X Deaths of Wolverine #5 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X DEATHS OF WOLVERINE #5
Writer: Benjamin Percy
Artist: Federico Vicentini
Colourist: Dijjo Lima
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER / PAGE 1. Wolverine fights Omega Wolverine. This is the other half of the image from the cover of X Lives of Wolverine #5, with elements of a fight between Wolverine and Omega Red spreading onto the page.
PAGES 2-4. Moira’s life flashes before her eyes as she dies.
She’s inside a sort of Krakoan battle suit thingy that she stole last issue.
Page 2, and the bench panels on page 3, are a parody of the flashback from Powers of X #1 in which Moira approaches Charles Xavier and reveals her previous lives to him.
Page 4 shows all of Moira’s deaths from her previous nine lives (with her death in this life shown in the foreground). They’re in sequence, running clockwise from the top left:
- Moira I dies at the age of 74 in her sleep. This is an original appearance, but it was described in narration on page 3 of House of X #2.
- Moira II dies when her plane crashed into the ocean. Again, this was described in House of X #2 rather than actually shown, and takes place between pages 9-10.
- Moira III is set alight by Pyro, as shown in a scene in House of X #2 which has been revisited many times since.
- Moira IV is killed by Sentinels. Again, this is technically an original appearance, since the House of X #2 scene ends with the Sentinel arriving. It takes place between pages 17-18 of House of X #2.
- Moira V is a little odd. This is the world shown only on page 18 of House of X #2, where she and Xavier built an isolated city of mutants, Farway, only for the Sentinels to show up and kill everyone. A data page in House of X #2 says that she had been in a coma for a year before she actually died, which is why she’s shown here in a hospital bed while the city is destroyed behind her (though it doesn’t really make sense for her to remember this, but okay).
- Moira VI is killed by Wolverine in the far future, from page 23 of Powers of X #6, in a deliberate attempt to send her back in time armed with new knowledge.
- Moira VII is killed by a spontaneously-emerging Sentinel – a “wild Master Mold facility” – moments after page 20 of House of X #2.
- Moira VIII is from the world where she aligned with an extremist Magneto, who was defeated by the superheroes. The panel shows her dying in a failed prison escape, something not shown on panel but mentioned in a House of X #2 data page.
- Moira IX is again killed by Wolverine in a deliberate attempt to send her back in time with new knowledge, this time from Powers of X #3.
PAGE 5. Recap and credits.
PAGES 6-13. Everyone fights Omega Wolverine, while Sage and Beast make plans.
The Cradle. The Cradles are the locations where Cerebro units are kept. The suggestion seems to be that Omega Wolverine (under Phalanx influence) intends to use the Cradle as an access point through which to infect Krakoan biotech itself and Phalanx-ise it. Quite why he doesn’t just infect Krakoa as he’s running, I don’t really get – after all, the premise of Omega Wolverine is that Moira was able to casually infect him when she killed him, no?
Sage claims that the Phalanx will be unstoppable if it gets into the Cradle, which is not easy to follow – and not really supported by the data page which follows this scene. That said, it would presumably make Cerebro unusable and put a stop to resurrection, which seems pretty bad.
The Cerebro Sword. Sage’s plan involves using the nebulously-powerful, plot-convenient Cerebro Sword, an artefact made by Magneto from a damaged Cerebro unit which is apparently nonetheless very important for reasons that have never been terribly clearly explained. Wolverine retrieved it from Mikhail Rasputin in X Lives of Wolverine #5.
Omega Wolverine. As he succumbs to Phalanx control, the future Wolverine symbolically burns down to just the adamantium skeleton, losing his humanity.
The pocket watch. Wolverine got it from Benedict Xavier as a teenager in 1900, as revealed in X Lives of Wolverine #5. It’s meant to be symbolic, I guess – something to do with Wolverine’s timeline not entirely making sense and hanging together, but still ultimately giving him the direction and sense of purpose he needs, is probably meant to be the idea.
“I’m a living computer, aren’t I?” Sage used to make this claim a lot in later Chris Claremont stories.
PAGE 14. Data page. From dissecting the pod in which Omega Wolverine manifested in issue #1, Forge has somehow found a memory drive and learned a bit about what happened to the X-Men in his timeline.
