[To]X-Men: X-Men #1

In Jonathan Hickman and Leinil Yu’s X-Men #1, the mutants adjust to domestic life on Krakoa as Orchis plots their next move.

Chris Eddleman: Rob, it’s been so long since last we’ve written, practically a full and entire week! We’ve moved on from HoXPoXToX to DoX ToX and I’m excited to get started. This issue is a real crowd pleaser, as far as I’m concerned. We’ve got hardcore plot, a fun family meal, and of course…graphs!

Robert Secundus: I do love the graphs. It’s weird how this feels like just the next issue of House of X in so many ways, and yet the tone, the pacing, the focus, so much has changed. It’s not what I expected, but I’m still very excited.

[Ed. note: I’m still here to put my twisted view on what these chuckle-heads say too.]

Magneto Triumphant

CE: So a big theme of this issue is Magneto’s newfound triumph and confidence post-Krakoa. We are seeing the arch Magneto of yesteryear but, now on the side of the angels. He radiates power and victory and it is pretty interesting. Lately Magneto has been a bit more inward, with less of the old Master of Magnetism. Lorna (now his only child, we guess) speaks about it, and seems thrilled. [Ed. note: Magneto’s other children are pretenders and aren’t invited to the X-Men’s orgy island.]

Are we concerned about this arrogance, or is it simply candy to finally have an archvillain on the side of the angels?

RS: So, I thought this was maybe the first time we’ve had a scene where Magneto stood triumphant and we weren’t supposed to be concerned; in the New Mutants and later eras where he stood with the X-Men, he was always struggling, always troubled, and even in places like his solo series, he goes to places that the reader is supposed to find disturbing. But this felt to me just… Pure? Seeing him with those kids, it just felt purely optimistic, in a way that a lot of this Krakoan stuff has not, to me. Normally there’s something to worry about. Where did you land on that question?

CE: No I completely agreed. If in any way during the Orchis mission he seemed haughty or prideful, it honestly could have been channeled anger. The humans were imprisoning children against their will and Magneto and crew were on a righteous mission to retrieve them. He can have a little bit of pride.

I have to say, these scenes with Magneto, Exodus, and Wolverine that we’ve seen where they’re interacting with mutant kids is kryptonite to me. It instantly humanizes even the mightiest villain. It’s also been cool to see Magneto interact with Lorna, which seems to rarely happen. She seems to be so proud of him!

RS: I still don’t have a great handle on Lorna; in House Of X she felt odd to me, and here she also feels odd. But then most of my exposure to the character was in the Austen run. So I’m not exactly the best judge.

CE: Lorna has unfortunately been kind of all over the place, from classic Claremont to X-Factor and elsewhere so I’m with you. I hope we get more as time goes on to really nail down her character outside of her relationship with Magneto. [Ed. note: Though, historically, she’s had less interaction with Magneto than Pietro or Wanda, so for some it may be refreshing.]

RS: How did you feel about the emphasis on Magneto this issue, over and above Xavier, who really only appears in flashback, and Moira, who’s just not here at all? Why him of the three to start us off in X-Men #1?

CE: I think Magneto has always been the most active of the three, in terms of combat missions so I suppose he needed to be there as assurance that the team wouldn’t fail. Magneto is an incredibly powerful mutant, and Orchis needed to see what the mutants would be willing to do. He is a morale threat, as well as a physical one.

RS: It wouldn’t be [To]X-Men without Reaching To Find Religious Connections, so before we move on, I want to point out that Magneto’s “Let no rubble, or rabble, be beneath my feet” bit is pretty resonant.

In general, in a variety of traditions, I believe that avoiding touching the Earth is a pretty common signifier of either nobility or holiness. I just want to pull from two. First of all, Psalm 91: “They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone.”

Also, for our fans of Apocrypha, the Protoevangelium of James: “And her [Mary’s] mother picked her up, saying, ‘As the Lord my God lives, you will not walk on this earth again until I take you to the temple of the Lord.’” Magneto’s continuing his role as the Prophet of the New Gods here. [Ed. note: Seriously didn’t expect to pull from the Protoevangelium of James today.]

Orchis

RS: So, I was very much surprised by how radically Orchis has changed by the end of this issue. First of all, they’re defeated on Earth. The X-Men are so effective that they almost immediately exiled Orchis from the globe (while somehow, as the army of a nation making strikes on foreign soil, avoiding a declaration of war). The X-Men are triumphant, and Orchis is an entirely celestial operation. Chris, what struck you most about Orchis in this issue?

CE: I have to agree with you. I assumed that at least several issues of X-Men would be dealing with Orchis in a more terrestrial sense, as X-Men rarely deal with bigotry so far away from home. Making Orchis a far away, yet ever present threat, gives them room to breathe—and us room for multiple plot lines. It looks like we’re going to get some classic X-Men in the form of several interconnecting long term plot lines, and I’m thrilled to see it.

RS: Let’s unpack a few of those plot lines. First of all: the Children of the Vault are back! They were seen in Mike Carey’s run on X-Men. They were human beings allowed to naturally and technologically evolve in a sped-up time; effectively, Hickman seems to have made the Children an early version of Homo novissima. [Ed. note: Mike Carey’s X-Men is the best run that no one talks about.]

