The only interesting thing Marvel Comics did in 2019 was finally take a firm grip of their X-Men line - which has been floundering aimlessly for years with numerous silly and pointless death/marriage/VS storylines - and unify it with a suitably epic new storyline. I’m sure Marvel saw the success DC have had by giving stewardship of their entire Superman line to Brian Michael Bendis who breathed new life into that icon for a new audience, so they brought back a big name to come back and take over their entire X-Men line: Jonathan Hickman. House of X and Powers of X are his opening two six-issue runs that complement one another into a sprawling, ambitious 12-issue vision of the X-Men for 2020 and beyond. And… eh, I wasn’t that taken with it. Largely because it’s 12 issues of non-story!
Krakoa (itself an island-sized mutant) is now the home of mutants everywhere. Xavier has unified all mutants - including the likes of Magneto, Apocalypse and the Hellfire Club - under his leadership and they seek recognition as their own sovereign nation, indeed their own race, with their own language, laws and culture. But why have they all come together so suddenly? Because, through Moira MacTaggert, a mutant whose power is reincarnation, Xavier has learned of what the future holds for mutantkind and he is preparing them all to face it - and survive.
Jonathan Hickman is really good at world-building but he is lousy when it comes to telling a simple story. Almost all of this massive book is taken up with how and why Krakoa came to be and I really didn’t care. In the same way that I’m not too fussed with how Xavier’s come back to life for the umpteenth time and other nitpicky details that I won’t go into here, I’m not bothered with how this situation came to pass - I’m happy to be told broadly without endlessly going into the finer details. But Hickman insists and so too much of this book is devoted to seeing things like Xavier convincing various mutant characters to join his cause one by one, assembling personnel to build the Krakoan infrastructure and announcing to the world the intentions of Krakoa, even though the opening chapter firmly established all of this. It’s soooo tedious to slog through so much exposition and dull detail.
Of the two titles, I preferred House of X because Powers of X mostly focuses on the distant future where mutants are - surprise surprise - under attack from killer robots yet again, and I didn’t understand half of what was happening. There’s a blue man who talks about godhood, there are giant shadow monster aliens that dissolve worlds, there are sentient sadistic robots called Nimrods - uh huh, and the point is…? It seems like it’s just a repeat of the classic mutants vs Sentinels (albeit updated) scenario with Hickman’s pretentious, convoluted and plain bad sci-fi mixed in - I hated all of that Year 100 and Year 1000 stuff. And I didn’t like the future X-Men characters either - a Colossus/Magik hybrid, a female Xorn, etc. They were just boring, uninspired and derivative.
Out of twelve issues, only two parts really stand out for me: the first is a confrontation between Cyclops and the Fantastic Four in the first issue over how to deal with Sabretooth, who’s just been on a bloody burglary and Cyclops is trying to get the FF to hand Creed over to him and, understandably, they’re not willing to. The second, and best, part of the book though is the daring raid on the Mother Mold.
A Master Mold is a Sentinel factory - a Mother Mold is a Master Mold factory. A faction of rogue scientists from AIM, SHIELD, and other groups have set up a Mother Mold in space - Cyclops leads a team to destroy it as the Mother Mold, besides the dangers it poses in the present, has implications for the future of mutantkind (the Year 100 and Year 1000 stuff). It’s an exciting and genuinely gripping set piece with a surprising coda.
But most of the book is repetitious, dreary world-building with way too much detail. The comics pages are interspersed with dozens of text and graphic pages full of irrelevant detail. Hickman’s created his own mutant language, which, while impressive, is too much - for me anyway, I’m sure Hickman fans live for this kind of stuff. Do we need to read about the different types of galactic societies? The different types of Mister Sinister? (Actually, Hickman’s campy Mister Sinister was another highlight for me.) How the UN voted on whether or not Krakoa should be recognised as a sovereign nation (two pages for something we were just told the page before!)?
I’m just not impressed with this kind of stuff. When I look at the actual story, and not the excessive fluff surrounding it, Hickman’s not doing anything that brilliant. A mutant nation state has been done before - Genosha and Utopia - and the doorways the mutants use to teleport around the planet - simply Krakoan plants - are flimsy at best. What’s stopping anyone from burning these plants down or digging them up, thus eliminating the portal?
The X-Men paradigm used to be Xavier as MLK, the non-violent advocate for progressivism, and Magneto as Malcolm X, the violent leader for homo superior dominance. Hickman’s Xavier is now even more radical than Magneto ever was (and, as if to underline that point, he’s given Xavier a Cerebro helmet that makes him look like The Maker, the evil Reed Richards from Hickman’s previous Marvel books).
So Hickman’s vision of the X-Men is to turn them all into dogmatic, weirdly religious (they have rituals and things now) villains. That’s not to say they’re juxtaposed with any heroes - the only thing approaching that is the Fantastic Four in the first chapter - so it’s a book filled with nothing but villains. I’m not totally opposed to that idea - villains are usually more interesting than heroes - but I also wasn’t rooting for anyone here. I don’t really like any of the characters and I don’t like how they all seem to simmer with barely-checked hostility towards anyone who isn’t a mutant. It’s like they’ve become what they always stood against: the definition of prejudice.
I really enjoyed Pepe Larraz’s artwork on House of X - definitely his best work so far - and quite liked RB Silva’s art on Powers of X. There are a couple decent set-pieces and the tone of the book is deeply grand, slick and cinematic - like a comics version of a JJ Abrams picture. Overall though with House of X/Powers of X Jonathan Hickman does what he always does: takes a meandering, complicated route to tell a not very interesting pseudo-story that’s really all set-up for something further down the line that probably won’t pay off.
No comments:
Post a Comment