(This continues from Part 1 and Part 2.)

After a lot of preamble, let’s get to it. When we read the Krakoa era of X-Men, what are we supposed to be reading?

Sidenote: I won’t tell you exactly how long it took me to figure out what to read and exactly how to read it, by the way. I’m not sure why this is the norm in comics, but the companies that want you to read these books, for some reason, don’t want to also make it easier for you to figure out how to read them.

Instead, they leave it to fan websites that painstakingly track releases and timelines to compile a coherent reading order for people like me who, years after the original publication, decide to do things like trying to read the X-Men Krakoa era, or Jason Aaron’s Thor, or Jonathan Hickman’s Avengers or, god forbid, Brian Michael Bendis’s Avengers.

I consulted several different online reading orders for this. The best one – and this is the site I refer to most times I want to figure out how to read long, convoluted runs like those mentioned above or an event comic like House of M or Spider-Verse or Secret Wars – is from Comic Book Herald. Even so, I was adding new books to the list till hours before I posted this.

Anyway, back to the topic.

So, the Krakoa era can be roughly divided into 6 phases:

1. House of X/Powers of X
2. Dawn of X
3. Reign of X
4. Destiny of X
5. Fall of X
6. Fall of the House of X/Rise of the Powers of X

These are the banners under which the books were launched, and each forms a definite step in the overall arc of Krakoa. This doesn’t mean that each and every book published within any particular era ties into the uber-story of that era – a lot of books are on the side doing their own thing – but this is the status quo under which each book is operating.

To make things more complicated, Marvel released a few “flashback” mini-series in this period that were set not in Krakoa, but in the past of the X-Men, rather than letting this revolutionary paradigm stand on its own. I haven’t included these series in my reading, but there were times when it was confusing to figure out which ones belonged and which ones didn’t. I might still have got some wrong, in fact.

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Let’s take these eras one at a time:

1. House of X/Powers of X

You cannot follow the Krakoa era without reading this book. Even if you could, why would you want to? This is where you get to know the status quo that everything after it operates under, where most of the interesting things about the Krakoa era are seeded and where the big questions are asked, on top of which it’s a cracking good read. (I got a couple of terse messages from readers after Part 1 in which I referred to it as “decent”, but stick with me, I’ll make it better.)

This consists of two series written by Jonathan Hickman that were released weekly, but not exactly alternating with each other. Each issue came with an indication of what to read next, but they’ve been collected together in a paperback and a now-out-of-print hardcover:

• House of X/Powers of X by Jonathan Hickman, Pepe Larraz and R. B. Silva

2. Dawn of X

This is the first phase of books exploring the consequences of HoX/PoX. HoX/PoX set up the story engine, this shows us what the engine is good for.

Most of the series launched in the Krakoa era get their names either from previous X-Men comics (like X-Force, Excalibur etc.) or from crossovers published in the past – e.g. Marauders was a team of villains, Trial of Magneto and Inferno were stories that ran through X-Men comics. Most of the time, the intention is to subvert what one expects a comic of that name to be given the history.

Dawn of X consists of the following series (for expediency, I will only be naming the writers of these series, because there are usually many artists for each one, and also, this is how Marvel advertises them):

• X-Men by Jonathan Hickman (including Giant-Size X-Men)
• Marauders by Gerry Duggan
• X-Force by Benjamin Percy
• Excalibur by Tini Howard
• Fallen Angels by Bryan Edward Hill
• New Mutants by Jonathan Hickman & Ed Brisson
• Hellions by Zeb Wells
• X-Men/Fantastic Four: 4X by Chip Zdarsky
• Wolverine by Benjamin Percy
• Cable by Gerry Duggan
• X-Factor by Leah Williams

You know, I said in one of the previous posts that there were a lot of books in Dawn of X, but holy shit, that’s a lot of books. Nine ongoing series, one ongoing that was truncated, and one mini-series. Which doesn’t include:

• Empyre: X-Men – A discrete mini-series created to tie into Marvel’s then-current event Empyre without interrupting the Krakoa stories, though it’s very much set within the Krakoa era. Each issue was written by a different collaborative team and then handed over to the next.
• X of Swords – A crossover event that took over the entire line for 22 issues and ended the Dawn of X era.

