The State of the X-Men Address
My fellow freaks in fandom; I write to you today to report that the state of the X-Men is good.
This wasn't always a done deal. I have seen the worry in you all, when it was announced that the primary architect of this era of generally good X-Men comics and also Fallen Angels would depart, lured in by the glamour of irrevocably corrupting your morals working with one of the most evil companies in digital publishing for a six-figure advance and upwards of 2300 paid subscribers. As far as farewells go, Johnathan Hickman and Valerio Schiti's take on Inferno was profoundly odd, a power-bummer of a four-issue miniseries that ended up almost making you feel bad for the fact the grand experiment launched with House of X/Powers of X ended up being so successful that it would keep going on for the foreseeable future. When X Lives of Wolverine/X Deaths of Wolverine arose from the non-existant wreckage of this cataclysmic anti-climax, the fear started to appear. Ten weeks of shockingly forgettable Wolverine time travel action came and went, and the epithets started flying. Afraid of a heartbreak to come, we said the X-Men line of comics was returning to the safe, business as usual, by-the-book form of commercial comics that we thought we had escaped. Harsher minds went so far as calling this the beginning of Krakoa's "Flop Era".
The feeling got worse as the perspective of massively disruptive publisher-wide mega-events showed up on the horizon. Soon, it was believed, we would have to cross over with Jason Aaron's completely wack run of Avengers, and then what? Madelyne Pryor, in full Goblin Queen by way of Rita Repulsa regalia showing up in The Amazing Spider-Man? It is said that comic book fans are afraid of change, and doubly so X-Men fans. But can you blame someone that has been through everything from Lemire and Ramos' Extraordinary X-Men to Larroca and Rosenberg's Uncanny X-Men for showing signs of weariness? Should you? Either way, the facts as I know them are this: one, Kieron Gillen and Esad Ribic's run on Eternals, which will beget this summer's Judgment Day, wrapped up last week, and it has laid a strong case for the turns ahead of us. Two, despite all the reservations I've had since reading the Beyond era of The Amazing Spider-Man and its Free Comic Book Day coda, I liked that first issue pretty good, and Zeb Wells is still the writer of an excellent Hellions run. Three, Mark Russell is writing the Avengers tie-in issues to Judgment Day, so that's one crisis already averted.
That will be then, and this is now. I launched into this exercise hoping that seeing the line in its totality would give me a better idea of what the present of X-Men comics under the sole stewardship of line editor Jordan D. White looks like. And as it turns out, outside of being in a shared continuity and going off of the same premises, there isn't really anything holding these books together. Not that there ever was, outside of these first few weeks when everyone talked about what happened in X-Force #1. But the line feels more beholden to the individual tics and idiosyncrasies of its individual writers than it has in a long while. This isn't a bad thing on its own, but as a result a lot of it feels less essential; a concession to an industrial logic that could see any given title get canceled at any time. No book is a can't-miss, must-read type of deal, as even the title ostensibly about driving forward the events the line will be going through is busy setting up its own status quo. But is it good? Let me make a concession to the usual format of these newsletters and we'll get into it.
HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS: THIS IS FOREVER, OR AT LEAST UNTIL I FIND A REAL JOB
There is an easy, one-adjective way of describing Immortal X-Men, and it's "familiar". Some of that is out of necessity: being the first point of contact with Destiny of X for lapsed and new readers alike, it has to lay down the facts that have been put in play by the last two years of X-Men comics in an easily digestible and altogether pretty elegant manner. To make the point even clearer, the first issue ends with the relevant maps, tables and charts you'll need for the adventures ahead. It's a very game-designer-y kind of move, which, coming as it does from crowd-funded actual designer of an actual game Kieron Gillen, makes a lot of sense. As far as the recent past goes, there is absolutely no subtext needing to be parsed by the fandom's best and brightest chroniclers --hey Matthew, love your work!-- because everything is spelled out on the page. This is good practice, especially considering the sheer number of balls currently in the air, and it makes Gillen and Wereneck's debut issue the most obvious recommendation there is to anyone looking to get caught up.
The other reason why this X-Men book feels so familiar is because it is in fact Kieron Gillen's second go at doing the big X-Men book, following a run on Uncanny X-Men that everyone seems to love but no one wants to reference, with the notable exception of the take on Mr. Sinister that Johnathan Hickman liked so much he had already started making it the new normal all the way back in Secret Wars. This comic comes in a similar shape, that of the post-Ellis widescreen blockbuster. The action is equally as cataclysmic, the solutions are radically clever and imaginative, and structurally, it seems to be going for a very simple "one issue for the cliffhanger, one issue for the resolution" format that is tailor-made to quickly satisfy.
