But is it any good?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Pretty much everyone would agree that the X-books needed a shot in the arm. House of X <\/em>and Powers of X <\/em>are certainly that. People are talking again, in a way that they haven’t been talking in years. Not only that, they’re talking about the plot. Jonathan Hickman has begun his X-Men run by bringing out the high concept ideas from the off – Moira’s multiple lives, the mutant island of Krakoa, the apparent immortality through back-up copies – and for the most part, people have bought it. In both senses of the word. So, as an opening arc, job done. Nothing in the X-Men has produced this sort of reaction since the start of the Grant Morrison run, back in 2001.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A book like this is inevitably going to divide the audience to some degree. For one thing, it’s very different in tone and focus, which means it’s not necessarily what attracted some readers to the X-books in the first place. And more fundamentally, this is the sort of story where you either trust that it’s heading somewhere, or you don’t – and if you don’t, you won’t be having much fun with this. But so far, for the most part, Hickman seems to have kept people on board.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n On a closer inspection, the actual content isn’t quite<\/em> as radical as it might first seem. Everything Hickman is doing is built from long-established X-Men elements. The mutants’ inevitable subjugation by machines was a standard plot element for decades after “Days of Futures Past”. The mutant island has been done before with both Genosha and Utopia. The X-Men as radicals was done, in however ill-defined a fashion, by Brian Bendis. Professor X has had a cloned body before. The Phalanx are less central to the X-Men mythos but they’ve been firmly part of it for decades. <\/p>\n\n\n\n None of which is to say that Hickman isn’t bringing something new. On the contrary – he’s displaying the existing elements in a new way and bringing something different out of them. That’s what makes it recognisably an X-Men comic, despite the drastic shift of style with the data pages, and the pushing to the margins of most of the familiar characters. That and the art – Pepe Larraz and RB Silva don’t have Hickman’s profile, but they’ve done excellent work on these two books, both in a suitably familiar Marvel-superhero style. If the writing is going to go flying off into weird and unfamiliar places, then the art is able to anchor it in something more recognisable. And if the writing is going to shoot up to a scale where conventional characterisation gets shoved aside, the art can help to keep things more reassuringly human.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But Hickman is the designated auteur for this series… which is interesting in itself, because House of X <\/em>and Powers of X <\/em>are not merely the introduction to his X-Men <\/em>run. They’re the introduction to an entire line of X-books built around the set-up that he establishes here. And most of those, of course, won’t be written by him. We’ve not quite had this before – other X-books reflected what Grant Morrison was doing, in terms of turning the school into a Hogwarts-style academy, but they never seemed to be part of an overall grant plan. The nature of Hickman’s grand plan seems to call for a bit more co-ordination than that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And these two books are all about the grand plan. I’ve seen it said that these are really just one book, and certainly they’re billed as two series that are one. But at the same time, structurally they are<\/em> two different parallel narratives. House of X <\/em>is the present day and the establishment of Krakoa. Powers of X <\/em>is the bigger picture, with the four time frames ascending through (most) of the issues, setting up the grander mysteries of the story. Yes, they’re part of a whole, but they’re different strands within that whole. One of the oddities of superhero comics is how the need to accommodate spin-off titles led to this sort of parallel structure becoming commonplace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A better complaint is that House of X <\/em>and Powers of X <\/em>aren’t stories. This is true, and not just in the sense that they’re the opening act of a bigger picture. Things happen in House of X <\/em>– Krakoa is established, the X-Men raid the Orchis Forge and destroy the Mother Mold, and dead heroes are restored to life from their back-up copies – but you’d struggle to say that they happen in a way that feels like a story with a start, middle and end. In fact, the establishment of Krakoa takes place largely off panel. Powers of X <\/em>is even more scattershot, and makes essentially zero sense if you try to divorce it from the bigger picture. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But neither book is really trying to operate as a conventional story. This is an exercise in establishing a very different new status quo, and setting up some key concepts for the upcoming series, and then carefully arranging a whole armoury on the mantelpiece for future reference. Twelve issues of this would not normally work (and if you don’t buy into Hickman’s bigger picture, it won’t<\/em> work for you). It holds together by hurling huge ideas at the reader, setting up a puzzle, and building trust that that puzzle is all going to pay off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Which is very necessary because, well, we’ve all been here before with great mysteries. The thing about mysteries is that while they’re still longing, you can project whatever you want onto them. You can believe that the pay off will be worth it. History is littered with puzzle box stories that fell apart when the reveal had to come, and all the speculation about where it was heading had to be replaced with a rather underwhelming reality. Remember Lost<\/em>? Remember Bruce Jones’ Hulk<\/em>? Marvel in the 90s got by for years by stringing out mysteries and convincing readers that it would all pay off in the end – and to be fair, the major plots were usually resolved, but not necessarily in a way that satisfied anyone. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Much of Hickman’s success in these first 12 issues comes from building trust that he absolutely knows where he’s going. There are mini reveals to start the ball rolling, which give the sense that big and unexpected things will happen here, and that it’s all been carefully mapped out. This is a world building exercise, even if it’s being built from pre-existing elements. In recent years it’s often been difficult to try and set up grand continuity-based mysteries because the approach to continuity is so lax that you can never really tell whether discrepancies are plot points, or not meant to matter, or just got overlooked. Hickman somehow manages to avoid that trap, despite his stories containing a bunch of things that seem to clash with established history – as should be obvious from some of the annotations. He does it partly by making clear that he’s intentionally revealing a hidden history, but also by throwing in enough continuity minutiae to send a message to the likes of me that, yes, he knows. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It works for Hickman. Will it work for a whole line? There’s something of a cult-like vibe to Krakoa in these twelve issues, a sense that it’s all a little bit too good to be true – even before you get to the inherent creepiness of killing characters and restoring them from back-up copies, or the obvious hints that all is not as it seems. What happens when other creators have to tell stories there? Hickman’s set-up goes some way towards providing a solution to that problem, since it’s clear that the inner circle of the Quiet Council know more about what’s going on than the average citizen of Krakoa (and Xavier and Magneto know more than the Council). So writers using those other characters can simply take Krakoa at face value.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the general aura and style of the place under Hickman is so distinctive that you have to wonder whether it can survive the range of depictions from other creators that it’s about to experience. We’re going to get more conventional character work, we’re going to see Krakoa in a less stylised way, and I wonder how that’s going to work. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I’ve got this far without even starting to discuss the themes of the series – largely because this is twelve issues of set-up, and while Hickman is raising big ideas, precisely what he has to say about them remains nebulous right now. On that level, these are things that remain annotation-fodder for now. Whether it all comes together is a question that will only be resolved in the future; at this stage, it’s just about convincing us to come along for the journey. <\/p>\n\n\n\n There are certainly big ideas being put into play, though – though still ones with a clear precedent in the X-books. We’re back to the idea of mutants as the next stage in evolution; and like Morrison, it’s taken at face value here, instead of being just a device to explain why some people have super powers. But Hickman seems to be rejecting the idea that that makes mutants the future, on the basis that the future actually belongs to the machines. Quite why only the humans that should ascend to posthumanity, rather than humans and mutants both, is not exactly clear to me at this stage, but it’s early days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Linked to all this are issues of group identity and individuality. In building yet another mutant island community, Xavier is creating a society that insists that the most important thing about everyone there is the fact that they’re a mutant. It’s a perfectly understandable view for a persecuted group but whether it’s a healthy end point is another matter entirely. Hickman is playing the old trick of repeating the same basic idea at different scales – that’s the basic conceit of Powers of X<\/em>, though actually using the powers of ten for notional time frames probably caused more confusion than it was worth. At the grand, universal scale, society becomes a collective in which the individual is lost; at the level of Krakoa, national\/mutant identity is displacing individuality; and at the level of the individual, copies are treated as interchangeable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In that light, the somewhat marginal space for character work in these two titles makes sense. There is<\/em> characterisation in here, but it’s on the margins, because this is a story being told at the level of society rather than individuals; or rather, the very marginalisation of individual characters is a big part of the point. It’s another thing that I suspect will change pretty rapidly once the line as a whole gets up and running, potentially diluting the coherent tone that Hickman has developed on these two books; perhaps it was a smart move to give him a clear run on these early issues to get it all going. You can’t have that many monthly books all taking place at the society level. We’ll be back in more conventional territory soon enough, even if it’s not in X-Men <\/em>itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hickman’s new status quo may be built from pre-existing elements, but the end result is novel. It’s not the island, but simply the fact that in Hickman’s set-up, the mutants have the upper hand. That’s what makes this different from Utopia, which was a refuge for the last remnants of mutantdom. It’s not exactly like House of M <\/em>or Age of X-Man <\/em>either, since both those stories came closer to just removing the humans from the equation. The result seems to pitch the X-Men somewhere between Attilan and Wakanda. <\/p>\n\n\n\n These aren’t really two stories. But they are a convincing statement of intent that the X-Men are going somewhere both different and interesting. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" But is it any good? Pretty much everyone would agree that the X-books needed a shot in the arm. House of X and Powers of X are certainly that. People are talking again, in a way that they haven’t been talking in years. Not only that, they’re talking about the plot. Jonathan Hickman has begun […]<\/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-4809","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\/4809","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=4809"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4809\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4811,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4809\/revisions\/4811"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}