When we look at this lack of moderation, we have to consider the circumstances of the COVID pandemic. During its early months, all of American comics distribution ground to a stop for about a month and a half, and many publishers cut down on their publication output (#PencilsDown trended on Twitter for a while, in good and bad ways). Marvel moved several of their mini-series to digital-only, and many series were cancelled, as were the launches of many new series and mini-series.

The Krakoa era X-Men launch had been successful enough not to warrant cancellation, but even that underwent skip months (months where no issues were published, either due to supply chain issues or paper shortages). So there was a short duration when the mutant books were a majority of Marvel’s output, which goes some way to explain the number of books – the publisher knew these would be successful, given the success of HoX/PoX and the fanfare around Dawn of X. This also resulted in X of Swords being retooled from a much shorter event tying into fewer books into the 22-issue behemoth we got, which is excessive by any measure.

Even apart from those realities, though, this is where the creators’ plans and the publisher’s plans started diverging. Hickman did not want his X-Men book to be called that, for example, and he didn’t want it to be seen as the spine of the era, which it inevitably was, given he was writing it and it was called X-Men.

He also didn’t want the big blow-out launch with so many books launched at once. His idea was to introduce the concept of each book in his series, and then each of those would be spun off into their own book. The only artefact of this that remains is that X-Men follows a single-issue story structure for its first several issues.

3. Reign of X

This is the post-X of Swords status quo, but honestly, it’s mostly the same status quo until The Hellfire Gala, when big stuff happens.

The following series from Dawn of X continue:

• X-Men by Jonathan Hickman
• Marauders by Gerry Duggan
• X-Force by Benjamin Percy
• Excalibur by Tini Howard
• Hellions by Zeb Wells
• X-Factor by Leah Williams
• Wolverine by Benjamin Percy

and the following new series are launched:

• X-Men by Gerry Duggan
• SWORD by Al Ewing
• New Mutants by Vita Ayala
• Children of the Atom by Vita Ayala
• Way of X by Si Spurrier
• X-Corp by Tini Howard

There was another Marvel line-wide crossover going on – Daredevil: Devil’s Reign – so we get:

• Devil’s Reign: X-Men by Gerry Duggan – once again separate from the main Krakoa story, but this time written by one person – Duggan, who was also writing the flagship X-Men book.

This run also encompasses the following events:

• The Hellfire Gala – the first Hellfire Gala (which, annoyingly, doesn’t include any specific book called the Hellfire Gala, which isn’t the case for Galas 2 and 3). This is where I had originally assumed the Dawn of X era closes out, because a) Hickman’s X-Men series ends with a lead-in to this, and something genuinely, suitably big happens in Planet-Sized X-Men, while X of Swords only caused a small change to the status quo. But all the reading orders seem to agree that no, it was X of Swords that ended Dawn of X, and who am I to confuse matters?
• The Trial of Magneto by Leah Williams – this one’s a black hole for me. I have no idea what happens here. Magneto goes on trial, presumably? As far as I can tell, this follows on from what happens in X-Factor at the same time as the Hellfire Gala.
• Inferno by Jonathan Hickman – this is Hickman’s final contribution to Krakoa. As mentioned in Part 1, one of the reasons Hickman left was that he wanted to move the Krakoa story to the “second act”, while the rest of the writing team wanted to stay in Act 1. But Hickman has also mentioned in interviews that continuing to manage Krakoa without taking the uber-story forward, while also maintaining Marvel’s desired sales thresholds, would’ve involved an amount of work on his part that he wasn’t willing to commit to, which … good on him. This one closes out the threads that Hickman cared about on a character level, which leaves … everything else.

4. Destiny of X

This is a big one! It’s also the most sprawling portion of the era if you try to look at it all at once, but it makes a bit more sense if you divide into 2 parts.

If we imagine that we’re still in Act 1 of the uber-story as we enter this, and that this uber-story has a three-act structure, then Destiny of X Part 1 ends the first act, while Destiny of X Part 2 and Fall of X form Act 2. However, you could also make a case for all of Destiny of X being Act 2 and Fall of X being the first half of Act 3.

This is also the point where, if one had to pinpoint it, the writing team gives up on the idea of writing for new readers, and focuses on creating stories for existing readers. Consequently, this is where the Krakoa era began to alienate new readers, because it felt like there was already too much history within Krakoa to catch up on in order to understand any of the comics.

In practice, writers like Gillen, Ewing and LaValle do write for new readers, as long as you’re willing to let some of the history wash over you without focusing on it too much – that’s something any superhero comics reader should used to, honestly.

Destiny of X Part 1

Unusually, this one begins with an event comic, back-to-back from Inferno.

• X Lives & X Deaths of Wolverine by Benjamin Percy – Another “two series in one”, this one moves forward some big pieces of Krakoa, also exploring the repercussions of what happened to Moira in Inferno. That second bit is, shall we say, contentious.

The following series from Reign of X continue:

• X-Men by Gerry Duggan
• SWORD by Al Ewing
• New Mutants by Vita Ayala
• X-Force by Benjamin Percy
• Wolverine by Benjamin Percy

and the following new series are launched:

• X-Men Red by Al Ewing
• Immortal X-Men by Kieron Gillen
• Sabretooth: The Adversary by Victor LaValle
• Marauders by Steve Orlando
• Knights of X by Tini Howard
• Legion of X by Si Spurrier

Destiny of X Part 1 closes out with two back-to-back events:

• The Hellfire Gala 2 – this is the one where mutant immortality is revealed to the larger world. You’d think a book called Immortal X-Men would be launched out of it, but no, there were two whole issues of that before this happened.
• AXE: Judgement Day – This was an Avengers vs. Eternals vs. X-Men event. Before I decided to check out Krakoa properly, this was my last brush with it, since I was reading Kieron Gillen’s (excellent) Eternals series, and wanted to read all the tie-ins. I will note that usually I’d be annoyed that an excellent comic like Immortal X-Men was derailed back-to-back by this event and then Sins of Sinister if it weren’t for the fact that both Judgement Day and Sins of Sinister were masterminded by Gillen himself. As it was, though, it did make me stop reading Immortal month-to-month, which is still not ideal.

Destiny of X Part 2

From here, you could draw a straight line to the end of Fall of X, as I said above. Here, the uber-story sort of splits up in two, with Gerry Duggan and Benjamin Percy taking the lead on the mutant-human stuff, and Gillen (backed by Ewing and Spurrier) taking the lead on the more sci-fi stuff. Roughly, one might say the story is cleaved tonally into House books and Powers books, and that’s a handy divide, since it continues on into the final era.

The following series from Destiny of X Part 1 continue:

• X-Men by Gerry Duggan
• New Mutants by Vita Ayala
• X-Force by Benjamin Percy
• Wolverine by Benjamin Percy
• Legion of X by Si Spurrier
• X-Men Red by Al Ewing
• Marauders by Steve Orlando
• Immortal X-Men by Kieron Gillen

and the following new series are launched, most of them limited series:

• X-Terminators by Leah Williams
• Rogue and Gambit by Stephanie Phillips
• Sabretooth and the Exiles by Victor LaValle
• New Mutants: Lethal Legion by Charlie Jane Anders
• Bishop: War College by Jeremy Holtham
• Deadpool by Alyssa Wong
• Ghost Rider/Wolverine: Weapons of Vengeance by Benjamin Percy
• Betsy Braddock: Captain Britain by Tini Howard
• Invincible Iron Man by Gerry Duggan (this version is very much an X-book, particularly in its second volume)

I believe, but I’m not a hundred percent sure, that these minis were created to fill the publishing gap while Sins of Sinister was happening and not every series could take part in it, but don’t quote me on that.

Destiny of X Part 2 wraps up with the aforementioned:

• Sins of Sinister – A mini-event converging plot threads from Immortal X-Men, X-Men Red and Legion of X, written by Gillen, Ewing and Spurrier, and mimicking the x10, x100 and x1000 time-skipping style of Powers of X. As I said above, this derailed my reading of Immortal X-Men back when it came out, but it’s conceptually intriguing, engages with a lot of things Hickman had set up, and it does so without trying to read like a Hickman cover band, which has its advantages and disadvantages.

5. Fall of X

This era, only recently concluded, is where I’m writing this from. I haven’t yet explored anything to do with the era after this, though that was the reason I started reading this – to see how they wrap things up.

This is where I “catch up” to the story, and I’ll be waiting for the finale to be done before reading any of that. At this moment, that end is a couple of weeks away, but I don’t think I’ll get to it for a month or two. I might revise some comments here once I do that.