CE: Yeah, as we’ve mentioned before—Hickman doesn’t seem to have one particular era that he is drawing from, he loves it all, or at least sees usefulness in much of X-Men history. Much in the same way that the defeat of Orchis plotline is moving quickly, so too seems to be the actual creation of these transhumans. Before we get into our next topic, Rob, what did you think of our introduction to the leader of Orchis, Dr. Killian Devo?

RS: It’s odd; he takes up a lot of this issue, but I feel like we have such a small glimpse of his deal. He gives a lecture on technology; he recaps part of HoXPoX; there’s not much more. The most interesting thing to me are the parallels established with Cyclops. The issue opens with Cyclops unable to open his eyes until he receives his visor. Dr. Devo emphasizes his own blindness and the wondrous abilities granted him by his own visor. He takes on blame and guilt the way Cyclops does; he commands his troops frankly; most of his dialogue I could see coming from a Cyclops. And his scenes bookend the Summers BBQ.

CE: Not content to have a protagonist with covered eyes, we now have an enemy with them as well. We close out the issue with a cliffhanger, the revelation that humans may too have the ability to bring back their fallen. Not sure if that crystal is Shi’ar or not but, we seem to have a “Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better” motif happening between our mutants and Orchis.

Summers House

CE: So now we get to the real meat of the issue (and not just because it’s kind of in the middle) which is our Summers Family meal in their new digs—a private house on the Blue Area of the Moon! I really enjoyed this scene quite a bunch, and not just because of the fun graph, in which we see that Wolverine and Scott sleep on the opposite side of Jean, and that we still have empty rooms. [Ed. note: Their room’s all connect for their devil’s triangle.]

I love Scott and Christopher son/father moments, and this one was really excellent.

RS: Really, every character got a special moment, and they were heartfelt or hilarious. It made me like Kid Cable. It made me like Vulcan. [Ed. note: Both of which are deeply disturbing to me.]

Everyone has a clear, distinct personality, and everyone is fun. Now, besides the empty rooms [Ed. note: Both which I assume will be filled soon by our messianic Nate Grey and Scott’s other brother, Adam-X The X-Treme. Not Major X as some writers of this article wanted to postulate.], do you think this scene is setting up any plots? Or is it solely character work?

CE: Well alarm bells went off in my head immediately after Scott gave the Krakoan gateway bloom to his father to take on his spaceship, a thing which is 100% going to be infiltrated at some point. Maybe it’s just a sweet gift, or an excuse to see Corsair and the Starjammers a bunch but, I’m concerned. Mainly, I honed in on the discussion that Corsair and Cyclops had over dishes, in which Chris is worried about the mutants post-Krakoa, as he assumes it is an even more dangerous time for them. Cyclops asserts his determined optimism, which is good to see. [Ed. note: See if this flower causes any problems in next month’s New Mutants.]

RS: That Corsair is there at all should help set some minds at ease; mutants have not rejected the entirety of the human species. People with human families still retain those families. They aren’t asked to cut people off. In that way too it’s more optimistic than we might have expected. But I do worry about that flower, too. Like, a Phalanx is just going to waltz right into Krakoa, a thousand years early!

CE: No, that’s 100% possible. Early transhumans, early robots? Oh no.

RS: Wouldn’t that be something, if Moira thought she bought everyone time, and instead the timeline had leaped forward massively? The Vault Child mentioned waking up early, and in PoX #6 Moira worried that Sinister’s biotech had been advancing early.

CE: I think this is a pretty great start to our post HoXPoX era of X-titles. If people were concerned that we weren’t going to be getting any “human” moments, this issue should put those fears to rest. We got a fantastic Summers family scene and some great mid-combat character moments to mull over. We even got villain monologuing! I’m interested to see what we get next, and I think we’re in pretty good hands for the foreseeable future.

RS: It’s such a great pace. If we were just getting this X-Men twice a month, I think I’d be perfectly satisfied. What’s really going to make DoX a revolutionary line, a revolutionary era, is how the other titles all work together. To my knowledge, this kind of massive, tightly constricted, cohesive, pseudo-writers-room hasn’t been tried before in comics, or at least, hasn’t been tried to this extent. This facet this week is stellar, and I imagine it will continue to be stellar; what I really need to see is the whole.

X-Traneous Thoughts

“Another hard drink for another hard girl.”
“They’re sure to be savvy—all these apes have PhDs!”
The final Krakoan reads: “Arakko!” Our demon island is coming… soon!
The parallels of “Just Look at What We Have Made” from the X-Men with “Just Look At What They Have Done” from Dr. Devo.
Emma doesn’t live on the Moon. We know she lives in her cool seaside castle, per the map but, it’s interesting to see her excluded.
If you want to know what the X-Men were doing in other books this week, we got you covered.
We’ll be back next week for Mauraders #1! Get excited scalawags.

Chris Eddleman is a biologist and co-host of Chrises On Infinite Earths

Robert Secundus is a Private X-Investigator and amateur-angelologist-for-hire