{"id":5464,"date":"2020-08-09T21:51:04","date_gmt":"2020-08-09T20:51:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=5464"},"modified":"2020-08-09T21:51:04","modified_gmt":"2020-08-09T20:51:04","slug":"x-men-fantastic-four-4x","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=5464","title":{"rendered":"X-Men\/Fantastic Four: 4X"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Very much on the fringes of the X-books, X-Men \/ Fantastic Four<\/em> didn’t get a mention in the X-books’ release schedules, and comes from the FF’s editorial office. So you might well wonder how much weight to give it in the context of the X-books as a line. In the short term, that turns out to be largely academic, since the main plot developments are about Franklin Richards, and they matter far more to the Fantastic Four. But it’s also the first time we’ve seen the X-Men interact at length with other major superheroes in their current mutant nationalist mode, and on that level it might be more significant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s certainly pretty – it’s the Dodsons, after all. Their clean lines and curves, and the light colours of Laura Martin, lend themselves to good, traditional superhero team-up fare. They’re perhaps not the artists I’d naturally choose for a Dr Doom story, given that his aesthetic is all about gloomy castles – but here he’s conveniently off on a desert island, so all is well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Chip Zdarsky is always an interesting writer – and he has some intriguing points going on just (only just) below the surface. The surface plot is more perfunctory, maybe be a bit more of concern to FF readers than it is to us. It’s a Dr Doom story, after all. And that surface plot is ultimately a little inconclusive and unsatisfactory, perhaps because the real sting is in the epilogue. Still, like many of the current X-books, there’s a sense that this story trades more heavily on hints about the future than on a strong story here and now. Perhaps that’s inevitable in a fringe title that needs to engage with some of the current X-Men themes, but can’t resolve them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story springboards off current Fantastic Four<\/em> events. Reed and Sue’s son Franklin is now a teenager, thanks to more time travel shenanigans. He remains a massively powerful mutant, but his power reserves are no longer replenishing. So every time he uses his powers, he’s counting down to zero – which means he’s a very powerful character who has to hang back and do as little as possible. Reed is unable to find a solution, and Franklin has his doubts about how much Reed really wants<\/em> to find a solution. The X-Men show up to make their pitch for Franklin to come to Krakoa, the FF squabble with them, and Franklin winds up running away and getting an alternative offer from good old Dr Doom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All of this is an explicit callback to the 1987 miniseries Fantastic Four vs X-Men<\/em>. That’s an odd call, because it’s not like the original series gets talked about that much. It’s not essential reading for this book, but it certainly helps with context. The original mini came out in the year between “Mutant Massacre” and “Fall of the Mutants”, when the X-books were just starting to expand beyond Uncanny X-Men<\/em>, New Mutants<\/em> and X-Factor<\/em>. Marvel put out two X-Men minis that year, both tying directly into the core plot, and effectively serving as a second X-Men title. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

FF vs X-Men<\/em> was written by Chris Claremont, and involved the X-Men trying to save Kitty Pryde’s life after she was stuck in intangible form and drifting into oblivion. Reed fails to save her due to a crisis of confidence, and Doom steps in to offer his own solution – all, apparently, as part of another scheme to prove his superiority over Reed by doing something Reed couldn’t. Kitty decides to kill herself so as to stop the X-Men getting indebted to Doom in order to save her, and there are key scenes where little innocent Franklin talks her out of it, then tells the grown-up heroes to stop fighting and sort themselves out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this book, the roles are reversed. Franklin is losing his powers. Everyone else is feuding over him for what he represents – family for the FF, mutant identity for the X-Men, a chance to humiliate Reed for Dr Doom. Only Kitty seems more concerned about Franklin as a person, and tries to support him in making his own decisions. By the logic of these stories, we’re evidently not meant to think that either team has got the balance right to start with; the whole point of this sort of plot is that Franklin and Kitty bring out the best of both worlds to show the better way forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here, that conflict brings out the awkward aspects of Krakoan mutant nationalism that have largely been left unchallenged in the main titles. The X-Men show up at the Fantastic Four’s home unannounced and more or less declare that because Franklin is a mutant, his home is with them and his existing family ties are just not relevant. This seems to be a view of the world which most of the mutants on Krakoa are happy to go along with, but it’s striking how few of the non-combatant mutants seem to care in any way about the friends and family they left behind. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Doom and the FF both directly challenge the X-Men’s insistence that mutants are building a better society because they’re mutants<\/em>. Giving the most direct speech on the topic to Doom helps to prevent the book from taking sides too explicitly, but Doom is surely right to object to the idea that having powers makes you a better person and somehow automatically qualified to build a better world. The claim from some on Krakoa that their mutant society will be better because<\/em> it’s a mutant society lacks any real evidence to support it, and when taken with the embrace of characters like Apocalypse, starts to look like a might-makes-right worldview. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s not a conventionally heroic stance, and it depends on the X-Men’s long history of persecution to make us accept it as one, even superficially. The unresolved question is whether we really are meant to take this at face value, or whether Hickman is playing off audience sympathies even while showing us quite directly that there are some seriously dodgy things going on at Krakoa. My money’s on the latter, though I sense there’s a segment of the audience who are quite invested in the former.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Zdarsky goes through the usual motions of the two teams coming round to a middle ground and bridging the gap. Franklin insists on going his own way and on bridging both worlds. The Fantastic Four see the X-Men still fighting against Dr Doom like in the old days, and accept that they’re still genuine heroes who have been shaped into this more radical stance by their personal experiences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But then there’s the epilogue, which suggests that the X-Men haven’t learned or changed at all. Fair enough, they’re aggrieved that Reed created a device to shield Franklin from recognition as a mutant, especially because it could also be used to remove his powers. They don’t want that around. But they don’t discuss the point with Reed. Nor do they simply erase it from everyone’s memory without telling them. Instead, Charles and Magneto make a big deal about messing with Reed’s mind, without giving him a choice, as a display of power. You can come up with reasons they need to tell him – maybe Charles figures Reed is bound to notice something has happened and doesn’t want to risk further interference with his mind – but he doesn’t give that sort of explanation. It reads as an exercise in humiliation, in which the X-Men manage to be reasonable in what they’re trying to achieve, but utterly unsympathetic in how they go about it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And in a story where the whole arc is normally about everyone finding middle ground and accommodation, that treats the X-Men as the bad guys. You could also read it as “the X-Men don’t play by the rules of the genre any more”, but that’s only the heroic position if you think Krakoa First is a good foreign policy for a self-proclaimed superpower. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That’s all quite interesting. The stuff with Doom and his giant Doombot Sentinels and the Latverian mutants really isn’t – the Latverians barely get a personality – and part of the issue might be that the book is less interested in its main storyline than in the subversion of expectations at the end. It takes aim at some of the most interesting questions raised by the Krakoa era, and generates some interesting scenes, but it doesn’t get a completely satisfying story out of them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Very much on the fringes of the X-books, X-Men \/ Fantastic Four didn’t get a mention in the X-books’ release schedules, and comes from the FF’s editorial office. So you might well wonder how much weight to give it in the context of the X-books as a line. In the short term, that turns out […]<\/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-5464","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\/5464","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=5464"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5464\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5466,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5464\/revisions\/5466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}