This is where my faithful companion Comic Book Herald broke down (although I fully expect them to cover this eventually), and I had to depend on another one of the excellent reading orders I had consulted, from Crushing Krisis. Now, some of these reading orders disagree on where the limited series I mentioned above fit in, precisely. By some reckonings, they’re part of Before the Fall, which is a sort of mini-era between Destiny of X and Fall of X (hrrm), and by others, they belong to the fag-end of Destiny of X. I’ve used my judgement to place them where I felt they belonged, but there’s enough ambiguity for it not to matter.

Before the Fall

The following series from Destiny of X continue:

• X-Men by Gerry Duggan
• X-Force by Benjamin Percy
• Wolverine by Benjamin Percy
• X-Men Red by Al Ewing
• Invincible Iron Man by Gerry Duggan
• Immortal X-Men by Kieron Gillen

Technically – technically – no new series are added, but the publishing timeline of the limited series in the previous section drips into this one, and you could say a bunch of them belong here outright.

There are also some Before the Fall one-shots (at least one of which takes place after the fall), but thankfully, they’re collected with the series their respective writers were currently writing.

Sidenote: This is where my brain started to break down a bit and I nearly threw my hands up and quit the whole venture. It was just too weird to try and figure out whether I had the right number of eras, and which books actually took place before other books that they might have been published after. 

I soldiered on, because there isn’t much left, and I’m just not going to read whatever doesn’t feel interesting. Nevertheless, doesn’t this feel like a terrible way to run a publishing endeavour? It should be easy to figure out what you want to read. It shouldn’t be a guessing game figuring out what’s essential and what’s not, what needs you to read ten other books and what’s standalone. This should feel rewarding, and not extractive (which is my big problem with corporate comics at their worst).

I can absolutely understand why readers started getting properly pissed off around this time. You know, a single comic costs $4.99, and each series here is multiple issues. If I tried to break this down into the sheer number of issues some people were buying, I’d definitely throw my hands up and just go.

It is, I suppose, only appropriate that this is also where the design language used across the whole imprint (originally conceived and governed with Hickman by the inimitable Tom Muller) also breaks down. It’s fine that different books are doing different things – I just wish it was better indicated, because at this point it becomes difficult to see what’s Krakoa-related and what just happens to be an X-Men comic published right now but “set” in an older era.

Fall of X

Sigh. Anyway.

Once again, the era is launched by an event:

• The Hellfire Gala 3 – In which, as Martin Lawrence would say, shit gets real. I won’t spoil this one for you, but big things happen.

The following series from Before the Fall continue:

• X-Men by Gerry Duggan
• X-Force by Benjamin Percy
• Wolverine by Benjamin Percy
• X-Men Red by Al Ewing
• Invincible Iron Man by Gerry Duggan
• Immortal X-Men by Kieron Gillen

And a shitload of new limited series are launched to explore the consequences of the third Hellfire Gala. I think between the last set of limited series and this one, the Krakoa era officially got too much for people, but this was also when I read Children of the Vault and got interested in catching up, so your mileage may vary.

• Alpha Flight by Ed Brisson
• Astonishing Iceman by Steve Orlando
• Children of the Vault by Deniz Camp
• Dark X-Men by Steve Foxe
• Jean Grey by Louise Simonson
• Ms. Marvel: The New Mutant by Iman Vellani & Sabir Pirzada
• Realm of X by Torunn Grønbekk
• Uncanny Avengers by Gerry Duggan
• Uncanny Spider-Man by Si Spurrier

6. Fall of the House of X/Rise of the Powers of X

The definite, and hopefully definitive, end of the Krakoa era, especially since the next era is already being advertised. (I don’t think I’ll be following that one, though Gail Simone on Uncanny X-Men might be a fun read at some future point.) This section of this post is most likely to be updated once I actually read it.

To be clear, some of the books from the previous phase are still wrapping up, but they still take place “before” this hits.

