{"id":7250,"date":"2021-10-24T18:04:53","date_gmt":"2021-10-24T17:04:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=7250"},"modified":"2021-10-24T18:04:53","modified_gmt":"2021-10-24T17:04:53","slug":"way-of-x","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=7250","title":{"rendered":"Way of X"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>WAY OF X #1-5 \/ X-MEN: THE ONSLAUGHT REVELATION<\/strong>
\nby Si Spurrier, Bob Quinn & Java Tartaglia<\/strong><\/p>\n

Another short-run series, then – six issues, in practice, despite the rather odd and arbitrary branding of issue #6 as an X-Men one-shot. (It isn’t.) But this ends by explicitly promising a sequel in the new year, and it’s not a gathering-of-the-team arc so much as a coming-up-with-the-premise-in-the-first place. It makes a certain sense to present like this, as a separate story in its own right.<\/p>\n

Nightcrawler has been on the Quiet Council since the Krakoan era began, but prior to this series he had actually\u00a0done<\/em>\u00a0very little, beyond serving as a Council member who readers could definitely trust to be sensible and decent. One issue of\u00a0X-Men<\/em>, clearly the set-up for this book, had him wavering about newly-coined rituals like Crucible and the casual approach to resurrection, and talking about setting up a mutant religion.<\/p>\n

Which wouldn’t have made sense. Kurt is religious already; it’s one of his core traits. He’s hardly going to show up on Krakoa and jettison those beliefs in order to contrive a syncretic religion for purposes of social control.<\/p>\n

Wisely, then – and despite the stained glass window on the cover of issue #1 – Si Spurrier disavows that idea pretty sharpish. This is not a story about religion; it’s a story about philosophy, about social cohesion, and about the building of a new society in the unique circumstances of Krakoa. Kurt’s religion informs his philosophy, of course, but it’s not the focus of this series. This isn’t a book about God, nor is it a comic about how He might or might not view the conquest of death.<\/p>\n

Instead, what troubles Kurt most at the start of the series is his fellow mutants’ increasingly casual attitude to death (even though he recognises it as a logical response to resurrection), and the question of what sort of values and practices actually bind together the new mutant nation of Krakoa. The populace seem to be heading towards a nihilistic stance where endless possibility makes everything rather meaningless, and gladiatorial nonsense such as Crucible seems to Kurt to show a society which has already bypassed the rise of an empire and gone direct to its fall.<\/p>\n

It’s ambitious, and… well, partially successful. There’s an awful lot going on here, and Spurrier does a pretty solid job of pacing it and making sure it doesn’t turn into an outright lecture. While a bunch of characters are introduced for later use, the heart of the series is Kurt and Legion, who, in the context of the X-books, has been Spurrier’s signature character since his run on\u00a0X-Men Legacy<\/em>. Here, Legion is the one who’s relatively sure of his approach to life, albeit that it remains a rigorous insistence on his self-determination. Kurt is one looking for answers, troubled by a sense that the apparent utopia is going to collapse in on itself, and hoping to find a way to steer everyone towards just Being Better. Creating a society where the mutants don’t have to worry about their safety isn’t enough for him; it has to be meaningful.<\/p>\n

Bob Quinn, given done some pretty dense material to work with, does a solid job of selling Kurt’s fretting and his eventual sense of revelation and triumph. He gets the harsher side of Legion nicely too, which gets across why it isn’t him leading this movement. Kurt has the human connection that Legion simply lacks, but he’s also the guy who’ll listen to what Legion has to say, if only because he doesn’t have any better ideas of his own. Quinn is given a few opportunities to be more showy as well, with visits to Kurt’s mindscape or the cutaway panels to Onslaught as the “patchwork man”, and that all largely works. The insane redesign of Dr Nemesis is all the more effective for being drawn in a fairly restrained way. But most importantly, the art helps to humanise the story and stress the emotional side of what could easily have been dry.<\/p>\n

There are plenty of nice structural ideas and parallels in the story, which has clearly been worked out in some detail. Nightcrawler starts off worrying that resurrection is destroying the humanity of his fellow mutants; by the end of the story, he sees it as the opportunity that allows mutants to pursue the new and the different more than ever before. There’s an attempt to use the Three Laws of Krakoa as a structure for Kurt to search for meaning. There’s a recurring theme of the tension between togetherness and individuality, with Legion screwing up a nascent relationship by exposing two people to each other too completely, before eventually coming up with some sort of abstract location on Mars where people can experience togetherness in a more nuanced, less invasive way. You can see how it’s all meant to fit together.<\/p>\n

But there are problems here, many of which are to do with whether Krakoan society can actually take the weight of this sort of story. There are a lot of underexplored issues with Krakoa – it’s all a little bit too convenient that everyone was just willing to accept the amnesty for supervillains, or to go and live in a country where half of the ruling body\u00a0were<\/em> supervillains, and which seems to have no democracy and no plans for it, and where you had to leave non-mutant friends and family behind unless, for reasons yet to be explained, you’re Northstar. You can gloss those over for a while, but if you make it a long-term setting, or if you start writing directly about the contradictions of Krakoan society, you need to get to grips with them a bit further.<\/p>\n

How many people are actually\u00a0on<\/em> Krakoa?\u00a0House of X<\/em> #1 said that 16 million mutants died in Genosha – but presumably the vast majority haven’t yet been resurrected.\u00a0X-Men \/ Fantastic Four<\/em> #2 gives the estimated population of Krakoa as 200,000. Fair enough. That’s roughly the size of Samoa, nearly twice the size of Grenada or the Seychelles. You could go much, much lower and still have a population comparable to, say, Andorra.<\/p>\n

What do these people\u00a0do<\/span><\/em> all day? Kurt raises this point directly in issue #1, in a way that suggests it’s going to be a theme of the book. As he points out, not everyone can be hero. We somewhat come back to this in the final issue with Fabian Cortez, who gets to make his contribution without really being a hero in any conventional sense. But… seriously, what do the general public on Krakoa actually do, and why?<\/p>\n

Apparently Krakoa provides everything, so they don’t need to grow food or make furniture or things of that sort. Fair enough. You don’t need a job because it’s a society of superabundance. But… hold on, Colossus and Kayla seem to have a job working in the flower-growing fields in\u00a0X-Force<\/em>. Why do people do that? Duty? Boredom? A need for purpose? Do they get paid? What about service industries? Apparently Krakoa can sustain one fashion designer, one chef and one – count it, one – bar. Are there no other cafes? Are there no bakers, or hairdressers?<\/p>\n

What about the media? There are two television channels serving San Marino (population 33,641). Is nobody keeping tabs on the Quiet Council for the benefit of the general public? Doesn’t Krakoa have any journalists? Is the whole thing just one big arts commune and we’re supposed to think that every mutant on the planet is happy with that, even the ex-villains?<\/p>\n

The point being: Krakoa remains a shadowy, underdeveloped society at best, which is not necessarily a problem if it’s just background. We don’t really know much about day-to-day Shi’ar society either, but who cares? Still, there’s at least an implication\u00a0<\/em>with alien races and such forth of a functioning society where you can fill in the blanks for yourself. Krakoa kind of implies that\u00a0none<\/em> of that is there.\u00a0When you start doing stories about meaning and social cohesion and you actively raise the question of what the population can do with their lives, though… it starts to be a problem. It lampshades the gaps in the set-up, and it’s a shaky basis for grand theorising.<\/p>\n

Similarly, Spurrier seems to be theming issues #3-5 around Kurt considering the three laws in turn as part of his quest. This doesn’t really work, because the laws weren’t particularly designed as a route to read this sort of conclusion, and only awkwardly serve in that role. Issue #3 is “Make More Mutants”, which takes us on a diverting visit to the Krakoan nursery, but hardly offers any revelations. Issue #5 nicely reinvents “Respect this Sacred Land” to refer to the community, but it boils down to spending three issues to come up with the idea that society requires mutual respect. And issue #4… by a process of elimination must be something to do with the law against murder, but it’s a heck of a stretch.<\/p>\n

Then there’s the choice of Onslaught as a villain. Onslaught was a wildly underdeveloped character in the first place. He seems to have been chosen here for two main reasons – first, there’s a parallel with Legion as a fractured creation of Professor X. And second, the original premise was that Onslaught was formed from the psychic offcuts of Professor X and Magneto, which Spurrier cleverly recycles into the idea that he’s being used as a weapon which feeds on psychic offcuts from resurrected mutants. (The premise, incidentally, confirms the notion that resurrected mutants aren’t just copies – otherwise there would be nothing lost in the exercise.)<\/p>\n

Still… Onslaught’s not a functioning character, so much as an established brand name being attached to a hostile concept. And that leaves a bit of a void at the centre of the story where the antagonist ought to be. Onslaught is rather too obviously a label whacked on a concept, and a little too far removed from the level of threat that his name invokes. We end up with an awkward finale in which Kurt’s big idea is essentially that resurrection creates new potential for mutants to lead positive, inventive, inspirational lives without being held back by the fear of death – that, in fact, pursuing routes that could get you killed may now be for the good of all in the long run – and this rather hazy revelation winds up defeating Onslaught in a rather unsatisfying climax. It’s not quite power of love, but it’s getting there. And while I can see why he’s tying Nightcrawler’s vision to resurrection – it’s a\u00a0practical<\/em> reason why mutant culture has the opportunity to be different, rather than one that asks us to believe that they’re inherently better people – I’m not really convinced that the fear of death is anything close to the main inhibitor on innovation.<\/p>\n

For all that, though, I like the book. It works on a character level; it has some decent material even with Fabian Cortez, though you have to turn a blind eye to some of his back story for it to work. (Yes, he\u00a0has<\/em> killed mutants, and no, his dedication to the mutant cause was\u00a0not<\/em> initially sincere – but he’s a more interesting character if we ignore all that, so fine, let’s run with it.) On the other hand, Lost is a bit too much of a cypher – for all Cortez’s grumbling that his arc is merely a supporting role for her, he’s the one who’s properly developed.<\/p>\n

Kurt is the heart of it all, though, and Spurrier’s take on Kurt convinces. That carries the book through a multitude of quibbles, at least for now – but if we’re continuing with this role going forward, some of these problems are going to need addressing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WAY OF X #1-5 \/ X-MEN: THE ONSLAUGHT REVELATION by Si Spurrier, Bob Quinn & Java Tartaglia Another short-run series, then – six issues, in practice, despite the rather odd and arbitrary branding of issue #6 as an X-Men one-shot. (It isn’t.) But this ends by explicitly promising a sequel in the new year, and […]<\/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-7250","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\/7250","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=7250"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7250\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7252,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7250\/revisions\/7252"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}