- Jean Grey is poisoned on the eve of an attack on Krakoa (which obviously had to be taken out at some point in order to stop everyone just being resurrected). Gorgeous George, who poisons her, is a minor background villain best known as a member of the Nasty Boys from Peter David / Larry Stroman X-Factor in the early 1990s.
- Nightcrawler actually seems to live to a reasonable age until the Sentinels finally catch up with him.
- Magneto is taken out by nanites.
- Professor X is apparently imprisoned psychically when the Cerebro network is compromised – presumably the same stunt that Omega Wolverine is trying to repeat here. In this timeline Moira seems to remain aligned with Xavier until the point where she mercy kills him (which arguably parallels what she seemed to be trying to do in this life with Krakoa).
The “Scottish folk song” is “The Bonnie Banks o’ Loch Lomond”, which is a standard in Scotland but for all I know is less familiar to Americans. It’s the “you take the high road and I’ll take the low road” one. Forge hasn’t properly understood it – it’s not about them being separated by the loch itself, even on a literal reading. There are various interpretations of it but in one way or another they tend to agree that it’s a soldier from the failed Jacobite rebellion of 1746 anticipating his death and thinking of home.
PAGES 15-19. Wolverine defeats Omega Wolverine by stabbing him with the Cerebro Sword.
Mmm. This doesn’t work.
What we have here is something vaguely ending-shaped. The Cerebro Sword is set up as a big symbol, and since it was the cause of the trouble in X Lives it gets to be the resolution in X Deaths – all of which seems structurally sound enough. The trouble is that the Cerebro Sword doesn’t work either as a plot element (because it’s totally unclear what it is or what it does or how it’s contributing to this) or as a symbol (because it’s totally unclear what it’s supposed to symbolise). So… vaguely ending-shaped.
Somewhere in here, Wolverine’s telling us that he feels a need to atone for things he may have done in the past or the future, which again, doesn’t really feel like it’s emerged very clearly from anything in either miniseries.
PAGE 20. Data page. Wolverine remembers a child unburdened by the weight of history; his own role, in contrast, is to have a life that stretches over a longer period so that he has to see the bigger picture. Basically, we’re trying to define Wolverine’s lifespan and his long and unusually varied back story as the thing that really marks him out from other characters.
PAGE 21. Wolverine and family celebrate in the Green Lagoon.
Professor X’s arm is in a sling because Wolverine (under Omega Red’s influence) stabbed him in X Lives of Wolverine #4. Wolverine is simply bracing himself for the inevitable next fight, and the final panel shows Sabretooth down in the Pit.
PAGE 22. The Beast and Sage discuss the story.
“I guess it turns out the mutants don’t always lose.” Sage is alluding to Moira’s prediction that the mutants always wind up getting wiped out.
The Beast sees Wolverine’s success as a vindication of his own morally flexible behaviour over in X-Force. Sage rightly points out to him that he’s being selective in focussing only on Wolverine’s contribution.
PAGES 23-24. Moira rises from the grave.
Note that the graveyard overlooks what seems to be the headquarters of Epiphany Platforms, whose technology she used to build this body. Apparently, her plan all along was that if she was killed in Krakoa, she would be brought back to life as a robot based on a back-up of her personality. This is her “eleventh life” as foreshadowed by Destiny in House of X #2. Obviously, Moira has now become posthuman – something she never attempted in any of her previous lives. This is essentially what Xavier and Magneto were asking her about in Inferno, and she was warning them off it – but then her plan according to Inferno was basically to sideline while posthumanity got on with everything.
PAGE 25. Trailers. The Krakoan reaads NEXT: WADE IN.
PAGE 26. The back cover.
I’m still confused. Who gave Moira cancer? Krakoa itself?
Close to 30 issues of X-Force and this is the biggest role Sage has played in Percy’s stories.
She got to get up from the chair to hand off the mcguffin.
So, Destiny wanted Moira to turn on mutants and embrace post-humanity? Silly Moira had no reason to keep Destiny dead. As Destiny said in her prediction, “Ten lives, maybe eleven if you make the right choice in the end.” That is apparently Destiny’s definition of Moira “making the right choice” in Percy’s view. Somehow I doubt that was Hickman’s intent because it sounds plain stupid.