Even the ways in which Immortal X-Men strays from the template carry this air of familiarity: as with Phonogram: the Singles Club and The Wicked + The Divine, each issue is told from the point of view of one character, which provides insights, secrets, and a nice helping of perspective, ever-so-slightly adapting the form of the comic to each character. Where Mr. Sinister has moments of rigid formalism denoting his imperialist empiricist view of the world, Hope Summers gets caught up in the balls-out action drama of it all, with the impossible stunts and the cool one-liners. It is playful with the form, and that includes taking the open format of the data pages and doing something wildly different with it at every possible occasion. But the question is: can it be something other than what it is? Part of what made Eternals so good is that it allowed itself to be any kind of story it wished to be. With a half-dozen X-Men books around it each doing their own thing, can Immortal X-Men go outside its own niche? It's a very good niche, to be clear, it is my favorite niche in all of superhero comics, but at this point, I need something that's going to challenge me.
Let's stay in the big time for a while longer, and talk about the other title driving the line, Gerry Duggan and Pepe Larraz's X-Men, which is still moving forward on its own merry way; that is to say: #10 and #11 are the exact same kind of ensemble cast action procedural as the nine issues that came before it. On its own, it's not an entirely terrible thing, how could it be, when Pepe Larraz is still several laps ahead of the field when it comes to drawing a gosh darn comic, but the general lack of ambition makes the flaws that have been present since the start of this current volume that much more apparent. This is a book that isn't quite sure of what to do with some of its characters: in the best case scenario, you get his take on Polaris, as someone trying to make up for her own insecurities by constantly acting like she's cooler than this and trying to be in it for herself. In the worst, you have Wolverine (girl version), who gets treated as a sharp object every which way, either from some villain's mind manipulation or by her own teammates using her as a meat and adamantium puppet.
In the middle, there is a lot of deferring to Chris Claremont, especially when it comes to Rogue, whose accent is as big a chore to read as it has ever been. And look: Chris Claremont wrote some damn fine comics. But at this point, they are old comics. And the bigger problem is that, for the past eleven issues, X-Men has rotated between just four new ideas, which all feel just a little underdeveloped, which makes the sudden twists a little bit weaker. It all works, because, at the risk of repeating myself, Pepe Larraz is an absolute powerhouse, but one gets the feeling it would all fall apart without all the next level visual stuff.
Supposedly, Destiny of X builds off of the stuff in X Lives and X Deaths, right? Well, if you were to check in on either X-Force or Wolverine, which Ben Percy is still writing, you wouldn't know any of that. Sure, the current story of X-Force might kinda sorta be a consequence of that disappointing event miniseries, but it hardly matters, you absolutely do not need to read it to enjoy Robert Gill delivering on the essentials. It's X-Force! It's got mutants dying in many grisly ways, Beast being the absolute worst, the romance and the drama of people who do violence for a living, and the occasional self-indulgent foray into Russian literature pastiche. Nothing has changed, not really, there's just more of it now because the current story arc is about a machine that feeds on mutant brains. It's great fun, especially if you like blood, but I know I'm not convincing anyone that isn't already reading the dang book.
So let's talk about Wolverine! Which for some godforsaken reason has turned into a Deadpool vehicle now. It's just old school Deadpool, in the grand tradition of Joe Kelly and Gail Simone. The old supporting cast is back, the jokes are turned to eleven and a lot of them are about ass, and he is more abrasive than you might be used to if all you've read is modern Deadpool. It is, in many ways, replaying the double act dynamic of Cable & Deadpool, except with one grumpy mutant swapped for another, way grumpier mutant. There is some sort of plot involving the CIA in there, which is carried over from previous issues, and which Percy thankfully sidesteps with a big reveal to make the action easier to follow. Oh, and, also, Adam Kubert draws it, and he's decided this was a project he was going to go all-out for. This is a beautifully laid out comic, in which all the tricks get pulled. There are beautiful repeated layouts, great paneling tricks, and the occasional 9-grid. It's all executed to the highest level, just a beautiful comic about Wolverine getting annoyed by some cartoon asshole. It's just about the most fun you can have until Marvel relaunches a Deadpool ongoing.
Over the course of its run, Excalibur became a book lost in the esoterica of the Otherworld that Claremont and Davis made. That in itself wasn't a problem until the later issues, when the high fantasy magic bullshit got in the way of everything else, culminating in the outright offensive issue #20, which is where I tapped out. All the best intentions in the world couldn't make up for the sheer amount of noxious nonsense you pulled with regards to Malice, and I just couldn't give a shit about the power struggles of made-up fantasy England. Eventually, I assume, they arrived to a proverbial fireworks factory, and said fireworks factory gave way to Knights of X, where the situation has stabilized into a more recognizable shape, which works in the book's favor by making it really easy to follow.
