{"id":3900,"date":"2017-10-01T11:06:27","date_gmt":"2017-10-01T10:06:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3900"},"modified":"2017-10-01T11:06:27","modified_gmt":"2017-10-01T10:06:27","slug":"x-men-gold-12-kologoth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3900","title":{"rendered":"X-Men Gold #12 – “Kologoth”"},"content":{"rendered":"

May as well knock this one off quickly, and get up to date with\u00a0X-Men Gold<\/em>. \u00a0There’s an issue to spare before a crossover with\u00a0X-Men Blue<\/em> (which gets a couple of pages of set-up in the epilogue, but we’ll worry about that another time). \u00a0So this is the origin story of Kologoth.<\/p>\n

Kologoth is the mystery new guy who showed up in the mind-controlled Brotherhood of Evil Mutants in the first couple of issues, and later turned out to be an alien. \u00a0One of the things which Marc Guggenheim has done reasonably well in this series is laying the groundwork for his subplots and checking in on them periodically; the book has taken its time building up the character before putting him in the foreground.<\/p>\n

So the story is that he’s from a planet in the Negative Zone called Dantaryus. \u00a0He’s a mutant, he was rejected at birth because he looked horribly deformed, he grew up in the wilds fending for himself, you know the drill. \u00a0Eventually he hooks up with somebody called Augor, who he describes as a “radical”. \u00a0The gist – at least in Kologoth’s account – seems to be that both of them have Apocalypse-style “survival of the fittest” agendas, but they’ve built a following by claiming to be a religious cult. \u00a0He leads a rebellion, loses, and gets banished to Earth.<\/p>\n

What follows in the rest of the issue is pretty much just the plot mechanics of his involvement with the X-Men to date – there are two pages explaining how Lydia Nance found him, followed by about four pages of straight recap. \u00a0Kologoth escaped from the X-Men when the X-Cutioner let him out during the\u00a0Secret Empire<\/em> crossover, he’s made contact with home, and now he’s waiting for them to come and get him.<\/p>\n

So… that’s an origin story, to be sure. \u00a0And it’s got Lee Weeks on art, which is always a pleasant change; Dantaryus may be your standard sci-fi\/fantasy trope collection, but at least Weeks gives it a bit of grit and energy.<\/p>\n

But it’s not so obvious how this is heading towards being an X-Men story. \u00a0Kologoth is a would-be conqueror, but he mainly just wants to go home. \u00a0Presumably we’re drifting towards the X-Men hunting him down and getting sucked into Dantaryus’s internal wars, so how interesting are those?<\/p>\n

Despite the initial set-up of Kologoth being rejected because he was a mutant, that doesn’t feel like an especially important feature of the overall story. \u00a0It’s his motivation for a “strongest survives” mentality, but it’s not actually the selling point for his army; instead, he tells us that he’s positioned himself as a sort of rallying figure for some sort of religious minority, and there certainly don’t seem to be any other mutants among his followers, as far as we can see. \u00a0Perhaps they’re meant to be united as social outcasts, but we’re not really told enough about the religious dimension to know.<\/p>\n

It’s hard to tell, at this stage, how far Kologoth’s set-up is simply underdeveloped, and how far we’re in unreliable narrator territory. \u00a0For example, his followers’ religion is clearly important to the plot, but he says \u00a0nothing about what they actually believe, or what he’s been telling them. \u00a0That may well be intentional; he doesn’t seem to actually believe any of this himself, and he may well not see the details as especially important. \u00a0He meets Augur while killing everyone else in the group, but gives a hand-waving explanation that he somehow felt Augur was different; it’s certainly possible that the idea is to have Augur manipulating him somehow. \u00a0And Kologoth explicitly claims that Dantaryan society is really all built on a survival of the fittest philosophy already, but he gives no real illustration beyond what happened to him, and acknowledges that it looks different on the surface.<\/p>\n

In short, if you take this stuff at face value, it’s weak and generic; but there are gaps in here that could plausibly be back doors to fill in a more complex picture down the line. \u00a0Then again, X-Men Gold<\/em>‘s track record when it comes to delivering on potential hasn’t been so great thus far. \u00a0And the iconography of Kologoth’s army – down to the black and white circular logo on a red background, which they wear as armbands – sends an unambiguous signal that they’re substitute Nazis. \u00a0It’s a mis-step, because even if that’s what they’re going to turn out to be, they’re still meant to be an alien army, and they look far too close to a historical re-enactment society.<\/p>\n

This one could go both ways. \u00a0It’s nothing great so far, but you can see the points where it leaves scope to expand into more interesting territory as the story progresses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

May as well knock this one off quickly, and get up to date with\u00a0X-Men Gold. \u00a0There’s an issue to spare before a crossover with\u00a0X-Men Blue (which gets a couple of pages of set-up in the epilogue, but we’ll worry about that another time). \u00a0So this is the origin story of Kologoth. Kologoth is the mystery […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3900","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-x-axis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3900","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3900"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3900\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3901,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3900\/revisions\/3901"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3900"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3900"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3900"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}