{"id":6953,"date":"2021-07-27T21:58:01","date_gmt":"2021-07-27T20:58:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=6953"},"modified":"2021-07-27T21:58:01","modified_gmt":"2021-07-27T20:58:01","slug":"x-men-16-21","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=6953","title":{"rendered":"X-Men #16-21"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s past time I started on another batch of reviews, which I was\u00a0planning<\/em> to start as soon as the Hellfire Gala finished, but, well, close enough.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>X-MEN vol 5 #16-21
\n<\/strong>by Jonathan Hickman, Phil Noto, Brett Booth, Mahmud Asrar, Francesco Mobili & various others<\/strong><\/p>\n

These six issues complete volume 5 of\u00a0X-Men<\/em>, which promptly gets relaunched for a new season under Gerry Duggan. So, in a sense, these issues complete Jonathan Hickman’s\u00a0X-Men<\/em> run.<\/p>\n

Except of course they don’t, because Hickman remains the moving force behind the X-books as a whole. And that’s going to be an odd thing to have lurking in the background behind Duggan’s run, though I suppose no more than in the days when we had heavier input at the editorial level. Still: the point here is that volume 5 of\u00a0X-Men\u00a0<\/em>is going to read very strangely if you try to take it as a thing in its own right. It only really makes sense when understood as part of the wider picture of the Krakoa-era X-Men books.<\/p>\n

There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s how the book is intended to be read. In some ways it’s a throwback to the time when the X-books were marketed much more heavily around their contribution to wider continuity, but this time round there’s more of a sense of it being driven by a creative agenda (even if it’s one that was no doubt developed with an eye to supporting a line of books). Still, Hickman’s\u00a0X-Men<\/em> is a strange, fractured thing – it doesn’t feature an X-Men team, or even a regular cast, but instead offers a selection of short stories that don’t directly connect to one another, instead feeding in various ways into the big picture. There isn’t even a regular artist, so much as a common talent pool.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

What do we have here, then? Issue #16 shows Arakko returning to Earth after the end of “X of Swords”, and failing to reunite with Krakoa as expected. Phil Noto’s art makes it both grand and low key. He can handle the interaction of the islands, and a scene consisting of several pages of talking heads, and make them look gorgeous. The plot significance here (with hindsight) is that because the islands won’t reunite, Magneto quickly sets about booting the Arakkans off to Mars, which from a certain perspective might be seen as an exercise in getting rid of the larger mutant nation before it can make too much trouble.\u00a0What’s conspicuously missing is the actual inhabitants of either island. Only one Arakkan shows up; Krakoa is represented by the Quiet Council and the Summers family. It’s all a bit bloodless, and something of a story of ideas rather than people.<\/p>\n

Issue #17, “Empty Nest”, is disconnected from everything around it – a 90s throwback issue in which the X-Men rescue Shi’ar Empress Xandra from a downtrodden rebel. It’s the most conventional issue of this bunch, perhaps because it’s so detached from the Krakoan set-up; it’s a story that could have been done, more or less, a quarter century ago. Brett Booth doesn’t exactly reflect the way the X-Men looked in the 90s – he was an artist of the early Image era, heavily influenced by Jim Lee, while the X-Men comics of the same period were being drawn by Andy Kubert and John Romita Jr. Booth’s not the greatest at leading the eye around the page, and drawing attention to the right beats, either. But he does give this a sense of being a more traditional X-Men story.<\/p>\n

Issues #18-19 are the final two parts of Hickman’s Children of the Vault trilogy. The first part appeared back in issue #5. The whole point of this storyline is that Synch, Darwin and Laura\/Wolverine have been stuck inside the Children’s time bubble for a notable length of time from the X-Men’s point of view, and therefore for an inordinate amount of time subjectively. These two issues – a rare two-parter in Hickman’s run – explore the idea that they’ve been stuck in there for centuries, kept alive by their powers. Synch and Laura both get killed in escaping; Synch is resurrected with his memories of the experience intact, Laura without remembering any of it.<\/p>\n

This is a story that plays both to Hickman’s strengths and his weaknesses. He excels at coming up with grand concepts that feel like they push things too far, and then selling them in a way that makes them work. There are potential problems with all this – is Synch really going to be a functional character after this sort of experience? – but then that’s something to be followed up in Duggan’s\u00a0X-Men<\/em>. The jury is still out on whether it works as set-up. What Hickman does very well here is to get across the sense of scale.<\/p>\n

Trickier is the relationship between Synch and Laura, which is where the emotional hook lies. While the story is pulling back to such a grand scale, it doesn’t really find space for the sort of details that make a relationship live. Mahmud Asrar does his best on that account, and fleshes it out somewhat with the body language and the way the characters interact, but it still feels like a case of telling, not showing. Then again, perhaps that’s partly intentional. By the end of this story Synch is talking as if he no longer thinks of himself as human in any sense – he talks about pretending to be human as a child \u00a0– and perhaps the experience\u00a0does<\/em> leave him difficult to relate to. Maybe some distancing works here. I’m not sure yet.<\/p>\n

