Chateau of Shadows #5 - The Fall of the House of X
I’m a huge fan of the X-Men – Marvel’s Strangest Heroes of All! That hasn’t been very easy over the past twenty years. Once Marvel’s Merry Mutants were leading the sales charts, but their importance to the publisher waned as the MCU rose in importance. Marvel had sold Fox the film rights to the X-Men for a comparative song in the late ‘90s, a desperate attempt to get out of bankruptcy. The publisher was less than enthused about promoting another studio’s movies, and what was once a Marvel Comics tentpole became something of an afterthought.
It's more complicated than that, obviously. You don’t give Uncanny X-Men to a superstar writer like Brian Michael Bendis if you don’t expect the title to succeed, especially not when he’s hot off of making people really care about the Avengers for the first time in decades. A lot of fantastic writers and artists put in some amazing work between the end of Grant Morrison’s tenure and the start of Jonathan Hickman’s. Even so, throughout most of the 2010s the franchise was clearly flailing, buried under the twin weights of editorial mandates and advertising someone else’s movies.
Then Disney solved the problem by just buying Fox. I’m not particularly enthused about one mega-corporation becoming even more mega, especially when said corp clearly has designs on rent-seeking all of human culture. Still, as a beneficial consequence, the X-Men have experienced a renaissance in the comics world. Beginning with House of X and Powers of X, the 2019 soft reboot by writer Jonathan Hickman and artists Pepe Larraz, R. B. Silva and Marte Gracia, the X-Comics took a radical new direction. What’s become known as the Krakoan Era has produced a wealth of fantastic stories reexamining the mutant metaphor as Professor X and Magneto finally decide to just establish their own nation.
It was a controversial creative decision. X-Men fans come broadly in two flavors – “I identify with the X- Men because I also felt like an outsider in high school” and “I identify with the X-Men because I’m also part of a minority group my government has actively marginalized”. The Krakoan Era is aimed primarily at the latter. The Team of X takes the bold stance that Xavier has been wrong all along – that human and mutant coexistence is probably impossible without separatism. Xavier works with the U.N. to turn the living island of Krakoa (it’s complicated) into a sovereign nation where all mutants are welcome – hero and villain alike.
It's a bold premise that’s never as radical as it should be. In part, that’s due to the Team of X’s makeup. Hickman and line editor Jordan B. White pulled together a tight-knit team of great writers, but one that has been almost uniformly white. While the team has had a large percentage of queer writers from the beginning, that’s still a needlessly narrow perspective. There’s also the fact that, at the end of the day, these are corporate cape comics. The overlords at Fortress Disnoplex are only going to let them flirt so much with Fully Automated Luxury Gay Mutant Communism.
The ride is coming to an end soon. The Krakoan Era has been broken into four phases; with this year’s Hellfire Gala one-shot, we’ve entered “Fall of X”. Anti-mutant fascist group Orchis, a villainous organization that has been lurking in the background since the era’s beginning, has launched its masterstroke, effectively destroying the mutant nation and rendering mutants persona non grata across the world. We’re in the last reel of Empire Strikes Back / first reel of Return of the Jedi. Things are looking dire for Marvel’s Merry Mutants, but unlike the stories of the Lost Decade, I’m hopeful that when this story ends, we’ll transition to another exciting new direction. I really would like to write these weirdos someday.
If you’re curious about the Krakoan Era, I recommend starting with House of X / Powers of X, available in both hardcover and paperback. After that, the “Dawn of X”, “Reign of X” and “Trials of X” paperback series collect literally every comic in the first two years in a decent reading order. That’s also more than forty individual volumes, so you might instead want to follow individual series. I highly recommend Hickman and Gerry Duggan’s X-Men, Kieron Gillen’s Immortal X-Men, Zeb Wells’ Hellions, Tini Howard's Excalibur and, most of all, Al Ewing’s S.W.O.R.D and X-Men Red. Of course, thanks to Marvel Unlimited I’m reading all of it, and while there are some duds, these are still the best X-Comics I’ve read in decades.
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