[To]X-Men: Breaking Down The New Biological Threat In X-Men #3

The Savage Land is under attack in X-Men #3 by Jonathan Hickman, Leinil Francis Yu, Gerry Alanguilan, Sunny Gho, and Rain Beredo. Cyclops, Emma Frost, and Sebastian Shaw confront Hordeculture, a group of radical bioterrorists comprised of elderly women with massive plans. Plans that are threatened by Krakoa. They show the X-Men the extent of their biohacking abilities and scuttle off with a bounty of Krakoan flowers. The X-Men have a bit of a problem.

Robert Secundus: Once more, we return. Three issues in now, we’re starting to get a good idea, I think, of what the Dawn of X landscape looks like: what niche each title is filling, how those titles interact, and how the flagship series, X-Men, plans to move the status quo forward. And so I went into this issue, as I’ve entered every DoX issue, tremendously excited.

Chris Eddleman: Yeah, I’m pretty much always done for a trip (or at least a promised trip) to the Savage Land, also known as the place where the plane always crashes. It’s interesting that this is our premise directly after the big joining of the last issue. I’m curious about what could possibly be going on in the land that time forgot so let’s go hang out with some dinosaurs.

The Goldenrod Girls

RS: I have to be honest: for me,I found exactly one scene in X-Men #3 really enjoyable, and it was sans these sinister sextagenerians. I found a lot of the ideas in the issue interesting, but the actual execution, the actual scenes on the page, more than a bit frustrating. Chris, as the official DoXToX Scientist, what did you think of these Bad Botanists?

CE: These venerable ladies were…interesting. I’m completely with you on the fact that the execution was weird. I think some folks are gonna enjoy the sort of wacky personalities that we get out of Hordeculture but some of these jokes were a little too stereotyped to land properly. Let’s be clear though, I am always here for an ecoterrorist villain group. [Ed. note: My lawyers are insisting that I add the words “in fiction” to this.]

RS: Eco-terrorists are absolutely an interesting threat for Krakoa, and their whole deal—fighting the ascendance of Humanity and its dominion over Earth—could be really thematically interesting given everything else that’s going on. And I’m always up for badass older ladies. But…. those jokes. The humor here feels different than New Mutants or even the first two issues. Everything with the bad words felt stilted, and “old woman calls young woman a slut” just feels like a better fit for Transhuman than it does X-Men, which is not a compliment. “A-Word means ASS” though, I must admit, in a different comic, would be a hilarious line. But here something makes it land with a thud.

CE: That brings me to my critique about the humor artistically. I don’t know if I love Yu’s art coupled with the visual humor that Hickman is going for here. His silent beats, such as Emma reacting to being called the “s-word” [Ed. note: Contextually we can assume “slut”] just look visually flat to me. Emma, by the way, has been called worse by better people. But yeah, if I see “blank-word” too much more I’m not going to be thrilled. Some of it was kind of nonsensical, which was maybe just supposedly to show how wacky these ladies were.

I do really want to hone in on their deal though because it’s metaphorically pretty cool. These ladies are all aged scientists who are completely sick of other scientists (and businessmen) have made botany into a strictly for-profit venture. Their criticisms are very much founded in real world issues. There are companies that engineer seeds that create nonviable plants, which keep farmers dependent on said companies for their crops. It’s a pretty awful practice, if you ask me, so I really felt for these villainous ladies, even as they grew flowers out of a man’s corpse.

RS: There are a couple of details that I think it’d be useful to highlight. First of all, they’re scientists, but the way they talk about biology and ecology isn’t very scientific at all: “They replaced God’s perfect cycle of death and rebirth.” Like we’ve seen so many times before (especially in the X² timeline), technology, science, and religion are all jumbled up in a destructive cult. Second of all, they exemplify a troubling undercurrent of a lot of the more extremist approaches to environmentalism, in that their solution boils down to, essentially, eugenics. They are deciding on groups of people to save or kill, and they have decided on a number of maximum lives to permit on the planet. They’re goofy, silly comic book villains in plague masks– and they’re extremely similar in rhetoric to real world white nationalist groups that drape their evil ideologies in environmentalist rhetoric.

CE: Plus they seem to have a very “we know best” attitude whereas they are very much endangering the youth (in this case mutants can be considered a stand-in) in favor of their own method, which I’m sure doesn’t involve their own deaths. This also seems to be shown in the choice of their first victims, which are the youth of Krakoa who are tending the flowers.

Also, because I’m insufferable, I have to remind everyone of my very incorrect theory about the flowers being grown in Krakoa secretly harming humanity. But now instead, humanity is using Krakoan flowers to also harm humanity. Frankly I like this better. But ultimately, I’m not sold on Hordeculture. They’re currently one-note (but one-note each, I guess) goofs about old ladies, who are startlingly competent.

Portal Problems

CE: So it seems as though we have many, many issues with the portals and Krakoa so far in Dawn of X. In this issue, the feisty ladies of Hordeculture manage to biohack [Ed. note: a real and actual term that is very dope] Krakoa into making the portals work for them, which leads our heroes to have to use Gateway to travel into the Savage Land. Is the idea that Krakoa is super vulnerable being used too much?

RS: I do think it’s odd that three issues into these titles, Krakoa has essentially been invaded twice. I think maybe we’re supposed to feel on edge—that we’re not sure if this new state can survive, if it’s under such constant assault—but instead I mostly feel confused. If it’s so narratively easy to invade Krakoa and put the entire status quo in jeopardy—the resurrection process endangered in X-Force, the flowers endangered here—that seems to rub up against everything else we’ve been shown about this new nation and about this story, that death is off the table, that mutants are safe, that they’re off in this stronghold isolated from the world, and that the X-Line is going to be tackling fresher, more complicated sources of conflict/drama than “maybe the Reavers (or Grandmas) might murder them all.”

All of that said, this week we do get glimpses throughout the titles on the stands at interesting uses of the Krakoan gateways and of Krakoa’s place in the world. This issue ends with Emma concluding “we have a bit of a problem.” Where do you think we go from here?

CE: Well, I have to give points for originality. While we haven’t gotten any new mutants, Hickman and crew are giving us quite a few new allies and enemies. I can’t complain too much about the ideas that are being presented individually—biohacking Krakoa, using pieces of mutants to invade, Kate being unable to enter Krakoa but, it seems like we’re immediately breaking a bunch of established rules. Okay now that I put it like that, obviously that’s something a story is going to have to do, but I’d like some other stuff played with.

Three Issues In

CE: Each of these flagship issues feels very much like they don’t necessarily follow the one that came before it. Need I remind us that in the last issue, a portion of another island from another dimension joined up with Krakoa, and with it brought a group of daemon summoning refugees. Is that touched here? Followed up on? Mentioned? Hinted at? Not at all. I honestly find that a little odd.

This is reminding me quite a bit of the early issues of the Hickman Avengers run, in which we got one issue vignettes. However, those issues focused in on some heroes that we weren’t super familiar with, while we still have the same characters throughout. We get certainly bites of issue to issue continuity, such as Scott kicking himself about letting Doug go to outer space, but it’s irksome to me to just start a sort-of fresh slate every time. I hope that after a few more of these (because solicits make me think we’re getting some more), we can start having a proper ongoing story. Charitably, I think this is all set-up for what looks to be a very long run on comics but, it’s a little hard to read this after the tight story that HoXPoX and either other series in DoX present.

RS: I’m right there with you. Conceptually, I really like the idea of a series of one-shots that put pieces on the board for a long run. But now we’re three issues into this approach, and I want to see just a page, a panel touching on anything already on the board (beyond the Summers Polycule). The other two things I think that have been established are the tone of the book and the way it works with the other titles. The former is far more humorous, far more lighthearted than I expected, and that tone has, mostly, worked for me. The latter is an odd middle ground between tight and loose inter-title continuity. Vaguely, all the Big Stuff that happens in each series is respected in each—Doug is gone, Xavier is dead—but it’s hard sometimes to keep track of exactly how each title fits in together, even with the reading order.

CE: I suppose it’s nice to keep individual identity. If X-Men is gonna be the one-shot book then so be it. There are plenty of more closely plotted stories in other issues. This honestly seems like a whole bunch of set up for a run that is going to continue for another forty issues, and it’s not unlike Hickman to jump around a bit or throw us into a situation without any regard for where characters were prior. But I just got these new and improved Hickman official pale cryptic people, and I want to check up on them. And now we have stereotype grandmas that need some fleshing out too! It’s just a whole bunch.

RS: We live in an exciting time for X-Men. I’m enjoying the entire line—there is no book that I can’t find something interesting in. I really didn’t have fun with the actual issue in my hands this time around, but I’m still interested in the ideas here. And I’m still ok with a relatively one-shotty series, but I’m going to need to see some ongoing threads to hang onto soon. We’re in a weird spot of this First Act of the new era of X-Stuff, and I’m having some very mixed feelings as a result. Still, still, that’s all relatively speaking. Remember the Death Cloud? Remember IvX?

CE: Yeah this one was a miss for me as well, and that’s from Mr. Biology. Conceptually, I think Ecoterrorist Botanist Old Women is a neat idea, and I’m hoping it gets fleshed out (as well as the characters themselves) but I wasn’t thrilled with this. While it’s always a good time to see Shaw get wrecked, I didn’t like the “humor” that he brought, even if it reinforced the fact that he’s a huge creep. The Cyclops fan in me is happy to see him in every issue, and I think the sort of deadpan style we get for him works well, even if I can’t see him calling anyone a “boor.” But hey, the nice thing about the one-shot style is that we’ll likely get something completely different next issue.

X-Traneous Thoughts

Krakoa, the Island that Vores Like a Man!
These graphics are mostly text but, lots of psychic eating
The Roster/Friend Group Dynamics of Hordeculture!
Chris is not really sold on this pun, and he’s a dad!
Green Thumb, a base that moves with the moon
Emma and Jean have either a Mean Girl-off or a Big Flirt and that was fun.
Psychic hangovers sound awful
Reminder that Sebastian Shaw is a Creep!
Emma is wrong, Gateway is always a lot of help.
People of color are colored like people of color. That’s nice. That’s a good, low bar that weirdly not every comic can pass.
The Krakoan reads: A Seat At the Table
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