X-Men In General

Yeah! I loved watching the nation itself develop, as though it were a character.

It’s sad to think that after pretty good runs on Deadpool and Avengers, Duggan sorta Zeb Wells himself with his handling of X-Men ever since he was made one of the primary writers for the main storyline.

Out of the Krakoa era, I’d say Dugganm Toni Howard, and Ben Percy are probably the worst writers out of the whole batch.

I don't think Hickman ever intended Krakoa to be "rotten". He just intended it to be morally grey and develop into something better over time probably, as others have observed and I have observed before. Hickman's Krakoa had a lot of questionable elements and bad actors, but that was the point and you were rooting for the genuinely good characters to make a change. And yeah, Krakoa represented something really special not just in-story, but on an out-of-universe level (since it marked the X-Men finally making their way back to Marvel's A-List and quality storytelling after the horrors of M-Day and Perlmutter). And not only that, but on a practical level Krakoa was really useful; it provided a perfect "homebase" around which all the books could operate and where characters not in-use could be placed in standby. In a very short amount of time, it basically became the X-Men equivalent of Gotham, a setting that's almost as much of a character as all the actual characters.

I guess what I'm saying is, burning it all down just to get back to the -Post-M-Day-esque status quo Hickman fought so hard to destroy because it fucking sucked and has always sucked is a huge mistake and I'm still praying From The Ashes isn't actually going full scorched earth with it and Krakoa will still exist just more as a background thing.

X-Men 33: Ahahahaha rest in pieces Devo! So the last of the original Petals left is Feilong; wonder if next week’s Iron Man will take care of him or if he’ll stick around?

Wasn't he a victim, a puppet of Omega Sentinel who'd been brainwashed into believing he was from the future?

Does it acknowledge that?

Devo getting casually and humiliatingly offed like that really highlights the thing I've flagged up with how Duggan and co have completely demolished all the nuance Hickman wrote the series with, how they've completely ignored Hickman's own work in favor of pushing their own, and how they seem to be largely just working through a checklist at this point. Hickman wrote Devo as a genuinely likable and sympathetic individual with understandable motives and pretty much a flatscan version of Professor X, on top of revealing that he was actually a victim of Omega Sentinel, a kind humanitarian who was brainwashed to think he came from a Bad Future where mutants were evil. He seemed to have plans for the character. But not only did he basically stop existing after Hickman left only to pop back up just to die, but he's treated as nothing more than an evil piece of shit who deserves to be slaughtered. It's infuriating.

Nope. It's not acknowledged at all.

Edited by immortaleditor on Apr 3rd 2024 at 8:21:48 AM

Devo and Gregor definitely seem like they’d have had bigger roles if Hickman had stayed on. They’re the only two Petals created by him, and the “nicest,” relatively speaking, of the bunch.

It still feels like Ewing and Gillen are a little closer to Hickman's ideas. Maybe Foxe as well, as he's using the infinity comics to tie up many, many loose ends.

And Percy was doing his own thing all along.

Most people attribute the grayness going out of the Krakoa-Orchis conflict simply to Duggan being less talented, or at least less capable of writing nuance, than Hickman, but I’ve also heard speculation it might have been due to George Floyd’s murder and the resurgence of BLM, which happened about a year into Krakoa; the idea being that they decided doing Villain Has a Point with what was effectively a hate group, if a fantasy one, wasn’t worth it in the current climate.

Edited by HamburgerTime on Apr 3rd 2024 at 10:39:25 AM

Yeah, that's my feeling. Ewing and Gillen have always seemed like they were on the same page as Hickman in regards to what the Krakoan Age was supposed to be, but they're pretty much the only two, or at least, the only two who wrote for the era consistently (Zeb Wells, Foxe, and Victor Lavelle all seemed to get it too, but they didn't write on a regular basis). Everyone else seems totally off-base with what Hickman started. Like I said awhile back, I think the seeds of this were planted years ago and that Hickman just made some very bad decisions when picking out the writing team.

That's stupid because Orchis wasn't written as a hate group, at least no more than Krakoa was. But I also totally believe that was part of the thought process behind some of the writers wiping out the grayness, even if it's dumb. I could also make a lot of comments about the BLM thing, but I don't feel like opening that can of worms here, things would get way too heated and too far off-topic.

Edited by immortaleditor on Apr 3rd 2024 at 8:57:44 AM

It's just a group that hired bigots, and now it's suffering the consequences of that.

As it should.

Edited by MorningStar1337 on Apr 3rd 2024 at 8:54:14 AM

Yeah, but then you have to say the same about Krakoa. Or are we trying to pretend they didn't have several different variety of mass-murderer and racist sitting on their government council, including one guy who canonically actively partook in the Holocaust?