Moira’s plan from “Inferno” wouldn’t have involved sidelining mutants and awaiting post-humanity because that makes absolutely no sense.
Moira knows that post-humanity can outcompete mutants. Mutants always lost due to the fact that humanity will not be bound by nature in the same way as mutants. So, if her intent was to help post-humanity, then all she needed to do was sit back and do nothing. The competition for survival between humans and mutants brings about the creation of post-humanity and once post-humanity rises, it leads to the eventual extinction of mutants.
Plus, Moira did want to stop the creation of Nimrod. She knows that the existence of the Nimrod AI causes an acceleration in technological progress which hastens the rise of the post-human.
Basically, nothing in Percy’s plot makes sense.
And here I was just thinking that what the X-Men really needed to make things interesting again was a second machine/human hybrid with knowledge of other timelines who’s determined to wipe mutants out
@Chris V: I don’t even know if this is Percy’s fault, considering Moira stopped making sense altogether in Inferno #4
X Deaths 5: not crazy enough. Nothing came close to the Banshee skin-suit.
“Nothing came close to the Banshee skin-suit.”
Marvel should release it it as a Halloween costume.
I don’t know what the big deal is with Robo-Moira. I mean, Magneto’s right there. He’s be like 7:30, either disassemble Moira or wipe her hard drive. 8:00 breakfast. 8:30 punt that Orchis space station into the sun. 9:00 leisure time.
I know that’s not how superhero comics work, but it would be lovely if they did.
It’s fun watching yet another generation get to experience the creative scrambling and incomprehensible plot contortions that come with the departure of an iconic, idiosyncratic writer from the X-titles.
Maybe it is just me, but I don’t think that we should see this last scene as a fulfillment of Destiny’s predictions.
Mainly because Destiny can and would lie to Moira under such circunstances.
So the entire nature of Moira X and her mutant power to rewrite the timeline, so to speak, acted as a Sword of Damocles hanging over the entire Krakoan status quo. As long as Moira’s power was active and she had one more life, there was the potential to hit a hard reset on everything.
But because this was already so tied into the mainstream Marvel Universe, there’s no way Marvel was going to let the X-Office do a significant reboot of the mutants from the beginning on. No, Krakoa was a thing happening in the MU as a whole.
So Inferno took Moira’s power out of the equation, thus making sure that the status quo remains locked in and can’t be altered just by killing her off.
And this storyline, this sweet hot flaming garbage pile of a storyline, finished turning Moira the X-Men ally and mutant sympathizer/secret mutant into… an evil AI with knowledge of multiple timelines bent on destroying all mutants.
Yikes. This can’t be part of Hickman’s original master plan… can it?
My guess remains that originally, the Krakoa arc was going to end with Moira being the enemy, and being taken out in a creative way. Probably via The Pit, which was used exactly once before Hickman stepped back, and is now suddenly used all the time.
The general thrust of Moira being revealed, becoming the enemy of the state, and being taken out in a way that preserved the timeline, they all remain. The business with her repeatedly losing arms and turning into a robot and all that confoundedness, that would be a new way to tie up the now loose plot threads, after they decided to keep the current status quo around for a while.
“This can’t be part of Hickman’s original master plan… can it?”
I could bet my expensive kpop photocards that it wasn’t. People always bring up that Percy worked the details of this story with Hickman, but ultimately it’s Percy’s story, likely tied to certain editorial interests. I imagine Hickman mostly colaborated clarifying certain details of what he intended and giving some advice here and there.
I think Hickman’s original plan was similar to what we saw in “Inferno”, except done better.
Destiny would discover Moira’s plan. Mystique would depower her. They’d either allow her to escape or kill her. If the Krakoan drugs were Moira’s “cure”, then Moira’s plotting against mutants would not be a threat. Moira wouldn’t really be used again by Hickman.
I don’t believe Hickman ever intended to use Moira as a reset button because Marvel would never allow it. He already got to reset the Marvel Universe once with Secret Wars, why do it again?
