This week, for the first time in about 20 years, I picked up a current issue of a comic. It was X-Men 35, or in Legacy Numbering, Uncanny X-Men 700, and it was intended as both the epilogue to the last five years of X-Men stories, and the intro to the coming era.
The reason I picked it up, rather than waiting a few months for it to appear on Marvel Unlimited, was that it felt important to grab an issue that was a milestone, both in terms of numbering and in terms of storytelling. For the former, I like the idea that X-Men has reached 700 issues, despite all the reboots over the past few decades. The original run of Uncanny ran, unbroken, from 1963 to 2011, with a few stints where it was bimonthly and then other periods when it would go biweekly during the summers, like a lot of Marvel titles did at the time. I consider it too bad that Marvel's been so ready to reboot titles to give collectors a number-one issue every couple of years - DC does it too, but it feels like Marvel's worse about it? I'll be better able to rule on this when I eventually subscribe to DC's app.
But I like the idea that, despite all the reboots and relaunches, and the thicket of "core" X-Men titles, Marvel is recognizing that its flagship and biggest seller for so many years has reached 700 issues.
In story terms, as I said, it's the epilogue to the Krakoan era, which kicked off in 2019 under Jonathan Hickman. It's actually a little silly of me to have bought it and read it now, since I'm still reading through the Krakoa stories; I've effectively jumped straight to the end of the story. But as I've said before, I don't mind spoilers so much, if I can still appreciate the journey to the end of the story.
What I like about Hickman's work on X-Men is that it felt like an attempt to do something big and new and innovative with the book, something that hadn't really been seen since Grant Morrison's run on New X-Men, which ended 20 years ago. Like New X-Men, the House of X/Krakoa era wanted to introduce a new status quo and a new way of looking at X-Men stories - rather than purely superhero shenanigans, it would be a science fiction story with a dash of Game of Thrones. It would take everything that came before, throw it in a blender with some new ideas and some logical extremes for certain X-Men tropes from way back in the Chris Claremont era, and see what the result looked like.
The result looked like a mishmash of good stories and blah stories - and, if some of the commentary I've seen or heard on the internet is to be believed, some duff storytelling as they tried to wrap it all up. But it was also a story told with deep love and understanding of the characters and the themes they represent. By putting the traditional "good guys" and "bad guys" on the same side as they built the mutant nation of Krakoa, they found new ways to examine the motivations of many of these characters - I especially liked what they did with Apocalypse, who's generally been portrayed as one of the most evil mutants, but who hearkens back in this storyline to a comic from the 80s that seemed to cast his motivation (ensuring that the strong destroy the weak) as his own misguided way of protecting mutants.
Another thing I liked about the Krakoan era was that it kind of bridged the gap between the eras that I know and the stuff in between. Before I began my X-Men reread last November, I was familiar with bits of the early Claremont era, the Outback era, and the Blue and Gold team era, when the original five members returned to the team. I was also familiar with New X-Men, but didn't really know how to bridge the gap between that and what came before it. I also didn't really know anything about what came after it, apart from having looked at various issues here and there over the years.
Under Hickman's supervision, the creative teams found a use for almost all of the characters and teams I knew back in the 90s. They also managed to update them while also filling in some gaps but also being faithful to the way the characters were back in the 80s or 90s. One example is the New Mutants: characters like Cannonball and Wolfsbane have clearly moved on from their confusion and angst as teenagers, but their newly confident versions feel organic and earned.
I could say the same for characters like Scott Summers and Jean Grey, about whom I go back and forth: sometimes I think they're Marvel's greatest and most enduring pairing (even more than Reed Richards and Sue Storm), other times I think they need distance from one another. Whichever way I feel about their relationship at any given time, the comics of the last few years (which, incidentally, I've only started reading in the last six months) have looked at the relationship from both those angles.
Speaking of relationships, the main tone of the X-books under Hickman was one of joy, and nowhere more so than in depicting queer relationships, but also exploring friendships among various characters that haven't been thrown together before. In other shows and books, it sometimes feels like the woke stuff is shoehorned in, but (apart from one or two cases) here it all felt organic. That's important for the X-Men, in particular: because the theme of the book has always been about outsiders and found family, it has acted as a stand-in for all kinds of social justice causes. Apparently, back in the 70s and 80s and 90s, Chris Claremont wanted to depict queer relationships in the X-books, but editorial prohibited it, so it feels like justice that the current teams have managed to introduce a lot of those stories that he pioneered - my favorite being the revelation that Mystique is not Nightcrawler's mother, but rather (thanks to her shapeshifting powers) his father.
There were things I didn't love about the Krakoan era. For all that I liked the emphasis on celebrating mutant culture and getting everyone on side, I would have liked to see the "hated and feared" part sidelined more. Around the time I started rereading my old X-books, I had this idea of giving the X-Men the "Star Trek treatment", i.e. depicting a true utopia where mutants are accepted and live in peace alongside humans. When I first heard of Krakoa, I thought Hickman was doing just that, but instead he maintained the idea that the humans would continue to stop at nothing to eradicate the mutants.
I don't want to claim that this is unrealistic, because every advance in social justice in real life consists of steps forward and steps back. You see this in race relations and LGBTQ+ issues. But I was hoping that we could see more of a cooling off, just as a way to show how a better world is possible.
Also, the main anti-mutant faction, Orchis, didn't seem to have much motivation beyond hating mutants. They felt nihilistic rather than well-rounded - which makes sense given that Mr Sinister was a key player in Orchis. But when I say nihilistic, I mean that the violence inflicted on the mutants during these years feels excessive - Orchis built space stations around the sun and colonized moons of Mars, all in a bid to eradicate mutants, but somehow it just never felt organic to their characters.
There were also a couple of books that petered out, despite having started strongly. In one case, it felt like a showcase for a queer relationship that, when I initially read about it, felt like a good idea, but in practice felt like a slog to read and the writer didn't seem to have much sense of either of the participants' personalities. This was disappointing because the book in question started out as a compelling read, addressing a lot of character arcs that were fun.
(BTW I'm purposely not naming the books because I don't want to be associated with the bad-faith trolls who talk shit about everything these writers do)
But enough about the negatives. Krakoa was all about joy and celebration, which is in short supply in comics in general, let alone the famously angsty X-Men. Like Chris Claremont and Grant Morrison, Jonathan Hickman aimed for the fences with his time on the books, and mostly hit home runs. Excalibur, Hellions, Marauders, New Mutants - these are the books I've read the most, and thought they were wonderful, full of good characterization and fun.
I wish some of the structural issues, like Orchis, had been addressed, so that we could have had it last longer. I worry that the coming "From the Ashes" era is going back to how the X-books were between Claremont and Morrison's runs, but I also appreciate the creators that have been hired to steer the books in the next few years. I may wait a little to pick those up, so that I can catch up with the rest of Krakoa, but I hope that the X-Men books are properly back, and won't be subject to a set of wilderness years like they did after Claremont left and again after Morrison left.
And I hope, one day, to be able to write my own chapter in the X-saga. That'd be fun, wouldn't it?
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