{"id":7639,"date":"2022-03-03T22:18:37","date_gmt":"2022-03-03T22:18:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=7639"},"modified":"2022-03-03T22:18:37","modified_gmt":"2022-03-03T22:18:37","slug":"inferno-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=7639","title":{"rendered":"Inferno"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>INFERNO vol 2 #1-4<\/strong>
\nWriter: Jonathan Hickman<\/strong>
\nArtist: Valerio Schiti & Stefano Caselli<\/strong>
\nColourist: David Curiel<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Joe Sabino<\/strong>
\nEditor: Jordan White<\/strong><\/p>\n

Inferno<\/em> is a strange book with a strange role. With Jonathan Hickman departing the X-books, it completes his run, but without resolving what he set up. The X-office has decided to stick with the Krakoan set-up for a little while yet, instead of moving on to the next phase of the originally planned storyline. That doesn’t mean it won’t happen at some point, of course – the nature of comics is that everything tends to revert to its traditional status quo in the end. But for now, we’re sticking with Krakoa.<\/p>\n

So, if that’s direction, how do you go for finality? Well, by paying off a few prominent storylines and moving those characters on to their next phases, which seems fair enough. Quite why any of this is called\u00a0Inferno<\/em>, mind you, is less than obvious. Yes, it’s a trademark, but they already did a series under that name in 2015. This has nothing to do with any previous\u00a0Inferno<\/em> story, and nothing to do with Madelyne Pryor, who was being set up for something over in\u00a0Hellions<\/em>. (Her story continues in\u00a0New Mutants<\/em>, to be fair.) It’s hard to avoid the suspicion that it’s called\u00a0Inferno<\/em> mainly because they’d already started foreshadowing something called\u00a0Inferno<\/em>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Maybe not. Maybe it was always just a bit cryptic. So, what actually happens here?<\/p>\n

Moira MacTaggert was set up with some fanfare as the power behind the Krakoan throne in\u00a0House of X<\/em> and\u00a0Powers of X\u00a0<\/em>back at the start of Hickman’s run, but she’s actually done very little since then. As we kick off, she’s still insisting that the main thing for mutants to fear is machines and post humanity, and the specific omens of disaster are the emergence of Nimrod and the return of Destiny. Since Nimrod has already shown up in\u00a0X-Men<\/em>, Moira demands that steps be taken to remove any possibility of Destiny being resurrected – the obvious question whether this is really about the big picture or just about Moira’s fear of Destiny from one of her previous lives.<\/p>\n

At any rate, Mystique gets there first and succeeds in both engineering Destiny’s resurrection, and getting her put onto the Quiet Council. Our sympathies have always been with Mystique given the way that Xavier has been stringing her along, and despite Destiny’s brutal murder of Moira in life three, it’s pretty clear that we’re rooting for Destiny to come back – besides, it’s been teased for so long that we’re expecting it. It has to be said, though – we never do get an explanation of why it was so important to have Mystique on the Quiet Council in the first place. Moira didn’t want it. Did Xavier and Magneto just want to keep Mystique in the fold so they could keep an eye on what she was doing with Destiny? It does feel a bit shaky when you stop to think about it.<\/p>\n

Charles, Magneto and Moira try to bring Emma into their secret, and she promptly shops them to Mystique and Destiny – who, for all the hype, apparently hadn’t picked up on Moira of her own accord after all.<\/p>\n

With Destiny’s help, Mystique promptly starts investigating Moira’s activities, and some frankly confusing scenes in Paris lead her to Orchis (who seemed to be keeping Moira under surveillance… or something). Mystique then arranges for Moira to get captured by Orchis and have her arm (which has a tracker device) cut off so that Xavier and Magneto will race to her aid and get stuck fighting Nimrod and Omega Sentinel, who kill them. Meanwhile, Mystique and Destiny confront Moira, who admits that she wanted to “save” mutants by “curing” them in some vague and unspecified way that would stop them ever becoming mutants in the first place. They remove her powers so that the timeline is now fixed, and Cypher intervenes to send her into exile. Moira’s involvement is removed and the whole Quiet Council now know the secret of how it was formed.<\/p>\n