Destiny’s words probably meant exactly what she said, Eleven, if you make the right choice in the end.” Moira made the wrong choice…she betrayed mutants, so she loses her power. So, ten lives.
I took the “Eleven, if you make the right choice in the end” to mean that she might be resurrected on Krakoa if she makes the right choices at some future point now that she’s depowered in her robot body. ie, She might do something to die nobly, and be rewarded with a resurrection by the Five.
Of course, it has the minor snag that we’re told that Moira’s memories weren’t being recorded by Cerebro… But who knows? Maybe Sinister figured a way around that? Maybe they’re able to recover her memories from the robot she’s inhabiting now?
Also, shouldn’t Proteus have some sort of feelings about all of this?
Gotta admit it, fellow X-fam, this story really bummed me out as did Inferno and if it wasn’t for Gillen starting on Immortal X-Men, I think it would have been the jumping off point for me after 25 years of reading and loving the X-Men
The visceral shock of the treatment of Moira and then Banshee was too much for me. Along with the current state of the world and Disney’s reluctant and uncertain support and representation of LGBTQIA communities, what really is the point of series like this to me and who am I supporting with my time and money?
The X-Men have been such a big and constant part of my life for so long but at the moment this extreme and graphic violence and especially treatment of women – Moira in this instance – is not good for me.
Was waiting for the Moira / Rahne reunion but it never came.
Was waiting for the Moira / Proteus reunion but it never came.
Why go to all these lengths when your son can warp reality and is vital for the resurrection process?
The whole way through this Krakoan era, I kept thinking back to that Excalibur issue when they went to the pub and trying to square that Moira with all this. (And I realise that was by Warren Ellis which is a whole other can of worms…)
Anyway deep down I know I’ll keep reading but the love is going – saying all that I did appreciate the recent Banshee/Black Tom infinity comic but the jarring then with the events of this series is why I question the editorial oversight?
I think Moira declaring her robot-life to be her 11th life is her interpretation of Destiny’s prophecy, and could be overwritten easily.
I think the 5 could clone a new Moira body from her DNA and that her AI consciousness could be downloaded into it through non-Cerebro means.
I think Moira’s heel turn was supposed to happen gradually, with the Warlock-arm being the first step in her exploration of, and turn to, post-humanity.
I think I’m dropping Wolverine & X-Force after this train wreck. I might have dropped most of the line, but…
… I think things will improve once the new series roll out. Gillen, Ewing, Spurrier, Ayala, & Orlando have good track records. Here’s hopin’.
@Diana: “Moira stopped making sense altogether in Inferno #4”
Counterpoint: she actually still makes sense, Inferno just lacked some room to communicate it better.
Hickman’s Moira is essentially a self-absorbed but still somewhat sympathetic figure who drove herself into a corner with her own arrogance and nihilism. Her very first instinct was to fall back into assimilationism/erasure through a “cure” and she was only prompted to explore something different after being threatened by Destiny – it’s not surprising she never got over what she still viewed as a pragmatic solution she never got to really try after centuries and centuries of failure.
This is why the whole X Deaths thing looks so frustrating to me: there’s having a hopeless character who is convinced simply giving up is the most pragmatic choice, and there’s this revenge-driven flattened character occupying a narrative space already filled by other different characters – like how is this cyborg Moira supposed to be much different from Omega Sentinel?
@Miyamoris: That is a truly compelling way to describe Hickman’s Moira. I want to read more about her.
I would have enjoyed Inferno more if Hickman had allotted some room to explaining Moira’s motivations this way. The worldweariness and nihilism you describe would have provided emotional closure to the character before she was shunted off into this ridiculous mess. But we know Hickman doesn’t really “do” emotion, so all we got was “mutants always lose.”
@Miyamoris: I think you’re putting a *lot* of interpretation and narrative construction here – if Moira was nihilistic and hopeless all along (and this is the question I guess will never be answered): what was the point of Krakoa? Why did she convince Xavier, Magneto and all the rest to form this new society if she always believed, all along, that it was pointless?
Don’t they outright say Krakoa is basically an old folks home for the mutants to live in safely until they die out?
Or less charitably, a honey pot to gather all the mutants in one place.
@Uncanny X-Ben: The problem is that HoXPoX is framed as Moira trying different paths to reach a solution other than mutant extinction. Krakoa was part of her ninth life too, and arguably the reason that didn’t work is because she let Apocalypse kill Xavier and Magneto early on. Hence, Life 10 is about uniting everyone, creating an actual nation, etc.
Since none of that makes sense if Moira was *always* planning to use the cure, we must instead assume that at some unspecified point during Hickman’s run, triggered by nothing in particular (since Moira wasn’t *doing* anything all this time), she randomly decided that actually, the cure was better. And after getting depowered and having stage 4 cancer, she randomly decided that actually, the enemy she’s been fighting for a thousand years is what she wants to be after all.
This feels closer to a Chuck Austen plot than anything else
I don’t know. I think it makes sense if you break it down like this:
— Moira’s first plan is to cure mutants.
— That plan is foiled (in a very scary way) by Destiny and Mystique.
— To avoid that terrible fate, Moira really tries to find a plan that saves mutants.
— She fails again and again, using up the lives Destiny tells her she has left.
— In desperation and despair, she comes up with a compromise: she’ll save the existing mutants and “cure” all future mutation.
I realize much of that isn’t explicitly stated during Hickman’s run, but it fits the structure of the plot. Moira’s thoughts are pretty much off limits to us the entire time, so we have to do what we can fill in the gaps.
We can also assume that Lives/Deaths is not a Hickman-directed enterprise, so whatever Moira does here is not part of the original plan.
Never let it be said that Benjamin Percy is a man who is afraid to hinge his stories on magic swords that do whatever the plot requires.
As for Moira’s plot, we have the fundamental problem that there’s nearly nothing on the page to explain when her heel turn happened or what motivated it. Logically, either she decided to cure mutants either before HOXPOX, in which case Krakoa et al. is part of the scheme, or she changed her views during the Krakoan era, presumably because the mutants began veering away from her plans. Apocalypse setting off X of Swords seems like it was a swerve.
Percy’s work tends to point towards a Krakoa-as-honeypot idea, as he’s been hammering at the idea that Krakoa and resurrection is making the mutants soft and complacent since his first issue of X-Force, and reiterates in this issue that Krakoa is only sustainable through the use of violence. Hickman, conversely, tended to play the note that Krakoa was making mutantkind stronger. But Hickman also had Moira turn heel, so maybe that was just a long con. So all we’re left are fan theories to connect the dots on stories that didn’t actually get written, upon which the current status quo fundamentally depends.
My biggest problem with the issue is that it completely sidelined Moira. This was primarily a series about Moira, from Moira’s POV, up until this issue… Then Logan sweeps in now that he’s finished with the sister series, and Moira just gets a few hallucinating images at the start and disappears until the dramatic end.
This doesn’t really work as a series without X Lives. That’s fair enough in general, except that until now it’s been pretty distinct. You have a few scenes saying that Logan’s off the board right now, look at Lives for why, but aside from that it’s been self contained as the story of Moira, and secondarily the story of Mysterious Future Logan. As soon as Logan’s back on the playing field though, both of the former main focuses are effectively dead for most of the issue and the emotional tie-up is just about Logan being tortured but awesome.
@Diana, I think the timeline traced by @Thom works well, but to go a bit further, I’ll answer your questions with another different question:
How do we know Moira is actually, sincerely on-board with the project of a Krakoan society?
Moira doesn’t need to be interested in Krakoa as a society able to fend off the machines to plan it alongside Xavier – but going by the theory of the cure, Krakoa as an imperialist power can facilitate spreading the drugs to the entire world.
Think of Moira’s Journal in PoX 6. It’s juxtaposed with the sequence where she tries to uplift Charles after showing him her nine lives, and it highlights like nothing how much of an unreliable narrator she is.
Not only she explicitly talks about manipulating Charles and Erik for the sake of her plan, but there’s some delicious lack of self-awareness when she condemns both for trying to shape the world and “bend others to whatever they will” and arguably a complete emotional detachment to what the whole enterprise means for mutantdom – if you consider she got involved with mutantdom as a community at least twice (lives 4 and 5) and now she’s trying something entirely new, it’s not too surprising she is emotionally detached.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m nor arguing Inferno is flawless – we should have gotten more of what was her concrete plan for a mutant cure on page.