Because Knights of X, deep down, is really nothing more than an Arthuriana-flavored take on the most standard of X-Men melodrama. There are mutants, a world that hates and fears them so much they want them dead, and the brave heroes in their fortress that have sworn to rescue and protect them. With the catalyst for the book being a story weaponized by its heroes, this is a choice made on purpose, stories about stories on top of stories. That much is enough to keep me engaged, especially when Bob Quinn, fresh from his run on Way of X, gives it so much love and attention. The insane part of me is already at work reading something deeper into it: there is a very obvious lens of metaphor through which one could read this book, which is about the United Kingdom, and in which a minority of people, who don't fit into an established tradition, get mistreated and hunted down because of a perceived dangerous influence they may have on society. It is a book in which King Arthur complains about "losing his son" Mordred. Our heroes are headquartered in a place that's LITERALLY called "The Lavender Keep". You can tell me it's not about any ongoing moral panics. I can choose not to believe you.
Okay, you know what? I just realized that there is in fact something I care even less about than the power struggles of Otherworld. It's the history of the Shi'ar Empire and its royal family and how they relate to the origin of mutants on earth. Three guesses as to what Marauders is about. Yeah. It should be a slam dunk! It is Steve Orlando picking some leftover characters and riffing on some dangling Grant Morrison plot threads! There is something engrossingly sacrilegious about bringing Cassandra Nova back to the fray! There is something called "The Tenth Shame" in there! It is gay as hell! And yet, I can't bring myself to care about it, because it feels like one of the most navel-gazing books in a line that's already far too navel-gazey for its own good.
But let us keep our eyes gazing at the vastness of space, if only for a few moments more, to address X-Men Red, the sequel to S.W.O.R.D.. Free from having to run the whole of Cosmic Marvel, and not having to tie into any currently ongoing events, Al Ewing is presumably writing exactly the comic he wants to do. As it turns out, he and Stefano Caselli want to make a pretty good comic! It's got the two main staples of an Al Ewing Team Comic, which are barely explained continuity pulls of varying depth, and character not so much having conversations as much as they are intensely posturing at one another in a perpetual contest to sound like the coolest and most badass version of themselves. To some, this will be exhausting. I couldn't get enough of it, however, and I am not about to apologize for that. Plus: there is some much needed fleshing out of Arakko, its people and its society in there, which is extremely cool.
I don't know what to make of New Mutants, which is why it's going here. We've covered Vita Ayala's run on here before, and as far as that first new issue goes, nothing has changed: it is a comic for X-Men oldheads, following up on old X-Men stories and finding ways to give them a satisfying conclusion. This new arc is about Magik, and it allows Rod Reis to flex with crazy creature designs, and mindblowing infernal landscapes. If nothing else, this is the most formally ambitious book in all of Destiny of X, keeping in the tradition of Sienkiewicz, and working in several different modes of storytelling in really cool ways. I don't know that it is for me, but it is really well made, and so here it is.
So let's finish with the book that has delayed this address for several weeks: Legion of X, which is exactly as strange as its pitch of "a police procedural set in a post-policing society" makes it sound. All the trappings are there, the briefing room where everything happens, the two partners that somehow get along despite all their differences, the testimonies from traumatized witnesses, the forensic evidence collector with an attitude, everything you know and love is there, but Krakoa, and eventually, Arakko, twist it in unexpected shapes. Where Way of X was a series of philosophical thought experiments interrogating the three laws of Krakoa, Legion is about what happens when the laws are put into action. Except maybe it's not? It's more about authority, in the general sense, and what we want from it. What do we want from our police? From our political leaders? From our parents? From our GODS? Those are big questions, presented in a familiar yet unfamiliar package so you don't realize you're thinking about them. It's shockingly clever, is what I'm trying to say.
In conclusion: yeah it's comics. It's good comics. The X-Men line has good comics. The state of the X-Men is good. Happy?
Are you still there? I don't know that I'm still here. If I am, and if you are, then thanks you so much for your patience, for all of it. This is late, self-indulgent, and I did not fully think it through before launching into it. So it's the usual! Thank you so much for reading this, thank you so much for telling your friends about it, please keep subscribing and telling your friends to subscribe! It's good stuff! The good comics will not stop! Be thankful! Be merry! HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS!