Saturday, April 4, 2020 by Paul in x-axis Posted onby Paul in

So, then. We find the X-books at a strange time, in an involuntary hiatus brought about by the Covid-19 lockdown, which has interrupted distribution of new comics. Presumably publication will resume in due course; in the meantime, I suppose we’re spared a series of issues that would read like missives from a parallel universe.

In the meantime, let’s take stock of where the books have reached, starting with X-Men itself – written by Jonathan Hickman and drawn, for the most part, by Leinil Francis Yu.

It’s an odd book, and one that only seems to make sense if Hickman has a very long game in mind – the sort of storyline where you don’t want a major historical event to come along in the middle, but so it goes. X-Men #1 is not, of course, Hickman’s debut. It follows on twelve issues of House of X and Powers of X, which established the immediate set-up of Krakoa, together with the grand themes and cosmic framework that seems to drive Hickman’s run. Those series take place on the grand scale, with individual characters getting less space to shine – and Hickman’s X-Men does indeed shift the focus more towards individual characters.

But you might also expect that with the set-up complete, X-Men would be the lynchpin book where the grand story of the Hickman-era X-books plays out. Instead, it turns out to be an episodic book which hints at that bigger story rather than explicitly telling it. Every issue seems to play in some way into the bigger themes, but there’s no particularly clear through-line in X-Men itself from issue to issue. There isn’t even an X-Men team; the cast of X-Men is pretty much whoever’s passing, though Cyclops seems to be at the core.

Let’s look at what we’ve had. Issue #1 puts the Children of the Vault into play, and establishes the Summers family’s living arrangements. Issue #2 is the one where Scott, Rachel and Nate fight giant monsters on the new neighbouring atoll. Issue #3 is Hordeculture. Issue #4 is the Davos issue. Issue #5 is the second Children of the Vault issue. Issue #6 is Mystique. Issue #7 is the Crucible. And issues #8-9 are the Brood two-parter – the only multi-part story in the series so far, and one which serves mainly to establish a new status quo for the Brood.

These are, for the most part, small stories that gesture in the direction of a larger storyline that remains in the background. Even after twelve issues of lead-in, Hickman’s first nine issues are principally concerned with still more set-up, bringing even more new elements into play – the Children of the Vault, the island of monsters, the Crucible, Hordeculture, the Brood. HoXPoX already seemed to be carefully arranging a number of guns on the mantelpiece; by this point, Hickman seems to be trying to balance a small arsenal on it.

But even though the main storyline is making slow progress at best, X-Men depends on that main storyline to make these issues work. A couple, like the Mystique issue or the second Children issue, are so entwined with the bigger picture that they can’t really stand alone. Others can technically be read in isolation, but they’re quite slight – like Hordeculture, or the Brood issues (which suffer from the fact that the Brood are treated as a faceless horde, so that the X-Men might as well be fighting a swarm of space locusts). The more comedy-driven issues are patchy too – issue #2 is a total misfire, where all the characters seem detached from reality, while Hordeculture’s “foul-mouthed old ladies” schtick wears thin rather quickly.

It’s not all one way, though. The Davos issue is very strong, and continues to play with the tension between our natural inclination to side with the X-Men (particularly when people are trying to kill them), and the fact that they’re behaving in a deeply arrogant way even towards the people who are trying to engage with them sensibly. The X-Men under Hickman are Krakoa First, with a very dubious tendency to keep asserting mutant superiority, and an ideology that attracts the sympathy of not just Magneto, but Apocalypse. The warning signs that all is not well are all over the place, and Hickman may well be engaging in an experiment in how far you can push the readers’ instinct to side with the X-Men, and back the underdog. The whole point of the Krakoa set-up, of course, is that they’re not the underdogs any more – it inverts that central part of the X-Men mythos – and we’re going to see if the world really would be any better with them in charge.

The Crucible issue pushes that further than anything else so far, with the X-Men tacitly endorsing (despite half-hearted reservations) ritual suicide. We’re given all sorts of reasons why this cultural institution has to be put in place for pragmatic reasons – it gives depowered mutants a route to reincarnation while discouraging them from committing suicide in droves. But it’s glaringly horrible and deeply disturbing, and surely a large part of the point is to have the X-Men acting as if it presents a difficult moral dilemma when in reality it does nothing of the sort – the answer is perfectly obvious.

The art is… hit and miss. Visually, my favourite issue of this bunch is issue #5, which is a fill-in by R B Silva. The splash pages with the Vault sequences and the weird purple lighting effects are beautiful, even if you do need a working knowledge of Hickman’s Ultimates run to understand the significance of it all. Matteo Buffagni’s Mystique issue is nicely underplayed too. Leinil Francis Yu’s art isn’t quite so well suited to the material; there’s something rather brittle about his art that doesn’t exactly say “island paradise.” He’s not a great artist for selling comedy, either. On the other hand, his work seems more at home on the Davos and Brood issues, where a certain distance feels appropriate – and in the Davos issue, he does pull off an extended conversation scene with decent subtlety.

As with HoXPoX, indeed perhaps even more so, everything depends in your confidence in where it’s all heading – and also your willingness to see that play out. These are single issues, but they depend on that bigger context in order to work. For me, Hickman is still managing to sell the idea of a grand plan, and a sense that all this is heading somewhere – the unusually coherent approach of all the other X-books helps to reinforce that sense. It’s that bigger picture that helps to make it seem intentional when the X-Men appear to be acting out of character, and that keeps my attention through the weaker individual issues.

If you don’t buy into that, of course, then you’re likely to be losing patience by now. And counting the lead-ins, we’re over twenty issues into the Hickman run by now (plus all the spin-off titles) – we could probably use a bit more momentum on the bigger picture by now.

X-Men is often deeply flawed on the micro level, but continues to hold up on the grand scale. And on that level, it’s such an inventively radical take on the X-Men that it can get away with a lot. If you buy into it, at any rate.