But if we’re asking the whys rather than the hows, if mutant cure as a goal is a plausible character development in life 10, then yes, I thinkthere’s enough character writing backing that.
Well, this happened.
“Inferno just lacked some room to communicate it better.”
One thing Inferno was definitely not lacking was space.
“Don’t they outright say Krakoa is basically an old folks home for the mutants to live in safely until they die out?”
No? How does Krakoa win and force Karima’s time travel it that’s the case?
I’ve read it pointed out elsewhere that Moira’s lack of a Cerebro backup shouldn’t stop her being resurrectable using Wanda’s new mutant afterlife thing.
Dave-It seems that in the alternate Life Ten, the mutants were sidelined on Krakoa. It says that the Children of the Vault emerged and went to war with humanity. The human nations unites to fight the Children, but were losing. They then formed an alliance with Krakoa asking for the mutants’ help.
The human/mutant alliance were able to defeat the Children. Afterwards, the mutants discovered that the humans were planning to betray them and thus began another war, which was won by the mutants.
It’s all hypothetical, but we could conjecture that Moira was steering Xavier and Magneto in a direction where the mutants would become more and more isolated on their island, content with the idea that they are immortal and have no more worries. They become a decadent society.
In the alternate Life Ten, things probably proceeded similar to “Inferno”, with Moira being discovered and her plan defeated.
This allowed Krakoa to achieve mutant ascendancy. Ironically, Moira’s plot to allow humans to win ended up being the one idea that actually led to a future where mutants win.
The current version of Krakoa, now that Moira has been exiled, would almost surely have led to the exact same future as the original Life Ten, except Omega Sentinel travelled back in time to found Orchis.
“we could conjecture”.
Yeah, they didn’t outright say it, or say it at all. And saying it might have gone similarly with Moira is even more…conjectural. I highly dispute the “almost surely have led to the exact same future as the original Life Ten”, because Karima’s presence has changed things. That’s the whole point, both for the character and as a story element.
Oh I’m not trying to argue any of this hangs together at this point, if it ever theoretically did.
Honestly, half of the Marvel comics lately are either incomprehensible or require research and supposition to fully get. Have you read Defenders? Ewing’s known for his high concepts but this one is crazy. Something about cycles of rebirth but also it’s metacommentary about superhero comics, and these huge concepts take up so much space the actual story is completely obscured. Meanwhile Hulk is a space ship now, with an imaginary Bruce Banner piloting from his mind palace bridge, flying into the space between space or something for some reason?
Bring back narration boxes, for God’s sake. I don’t want to listen to an obscure podcast interview to understand why Writer A did Thing B, I just want to read a fun comic before bed. And preferably not grimdark, thanks.
The comics that aren’t about superdecompressed plots making sharp turns for reasons partially explained by the author on a Bhutanese comic site article two years ago; are about a supervillain and how awesome it is to torture innocent people to death. If I wasn’t paying for Marvel Unlimited and mostly reading from the back catalogue, I probably wouldn’t read any of this junk.
Si, I get where you’re coming from. I hate how producers of current super-hero comics expect readers to know every obscure character without mentioning their names or explaining or displaying their powers. I didn’t read most X-books between from the last 15 yrs before HoX/PoX. I don’t know anything about Trinary or Gentle. Just give me a quick rundown so I can get on with reading the story. Also: yeah, too much grim dark. Can we please have heroes stop villains *before* they murder a ton of people?
But I really enjoyed Defenders. It’s a bit meta, sure, but I got what Ewing & Rodriguez were going for. The execution was top notch.
If reading a lot of narration boxes is your idea of fun before bed…
I would like comics to fully commit to stories that don’t need a lot of explanation, because the more you think about them, the less they make sense.
But even long-winded explanations are a form of fanservice nowadays.
I should say that I’m enjoying Defenders even if I don’t know what is going on. The characters are fantastic. I think the mask guy has a lot of legs as a concept.
I think a lack of (sufficient?) explanations is only a problem if the relevant stories are long out of print or not available digitally. That’s not much of a problem anymore, is it?