The return of Destiny is the most satisfying thing here. In fact, much of what this book does well is the neat reveals, both of the details of its own plot, and of long term elements of Hickman’s run. The bit about Mystique having plotted to manipulate Moira is rather confused, but the misdirection in issue #1, with a sequence of “Xavier” and “Magneto” taking the steps to gather Destiny’s resurrection elements, only for us to find out that it’s actually Mystique, is very nicely done. The idea that Cypher has been quietly in on all the secrets from the start makes perfect sense but still works as a twist. Somewhere in here, we also get the back story of Omega Sentinel, who hasn’t really\u00a0done<\/em> much beyond act as a sounding board for Orchis – but making her an inverted Kitty Pryde, in her own version of “Days of Futures Past”, is a neat little idea.<\/p>\n

The scenes of Destiny pre-arranging votes to get on to the Quiet Council and out manoeuvring Xavier and Magneto are fun too. Political shenanigans can be very dry but these double sized issues make them work. And Valerio Schiti’s art is fabulous – I love the reveal of Destiny entering the Council chamber or Emma reacting to Moira’s past lives. Schiti brings a lot of lightness and fun to the book, which stops it feeling like a tour of Hickman’s flowchart. When it needs to go epic, it can; when it wants to call back to a previous page, it nails it. \u00a0Stefano Caselli’s pages aren’t quite on that level, but they\u00a0are<\/em> plainly fill-in work. For the most part, this is a gorgeous book to look at.<\/p>\n

Does the Moira reveal work, though? A big part of the problem is that it’s never really clear exactly what’s being revealed. It’s rather tiptoed around. Reading between the lines, the suggestion seems to be that she was going to get all the mutants together on Krakoa and generously let them live out their days in paradise while quietly drugging the world with Krakoan medicines to get rid of future generations of mutants. This always seemed like a possible direction, given that we knew as early as\u00a0House of X<\/em> #2 that (1) Moira had developed a cure for mutant powers in an earlier life, and (2) Krakoan drugs were very, very emphatically for humans only.<\/p>\n

But if that’s the idea, it’s not really spelt out – the role of Krakoan medicine and its human-only customer base doesn’t actually come up in this series at all. Of course, if that’s the idea, you can see why we might be tiptoeing around it. The Hickman run started in 2019. A lot has happened since then, to put it mildly. The idea that a vitally important wonder drug would be taken by everyone is, shall we say, an even tougher sell than it was then. And if the plot was going to be “Moira laces Krakoan drugs with the cure” then two years down the line, that’s become an anti-vaccination conspiracy story. You can see why you wouldn’t want to go there. But the vagueness about how\u00a0exactly Krakoa fit in to anything that Moira was planning really blunt the force of\u00a0Inferno<\/em>‘s main plot.<\/p>\n

Could be worse, I guess. You could have committed to a major storyline in two ongoing titles and an event mini about Russia.<\/p>\n

For all that, I like\u00a0Inferno<\/em> – I just like the feel and the look of the book, and the sense of things fitting together. It’s not really about anything in particular; it’s just enjoying the playground that Hickman set up one last time and moving some major elements on to create a sense of resolution. But in a weird way, it still feels right, even if that may be hard to fully justify. In both its strengths and weaknesses, it certainly exemplifies Jonathan Hickman’s time on the X-books, which is perhaps the main thing it needed to do.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

INFERNO vol 2 #1-4 Writer: Jonathan Hickman Artist: Valerio Schiti & Stefano Caselli Colourist: David Curiel Letterer: Joe Sabino Editor: Jordan White Inferno is a strange book with a strange role. With Jonathan Hickman departing the X-books, it completes his run, but without resolving what he set up. The X-office has decided to stick with […]<\/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":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7639","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\/7639","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=7639"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7639\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7645,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7639\/revisions\/7645"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}