Welcome back to Mutantversity, a class offered at the Krakoan Akademos Habitat. This isn’t a place to find big reviews of X-books, (that’s what our Review section is for!) but it’s a great way to keep up with one of the most complicated superhero series around. We’re going to dive into the deep end as we try to parse all the secrets of this new era of “X-Men” comics. As your designated X-Pert, I will do my best to help you work through everything Marvel’s Merry Mutants have to offer!
This week we have more than one crossover to consider. The twist is, they’re all good!
This month in X-Men:
Storm’s Squad Stopping Sinister
Last time in Mr. Sinister’s dystopian dimension, Storm was too smart for his tricks and fled before he could control her. Along with fellow Quiet Council members Destiny and Mystique, Storm created a new Brotherhood of Arakko mutants and former SWORD operatives. The rest of the team includes Ironfire, Khora, Cable, and Wiz-Kid. They are Storm’s Seven. Sugar Man appears in a single early panel, and I know it would break the alliteration, but I would not have minded him as the eighth member of the team. Any team is more exciting when Sugar Man is around.
The whole endeavor is given a groovy 80s feel, with radical fonts and fuzzy VHS-tinged captions. It’s a fun issue, even if most of it followed Storm’s team zipping from one famous X-locale to another. They fight twisted experiments on Muir Island, and in a Cerebro. We get a chance to enjoy a bunch of vainglorious pricks messing with each other as they barely escape murderous mutates.
But the last panel leaves us with our big wha-huh? Destiny is serving an entity who has tech that looks a whole lot like what we saw in the far future of HOXPOX. Only this guy doesn’t appear to be a machine. In fact, he looks an awful lot like Gateway, the mostly mute Australian mutant who occasionally teleports fellow mutants around. But this Gateway looking dude has a spade on his forehead, making a set with Mr. Sinister’s diamond. So is this some far future rogue Sinister, like Doctor Stasis? This event has me on the edge of my seat.
Bishop Unstuck
Not content to publish one alternate-universe X-Story in a month, we also need to talk about “Bishop’s War College.” Besides featuring a team of black X-Men, I went into this one not knowing what to expect. What we got was mostly an in-universe story, showing us how Lucas Bishop is teaching the future defenders of Krakoa. This was great to see; there are too few books set on Krakoa showing us how their society functions on the day-to-day. Now we know that there is military training available to youngster who want it, and that Armor and Surge were two of the more familiar faces to sign up.
We also see that even though he’s all smiles with the Marauders, Bishop is still an incredible hard-ass. He walked the beat in one of the toughest futures the X-Men have ever seen, and he’s the kind of teacher who will ambush his students to teach them about constant vigilance. He even asks Tempo to help him make a pocket where he can take all the time he needs to get his pupils up to muster. Lucas should have known better, because he and Tempo find themselves on the front lawn of the Xavier School, where they meet the X-Men of the cover.
I like how much time this issue spent before getting Bishop to his destination. This miniseries is functioning more as a character piece than a What If? story, so it’s important we see Bishop’s mental state as he gets thrown into this adventure. I don’t know what kind of story this new team of X-Men is here to tell, but I already care about Bishop and I have been wanting to spend some more time with Tempo, so now I am all in no matter what. But it’s nice to have some idea of the shape of things to come. Destiny should stop her whining!
Continued below
The Isle of Britannia
Wow. I loved every inch of this first issue, which feels like the best versions of all of Tini Howard’s ideas. The scope and scale of the book sticks with characters you can care about, who all have a clear role in the story. And the mix of tones and genres is that good superhero stuff. How much do I love this book? Let’s count the ways.
This is the best version of Betsy. She has gotten over previous insecurities and shaky alliances. She knows who her friends are, and her allies, her family, and her enemies. I’ve loved Betsy’s personal struggle balancing her many responsibilities, but here she has made her choices and now she has to live with them. That’s great.
