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For the first time in centuries, the entertainment I expected most was a handful of monthly comics about the X-Men. Week after week this fall – absolutely a time lousy with great books, movies, TV shows, and video games – what I really wanted the most was to pour words and pictures on Marvel Comics’ deep mutant list, and a story about them that I have never seen it before.
It can’t be underestimated how bold and interesting the X-Men comics are right now. After a smooth reboot of the 2019 twin miniseries written by Jonathan Hickman with illustrations by RB Silva and Pepe Larraz, House of X and Powers of X (the best place to start reading), the mutants of the Marvel Universe have banded together to form the mutant nation of Krakoa. They have decided that they are tired of waiting for humanity as a whole to accept their existence and instead are going to build a place for themselves whether humanity as a whole likes it or not.
These mutants – former heroes of the X-Men superhero team and their former opponents – banded together on the grounds of a living island (also known as Krakoa) to begin the messy nation-building business. There is a new language, new rituals, new beliefs – the building blocks of a culture are created in real time. The results were some of the best comics of the year, full of political intrigue, love stories spanning millennia, and yes, even a whole series (Maruaders by Gerry Duggan and a range of killer artists) on pirates.
This messy and complicated new status quo is comics at its best, packed with possibilities and things to dream of. He even did a 22-part crossover – the absolute worst stunt modern superhero comics love to do – absolutely convincing. X of swords, as this crossover was called, dragged this new nation into a magical struggle in an unknown world, as the X-Men were forced into a tournament where they had to fight challengers with swords. It was the premise that was meant to fuel twenty-two whole comics, and they absolutely did, overturning all expectations of what a story like this might involve along the way.
Most of the fun of these comics comes from seeing how the whole world reacts to Krakoa’s existence, and some of the conflicts are wild. In an early X Men story, Krakoa is overrun by an aged trio of radical super-botanists named Hordeculture (seriously). In X-Men # 4 – one of the first and best comics released in 2020 – Krakoa leaders travel to Davos and dress the world’s economic leaders over dinner. In the most action-oriented X-Force, Krakoa is threatened by international black ops squads sent in by people who see Krakoa as a time bomb.
But above all, in a year full of news that has been a non-stop assault on anyone but a few – mostly white, mostly wealthy – the X-Men comics were a joy, simply because they are one. story of characters who by definition (all great X-Men history must note how much they are hated and feared), are always losing and eventually showed them refusing to play the same broken game.
“The world told me I was less when I knew I was more,” Cyclops says, from the start. House of X. “Did you honestly think we were going to just sit there forever and just take it?”
Part of what makes the X-Men endure is that there is a certain malleability in the mutant metaphor. For years fans and writers have compared the X-Men to the struggle for civil rights; more recently the metaphor has been adopted as an exploration of queerness. No matter how you read them, if you come some kind of a marginalized group, it’s easy to identify with the seemingly futile struggle of having to advocate for yourself and for others in spaces that are hostile to you, spaces to which you should belong without the systemic injustices that you feel. have excluded. I’m fed up with the fight for diversity in spaces that are only interested in the perspective of diversity. There is something cathartic and beautiful about a story where Cyclops – the face of the X-Men for roughly 60 years of their existence – says we’re all done taking it. He’s found an answer he believes in, and he’s going to do the work to make it happen.
It also helps that currently the X-Men are only about the comics. Of course, they still belong to Disney and since The new mutants released this year, their previous movie franchise isn’t even that far in the rearview mirror. But they also aren’t a slide on a presentation on the next four years of the Marvel Cinematic Universe yet, at least for a little while. They are not reminiscent of their owner’s stranglehold on the entertainment industry at large. Right now, they just feel like stories made for anyone curious enough to read them. Stories for people who are trying to find an answer they believe in, to build a world they want to make real.
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