{"id":4650,"date":"2019-07-25T23:21:56","date_gmt":"2019-07-25T22:21:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4650"},"modified":"2019-09-13T08:30:50","modified_gmt":"2019-09-13T07:30:50","slug":"house-of-x-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4650","title":{"rendered":"House of X #1"},"content":{"rendered":"

So I’m not ignoring the review backlog, but something tells me there’s a bit more interest in\u00a0House of X<\/em> #1 than there is in, say, the\u00a0Wolverine vs Blade Special<\/em>. \u00a0On the other hand, I don’t want to\u00a0review<\/em> this until it’s actually finished… and I don’t want to just post “open thread.” \u00a0So instead, since Hickman seems like the sort of writer whose stories are designed to repay scrutiny, let’s just unpick what’s going on here in continuity terms.<\/p>\n

I’m using the page numbers for the digital edition here, which will be out of synch with a paper edition (since the double page spreads count as a single page) but I’m sure you’ll figure it out.<\/p>\n

COVER (PAGE 1).<\/b> \u00a0The X-Men step through one of those gateways we’ll be hearing so much about.<\/p>\n

PAGE 2:<\/strong> This is a Jonathan Hickman comic, so we’re getting lots of black and white “data pages” between scenes – a fairly standard device in his comics. \u00a0The script at the back is heavily redacted for this page – despite it containing almost no information – but does reveal that this quote is part of a telepathic speech by Charles Xavier to the world, evidently announcing the way things are going to be from now on.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

PAGE 3-4:<\/strong> All very mysterious. \u00a0The script confirms that this is\u00a0Krakoa<\/strong>, now a mutant island nation – and presumably linked in some way to the Krakoa from\u00a0Wolverine and the X-Men<\/em>, rather than just reusing the name. \u00a0Last we saw of it, it was hanging out with Kid Omega. \u00a0The guy in black is apparently\u00a0Professor X<\/strong> and his X-helmet is Cerebro – or so the script says – but it also prevents us seeing his face. \u00a0In the event, he looks an awful lot more like the Maker, the evil version of Reed Richards from the Ultimate Universe, and a character that Hickman has used before. \u00a0He appears to be growing new mutants in pods, or at least he’s been doing\u00a0something<\/em> to existing mutants; one of them has glowing eyes which obviously reference Cyclops. \u00a0The woman next to him isn’t a million miles from Jean Grey either.<\/p>\n

PAGE 5:<\/strong> The title page, complete with a logo that\u00a0presumably<\/em> reads “HOUSE OF X” in the Krakoa font. \u00a0That would fit with the word above the creator list being ONE.\u00a0 \u00a0House of X<\/em> is, of course, a reference to 2005’s\u00a0House of M<\/em>, about an alternate reality ruled by mutants.<\/p>\n

PAGES 6-7:<\/strong> A montage of various X-Men, in various places, planting flowers over a period of about five months – establishing a long time gap from the end of Matthew Rosenberg’s run. \u00a0The idea is that the panels all show different stages in the planting of their respective flowers, from starting on a vine to being planted in the ground. \u00a0We’re apparently meant to be able to distinguish between the various types of flowers; the script says they’re all “habitats” except for the Savage Land flower, which is Human Drug: L, and the Washington flower, which is a gateway. \u00a0The difference isn’t hugely apparent in the art. \u00a0Perhaps making them different colours would have helped.<\/p>\n

The X-Men here are all familiar members:\u00a0Colossus, Storm, Nightcrawler, Armor, the Beast, Kitty Pryde<\/strong> (with\u00a0Lockheed<\/strong>, who hasn’t been with her much lately), and four of the\u00a0Stepford Cuckoos<\/strong>. \u00a0The script says there should be five of them, but the art clearly only shows four. \u00a0However, in the next scene, two of them introduce themselves as Sophie and Esme, both of whom are meant to be dead, so apparently the book is (somehow) back to full strength.<\/p>\n

As for the locations seen here, Westchester (the original X-Men Mansion) has been rebuilt. \u00a0It’s less obvious why the X-Men are growing flowers on the Blue Area of the Moon or Mars, or indeed how they got there. \u00a0The script contains a warning that the Earth shouldn’t be visible in the Blue Area scene, but that could just be an aide memoire – the Blue Area is on the far side of the moon, so you\u00a0shouldn’t<\/em> be able to see Earth from there.<\/p>\n

PAGES 8-11:<\/strong> A bunch of ambassadors arrive at the Jerusalem Habitat in response to Xavier’s invitation; apparently, after all the X-Men’s months of preparation in the previous scene, they’ve revealed themselves to the public in the last few days (though this seems to contradict the timescales on the Orchis Protocol’s data page later on). \u00a0Basically, the X-Men are growing miracle drugs on Krakoa, and offering them to the humans in exchange for being left alone and all mutants being given an amnesty.<\/p>\n

The two Cuckoos who welcome the ambassadors introduce themselves as Sophie and Esme, both of whom are meant to be dead (see\u00a0X-23<\/em> #5). \u00a0One of the Cuckoos, unnamed, is wearing black; this happened in the recent\u00a0X-23<\/em> story too, but in that case it was Esme. \u00a0Magneto<\/strong> – wearing an X-Men uniform – has apparently been sent to meet the ambassadors, which can only be intended as an exercise in intimidation.<\/p>\n

PAGE 12:<\/strong> A data page on the flowers of Krakoa, which are evidently going to be a big plot deal. \u00a0Note that just as one of the Cuckoos is wearing black, one of the six flowers is coded in black, and described as a “tumour” that allows things to go on without Krakoa knowing about it. \u00a0In other words, you could use it to fake being part of the Krakoan ecosystem. \u00a0(Is Magneto\u00a0really<\/em> representing the X-Men?) \u00a0The tumour flower is described as “non-naturally occurring”, implying that Krakoa grows all the others naturally. \u00a0(What claim do the mutants really have to Krakoa’s flowers?)<\/p>\n

Jonathan Hickman has confirmed that the “G” and “H” symbols have been reversed in error here.<\/p>\n

PAGES 13-16:<\/strong> Marvel Girl<\/strong>\u00a0leads new mutant students through the “Graymalkin Habitat” gateway to Krakoa. \u00a0This is the X-Men Mansion, back in its original place on Graymalkin Lane, though it’s now crawling in Krakoan plants. \u00a0Jean tells us that Krakoa is a mutant, and only allows non-mutants in if they have a chaperone and ask for permission. \u00a0Jean is back in her late-sixties costume, and she’s called “Marvel Girl” again. \u00a0She’s also addressed as “Mrs Grey”, so presumably she’s back together with Scott now that they’re finally both alive and in the same place at the same time.<\/p>\n

Banshee<\/strong> is here too, though we don’t see enough of him to find out whether he’s recovered from the zombie-like condition he had in the Rosenberg run. \u00a0The kids are apparently generic randoms, though a computer identifies three of them as Sandra Yo (“Wrench”), Robert Wynn (“Sonos Rex”) and Desi Ochoa-Diaz (“Fauna”). \u00a0All of them are new.<\/p>\n

Behind the scenes – and in an area that looks infinitely more creepy than the external sections, with walls full of eyeballs and the like – are\u00a0Cypher<\/strong> and\u00a0Sage<\/strong>. \u00a0Cypher was last seen helping out in Daredevil,\u00a0<\/em>and he’s looking healthier than he has in a while, though he’s also cheery to a fault. \u00a0He has a Warlock<\/strong>-style arm, so something’s happened there, though the idea that Cypher and Warlock would eventually merge was teased relentlessly back in\u00a0New Mutants<\/em>. \u00a0Sage is an 80s bit player who ascended into a major character in Claremont’s later years, but she hasn’t had a major role since X-Treme X-Men<\/em>. \u00a0This backstage role is in character for her, though.<\/p>\n

On Krakoa,\u00a0Wolverine<\/strong> is playing cheerfully with kids and Xavier immediately gives Jean Nice Reassuring Thoughts. \u00a0This all screams “something wrong beneath the surface.”<\/p>\n

PAGE 17<\/strong> is a map of Krakoa. \u00a0Most of the names on the key don’t mean anything to us yet, but note there’s a “House of X” and a “House of M”. \u00a0We haven’t seen either yet.<\/p>\n

PAGES 18-22:<\/strong> Introducing the Orchis Protocol, who seem to be our antagonists. \u00a0Following Xavier’s announcement, they’re retreating to a space station held in reserve – oddly, called the Forge, even though Forge himself gets namechecked later on. \u00a0They appear to believe that they’re protecting humanity from mutant doomsday, but then X-Men villains often do. \u00a0It’s the first appearance of all of these characters – Erasmus Mendel, Agent Goodall, and Dr Alia Gregor seem to be the main ones – \u00a0except for\u00a0Karima Shapandar<\/strong>. \u00a0She was an Indian police officer who got turned into an Omega Sentinel in “Operation: Zero Tolerance” and went on to join the X-Men for a bit. \u00a0She’s been off the radar for quite a while, and her membership of this group is curious.<\/p>\n