I find this is more of a problem with DC than Marvel. Yes, Marvel continuity is tied in knots, but on the flipside, I genuinely don’t even know which continuity each DC story is working off of anymore.
@Si
“Something about cycles of rebirth but also it’s metacommentary about superhero comics, and these huge concepts take up so much space the actual story is completely obscured.”
That stuff is the actual story, in that Defenders series.
@Josie
“I think a lack of (sufficient?) explanations is only a problem if the relevant stories are long out of print or not available digitally. That’s not much of a problem anymore, is it?”
If it’s, say, an issue of Fantastic Four referencing an old 90s issue of New Warriors, it’s still a problem. If it’s the 30th issue of a run referencing the third issue, I’ll agree that it’s not a problem and treating it as if it is kind of behind the times thinking.
Just as nobody starts Game of Thrones in Season 3, I don’t think the hypothetical reader choosing to jump on in the middle of a run is something to be too concerned over.
Josie:
“I think a lack of (sufficient?) explanations is only a problem if the relevant stories are long out of print or not available digitally. That’s not much of a problem anymore, is it?”
It is for me because I don’t want to have to cross-reference the internet to find out said information, go to an app to read about the character, and then come back to page 11 of the comic I’m currently reading. I just want someone to say, “What’s up, Storm?” and then Storm whips up a hurricane to beat a Sentinel or uses a tiny rain cloud to put out a campfire.
I think Victor LaVelle & Leonard Kirk did a great job of that in Sabretooth 2. I’ve never heard of Mole, but we were given a personality, motivation, and power description in 2 pages. I don’t know much about Madison Jeffries, but he demonstrated his power to control non-living/inorganic matter in one panel. I didn’t know there was a new Melter (who at least has a self-explanatory code name), but I want to know the real story of why he was sent to the Pit after one scene.
I don’t need a Shooter-era info-dump, just their names, powers, and at least a sketch of their personalities. Even Scott Lobdell and Howard Mackie would give the reader that.
I thought SWORD was fairly good at laying out the basics of whatever crossover it was tied with. At the time I started the book I wasn’t reading the rest of Ewing’s cosmic Marvel stuff but I had no problem opening, say, issue 7 and getting the basic gist of the last annihilation and the non-mutant characters involved.
*sigh* I miss that book dearly…
@Si: I hear you about Defenders. Truly fun meta hijinks, but the plot mechanics kept getting overshadowed.
Every issue I had to ask: who is this guy they’re chasing again? Why are they even doing this? Never did understand the problem with [redacted]’s powers. (Not sure if that’s a spoiler or not.)
But I loved the ragtag team, and I loved that Cloud got some attention after too long away. I’ve always thought Cloud was cool.
Defenders was the kind of self indulgent meta commentary on fiction I would have been very impressed by as a young man, and I’m tired as shit of as a middle aged one.
However all the stuff with Galactus’ Mom and Surfer cursing Baby Galactus with a conscience was fun.
Uncanny X-Ben, I had the same reaction as you to the meta-commentary in Defenders. I loved the art enough to buy all 5 issues though. I really wish Javier Rodriguez would draw more comics I was interested in buying.
Yeah me too, it’s a pretty book.
I almost bought a Dan Slott FF event issue because Javier Rodriguez drew it. If comics weren’t so damn expensive, I would have.
Speaking of metacommentary, the cover of this comic, with three Wolverines and the arm of a fourth Wolverine, and nothing else, is a brilliant unintentional commentary on a problem with Marvel comics.
Even by X-Men lore standards, this storyline has really gone off the rails.
@Uncanny X-Ben:
“Don’t they outright say Krakoa is basically an old folks home for the mutants to live in safely until they die out?”
Why would they die out? They’re immortal. Mutants would become an isolated society like the Inhumans or the Eternals, and baseline humanity would no longer fear being replaced.
@Chris V:
“Afterwards, the mutants discovered that the humans were planning to betray them and thus began another war, which was won by the mutants.”
You keep saying this, but how is it a betrayal to not unilaterally disarm? Humanity had already been attacked by one superhuman group, and the mutants included Apocalypse, who once threatened to kill all humans. There’s no evidence they were planning an attack, it was the mutants who attacked preemptively.