To be fair, that was a “bite the bullet” scenario for the sake of the Resurrection Protocols, it’s not like they’d have WANTED him there otherwise…

The BLM comparison is even sillier because of what's happening now with the more apt allegory for Krakoa. And to be controversial, I'd guess that those who are totally down for mass murdering ORCHIS without any guilt have different opinions about those current events.

Please don’t do that; trying to read people’s IRL views based entirely on fandom is annoying to me.

Perhaps, but than you can't dismiss it when Orchis has to "bite the bullet" and include bigots in their organization out of pragmatism in the same way. You can't go "to be fair" when the mutants invite a Nazi onto their leadership but than act like Orchis is objectively in the wrong for doing the same thing. Literally the same thing, considering both sides had Sinisters near the top.

What I'm highlighting here is how Hickman purposefully wrote the mutants and humans as Mirroring Factions as part of the theme of how foolish the bigotry between them was - as Omega Sentinel and Nimrod point out in Inferno, for all that the mutants and humans go on about being different, they act exactly the same, and ultimately the sentinels act the same too. Flatscans, muties, robots, transhumans... they're all just humans, no matter how much they pretend otherwise. But increasingly after he left, there's this massive Protagonist-Centered Morality where everyone in-universe and out just kinda acts like the mutants weren't doing all the same horrible things the humans and machines are doing now.

I actually do agree with most of this; stuff like Polaris being treated as a YASS QUEEN for unleashing the Brood on the Orchis goons is pretty cringe.

Re: Devo.

Black Swan flashbacks. When she got introduced by Hickman, Black Swan's goal was to stop the incursions at any cost and find a safe dimension to resurrect her family- again, at any cost. Now, she's a member of the Black Order and isn't resurrecting or even mentioning her family because... the Black Order is her new family. No, really, that was the given justification.

Yeah, that kind of Villain Decay where a villain is written with a unique motive by their initial creator and than are treated by subsequent (and usually worse) writers as just a Generic Doomsday Villain is sadly common.

I'm reminded of something Dan Slott talked about in an interview with how comic villains have a nasty habit of going from having proper motives and plotlines to being "one of five guys robbing a bank" in the Batman Cold Open of an issue. And he subsequently joked that he'd like to write a story that opens with five supervillains robbing a bank and one of the guys is Galactus.

This actually happened in a recent DC issue - the main characters crash a Bad Guy Bar and among the customers are Chemo, a barely-sentient kaiju now shrunken down to human size with no explanation, and the Upside Down Man, an Eldritch Abomination comparable in power to the major crossover villains who would realistically just be there to eat everyone else.

Oops, to be fair I got this impression scrolling down twitter on #Xspoilers. You see the aforementioned yaas queen Polaris post, scroll down their page, and there you go. Although generally I think it's absurd to say that opinions on such a deeply, intrinsically political work like this doesn't have any bearing on personal political opinions. YMMV

Edited by raykoda16 on Apr 3rd 2024 at 9:26:09 AM

I recall that being discussed over in the DC thread and taking part in that talk .

Edited by immortaleditor on Apr 3rd 2024 at 9:25:05 AM

I've probably mentioned this before, but I do wonder if the Krakoan fear of AI is going to be revisited harshly in future stories.

One story in Wells' Hellions had the team ordered to murder a group of AIs - robot soldiers for The Right that had grown beyond their anti-mutant programming and become free-willed and more benevolent. But Krakoa's leadership didn't want to take the chance. AI is bad and must be extinguished. Greycrow was shown to be pretty uncomfortable with that order.

I have to wonder how, say, Vision would interpret that.

(Many, many years back, Gillen's first Iron Man run included a confrontation with robot bounty hun—er, I mean freelance peacekeeping agent — Death's Head, who challenged Tony on whether his "no murdering enemies" code only applied to organic life. I was hoping Krakoa would give us something similar)

I think the mindset and the PCM might stem from the following factors.

• The mutants are coded as underprivileged minorities in most story's since Claremont. There is a running idea in some circles that bigotry, specifically racism, needs both privilege and power. It is possible that the writers subscribed to the idea and think the Krakoans justified because they are still a minority and thus lacked the privilege to be racist
  • There are some holes in that reasoning. First of which being that mutants weren't a minority in Krakoa itself. The argument could be made that they had more privilege than assumed in the time Krakoa existed and they therefore qualified here. It is a matter of context.
• The more likely factor is that the X-Men are to this day seen as heroes, so there is some bias towards them that would lead to PCM and erasure of nuances. Also, Unlike the pre Krakoa era which saw the X-Men fighting their allies, there is an actual antagonist here. That meant they had less room to be shunted in the role of (anti-)villain protagonist in comparison and that their deeds would be painted more favorably. Especially in the wake of an ongoing adaptation and possible MCU integration.

I can see it being possible, especially given how topical it would be to creatives like the guys writing the comics to begin with.

Edited by MorningStar1337 on Apr 3rd 2024 at 9:31:54 AM