In 2019, something very exciting happened to Marvel’s X-Men comics, which, by that point, were sustaining themselves mostly with a readership that was already thoroughly invested in them, as is the case with a lot of corporate comics these days. (Also, at the time, Fox wasn’t owned by Disney, so Marvel wasn’t as invested in the X-Men, but they tend not to come out and admit that.)
If you’re a regular comics reader, you’ll be familiar with HOX/POX (i.e. House of X/Powers of X, the latter pronounced “Powers of Ten” in a half-hearted nod to Apple’s OS X). But if you’re not, HOX/POX consisted of two six-issue mini-series, intertwined into one big story, which overhauled the history, present and future of not just the X-Men, but of mutantdom in its entirety (while staying surprisingly faithful in mining from its actual history rather than creating concepts from whole cloth).
Written by Jonathan Hickman and drawn by Pepe Larraz and R. B. Silva in the bombastic superhero style brought into vogue by Stuart Immonen, HOX/POX proposed that frequent mutant collaborator Moira MacTaggert was herself a mutant, and her power, which I’ll let you find out for yourself, resulted in her knowing that in every potential future, the mutants will lose, unless they find a way to band together like never before.
Over 12 dense issues packed with data pages and storytelling potential, Hickman and co. set up a new status quo for mutants, including a mutant nation on the sentient island of Krakoa, heroes and villains all joining hands for once, instant healing and teleportation enabled by mutant technology, and (spoilers for HOX/POX but not for anything else in the run) mutant immortality.
This enables the mutant nation to finally face the world on its own terms. It just happens to be in the form of something that looks very much like an ethno-state. (A lot of readers at the time seemed to think that was sub-text, but honestly, it just read like text to me.)
HOX-POX, as a story, was decent work, leaning more on exposition and big twists than I’d like, but that’s if you consider it a stand-alone story. It was meant as the opening salvo of an era of corporate storytelling consisting of several books, that is now, five years later, arriving at its close without its original showrunner (the so-called “Head of X”) Jonathan Hickman. And as the first chapter of that potential story, it was exciting as hell.
As told by Hickman in interviews, the era was meant to be structured as three acts, and while he wanted to move on to the second act, the rest of the storytelling team didn’t, so he decided to bow out, closing some but not all of his intended storytelling threads in the mini-series Inferno. (If you consult the internet on this, you’d think this was either entirely because of Hickman’s inability to finish a commitment or entirely because of Marvel’s greed, rather than the most likely reason – a genuine difference of opinion. At the time, however, it felt symptomatic of corporate comics’ reluctance to have things end.)
When Dawn of X (the first “act”) began, I was cautiously excited by the possibility of the high-level science fiction story that was promised by HOX/POX, involving mutants not just in conflict with humanity, but with future artificial intelligences and alien civilisations that had ascended into conceptual entities, but it soon became clear that most of the actual series, of which there were far too many, were intended to be superhero stories and character-based soap opera, and I found myself checking out after a couple of issues of each series.
I continued reading Benjamin Percy and Joshua Cassara’s X-Force for a little while, because that was the comic that seemed to be the best self-contained series that just got on with the business of telling stories instead of being a fragment of a larger story, but even that got waylaid by two events in succession, and I lost interest. (I also read Way of X – a mini-series about mutant religion by Si Spurrier and Bob Quinn – mainly because I really enjoyed Si’s previous _X-_comics, but other than that, I stayed away.)
After two years away, I picked up Inferno when it came out, thinking that this would be the final act of Hickman’s story, but I found that a) it’s not quite that, but some kind of strange hybrid between an ending and a setup and b) a lot had happened between HOX/POX and Inferno, which meant that I wasn’t able to understand more than half the story.
At this point, I would’ve stopped even thinking about the rest of the line since Hickman wasn’t involved, if Marvel hadn’t brought on Kieron Gillen as one of the architects of the remainder of the story, and Gillen’s superhero comics always have interesting things to say.
So I read Gillen’s big event comic – AXE: Judgment Day, a three-way battle between the Avengers, the X-Men and the Eternals – mainly because I was reading and thoroughly enjoying Gillen and Esad Ribic’s Eternals series. And then I tried to follow Gillen’s Immortal X-Men for a little bit, before that went into another event – Sins of Sinister – which sounded fascinating, but which was incomprehensible to me because I wasn’t reading the other two series that led into the event.
I stopped again, and decided that that was it for me, since Marvel didn’t seem interested in giving the Krakoa era an actual ending.
Except that now, in 2024, that’s exactly what they’re doing, with Fall of X, written by Kieron Gillen and Gerry Duggan who was one of the architects that worked on the first part with Hickman.
I feel like this is the usual issue with superhero comics, writ large or small, depending on where you look at it from.
