For the first time in years, the entertainment I most expected was a handful of monthly comics about the X-Men. Week after week this fall – an absolute moment disgusting with great books, movies, TV and video games – what I really wanted to do was to pour myself over words and images about the big list of Marvel Comics mutants and a story about them like no other I’ve seen before.
One cannot underestimate how bold and interesting the X-Men comics are now. After a smooth reboot in the 2019 twin miniseries by Jonathan Hickman with art by RB Silva and Pepe Larraz, X’s House and Powers of X (the best place to start reading), the mutants of the Marvel Universe came together to form the mutant nation of Krakoa. They have decided that they are tired of waiting for humanity in general to accept its existence and, instead, they will build a place for themselves, whether they like humanity in general or not.
These mutants – ex-heroes of the X-Men superhero team and their ex-opponents – came together on the ground of a living island (also called Krakoa) to start the complicated business of building a nation. There is a new language, new rituals, new creeds – the building blocks of a culture are being made in real time. The results are among the best comics of the year, full of political intrigue, love stories unfolding over millennia and, yes, even an entire seriesMaruaders by Gerry Duggan and a list of killer artists) about pirates.
This confusing and complicated new status quo is the best in comics, rich in possibilities and things to dream about. He even did a 22-part crossover – the worst feat that modern superhero comics love to do – totally attractive. X of Swords, as this crossover was called, took this newfound nation into a magical fight in an unknown world, when the X-Men were forced into a tournament where they had to fight opponents with swords. This was the premise that it should feed twenty-two entire comics, and they did it absolutely, subverting all expectations about what a story like that could bring along the way.
Most of the fun in these comics comes from seeing how the rest of the world reacts to Krakoa’s existence, and some of the conflicts are wild. In an early X-Men history, Krakoa is invaded by an elderly trio of radical superbotans called Hordeculture (seriously). Inside X-Men # 4 – one of the first and best comics released in 2020 – Krakoa leaders go to Davos and disguise the world’s economic leaders during dinner. In the most action oriented X-Force, Krakoa is threatened by squads of international black operations sent by people who see Krakoa as a time bomb.
But mainly, in a year full of news that was a continuous attack for anyone, except a few – mostly white, mostly wealthy – the X-Men comics were a joy, simply because they are a story about characters that, by definition ( all great The history of the X-Men must observe how they are hated and feared), are always losing and finally showed that they refused to play the same broken game.
“The world told me I was less when I knew it was more,” said Cyclops, early in X’s House. “Did you honestly think that we would sit forever and just take it?”
Part of what makes X-Men last is that there is a certain malleability in the mutant metaphor. For years, fans and writers have compared the X-Men to the fight for Civil Rights; more recently, the metaphor has been adopted as an exploration of strangeness. It doesn’t matter how you read them, if you’re from some type of marginalized group, it is easy to identify with the seemingly futile struggle of having to defend yourself and others in spaces hostile to you, spaces to which you should belong if it were not for the systemic injustices that excluded you. I got tired of fighting for diversity in spaces that are only interested in the perspective of diversity. There is something cathartic and beautiful in a story where Cyclops – the face of the X-Men for almost all of the 60 years of its existence – says that we have all finished taking it. He found an answer he believes in and will do the job to make it real.
It also helps that, currently, the X-Men are just a comic book concern. Of course, they are still owned by Disney and since The New Mutants came out this year, your previous film franchise is nowhere near the rear view. But they are also not a slide in any presentation about the next four years of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, at least for a while. They are not a reminder of the dominance that their owner has over the entertainment industry in general. For now, they look like stories made for anyone curious enough to read them. Stories for people who try to find an answer they believe in, to build a world they want to make real.