It’s not identified here, but the space station is\u00a0Sol’s Hammer<\/strong>, a planet-destroying weapon created by Tony Stark during Hickman’s Avengers<\/em> run. \u00a0There’s now a\u00a0Master Mold<\/strong> head in the middle of the Forge, so apparently someone’s thinking of building Sentinels.<\/p>\n

PAGE 23:<\/strong> The Stan Lee tribute page.<\/p>\n

PAGES 24-25:\u00a0<\/strong>A data page on the Orchis Protocol, which is \u00a0an alliance of segments within various groups preparing for a mutant doomsday. \u00a0Other than Karima Shapandar (again, singled out to be shown in black), the named characters in the organisation chart seem to be new. \u00a0Head of engineering “Zaha Gehry” is presumably named after architects Zaha Hadid and Frank Gehry. \u00a0Alia Gregor gets some backstory: if the data page is to be believed, she’s both<\/em> a scientist who started out with a humanitarian concern to rebuild the mutant population after the Genoshan genocide (from Grant Morrison’s run), only to discover that they were going to become the dominant population\u00a0and<\/em> a member of AIM.<\/p>\n

Most of the groups contributing members to Orchis Protocol are broadly goodies – SHIELD, STRIKE, SWORD, Alpha Flight, and ARMOR – but AIM, HAMMER and Hydra are in there too, with AIM as the single largest contributor. \u00a0Maybe it’s the nice AIM from\u00a0USAvengers<\/em>? \u00a0If the names aren’t familiar, STRIKE is a British intelligence agency which Psylocke worked for back when she was a supporting character in\u00a0Captain Britain<\/em>; SWORD was Abigail Brand’s outfit, which used to show up in X-Men stories fairly regularly; HAMMER was Norman Osborn’s ersatz SHIELD during the “Dark Reign” storyline; and ARMOR is the alternate-reality monitoring agency first introduced in\u00a0Marvel Zombies <\/em>(to go with SWORD and SHIELD, you see…)<\/p>\n

PAGES 26-28:<\/strong> Mystique, Sabretooth <\/strong>and\u00a0Toad<\/strong> are stealing data from a “Damage Control contested storage facility” (on which, more in the next scene) \u00a0We don’t find out here what they’re actually stealing, but Mystique talks about reaching a “gateway”, so they’re evidently hooked up with Krakoa somewhere. \u00a0The Fantastic Four\u00a0<\/strong>show up to stop them, being the embodiment of typical, non-mutant Marvel Universe superheroes.<\/p>\n

PAGE 29:<\/strong> A data page on Damage Control<\/strong>, of all people. \u00a0Damage Control are mainly a comedic idea, though they sometimes show up as a straight building firm – the idea is that they’re the people who put the city back together between all the massive fights. \u00a0Apparently, they also look after superhuman artefacts with no traced owner, which somehow included (or was claimed to include) most of Tony Stark and Reed Richards’ stuff. \u00a0This sounds a lot like a pretext. \u00a0There’s a list of “level 5” security items here, which includes Sol’s Hammer (see above), “Sol’s Anvil” (an allegedly similar weapon also mentioned in Hickman’s Avengers\u00a0<\/em>run) and “the Bridge” (a device for alternate-reality Reed Richardses to talk to each other, again used before by Hickman). \u00a0Mind you, the rest of the list is stuff like early versions of the Rescue armour from\u00a0Iron Man<\/em>, so maybe it’s just filling out the list.<\/p>\n

Not sure I follow how Damage Control could have taken possession of a space station. \u00a0But at any rate, it would explain why the X-Men are taking an interest in Damage Control’s data – if they already know about Orchis.<\/p>\n

PAGES 30-33:\u00a0<\/strong>Back to Magneto and the ambassadors. \u00a0We’re shown a hub which links the various parts of the Krakoan ecosystem (but isn’t on Krakoa), and a sign written in the Krakoan cypher. \u00a0We’re presumably not meant to be able to decipher it yet –\u00a0Bleeding Cool<\/em> says<\/a> it reads “GALM”, which isn’t terribly enlightening. \u00a0Magneto claims that the Krakoan language exists in order to give mutants their own distinct culture; this is about separatism. \u00a0We get a brief tour of the Krakoan outposts which seems to include both versions of\u00a0Xorn<\/strong> (shown together).<\/p>\n