You come into the universe, which is in many ways just one big story, and you’re baffled at where to start. So you find yourself one that seems interesting, and you read that month-on-month. Then you come upon an issue which only has half the story, and the rest continues in another character’s series. So you read that, and if that second writer’s done a good job, now you’re reading two series. If they haven’t, though, you might be baffled by everything else that’s going on in the second series, and you might drop both.
Or you continue reading your one or two books, and suddenly there’s a line-wide event, and no book is exempt. Now, there’s a high chance that for several issues, your book is going to be a part of some other book’s story, rather than the thing you were reading.
So you go all in, or you stop reading altogether.
There is a joy in the mega-story. Grant Morrison talked about this when they were working on Seven Soldiers, this idea of modular storytelling – one story made up of several stories. And this joy is why people like superhero universes in the first place.
But the problem with juggling this kind of modular storytelling is that it’s very easy to get wrong – you release too many books that people can’t follow, your creators aren’t communicating properly with each other, some creators either aren’t as clever as others or just don’t agree with what the story should be, or you have all the right books but you can’t keep them on schedule.
As we’ve seen with event comics of the years gone by, this ends up having a cleaving effect. It discourages casual readers who just want to follow one or two series. You’re left with uberfans who are invested in your universe (at times more than you are), or people who drop your books entirely (and usually end up in creator-owned comics or manga, because at least there, books start at 1 and then go up, one digit at a time).
It’s complex when done right, and it’s complicated when handled wrong. At its best (say, as in Hickman’s own Secret Wars and the original Spider-Verse event), it’s like reading an epic, multi-thread novel. At its worst, it’s like channel-surfing (though even that can be deployed to good effect, as in Morrison’s Final Crisis).
Krakoa, looking from the outside, seems to have been jumping that rope all through its five years.
Apart from its sheer complexity/complicatedness, I realised soon that the Krakoa era I wanted to read and the one that the writers and most readers wanted were very different. I wanted to read the science fiction story that was set up in HOX/POX, while the creators wanted that used as a status quo to tell different kinds of stories about what living with Krakoa was like.
Which is, of course, extremely reasonable – it’s a great setup, and there’s no harm in using this to create a mini-universe within Marvel. It’s a difference in taste rather than a wrong decision.
There’s also the flavour of stories. When you’re creating a superhero story, and you’re thinking, Who is this for?, you’re not just thinking about style, genre etc., you’re also thinking about the reader’s familiarity with your characters. Are you writing for new readers who need some handholding? Or are you writing for fans who know everyone involved?
Now, I’ve read my share of X-Men stories from before the Krakoa era, but I have no clue who most mutants are other than the main X-Men themselves. In fact, while I didn’t enjoy Matt Fraction’s Uncanny X-Men much, I did find it extremely handy how every new character got a little character slug next to them with their name, superhero moniker and their power. Great device to get you up-to-date on their function in the story without slowing anything down.
In far too many of the Dawn of X stories, I found myself saying, Wait, who is this? Which is fine if you’ve got a cast of maybe 4-5 people, but some of these books had as many as 10-15 characters playing some kind of story role. And often, I’d look at the pages before and after, and couldn’t even trace a name that I might google. I was supposed to know these people by sight, which put me very definitively outside the demographic of the book.
Not every book was like that, but I was trying to follow 4-5 books at once, and started to feel alienated. Eventually I just read the books that didn’t make me feel like that, and then dropped them as well.
For the last year or so, I’ve barely been reading comics. It’s only in the last month that I began to miss them, and decided to start again, beginning with comics written by my friends, because I’ve got a vested interest in those.
So I read, among other things, Children of the Vault, written by my pal Deniz Camp and drawn by Luca Maresca, and good lord, it was so much fun. For one thing, it told a self-contained story – I’m still reasonably soaked in the comics industry, so your mileage might vary, but I didn’t know who the titular Children of the Vault were, and I did fine.
For another, my favourite superhero comics when I started reading those regularly were those that delighted in playing within the superhero universe. Rather than trying to tell grounded stories inspired by other genres, these books tried to do their best to explore what a superhero universe would be like, mostly by throwing scores of madcap sci-fi and fantasy ideas at the wall and seeing which sticks. CotV reminds me of the best of those, with a breathtaking pace of extremely clever, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny sff concepts. As I told Deniz himself, this was everything I liked about Grant Morrison and Jonathan Hickman’s work, along with everything that makes Deniz’s own work unique.
After that, I figured, hmm, I enjoyed that, and we’ve got Fall of X coming. As good a time as any to give it another go, and this time, let’s not try and read everything.
So that’s the intro, and a good place to stop. In the next post, we’ll talk about how I decided to cover as much of this era as possible without fatigue, and then I’ll tell you what I thought about these books.
Spoilers: I’m having a great time.