This is the most I’ve cared about the Braddock family ever. There are fun stories with various configurations of Braddocks, but now I love the idea of these wacky superheroes living in a big weird house and having adventures. Betsy is there with her brother Brian, plus his wife Meggan and their daughter. But then we have the very unstable and arguably evil Uncle Jamie! His wild card status gives the rest of the family room to actually get along. Oh and there is one more member of their little family-
This is the most I’ve liked Rachel Grey in forever. She ditched the codename Prestige, which is great because that name sucked. Now she’s going by Askani, and she’s taken up responsibilities to match that name. The Captain Britain Corps defends the multiverse and the Askani protect the timeline, which we all know is a very compatible purview. Her weird psychometry powers are also more useful than ever- she can detect which reality any given person originated in. But best of all-
This is the most successful queer relationship for previously-portrayed-as-straight characters in a Marvel book yet. Rachel is with the Braddock family, because Rachel is with Betsy. Romantically. When Iceman came out, we got a tortured story about why he stayed in the closet, not to mention how he was outed by an extremely shitty Jean Grey. Betsy and Rachel have easy chemistry, and cute romantic banter. Rachel was always intended to be written as gay by (her creator) Chris Claremont, but for Betsy, we’d have to dig into some more subtext. This book doesn’t care. It is interested in telling stories about who they are now, their relationships now, their adventures now.
This is also the first time I’ve felt like Captain Britain has a solid rogues gallery. The sorceress Morgana le Fey is working with Clan Akaba to create an alternate, whiter, less mutant Captain Britain for the Brexit crowd. And she’s working with the totally revamped Furies, who have a leader, a homeworld, and a society now. Oh, and Pete Wisdom is on the fringes with his agents of STRIKE, who are practically the Slow Horses now. And they are running a protection detail on-
Faiza Hussain! I love Faiza. I don’t know how she is going to fit into the rest of the story yet, but I can’t wait to find out. And I haven’t felt that way about Marvel’s Britain in a long long time.
No Second Honeymoon
I forgot that we were getting a “Rogue and Gambit” book! Bonus! We’ve seen glimpses of what their Krakoa life looks like. They have a lot of cats. They own a hot tub. They’re having grown up conversations, like about whether or not to have kids. But we don’t love Remy and Ana Marie because they are mature. We love them because they are sexy, messy, southern-fried disasters.
To usher us into these adventures, we are graced with the pen of Stephanie Phillips, over from a widely-liked run on “Harley Quinn.” She does a great job at bringing these two characters back to the versions we know best, without strongly diverting their Krakoan developments. This whole story starts as a vacation gone wrong (Thieves Guild nonsense in New Orleans) before it is interrupted by Destiny, who instructs the couple to nab Manifold for her. And she won’t tell them why.
Continued belowSo the two of them get caught up in Manifold’s own superhero investigation. He’s been tracking disappearing supervillains across the globe, including Deathstrike, Absorbing Man, Juggernaut, Vanisher, and Electro. I thought Juggernaut was currently working as the Sheriff of Krakoa but whatever, he got got. Behind it all is Ambassador Brousseau, who we are also following in the pages of “Captain Britain!” So even if Rogue and Gambit are on an extracurricular secret mission, they are still dealing with schemes from current villains.
I’d love to see more mutants get miniseries that let them stretch their legs and enjoy the status quo. Wolverine is jetting off to new locations every month. We found time for Rogue and Gambit! Let’s spread that love to all the X-Men.
This Month’s X-Books:
“Storm and the Brotherhood” #1 – A fantastic, dramatic, bombastic alternate reality tale.
“Bishop: War College” #1 – As a character piece for Lucas Bishop, this was great. But I am so curious to find out what’s up with that cover and that final page…
“Betsy Braddock: Captain Britain” #1 – By making thorny X-contonuity fun and breezy, Tini Howard may be helming her best X-book yet!
“Immoral X-Men” #1 – One of the meanest, funniest, horniest issues Kieron Gillen has ever written.
“Rogue and Gambit” #1 – The delightful Stephanie Phillips makes her X-Men debut. On the strength of this issue, I’m sure she will survive the experience.
