeping his head down, and Nightcrawler turned up to hassle him and remind him that he’s just a clone and has no soul.
@Chris V
Nightcrawler says that he lost his faith. The implication as I understood it was that he is not necessarily aiming to conform to Christian doctrine or expectations.
As for merging Xavier, Magneto and Apocalypse’s viewpoints… sorry, but I don’t think that holds any water. It is just too arbitrary and also dysfunctional. Why stop with those exact three? Why not include, say, Nightcrawler? And it is not like those commitees of people with wildly diverging viewpoints tend to work in real life either.
FWIW, Warlock is supposedly a mutant, in that he’s deviated from his race’s usual process of belief… i.e. he wasn’t a murderous monster like his “father.”
So -do- mutants of other races get accepted by Krakoa? How about, for instance, Longshot–does he qualify?
@Chris V
Assuming the X-Men are brainwashed/drugged by Xavier/Krakoa, what would the main story even be about?
Everyones just shakes it off and goes back to business as usual?
Don’t see how that would fit very well with the narrative established by Moira’s previous lives.
Didn’t care much for the Crucible stuff itself. But I did enjoy the scenes with Scott/Logan, Exodus, and Scott/Kurt.
A few random thoughts:
1) I loved this issue. It was weird, unsettling and probably the most interesting a main title of the x-line has been since… forever. Morrison, probably. (The side titles are usually where the interesting stuff happens. Also the good stuff, usually. Honestly, for the past 15 years the main X-Men title was usually a mess or just generally more boring than other titles of the line).
2) Okay, whose fanfiction has Hickman been reading? Because ‘Melody Guthrie sword fights Apocalypse’ has fanfiction written all over it.
3) I’m calling it now – one of X-Factor’s investigations will turn out to be about a depowered mutant who faked their death because they couldn’t face the Crucible but still wanted a version of them to be reborn into their former, powered life.
4) I’d be very interested to know how the Crucible vote went down in the Quiet Council.
Really liked this issue. LOVED Scott and Wolverine flirting.
JCG-It’s part of my idea that Moira is not attempting to accomplish what she claims she is doing.
I believe that she still holds to her belief that “mutants are a cancer in need of a cure”, as she believed in life two and three, before Mystique and Destiny tortured her to death.
I base most of my theory on the fact that it’s so important that Destiny stay dead.
I believe that some point, Moira will be revealed as the problem, Moira will be gotten rid of, and Krakoa will move on.
I think that, yes, some characters will decide to leave Krakoa, some of them returning to being “evil mutants” opposed to Krakoa.
I think that most mutants will remain on Krakoa.
They will have developed a familial bond, and learning about the threat of post-humans which are the enemies of both humans and mutants will change their minds about the mutant/human conflict.
Then, I think the new status quo will continue, with Krakoa attempting to achieve Xavier’s dream.
I think that the stories going forward will be more hopeful (for a time), with humans and mutants becoming less and less antagonistic.
Just where I think things are going.
Luis-Because those are three that Moira sees as the lynchpins of the “mutant race”.
That’s why they are the ruling triumvirate, more important than the rest of the Quiet Council.
Those are the characters that Moira turned to in past lives. First working with Xavier to achieve his dream.
Then, she sided with Magneto in his war against humans.
Then, she aligned herself with Apocalypse in life nine.
In life ten, her plan was to bring all three of her “strong men” together in to one whole.
I do agree that it does seem as if Xavier’s dream is somewhat being lost with Krakoa’s vision.
This really should have been issue 3 or 4. In retrospect the main book has been treading water this whole time.
What I find fascinating is how Krakoan religion and spirituality exist in conversation with Christianity. Xavier elevating himself as a Christ surrogate, amnesty as the unconditional forgiveness of sin, the terror of embracing suffering and death despite the promise of bodily resurrection. Mutants from persecuted minority to global superpower echoes “the first shall be last and the last shall be first” and “the meek shall inherit the earth.”
As a recovered Roman-Catholic, the Crucible “sacrament” rang especially true to me. You have to earn your salvation through suffering – specifically public torment and execution, fighting right up to then death. The “cruci-“ part of the word doesn’t just refer tothe witch trials.
But this is a twisted interpretation of Christianity, for the many reasons explained above. In many ways it evokes how real religious and political leaders twist Christianity to justify their actions… in other ways, it actually seems closer to original biblical doctrine of salvation through sacrifice and radical social transformation.
Which is why this issue makes for such interesting debate, and why it should have come sooner. We did not need the Summers moonbase BBQ or the ecoterrorist golden girls. That stuff will be easy to breeze through in the trade paperback, but I somewhat resent the six months of wasted time before we got to the point.
Also, why not include Nightcrawler? Because, he’s never been shown to be a “mutant messiah” in the way that Xavier, Magneto, and Apocalypse have been throughout X-history.
Nightcrawler has always been portrayed as a “true believer” in Xavier’s dream, he never had a distinct vision of his own that draw other mutants to his dream.
Other mutants have always shown a willingness to follow the dreams of Xavier, Magneto, and Apocalypse.
Not so much any other mutants.
Those three are the “alpha males” of the “mutant race”.
As far as my theory, another clue I happened upon (which I may be totally wrong about) is the fact that the Krakoan drugs are labeled L I M.
LIM-domain protein have been implicated in cancer.
Now, some people online have guessed that this is Krakoa’s plan to kill off the humans with cancer-causing drugs.
Yeah, Marvel isn’t going to allow the X-Men to be implicated in attempted genocide of the human race by giving them cancer.
It made me think of Moira’s line from life three…”Mutants are a cancer, in need of a cure”.
Could this be Moira’s little in-joke about the true effect of the drugs that Krakoa is giving to humanity?
Some other people speculate that this is a different attempt at genocide, by causing humans to solely give birth to mutant children.
What if it’s the opposite?
What if Moira is using these drugs to make sure that humans no longer give birth to mutant children?
Could the “LIM” signifier be Moira referencing his belief that “mutants are a cancer”, while these drugs are part of the “cure”…
Otherwise, I think that the drugs are legitimately what Krakoa claims, a way to help the human race and encourage them to trust mutants and open trade with Krakoa.
On the religious issue, also go back to Powers of X, with life nine.
The man-machine supremacy had a lot of the same types of this twisted religious symbolism.
The humans had created a seeming religion based around the machines.
It doesn’t seem all that different from the mutant cult created around resurrection.
Plus, with life six, there’s the constant references of Ascension, which is a religious concept, itself.
The religious symbolism goes beyond Krakoa and mutants.
RE: Moira, I don’t think she’s The Big Bad. Rather, I think she’s the device to revert things back to the status quo.
First, by being the one to “wake up” the X-Men, either figuratively, by plucking them one by one from Krakoa and de-programming them, or literally i.e. the Krakoan X-Men really are all pod people and the originals are stashed away on ice somewhere. She broke with Xavier and Magneto at the end of HoX/PoX and is presumably pursuing an agenda in conflict with theirs.
Second, Moira’s 11th life is a Chekhov’s Gun waiting to go off, and Hickman has talked about “putting the toys back in the box” when he’s done. Resetting the timeline via Moira reincarnating again fits that bill AND follows Hickman/Marvel precedence with how Secret Wars 2015 ended. Furthermore, with Kevin Feige now in complete creative control of Marvel, I expect the next incarnation of the X-Men will reflect the MCU vision of the franchise.