Issue #20 is Mystique trying to destroy Nimrod in order to get Destiny resurrected, and instead only accelerating Nimrod’s development. In fact, this story continues a theme in Hickman’s run of Orchis and Nimrod being something of a self-fulfilling prophecy; as in\u00a0House of X<\/em>, the X-Men’s own efforts to change history turn out to be the very actions which accelerate Orchis in the first place. Previously there’s been some scope to argue that the X-Men merely accelerated things that would have happened anyway, but this time round it’s rather clearer that the X-Men have made matters worse at a crucial time. If they’d left well alone, Nimrod would just have been a scientist resurrected in a robot body, instead of a lethal anti-mutant AI.<\/p>\n

The strongest emotional angle in Hickman’s run belongs to Mystique, who is being strung along by Professor X and Magneto with promises of resurrecting her wife Destiny. We know they (supposedly) can’t do this because Moira won’t permit precogs on the island. Our sympathies here lie entirely by Mystique, who’s being cruelly exploited for reasons that are still not fully clear to us. Why was it necessary to get Mystique on side at all, for example? Presumably that’s going to be explained at some point – perhaps in\u00a0Inferno<\/em> – because it’s an obvious question that needs addressed. At any rate, Mystique is the element of Hickman’s run that really lands on an emotional level.<\/p>\n

That’s four stories with no direct connection between them. Not in plot terms, at least. Thematically, the link seems to be mirrors of Krakoa. Arakko is (obviously) a Krakoa made dark through centuries of warfare – that’s the entire concept, and one that Noto gets across very effectively by presenting Krakoa as spring and Arakko as autumn. The Children of the Vault are another parallel for Krakoa, with their isolated community, their belief in their destiny to supplant humanity, and their newly-introduced practice of resurrecting their dead in new and improved form. They’re the post-human Krakoa.<\/p>\n

Orchis have repeatedly been presented as parallels to Krakoa, with the groups locked in mutually reinforcing destructiveness. That’s all the more glaring here, where the whole story involves Alia Gregor trying to resurrect her late husband Erasmus Mendel in the robot body that will become Nimrod. Her story (and her failure) blatantly mirrors Mystique; the attempt to introduce resurrection blatantly mirrors Krakoa in general.\u00a0And while the Shi’ar are… less obviously part of this theme, but that issue does see the X-Men siding with the empire against the very sort of oppressed underclass that they would fancy themselves to be on earth. Sure, they’re dealing specifically with a revolutionary who’s kidnapped the queen, but it’s not like the X-Men have ever been rushing to denounce Shi’ar imperialism so long as it’s convenient to them. (And let’s not forget that the resurrection system depends on Shi’ar technology.)<\/p>\n

So our unifying theme here seems to be that Hickman keeps drawing parallels between Krakoa and all sorts of other groups or locations that seem, on the whole, pretty bleak. And of course we have Destiny warning Mystique that Krakoa may look like a utopia, but it has to be destroyed. In parallel with that, we have the X-Men re-emerging in issue #21 as a separate power base, independent of the villain-heavy Quiet Council, and not even based on Krakoa. There’s a striking contrast between Synch’s speech in issue #19 about how he isn’t human at all, and Cyclops’ statement of principles in issue #21, which are a reversion to playing up how everyone is the same at heart. Scott’s embrace of Krakoa seems a little bit more equivocal about the culture than some of the more triumphalist stories, and the direction of books like\u00a0New Mutants<\/em> and Way of X<\/em> also makes me wonder how long Krakoa lasts before we get to the disillusionment phase. It’s hardly a direction that ought to be surprising – they kill people in ceremonial combat, for god’s sake. Besides, “the heroes already created utopia before the story began, the end” is hardly going to be the overreaching plot of the Hickman run.<\/p>\n

Issue #21, the Gala issue, is… a bit of a mess. It’s an artist jam issue, which means it’s visually inconsistent; not much really happens in it beyond the reveal of the new X-Men team, which had been spoiled in adverts anyway. It’s not helped by the unwise celebrity guest appearances, who are a distraction at best – but mostly it feels like a book that needs to reveal the new team and have Scott make his state-of-the-nation speech, and then finds it still has half the pages left to fill. It leads in to\u00a0Planet-Sized X-Men<\/em> #1, of course, but that’s a Gerry Duggan comic. As an ending for Hickman’s X-Men<\/em> run, issue #21 is a curious choice; the turning point of restarting the X-Men underwhelms because the core decision was taken issues previously, and it promptly gets overshadowed by the terraforming of Mars later in the crossover.<\/p>\n

That final issue is a weak ending to Hickman’s run, then. But these issues as a whole continue to build intriguingly towards his big picture.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s past time I started on another batch of reviews, which I was\u00a0planning to start as soon as the Hellfire Gala finished, but, well, close enough. X-MEN vol 5 #16-21 by Jonathan Hickman, Phil Noto, Brett Booth, Mahmud Asrar, Francesco Mobili & various others These six issues complete volume 5 of\u00a0X-Men, which promptly gets relaunched […]<\/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-6953","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\/6953","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=6953"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6953\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6956,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6953\/revisions\/6956"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6953"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6953"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6953"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}