Ah, my favourite.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If X-Men<\/em> is carried by the promise of future gratification when the big picture starts to pay off, Marauders<\/em> is the X-book that delivers the most entertainment here and now. In some ways it’s the most traditional X-book of the current line – Chris Claremont always liked writing the sort of story that characters could describe with a straight face as a “caper”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On paper, the premise of Marauders<\/em> didn’t sound all that enticing. A vaguely pirate-themed book about, er, pharmaceutical smuggling. It didn’t exactly leap off the page. But it turns out to be the most consistently fun<\/em> of the current titles. Probably because there isn’t all that much smuggling in it. Or rather, we’re not expected to get all that interested in the mechanics of flower distribution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Instead, the Marauders turn out to be an erratic selection of characters sailing around the seas, rescuing mutants who can’t get to a convenient gate, beating up bad guys, and pausing rather too frequently to get completely wasted. They come across as an erratic bunch who are relishing the new status quo that puts them on top for a change. Marauders <\/em>isn’t brooding like Fallen Angels<\/em>, or violent like X-Force<\/em>, nor is it overly prone to people dancing around Krakoan groves. On the surface, it’s the book for characters who are just enjoying their new status quo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So Gerry Duggan’s script keeps up the pace, throws in the odd wild idea like Yellowjacket infiltrating Krakoa by getting himself injected into Pyro, and gives plenty of opportunities to see the stars actually winning. Which is something we don’t see all that often in the X-books, when you stop to think about it. The Marauders are not the plucky underdogs who won’t give up. They win, quite a lot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Matteo Lolli’s art is a good fit for all this – bright colours, clean lines, not leaning too<\/em> excessively into the pirate theme. At the same time, though, there’s enough to suggest that all is not entirely well beneath the surface of the Marauders, whether in terms of what the team themselves are thinking, or the scheming going on within Krakoa. For once, the Marauders’ surprisingly decent win-loss record helps to lull us into a false sense of security for when Kitty gets herself killed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After all… they’re called the Marauders, a name which has tons of connotations for the X-Men, none of them remotely positive. So there’s something a little bit weird about this team from the outset. And Duggan is quite subtle about which members of the team he chooses to play up; sensible characters like Storm, Iceman and Bishop are on this team, but it’s the newly swashbuckling Kate who gets more of the page time, and the crazed Pyro burning everything in sight who helps to set the tone for the whole thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In fact, despite the title, this isn’t so much a book about the Marauders at all. The focus of this book is far more on the Hellfire Club and the rivalry between its various wings. It’s far more interested in Emma Frost and Sebastian Shaw than it is in Storm. Really, the first arc plays as a Kate Pryde series with an extended supporting cast – which makes it all the more effective when she’s taken off the board.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The undercurrent here is that Kate doesn’t fit in on Krakoa, and she’s taken on some nastily self-destructive tendencies. For reasons yet to be determined, Kate can’t use the Krakoan gates, and the resurrection thing doesn’t seem to work for her either. (I mean, we all know she’s coming back, but that’s the claim.) The gates are the bigger thing at first, though. They’re an essential part of the Krakoan set up, and for whatever reason, Kate isn’t invited. So while she’s out and about doing her pirate thing for Krakoa, she also feels excluded from the new mutant society, or at least like a second class citizen. Her new attitude isn’t quite so celebratory after all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nor does the book <\/em>cross the line too readily into silliness. That may not be immediately apparent when you see that the kid Hellfire Club from Wolverine and the X-Men<\/em> have been brought back as the main villains. They were designed for a book that was frequently very silly indeed, and so they were divisively silly characters in their own right. I always hated them. Duggan is using them, true, but he’s dialled them back just a little to make them work in a more normal story. Really he’s just playing the original idea straight, and letting them be a bit more convincing as evil prodigies. You still probably wouldn’t use them if it wasn’t for their symbolic value as a rival Hellfire Club. But he’s made them work, which is something I wouldn’t have expected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There’s plenty in Marauders <\/em>that doesn’t really make sense on analysis. Given what we’re told about Krakoa’s massive global impact, are these three boats really <\/em>meant to be enough? Why does everyone assume that just because Kate can’t use the gates, there’s going to be some issue with the resurrection protocols? (It turns out they’re right, but they don’t have any particular reason to do so.) Why is Pyro now a drunken lunatic getting facial tattoos, and why doesn’t anyone stop him? He was never remotely like this before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My biggest problem is probably the vague, arbitrary rules about how the Hellfire Club actually works, which seem to be made up on the fly – who actually decides on the Red Queen’s appointment and why can Emma outvote Sebastian? Plus, it bears no resemblance to anything we’ve seen in the Hellfire Club before, particularly with the three-colour set-up. Maybe it’s the fact that the Hellfire Club characters are acting as if everyone knows these rules, which have been in place all along – it’s not easily attributable to the Krakoan status quo change. And this stuff is important to the politicking, which means it’s important to the plot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But I’m willing to look past these things because Marauders <\/em>works so well on its own terms – which are at least internally consistent. There’s a sense of reckless abandon about this book, where the heroes are winning for a change, but in a way that feels like it could go horrendously wrong at any minute. As a standalone title, it’s the most satisfying of the current X-books.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ah, my favourite. If X-Men is carried by the promise of future gratification when the big picture starts to pay off, Marauders is the X-book that delivers the most entertainment here and now. In some ways it’s the most traditional X-book of the current line – Chris Claremont always liked writing the sort of story […]<\/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,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5243","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\/5243","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=5243"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5243\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5244,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5243\/revisions\/5244"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}