Magneto claims that “There has never been a mutant war… \u00a0We’ve never conquered a people, stolen their land, or made slaves of the vanquished.” \u00a0But this isn’t true – Magneto spent much of the Silver Age claiming that mutants should rule the world, and he claimed Santo Marco as a mutant state. \u00a0More recently, he seized control of Genosha by holding the UN to ransom and declared it a mutant homeland. \u00a0(Genosha is an obvious precursor for Krakoa, incidentally – a mutant nation on an island – and Hickman is clearly aware of it, since he cites it as the inspiration for Dr Gregor to start taking an interest in mutants.)<\/p>\n

PAGES 34-38:<\/strong>\u00a0Mystique and Toad make it back to Krakoa with whatever data they were stealing, but Sabretooth gets captured by the FF. \u00a0Cyclops<\/strong> promptly shows up to politely demand him back, but he doesn’t push the point – Sabretooth pretty clearly thinks he’s been double crossed, and he has a point, since it sure looks like the villains were on some sort of Krakoa-related business. \u00a0Cyclops is masked, so we can’t tell if he’s got his missing eye back. \u00a0He’s very keen on what Xavier is up to, which is hardly surprising given the direction of his character in the Utopia and Bendis eras. \u00a0He makes sure to remind us that Reed and Sue’s son Franklin Richards is a mutant whose\u00a0real<\/em> family is waiting for him on Krakoa. \u00a0The X-Men don’t exactly come off as the good guys in this issue, if you leave out of account the fact that they’ve been so badly abused in the past.<\/p>\n

PAGE 39:<\/strong> A data page on Omega Level mutants. \u00a0Hickman’s definition is that an omega legal mutant is someone who has no definable upper limit on a particular specific power. \u00a0This isn’t the traditional definition of an omega mutant – which boiled down to “really really powerful” – so it allows him to rewrite the list.<\/p>\n

The list has fourteen omega mutants, of whom nine are already allied with Krakoa: Iceman, Elixir, Marvel Girl, Magneto, Proteus, Storm, Kid Omega, Vulcan and Hope. \u00a0(Vulcan’s a surprise entry on the list, since he’s been off the planet for years, and he’s been missing since the end of\u00a0War of Kings<\/em>.) \u00a0The data page also tells us that locating all the other omega mutants and getting them to Krakoa is a top priority – and one of them (highlighted in red) is Franklin. \u00a0So trouble to come there.<\/p>\n

The other four omega mutants are Captain Britain’s mad brother Jamie Braddock (listed as unaligned), Legion (“unknown” following Age of X-Man<\/em>), Exodus (unaligned, which is interesting, since he was with Magneto when we last saw him) and Mister M (a character from\u00a0District X<\/em> who supposedly died in\u00a0X-Men: The 198<\/em> #5 – again, “unknown”, but something has apparently led the X-Men to think he’s alive).<\/p>\n

PAGE 40-44:<\/strong> We round off with Magneto completing his passive-aggressive show of power and then revealing that the various ambassadors are all plants from assorted underhanded organisations. \u00a0One of them, Reilly Marshall, has an affiliation which the Cuckoos can’t quite read – from the fact that he’s been associated with SHIELD and SWORD, it seems a reasonable guess that he’s something to do with the Orchis Protocol. \u00a0Magneto rounds out the issue by proclaiming mutants to be “new gods”, which doesn’t exactly sound reassuring.<\/p>\n

PAGE 45:\u00a0<\/strong>A rather threatening quote from Magneto.<\/p>\n

PAGE 46:<\/strong> The reading order. \u00a0For no apparent reason,\u00a0House of X\u00a0<\/em>#2 and #5 and\u00a0Powers of X<\/em> #6 are singled out in red.<\/p>\n

PAGES 47-48:\u00a0<\/strong>Two pages of Krakoan cipher. \u00a0According to\u00a0Bleeding Cool<\/em>, they read: “Next – It’s Not A Dream If It’s Real” and “Then – The Curious Case of Moira X”.<\/p>\n

Well, that took longer than expected. \u00a0I doubt we’ll be doing this in quite so much detail with every issue, but there you go for now…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So I’m not ignoring the review backlog, but something tells me there’s a bit more interest in\u00a0House of X #1 than there is in, say, the\u00a0Wolverine vs Blade Special. \u00a0On the other hand, I don’t want to\u00a0review this until it’s actually finished… and I don’t want to just post “open thread.” \u00a0So instead, since Hickman […]<\/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":[30,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4650","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hoxpox","category-x-axis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4650","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=4650"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4650\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4754,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4650\/revisions\/4754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4650"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}