There are two series that do seem to fall here, continuity-wise:

• Invincible Iron Man by Gerry Duggan (I’d be curious to see if Duggan continues writing this into the post-Krakoa era)
• Wolverine by Benjamin Percy (wrapping up with the “Wolverine/Sabretooth War” co-written with Sabretooth writer Victor LaValle)

The main event, like HoX/PoX and X Lives/X Deaths, consists of two series (of 5 issues each), but this time, they seem to be more parallel than intertwined. These are:

• Fall of the House of X by Gerry Duggan and Lucas Werneck
• Rise of the Powers of X by Kieron Gillen, R. B. Silva and Luciano Vecchio

Joining them are the following limited series:

• The Resurrection of Magneto by Al Ewing
• Dead X-Men by Steve Foxe
• X-Men Forever by Kieron Gillen
• X-Men: Heir of Apocalypse by Steve Foxe (which might be unrelated to Fall/Rise and which I might remove from the list if that’s the case)

There’s also a continuation of the last Ms. Marvel series by Iman Vellani & Sabir Pirzada, called Ms. Marvel: Mutant Menace, but I don’t believe it’s involved in the “Fall” event.

Sidenote: I’d like to commend Benjamin Percy here for taking not one but two series to issue #50 in X-Force and Wolverine. That seems to be a near-impossible task in modern superhero comics, and he’s accomplished it, with a run that’s largely lauded (though I’ve heard some quibbles about X-Force that I intend to make up my own mind about.

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So, that’s Krakoa. It’s … a lot. I’ve already skimmed the major series, and I’ve read the “spine” of the whole era till The Hellfire Gala 3 in order to put these things in order, but I intend to read the whole thing properly from the beginning as I write about it.

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Unsurprisingly, this was the post that required the most work, at least so far. I originally thought I’d skip it entirely, given there are several reading orders on the internet and I could just point you to those, but they’re meant for people already interested in reading the Krakoa era, and they’re far more granular than any casual reader should have to contend with (and many of them either lag behind or have been abandoned entirely).

I needed a reference sheet for myself that was simpler and could be skimmed if needed. Originally, I planned to make a table or flowchart that indicated the main books that form the Krakoa uber-story (in bold) and “the rest”, and how they flowed into each other, with colour coding, but we’d have been here all month if I had to figure out doing that on WordPress. Plus, I’m of the fervent hope that some uberfan is planning to do that once this whole thing wraps, and I can link you to that.

Anyway, all of this work was to help me figure out how to read “the Krakoa” story, where it branches, and so on. It’s accomplished that. The next post will be tracing the uber-story through all these eras, talking about what happens, how interesting it is, how faithful I feel it is to the original conception and so on.

After that, I’ll be going era-by-era reading all the “essential” books – i.e. books that add to Krakoa substantively despite not being the story. Then I’ll catch the strays – all the stand-alone stuff.

Originally, my idea was to read the uber-story and then just stick to books by creators I like reading (e.g. Percy, Cassara, Camp, Spurrier, Gillen, Williams), but I felt that I might be depriving myself of pleasant surprises and new creators who are going to be big. (Like, I knew Deniz was a rising star, but that’s because I know him personally. His book has been a surprise to a lot of readers. In the same way, there might be a creator in that sprawl who’s my next favourite.)

But there will be some books that, on a skim, I simply don’t find myself interested in and which do not impact the Krakoa story at all – I’ll be skipping those. (There’s one book which I wasn’t interested in, but I realised later that it does impact the uber-story, even if it doesn’t feel like it – can you guess which one?)

I don’t feel I need a format for reviewing these books, or any kind of rating system. A lot of these reviews are going to be springboards to talk about various ideas on creating comics, the publishing industry, story styles, art styles and so on. I’m sure the books I don’t like are going to be as interesting to talk about as books I do like. Plus, every reader’s mileage is going to vary, which seems particularly to be the case with X-Men stuff, where every obscure character has a fan and every superstar creator their detractors.

But one thing I do want to judge on some kind of scale is how new-reader-friendly these books are. My own familiarity with the X-Men before this was reading Morrison’s New X-Men, Nicieza’s Cable & Deadpool and watching the first few X-Men movies. In fact, a friend asked me after I read HoX/PoX what I thought Hickman had invented vs. taken from the existing mythos, and I got almost everything the wrong way around. So I’m a decent gauge of how friendly any of these books are to someone who is aware of superheroes, can read comics, but that’s about it.

That’s an interesting point because Hickman has repeatedly said that his intention with HoX/PoX was to bring people back to comics, and he succeeded resoundingly in that. It’ll be interesting to see which comics keep to that spirit, independently of whether they’re good or not.

I’m anticipating most of the later posts to be smaller, because I want to tackle books in chunks that belong together, but the next one, on the uber-story, might end up reasonably long. We’ll see.